Night+ Day in Hong Kong;   Fallen Angels(1995) + Chunking Express(1994)

  ”You’re right, because to me Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long. I always think these two films should be seen together as a double bill. In fact, people asked me during an interview for Chungking Express: “You’ve made these two stories which have no relationship at all to each other, how can you connect them?” And I said, “The main characters of Chungking Express are not Fay Wang or Takashi Kaneshiro, but the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong.” I see the films as inter-reversible, the character of Fay Wang could be the character of Takashi in Fallen Angels; Brigitte Lin in Chungking could be Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. All of their characters are inter-reversible. Also, in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us”. -Wong Kar Wai

 

(Source: gilbogarbage, via farewell-wkw)

A upcoming Chinese film, The Chef, the Actor, the Scoundrel, seems to have referred to some iconic films in its title. And it is marketed as a April fool comedy. Quite a refreshing marketing strategy I say. 

Chan-wook Park’s works are becoming my guilty pleasure

Watched Lady Vengence and Stoker in the past couple of days. Having a weak heart, I had been avoiding watching Chan-wook Park’s works because they were known as being violent, scary and dark. But these two films offered such thrilling viewing experience that I am becoming a fan of Park’s works. 

Surprisingly, Stoker is not written by Park, because the darkness and emotional intensity is certainly the signature of Park’s auteur style. Having not seen any information on why Park came to Hollywood to direct this project, I suspected that he was invited to direct this film because Hollywood producers see how skillfully Park has made morally twisted thrillers. 

Park is certainly good at at least three things:

1) the cinematography is just stunning. Almost every shot has an amazing composition and each shot has a reason to be there. While watching both films, I more than once burst into a cry of Oh My, simply because of the unimaginably beautiful shots. The colors were vibrant and functional to the atmosphere of the whole film. The cinematography is one of the main reasons why it gave me guilty pleasure. When the sheriff is killed and his blood spurting all over the field, you see what India sees: the flower and the wheat being painted by the red blood. That was just too beautiful to not feel visually pleased by it. Park uses this cinematography to invite the audience to share the beauty that India saw in the act of killing, and this scene made me feel thrilled and guilty at the same time.

2) Park is a master of creating tension and suspense. In both Lady Vengence and Stoker, Park shows his skill of using parallel editing as a moment of horror and discovery. In Stoker, we see Evelyn putting on make-up to seduce Charlie, finding out that he is not there; Charlie approaching the aunt in the motel telephone booth and strangle her; and India eating icecream at the basement and found out that the housekeeper’s body was in the fridge. To refer to another of my post on the middle point of Lady Vengence, we could see that how unbelievably well Park makes use of parallel editing to create the most exciting and revealing moment in his thrillers. In my opinion, he is truly masterful as a director of the genre of thriller.

3) Park’s incredibly thrilling editing and smooth transition between scenes/shots was one of the main source of my pleasure from Stoker. He seems to like using flashbacks, which allows him to connect different points of the story and allows the audience to remember some of the details that  have a deeper or a new meaning after the revelation of a new layer of the story. In Lady Vengence, there was even a moment when he flashed some moments from the future in the scene when all the parents of the abducted children were gathered to watch the videos of their children. In my opinion, some of the flashbacks were great, but sometimes I thought he was a bit over-using it. 

In terms of the depth of story, I liked how Stoker kind of challenges or did not care about any accepted moral value. The film invites the audience to identify with India’s character and even see the beauty of killing from her point of view. It does not pass any judgment about the act of killing itself, although it did define this act itself as a result of insanity. But I liked how the film implicates the audience into this conspiracy of killing, in the way that Charlie implicates India in this guilty pleasure. 

As for Lady Vengence, the story shows the weakness of legal system, people’s doubt about law, and a figure who is seeking for redemption but did not eventually forgive herself. Strangely, I have coincidentally watched a couple of films about justice, punishment and compensation. In Herzog’s Into the Abyss, despite most people’s objection to the death penalty, the victim’s family said that she felt a burden off her shoulder when she witnessed the death of the murderer. The scene of all the victims’ parents eating a cake together in Lady Vengence reminded me of this. It seems that after each of them hurt the killer and shed his blood, they felt relieved in some way, although their children can never come back to life. This mentality of feeling compensated through punishment is certainly peculiar. 

Anyway, one of the thematic elements that both Lady Vengence and Stoker shared was that they were not confined within the moral judgment and did not have much respect for the existing legal system. They both beautified, justified and glorified an act outside of law, either vengence, or enjoying killing beyond the normal. Chan-wook Park is not only a master of suspense and beautiful cinematography, but also a storyteller who is pushing the boundary of existing ideology of law and normality, and challenges the audience’s idea about what is morally, ideologically correct. In his film such as Stoker, the morally “perverted” is presented as being aesthetically pleasing, and for India even as being sexually arousing. Some criticism blamed the film for being violent for the sake of violence. And I think that says that these viewers totally missed the point of the film. 

chihiroinbathhouse:

The Middle Point of Lady Vengence, 2005 (dir. Chan-wook Park)

What exactly happens between 55 and 56 minutes into this 111 minutes long film? Geum-ja has been planning to take her revenge for 13 years, and it finally comes to the night for the execution. However, the intervention of this Christian, who is upset by Geum-ja’s sinful attempt for revenge and sold her to Mr. Baek, the target of revenge learned of the plan and hired two killers. 

The middle point of the film is a growing tension created by suspenseful parallel editing. The killers snapped off the light, prepared for their action, waiting for Geum-ja and Jenny at the end of the tunnel. A couple of eyeline match shots builds up the suspense. Geum-ja and Jenny paused at the sight of the black car that is darkened inside, realizing the danger ahead. As they proceeded, we see them slowly moving from the lighted area to the total darkness. In the meantime, we know that Mr. Baek’s wife, who is helping Guem-ja, was going home to cook her husband a dinner, unaware that he knew that she betrayed him. In the parallel editing, when the killers are preparing for the killing, we see Mr. Baek calmly having dinner, starring at the shimmer light, which is supposed to be from a TV. When Geum-ja and Jenny walk to the killers, the shot is cut to Mr. Baek, and this time we see that in the direction he stares at is actually his wife in bondage, not the TV. This is the moment when the suspense reaches the highest point, and the moment that greatly upset the audience’s rising hope for the fulfillment of Geum-ja’s plan. The second that follows is the decline and resolution of this tension. What Park does in this very middle point of the film is just marvelous. 

I am making a fuss to get angry with Futurama

While I first started watching Futurama, I was thrilled to see such a smart show with so much imagination. Then came a scene that quite disappointed and somewhat enraged me, when the spaceship flies over the Great Wall and many ancient-looking Chinese. When the spaceship broke the wall, some tribal people rode horses through the opening on the wall. So is Matt Groening saying that when America is using spaceship as the main transportation means in the year 3000, Chinese people are still living a primitive life? Some people argue that the show is being satirical, but I did not see any progressive satire in this at all.

Then came Leela’s comment on the inhuman overpopulation of Hong Kong; in UN’s meeting, a Japanese-like figure is singled out as the only person who needs the translation to understand English, even when his arm is cut off by the sword; Amy Wong’s parents are speaking English with a Cantonese accent, and when they lost their casino to the mob, her mother said:My days of joy and luck are over. Guess I got to quit that club. as if all Chinese women in America joined Joy Luck Club (That book is indeed very popular); and when all the characters are transformed into Japanese animation style, only Amy utters some different language, which vaguely sounds like Japanese. I guess I need to give the show a bit credits to make this sound differently from Amy’s occasional Cantonese. But while other characters are still speaking whatever they speak normally, why single Amy out to let her speak like Japanese? 

Futurama confuses me and I don’t know whether I should give these depictions credits and see them as being satirical, or should I be critical and angry about them. Sometimes I think the creators of the show are brilliant in casting some stereotypes into doubt, but other times I think they thought they were being clever in making jokes about Joy Luck Club, which turned out to be too obvious, self-righteous, and problematic. Again, maybe it is just me being radically critical and demanding. 

A clever, humorously cut scene in Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengence. Would make a sophisticated example to talk about film editing

Wong Kar Wai: The Hand, in Eros. I would strongly argue with people who said that Wong does not have his style, since this film and every Wong’s film (probably except the first one) has a recognizable oppressed emotion, atmosphere and aura. The manner of composition and lighting is very signature Wong Kar Wai. The title of the film indicates the image and symbol that is dominant in the film: the hand. The character’s oppressed lust and love, and the dramatic tension are all suggested in the close-up of the hands. Wong Kar Wai’s 40 minutes entry for this triple feature shorts anthology reminded me of how much and why I admire his work. Next time when someone questions me why I unreasonably adore Wong’s works, I could list a dozen of reasons to defend my standing. 

Death and the Ritual of Funeral

Just talked about Realism and asked the students to compare Courbet with Caravaggio’s depictions of a burial. One of the fascinating detail that is in common in both paintings is that the grave extends into the real space, and as viewers our space is connected with the one in the painting, and our position is probably in the grave. Other than Caravaggio’s emotionally elevated imagination of the entombment and Courbet’s emotionless, anti-emotionalism approach, contemporary film makers offered even a comic approach to dramatize funeral. Itami, Xiaogang Feng, and Oz makes use of the occasion of the funeral to present the conflicts in a malfunctioned family, or even the larger picture of a commercialized, commodified society. Another fascinating aspect of these films is that they allowed us to take a look at the different cultural perceptions and rituals of funerals. The rituals of funeral practice differs among cultures and even districts in one country. What is shared in all these rituals is to value the dignity of the dead. In front of death, life seems short, trivial, meaningless, but also precious. You wonder whether you should pick up the blind hope of finding meaning in life and keep on trying, or just give up. 

Here is a bow to the ones that have gone to another world, as a compensation for the missed funeral. What is the meaning of this cycle of life and death, if I may ask? 

The subject matter of insanity and asylum has always fascinated me. Not surprisingly, some horror and thriller flicks were set in asylum. But there were some filmmakers and playwrights who recognized the asylum as a battlefield where political struggles of power and humanity takes place. In Durrenmatt’s The Physicists, the scientist pretended insanity and hid in the asylum, but found out that the attempt was in vain because the whole world is an madhouse. Some of the serious exploration of asylum as a social institution of confinement help us to ask the questions that Foucault has asked before in Madness and Civilization: who were locked away in the asylum? The mentally challenged people or the poor, the socially deviant? Why is it necessary to segregate them from the society? What does the term “mad” mean, and what does it mean to be “normal”? How does these mental institutions operate? 

Films about prison, confinement, the culture of incarceration. It is fascinating to see how films about prison could address issues that are so different but yet all so complex, profound. It could be about postwar trauma and frustration in the time of peace; it could be about people who are not only legally but also sexually marginalized; it could be related to faith and hope, or the growing love between people whose world views conflicted with each other. Films about prison show us different reasons for people’s imprisonment, the construction of people’s body and subjectivity by the prison and the society outside of prison, and further question the system of incarceration and the political system that leads to crime and injustice. There were also a couple of documentaries focusing on the social life such as theater activities of prisoners, which for me reveals another strategy of correction and normalization. Again, I found that everything Foucault has said about prison and asylum, about discipline and punishment are still totally in operation beneath the system here.