[rooster]

The bikes are all they had. And even badasses die when up against other badasses. But they were really good shots.

You can't judge them all by Furiosa since she had been away for so long.The Vuvalinis relied on a trap and ambush method to stay alive and there were only a handful of them left. 

I don't know, I didn't think they were hyped up. They seemed tired with little hope left.

[Blanko]

Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1996)

I feel pretty much the same way about this as I did about Flowers of Shanghai. I may have to keep repeating this a lot in my Hou reviews, but this film is gorgeous. Seriously, everything from this guy is just stellar in terms of cinematography. The thing I keep reading about Hou is how little camera movement he uses (which certainly was the case in Café Lumière, and presumably his earlier work which I will get to eventually), but again I'm left surprised by how little Hou sticks to his own conventions, as here he utilises tracking shots, crane shots and various fascinating POV shots to great effect (still no sign of shot-reverse shot, I wonder if I'm ever going to see that in a Hou film?). There's a lot of juxtaposition between lush vistas of rural Taiwan and the neon-lit cityscape of Taipei.

As was the case with Flowers, in this film it's again difficult to get a good grasp on what exactly is going on. A small-time gangster and his pitiful entourage get into financial trouble and their attempts at get-rich-quick schemes lead them into a deeper hole. The gangster contemplates over his desire to leave the life of crime behind and start a restaurant. A lot of major events are either merely referenced or implicitly discussed over the phone, so I didn't get a very clear picture of the events. Again, might be something that improves with a rewatch. 8/10

[Blanko]

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007)

This film is to Paris as what Café Lumière was to Tokyo. It pays homage to Albert Lamorisse's short film The Red Balloon, even making direct reference to it. In an uncharacteristically self-referential fashion, one of the main characters, a Chinese film student (who incidentally plays herself) is also making an homage to The Red Balloon in the film. Her role is focused more on her job as a nanny, and the film follows her and the boy she looks after, as well as the boy's stressed out single mother, in a once again fairly plotless manner. All the while a red balloon looms over Paris, acting as a distant inconsequential observer; and at times, Hou's camera does the same by taking out a page out of Yang's directing style book and shooting the action through windows, placing prominent reflections of Parisian streets over the action. Red balloons are referenced in the dialogue as well (often coinciding with the appearance of the actual red balloon) in instances where the subjects referenced bear symbolistic resemblance to the lives of the characters.

In a way all of Hou's films are explorations of the human condition in different cultures, time periods and ages, and as such his films remain resonant and poignant despite usually lacking a conventional narrative structure; in this film, however, it seems less effective (could be just because it's a French production made by a Taiwanese director), as the characters and their actions don't seem to be saying as much. Overall, it's a good film, but not quite as good as his other films. 7/10

[Rama Set]

Chinese Charlie Kaufman

[Blanko]

Chinese Charlie Kaufman

Amusing, but not really true in the slightest. Even at his most self-referential Hou is nowhere near Kaufman's absurdity. Hou loves depicting reality as is, including the mundane, whereas Kaufman seeks to avoid it and is obsessed with the fantastical and surreal.

Also, I haven't mentioned this before, but Hou doesn't actually write his own scripts - most of them are written by novelist Chu Tien-wen. However, I assume that there's a lot of close collaboration between the two to match the scripts to Hou's slow and deliberate rhythm. I tend to attribute his films' storytelling methods to himself, as Hou is first and foremost a visual storyteller.

[Saddam Hussein]

Hooray for great dystopian stories!

Fury Road is post-apocalyptic, not dystopian.  The only movie in the series that you could really call dystopian is the first one.  Speaking of which, in preparation for my own viewing of Fury Road, I have watched the three previous movies in the series, and will now review them:

The first movie, Mad Max, is radically different to the rest of the series in both tone and setting.  It takes place not after the apocalypse, but in a rotting society full of rampant crime and low moral standards that honestly doesn't feel too far away from a collapse.  The movie clearly had a very low budget, and while there are a few thrilling, well-directed car/motorcycle chases and crashes, it puts more of an emphasis on suspense and atmosphere than the actual action - and it worked out very well, because this is a great movie.  Miller's directing is really what makes the movie work as well as it does (I particularly like the use of discretion shots to imply some very harsh and brutal violence without splattering the screen in gore), but there's also something to be said for Mel Gibson's remarkably subtle performance in the title role.  Max Rockatansky isn't the generic HardAss McSuperCop that we typically associate with action heroes; instead, he comes across as very shy and socially awkward, with an endearingly geeky love of cars and driving.  He's a relatable and sympathetic hero, which only makes the harsh events of the plot all the more uncomfortable to watch.  By the end of the movie, his thousand-yard stare feels more than earned.

Now forget about everything I just said, because for better or worse, the sequels pretty much throw all that out the window.  They're much more straightforward action movies, and Max is a much more straightforward action hero in them.  They feel a lot like Westerns - Max wanders through the desert alone, finds some people in a jam, helps them solve their problems, and continues to wander alone.  Oh, yeah, and society collapsed at some point between films.  There's a lot more action and humor in these movies, and while I definitely enjoyed watching them more than the first, I do have to admit that the first is probably better in an artistic, Blanko/Crudblud sense.  Mad Max: The Road Warrior has a simple story about a peaceful colony of people fighting with a gang of raiders over a tank of valuable who the fuck am I kidding it's about wacky car chases, hilarious sight gags, and glorious fashion styles.  Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is the story of how Max gets involved in some behind-the-scenes political wrangling in a shantytown run by Tina Turner, and when everything goes terribly wrong, is mistaken for the messiah of a cargo cult of a strange tribe of children and reluctantly becomes their savior, and this is the most bizarre sentence that I have ever written in my life.  Despite the wonderful weirdness in this movie (I didn't even mention the midget who runs a pig manure farm and the arena deathmatches on trapezes), this is something of a step down from The Road Warrior.  The plot is too jumbled and convoluted, and they very unwisely reduced the prominence of the ridiculous car chases, which were easily the highlights of the previous two films.

[rooster]

Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,[2] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,[3] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.

You can easily have a dystopian post-apocalyptic society. It describes the environment, not how the environment came to be. I've seen people try to say that dystopia only relates to wide spread government themes, but technically that is not true.

Big themes from the movie are ecosystems, social stratification, and violence. The story focuses on one community. This is dystopian.

[Fortuna]

Post-apocalyptic doesn't necessarily mean dystopian. Fury Road is a post-apocalyptic movie that happens to have dystopian elements, but "dystopian" is not a very good classification for the genre of the movie.

[Ghost of V]

Dystopia translate from Greek to "not good place", so I think the setting in Mad Max qualifies. Sure, different elements were added by sci-fi writers over the years, but the main meaning still applies.

[rooster]

Post-apocalyptic doesn't necessarily mean dystopian.

I didn't suggest it did.

Fury Road is a post-apocalyptic movie that happens to have dystopian elements, but "dystopian" is not a very good classification for the genre of the movie.

Why not? You can have more than one genre for a movie. A lot of dystopian environments are formed after an apocalypse. The movie focuses on a community, not rag tag individuals coping with immediate fallout like The Walking Dead, which is what I would consider post-apocalyptic but not dystopian. Dystopian refers to any society/community that sucks. And in Fury Road there is an organized society that is really fucked up.

Dystopia translate from Greek to "not good place", so I think the setting in Mad Max qualifies. Sure, different elements were added by sci-fi writers over the years, but the main meaning still applies.

Exactly.

[Fortuna]

We could call it a "shitty place" movie, and that would be accurate, but it's still not a good classification for the genre. "Post-apocalyptic" is what is used for movies like these. "Dystopian" is for things like 1984.

[rooster]

We could call it a "shitty place" movie, and that would be accurate, but it's still not a good classification for the genre. "Post-apocalyptic" is what is used for movies like these. "Dystopian" is for things like 1984.

Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,[2] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,[3] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.

I've seen people try to say that dystopia only relates to wide spread government themes, but technically that is not true.

Big themes from the movie are ecosystems, social stratification, and violence. The story focuses on one community. This is dystopian.

Someday I hope you realize that you can apply a lot of genres to movies, books, video games. Hardly anything just fits one single genre.
Sure, Fury Road is more easily recognized as a post-apocalyptic movie, but calling it dystopian is not wrong and it's the dystopian elements that make me love it.

[Blanko]

A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)

A little backstory: Taiwan was under Japan's rule from 1895 until Japan's surrender in WW2, at which point Japan ceded control of Taiwan back over to China. Taiwan became officially governed by the Chinese Nationalist party, which eventually led to growing tensions between Taiwan's inhabitants and the new provincial government, leading to riots causing thousands of casualties. Taiwan was placed under martial law and public discussion of civil unrest was prohibited, until it was lifted in 1987. Two years later, Hou released A City of Sadness, based around the circumstances of the riots.

Hou isn't a documentarian; he's more interested in depicting how the riots affected the average everyday folk, instead of teaching history by capturing the biggest riots for the sake of violent spectacle. As such, it's good to know a bit of Taiwanese history before going into this film. The film follows one family, whose members are each affected by the unrest in individual ways and only capturing glimpses of the unrest. It feels genuine in terms of how the average person living away from most of the action would witness it. The struggles these characters are facing feel all the more personal as a result, and while we don't get to see much of the main action, we learn a lot about the political subtext surrounding it.

This is a huge story with a lot going on, and in accommodation Hou forgoes his typically slow rhythm to pick up the pace. Shots are generally less contemplative and linger for much less time, and there's a lot of crossfading and utilisation of off-screen space to keep the pacing airtight. As such this is a fairly uncharacteristic film for him, but it's a good sign that he can adapt where necessary. Shot compositions are more conservative than what can be found later in his career, but it fits this sort of objective historian portrayal. I may have a slight personal preference for modernist Hou, but this film is regardless expertly made and told. 9/10

[Ghost of V]

We could call it a "shitty place" movie, and that would be accurate, but it's still not a good classification for the genre. "Post-apocalyptic" is what is used for movies like these. "Dystopian" is for things like 1984.

I agree that dystopian doesn't accurately describe the movie 100%, but it doesn't accurately describe most things 100%. That's why most works have several different elements from different genres. Like rooster said. Rarely, if ever, you will find something that adheres to a specific genre completely.

[beardo]

Kung Fury. I came.

[Blanko]

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1993)

This second part of Hou's trilogy of films on Taiwanese history is definitely the most direct and straightforward Hou film I've seen yet. That is in large because it's biographical, detailing 30 years in the life of a master puppeteer Li Tian-lu during Japanese rule of Taiwan, and how his skills came to be used for Japanese propaganda. As it's a fairly simple display of Li's memoirs, Hou's personal characteristics don't really get to shine through, and this shows very clearly in cinematography as well; for whatever reason, this film looks significantly older than it is. It's shot in 4:3, the lighting is so subdued and reliant on natural light that it's actually difficult to sometimes tell what is going on in the scene because of how dark they are, and the shot compositions are flat and the most unmoving they have ever been. Good performances and political subtext of japanization in Taiwan make this an enjoyable watch overall, but to me it feels like an Ozu film; good, but I didn't find it remarkable at all. 7/10

Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1995)

And this is pretty much the polar opposite. It's bursting with everything I love about Hou. As the final part of the historical trilogy, this film actually predicts Hou's shift into contemporary storytelling by not technically being a historical film at all. It's actually an intermingling of three separate storylines: a contemporary story of an alienated actress; a story of the same actress from three years earlier, dealing with her relationship with a gangster; and a film-within-a-film in which the actress plays the leading part, which deals with a group of Taiwanese people going to China to join the anti-Japanese resistance during WW2 (based on a true story).

In his juggling of these three narratives, Hou suggests multiple shifts: a generational shift, a nationalistic shift, and a personal shift in maturity. The three stories suggest that people are faced with struggles despite the circumstances they live in. The actress in the present day story is alienated by her peers and is stalked by a stranger who has stolen her diary and faxes pages of it back to her. The actress in the flashbacks is living in uncertainty, instability and fear of her gangster boyfriend and his enemies. The resistance fighters in the past have to struggle with constant fear of persecution, imprisonment and even execution. A motif of pregnancy appears in each story, as one of the rebels in the historical story has to give her child up for adoption and the actress in the flashbacks struggles with giving up substance abuse while pregnant. It's suggested that she doesn't end up having the baby as we don't see him/her in the present day story. We learn from excerpts of the faxed diary pages that the actress in the present day believes she may be pregnant again, and that the baby would be her now dead gangster boyfriend reincarnated. The film draws strong parallels between the political struggles of the past and the personal struggles of present day, suggesting that both are results of circumstance and isn't judgmental towards either, although one might think the activist youth willing to die for what they believe in are in better shape than the hedonistic and irresponsible youth of the present day.

This film is a mere 108 minutes long, yet with Hou's particular style of minimalist storytelling it never feels like something is sacrificed to keep it as well-contained as it is. The three stories are infused with different visual styles, and they all look gorgeous: the present day story is a precursor to the third part of Three Times, gushing with soft and naturalistic lighting shot in long pans; the flashback story is a precursor to Millennium Mambo with its wide variety of auxiliary lights producing a wide spectrum of neon colours (amusingly, and perhaps consciously, those two films draw similar parallels to each other as the two smaller stories do in this film); and the historical story is shot in black and white, in which Hou demonstrates he is quite capable of that style as well by utilising deep contrasts beautifully. Sadly, this is one of those Asian films that never got any proper distribution and as such the few copies that circulate on the internet are of substandard quality. Hopefully I'll one day see it in a form it deserves.

All in all, this film is a remarkable accomplishment given its sheer ambitiousness. It's a close call between this and Millennium Mambo as my favourite Hou feature. 10/10

[Saddam Hussein]

I watched Kick-Ass.  Apparently it got pretty good reviews for the most part, but I didn't like it at all.  The biggest problem with it is that it can't decide whether it's a deconstructive parody of capeshit set in the "real" world, as we see in the scenes that follow the title character, or an over-the-top celebration of capeshit and action movie clichés set in the goofy world of comic books where the laws of physics do not apply and tiny little girls are able to physically overpower grown men three times their size.  They should have just gone with one or the other.  It really sucks a lot of humor out of these "and then reality ensued!" jokes when the perspective is frequently switching to a couple of superheroes for whom reality evidently doesn't ensue and we're supposed to just suspend our disbelief for them.

Speaking of the humor, it's not great.  Nicolas Cage is pretty funny - of course he is, he's Nicolas Cage - and some of the antagonists have a few good lines, but for the most part, the movie's comedy seems to revolve around shock value and the notion that swearing is inherently funny.  The action ranges from passable to pretty bad (the scene with the flashing lights near the end is particularly awful).  And maybe this one is just personal, but I couldn't stand the main character.  He was weird, unfunny, annoying, and utterly unlikable all throughout the movie, and by the end of it, he's no less inept and pathetic than he was in the beginning.  I haven't been this unimpressed by a capeshit character I was apparently supposed to think was badass since Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Dark Knight Rises.

[rooster]

That actor hasn't impressed me in anything. I thought he was bad in Godzilla and as Quicksilver. He reminds me of Sokka and Twilight guy - Jackson something. Just... nothing going on behind the eyes.

[Blanko]

Bulk reviews, yay!

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

As a huge fan of Yi Yi, I had been meaning to watch this film for a long time as it's frequently hailed as Yang's magnum opus. Frankly, it's almost surprising it's gained any sort of reputation at all given the circumstances - due to copyright issues concerning the use of Elvis songs, this film has never been released on home video and the only way you will see this outside of a select special screening is on a bootleg copy that is just about VHS quality with very inconsistent tracking and forced subtitles that are at times difficult to read. Oh, and it's four hours long. So you'll probably understand why it took me a while to finally get around to watching this.

That all being said, this film is actually really good. Its defining feature is really just the sheer scale of it, which is unprecedented for a Taiwanese production. It has over a hundred speaking roles and it has so many intricately choreographed long shots that it's simply astounding. Oh, and it's four hours long. I already mentioned that, but it's worth bringing attention to just how much intricate craftsmanship there is packed into this film.

Set in 1960s Taipei, it deals with increasing gang violence among the youth and the main character who comes to be involved with gang activity and slowly starts to spiral out of control. Yang uses the long running time for an immense amount of world building and it really sets you into the political climate and attitudes of that era. It does begin to drag a little towards the end - although that could just be because it's just an exhausting watch - but it picks it up again for the climactic and emotional ending. I think I slightly prefer Yi Yi to this, but this is still an amazing film and I hope to see it in a better format soon (Criterion pls). 9/10

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1990)

Wong is always exciting to watch because I never know what he's going to go for. Here his direction is very up close and personal, using extreme close-ups to convey sexual tension from the slightest of cues. Even when he's not closing up, he never misses a chance to present the scene from a wonderful and unique angle. The theme of unrequited love is the same as in many of his later films, but it's always great to see him tackle it in refreshing and exciting ways. 9/10

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

Made on a mere $50,000 budget (which is still seven times the budget of his previous film), Carruth really owns this film, doing everything from directing, writing, editing, cinematography, playing the lead part, and to even composing the score. You can tell Carruth has great ideas wanting to come out, but it's clear he shouldn't be doing everything himself. Everything about this film has a hint of amateurishness to it - the cinematography is really cheap and digital looking, the acting is pretty weak and the editing is kind of choppy and erratic. You can tell Carruth wants to be a sort of pseudo-Malick with his handheld shooting and quick cuts, but he simply doesn't have the tools to accomplish it properly. That being said, I think he'll be a great director one day, he just needs better production values to work with. 7/10

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

Seconding Crudblud's sentiments regarding this film, I'm not sure what this is either, but I absolutely loved it. Sure, it's a bunch of loosely connected scenes of people talking or just doing stuff, but Weerasethakul manages to make that a thoroughly mesmerising and meditative experience with his amazing cinematography, mise en scène and use of aural stimuli. Every shot in this film is just so masterfully composed. Some sequences are repeated with slight variations, first in a rural hospital and a second time in a modern urban one, and it's fascinating how small changes in tone, reaction, perspective and some changed dialogue can make the same sequences feel so different and captivating. 10/10

[spoon]

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)

I unfortunately dozed throughout the second half of this movie, but what I remember was good. John Carpenter is bae <3