By Arty Chick, on August 28th, 2009
This sweet coming of age story is almost worth seeing just for the scenery alone. Shot in southern China’s Yunnan province, When Ruo Ma was Seventeen uses the beautiful landscape of terraced paddy fields as a reminder that we are not in any place we know. It is far removed from our world. But Ruo Ma has lived here all her life with her old grandma, working these terraced fields with her fellow Hani (aka Xiani.) Now 17, she goes to town to make some money selling roasted corn on the street.
Tourists flock to this quaint [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 27th, 2009
If you’re looking for a good musical romance in Chinese, “Perhaps Love” is your movie. It stars Asian heart throb Takeshi Kaneshiro and Superstar singer Jacky Cheung in a love triangle with Zhou Xun. The movie opens with Lin Jiandong (Takeshi Kaneshiro) arriving in Shanghai to co-star in a musical film with his old flame Sun Na (Zhou Xun) who is in a relationship with the famous director Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung). The musical they are all making together is about a young woman who loses her memory and is taken under the wing of a circus owner [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 19th, 2009
“The Road Home” is a fantastic chick flick, a 3 hankie love story set in a small village in north China sometime during the Cultural Revolution though you’d never know that from the look of the village; it could be any time. It is the edge of nowhere, surrounded by stunning scenery, gorgeously shot by director Zhang Yimou. The film introduces the beautiful young Zhang Ziyi who lept on to stardom in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ” and “Memoirs of a Geisha,” here playing a village girl who falls for the new school teacher who comes to [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on June 8th, 2009
I rented two films this week that coincidentally both center on older men and fractured relationships with their grown sons. Why do so many men and their fathers have such stormy relationships? Is it a testosterone thing? Of course it makes for good drama, though I am not sure men go out of their way to see films that remind them that their machismo gets in the way of a close bond. (We’ll leave the mother-daughter thing for a later time.) Ikiru 生きる, “To Live” (1952), a classic from Kurosawa, deals with a career bureaucrat finding [... Keep reading]
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