前天晚上去了豫园看灯会，观摩的主要是人海，但是喜气洋洋的，感觉还是不错。后来跟朋友在老城区溜达，久违的灵感也终于回来了，当然，这也跟我带新的相机出去也有关。谢谢长辈的提携以及各位朋友的支持！我要坚持拍下去！
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Sometimes you have to believe that peaceful co-existence is possible.
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 of high-gloss, empty-headed pictorialism deployed by corporate advertising.Tarsem, as the filmmaker prefers to be called, made his name marketing soft drinks and sneakers, and “The Fall” bids to sell its audience on a visionary quest full of romance, intrigue, fabulous sights and fantastic creatures (Charles Darwin, swimming elephants, white people with dreadlocks). It’s strictly bargain bin.
Ouch.
Roger Ebert is a bit more sympathetic to the movie, saying:
Tarsem’s “The Fall” is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance “The Fall,” filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.
That’s the initial wow-factor, a feeling that has any visual sensibility or heck, anyone with a still beating heart ought to share. The images are simply stunning, though I suppose Nathan Lee would argue that this art for art’s sake stuff is still essentially vacuous. I would like to know the locations, spread over 28 countries, where the film was made: there is one place which is MC Escher like in its geometry of strange, angular staircases. When the black-clad bad guys are running up and down the stairs like so many evil ants, it’s just about as good as anything computer-generated in Star Wars (I mean the prequels) or the Matrix. Perhaps it is more stunning knowing that there were supposedly no CGI in the movie at all (just old style special effects).
The film’s style is a mashup of fantasy, historical drama and animation. In the end, you see the characters (in 1915 LA) watching silent films…including the early action and stunt work in films. I suppose I’m a sucker for this meta-cinematic stuff, you know, the Cinema Paradiso-esque love letter to the cinema business, because I do love movies, and of course everyone who loves the movie loves to bask in the glow of kindred spirits. The delight of watching the oh so cute wiggling and squirming faces of children in the hospital ward watching the “flickers” is a mirror with which the narcissistic cinephile gazes at himself.
But, critics will have their criticisms. A bit interesting of a read is the Onion A.V. club’s interview with Tarsem. The stunning locations: he piggybacked them off of commercial ad work.
And then after that, I needed the characters’ backstories, so for those, I went around the globe, saying “I need to go to this location, this location,” places I’d scouted for 17 years. I would only take ads that went to those regions. So I’d shoot an ad, and then bring my actors over to shoot on location.
Anyhow, it’s a great interview, full of interesting things about his filmmaking style and methods, as well as some tidbits about his life. Like this bit about how he got into commercials, videos, and films:
So I told my dad, and he said no way. Every year, we’d go to England, because my dad was in the airlines and he got free tickets, and at that point, he just stopped it. He said, “No, you’re gonna jump ship.” He wouldn’t let me come abroad with him unless I graduated in business. I love science, but business was absolutely something I dreaded. So I barely went to college, I lied and cheated like mad, I had other people sit for my exams, everything possible. And then I got a 99 percentile on the GMAT, which got me—I could pretty much go to Harvard. So we applied out there, and my dad said, “Okay, now it’s done. He’s settled down, calmed down.” And he sent me on my way there. He sent me to visit my cousin in Vancouver, and I called from Canada and said “I’m going to go study film.” And he said, “Get to the other coast and go straight away to Harvard! Ninety-ninth percentile, you should be able to get in wherever you want!” I said “no,” and he said, “Okay, then you don’t exist any more.”
Oh, and as far as Deception and Righteous Kill….well, it’s always a joy watching De Niro and Pacino, but really, this geriatric thriller stuff doesn’t really move me. Plot twists are so common to films of this sort that it makes us jaded, I think, and that’s not good for the cinema in general. Oooh, the good guy was really the bad guy, it was an inside job, he was pulling the strings the whole time, you know how it goes. These are two terrific actors, but really, this and Deception truly belong in the category of Mc Thriller, because that’s what they are, boilerplate thrillers. I know that sounds like a paradox but this, I truly believe, is a new Hollywood genre. They are typically slick productions with your typical repertory of cinematic tricks, the high contrast shots, the moody lighting, the skewed color palettes, etc. Everyone plays their part, which is fine and good, but that’s the problem: you forget these films right after you watch them, because nothing is real and nothing leaves any lasting impression on you.
Tarsem’s film, whatever its faults, is as Roger Ebert said, something that you just have to see because it exists. It’s just an audacious thing and you can’t say that about Deception or Righteous Kill. I know that this might seem like apples and oranges, but its just that these are the last three movies that I happened to watch, so are most recent in my mind.
I don’t remember where I first heard of Tin Shui Wai, but I believe someone told me that this was the famous “walled city” (圍城） that the movie was named after, so I went there expecting something desperate and ghetto, but didn’t find anything of the sort. The subway ride is nice…the stations are not as flashy and busy as the ones in the major Hong Kong lines; there’s a certain sterility, as if somewhere along the way, somewhere underground you passed a threshold. Of course for me, this is just reflected in how things look and appear, and what effects that has on you–that is, how the urban environment, urban form, urban aesthetics affects your perception of, well, everything: even if you are thinking of something utterly different, the environment is still there, leaving some kind of subtle imprint on your mind, coloring your moods and perceptions. I think that’s why my photos has some strange and obviously distorted color schemes: the attempt to impart the deep truth of the place, or one’s subjective vision of a place, means that you hve to depart from the common notion of verisimilitude, and truth be told once you get used to it, it ain’t no thang.
I wondered what it would be like living here; in one sense it’s no different from the rest of Hong Kong, but in another sense, it is separated by those lush forests and hills, and has a radically different form—we’re talking suburbs here, high-rises cloned and sprouted all over the place, jutting awkwardly into the sky, assured of their functionality but somehow unsure of their existence.
Shopping malls: I played Time Crisis 4 there, blowing a chunk of change that could have been used for better purposes. Others played that horse-racing game where plastic horses race across a track. It’s dated and quaint for that very reason. You would have expected horse-racing to have morphed into some high octane video game with crystal-clear graphics, the whole nine yards. And here was this old contraption, looking like some kind of cheap museum diorama…anyhow I can’t see what the fun of it is. Nearby, old men play video game mahjong.
I wonder how much time I’ve spent wandering through malls. It’s become some kind of ritual, so much so that I can pretty much sleepwalk through it. It’s so utterly familiar and so perfectly banal that you don’t even think twice about it, it’s automatic, a twitch that sometimes lasts an entire afternoon.
The rest of that series is here. Some photographs from the Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann are here.
This picture is from the Times UK photographer Marc Aspland: quite nice and painterly. He’s photoblogging the Games but if you’re in China you probably have to use a proxy to read his typepad.com blog.
H/t to Matt for showing me the link. Twin brothers, both devoted to the Party. Even whitey’s got to smile at that.
Hu Yang (胡杨) is the Shanghai based documentary photographer that takes shots of people living in Shanghai, in their native environments–their homes. He did a series that got a lot of publicity in the last year or so, it was called 《上海人家》 and showed Shanghainese people (or at least people who live here) from all walks of life in their homes, which was quite interesting not only sociologically but because many of the rooms had a personality of their own and showed us personal idiosyncracies that were far more interesting than any broader, social truth that might have (but ultimately was not) gleaned from the picutres. Well, I was leafing thorugh the pages of Shanghai Photography Magazine and saw that he’d done some new pictures, portraits of young people born anytime between 1970 and 1989. The photographs are nothing to write home about, but I guess there is still that minimal portrait of a generation value to it. In the actual exhibit and article in the magazine you read what each subject answered to a questionnaire given to them by the photographer, stuff on what their personal interests and hobbies were, etc. Anodyne but interesting, I suppose.
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 not the quality of the product that matters to me, or even the quality of the photography contained inside, but rather just the fact that it’s a pictorial record of what happened, and that’s just something that I feel I ought to have with me. Order it from Amazon China. Look at more images from the book on this blog. There are some other photography books on the earthquake, one of them was a big coffee table one that I saw in the same bookstore but I didn’t find it online. But it may be called 震殇5·12(崔益军汶川大地震摄影纪实) and be purchasable from Amazon as well.
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