Ye Wen 2

This was the first movie I saw in theater since I came back to China 2 and a half weeks ago. I hadn’t expected to see a great movie, and I was ready to be very critical. But after the movie was over, I stayed in my seat a little longer, because I didn’t want anyone to see I had tears in my eyes. Yes, I had tears in my eyes at the end of the movie because I was so involved with the main character, and I was so happy that I saw a Chinese language film that was so well made.

The movie, a second installment of “Ye Wen” released two years earlier, tells the story of Ye Wen, Bruce Lee’s teacher (which I didn’t find out until the very end). We start with Ye struggling to open a Martial Arts school. Here we are introduced to one of the most powerful martial artist in the world. He is extremely humble, and he looked almost meek. That got me hooked right away. I hadn’t seen a Martial Arts character like that, and it fascinated me.

After some minor scuffles with a rebellious youth, Ye manages to run a fairly decent business, but then he is confronted by Hong, a local martial art teacher, and a thug who “approves" other teachers and collects money from them. Ye impresses Hong by defeating other teachers in a showcase, and proving himself a good match for Hong. But the conflict remains - Ye refuses to pay Hong the monthly fee that he collects from everyone else, until another confrontation between them gets abruptly halted by the appearance of Hong's own family, when Ye finally wins Hong's friendship.

Then the movie takes a sharp turn as it moves to the second half, which would be my only criticism on the plot. Hong is outraged by the fact that the Hong Kong Royal Police are taking advantage of him with no respect whatsoever. During the boxing match he was commissioned to set up, but with obviously no pay, he takes on the boxing champion, who openly mocks Chinese martial arts. Hong gets brutally beaten in the ring, and dies on the spot. And that's when Yen decides to take on the boxer himself. The movie ends with a heated boxing match between Yen and the boxing champion, which reminded me of "Cinderella Man" in a smaller scale, and Yen defeats the box champion and delivers a somewhat preachy speech afterwards.

The story is somewhat cheesy and cliche, but the movie still rekindled my hope for Chinese cinema, or at least Chinese language cinema made in Hong Kong. The main character got me immediately at the beginning, and the scenes were all constructed cleverly. Every moment of the film was either thrilling or entertaining. I was also amazed at the fact that the acting was a world better than the acting in most mainland productions I had seen so far. Hong Kong actors have better personalities for sure.

Chloe

I had watched some of Atom Egoyan’s earlier works before I went to see Chloe. His “Family viewing” was very hard to watch. It was slow and poorly edited, and bared every characteristic of ultra-low budget films. In fact, I didn’t finish watching it. I remember watching “Sweet Thereafter” a few years ago. It was a good film, although the end of the film was a little too abstract for my taste.

Seeing “Chloe” was a good experience, although I wouldn’t say I totally loved the movie. It was an art film, fully financed by French production company Studio Canal. On the Internet it was said that the film company had already made all the money back through international sales before the US release. It was encouraging to know that, because the film has a style that I strongly identify with, in spite of quite a few things in the plot that seemed forced and even absurd to me.

The film tells the story of Kathryn, a middle-aged doctor whose insecurity in her sextuality compels her to test her husband’s loyalty by hiring a hooker to seduce him, only to find herself in the middle of an emotional turmoil. Chloe, the hooker Kathryn hires, takes on the job and lies to her about all the details of her sexual encounters with the husband, eventually seduces her client and it is revealed at the end that her infatuation with Kathryn is the reason for she went through.

The film has a lyrical tone throughout that I find very familiar to the films I have made, as well as its dark dramatic feel. It’s also a film that I find encouraging because the strength of the actors’ performances carried many heavy moments and made them work without feeling melodramatic. The reason I think those moments are potentially melodramatic is because most of the characters lacked logical motivations, or when they did have motivations, I felt they were not strong enough. Chloe's infatuation with Kathryn doesn't seem to have been established strong enough to make her action in the end believable. As cliche as most Hollywood movies are, they do a good job providing the reasons for their characters' actions. For instance, in "Single White Female", Jennifer Jason Leigh's character's behavior is justified by her guilt and pain over the loss of her twin sister. In Chloe, we don't see a strong justification for Chloe. Is it because she is fed up with having sex with men that makes her helplessly fall in love with Kathryn? We don't know.

Also Kathryn’s decision to hire Chloe to seduce her husband seems a little random. What triggers that idea in her? I don’t even remember the scene in which she approaches Chloe. There needs to be an incident, or a character trait that makes her decision logical. But at the same time I understand the story is about how she gets emotionally wrecked because of her decision, and we can't afford to spend too much time at the beginning to see how she comes up with that decision.

The end of the film, where Chloe seems to commit suicide, again shows the damage of lack of justification of her behavior can do to a movie. I actually heard people laughing at the moment. It was a scary and understandable scene where Chloe, after failing to make Kathryn love her, turns to her son because of the resemblance between the two, but her committing suicide after she is rejected? That was too much for me.

Maybe this is the difference between an art film and a commercial film. In an art film, you don't have to worry too much about the logic. What matters is the depiction of the emotion, and how it makes us feel. But I think it's also a sign of sloppiness. A good piece of work, again, should make us believe the characters first, and then we will be able to feel the emotional impact.

The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” got terrible reviews since it was released, and that’s why I didn’t see it in theaters and waited until it was available on DVD, although I had bought the audio book and listened to it and was very enthralled by the brutal story of the 14 year-old girl raped and killed by a pedophile and then watching the life of her loved ones (and hated one) through the years that followed. The brutality of the story, told from a young girl’s point of view, who still has her innocence and dreams, is very original and heartbreaking.

I can see why the movie got back reviews. Frankly I would have given it a “C” as well if I was a critic. I think Peter Jackson paid too much attention on the computer graphics and how beautiful the shots looked, that he forgot how to tell the story. The pacing of the movie was very strange, way too slow most of the time. Too much time was spent on slow shots that had way too much sentiment, and it felt like watching a Chinese soap opera most of the time. In fact, I had to fast forward through many scenes because they were excruciatingly slow.

So what would have been the better way to capture the sentiment in the book? I think what literature does best that movies fail to do is best exemplified in this movie. It’s how the emotion evolves over long time passage. Part of the wonders of the book is the opportunity for us to see how Salmon watches her family through the years. How she aches for them, how she wants Ray Singh her boyfriend, and how precious her moment with him is at the end when she borrows her best friend's body. But somehow when all this was expressed on the screen, it lost its power, and we had to understand everything intellectually rather than emotionally.

There are a couple of sequences I really liked in the movie, though. The scene that Harvey attacks Salmon in the underground shed is pretty scary, and I was worried that Jackson would show the ugly and disturbing images of Harvey attacking her. But instead, he shows her getting away. For a moment I thought she actually does get a way. But the tone of the sequence remains horrifying, and soon after we realize the world around her is different. It looks like heaven (or hell), the lights are extremely bright, and the streets are eerily empty. Then we know she has already been killed by Harvey.

Another scene I liked is where her sister Lindsey finds Harvey's journal under his bedroom floor. There is an intercut sequence of her carefully putting the wood back in place, while Harvey is listening intently in the basement. She inevitably makes a sound, and the chase ensues. I thought it was a pretty original scene.

Kickass

I have been telling everyone that “Kickass” is American Pie meets Goodfellas. I believe it’s a pretty accurate observation. And that’s why I didn’t like it. I feel there are two completely different stories in two completely different styles, and one contantly reminds the viewer that the other wasn’t real. These two different styles simply don’t work well together.

I do have to give the credit to the filmmakers to attempt such combination for originality. I am notoriously well-known for resisting new things, so maybe I am wrong to think it doesn’t work. After all the movie got good reviews from critics and a lot of people liked it.

The movie tells the story of a highschool teenager who wants to be a superhero. He buys a superhero outfit and starts roaming the streets to do good, only to get his ass kicked. The antagonist of the movie is a ruthless gangster, whose son shares the same ambition as out main character. The catalyst of the movie is Nicholas Cage, along with his daughter Hit Girl, who has been framed by the gangster and done time in prison. His wife became extremely depressed and died of overdose while he was in prison, but somehow managed to give birth to Hit Girl. So now the father and the daughter are teamed up to revenge. Their goal is to kill the gangster.

When our main character comes across Cage and Hit Girl, he realizes that he is never gonna be a true superhero, in spite of the fact that some luck has brought him Internet fame. In the meantime, the gangster Frank mistakes the damages Cage has done our main character’s doing. Eventually, our main character and Cage and hit girl are pushed to a corner. Cage dies, and our main guy and the hit girl team up to defeat Frank. At the end, we see Frank's son has now become the new villain and a sequel is implied.

I thought it was interesting to see how a normal teenager with the desire of being recognized and getting the girl of his dream attempt to become the superhero, and when reality kicks in, he realizes that there is no way he can be one. I also like the idea of his meeting someone he considers the true superhero, but I wish the rest of the movie (from midpoint on) was about how the main character changes through close interaction with Cage and Hit Girl. I lost interest in the movie from the midpoint on, because the characters remained disconnected with each other, and at many places, our main character became so passive I lost interest in him altogether. Yes, he does take action at the very end, but it's way too late for me to care about him.

It’s interesting to see the style of high school comedy and bloody gangster dramas in one movie. When Kickass gets stabbed in the stomach and then ran over by a car, the scene is so brutal that it shocked me. It got my interest right away, but somehow when the movie got back to the tone of High School comedy and then went back and forth between the two styles, it lost me because I didn't really believe in the world anymore.