With a story that ranges from the 1940s to the present and, although mostly set in Bangkok, revolving largely around Teochew-speaking Chinese from Guangdong, this generations-spanning drama feels like a good old-fashioned novel. A romantic beach read, perhaps, the kind in which coincidences and random accidents cause misunderstandings that last for decades until the truth is finally revealed. It’s sentimental in places, sure, but there’s also a fair bit of salty, bawdy humour to cut the sweetness, lashings of period colour, and impressively naturalistic performances from a mostly non-professional cast.…
Tag: Film
Girlfriends review – love and growing pains in queer coming-of-age tale that goes from Hong Kong to Taiwan
It can stretch credibility a little when an actor plays the same character over a long time span in one film. Richard Linklater solved the problem in Boyhood by shooting scenes over succeeding years; AI and de-ageing effects are now an option. With this intimate queer coming-of-age drama, film-maker Tracy Choi instead casts a trio of actors to play one woman from high school to her mid-30s. The three don’t look particularly alike; their temperaments overlap but are by no means identical. The point is perhaps to show how intense…
China wants to suppress independent cinema. But young film-makers are undaunted by red lines
Class started at 9am. Assignments were doled out, ideas were pitched and scripts written, followed by a long day of shooting and editing. Twelve hours later, 20 aspiring and exhausted film-makers were sat in a crowded, makeshift studio, listening to their work being trashed. “The content is still too poor,” the course director, Nan Xin, remarked, after watching a two-minute film about boys on the loose who harass a stray dog. “I didn’t see any deep thought in it. What you did left me with no clue how to actually…
Being Towards Death review – Chinese hospital comedy drama uses plucky patients to ask big questions
‘You know the law of entropy? Life is a process of constant decay,” ssays a doctor in this Chinese hospital comedy drama – but not that you’d know it from the gabbling, frenetic first half-hour of director Chen Sicheng’s death-fixated film. Being Towards Death kicks off with caregiver Xiaobing (Jiang Long) about to throw himself off the roof because, after a scheme to flog his superiors care robots fails, he’s in hock to triad loan sharks. Thankfully the film later settles into an intermittently touching ensemble drama with a meta…
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass review – furry foes out of their depth in candy-coated Chinese adventure
This expensively rendered, eye-searingly bright animated feature from China rests on a truly weird premise. Tom and Jerry, the cartoon foes of yore, are chasing each other around a museum in present-day New York City when they are supernaturally transported, thanks to a magic compass doodah, to a quasi-medieval China where humans mix freely with gods and cryptozoological animals including phoenixes, gargoyles and talking rats. Which, admittedly, isn’t a massive conceptual leap from Tom and Jerry’s usual imaginary world, where a cat and a mouse can be endlessly regenerated after…
Rush hour on Air Force one as Melania director Brett Ratner joins Trump China trip
Brett Ratner, the director behind the Rush Hour movies and a documentary on Melania Trump, is accompanying Donald Trump to China for his summit with Xi Jinping. Trump is due to hold talks with the Chinese leader on Thursday and Friday over pressing economic and geopolitical issues, including Iran and Taiwan. The US president was accompanied on Air Force One by CEOs and top executives from major US tech and finance firms, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla’s Elon Musk and BlackRock’s Larry Fink. Ratner was among the groups as well.…
Ciao UFO review – Hong Kong tear-jerker is less ET than time-hopping chronicle of housing estate kids
Directed by Patrick Leung, this affecting saga from Hong Kong is a bit tricksy to get to grips with because it keeps hopping back and forth between an assortment of time frames. It tracks a set of characters as children in the mid-1980s, played by one group of young actors, and then later in the 1990s and early 00s when an adult cast takes over. But as it spirals in towards its surprising and dramatic conclusion, everything falls into place and the last 10 minutes is properly tear-jerking – even…
Blades of the Guardians review – swords to the fore in martial arts master Yuen Woo-ping’s wuxia heaven
Recently becoming the most successful wuxia film of all time at the Chinese box office, Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords. One wouldn’t expect anything else, given it is directed by veteran fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, best known to western audiences for his contributions to films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix movies and Kill…
Scare Out review – twisty spy thriller is all style, little substance
Back in the 1980s and 90s, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) was acclaimed as one of the most talented directors to emerge from China’s “fifth generation”, film-makers whose work broke with the socialist realist style of their predecessors. While still working within the establishment industry, the fifth generation – including Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang – were considered to varying degrees if not quite dissident, at least somewhat heterodox and anti-authoritarian. Either way, having started out as a cinematographer, Zhang quickly became an arthouse darling abroad, feted…
TikTok creator ByteDance vows to curb AI video tool after Disney threat
ByteDance, the Chinese technology company behind TikTok, has said it will restrain its AI video-making tool, after threats of legal action from Disney and a backlash from other media businesses, according to reports. The AI video generator Seedance 2.0, released last week, has spooked Hollywood as users create realistic clips of movie stars and superheroes with just a short text prompt. Several big Hollywood studios have accused the tool of copyright infringement. On Friday, Walt Disney reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance which accused it of supplying Seedance with…