im anticipating the grandmasters by wong kar wai, you can do what you like

i realised while i was watching this that when i am watching wkw movies i am always wishing they were other wkw movies. maybe it is an impatience to get to the end product that's circuitously delivered, or maybe the scene-long specifics don't seem as appealing as the kind of amalgamated sense memory of what you have already watched & processed & know & want. i liked this & thought it was interesting, & was pretty moved by it, having been kinda worried at first, the economy of its storytelling coming at the expense of the space that's common to his other films - the understanding of how suggestive a canvas tony leung can be seemed sidelined to exposition & montage, of ip man's happy family, shown kinda quickly & generically, or of what we heard of political shifts. i disagree w/tipsy, though, cause i think his genre films are genre films - this reminded me most of as tears go by, which i haven't seen for forever (& which i didn't like) but which i think managed to be clearly informed by the tropes & styles he was working with & not like ... a commentary on that, not an exploded version of them (the way that say jarmusch's dead man isn't & is a western). like i felt an absence of knowledge of the genre that might have improved my understanding of this but i also think it was pretty tightly in the genre - there was a voice in my head halfway through that was saying wait so nobody even landed a punch on h-, quieted by remembering it's a kung-fu film, in that tradition, that storytelling mode, that distance from realism. but it progressed really interestingly, i think, maybe in moving toward zhang ziyi, all her lines so good & that coming closer to the less purposeful territory of in the mood for love, or whatever, where conversations are genuinely conversational & are allowed to circle or be funny or build character not narrative. it was interesting how diffuse it was. i would like a longer cut. i felt like it didn't earn the button motif. i didn't realise how i'd missed tony leung's voice, the calm, clipped narration of leveled emotional terrain. i didn't think that the kinda generic visual motifs of wkw really worked in this - reflective water, cigarette smoke, & think he has lost something (not even necessarily christopher doyle, which would be the obvious explanation) - the close ups of zhang & leung felt less thoughtful, less open, the specificity & clutter of wong's previous renderings of hong kong kind of a damning comparison, what he would make of actual texture & physical spaces rather than kinda classical, well adorned settings. train stations, train windows. i remember hearing nick james talk about how he thought yi yi & in the mood for love were kinda the last of the classical cinematic epics, which had that vantage point and operated in that register, this assumed & delivered graceful tone & frame, & that that film wasn't made anymore, or wouldn't be what it was anymore. & seeing this projected digitally felt genuinely jarring, to me, the softness of the celluloid gold gradients of his films still visible to me absent, the plasticity of the new image unbelievable, inappropriate. i liked this, anyway, i wonder what he has an appetite for next. i wonder how hou's martial arts movie will be (kinda felt puppetmaster vibes from this, too).

He does work genres from the inside and not the outside, he's not deconstructing or critiquing or whatever. But the genre motifs are always just his way into a Wong Kar-Wai movie -- which is the real genre he's always working in.

yeah sure - was maybe speaking past you, there, sorry! I did find it simultaneously engrossing & strange to be back in the territory of lovesick tony leung (in a suit! in 50s HK! like when will someone re-edit the diffuse sections of various wkw films into a new miniseries?) having circuitously climbed through the action to get there.

ha yeah like 2/3 of the way through when i thought "oh yes this is definitely a wong kar wai movie" now.

I'm super excited about this movie! I still have many WKW films to watch, mostly his early ones but I like not seeing them yet.

i watched this again. it's mesmerizing on a purely textural level (like most WKW) but the shift to rueful melodrama for the last reel left no impact on me at all. and what is up with the montage sequence after the end title credit that shows you fragments of scenes that were presumably cut from this version?

i'll have to see chinese cut to judge really but I'm not sure if WKW really knew what kind of movie he wanted to make? but yeah I liked some of the fight scenes better the 2nd time around.

esp. liked the one with the elder grandmaster (zhang ziyi's dad) where after basically circling around each other the elder just realizes without even fighting per se that he has met his match. it's like two chess opponents who don't even need to play the full game; after a few moves they can foresee every subsequent move up to and including the checkmate.

still this wasn't a patch on chungking express or days of being wild or even ashes of time. miss the vibrant colors and manic mood swings.

all the same it was a good experience to go to a multiplex and see something that was really :cinema:, you know. for all its many faults, the images at least gave my brain a lot to chew on.

this movie strikes me as the kind of biopic you see after you've seen the other 85 biopics on the same guy ( even though it's really about two people not one as the american title would suggest). the weinstein cut takes pains to "place" each sequence historically/geographically and i understand why they did that, but chinese audiences have seen (just in the last 2-3 years!!) like three or four more conventional biopics of ip man (not to mention a huge back catalog of books, movies, comics, etc.) and so you could argue wong doesn't really need to "tell the story" in a conventional sense.

that said, i would love to read a book by a good historian on the chinese martial arts and how they functioned in society over the last millenium or whatever. all the movie versions are, like westerns in american cinema, kind of just embellishments on, comments on, revisions of, etc. other imaginings which are all more or less overtly mythologizing. and i love them. but although martial artists have an enormous place in the chinese cultural imaginary, just practically speaking they can't have been all that essential in an age of mass-manufactured munitions. that's assuming that the fighting aspect is most salient, which a lot of films, etc. would have you believe is wrong. (the grandmasters fitfully tries to suggest the more abstract intellectual content but as with most such depictions it's really just a few quotables rather than a sense of a real philosophy).

supposedly hou hsiao-hsien is working on a wu xia and i can't imagine that one--if it ever finishes, last i heard he had run out of money--will be in the standard mythological mode.

blah blah blah.

Watched the Chinese original cut and was surprised at how straightforward and action-filled it was, but I really liked what WKW did with it. In a way it's a simple film, and the passing of traditions theme is conveyed well and concisely enough even at 2hrs+ with beautiful fight scenes inbetween. Leung and Zhang under WKW's lens and especially the latter with a character to chew on makes this an instant success, but otherwise as well I felt it was a complete work, not a half-finished something or an over-ambitious mess. Very solid stuff.

you might say the narrative is too simple as i wasn't drawn into it a la chungking express, days of being wild...

no, sure, & I think that's true of the film more broadly, too; I think that the linearity, the lack of clutter or specificity or unnecessary detail, is some of what made this minor, for me. I feel like perhaps for Wong this was an attempt at a bolder, almost austere, more refined & elemental style; compare the close-ups of Zhang, say, dedicated entirely to the balance of focus across the contours of her face, with the drawing of Maggie Cheung in ITMFL, accessorised with costume, colour, contrast, locale, &c. I think there is cinematic math, & precedent, for this working, for bolder image-making, & I feel like perhaps the idea of portraying a train station through just steam, light & an everlasting passing train felt like a distillation of its essence. but I think - & I can't separate this from seeing it protected digitally, the memory & associations & romantic history of film - that it didn't work, here, or maybe just disappointed an audience accustomed to such textural richness. I am pretty sure I could walk into a fabric store & match the materials from which Tony Leung's suits in previous WKW films were made, could gauge their likeness from their absorption or reflection of light, so evocative was their rendering. & this, in narrative, too, felt like it denied some of that connection, or familiarity.

my understanding is that the american cut was simplified narratively xp

but the chinese cut wasn't that hard to follow either, which i was fine with.

yeah weirdly a bunch of reviews of both versions complained about it being incomprehensible but I found that to be far from the case and I'm the sort of guy who gets confused by narratives

i mean i can see how WKW probably left a lot of connective tissue out, but it's not very hard to fill it in yourself

the contours of the narrative are roughly visible by virtue of simply being a historical story

i mean i can see how WKW probably left a lot of connective tissue out, but it's not very hard to fill it in yourself

this is true, but it's only really possible after the fact. so (for me anyway) i didn't often understand what i was seeing as i was seeing it. but i think that sorta thing is almost common in WKW, at least the post-ITMFL movies.

yeah the rhythm of a WKW movie is sensuous, non-narrative vignettes capped by wistful Tony Leung reminiscences, its like its own tense form

the flip from utter incomprehensibility to complete comprehensibility between the first and second viewing of a wkw movie is almost like black magic

yeah, that's kind of true.

although the 2nd half of the grandmasters seems immediately legible to me, it's the earlier stuff that might be a bit challenging at first viewing.

talking about the american release btw. maybe i'll watch the chinese one this weekend.

i've seen the 130 minute cut and the weinstein cut. the weinstein version makes two major changes - some horrible concessions to american ignorance (in the form of overly literal title cards & narration and the like), and it messes with the structure of the movie to make it more melodramatic. the depiction of Yip Man's relationship with his wife suffers a lot for this - in the 130 minute cut it's treated in that achingly delicate WKW way, but in the american theatrical version a lot of nuance is missing. weinstein's version attempts to build suspense about the fight between Gong Yutian and Yip Man, but in the 130 min cut there are multiple scenes making it clear that Gong Yutian not only expects to lose, he wants to so that he can pass the torch. in the 130 min version the Gong Er scenes set during the war are presented chronologically, whereas in the weinstein cut they take the form of a melodramatic revelation in the final act. in the chinese version Yip Man's scenes with her in Hong Kong are mostly about kung fu and his interest in learning and passing on her family's martial legacy; the weinstein version makes it seem more like he's pursuing a long lost love. and there's a bunch of other, smaller things missing, like a very ITMFL shot of Gong Er whispering into a hole in a wall just before she vows never to marry. (there's a few things added, too, to be fair.)

you know what though? it's an impressive film in either form. i love how seriously it takes kung fu, that it's as willing to end a fight with a broken cookie or a disarming tony leung smile as it is a brutal asskicking. i love that it's really Gong Er's movie, and that the central tragedy of the film is of her potential being strangled and killed by Confucian strictures. (zhang ziyi has the movie's two most powerful moments imo) i even loved the fights and how they were shot, and i'm normally pretty rigid about how i like my fight scenes. i thought the emphasis on foot movement, objects shaken by impact, and kung fu moves that use someones momentum against them was really great and beautiful at times. this film really stuck with me... it's got a lot going for it.

i love that it's really Gong Er's movie

That's a good point. I'm not sure it's completely true -- tho I haven't seen the long version -- but it could or should be true. She's definitely the most interesting character, and she also has the best fight scenes.

Finally saw this (American cut) and pretty much loved it. It's not up there with 2046, but what is, really? Still, it's gorgeous and melancholy, and I loved the fight scenes.

i love that it's really Gong Er's movie, and that the central tragedy of the film is of her potential being strangled and killed by Confucian strictures.

Yes! It's really about kung fu as an art form and the importance of preserving the knowledge of the past, and Gong Er embodies that through failure: missed opportunities, lost knowledge, regret, regret, regret...

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/27/william-chang-on-the-art-of-movie-design-2/?mod=WSJBlog

Unghngnhngng I wnat this guy's job

saw the grandmaster last night, seeing it with a saturday night movie crowd was probably a bad idea. but not sure anything would have helped make it any better. you can tell its had harvey weinstein make cuts to it, as its insultingly littered with intertitle screens, which should make it easier to follow, but instead just make the film feel dumber. but then i dont know if the longer cut of this would have been much better either. wong kar wai is becoming a parody of himself really. his style is so mannered on this, its almost like someone doing an imprersonation of his style after watching in the mood for love. far too many slo-mo shots, for no real reason, odd camera placing, which makes no real sense, and looks like a real mess. it has one truly affecting scene at the end, between zhang yiyi and tony leung in terms of something that is very WKW, and a few decent fight scenes, but mostly, its just a mess of a movie. poetic in places, but a fallure as a biopic, a failure as a romance, and worst of all for a film called the grandmaster, just not that memorable as a martial arts movie. in WKWs defence, it made me really hate harvey weinstein. if WKW is to make any more films, he should probably do away with his now very affected style, and just go back to basics (ie no more closeups of raindrops when you actually want to see fighting). he should go anti-style. because this is just silly. and why does tony leung have that hat on so often?

also, for an ipman film, its just stupid that the first intertitle screen in the epilogue is about gong er. and some of the dialogue is just silly (and im someone who genuinely likes the philosophy that you get in martial arts movies).

harvey weinstein should never be allowed to buy any asian films again.

I could never see this film with its so-called 'cuts'.

I've remembered many of the fights throughout the year since I saw it, so I'd say the fights are memorable. Also, this is a wkw-film first and foremost, that it fails at being something else is not that important. Now I really want to rewatch it :)

theyre memorable, sure, but not for anything other than their wkw-ness but why is that always seen as a good thing? i see it as not so much a directorial stamp, but a sign of limitations. this is kind of a problem i have with praising directors for their auteur-ness - critics like spotting the same things in their movies, and directors seemingly like to, or cant help but, give them the same things to spot again and again, leading to a rather ridiculous circle jerk.

No, they're memorable because they are insanely beautiful. Which has a lot to do with their wkw-ness, but nothing to do with a circle-jerk. The train, the snow, the rain, the moment where Leung jumps over Yiyi. They're memorable. I couldn't care less that it isn't the kicks and punches that are particularly memorable.

youre not wrong in that they do have an aesthetic power, but i felt like i was watching a music video or some sort of tv commercial at times, there was something a little too slick about them. the editing was too quick, and the camera positioning meant you were constantly disoriented and not being sure where to look in a way that made me think more of a bourne-style hollywood actioner than something like crouching tiger or hero.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/talking-grandmaster-costume-design-with-oscar-nominated-william-chang-193468/

Tl;dr article by David Bordwell here:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/09/23/the-grandmaster-moving-forward-turning-back/

Which links to something he wrote about ASHES OF TIME REDUX: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2008/12/18/ashes-to-ashes-redux/