贾樟柯导演的《天注定》| a touch of sin, directed by jia zhangke

id suggest getting a k4r4g4rg4 invite and downloading the bluray rips of his recent films but enjoy the vhs quality 5th gen pyrotechnics if u must

its more real & truer to the spirit of life in an agrarian commune in podunks china 30 years ago, anyway

i've only seen unknown pleasures and i remember loving it, lots of motorcycles on new highways in exurban hell iirc? at that time i was just getting into movies with long-duration shots and a lot of spatial exploration and respecting jonathan rosenbaum for whatever awful reason. i'm still into the kind of thing that gently lulls you to sleep basically, a note of urban discontent is ok as long as the soundtrack isn't too loud, i don't see a listing here for this but i wouldn't be surprised if it came for like four days in january or something, keeping my fingers crossed.

xp haha

respecting jonathan rosenbaum for whatever awful reason

nah he's the best one

my stream has had a loading issue 8 minutes in but great so far. hopefully this is the last update for the next 2 and a bit hours

no imago that is a long take

get blunted 2 fuq and enjoy the show imago lad http://i.imgur.com/ED9eRuO.gif

Still Life is amazing

imago, some of jia's films are p cheap to buy in eg fopp, and are available to rent legit from lovefilm

yeah pretty extraordinary

unformed immediate thoughts: moved from a fairly static first half to a crazy, delocated second. it became all about departures, arrivals, jarring cuts between hairstyles & band-members. the Culture Team literally and figuratively sailing away down the river, changing its name, heading even into the desert before turning around and going back. the fetishisation of movement, of trains, as promised early on, becomes a baffling and humbling world of missed connections

some wonderful shots. especially liked one early on as our bespectacled protagonist and his maybe-girlfriend have a conversation obscured by the corner of a building, each disappearing behind it & subsequently emerging in alternation. also loved the front-of-cab shots (arrivals, departures) and the increasingly allegorical style

the most haunting character obviously sanming - his central cameo crucial to the entire movie & practically made me cry as he walked off - although it is also noticeable how the two female leads respond to the pressures of both modernity & established creed - they're extremely sensitive to the double-pull, although it is zhong who follows the path (of what rapidly turns out to be exploitation, both by her buss and her commitment-shy boyfriend) furthest before reaching combustion point and disappearing

sanming of course the victim of china old and new, the servant to all masters

mmmm sounds like some good weed!!

o hush. also what ya got vs rosenbaum

nice
i hope u now go on to become ilx' maven of contemporary chinese cinema
lord knows apart from taiwan i am not that well versed

A MAVEN

LJ PLEASE BECOME A MAVEN

rosenbaum is fine, i just stopped caring

he retired

oh yeah

supreme film critic but i seldom read him now because.......it's on a blog

his reader archive (along with camper and to some degree kehr) was my most important formative influence wrt film as a teenager

he's the only film critic I'd say I trust. had my david thompson phase but now I regard him as more a very talkative fellow fan

my mavenhood is limited to a very few topics, at least within an ILX context. probably only cricket

and pizza

you have a good work ethic
you could be a chinese contemporary cinema maven in maybe a fortnight of reasonably dedicated study

i will be posting a trite opinion about the importance of 'springtime in a small town' on the 21st of october and i fully expect it to be given short shrift

haha it's a thought

really though I have to be maven of my writing. I will however pledge to only watch contemporary Chinese movies for the next 6 months (at home - I want to see Gravity)

good - we could use some contrary challopsing in the gravity thread

oh I plan to like it

oh wait that's clearly a sign that there's alREADY been some *crazy challopsing* well this is ILX ffs of course, I'd be sad if there wasn't

no... i was playing it straight. the only challopsing has been by the croup and he hasn't even seen it yet

sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssspoilerssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

very interesting, schlump!

yeah, the guy in the intro - dahai. i didn't think to reexamine the opening after knowing the denouement of his segment, but: a heavy static of the potential overlays that first scene. a truck of tomato cartons, overturned - he has plucked but one - sitting on his motorcycle, unsure of what to do. meanwhile the other guy arrives, takes measure, wends his way through, is on his way again. i don't want to draw out the obvious symbolism here but, classmates with the coal mine boss, two lives weighted differently, one ascendant, the other...flat. the story portrayed in the first segment rang the most true to me, even if its irruption into violence felt the most fantastical, wish-fulfillment out of the stories. from here i'm just gonna bullet point some stuff that i took note of while watching;

• dahai eating his dinner with cloves of raw garlic. yes, this is how a real Northerner does it.
• dahai jabs himself with a medical device - i think it's probably one that measures his blood sugar. he's probably diabetic. the next scene: he enters the factory, all his chums are eating noodles, he has a bite from a friend.
• the shots of the horse getting whipped. how dahai's avenging angel fantasy moves him to vengeance here. how this is the exact opposite of what nietzsche did.
• all the, uh, paratext? not sure what the lit crit term is here - but the other media that we see throughout the movie. for example, on the busride, the robber - the movie that's playing on the TV is hard boiled, natch, more specifically, the teahouse shootout. in the sauna girl's segment, the snake - the movie on the tv in the breakroom shows a woman with a forked tongue.
• the snake symbolism for the sauna girl's segment. i want to say that there's maybe an association between adulturesses and snakes in chinese culture, but it could just as easily be reference to the legend of the white snake, a popular chinese opera of old.
• the chinese name of the film, 天注定, translates as 'destiny,' and literally translates as 'heaven decides' - the only part of the film, as far as i can tell, where it is said, is by the hawker in the sauna girl segment - the part where he is talking about holy snakes, marriage is destined. or marriage is decided by heaven. tbh, i heard the phrase preceding 天注定 as 阴阳, or yin-yang. but i don't think that's a term for marriage.
• the english name, a touch of sin - i think the closest echo of this in the film is the final scene, where she goes to watch the beijing opera - the actor says "do you know your guilt?" and you could probably tanslate 'guilt' as 'sin.' apparently, according to wikipedia, the english name is a play on the wuxia film 'a touch of zen.'
• i'm not sure how prevalent the wuxia elements are in here, but - when the sauna girl kills the john, the knife movements - those are straight out of a wuxia film.
• similarly, the interplay between the stories and the play-within-a-plays of the beijing opera stage acts that the characteres encounter - dahai encounters one, and iirc it's thematically related to what happens in his segment. at the end - a person accused, wrongly she thinks, of being a murderer... the sense that none of the characters in this had agency in their actions, but were pushed towards it by outside pressures. hamlet....
• the dude who ends up at a brothel - i laughed when the guy tips him in hong kong dollars. lol, 100 hkd is not worth 100 cny. but - the promise of hong kong. how he learns cantonese, how his paramour knows cantonese, and is from his hometown. what a paradise hong kong must seem viewed from his digs in the gutter.
• the shots of the oxen and cow and animals in this movie. the three ox in the truck, shackled, staring. the cattle that the sauna girl walks by, oblivious to her crime.
• the animated background of leaves is taken from the wallpaper of the sauna/brothel.

apparently this movie has been cleared for release in the mainland. i'm surprised, but given the current culture of anti-corruption, maybe the party thinks it's good for people to ruminate on these matters.

Sort've talked about Jia Zhangke yesterday with Han Jie, though more about Hello, Mr. Tree. Still need to see this after missing it at the film festival, bleh.

Just wanted to say, that I'm very much looking forward to seeing this film whenever that will be (probably next spring), that I'll be watching Platform on youtube as well and thanks for the link, and that A Touch of Zen is awesome, especially the final part. That is all.

apparently this movie has been cleared for release in the mainland. i'm surprised, but given the current culture of anti-corruption, maybe the party thinks it's good for people to ruminate on these matters.

― 乒乓, Wednesday, October 9, 2013 8:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

dargis' review reminded me of the scene in the hostess club where all the girls are wearing sexy halloween red army costumes - again, surprised that this is being released domestically!

this is prob my movie of the year

http://25.media.tumblr.com/6fc7d1815d988297321249b7187fc8c8/tumblr_muubfyn7zf1ryzchqo1_r1_500.png

apparently jia loves putting john woo on small screens in his movies!

at first I wasn't sure if the violent conclusions to each story really worked, but thinking back, having this pattern in the back of my head for most of the movie really gave the it this powerful sense of dread and I found the fatalism of it all really moving at times

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/q-a-jia-zhangke-on-his-new-film-a-touch-of-sin/?_r=0

Actually I had been preparing to make a martial arts film since 2007, a real martial arts film. It doesn’t have an English title yet. In Chinese it’s called “In the Qing Dynasty” (在清朝). It deals with the period from 1895 to 1905. The reason I wanted to film this period is because this is when China’s transformation began. And that transformation has continued up to now. It hasn’t stopped.

interesting - WKW covered a time period right after this in the grandmaster. the grandmaster can be seen as a critique of china's creation myth, i think, and it's interesting to see jia explicitly say the same about his movie.

i've been thinking about the scene with dahai at the post office - it's really quite perfect. dahai is exposed as a naïf, who has bought into the party propaganda that justice will be dispensed swiftly and certainly from 中南海 (the equivalent of the capitol building in DC, i think.) so he just tells the postal clerk, send it there! and while it's not surprising that she rebuffs him, i kind of feel that if dahai had been, say, the factory owner, the postal clerk would have known how to send the letter, would have found a way.

will work 4 karag4rg invite

i guess what i want to say is that, with chinese nationalism being what it is, it wouldn't exactly be ludicrous to expect that every postal clerk in the country would know how to send a letter to 中南海. it's a little bit like how every post office in america will accept letters to santa claus, with a wink.

i've been thinking about the scene with dahai at the post office - it's really quite perfect. dahai is exposed as a naïf, who has bought into the party propaganda that justice will be dispensed swiftly and certainly from 中南海 (the equivalent of the capitol building in DC, i think.) so he just tells the postal clerk, send it there! and while it's not surprising that she rebuffs him, i kind of feel that if dahai had been, say, the factory owner, the postal clerk would have known how to send the letter, would have found a way.

― 乒乓, Saturday, October 19, 2013 10:28 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/q-a-jia-zhangke-on-his-new-film-a-touch-of-sin-part-2/?_r=0

Q.
You’ll be at the New York Film Festival at the end of September. Are you looking forward to it?

A.
It has a big Chinatown, and I’m looking forward to going there. The first thing is always to find a Chinatown. Then you can have a great Chinese meal. [laughs]

HEll Yeah

i did a little bit more digging and so yeah, snakes in chinese are a pretty standard trope for seductresses. or at least can be. i'm not familiar enough with wuxia films to know how jia is playing off that symbolism. see also the shot where the camera pans to the cloth w/ the tiger print, and you hear the tiger roar.

Really unexpected move by Jia (though I had been tipped even just skimming reviews) ... still 'documentary' elements aren't *entirely* absent I thought, just in comparison to what he'd been doing.

I knew this was episodic going in, but not sure if they were gonna overlap; so I was glad when we reached the end of Dahai's spree. For a bit.

For several months it has been pegged as being set to receive a (domestic) theatrical release in November, but still a more specific date has still not been set.

Now reports are emerging that the Chinese authorities have banned local media from reporting on the film or reviewing the picture, which claimed the best screenplay award at Cannes, where it played in competition.

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/silence-surrounds-jia-zhangkes-sin-1200853839/

i can see blue valentine 10+ times in manhattan today, and touch of sin once, at 1.40 in the afternoon.

yes and it's the last day, which is why i follow what's exiting theaters with great paranoia.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/taiwan-may-miss-out-on-jia-zhangkes-a-touch-of-sin/?_r=0

Everything seems fishy

what's fishy about the taiwan situation? i think it's, 1) a case of it just not being that big of a movie compared to what else is on the quota list and the quota longlist. there must be some goofy romantic comedies on the list but also drug war,《毒战》 and the grandmaster/《一代宗师》). 2) maybe a little bit about responding to cultural sector grumbling about mainland cultural influence. the last two years that mainland films won golden horse awards, let the bullets fly/《让子弹飞》 in 2011 and beijing blues/《神探亨特张》 in 2012, there was lots of handwringing, if that's the right word, about mainland films winning taiwanese awards and the brutish machinery of the mainland film industry overrunning taiwan.

even if it doesn't screen, i don't think it's a huge deal. on the other hand, it's never ever ever getting a legit mainland release. i feel like xi jinping or someone else near the top had a moment with this film something like deng xiaoping seeing unrequited love/《苦练》 for the first time.

mountains may depart is fantastic

ooo

watched Xiao Wu tonight, it was v. good

http://shanghaiist.com/2016/01/15/orange_truck_overturns.php

http://i.imgur.com/kFdnuz0.jpg

watching MMD tomorrow

I quite liked it, but not as much as A Touch of Sin

Lovely until the last chapter, in which Jia falters with the use of English.

didn't bother me much

at least not as much as the way no directors but QT and the Coens seem worthy of a new thread for each film

Start it!

Lovely until the last chapter, in which Jia falters with the use of English.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 7, 2016 2:41 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

this was fine, and probably only resonates if you're someone with experience of ESL in the chinese community, and second-generation overseas chinese.

new one is accused of being "greatest hits" by some, i like it fine; wish i hadn't been exhausted.

predictably great and at times transcendent. your man's gun falling out of his pants while dancing to YMCA was 10/10

i thought it was just ok

STILL LIFE getting a long-overdue Blu-ray release on December 1st: https://t.co/QDSt0wbJPn

— Josh Martin (@MajorHints) October 30, 2020

I like that post from morbs from two years ago, it's painful to think we will never hear from him in the film threads again

All of Jia’s films are worth watching imo. Ash Is Purest White is the one I love the most, but also A Touch of Sin. Still Life was interesting to me, I didn't really get it at the time and want to see it again. Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World - all great

I've seen five of his films and heard him speak at a retrospective. My favourite was The World, maybe it had a slightly more hopeful air than the others.

Our new poster for Jia Zhangke's SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE. Opens in theaters May 28. Exclusive trailer premiere @hyperallergic. https://t.co/eoheERX6B2 pic.twitter.com/ucK21B0CKq

— Cinema Guild (@CinemaGuild) April 27, 2021

<3

Watched A Touch Of Sin tonight and am stilll thinking about it and trying to articulate something more than "it's a grind house version of Ascension. Liked it, did not love it but am willing to change my mind. Mountains May Depart is still the masterpiece.