11-04-2013, 10:23 AM
This is China's entry for foreign film for the next Oscars.
There is this genre of Chinese tragedies that starts from a horribly miserable place and then sinks down. I think China likes this sort of flick because it can be so hard, so for a purgative tragic experience, it's gotta be so utterly dismal, so hopeless, that viewers can say 'my life ain't that bad'. This is about the great famine that hit Henan in 1942. Millions of refugees march to Shaanxi in hopes of relief. SPOILER it's eat your pets, sell your daughters and wives to be sex slaves, life on ground tree bark, miserable. END SPOILER Adrian Brody and Tim Robbins appear to give it that international flair. For the most part, both actors are stiff and underused - whites just don't fair well under Chinese direction, including that of Director Feng Xiaogang (Banquet, Aftershock). How Brody travels from the refugee march back to civilization to report is a mystery. There's a huge error in his pronunciation of the name 'Zhang' which he pronounces with a 'zh' sound, but that's an artifact of pinyin which wasn't established in 1942, so it should be a 'j' sound. It doesn't matter much as his character sort of fades out halfway through.
Once you get past the dreary depressing dismal downers, there's some good ultravi. It opens with a good starving peasants fight, replete with farm instrument massacres. There are several CGI Japanese Zeroes strafing and bombing the refugee march that are gruesome spectacles. And there is a sword scene that cuts to the quick (pun intended).
Not a DOOM flick. Hardly a DM flick. In fact, it felt like work.
There is this genre of Chinese tragedies that starts from a horribly miserable place and then sinks down. I think China likes this sort of flick because it can be so hard, so for a purgative tragic experience, it's gotta be so utterly dismal, so hopeless, that viewers can say 'my life ain't that bad'. This is about the great famine that hit Henan in 1942. Millions of refugees march to Shaanxi in hopes of relief. SPOILER it's eat your pets, sell your daughters and wives to be sex slaves, life on ground tree bark, miserable. END SPOILER Adrian Brody and Tim Robbins appear to give it that international flair. For the most part, both actors are stiff and underused - whites just don't fair well under Chinese direction, including that of Director Feng Xiaogang (Banquet, Aftershock). How Brody travels from the refugee march back to civilization to report is a mystery. There's a huge error in his pronunciation of the name 'Zhang' which he pronounces with a 'zh' sound, but that's an artifact of pinyin which wasn't established in 1942, so it should be a 'j' sound. It doesn't matter much as his character sort of fades out halfway through.
Once you get past the dreary depressing dismal downers, there's some good ultravi. It opens with a good starving peasants fight, replete with farm instrument massacres. There are several CGI Japanese Zeroes strafing and bombing the refugee march that are gruesome spectacles. And there is a sword scene that cuts to the quick (pun intended).
Not a DOOM flick. Hardly a DM flick. In fact, it felt like work.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse