I would love Inception if the wifeguy murder mystery was excised. As is it grinds everything to a halt to be sentimental and misogynistic. I suppose that’s James Bond demo reel as well.
Like what if it was just about corporate espionage by giving rich people cathartic nightmares?
I feel like I post this every 8 months on this forum but when you mention Inception you have sounded the Mikey Klaxon
I enjoy the bits where they are Assembling a Team and Explaining The Hand-Wavy Sci-Fi Elements and when The Job Doesn’t Go According to Plan
Elliot Page can’t carry the scenes about Leonardo DiCaprio maybe living inside psychosis but he absolutely carries every other concept where Robert Pattinson didn’t.
Inception is too stupid for me to care about its awful treatment of women, but Tenet is even stupider and less forgivable (and even more misogynist, which is quite the achievement) yet it has zero scenes that justify its existence. (Inception at least had that fun corridor fight)
The corridor fight was cool, Joseph Gordon Levy was hot
It’s like 3 hours too long though. Should’ve been a YouTube vfx showcase
his new movie is great too
Zhang Yimou’s entire career is fantastic, really respect someone who basically floated in and out of making near outright propaganda depending on whether it suited his artistic inclinations at the time
i love the rumours that this one was made to appease censors after One Second was pulled from distribution and re-edited. and that One Second was pulled for being ‘too good’ and potentially shining too much light on poverty in China rather than being particularly critical of it.
it’s unbelievably funny too
i hadn’t heard of this movie or this rumor until i saw your post about it above, but this exact thing is the first thought i had about it lol
i think zhang yimou’s equivalent of the ‘one for me, one for them’ approach to filmmaking is just ‘make one film that will be banned for unexplained reasons, then just do some propaganada’
i don’t wanna go too hard on the propaganda aspect of Chinese filmmaking, but Cliff Walkers is almost subversive with how blatant it gets. for a movie about spies it’s so morally objective.
yeah i feel you. it does kind of bother me to get that self righteous about it when the average usa blockbuster has kind of similar levels of nationalism. i’m not a fan of the wolf warrior-ish stuff but i feel like it’s not the worst thing in the world to do flag waving movies about ww2 stuff. i mean everyone loves it when indiana jones punches nazis right…
It’s funny how, out of anyone else in Yimou’s generation of Chinese directors, he has the most output.
chen kaige makes a lot of movies too its just that a lot of them really suck. i think there’s something kind of special about that. also chen kaige is better at doing blockbuster trash than zhang yimou. like zhang did the great wall which just looks horrible, but the legend of the demon cat actually looks pretty cool. sadly i havent seen it yet. it is a much better premise and cast than great wall though.
After posting that, I immediately looked up his contemporaries and I was surprised that Chen Kaige was still making things. Are they any good? I have no idea. I saw Great Wall while I lived in China. It is absolutely terrible. Jing Tian is good in it I think? So many other people I talked to saw it and groaned whenever it was brought up. Shadow, on the other hand, had better reception when I was talking with university students two years later.
he codirected a movie with dante lam and tsui hark that is like a korean war movie thing? it’s the highest grossing chinese movie in history and i think zhang yimou’s latest one is probably trying to capture some of that saber rattling magic
Saw The French Dispatch and couldn’t help but have a similar reaction to the May 68 student protest pastiche in that movie that I think onesecondbefore mentioned having. But besides that lengthy episode of cringe, I just thought the movie was annoying as fuck and a total indulgent waste of time. I am cool with indulgences but Wes Anderson has basically made a career out of indulgences and I think I just don’t want to see any more of them, especially in this totalized picture book style he’s realized ever since Moonrise Kingdom. His stories aren’t good anymore and neither are his characters.
I keep thinking about how Jiang Wen definitely wasn’t banned for making films for 7 years after Devils on the Doorstep, he just didn’t make anymore by coincidence.
