a shameful waste of madhouse time

ponderings of a pococurante

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Beijing Olympics spoof movie posters

August 18th, 2008 · No Comments

Netease has a bunch of spoof movie posters featuring Chinese Olympic athletes. You can vote for the ones that you like. Here are some of the ones that I liked or thought were nominally interesting, featuring Yao Ming, Liu Xiang and the usual suspects:

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addthis_title = [...]

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Tags: China

Movies I’m Watching: Nosferatu the Vampyre

August 10th, 2008 · No Comments

I’m a big fan of vampire movies and most of them scare me because of the typical techniques that modern horror films use. However, Herzog’s is different, in part because it’s shot in the same documentary type style that he uses in all of his films—so in that sense, there is no point in even [...]

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Tags: movies

Movies I’m Watching: Antonioni’s La Notte

August 9th, 2008 · No Comments

lanotte_062220070442.jpg (JPEG Image, 550×365 pixels) via kwout

Antonioni films are always difficult for me. They are in their wayso eravishing and yet there is something maddeningly obscure about them. The dialogue is not something that you can understand if you are expecting stuff that echoes regular speech. If you watch the European auteurs of that era [...]

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Tags: movies

Movies I’m Watching:Straw Dogs

August 2nd, 2008 · 1 Comment

Violence, in most movies, is pretty standard—you get shot in the face by Scarface, your neck broken by Steven Seagall, or eaten alive by sharks. How many time have you seen a man thrash about as he is nearly decapitated by a bear trap? That’s Straw Dogs, a movie that must have been much more [...]

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Tags: movies

Movies I’m Watching: Edward Yang’s Terrorizers (恐怖分子)

July 30th, 2008 · No Comments

《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 [...]

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Tags: Uncategorized · movies

Movies I’m Watching: Les Amants (The Lovers)

July 27th, 2008 · No Comments

Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a [...]

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Tags: movies

Movies I’m Watching: Comrades—Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜)

July 27th, 2008 · No Comments

Comrades—Almost a Love Story is a movie I am embarrassed to admit I had not seen until a couple of days ago. I’ve always suspected that Peter Chan’s movies are a bit heavy on the schlock factor, and to a certain extent, that’s true of this film, but in a relatively unoffensive way.
I can’t [...]

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Tags: China · movies

Movies I’m watching: Le Feu Follet and Naked

July 24th, 2008 · No Comments

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, [...]

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Tags: movies

A picture of Wong Kar-wai at Tony Leung/Carina Lau wedding–WITHOUT SHADES

July 24th, 2008 · No Comments

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 [...]

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Tags: Uncategorized

Movies I’ve watched: Lars and the Real Girl

July 14th, 2008 · No Comments

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times thought that this film was a bit hokey because it takes the issue of mental health and makes something Capra-esque out of it. Lars was abandoned and abused when he was young and finds it difficult to connect with other human beings, to the extent that he ends [...]

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Tags: America · movies