One of Hong Kong’s best loved musicals in its time, and screened at 2023’s Queer East film festival, The Love Eterne is an adaptation of the Chinese legend Butterfly Lovers. It plays very differently to a modern audience, and to a Western one. The narrative is naïve and simplistic and incredibly drawn out, and viewers unaccustomed to the high, stylised vocals or repetitive motifs of Huangmei opera may find it grating. That said, this is a fascinating historical artefact, and for those interested in the cinematic art form itself, there’s a lot to unwrap.
Zhu Ying-tai (Betty Loh Ti) is an unhappy teenager whose acting out gives way to a refusal to get out of bed or engage with life in any way. This may not seem to make for an appealing heroine, but there’s an understandable reason for it. As she puts it, she prefers literature to jewels,...
Zhu Ying-tai (Betty Loh Ti) is an unhappy teenager whose acting out gives way to a refusal to get out of bed or engage with life in any way. This may not seem to make for an appealing heroine, but there’s an understandable reason for it. As she puts it, she prefers literature to jewels,...
- 4/28/2023
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
When A Chinese Ghost Story premiered in 1987, it was already part of a unique category – the fusion of horror, comedy, and Kung Fu. Asian horror films are known as jiangshi, which is the name of a specific spooky hopping ghost found in Chinese folklore that proliferates these films.
Part zombie, part vampire, jiangshi are corpses that are usually reanimated by demons or Daoist sorcerers. They hop along mindlessly with their arms outstretched like sleepwalkers, and feed on the life essence – or qi – of the living. Often a jiangshi is blind but can smell breath. This makes for great comic hijinks as hapless characters struggle to hold their breath while gruesome jiangshi shove their rotting noses close to their mouths trying to pick up the scent.
Comedy is a common horror film device. It releases tension and leaves the audience unguarded for the next jump scare. The addition of Kung Fu...
Part zombie, part vampire, jiangshi are corpses that are usually reanimated by demons or Daoist sorcerers. They hop along mindlessly with their arms outstretched like sleepwalkers, and feed on the life essence – or qi – of the living. Often a jiangshi is blind but can smell breath. This makes for great comic hijinks as hapless characters struggle to hold their breath while gruesome jiangshi shove their rotting noses close to their mouths trying to pick up the scent.
Comedy is a common horror film device. It releases tension and leaves the audience unguarded for the next jump scare. The addition of Kung Fu...
- 10/25/2020
- by Mike Cecchini
- Den of Geek
Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling wrote about ghosts, fox spirits and monsters in his novel Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. “The Enchanting Shadow” is an early film adaptation of one of his stories about a scholar and a beautiful lady ghost. Director Li Han-hsiang was mostly known for making historical spectacles and Huangmei opera musicals but here he’s trying out a nonmusical horror film instead.
Betty Loh Ti plays Nie Xiao-qiqn, the lady ghost that haunts the local deserted temple in human form; she seduces young men who happen to stay the night there, being forced into this situation by Lao Lao, a more powerful female demon who’s using her to lure those men so she kills them herself and feasts on their blood.
Knowing that the local temple is haunted, Ning Cai-chen (Zhao Lei), a tax collector and a scholar is still keen to spend the night.
Betty Loh Ti plays Nie Xiao-qiqn, the lady ghost that haunts the local deserted temple in human form; she seduces young men who happen to stay the night there, being forced into this situation by Lao Lao, a more powerful female demon who’s using her to lure those men so she kills them herself and feasts on their blood.
Knowing that the local temple is haunted, Ning Cai-chen (Zhao Lei), a tax collector and a scholar is still keen to spend the night.
- 7/14/2020
- by David Chew
- AsianMoviePulse
If you wanted a crash course in Chinese language cinema of the past 40 years, you could do a lot worse than the series playing at the Metrograph from May 18 - 27 built around the career of Sylvia Chang. An actress, writer and director of tremendous accomplishment (as well as popular singer and playwright), Chang has been a major figure since the mid-1970s, playing important roles in both the Hong Kong New Wave and New Taiwanese Cinema, working with key directors King Hu, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Edward Yang, Stanley Kwan, Johnnie To, Mabel Cheung, and Ang Lee. She’s played waifish ingenues and hard-nosed career women, exasperated mothers, bohemian artists, bourgeois matrons and ass-kicking cops. As a director, she’s brought special focus to women’s changing roles in domestic and family melodramas, creating sophisticated works that straddle the line between mainstream and art house. The Metrograph is playing 15 of her films,...
- 5/16/2018
- MUBI
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