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Jan. 27th, 2013 05:57 pm
WotD: Grifola frondosa
- der Klapperschwamm, der Laubporling
- de eikhaas
- el (hongo) maitake
- la gírgola de castanyer
- la poule des bois
- żagwica listkowata
- 잎새버섯
- 灰樹花 huīshùhuā
- 舞茸 マイタケ
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Jan. 27th, 2013
Jan. 27th, 2013 09:40 pm
Im Westen nichts Neues
It's too bad Warriors of Heaven and Earth (天地英雄) wasn't a better movie. It seemed to have all the necessary elements to wow, but it left us both vaguely disappointed.
Let's start with the outstanding bits: the locations and the cast. Except for some interior scenes shot on a soundstage in Beijing, it was all filmed on location in Xinjiang. There's a real variety of landscapes in Xinjiang, from the alpine vistas of the western Tian Shan to the sandy dunes of the central Takla Makan, and the filmmakers covered hundreds of miles in order to include them all, even building a full-sized Tang-era frontier village and a military outpost for two of the movies setpieces.
The cast is anchored by leading actor Jiang Wen (姜文), who has more than enough charisma for the role of army-officer-turned-bandit-chief. Perhaps his "frenemy" Nakai Kiichi (中井貴一) has an equivalent amount in his native element, but this was his first Chinese-language role and it shows in the stiffness of his performance. Wang Xueqi (王學圻) brings the right amount of cool menace to role of heavy, and there's a good chemistry between the members of Jiang's merry band, reunited for a final mission which will prove fatal for some or all of them. (In the making-of featurette, director He Ping explains that he had them train together for three months before filming started to build that sense of natural camaraderie.)
Speaking of the cast, they're as diverse as Xinjiang. Tipped off by the non-Han appearance of some of the actors and their multicharacter surnames, I sleuthed about on some Chinese sites. Hasi Bagen, who plays One-Eyed Cao is Mongol. The innkeeper, Tuerxunjiang (i.e. Tursunzhan) Zunong is a Uyghur and the Turkic envoy is played by an actual Turk, Xinjiang Kazakh actor Ye'erjiang (i.e. Yerzhan) Mahebushen. Similarly, the hundreds of mounted extras in the climactic siege were recruited from the Kazakh autonomous region in the north.
If there's a weak spot, it's leading lady Zhao Wei (趙薇), but that's probably due to her part being underwritten. The understated romance between her and Jiang is one of several plot hooks that could've used more nourishment. There's also a scrappy orphan boy who is mercifully not exploited for either awwws or laughs, but instead ends up getting the heave-ho at a curiously inappropriate time, and a tragicomic warrior long past his prime who earns our sympathy even if his inclusion in the band is never really justified.
The movie has a solid classic Western plot: After a couple decades of service to theUS CongressEmperor, Nakai Kiichi wants to return home to England Japan, but is first forced to complete One Last Mission. Jiang Wen wants to...head off into the desert to die? (It's never adequately explained why he wanders off there after dismissing his band with instructions to settle down and get married.) But he stumbles upon a lost wagon traincaravan and takes it upon himself to escort it back to civilisation. Naturally, the two Men of Honour are at cross-purposes. And naturally they both make enemies of the vicious rogue sherifflocal warlord and end up together trying to defend a lonely outpost against a mass assault of murderous IndiansTurks.
Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the way through, a mystical macguffin is introduced that brings incoherence and anticlimax to the bloody denouement. I felt like I had to shift my expectations too many times through the course of this film. The first time the baddie sends his men after one of our heroes, I tensed for some spectacular swordfighting, only to see them all summarily dispatched. The making-of short made a big deal out of the fact that they'd hired a team of wire-fu experts from Hong Kong (although, judging from his credits, the action director who came with them is second-rate at best), but except for one gonzo training scene early on, their contributions don't amount to much.
And then there was the camera work, which I found more distracting than exciting. In particular, director He seems to like shooting from above, which he falls back on even when it doesn't really make sense (such as during a nighttime escape sequence) or raises false hopes. (He goes to it during our protagonists' first duel, which takes place in and around a roofless shack; when he pulled back up to the gable, I literally squealed, thinking, "Someone's going to go over the top!" but it was just a distraction shot for a rush around the side.)
By the end of it all, I was really missing the balls-out exuberance of the Hong Kong films I watched so many of in the 90s. Yeah, it often resulted in a mess, but it was usually a glorious mess; at the very least, you knew it would be unlike anything you'd seen before. Here I just sat back and watched the slow smothering of squandered opportunities amid some affecting character interplay and rather irrational tactical manoeuvring.
Unfortunately, the featurette doesn't delve into any of the most interesting aspects of the movie-making process for me, namely the politics. It's very interesting, in these days of ratcheting tensions between China and Japan, to see a film depicting them as allies. Likewise, six years after a film which made the natives of Xinjiang black-armoured "Turks" bent on invasion and subjugation, the capitol of the province erupted in anti-Han riots. But of course, all that is off-limits, so we just pick up some cute tidbits about how a surprise snowstorm halted filming and the dancing girls had to perform their big scene in below-freezing weather.
Let's start with the outstanding bits: the locations and the cast. Except for some interior scenes shot on a soundstage in Beijing, it was all filmed on location in Xinjiang. There's a real variety of landscapes in Xinjiang, from the alpine vistas of the western Tian Shan to the sandy dunes of the central Takla Makan, and the filmmakers covered hundreds of miles in order to include them all, even building a full-sized Tang-era frontier village and a military outpost for two of the movies setpieces.
The cast is anchored by leading actor Jiang Wen (姜文), who has more than enough charisma for the role of army-officer-turned-bandit-chief. Perhaps his "frenemy" Nakai Kiichi (中井貴一) has an equivalent amount in his native element, but this was his first Chinese-language role and it shows in the stiffness of his performance. Wang Xueqi (王學圻) brings the right amount of cool menace to role of heavy, and there's a good chemistry between the members of Jiang's merry band, reunited for a final mission which will prove fatal for some or all of them. (In the making-of featurette, director He Ping explains that he had them train together for three months before filming started to build that sense of natural camaraderie.)
Speaking of the cast, they're as diverse as Xinjiang. Tipped off by the non-Han appearance of some of the actors and their multicharacter surnames, I sleuthed about on some Chinese sites. Hasi Bagen, who plays One-Eyed Cao is Mongol. The innkeeper, Tuerxunjiang (i.e. Tursunzhan) Zunong is a Uyghur and the Turkic envoy is played by an actual Turk, Xinjiang Kazakh actor Ye'erjiang (i.e. Yerzhan) Mahebushen. Similarly, the hundreds of mounted extras in the climactic siege were recruited from the Kazakh autonomous region in the north.
If there's a weak spot, it's leading lady Zhao Wei (趙薇), but that's probably due to her part being underwritten. The understated romance between her and Jiang is one of several plot hooks that could've used more nourishment. There's also a scrappy orphan boy who is mercifully not exploited for either awwws or laughs, but instead ends up getting the heave-ho at a curiously inappropriate time, and a tragicomic warrior long past his prime who earns our sympathy even if his inclusion in the band is never really justified.
The movie has a solid classic Western plot: After a couple decades of service to the
Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the way through, a mystical macguffin is introduced that brings incoherence and anticlimax to the bloody denouement. I felt like I had to shift my expectations too many times through the course of this film. The first time the baddie sends his men after one of our heroes, I tensed for some spectacular swordfighting, only to see them all summarily dispatched. The making-of short made a big deal out of the fact that they'd hired a team of wire-fu experts from Hong Kong (although, judging from his credits, the action director who came with them is second-rate at best), but except for one gonzo training scene early on, their contributions don't amount to much.
And then there was the camera work, which I found more distracting than exciting. In particular, director He seems to like shooting from above, which he falls back on even when it doesn't really make sense (such as during a nighttime escape sequence) or raises false hopes. (He goes to it during our protagonists' first duel, which takes place in and around a roofless shack; when he pulled back up to the gable, I literally squealed, thinking, "Someone's going to go over the top!" but it was just a distraction shot for a rush around the side.)
By the end of it all, I was really missing the balls-out exuberance of the Hong Kong films I watched so many of in the 90s. Yeah, it often resulted in a mess, but it was usually a glorious mess; at the very least, you knew it would be unlike anything you'd seen before. Here I just sat back and watched the slow smothering of squandered opportunities amid some affecting character interplay and rather irrational tactical manoeuvring.
Unfortunately, the featurette doesn't delve into any of the most interesting aspects of the movie-making process for me, namely the politics. It's very interesting, in these days of ratcheting tensions between China and Japan, to see a film depicting them as allies. Likewise, six years after a film which made the natives of Xinjiang black-armoured "Turks" bent on invasion and subjugation, the capitol of the province erupted in anti-Han riots. But of course, all that is off-limits, so we just pick up some cute tidbits about how a surprise snowstorm halted filming and the dancing girls had to perform their big scene in below-freezing weather.