Thursday, March 03, 2005
Movies
I happen to enjoy watching Chinese movies, especially the period action films. I'm not all that crazy about those 70s Kung Fu movies that were pushed out, but do like many of the movies from the 80s on. Many of the the movies I enjoy tend to be very formula based. There's usually a love triangle (at least 3), a certain amount of gender confusion (spoken Chinese is often gender nonspecific), conflict between social and personal duty, and a great deal of death. A quick synopsis of many moves would be: A loves B who loves C who loves the country and then they all die. Because of all this, they can be confusing to follow at times.
A movies I've just started is Ashes of Time. So far, it follows the above synopsis pretty close. To make it more difficult to follow, A and C are played by the same female actress (Brigitte Lin) who get referred to as him and her; and both are both supposed to be the same person in the movie. B drank a mind wiping wine who no longer realizes he met A, C and D. In the meantime A and C are in love with B and have hired D with whom they spend a lot of time with to kill C and A. I'm guessing that D is also in love with A and C and is the best friend of B. And I'm only 25 minutes into the movie.
This movie (at least this particular DVD version - movie DVDs tend to come in very many versions) also displays many of the problems inherent in Chinese language movies. First, there is no choice of language or subtitles. The best DVD versions offer language choices in both audio and subtitles. I very much prefer to listen to the movie in Chinese and read English subtitles. In some DVDs subtitles are lost against the movie background - white letters against a snowy pass for example. In this movie, they seem to have a laid a dark piece of cardboard over the bottom almost 1/3 of the screen and stuck in English subtitles which may or may not appear with the particular character's voice. You can occasionally see bits of the original Chinese subtitles appearing under the dark foreground.
By the way, the reason many Chinese movies have Chinese subtitles is that while almost all literate Chinese can understand written Chinese, there are several dialects of spoken Chinese that are as different as French and Spanish to English speakers. With Chinese subtitles many more Chinese can enjoy the movie.
Anyway, the movie has quite nice scenes and is filmed well. I like the characters and plan on trying to wade through all the problems to finish this and see that probably in the end, A, B, C and D will probably all be dead. And having looked over some of the reviews of this movie, there seems to be as yet to be met, E, F and G among others.
2fers: Hong Kong Cinema and Yes Asia
