2000

Also, Do you think there are any similarities between Ledger (The Dark Knight) and Brando (Last Tango in Paris)??

Drake, do you think shyamalan’s Unbreakable is close to being archiveble?

@Azman – watched American Psycho for the first time in a while and can say it’s one of those movies that seems to improve on each subsequent watch. The initial shot of Batemans apartment is great camera movement. It’s also a very funny movie, just in the absurdity of the consumerism and the way Bateman talks about his favorite albums like he was reading off a Wikipedia page.
I definitely agree with you on its focus on masculinity and competition amongst men, the ridiculous obsession with business cards, getting reservations at top tier restaurants, getting the best clients, etc.
It’s an interesting comparison with a movie like Wall Street (1987) but obviously much darker.

What do you think of michelle yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Drake, I have seen Yi Yi. It was staggering. I’d like to give it some time to sit, but I don’t see how it can’t end up in the Top 50 of all-time, and that’s really significant since that would make it the first film I’ve dropped directly into my Top 100 list since making it, though I’m still considering doing the same for Ordet. I will of course be posting about it in the next few days, and I might even watch A Brighter Summer Day again if I have time but no promises. I do hope you will consider studying Edward Yang soon.

In the most underrated section, the sentence “This does not describe Traffic at” is missing an “all” at the end, and American Psycho is not bolded.

Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/M6qC6EF (woefully incomplete as I found out when rewatching some of the scenes to write this)

Yi Yi:

– Yang’s final film and one of the first major cinematic achievements of the 21st century, he won Best Director at Cannes for this.
– He strikes gold in the repeating shots; there are so many cinematic paintings here that consist of shots of large windows, with people on the other side of those windows, and other things behind the camera reflected on those windows. Yang pays great attention to these shots throughout the film often going as far as to use famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower remake in Tokyo reflected on the glass.
– Gloriously set interior shots – Yang just totally loads them with tables, chairs, couches, rugs, lamps, clocks, wall paintings, plants, newspapers, DVRs really putting us in the middle class world of his gaze.
– Yang has had better individual frames but the one shot with Elaine Jin looking out through her office window – that’s one of those with the city reflected against it I talk about just above – as the lights in the office are completely dark and they slowly and gradually turn on behind her is maybe the best complete shot of his career.
– Another great shot early on is at the hospital and Wu is talking to a nurse in a hallway and the camera draws backward into a wider room, slowly pitching rightward as Wu’s brother-in-law comes into the room and then back leftward stopping at some mirrored doors and then the camera holds on the doors with their reflections.
– One especially hysterical bit is one between young Jonathan Chang, playing the son of the family in the film, and his teacher who despises him. Chang is playing with a balloon early in the film which is actually a condom, which he doesn’t know about. A hall monitor Chang is attracted to informs that he has a condom with him so the teacher tries to punish him in class for having it, but upon finding that Chang has no idea it’s not a balloon he lets him off. This all comes back as Chang and his friends fill up the condom with water and drop it on the teacher’s head in a hilarious episode.
– More parallel editing, but this time unlike The Terrorizers it’s less derivative (still exceptionally strong in his 1986 film) of other directors and feels more homegrown. Leading up to the great forest sequence we get a crosscutting montage as the daughter is connecting with her friend’s boyfriend (who her friend cheated on) all as Wu and his own lover are reconnecting in Japan. This goes beyond cutting as well, with even the sound interspersed between the two scenes on a separate plane – elliptical like Tarkovsky or somebody – as you can hear in the film the daughter is still speaking for a brief moment as we begin the forest scene she is not a part of and it does go further than that within the various edits but that’s just one example of it.
– Another really good edit here is a sonic match cut around the midpoint of the film; in a really funny vignette (due in large part to Yang throwing it at us completely out of context, which will arrive much later on in the film) with Kelly Lee’s friend, the one dating Fatty who is the guy Lee herself ends up going out with in the film, we watch as Lee goes to see her friend but comes upon chaos in her apartment building, we’re watching from her POV through the door into the apartment as her friend, her friend’s mother, and her friend’s music teacher are all running wild through the apartment as the mother and music teacher are buttoning up their clothes and trying to calm down the hysterical friend. This fails completely and the friend briefly starts screaming a piercing high note before we rapidly cut away to Wu’s brother-in-law Chen Hsi-sheng’s (who Wu works at the same company as) infant daughter crying after being born; this is just a really great match cut with the sounds here and a perfect way to transition between these two scenes.
– The events of the film are really kicked off – Elaine Jin’s (the mother of the family) departure to the retreat, Jonathan Chang getting his camera, Kelly Lee’s ennui, the slow deterioration of Chen, and Wu’s decision to go see Sherry again – by the grandmother character being injured at the beginning of the film and falling into a coma. Yang will formally throw in the same sequences of the characters, particularly her children Jin and Chen as well as Kelly Lee, all trying to talk with the grandmother even though she will not respond as the doctor (whose advice Jin follows to a T) recommended they do this to keep her soul alive. I should need another viewing to confirm this since I’m only thinking of this now but I wonder if the departure of Jin to the retreat and Chen’s various life failures over the course of the film, which prevent them from being with their mother to speak with her as the doctor recommended contribute to the grandmother dying. Lee especially is broken over her grandmother as at the beginning she is taking trash out to the trashcans but is distracted by seeing her friend and friend’s boyfriend down on the street below their apartment and doesn’t take out the final trash bag, so the grandmother resolves to do so later, slips out by the trashcans and falls into her coma as Lee failed to take out the trash herself.
– Anyone who’s seen me talk about Yi Yi before probably came into this knowing I was going to talk about the forest temple sequence. It’s one of those scenes that sticks itself in your mind long after you’ve watched it like the ending (I actually mean the entire runtime) at the bridge of Touch of Evil or the repetitive games of Nim (the stick game) in Last Year at Marienbad. It’s a powerful visual sequence with Wu and his girlfriend Sherry enveloped in this gorgeous mazey Japanese temple, 6 shots in 3 minutes as they reflect with a charged melancholy – Antonioni’s influence – on their lost time together after he broke off their affair 30 years prior. The years of lost love and passion are spoken as whispers with their distance from the camera but every word feels like a shout of anger as we witness the two alone in eachother’s company for the first time in decades, still eachothers’ soul mates with her more emotional yin being balanced out by Wu’s more reserved and collected, but still equally as dynamic Yang (yes, I just said that). It’s very rare that I ever revisit scenes in films and yet time and time again I find myself pulling up the film on the Criterion Channel to watch this scene again. This scene packs even more of a punch when you watch it again having already seen out to the end of the film knowing how it all ends. If there’s one scene from this film that you could realistically turn into a short film, this is the one. It stands out to me to such a degree from every other scene in the film, communicated so well with the foresty, rural decor contrasting to the rest of the film in the urban metropolis of Taipei.
– Lots of narrow doorway shots particularly when they’re heading into the grandmother’s bedroom emphasizing how hard it is to go in there for them.
– Lee’s sequences with her friend and the friend’s boyfriend (Fatty is his name), visually influenced by Jeanne Moreau traversing Milan in La Notte, are also worthy of mention in the film. It’s set up here at the beginning that Lee has some unrequited love for Fatty with how often she watches the two from afar and Lee’s friend uses her (I actually mean exploits) to deliver letters to Fatty and from Fatty back to her after they separate for a while, but later on as Lee walks down the street she always sees Fatty at he runs after her with a letter, but here it’s for her. They begin an affair of their own, but when he cannot consummate with her (a really strong long take in a hotel room of the two standing in there staring at their shoes not doing anything before he runs out) they no longer see eachother and later on Lee sees Fatty back with the friend again which increases the sadness she feels throughout all of the film
– Begins with Chen’s wedding, in the middle his daughter is born, at the end we are at the funeral of his mother, the grandmother. Love, life, death.
– Wu is very reserved here, his face always expresses little relative to the pose of his body (which is amplified by Yang often shooting him from behind instead of in front of him), it’s a really good performance actually; his brother-in-law Chen on the other hand is a bit of a joker, always laughing and bringing humor to the scenes he’s in but he is also extremely irresponsible, he is constantly taking loans he can’t pay back from Wu and his old lover and at a baby shower for his new child the lover shows up and there’s a confrontation between her and the new wife that Chen is unable to control and it really throws the relationship with the wife into disarray.
– I really like Fatty randomly going on this aggravated verbal assault on Lee as she walks back home after their affair ends, which at first we assume is because he’s angry at her over his impotence but before long something else happens that shows another thing entirely has been what caused him to have his outburst, and it was not out of anger at Lee but to make sure he did not drop out of verbal harassment and into something more physically aggressive.
– Issey Ogata plays a Japanese businessman who Wu is trying to get to invest in his company and they become close friends; the pretext for the trip to Japan with his girlfriend was to meet with Ogata there (and he does still do that of course). Out of all the characters in the film (and perhaps of Yang’s entire career) I think he is the one that stands out the most against the others. He comes across as some kind of old wise master always speaking words of great wisdom conveyed with wonderful stories about his past, in perfectly cadenced English that gives a melodic tone to his sentences, like this one about a great magician Ogata would always watch, andt who refused to reveal the secrets behind his tricks yet Ogata managed to learn them anyway (which he demonstrates to Wu in a nice little scene). Ogata is the only person Wu lets in on his past with Sherry and the reasons why he left her without a word so long ago, demonstrating the trust they have together, and I could watch an entire film that’s just these two talking about their lives their chemistry together on screen is just so strong, but Ogata stands on his own here as well of course like in the great scene of him playing the piano like a drunken madman at the club they first meet at (the bartender is so entertained by Ogata’s performance on the piano that he tells Wu to bring him again later). I would assume Scorsese had to have been impressed by Ogata here as he picked him up for a role in Silence as well.
– Both parents leave their children for long periods of time: Jin goes to her mountain retreat with the monks or whatever (Yang never takes us there ourselves) so she can collect her sanity while she comes to terms with her mother’s impending death and Wu is sent by the company to meet with Ogata again in Japan and he stays there for a while meeting with Sherry along the way.
– All three main characters have forbidden love interests, Sherry (Wu is married), Fatty (Lee’s best friend’s boyfriend), and the hall monitor (she abuses Chang). The first two affairs end as easily as they started and the last never even kicks off.
– Neon lights in a number of scenes, the nightclub, shopping districts of Taipei, also Japan
– It’s poetic for Wu to have been the one to cut off Sherry in their first affair long before the film takes place without a word but in their second it is she who does it leaving him now with the thoughts of what could be. It’s not just the poetry though, it’s an impressive way for Yang to set up that outcome of their renewed relationship.
– Love the inexplicable plant Kelly Lee gets for a school project that never grows and she’s constantly staring at it in her hands whenever she’s contemplating in her room on how things in her life are going
– Every scene with the young Jonathan Chang is so funny and playful, I see a bit of a Felliniesque Amarcord-like influence on Yang here. You’ve got the attraction to the hall monitor who wants nothing to do with him (Magali Noel), the antagonistic relationship with the teacher who he pours the condom water bottle on (pretty much the entirety of the distrust of authority there from the lackluster priest’s advice and the piss tube in the classroom), we even get a scene where Chang and the hall monitor are in a theater together just like Amarcord (but here it’s a weather observatory instead of Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco) and there’s strange creative meaningless (but awesome) episodes like Chang going out with his camera and taking pictures of a bunch of people for absolutely no reason and with no seeming artistic drive, and with which Yang later hits us with the formal payoff of Wu discovering his son’s photos and finding they’re all pictures of the backs of people’s heads (which you see referenced in the Blu-Ray release poster of the film). Yang really divides the three major plotlines into 3 genres like this: Wu (drama), Lee (melodrama), and Chang (comedy-drama), and never do they come across as conveying weird tonal shifts with how well Yang maneuvers through the long runtime.
– Really great scene about an hour into the film after Wu’s first meeting with Ogata at the club where he calls Sherry in his office with all the lights off, the shot is totally black and Yang holds the camera still for minutes on end as Wu barely moves and we only hear his voice as he’s on the phone with his soul mate and he apologizes for his abrupt departure from her life all those years ago, the lines are very well-delivered with the quiet tone of voice over the phone.
– What blows my mind the most about the film is that it really is just Yang filming life. I mean you forget that you’re in the world of a film while you’re watching it because their lives are so intentionally normal and the characterizations not larger than life, it feels like Wu could really be a coworker you talk to every day and Kelly Lee or Jonathan Chang just another face in your classroom. This may sound like it would be monotonous but not with the way Yang frames his shots and the deep character relationships that are built throughout the film, it’s a tightly-knit family that has to survive at all costs through these many great hardships, these are really well-formed characters.
– With all due respect to Soderbergh, Aronofsky and Inarritu this is the best epic multi-storyline film of 2000
– Chang refuses to talk to his grandmother like the rest of his family until he’s at her funeral where he tells her about the hopes he has to change things in the world he lives in and that his inability to speak to her gives him the same feeling as his inability to speak to his new cousin, Chen’s child. He mentions that grandma told him she felt old and that he hopes he can tell his cousin, when he comes of age, that he feels he is old too. We wait so long throughout the film for Chang to really speak up about how he feels with how much he is talked down to by those older than him that it is impactful when he finally does.