Posts Tagged ‘hong kong cinema’

Yet another evening of Hong Kong classic cinema, this time with King Hu’s Shaw Brothers classic from 1966 Come Drink With Me/Da zui xia/Big Drunken Hero, starring drop-dead gorgeous (and Shanghai-born!) Cheng Pei-Pei/Zheng Peipei, as Golden Swallow, prancing around the screen like a prima ballerina and applying a major bad-ass hurt-on to all the baddies.

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Sure, I know, it took me too long enough, but I finally got around to seeing Jia’s The World last night and I’m still ruminating on how I should feel about it. I need a few more days.

In any event, today is a great opportunity to scribble a bit more about modern Mainland Chinese filmmaking styles, and why the art form is slow to make a decisive breakthrough into Western film-going markets.

Jia Zhang-ke/贾樟柯’s back story is an interesting one. His reputation as an indie Chinese filmmaker based in the PRC was fully cemented during his badboy days of shooting films outside of the State-approved film sector. Read the rest of this entry »