The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-language cinema. Milestones like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood for Love and Yi Yi saw release alongside lesser-known, but equally important, films like Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (in the Mainland) and Johnnie To’s Needing You… and Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian (in Hong Kong). It was also the year of Lou Ye’s second feature, Suzhou River, a beguiling amalgam of Hitchcock and Wong Kar-wai, New Wave…
“I should correct something if it’s wrong,” says Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), the titular virgin of 2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, to her smothering art dealer suitor, Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok). She refers only to her own improper chopstick technique, which Jae-hoon was so…
#32: Beyond the Masked Tortilla: Musicians Making Movies Download episode here. Episode Description: “This is where we came in…” Like guilty men returning to the scene of a crime, Simon and Steve decide to revisit an idea they’ve had before — in fact, the idea behind the very…
Sion Sono’s eighth feature refined and nearly perfected his early, amateurish Dogme 95-esque aesthetic. Billed as a “film about the human body,” The Real Body is a totally singular hybrid of documentary and fiction. It examines the work of four artists—photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, buoh dancer Akaji Maro, fashion designer Shinichiro…
The title of this pre-Suicide Club entry—which Sion Sono categorizes as a straight pink film—pretty much sums up the film in its entirety. Together with his wife, a master pottery maker (played by Sono himself), crippled by some unnamed malady, channels sexual energy into art. The…
In retrospect, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us represents the calm before a contentious political decade between Iran and the U.S., one that dragged filmmakers into the fray. Two years after the film’s American release, George Bush named Iran part of an “Axis of…
Most of us are loathe to admit it, but the job of a film critic is, more often than not, that of a glorified publicist. The best among us aspire to more—to enlightenment, to intellectual engagement, to the communication of everything this oh-so-young artistic…
