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Reviews
Se, jie (2007)
Sentimental Mutation Visualized in Sexual Sequences
It is a film of a young woman's prowess and tragedy narrated with a flashback between two current sequences. In a mixed genre of adultery and espionage, the story is told in a unrestricted narrative in which the audience are disseminated with full information some characters don't have. Despite the unrestrictedness in the knowledge domain of the audience, tension mounts on when Jiazhi Wang (Wei Tang) embarks on her mission to assassinate her target as the audience are puzzled with the leads' staging and other diegetic hints on whether or not her identity is or will be exposed.
Director Lee packs the film with sex, a common element of the genre. Lee establishes Wang as a cool girl in the expository sequences by use of apathetic expression (actually a non-expression) under freeze staging. Down the plot, Wang apparently remains tough and firm in her mission, as revealed from her dialogues. Nevertheless, Lee portrays Wang's evolutionary attitude toward Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) essentially by use of the 3 sex sequences in which Wang behaviorally shifts from being passive to active. As a mirrored portray, Mr. Yee's calmness (and seriousness as well) is seen alleviated by his disclosure of his job to Wang in the last hour of the story. Lee in practice builds up a subtle, slow-paced escalation of passion and psychological mutation of both leads, culminating to the diegetic climax.
The carefully choreographed overt sex sequences, in a whole, are instrumental in portraying the evolution of subdued passiveness of Wang toward her target. The sequences witness Wang's gradual sentimental change from taking up a hunting job in fulfillment of her patriotic duty to the nation to an ever deepening voluntary enchantment with her target. Lee goes further from his "Brokeback Mountain" to enhance the degree of explicitness by bringing the leads' body/pubic hairs, Wang's underarm hairs in a close-up in particular, into mise-en-scene to connote the rawness and liberation of the couple's desires.
With the acts of excruciation and execution of spies brought off screen, Lee keeps violence to the minimum despite the blood shedding sequence in the Hong Kong apartment in an earlier plot. There is a slight change of cinematographic style in the film: fast cutting and swish pans at the beginning; slow cutting, static camera and occasional tracking from the middle to the epilogue. While both leads exercise caution along their ways in concealing their respective motives, rationality is, consciously and unconsciously, marooned by lust, the desire for love and sentiments, which eventually render betrayal and fiasco. The film is a narrative on the subordination of rationality to long suppressed emotion and passion.
Tai yang zhao chang sheng qi (2007)
A Challenge for Practical Decoders
The film is more a self-actualization of Director Jiang himself on his aspirations and far-sightedness than a readily decipherable reading for the audience. Alongside the 4 episodes respectively under the narrative motifs of insanity, love, gunman and dream, the quadruple-segmented parody in a non-chronological structure embeds in its inner core, quite implicitly, a philosophy of karma, cycling, reborn, rejuvenation and blessings. Structurally, events in the last episode (dream) precede those in the first episode (insanity) in temporal dimension but is narrated in a flashback. The interrelatedness between the first episode (insanity)and the third (gunman) as well as the sequential arrangement of the second episode (love) and the third (gunman) provides a bridge that completes the causality in both temporal and spatial dimensions of the story. The last episode (dream), a flashback, closes most gaps, bestowing on the audience a residual brain working activity on leaving the cinema.
The wide spectrum of the director's meditation of the story does not call for a preferred reading on the part of the audience. Instead, it leaves ample rooms for decoding and boundless interpretation. Insanity rides through the entire story in various degrees and in variant forms: insanity reigns in the insanity episode; it then tunes down itself as an over-reaction in the love episode; it transforms itself into an extreme sentiment and lust in the gunman episode; it becomes a possible nirvana (expressed in an aberrant gesture of the character), under a rising sun, on the next generation in the dream episode.
Jiang establishes love as another common narrative theme and the act of running as visual motif in the four episodes. Love sways between parental care and lovers' romance in the sequences. The wide geographical coverage in the story and the western-styled gunman perhaps are projections of the grandiose and ostensible aspirations of the director.
Under fast pacing, fast cutting, elliptical narrative, a deluge of film language and cinematographic techniques, fluidity in temporal and spatial orientations and with abrupt slapsticks in loud volume (ambient sounds), the film presents with comic effects and titillating musical acoustics a contrivance from an essentially intrinsic perspective that swings between perceptibility and imperceptibility to practical decoders.
Cheut ai kup gei (2007)
Filmic Propertiies Better Than Content
At the denotative level, the film comes with an explicit theme of females' distrust on the other sex. At the connotative level, it is loaded with a wider exploration on the disequilibrium of the sexes. Set in a story line of suspected conspiracy of the feminine gender, it is a film noir with a mild degree of suspense and tension. Director Pang adopts a multiplicity of film language and cinematographic techniques alongside the restricted narrative. Pang deliberately leaves time for the audience to self-explicate the narrative and the leads' staging by use of, among others, freeze action, slow camera movement, slow cutting, lugubrious piano key strikes, subdued blue lighting and sound off, all in consonance with the tone of the story. The film is particularly slow-paced and consequently relatively hypnotic in the first half. The exposition on the lead's (Simon Yam) personality is unnecessarily long and the portray on his intrinsic psychology seems to be pointless, weak and, after all, in vanity. Pang also uses discontinuous and elliptical editing for narrative purposes. The former renders several scenes mildly undecipherable before the entire narrative is shown, although this is probably an ostentatious narrative device of Pang to intensify the audience's brain working process in a psychology loaded product. Creation of sparse mise-en-scenes together with the infrequency of dialogues further establishes a mood of alienation among characters in addition to the story's mystery mantle. If termed a comedy, the film is a noir comedy. Not surprisingly, it is not associated with logic, nor are the lines of thoughts behind the theme reasonably articulative as the screenplay is from Goo Bi GC. It is ontologically more an exquisite, eccentric and cult film aimed at a minority market.
Tian tang kou (2007)
Elegance in the absence of depth
With the 30's Shanghai as background, the film is a gangs story, a romance story, a brotherhood story and a simple story, with a theme portraying the lust for power against brotherhood piety. The narrative is unrestricted with plots generally linear albeit that it is told in flashback. The story embeds complex relations among characters with such relations & revenges constituting parallel narratives for similarity and contrast. The narrative is framed from the perspective of Feng (Daniel Wu) and supplemented with ancillary perspective from the other lead, Mark (Chen Chang). Director Alexi Tan attempts to make it moderately stylistic by use of freeze action (not freeze frame), complete silence and some other cinematographic devices (obviously Tan restrains it from being overdone). Though the movie comes with strong leads and their fine staging, the diegesis is relatively weak and shallow in portraying the evolution of the key antagonists' personalities down the plots. Nevertheless, visual motif (flicking of cigarette on a cigarette box) is repeatedly used to reinforce the use of power and the desire for such. In terms of visuals, the film comes with replete elegant costumes and settings with Mckintoshes, western hats, suits and cuffed shirts' sleeves filling the mise-en-scenes. Fine mastering of lighting and shooting angles in the presence of both diegetic and non-diegetic music delivers a moody combination of visual and acoustic amusement to the audience. The gun-pointing scenes are fairly flamboyant in mounting up tension whilst sudden fires and zigzags of characters' motions bring occasional shocks to the audience and generate uncomfortable surprises to the audience. Yet the visual-acoustic artifice is less than sufficient to redress its shortcoming in the meek, if not weak, psychological coverage of the characters. The film is another product in which substance is subordinate to style.
Ratatouille (2007)
Fantastic, with Depth
The film comes with a theme that endeavour goes a long way. It calls for the core ability and latent values for both people and arts, instead of peoples' outlook or their past. Quality output can arise from simple and inexpensive materials in the presence of innovation and diligence. The story brings two apparently incompatible subjects together: rat and fine dining. It is rhetorically weak subject wise but propitiating both story wise and theme wise, coming with a classical narrative flow of Hollywood flicks. The epilogue brings an enlightening remark for commentators of any kind. The Cantonese version of voice-acting (Hong Kong) is excellent. Some graphics and dialogues are locally adapted with vividness enhanced. The flick is no less a film for adults as well and a good one with depth indeed.
Next (2007)
A Product of Feedforward Narrative Structure
The flick is an action packed cop movie with a supernatural package. Tamahori adopts a feedforward structure for the narrative in a way that eventuality precedes the event. This unrestricted narrative device brings both humors and tension. Tension soars to the highest when the audience, already fed with the events' outcome, await to see how the characters cast off the perils. Cage's dialogues in the theatrical trailer are prophetic of the epilogue. The gunfire sequences under mobile framing and swish pans present a preponderance of visual tiltillations to the audience. SPOILER ==> The weakest aspect of the movie is that the denouement is anti-climatic.