MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: TO LIVE (1994)

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(Hint: most of the posters will enlarge if you click on them.)

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ATTENTION MUST BE PAID - some easy to miss element worth noting.

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
God help us.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

TO LIVE (1994)

Zhang Yimou has such a natural, flowing technique, that all his films are a pleasure to watch. Yet I don’t think his best work comes from the serious nationalistic dramas that win the awards, but in pics that dabble in genre tropes, like JU DOU or HERO. They avoid the corporate, group-think plotting that can bog down his productions, turning him into a sort of Asian David Lean. Well, Lean at less than his best, and TO LIVE certainly has a sort of ZHIVAGO-y tone to it, though with better music! A rich wastrel played by Ge You (in a staggeringly fine perf) gambles away the family fortune, but manages to survive Mao’s Revolutionary March, Great Leap Forward & even the Cultural Revolution. How these events play out on his wife (the wonderful Gong Li), his two kids & his shadow puppets carry us thru the storyline. It’s certainly well handled, but you keep expecting someone to break out with a chorus of "Old Man River."

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

TO LIVE (1994)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE