Dark Matter 《暗物质》preview
We recently watched Rendition, which featured Meryl Streep, who’s usually, or heck almost always, a pleasure to watch. We were intrigued to learn back in July about her work on a film called Dark Matter (暗物质), from New York-based but China native theater director Chen Shizheng, whose film debut features not only Streep but Chinese actor Liu Ye (刘烨). The article was written by Thomas Podvin and published in the July 2007 issue of That’s Shanghai.
The story is based on the true life tragedy of Lu Gang (卢刚), the Chinese physics graduate student who in 1991 went on a shooting rampage. We found a tribute video on YouTube, as well as a book on the incident called Deadly Scholarship and, of course, a useful Wikipedia entry on Lu Gang from which you can get a basic sense of what happened.The film won an award at Sundance 2007, so you figure it can’t completely suck. Although Liu has been in some real stinkers of late (Blood Brothers 《天堂口》 and Curse of the Golden Flower come readily to mind), he seems decent in this kind of movie, though you’d never believe that with his good looks that he was supposed to be the awkward, socially maladjusted and ultimately murderous graduate student.
That said, we thought the preview made the movie seem a bit cheesy, though to be fair, previews tend to do that. They pick out some key dialogue in order to give us the gist of the plot, and yet sometimes that ends up ruining our first impression of the film, because dialogue taken out of context oftentimes just comes across as hackneyed.
Anyhow, we don’t know when this movie is coming out on DVD, but we’ll definitely have a review just as soon as we get our hands on a copy.
March 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Well the movie (and the characters) are *inspired* by* rather than *based on* a true story. In American films that means it’s more loosely connected to the actual events. Less like “Boys Don’t Cry”, and more like say, “Better Luck Tomorrow” (off the top of my head, perhaps a better example is out there).
According to this New York Times article, the move away from to a slightly different subject (cosmology, instead of plasma physics) and a fictional setting (“Valley State University” instead of Iowa) was done partly out of respect for victims’ families, but also because Chen Shizheng wanted to explore the dynamics involved in academia, particularly with the first wave of mainland Chinese students who came to the U.S. (of which Chen was one). It’s widely known that science graduates are treated little better than serfs. Apparently with immigrant grads, even more so.
It should be said that, these were not necessarily the dynamics surrounding the real-life Gang Lu and the university. That’s evident from the Times story and this article from a local paper.
The film gets a theatrical release in the US next month. It was delayed last spring due to the killings at Virginia Tech, which were committed by a Korean-American.