Change Your Image
anonyimdb1
Reviews
The Mist (2007)
Fate Beats Man
When the lady who had been spewing biblical doomsday quotes and cursing anyone who dared to doubt her piousness or whose piousness she doubted, ever since things went wrong, finally went nuts, was hailed as the prophet because she did, demagogued the crowd, and made human sacrifice to the monsters unknown, I was almost certain that this film was lampooning the intolerance and the ridiculousness of the religious (and political) right and hallowing the rationality and the clear-headedness of the almighty and invincible American (upper) middle-class (especially the sea-board educated liberals).
"Damn." I thought, "I should've seen that coming the first moment I saw how that blue-collar, common, vulgar, uneducated, stupid, cowardly, no-good manual labourer even dared to question the judgement of our great hero artist." Then I continued enjoying the show, not only because Marcia was doing a dead-on satire of the 'politics of fear' but also because I, along with the more enlightened part of the American public, was quite sympathetic to what I, at that moment, thought to be the politics of the director.
Just when I was thinking what an important message that this supposedly 'horror' film was sending and savoring the words of wisdom from our heroes about how blind the 'mass', which, of course, were below our sane, sophisticated, and heroic ones, could get when they were in a panic mode, the ending came.
And bammmmmmmmmm! Everything that you thought you saw unravelled, and reincarnated into a paradox neither could we explain nor did we want to believe. All this time, we thought the ones who were supposed to be the heroes remained as sane as their reason allowed them to be, which no one can say they did not, wrestled with the calamity the most fiercely among their fellow men, which no one can say they did not, and, in every circumstances, made the best guess according to the cards they were dealt, which no one can say they did not either.
Even when the artist pulled the trigger, it was for the best, since they were without supplies or weapons, their car was out of fuel, no aide was in sight, and it was the only other way to die aside from being consumed by the bugs from another dimension. The artist did the noble thing, like a leader should have done, plunging his hands into blood, taking the guilt, and prepared to offering himself to the suffering that others would rather die to avoid. And then, the mist cleared, and the tanks of the military victoriously arrived, along with the lady, who no one thought to be rational to run into the deadly mist alone and was deemed most assuredly dead, and her children, the reason that she so foolishly left the smart.
In the end, the demagogued, the foolish, the stupid, and the insane survived, while the heroic, the reasonable, the rational, the enterprising, and the sophisticated perished.
When the self-deemed superior ones made the comment about the blindness and stupidity about the mass in panic, what they did not know is that they were indeed, as the no-good manual labourer so unknowingly presciently said, not better than the mass. Yes, they did everything they were supposed to do. But they were still in a panic. As they themselves succinctly put, when commented on the stupid mass, - "You scare people badly enough, you can get 'em to do anything. They'll turn to whoever promises a solution, or whatever.", they, the supposedly intelligent ones, were also scared enough and, thus, could not escape from their truth either. When they were saying "As a species, we're fundamentally insane.", trying to illuminate their fellowmen's ugly nature to make sense of their inferior behaviours, what they seemed to forget was that they were also part of the species. When they were scornfully watching their kins descending into lunacy, priding in their own 'saneness', what they failed to see is that, in the big picture, they were all the toys of their fear, only with different symptoms. When what you can do is not based on reason but a wild guess, fate rules. It always beats man, who perpetually lives under its whim. And it treats man mercilessly, no better than the bugs man were trying to kill.
Which leads me to think of the wise words of the Great Turtle Master in Kung Fu Panda - "One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.".
Which leads me to think of the current financial crisis.
Alan Greenspan, the Maestro, the master of the universe, the wisest of all the finance wise men, whose ass both parties had been so desperately trying to kiss, before he retired with glory, had been adopting an easy monetary policy for years, which increased the money supply, which placed in the hands of the banks so much more money that they were willing to lend to anyone even if they know the person cannot pay back. He aimed for a boom but America got a depression instead. Well, he is just trying to do the obvious, the right thing, predicting the future based on a wild guess, but fate beat him, which he should have known full well that he was no better than any of us when playing a game against fate.
Not to mention W's Iraq fiasco.
They were both trying to do the right thing, the logical thing, yet they both forgot that they belong to the mankind, they are fundamentally insane, and they are scared. This is a lethal combination that guarantees a show-hand with the fate that often beats man. No wonder they both met their destiny.
It simply reminds me again of the Great Turtle Master's wise saying.
And let's just hope the next president of America is, at least, not as scared as those men who would often meet their destiny.
Zhantai (2000)
A nation that lost itself
The essence of the story is simple, though with multi-layered implications.
For the essence, the dialogue says it all : "Where is outer-Mongolia (the name used by the Chinese for Mongolia)?" "North of inner-Mongolia (a province of China)." "Which country lies north to the outer-Mongolia?" "Russia." "Still north?" "The ocean." "What is beyond that?" "Fenyang, your home town." . The essence is "nowhereness".
The members of the state-owned vaudeville group were supposed to be the cultural elites of the town, with most of the peasants illiterate, intellectually bleak, and with no appreciation for art. They could perform ballet, opera, various instruments, and flamenco. But they were tied to the peasants, for they were the tools for the government to please and entertain the grassroots of its support. They had all the longing for a brave new life that would suit their values, ideologies, and aesthetics, but they did not know how to act. Though they were given the eye for a better life, they were deprived of the chance to live it. They still lived as the peasants, eking out a meager living. Both the inaction on their behalf and the innate determinant posed by the social reality for their inaction constitutes the "nowhereness" for the semi-intellectuals.
All they ever had was a moment of pleasure and inspiration by art and an everlasting bitterness and backbreaking excruciation imposed by the actual living that goes nowhere and has no end.
The life of the masses is another layer of the "nowhereness". It is no doubt that the change in China during the '80s were profound. The Big Brother abandoned the central planning economy along with the ideology that acted as the appurtenance. A new kind of exploitation took the place of the old one, and the peasants (the masses) were still nowhere to be the beneficiaries. The illusory glory of contributing to the nation in the totalitarian state made way for the cheap and coarse consumer products in the national capitalism. The difference between the masses and the elite is that the masses never knows and never has the urge to know the truth. They were already consumed and wasted by the effort to sustain their mere existence. Leisure and education are never on their side. In the new world, they gained the return of a minute scrap from the spoils of the exploitation of their own sweat and blood, and lost the meaning of life with the peace of mind. They no longer has a direction or a cause. It is an every-man-for-himself scenario let loose in a country with 1.3 billion people. "Nowhereness" seems to be a result very much acceptable.
The last layer of the "nowhereness" is the nowhereness of the nation as a whole. The story of the Fenyang Town goes the same for the Chinese nation. The Jeffersonian-like ideal of the ancient empire was but yesterday's dream. The current China, dated back to mid-19th century, through its search for power, independence, and its own identity, has got used to the nation-wide mobilization, and consequently, with a constant change of plan, accidentally and successfully obliterated its own culture and identity. What is left is but the dregs of old memory and folklore. The nation's elite today could only satiate their quest for meaning with the ideas of the Western world that their forefathers labelled as barbarism one century and a half ago. As a culture entity, China is already lost.
A nation has thus lost itself.
Zui hao de shi guang (2005)
Hou's Unique Vision
You need patience to sink yourself into Hou's rhythm. But it is not to say patience alone would enable you to understand him. You need to think, use retrospection, and savor. His film is not constructed like our modern day commercial productions that employ the conceptions so successfully implanted in your brain by the omnipresent pop culture throughout your life that when the buttons are pushed you are instantly and readily joyed, angered, saddened, or cheered.
Hou's film is not built on that.The expression is not visually over-charged, nor verbally flowered, nor did he use any clichés, be it western or eastern. The screen speaks beyond itself.
It could be said that most western (by "western" I mean culturally European or American in contrast with the "eastern" by which I mean the Chinese or Japanese culture) movies have their meanings put as explicitly as possible, with one of the criteria of success being that the film should say everything that could be said and with nothing left. The audience would only appreciate the things presented and ignore the ideas inexplicit. With quite an opposite of this western technique, Hou expresses himself mostly in an implicit way. The movie itself is not the ultimate product but only the more superficial side of a deeper meaning. It is like painting. In order to describe the wind, a swinging willow has to be drawn. Because the wind is invisible and cannot be captured. It is the same with the technique that works implicitly which Hou uses - he is trying to capture the culture of the society as a whole and the various individual views on love in each of the three historical phases where three love stories took place. He was trying to capture the unspeakable panoramas of the societies with the stories that were each unique to their respective historical context.
Hou pieces the three stories together to mark the transition of the Taiwan history and to compare the societies and their impact on individuals. The three couples in each era were all played by Chang Chen and Shu Ki. Thus, the three stories could be seen as three hypotheses of how their love would evolve under the respective influence of each particular historical setting. The lovers are the same, but the times change. Then you could see his evaluations on each era, how he reminisces the halcyon days of the 60s, how he respects and yet condemns the protestant-like days of early 20th century, and how he doubts the present globalization and the emergence of the hybrid culture between the western (chiefly American) and the Chinese.
This is simply a masterpiece. I give it a 9 only because I've seen better ones from him and his fellow Taiwanese director Edward Yang. For those of you who enjoy this film, I recommend Hou's A City of Sadness and Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. The latter, in my opinion, is the best Chinese movie ever, and arguably the best movie ever. It used the "implicit technique" to the consummation.