When pretense and boredom walks together like this, it could be nothing but a masterpiece...Or how to let people think you've got ideas when you got absolutely none!!
(My, the metaphoric watermelon....ah ah ah ah!!)
Dear Mr Tsai, go back to your art-school, please!
Yeah, and the judges at Berlin Intl' Film Festival who rewarded this work obviously haven't a clue. They are nowhere near your level of film expertise.
sharewell, let me just tell you that I'm glad living in a world (except from you :D ) where the real quality of a creative work have nothing to do with "expertises", thanks God...
But if you insist, please notice that this pretentious and boring thing won the Fipresci Prize (international cinematographic press) with a special jury completly independant from the official judges at Berlin Festival ;)
I completely agree on how boring and pretentious this movie was. It was painful to watch. I despised the cinematography as well. Every shot was from the same perspective. One gruelling hallway shot was more than enough. I felt like I was watching the same scene over and over again.
shareI agree and disagree. I think some of the scenes were brilliant, but why did they have to be so damn long?
"It's funny until someone gets hurt, then it's hilarious..."
Have you guys never watched a Tsai Ming Liang film before?
What's pretentious about this film? What is he trying to say that isn't being said? He deals with alienation, therefore he gives us excrutiatingly long shots that provide us with a sensation of isolation, of loneliness, disconnection. It's pretty clear isn't it. I don't find that pretentious.
Maybe it doesn't float your boat, but calling it pretentious and then not explaining why is sort of meaningless don't you think?
This is the fifth Tsai film I've seen (after The River, The Hole, What Time Is It There?, and Goodbye Dragon Inn), and this is the first one I didn't think was highly great.
This is sort of the "Man Without A Past" for Tsai. The Coen Bros. ran out of ideas by the time they made that one, just compiling all of the old ideas from their old film into a retread that is "new!" only because it is in black-and-white. Well, this time, he takes little What Time, a little The River, a little The Hole, puts it together in one film and makes it "new!" by adding lots of overt freaky sexuality. And while that might make this an admirable attempt, it's still a jumbled mess that has too expansive of a visual pallette and too many ideas to keep its plot flowing at a sensical pace.
I really liked a few things about this, but even this I wouldn't call pretentious, though I certainly understand why you would say that. It just lacks the elegant simplicity of his other features.
[deleted]
Let's turn your reasoning upside down by giving an example:
When you read a book do you just see the text, or does it create images of the story?
What's so wrong about doing (aprox.) the same with a film?
k
Re: duandsku,
the coen brother film you mentioned is "the man who wasn't there", "the man without a past" is the aki kaurismaki film. the fact that you mistaken the film title makes me wonder if you actually bothered to watch the film at all. and if you didn't, maybe you shouldn't comment on it. like tsai ming-liang, the coens are well-known for recycling their ideas, infact many great filmmakers do, so i don't really see it as "running out of ideas", i see it as the directors' stamp.
Well said! Tsai Ming-liang is one of the best filmmakers today, simply because he's taken the usual conventions of cinema and turned them on their heads. If Tsai had kept his film flowing, with quick shots and scenes of immense dialogue, it wouldn't be original--just another boring, "normal" film.
As for the recycling of ideas, what director HASN'T recycled their ideas now and again? Look at Sam Peckinpah (the isolated character and slow-motion violence), Tim Burton (the innocence of childhood), Abbas Kiarostami (reflections on life and identity), Ingmar Bergman (life, death, and the unexplained), Woody Allen (the sarcastic, nerdish male lead), etc... When you find something that works (and Tsai has), you stick with it.
i remember being young, a silent alienated taiwanese movie called River made a life time memory in my young head. Now seeing this one, esp the scene of flowing dirty river with the mellons in reminded me of it. Smth familiar about taiwanese movies? Now i see its the same director, duh. Such a pleasant surprise waaa.
Love the director. That lonely atmosphere and the characters so passionate yet reserved; so controversial, never forget it. Esp the 'oral moral' ending as some say. She loves him that's obvious, but how many more tears will she have to drop to feel the intimacy if he shares it with a fainted (dead?) piece of jap?
personally, i think this movie is fantastic.
as is the man who wasn't there.
Agreed!This movie was a load of gibberish. The only things worth it were the singing scenes.
shareyeah, we want to se fast paced action. we only want to see entertainment because we don’t understand art.
shareI think one of the keys to art, and I say this as a balet choreographer, is to sometimes let the images wash over you, without looking for too much metephor. Feel, don't think. I saw the Wayward Cloud without subtitles and I don't even speak Chinese
The images and colors in this film were amazing. I loved the bathroom sequence, for example. It reminded me of the Umbrellas of Cherborg.
This film was very symbolic, I could tell, but I couldn't figure out what was going on at all! It was all so confusing.
sharetheres no much symbolism in tsai´s films. Symbolisms in general determine a very specific meaning for any image or text or whatever. In Tsai we have something different, we have the search for something real, for communication, for true contact between humans in a world getting every time more isolated, rational, cold , mechanic. The last scene takes that and much more (that´s the beauty of it, some images cannot be explained or expressed by any other way) in the most intense and poetical way. The images are incredibly powerful through the whole movie and the slow pace makes me feel it real. I totally loved the film.
shareWell, this is my modest opinion: wether you like it or not, wether you love it or you hate it... there is something NOBODY can take away from this film: its power.
This film is so powerful that it lacks the words to critic on it, in a positive or negative way.
Just one more thing: for those who said this film was too long, I cannot agree by any chance. What I think is actually the extreme opposite: despite having long scenes throughout the film, it NEVER bored me. All the scenes were just perfectly timed and thought.
Great work, mr. Tsai!
Couldn't have said it better myself. Powerful, and not boring.
shareI think one of the keys to art, and I say this as a balet choreographer, is to sometimes let the images wash over you, without looking for too much metephor. Feel, don't think. I saw the Wayward Cloud without subtitles and I don't even speak Chinese
The images and colors in this film were amazing. I loved the bathroom sequence, for example. It reminded me of the Umbrellas of Cherborg.
Indeed. I rather liked the Crab scene myself.
Last Films Seen:
The Caine Mutiny 7.5/10
The Conformist 9.5/10
Lady Vengeance 8.5/10