The 11th Hall of Fame

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Well there's one. Citizen was third as he said to contact me. No point in dragging this all up again, you two can if you want but:



Think we should all just agree that this is the best thing of all time!



Re: Bashu
I searched YouTube again and found this. Not sure why it didn't come up in my previous search. I haven't actually watched it yet, but I skipped ahead a little and the subtitles seem to be working.

I'm gonna stick with my plan of watching it last, but in case anybody else is having trouble.

First Half:


Second Half:





Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013)
Imdb

Date Watched: 9/28/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: The 11th MoFo Hall of Fame
Rewatch: No


Potential Spoilers Ahead

Despite its 82 minute runtime, this is by no means a film for those with deficient attention spans. It crawls at a snail's pace. There's little excitement. There's no color. There's only quiet contemplation, reflection, and questions with no concrete answers.

The film centers on two characters - Anna and Wanda. Anna spent her childhood as an orphan in a convent. Now a young woman, she is on the verge of taking her vows to spend the rest of her life as a nun. But first she must spend time with Wanda - an aunt Anna never knew, who will reveal to her a tragic family secret.

I instantly connected with Wanda and sympathized with her struggles to process her grief over the murders of her family. Anna was a little more difficult. I imagine it must be quite a shock to suddenly go from knowing nothing of your origins to learning that your name and your religion are not at all what they once were and that your parents are buried somewhere in unmarked graves - victims of murder that will never get justice. But her face and actions never seemed to betray any emotion at any point in the film, making that critical connection nearly impossible for me to form.

Which is not necessarily to say that this was a poor artistic choice. After all, how much grief can a person really have for people they never really knew? But even in Ida's (Anna's birth name) brief discovery and exploration of mankind's carnal urges she expresses neither joy nor regret or disappointment. Something that I found almost more frustrating than her near non-reaction to finding out about her family.

Still, the story itself was an engaging one and as frustrated as I was with Anna/Ida, she still somehow didn't seem unreal to me. I also really liked that the film never really vilified the killer and left his true motivations open to interpretation rather than painting a black and white picture of the how and the why.

Anyway, forgive my rambling, train-of-thought review here. There were several things that I really liked about the film, but ultimately I found myself respecting it a lot more than I actually enjoyed it.

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Guap, that's the same generalized foo-foo, nothing write up that you always do for the Hofs.
That was not my "write up" for this movie.

Ever since Camo said you needed to write more, you've only made your write ups longer, never do you do personally takes, like you just watched the movie.
I don't understand. You want me to give a plot description of the movie? Because that is actually much weaker evidence of watching than writing up your subjective reaction to it.

BTW I was the third person who told Camo that I don't believe you watch the movies. And I still don't think you do.
The way I write about the animation I watch is also like that, in fact, it's less detailed than what I wrote in here: http://www.movieforums.com/community...=40647&page=18

So there is absolutely nothing more I can do to convince you because I watched them and I reviewed them. If you find the way I talk about the movies indicative of not watching them, well, I guess there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it.





The Flowers of War (Jin ling shi san chai) (Yimou Zhang, 2011)
Imdb

Date Watched: 9/30/16
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: The 11th MoFo Hall of Fame
Rewatch: No


Like Raise the Red Lantern, the other film I've seen from Yimou Zhang, The Flowers of War is breathtakingly shot and features complex characters. Unlike Lantern, however, there were a few things that bothered me about this film.

I think my biggest gripe is that the film felt too Hollywood in all the wrong ways. The white hero - played by an A-list Hollywood actor, no less - in a foreign land BS particularly rubbed me the wrong way. I expect as much - and can better accept it - from a Hollywood director, but I hoped for something else from a Chinese one - especially since the story is only inspired by the events of the Rape of Nanking and the characters themselves are fictional. The shoe-horned in love story and the fact that Bale is among my least favorite actors didn't help much either. I was also a bit bothered by the one dimensional pure-evil portrayal of the Japanese, though given the event that inspired the film, its is far more forgivable than other issues I had.

Thankfully there was enough in the rest of the film to compensate for these problems. It's worth mentioning again how beautiful the cinematography is - from the vibrant colors of the women's dresses to the dark, somber scenes of death and destruction on the street. The film spins the tale of unlikely heroes (a drunken mortician and a group of prostitutes hiding in a church in order to save themselves) and of self sacrifice so that others may live. The juxtaposition of mankind at its worse and its best, was moving and heartbreaking. I just wish it felt more authentic and less like the fiction that it is.

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Good review MV, and I can agree with a lot of what you said too.
I think the director's intent was to create a Chinese arthouse-Hollywood fusion movie. So yah, it does feel more Hollywood with it's story line and with Christian Bale, than Raise the Red Lantern..but that's what the film is aiming for, a broader American audience. As the average movie goer won't watch an arthouse film with subtitles.

I'm not a fan of Christian Bale either, but at least here he's an unlikable actor playing a semi unlikable character I mainly picked Flowers of War as I thought I would try something different this time around, and I don't expect to win, but as long as people feel the movie was worth their time, then I'm OK with that.



I remember liking Christian Bale's performance in The Machinist (or at least admiring his dedication to the role and the weight loss it required), but other than that I'm not really a fan of him either. I liked Equilibrium and The Dark Knight despite that, so it doesn't necessarily mean that I won't enjoy Flowers of War when I get around to watching it. Hopefully.



Speaking of which, I just noticed that I've unintentionally watched movies in the pattern of rewatch, new watch, rewatch, new watch, rewatch. I guess I'll have to watch something new to me next.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
In reality, The Flowers of War was one of Zhang's lowest-grossing movies in the U.S. - $300,000. House of Flying Daggers made $11,000,000, Hero made $54,000,000 and even Raise the Red Lantern earned $2.6 mil.
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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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I just have Bashu left.

I had intended to watch it this weekend, but I've come down with a cold so I don't know if that's going to happen. It may have to be put off a week or so.



Nothing good comes from staying with normal people
Think I'll watch Bashu tomorrow and get that done. Thanks for the link Miss Vicky. Had a review written up for Samurai rebellion, but the page didn't load properly and when I hit return I got back to a blank box *sighs in frustration* Will do a rewrite in the morning.
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Why not just kill them? I'll do it! I'll run up to Paris - bam, bam, bam, bam. I'm back before week's end. We spend the treasure. How is this a bad plan?



Think I'll watch Bashu tomorrow and get that done. Thanks for the link Miss Vicky. Had a review written up for Samurai rebellion, but the page didn't load properly and when I hit return I got back to a blank box *sighs in frustration* Will do a rewrite in the morning.
I did that with a long review yesterday. It was just about done when I accidentally closed the browser. Sucks when that happens.



Nothing good comes from staying with normal people
I did that with a long review yesterday. It was just about done when I accidentally closed the browser. Sucks when that happens.
From now on, we both use the notepad or somthing to write the review, then we copy it into the reply box and make it pretty and stuff. Deal?



That's what I do. I don't dare trust the browser/forum textbox. I've lost write-ups one too many times before.

I usually use a note program, which also makes it easy to write something up on the phone, and then Word for my longer and more well-rounded write-ups (sometimes in extension of my note-write-ups).

Anyways, watched The Dead Girl not too long ago, so that's one less... gotta get around those write-ups though.



From now on, we both use the notepad or somthing to write the review, then we copy it into the reply box and make it pretty and stuff. Deal?
That sounds like a plan! I sometimes copy what I write into notepad, but not yesterday.



Flowers of War (2011)


A blockbuster Chinese/American film, directed by a Chinese director aiming at a mostly Chinese market.

Anyway, this was a very nice movie, very nice to watch, it goes down very "smooth" like a Heineken. Although it's ending left a lot to be desired: the movie felt like it finished in the middle to the end, although in many cases an ambiguous ending is better than a well characterized ending (like in Once Upon a Time in America).

What I liked about it was the cinematography and the sets, really beautiful stuff. I also liked the dynamic use of the camera in some scenes such as when the two girls are trying to escape from the Japanese soldiers and one of them jumps into the lake.

Also, one cool thing is a movie about the Japanese invasion of China, since in WW2, most Japanese soldiers didn't die fighting Americans but Chinese, actually, in their futile attempt to conquer China. It reminded me of the Japanese movie about the occupation of certain parts of Japan by the Soviet Union after WW2, something that very few people in the West are aware of.

One thing I disliked about the film was the unrealistic portrayal of combat, specially given that by the time of the film, the vast majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery, yet, no artillery barrage is seem in the movie. Historically, artillery barrages were the basic form of attack while infantry's role was just to advance and occupy territory, and it was not designed to be the main source of casualties on the enemy through man-to-man combat. War had evolved to the point where 80% of the soldiers died without seeing their enemy: it was either an artillery shell fired a dozen miles away, or a mortar shell fired several miles away or a bomb dropped by an airplane 20,000 feet up on the air, that killed the soldiers in the battlefield. Yet, most movies about the war depict warfare as if it were still a man-to-man fight instead of a impersonal and brutal type of warfare (movies about WW1 like All Quiet on the Western Front, are a better in that regard).

The acting was ok, some of Batman's acting left a bit to be desired though (it left me unimpressed) while the Chinese actors spoke tremendously perfect english given the historical background of the film (I mean, I think the probability a Chinese back in 1937 of understanding English perfectly was less than 1 over 100,000 while in the film many Chinese and Japanese appear to speak and understand English fluently).