The monumental Shaw Brothers logo hits the screen, but rather than the punches and kicks that would usually follow it would be followed by a sensitive modernism forgotten in the annals of literature and its acceptable subversive elements. The logo is succeeded by watercolor pain... Read More »
36th Chamber of Shaolin begins with a kung fu trope that Lau Kar Leung helped father as Gordon Liu demonstrates various fighting forms that would used throughout the film set against theatrical monochromatic backdrops. The actions have no bearing on the plot; they are simply exp... Read More »
The brilliance of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love lies in the odd space where subtlety in character and story are able to intertwine seamlessly with breathtakingly obtrusive cinematography. Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle use a brilliant framed language in the film... Read More »
Between the opening scenes of Louis Koo’s character Choi Tin-ming swerving his car in the streets and reeling and vomiting on himself at the wheel, the effects of an explosion at his cocaine factory, and the concluding scenes of Choi on an operating table being executed by inject... Read More »
Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) is a fascinating film that was based on a true story from 1996. Ga Yu (Liang Qi) is a reporter from Beijing sent to do a story on the death of a man who was a volunteer patrolman on the Kekexili Mountain in Tibet. These patrolmen were founded by... Read More »
Kaige Chen’s 1993 film Farewell, My Concubine is a masterpiece. It is a film of rare beauty that does not shy away from the pain and brutality that beauty comes from. The story is that of two men, Douzi (Zhi Yin as a teenager,Leslie Cheung as the adult) and Shitou (Yang Fei as ... Read More »
At one point, near the end of John Woo's masterful A Better Tomorrow, Sung Tse-Ho (Ti Lung) asks his partner-in-crime and best friend, Mark (Chow Yun-Fat), if he believes in God. Mark replies “I am the god”. In the context of the conversation and the film, he is talking about age... Read More »
Snubbed in mainland China as being too westernised, widely praised in the Western world as it’s more attainable in terms of narrative content, easily fluid compared with traditional wuxia films from the 1920’s mainland Chinese cinema. Largely defined as a period film and a marti... Read More »
What the marketing department were thinking when they made the poster for The Sorcerer and the White Snake is anyone’s guess. Proudly displaying a typical example of what the film’s few defenders have kindly described as “stylised” CGI—a careful euphemism for “incomplete”, or per... Read More »
What the marketing department were thinking when they made the poster for The Sorcerer and the White Snake is anyone’s guess. Proudly displaying a typical example of what the film’s few defenders have kindly described as “stylised” CGI—a careful euphemism for “incomplete”, or per... Read More »
Perfect as it was in its initial iteration, the news of Unforgiven’s remake as a samurai film starring Ken Watanabe comes as a curiously exciting prospect; perhaps it’s the cultural transplantation of Eastwood’s bravura treatise on the mythology of violence that makes less distre... Read More »
