Entries associated with the tag "Nelson Yu Lik-wai":

Let's start here: Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life "blows everything else out of the water"—There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, all the year's Oscar competition, in fact anything you can think of of recent commercial vintage.

Or maybe it's into the water, since imminent immersion's the theme—for towns immemorial along the banks of the Yangtze River, where China's Three Gorges dam project lurches toward completion, yet another of Yeats's rough, slouching beasts whose hour has finally arrived.

Paradoxically though, almost everyone works in demolition, gangs roving up and down the river, lighting out for whatever serendipitous employment territory they can find. No country for old men here—for "nostalgics," as one character calls them, living on memories of a world past vanishing. But yuan, the paper currency—always time for those, every denomination a picture of some natural wonder or other threatened with extinction. And even in this brave new world of capital, where "change" is the official watchword (hello, Barack Obama) and everything's been ruthlessly commodified—three yuan for a ride to an island underwater, another three or twenty for a night in a shabby workmen's hotel—there's still that vestigial craving for the obsolete and comfy. Like those waterfall engravings on the bills ...

Or maybe it's something else—the future as SF excavation site, some weird archaeological dig, like Blade Runner in reverse. Which shouldn't be surprising if you consider that Jia (in Unknown Pleasures) and his cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai (in All Tomorrow's Parties—aka the "Chinese Blade Runner") have tramped over this kind of ecologically straitened turf before. Strange and otherworldly, even spiritually ravaged, like the "burned-over district" in 1840s New York state—except instead of Jesus saving, there's now unappeasable Moloch, lord of the economic flies. A variation on the technological sublime, in the 18th-century Burkean sense, combining sheer raw terror with reverential awe ...

So buildings fall to rubble, or shoot off into CGI-confected space, and still the awe remains—as we've witnessed here at the Reader, our own Burgess Shale of evolutionary opportunity. One species dying, another—or maybe several, a dozen—springing to new, unruly life, like weeds in the concrete fill at the Three Gorges site. Some call them teratisms, monsters from the economic id, but I say: who's the last Morlock standing? ... assuming there's anyplace left to stand.

So no place of grace in this postdiluvian world, nor home for anyone either—which obviously has to be the case, since homes are for wusses only, the "nostalgics" who make bad choices, who don't know how to cope. But random variation is the everlasting engine and capitalism the universal solvent, subverting all the wayward, clinging molecules—which brings us back to total immersion again. Just keep moving, people ... or swimming, trying to stay above the waterline.

Which is why I think Still Life's a "great" movie, if not exactly a film you'd warm to. Audiences exit the theater and everyone seems mystified, vaguely drained or unsettled. Because they've seen the future and none of us is in it—or, to drag in Whitman, inadvertent apostle of dystopian transformation, of change without an end point or promise of repose:

  Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
  Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
  What is this earth to our affections? ...

  And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

  O my brave soul!
  O farther farther sail! ...
  O farther, farther, farther sail!

As someone who doesn't get out of town that often, the two September-October weeks of the Chicago International Film Festival (running October 4-17 this year) are usually the high point of my moviegoing year. Partly it's the gambler's game, the sometimes giddy (or is it only fraught?) calculation of deciding what to take a chance on and what not to and how to juggle two or three must-sees at different theaters on the same off-night Tuesday. Not being a guy with lots of disposable income, I have to make these choices count. On the other hand, it's no fun always playing the safe, sure bets—films with critical imprimaturs decked out in the metal regalia of other, more prestigious fests: Golden Lions, Silver Bears, Palmes d'Or, etc. Sometimes there's nothing to do but close your eyes and jump.

My own all-time-favorite CIFF leap into the void was a one-time-only screening of Nelson Yu Lik-wai's All Tomorrow's Parties at the 2003 fest. Terra incognita for the most part, since nobody bothered to review it (the Reader ran a descriptive blurb) and the only online commentaries I came up with gave it a classical one-finger salute (with "terrible" as pejorative of choice). But writer-director Yu had been chief cinematographer on all the features of critical darling Jia Zhang-ke (as he continues to be today), and the program notes' anonymous burble about a "Chinese Blade Runner" made it sound ... well, kind of inviting. How much recommendation does any unknown film need?

But Blade Runner it wasn't—though it probably was the sleeper of the fest, all those resourceful, elegantly stripped-down visuals, like dystopian dream time in Outer Mongolia or some other mysteriously forlorn place. And with expectations almost ratcheted down to zero—with an audience to match, just a dozen or so intrepid souls—it's as close to private epiphany in a public space as I've probably ever come. (OK, I'm exaggerating, but here's me in my seat: "C'mon, don't blow it now!"—like some nickel-and-dimer at Arlington or Sportsman's trying to coax his 50-1 nag home.) Do we live for that kind of experience or what?

Finally—also indulgently, except memory jogs do matter: as ritual incantations, as ways of keeping the inner discourse alive—my own top CIFF films in order of preference from each of the last five years (obviously 2004 was astonishingly packed!):

2002 Monday Morning, Otar Iosseliani, France; The Uncertainty Principle, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal; Springtime in a Small Town, Tian Zhuangzhuang, China; The Happiness of the Katakuris, Takashi Miike, Japan 2003 Father and Son, Alexander Sokurov, Russia/Germany; Distant, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey; Madame Sata, Karim Ainouz, Brazil; Jesus, You Know, Ulrich Seidl, Austria 2004 The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone, Julio Medem, Spain; Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand; Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi, Iran; Kings and Queen, Arnaud Desplechin, France; Nobody Knows, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan 2005 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Cristi Puiu, Romania; Magic Mirror, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal 2006 Summer Palace, Lou Ye, China; Comedy of Power, Claude Chabrol, France; Belle Toujours, Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France; Syndromes and a Century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand

For a full critical rundown of this year's fest, see the Reader's online sidebar at www.chicagoreader.com/movies (to be posted later on today).