Best 5 Asian Films of the Decade.
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, China, 2001)
I am not really a Wong Kar Wai fan. Most of his work seems to get lost in the space of his imagination, tinkered and fiddled with until it is almost abstract in its formalism. Ashes of Time and 2042 felt that way to me. Not this one. The finest film to come out of China in the last decade, In the Mood for Love is a tale of longing between two disparate people who have already made-up their minds that they can never consumate that love. They are a man (Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) whose spouses have had an affair together. They meet, talk, and slowly draw close in trying to understand how this is has happened. They will not, however, be unfaithful. The setting is 1920s Hong Kong and Wai is remarkably faithful to the construction of the time period and the social structure in which these two people are caught. Visually, it has the feel of a film noir, and the movie is a feast for the eyes, using shadows and light and color in suprising and poignant ways. The performances are heart-breaking and intuitive.Typically, films about chaste love affairs are hollow and empty (American audiences can’t put their heart into them), but in this case Wai isn’t taking the obvious route. Leung and Cheung are true to their vows and the movie doesn’t question them, doesn’t push them towards their own affair, or suggest that they are violating any deeper conviction by their choice. Instead, it provides the viewer with an opulent, tender and sublime experience that rivals the all-time great love stories.
4. Old Boy (Chan Wook Park, Korea, 2005)
One of the unifiying elements of Asian cinema during the aughts was the desire to be edgy and transgressive. Mostly, this landed us with alot of hyperviolent, masochistic trash that wasn’t worth a second of our time. When it comes to the work of Chan-Wook Park however, his violence and madness have a method. His strength as a filmmaker is we don’t see the method until after the fact; we are caught up in the moment, pulled along by brute force and powerful storytelling. Old Boy is a violent and brutal story, but it also has sequences of gentleness, dread, and can strike deep, deep chords of remorse. It feels like noir and plays like a Greek tragedy as filtered through the mind of Travis Bickle. I was caught up in the ride, not prepared for the film’s ending, or the overall impact it would have on me . The film is a wonder-work as a thriller–it moves quickly and confidently through its sinister coils and has no doubts about what it wants to do to us in the final third. This is not a happy film and the solutions to its narrative are not the kind of resolutions I really wanted, but there they are anyway. I do not appreciate films that try to shock us for the sake of shock, but Oldboy wants under your skin and it wants to show you what lies behind a door you’d rather not open. At the same time, it isn’t an torturous experience and the impact is in the concepts and taboos explored, not excessive visual mayhem. It’s a powerhouse and one of the finest accomplishments of the decade.
3. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring (Kim Ki Duk, Korea, 2004)
Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring is unlike any movie I have ever seen before. Made in Korea, it feels like the cinematic summation of the surging growth that country’s film artists have experienced. There is an old monk and a young boy, living on a floating temple in the center of a lake. The boy is there to learn the ways of the monk and become the master one day after the old man is gone. Years go by, and the callous youth grows up and a young woman comes from across the lake to the temple. This changes everything for the young man, and the remaining years examine what transpires between these three characters, who are in fact the only people the film follows. The rest is given over to unique and transcendent film compositions that attempt to capture the glimpses of a spiritual dimension existing at the edge of our natural and fleshly one. The story feels like a parable, but it avoids that by immersing the viewer so deeply in the imagery; these may be dreamlike places we are being shown but they are concrete and tangible thanks to the medium of film. The monk, the boy and the woman are also flesh-and-blood people and their struggles as seen over the space of an entire lifetime gain a kind of omniscient trajectory. We have the advantage of seeing how these events impact other events and how one choice will lead to the revoking of another. Watching the characters learn these lessons and move to the next stage is an integral part of the film’s triumphant effect.
2. The Clone Returns Home ( Kanji Nakajima, Japan, 2009)
It is difficult to imagine that The Clone Returns Home is Nakajima’s first film. It is the kind of bold gamble that most filmmakers strive an entire lifetime to make, never knowing when to humbly draw back or confidently surge forward with their odd ideas and visually peculiar instincts. I realize the film may feel ‘too fresh’ for this list, and I doubt may have seen it, but the simple fact that it springs to mind after a single viewing more intensely than many other films I have seen dozens of times says something about it. It is a science fiction story that achieves more in terms of defining our human connection to the spiritual and familial than any other I have ever seen. Many have compared it to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and that is surprisingly accurate, although I would aruge that this film isn’t as obtuse or as distant from its human subjects as Solaris. Both are masterpieces, but Clone, which tells the story of an astronaut who has his body replicated and then dies in an accident, only to have the cloned version return to his childhood home and reenact the life he once lived, transcends stuffy philosophy or tedious repition by breaking the narrative up into stages related to the man’s life cycle. Every element of the film is given over to creating an atmosphere that feels other worldly and yet recognizable and relatable. This is an amazing movie and I look forward to seeing how the sci-fi community will respond to it.
1. The Twilight Samurai (Yoji Yamada, Japan, 2002)
In my mind, Twilight Samurai is an almost perfect film. Every line of dialogue, every performance, and every lovingly designed detail is in service of the film’s story. Yamada and his lead actor Sanada, as the shabby Sebei, have made the finest samurai film since Kurosawa’s Ran. This one is much different than that one, and indeed, much different than any of Kurosawa’s other films. It has more in common with pictures like Samurai Rebellion, but even then there is a gentleness at its core that none of those other films ever had. I am in awe at the way Yamada can evoke beauty and decay in the same scene. One of Sebei’s children is gathering flowers in a lovely field and as she comes to the riverside, there are bloodied bodies washing down the current. The stately structure of Japanese art and literature are present in the way Twilight Samurai is arranged. But instead of feeling lifeless or calculating, this is a film bursting with life. Sebei’s courtship of his love is endearing and touching and the scenes that take place in front of the lords have an authenticity that a movie like Last Samurai lacks. Finally, and this is a preequisite for any samurai film, the movie has a brilliant and engrossing sword fight in the final half hour. Watching these two men comes to blows, you are watching two parts of the same world, fractured by time, clashing into one another. In the aftermath, Twilight Samurai even provides necessary catharsis. The old masters would be proud.
Best 5 Asian Films of the Decade.
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, China, 2001)
I am not really a Wong Kar Wai fan. Most of his work seems to get lost in the space of his imagination, tinkered and fiddled with until it is almost abstract in its formalism. Ashes of Time and 2042 felt that way to me. Not this one. The finest film to come out of China in the last decade, In the Mood for Love is a tale of longing between two disparate people who have already made-up their minds that they can never consumate that love. They are a man (Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) whose spouses have had an affair together. They meet, talk, and slowly draw close in trying to understand how this is has happened. They will not, however, be unfaithful. The setting is 1920s Hong Kong and Wai is remarkably faithful to the construction of the time period and the social structure in which these two people are caught. Visually, it has the feel of a film noir, and the movie is a feast for the eyes, using shadows and light and color in suprising and poignant ways. The performances are heart-breaking and intuitive.Typically, films about chaste love affairs are hollow and empty (American audiences can’t put their heart into them), but in this case Wai isn’t taking the obvious route. Leung and Cheung are true to their vows and the movie doesn’t question them, doesn’t push them towards their own affair, or suggest that they are violating any deeper conviction by their choice. Instead, it provides the viewer with an opulent, tender and sublime experience that rivals the all-time great love stories.
4. Old Boy (Chan Wook Park, Korea, 2005)
One of the unifiying elements of Asian cinema during the aughts was the desire to be edgy and transgressive. Mostly, this landed us with alot of hyperviolent, masochistic trash that wasn’t worth a second of our time. When it comes to the work of Chan-Wook Park however, his violence and madness have a method. His strength as a filmmaker is we don’t see the method until after the fact; we are caught up in the moment, pulled along by brute force and powerful storytelling. Old Boy is a violent and brutal story, but it also has sequences of gentleness, dread, and can strike deep, deep chords of remorse. It feels like noir and plays like a Greek tragedy as filtered through the mind of Travis Bickle. I was caught up in the ride, not prepared for the film’s ending, or the overall impact it would have on me . The film is a wonder-work as a thriller–it moves quickly and confidently through its sinister coils and has no doubts about what it wants to do to us in the final third. This is not a happy film and the solutions to its narrative are not the kind of resolutions I really wanted, but there they are anyway. I do not appreciate films that try to shock us for the sake of shock, but Oldboy wants under your skin and it wants to show you what lies behind a door you’d rather not open. At the same time, it isn’t an torturous experience and the impact is in the concepts and taboos explored, not excessive visual mayhem. It’s a powerhouse and one of the finest accomplishments of the decade.
3. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring (Kim Ki Duk, Korea, 2004)
Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring is unlike any movie I have ever seen before. Made in Korea, it feels like the cinematic summation of the surging growth that country’s film artists have experienced. There is an old monk and a young boy, living on a floating temple in the center of a lake. The boy is there to learn the ways of the monk and become the master one day after the old man is gone. Years go by, and the callous youth grows up and a young woman comes from across the lake to the temple. This changes everything for the young man, and the remaining years examine what transpires between these three characters, who are in fact the only people the film follows. The rest is given over to unique and transcendent film compositions that attempt to capture the glimpses of a spiritual dimension existing at the edge of our natural and fleshly one. The story feels like a parable, but it avoids that by immersing the viewer so deeply in the imagery; these may be dreamlike places we are being shown but they are concrete and tangible thanks to the medium of film. The monk, the boy and the woman are also flesh-and-blood people and their struggles as seen over the space of an entire lifetime gain a kind of omniscient trajectory. We have the advantage of seeing how these events impact other events and how one choice will lead to the revoking of another. Watching the characters learn these lessons and move to the next stage is an integral part of the film’s triumphant effect.
2. The Clone Returns Home ( Kanji Nakajima, Japan, 2009)
It is difficult to imagine that The Clone Returns Home is Nakajima’s first film. It is the kind of bold gamble that most filmmakers strive an entire lifetime to make, never knowing when to humbly draw back or confidently surge forward with their odd ideas and visually peculiar instincts. I realize the film may feel ‘too fresh’ for this list, and I doubt may have seen it, but the simple fact that it springs to mind after a single viewing more intensely than many other films I have seen dozens of times says something about it. It is a science fiction story that achieves more in terms of defining our human connection to the spiritual and familial than any other I have ever seen. Many have compared it to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and that is surprisingly accurate, although I would aruge that this film isn’t as obtuse or as distant from its human subjects as Solaris. Both are masterpieces, but Clone, which tells the story of an astronaut who has his body replicated and then dies in an accident, only to have the cloned version return to his childhood home and reenact the life he once lived, transcends stuffy philosophy or tedious repition by breaking the narrative up into stages related to the man’s life cycle. Every element of the film is given over to creating an atmosphere that feels other worldly and yet recognizable and relatable. This is an amazing movie and I look forward to seeing how the sci-fi community will respond to it.
1. The Twilight Samurai (Yoji Yamada, Japan, 2002)
In my mind, Twilight Samurai is an almost perfect film. Every line of dialogue, every performance, and every lovingly designed detail is in service of the film’s story. Yamada and his lead actor Sanada, as the shabby Sebei, have made the finest samurai film since Kurosawa’s Ran. This one is much different than that one, and indeed, much different than any of Kurosawa’s other films. It has more in common with pictures like Samurai Rebellion, but even then there is a gentleness at its core that none of those other films ever had. I am in awe at the way Yamada can evoke beauty and decay in the same scene. One of Sebei’s children is gathering flowers in a lovely field and as she comes to the riverside, there are bloodied bodies washing down the current. The stately structure of Japanese art and literature are present in the way Twilight Samurai is arranged. But instead of feeling lifeless or calculating, this is a film bursting with life. Sebei’s courtship of his love is endearing and touching and the scenes that take place in front of the lords have an authenticity that a movie like Last Samurai lacks. Finally, and this is a preequisite for any samurai film, the movie has a brilliant and engrossing sword fight in the final half hour. Watching these two men comes to blows, you are watching two parts of the same world, fractured by time, clashing into one another. In the aftermath, Twilight Samurai even provides necessary catharsis. The old masters would be proud.
Best 5 Asian Films of the Decade.
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