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Black Snow: A Film by Xie Fei

March 9, 2010

Black Snow [DVD] [1990]

Film: Black Snow

Director: Xie Fei

Label: Second Run DVD

Winding his way through the streets of Beijing, former prisoner Quanzi (Jiang Wen) settles back into his old shack and looks to reconstruct his life that has changed drastically since his departure. His only family members left are a few aunts who only want to meddle, the only job available is one selling clothes in the market, and the only friends he has left are doing everything in their power to drag him back into the life that put him in prison in the first place.

Enter a female singer. This woman captivates him. He wants to be with her, but has no idea how to get her let alone retain her. He feels alien to this strange land that was home and nothing seems to go right in any way. A classic tale of former criminal who yearns to be free from the riches and indulgences of crime, but has not learned to cope with the realities of normal life.

The new year has dawned and Quanzi works hard at forgetting his past even while being reminded of them on a daily basis. He likes to eat in his favorite restaurants, but he ends up helping an old friend commit murder. He wants to pursue love, but he cannot get over his fiancé and pursue a dream relationship with his singer. He wants to forge ahead, but his past drags him back and back again.

Xie Fie, a master of Chinese cinema not known outside of his home country, broods Quanzi with his chain smoking and long lasting glances at what could have been a dream life. Jiang Wen’s performance is on par with any classic actor and the never ending supporting cast gives Black Snow just about every type of character one would expect to run into in a Chinese back alley.

Awards for Black Snow:

1990 Silver Bear/Berlin International Film Festival (Germany)

1990 Best Film/Hundred Flowers Awards (China)

Black Snow will be released on March 8, 2010 by Second Run DVD with an interview with director Xie Fei and an excellent essay on the films of Xie Fei by Shaoyi Sun who is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Shanghai University’s School of Film and TV Art and Technology.

For more information on this film click here.


 

Gaea Girls/Shinjuku Boys

February 8, 2010

Kim Longinotto has been making documentaries since 1976. Saying that she just makes documentaries would do a disservice to her thirty-five year career. Longinotto specializes in showing the plight of females from around the world who are marginalized, oppressed, and discriminated upon. Choosing this line of work is definitely a labor of love as her works have mostly went unnoticed until the late nineties when she started to win awards at film festivals with her latest being the prestigious Prix Art es Essai at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. Following up on their release of the two excellent Longinotto documentaries Divorce Iranian Style/Runaway, Second Run DVD brings us a no holds barred wrestling match in Gaea Girls and then the somewhat strange story of women who pose as men to work in Japanese nightclubs in Shinjuku Boys.

Gaea Girls focuses around the story of the GAEA which is the Japanese women’s version of the WWE. In Japan, tradition dictates that women be more demure and introvert. Even in our modern day with more and more Japanese women branching out into business and doing other things that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, professional wrestling is still an outsider sport.

Focused on the training camp led by wrestling veteran and legend Nagayo, the documentary studies the efforts of newcomer Takeuchi as she seeks to prove her toughness and pass the extremely hard tests administered by mentor Nagayo herself. The insults and abuse end up being way more than Takeuchi had bargained for as she is continually berated and shown up even by newcomers. As a film, Gaea Girls is an odd look into the world over women who may never marry and bear children, but they simply want to prove to themselves that they can physically compete on a stage that may only be for show, but allows them to be the spotlight every night.

Shinjuku Boys revolves around the lives of three women as they transform themselves as men who serve drinks in the women only nightclub New Marilyn.  The fact that these women have chosen to forgo their lives as women and pretend they are men is an interesting study. What may even be the more interesting study is the women who frequent the clubs and who sometimes have relationships with Gaish, Tatsu, and Kazuki.

When watching these two documentaries back to back, there are similarities that come to the forefront. All of these women are searching for acceptance in a harsh society. All of these women have forgone the journey of love and the pursuit of lasting relationships to hang out on the fringe of society and interact with people who are just customers. All of these women embrace their differences from the norm. All of these women find their champion in the form of Longinotto who shows us the fringe while giving us sympathy for those who just want to be accepted.

 

The Ultimate Kurosawa Collection from Criterion

December 10, 2009

THE MASTER CLASS


Criterion’s deluxe DVD set AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, the largest collection of the Japanese director’s work ever released in the United States, is now available. Created in honor of Kurosawa’s centenary, this linen-bound box contains one legendary film after another (Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Kagemusha ), spanning the master’s fifty years making movies, as well as four rare films never before available on DVD and a beautifully illustrated, ninety-six-page hardcover book featuring writing by Stephen Prince and Donald Richie. This anticipated collector’s set has become one of the most talked-about gifts of the holiday season, having turned up in the Los Angeles Times (“flat-out masterpieces”), New York (“fabulous”), and Time (“the biggest and most rewarding box set of the year”). At the Auteurs, Glenn Kenny calls it “a genuine triumph ... a work of art in itself,” and Time Out New York ’s David Fear writes, “Criterion’s AK 100 essentially gives you Kurosawa’s entire career in one container. It’s a stunning collection in both quality and quantity ... Any true appreciation of Japanese cinema begins here.”

Shakespeare, samurai, noir: there are so many sides to Kurosawa. Watch this exclusive montage for a taste of what you’ll find in AK 100.


BUY the box set

READ the New York Times review

READ the Los Angeles Times review

READ the Time Out New York review

 

Criterion Releases Gomorrah

November 28, 2009

CRIME WAVE


Few films of recent years feel more urgent than Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. A devastating inside look at organized crime in contemporary Naples, Gomorrah is based on the book of the same name by Italian undercover reporter Roberto Saviano, who had to go into hiding after its publication. Garrone’s film, consisting of five interconnected stories, makes cinematically vivid the Mafia underworld that Saviano exposed, a crime syndicate whose tendrils snake from the poorest tenements to the highest fashion circles. Gomorrah—which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and has garnered numerous film awards around the world since—is contemporary cinema at its finest, a virtuosic, shockingly realistic look at how violence shapes our world.

Martin Scorsese was so taken with Gomorrah that he lent his name to the film’s U.S. release, as you’ll see in this gripping trailer.


BUY the DVD or Blu-ray edition

READ Chuck Stephens’s essay

READ Home Theater Forum’s review

READ Pop Dose’s review

 

 

Criterion Release Wings of Desire

November 4, 2009

ANGELS AMONG US


The least sentimental and most beautiful movie about angels ever made, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire arrives in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray special editions just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Filmed in a shimmering yet realistic cold-war Berlin only a few years before that momentous event, Wenders’s ode to a troubled city takes a fanciful look at the afterlife, narrated by a gloomy guardian angel: Bruno Ganz’s Damiel, who must choose whether to give up his immortality when he falls in love with a very human trapeze artist. With its wistful, collagelike impressions of urban life and its pristine, ethereal cinematography (plus Peter Falk!), Wings of Desire is an unforgettable experience. Take it from these just-in reviews: Says DVD Talk,Wings of Desire is the work of an artist who can see a better world on the horizon and is using his art to reach out for it ... This is one of those movies that belongs in every home.” And according to Film.com’s Amanda Mae Meyncke, “The wholly perfect release from Criterion leaves nothing to be desired.”

This stunning original trailer for Wings of Desire lets you glide over Wenders’s images, from black and white to color and back again.


BUY the DVD or Blu-ray edition

READ Michael Atkinson’s essay on the film

READ Wim Wenders’s original treatment for the film
 
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