Some of my favourite Chinese language films

Incidentally, I don't know if any of you have come across Frame Within Frames, but I've watched of the videos and find them interesting.

Here's the Take on In the Mood For Love (spoilers obviously, so I don't recommend if you haven't seen the film).



{it's one of my favourite films that I've seen in the cinema as a new release, incidentally} Opps, vid I embedded cut out too soon, so an earlier upload of it just in case anyone here would want to see it.

Edited by Logan - October 26 2017 at 12:18

I'm just now realizing I've never seen a single Chinese movie. Lots of Japanese and a few Korean but never Chinese. Might have to rectify that.

A post of regrets, putting it out here as a reminder of things to change:

It's rather sad to think that in the 90s and into the 2000s I was exposed to so much great cinema, and that became a trickle later on despite subscribing to Netflix, despite more cable channels, despite youtube, dailymotion and other video streaming sites.   Part of it had to do with where I lived, The North Shore of Vancouver had great libraries with tons of videos (and DVDs later) and we had a few really good cinemas in Vancouver. The video stores while they existed, there were some really great ones where I could get anything with huge numbers of such films. Then we moved South of Vancouver and the library was lousy and I didn't get out to the Vancouver theatres so much. I stopped picking up the Georgia Strait (a newspaper which had reviews of all these films that came to town).

I mean maybe I watched too many films and for a time I was writing reviews for a "local" newspaper off and on. And maybe forums kind of took over.

We have film clubs in Vancouver, and I plan to make the trek from Delta to join some of these (harder with kids). This is one passion that my wife and I have shared, so I miss not watching such things more. We used to see a lot of Chinese. Japanese, French, Spanish etc. films and was so exciting when I first got to know directors such as Zhang Yimou, Kieslowski, Chen Kaige, Lars von Trier, Shohei Imamura, Juzo Itami, Almodovar, Bigas Luna, Holland, Jeunet et Caro etc. I guess my biggest finds in more recent ears have been South Korean directors such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho.

Yeah, I watched a lot of movies, but I'm more of a couch potato now than I was then. I was always busy (working, hiking, biking, studying, watching movies, going to parties, living it up). Just got disconnected somewhere.... I'm passionate about film, and want to make the effort to go to the film festivals more, meet up with people to discuss them afterwards, and leave my kids at home and make more time for my wife so that we can do this stuff again more, because dinner and a movie was such a pleasure. Nowadays we stay at home and search Netflix but rarely find anything that we'll both enjoy or really want to see (and since the kids are around, I don't want to expose them to certain content -- though i have been watching Black Mirror and Death Note with my daughter and do look forward to Stranger Things).

Time to start living life to the fullest again (and stop posting nonsense such as this post).

Incidentally, what attracted me about a filmmaker such as Zhang Yimou was the cinematography (he was cinematographer on Yellow Earth, btw). There'a formalism that I love and these almost static beautiful scenes such as the sorghum blowing in the wind in Red Sorghum. Ju Dou was my favourite of his back in the day. He had a big effect on what direction I thought I wanted to take (things didn't work out as planned, and now I'm here....)

Edited by Logan - October 26 2017 at 15:42

Chinese movies did have a marvelous rebirth in the '00s, especially the wuxia, among my faves were House of Daggers and Hero.   The Last Emperor and CTHD also superb.

South Korea also doing great things in film now.





Edited by Atavachron - October 29 2017 at 23:22

I have seen shamefully few of these, but loved Yellow Earth.

I have a bit of an Hong Kong bias, so for this list I went with In the Mood for Love (never been into choosing "other" unless I'm not a fan of any of them). I even call my car "The Maggster".

I have a lot of respect for Jackie Chan-- happen to like his movies too -- the 70s Drunken Master is a favourite of mine of his, but I haven't seen the Legend of Drunken Master.   I enjoy his combination of visual comedy and martial arts (he as said before that he is influenced by Buster Keaton). My wife's uncle, recently deceased, was called Drunken Master (though a drunkard, I'm not so sure about the master part).

Prog Sothoth wrote: I have a bit of an Hong Kong bias, so for this list I went with In the Mood for Love (never been into choosing "other" unless I'm not a fan of any of them). I even call my car "The Maggster". I'm also big into fantasy wuxias, thus my actual fav Chinese language film is A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) with Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong. I NEVER get tired of watching that. As for Zhang Yimou, this is going to seem a bit trite, but my favorite of his is believe it or not The Road Home. It's a beautiful little film, and it was nice to see Zhang Ziyi smile a lot, kind of a rare thing back in the early 00's.

I enjoyed The Road Home, it's another I saw in the movie theatre. The loving shots of the young and beautiful Zhang Yihi did come across as a little creepy to me at the time (very similar to the loving shots of Gong Li before that). That's probably the third last Chinese film I saw in the theatre (hardly ever go see movies now). While I haven't been as big on wuxia as most who have posted, I did love A Chinese Ghost Story -- and unlike some others on the list, I've seen it multiple times (glad people are mentioning others, cause I knew even for my tastes that my list would be really unsatisfying).

After working in Japan I really got big on East Asian cinema, and it was something that my wife and I could enjoy together. While there are many Chinese (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) Japanese, South Korean, and Vietnamese films I like I never got into Philippine, Indonesian or Malaysian films in an meaningful way.

If you haven't seen 2046, it's well worth watching (very loosely a sequel to In the Mood for Love).



Not a Chinese film, but a film I really liked with Maggie Cheung is Irma Vep (I like it a lot more than most, but then as I wanted to be a filmmaker, I appreciated the metafilm qualities).