I’ve waited a long time to lose the Desplechin virginity, and finally got around to it recently by watching “Un Conte De Noel.” The films tells the story of the Vuillard family, with a history of shared mental and physical illnesses,making their family an atypically unhappy one.
The critics, from what I’ve read thus far, [...]

A lot of critics, such as the NY Times Nathan Lee, did not like this film.
Here’s some of what he says:
The details of this saga, a threadbare patchwork of postcard exoticism, turgid characterizations, stilted duels and lackluster spectacle, are projected via the imagination of a little girl cognizant, it would seem, of the full repertory [...]

Something’s been running around my mind since I started reading this book: the idea of the scholar-painter. Each of the early Chinese dynasties had court painters, but its during the first centuries AD, after the fall of the Han and during the successive Wei, Jin, Tang, Song, Five Dynasties that you have individual “artists” emerging, [...]

The rest of that series is here. Some photographs from the Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann are here.

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I was at the Ke Center about a week ago for the opening of their new exhibit, and met the lovely Kat(therine) Don, director of RedBox Studio, who do graphic design and are also involved in the contemporary art scene in China. They made a bunch of these little colorful pocket-sized guides as a [...]

《恐怖分子》影评：杨德昌的手术刀-搜狐娱乐 via kwout

Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting [...]

This is the first time that I have ever seen Wong Kar-wai without his trademark sunglasses. I never realized his face was so big;
evidently the shades he wears occupy a good part of his face. He was in Bhutan for the wedding of Tony Leung and Carina Lau
and lots of other Hong Kong celebs, such [...]

I saw this book when i was in the Xingguang Photographic Equipment Center on Luban Lu, in one of the bookstores on the third floor. The book is called 震动中国(百名摄影记者震区全记录 and cost 80 rmb, but I felt cheap at the moment, so didn’t end up buying it. I think it’s a good book, but it’s [...]

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed � persistently inquisitive � about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on [...]