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Reviews
L'enfer (2005)
Typically Overblown French "Art" with Bee-Stung Lips
I've just seen this film in a lovely air-conditioned cinema here in Bangkok. And since the temperature outside is hovering somewhere around 37C with very high humidity, my 100Bt was not wasted.
Failing that, I haven't seen such a piece of extremely well-made junk in a long time. This is the kind of film that provides a test of taste, as it were. Anyone who claims to like or love it goes immediately onto the same list of tasteless phonies who still go around talking about the superiority of British television. At least the gormless old broad in the wheelchair was good for a few guffaws.
Pseudo-profundity and fat lips, while characteristic of much French cinema, really do not a good movie make. I'd rather watch Independence Day 10 times in a row than sit through this stinker one more time.
Wu ji (2005)
in the midst of carnage on a battlefield, a desperately hungry girl makes a Faustian bargain with a Chinese goddess and lives lavishly thereafter to regret it
I think that this is a very good film, in spite of what many people on this board have said. It is, however, a very different kind of film altogether; it is almost a pure transposition of folk tale to film, with all of the magic and illogic and quirky plotting that such tales involve. Films that attempt to transpose/translate comic books to film do so best when they manage to get the 'tone' of the comic onto the screen and recreate as much as possible the graphic and narrative style of the comic. _The Promise_ does this effectively for folk-tale/myth.
I should probably add that I also like _Operetta Tanuki Goten_, by Suzuki Seijun, which is also working the same territory, albeit in a very different way. Chen's film also references highly formalistic genres like Beijing Opera, hence the acting styles are sometimes very far from the boring "realism" of most contemporary film. Viewers who complain of a lack of realism or believable emotion in films like these should try to climb Rapunzel's hair, and stick to "classic" fare like _Red Sorghum_ and _Farewell My Concubine_, which, brilliant though they are, work in the very familiar idiom of 'Art Film', and provide no difficulty for the kind of viewer who used to say, "I don't watch TV, but I really like _Masterpiece Theatre_".
Yimou and Kaige, with their latest films, are pushing Chinese film, and therefore international film, in new directions altogether, and part of that push is clearly an attempt to escape the heavy yoke of the 'European Art Film' tradition, the 'quirky-Indie-imitation-thereof' tradition, and the narrow confines of the various 'martial arts film' traditions as well. I say, good on them, and shame to those who won't celebrate creative development because it betrays their deeply conservative and traditionalist expectations. As to the suggestion that their recent work betrays a kind of "Hollywood-ification", all I can say is, "huh?"