Watch the flicks

[muckefuck]

Bend It Like Beckham Pretty much exactly what I expected: Feel-good sports movie meets culture-clash comedy; wackiness ensues. I was particularly amused to see baldy-man Anupam Kher concealing his big shiny pate under a Sikh turban. (Note to the hair-challenged: It's never too late to convert!) The only thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth was the lesbophobia. Did we really need the scene of Juliet Stevenson (looking eerily like Michael Palin in drag, but with even more crackerjack comic timing) disrupting the wedding with charges of dykery? Or the underwhelming education scene following it (best summed up as "Y'know, lesbianism isn't that bad!")?

Also, for a few moments, I thought the filmmakers would actually have the gonads to give us a happy ending which doesn't require the female lead to be paired off with a male, but I guess that was simply too radical a departure from formula and I should be content that it wasn't felt necessary to assign a man to Keira Knightley as well. But my biggest disappointment was not being able to find out what all the Punjabi was. The closed captions simply say "[Punjabi]". I thought for sure some geeky Punj would've produced a web page similar to, say, the guide to Chinese dialogue in Firefly in the four years since the movie was released, but no joy.

活著 (To Live) For a while there, I made a point of watching pretty much every product of the collaboration between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li so I'm not sure how I missed this one. She was beautiful, of course, even when artfully aged and succumbing to some decorous wasting disease. Likewise, the whole film was beautiful, even when depicting awfulness that should've been unbearable. I'm not sure what I really got from it besides "Sucks to live in China", something that I kinda knew already.

All films are manipulative, of course; what we ask is simply that they not make it too obvious. But I felt that the melodrama was overdetermined in spots. (C'mon losing both children, respectively to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?) Moreover, the long takes of parental histrionics verged on emo-porn. If The Sweet Hereafter taught me anything, it's that depictions of grief can be so much more wrenching when they're quiet.

Next in the queue: Bollywood Dreams. Which reminds me that I really need a short list of recommendations from local Hindi movie musical maven mollpeartree. If anyone else has suggestions for films we simply must see, feel free to pile them on.

Comments

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

活著 (To Live)... ...Likewise, the whole film was beautiful, even when depicting awfulness that should've been unbearable. I'm not sure what I really got from it besides "Sucks to live in China", something that I kinda knew already.... ...But I felt that the melodrama was overdetermined in spots. (C'mon losing both children, respectively to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?)
I agree with all your points - I really enjoyed it when I saw it, despite the melodrama and owing largely to the epic beauty. Given the impressively strong and not at all hidden anti-Communist message, how did the director manage to stay out of jail long enough to do the movie he did with Jet Li?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

To Live was banned in mainland China. IIRC, Zhang made two or three movies before Hero which the government wouldn't even allowed to be screened abroad. I think the only reason he's stayed out of jail is that the government doesn't want another embarrassing cause célèbre. Remember that, at the time, Zhang was coming off a string of major international art house (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern) hits and his imprisonment would've caused an outcry around the world.

I think it also has something to do with the contemporary ideological trends, which I only hazily remember. The movie can always be viewed as more a criticism of Maoism than Communism, per se, and Maoism has gone in and out of favour in China.