China Film Journal

This film is about the Chinese that left China in the 19th c. to build railroads in Canada and the US, and of course, has a bit of intrigue and romance as well.
The story follows Little Tiger (Sun Li), a plucky girl living the hard scrabble life on the streets of Hong Kong. Without family or friends, Little Tiger has to pretend that she’s a boy (a la Mulan) and work odd jobs to keep herself afloat. Her dream is to learn English and then go to the “Gold Mountain”, where she thinks she can make some real money and perhaps find her long-lost father, who went there and was never heard from again.

Fate has it that she runs into James Nichol (Luke McFarlane), the dashing young lad that is sent by his railroad tycoon father to get 2000 coolies to Canada right quick, lest they not able to finish their railroad and thus forfeit everything to their debtors. From there on in you can expect plenty of fortune cookie type moments thrown in, and you can guess who falls in love with who, and you can almost guess if there is a happy ending or not.

The two performances that I enjoyed the most were not by either of the main actors, but by Tony Leung Ka Fai as the bookman with the mysterious scar on his face as well as the venerable Peter O’Toole, who gets to play a drunken, aging old China hand responsible for finding workers for the Nichols. Peter O’Toole’s performance is of note, and not because it’s bad–I think it’d be hard for an actor of his caliber to be awful, but there are some ropey lines in there, especially when O’Toole is speaking Chinese and says some cheesy things like “forgive him, he is but a foreign devil” or just “oh shit”…it’s the kind of role that are easy paychecks for O’Toole John Hurt and the like–a sagging face, a slurred voice, drunken roues, world-weary philosophers, a still posh English accent–its still a joy to watch but there is, truth be told, nothing of real value in a role or performance of that sort. It adds nothing new. It is, literally, just a role.

The story itself, when it moves to Canada, has the normal ups and downs. There are a couple of secrets, a couple of conspirators, an couple of racist baddies, etc. There is also supposed to be this streak of melancholy because of all the Chinese workers that lost their lives in this process–they said 3 for every mile of railroad–and they hit this point home fairly often enough in the movie, when random Chinese workers get tragically killed. There are some bits about the emotional lives of the workers–but for the most part, the story is focused on Little Tiger, the she that is a he, as well as James Nichols, who learns a little something about Chinamen, building railroads, and himself in the process.

On the whole, not too bad, but nothing that you really want to waste your time watching if you have something more pressing to do, or something of real quality to watch.

Squat – The Moss via kwout

Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough time to devote to this website. I wrote a review that appeared on Batgwa/Squat, which you can read by clicking on the link above.

moss, shawn yu, violence, hong kong, society, police, cops, China, drama, action

彭韬凭《血蝉》获亚洲数码录像银奖 王小帅颁奖_影音娱乐_新浪网 via kwout

《血蝉》（Xue Chan/Little Moth) is a film about a girl that gets sold into slavery, joining one of those large beggars’ rings that anyone that’s spent any time living in and reading about urban China knows about. I had never heard of its director, Peng Tao (彭韬）until today, because while in Paris I went to an exhibition on China’s cities, and one of his films was showing there. The film was called “Wait” and was executive produced by Jia Zhangke and starred his leading lady, Zhao Tao. The film was about a woman with a young baby trying to make ends meet in Chongqing. Her husband is living in Pakistan and is absent throughout the film, echoing a theme found in Jia’s film Still Life. Her only form of communication comes in waiting at the post office for letters/mail that he might send, but of course, she never receives anything and then the post office ends up getting demolished (sorry for the spoiler, but the film is only 24 minutes long and being contemplative and arty doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with). Her noodle stall gets demolished and so she’s forced to scrounge with work with a former patron who gives her some somewhat sketchy singing/karaoke type job, and that’s more or less where the movie concludes.

This was a short film, and it seems that Little Moth is the only feature length film that Peng Tao has made. As you can tell from the above picture though, it seems that he won an award (and was given that award from Wang Xiaoshuai, who is on the left). Googling in Englsih I found that he did indeed win the ,a href=”http://www.hkiff.org.hk/eng/programme/award01.php”>”Silver Digital Award” at the last Hong Kong International Film Festival.

I don’t know if any of his films are out on DVD in China, but would love to get a copy of Little Moth—I think I know what to expect, basically a bit of Jia Zhangke with a dash of Zhang Yang. Excuse me if I’m starting to sound a little cynical at this point, but hey, we all know what the Chinese arthouse is about. That doesn’t vitiate its value, by any means. Technorati Tags: china, peng tao, hong kong, HKIFF, little moth, slavery, beggars, china, chinese, society, awards, silver, zhao tao

Boomtown Beijing does fulfill its basic mission of capturing how ordinarhy Beijing residents are preparing for the Olympics. It’s an interesting cross-section of Beijing–there;s an old man practicsing magic sticks, a nearly blind sprinter preparing for the Paralympics, a young boy who wants to be torch-bearer even though he’s too young. These are people who are lit up, from the inside, by their dreams, but wwho are, nonetheless, quite aware of the possibility that their dreams will never come to pass.

The only real complaint that I had with this movie was that it was a bit too rough, and by this I mean its editing and structure, rhythm and pacing–there were several characters, each developed in parallel. The ccharacters were introduced with subtitles, rather than narration–somehow it came across a bit haphazard. There was no real connection between any of the characters, which made each one a separate vignette, tied together “externally” only by the fact that we know they are all preparing, in their way, for the Olympics. Although by including all these disparate characters we are offered more information, it never gelled together; there was no cohesive narrative, the pace sometimes seemed slow, since we were always a bit in teh dark as to what was happening with each character.

I’m not the type of film viewer that likes to be told everything, and I’m also a part-time fan of the fly-on-the-wall school of filmmaking, which dispenses with talking heads and narrators imposing their version of events on you. However, there were times when I wish Boomtown Beijing had precisely that–something or someone weaving the threads together. We go from the characters and their individual quests to investigations of the changing physical landscape of Beijing–which is fine, since the latter is an intellectually interesting topic in itself and also terribly topical because the ancient capital is, in many ways, getting a major facelift, and what was will never be again. However, Boomtown Beijing dips its toes in the water but doesn’t want to get too wet. Given that it was made by students and staff at the Beijing Film Academy on a obviously shoestring budget, perhaps we shouldn’t ask that it go too into depth. It wasn’t meant to be some Ken Burns-esque heavy on historical research and overview type documentary. I am merely stating what I felt as I was watching it. Perhaps it is to the film’s credit that it at least elicits this greater curiosity in the subject.

By the end of the film you get a better sense of who each person is, and things start falling into place. Still, there’s not much narrative thrust…as I said before, the film seems to be have made in a short time, on the cheap, and life isn’t always as packed with drama as fiction is. I think Boomtown Beijing works as a light sketch of life for some Beijing Olympics fanatics in the run-up to the games–but not necessarily as a highly nuanced or detailed portrait of a human and physical/built environment in flux. The latter is higher order, no doubt, that will have to be left to someone with more time and credit cards.
Technorati Tags: beijing, olympics, 2008, sports, athletics, documentary, video, chinese, china, society