Posts Tagged ‘review’

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Going old school | Writing chez moi | Isn’t that odd?
Approximately 18h
The Czechs clash with their former overlords today on the ice. A little too much mustard, a little too late, don’t you think? ;-P There will be drunks on Prague’s streets tonight…

Kang Chol-Hwan’s bestselling North Korean captivity memoir found itself on my required reading list for May. When it slid into my mailbox last week I – again – nearly plowed through its pages in record time. These “single sitting finishes” have been happening to me often lately, a good sign, alas. Means I’m picking them correctly. Means we’re getting close. Means…well, it means a whole lot of things!

So what is it about titles like The Aquariums of Pyongyang?

Why do I find myself drawn so magnetically to these sorts of emotive sagas recounting the tragedies of seemingly hopeless individuals who find themselves staring dead into the snake eyes of what Life has to offer, only to emerge on the other side wiser, more enlightened, and more worldly then ever before?

The story of author Kang’s life is horrific in the extreme.

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Thanks again to the good folks at Chinese indie film distributor dGenerate Films, I finally had the chance to catch Liu Jiayin’s (pictured above, far left) cute “no-budget” flick Oxhide this past weekend.

Sipping on several tall Gambrinuses, I was amazed at how such a puny little film succeeded in making its splash on the festival circuit, given how Oxhide’s plot unfurls via a truly novel – and potentially unsettling — series of long static takes. Director Liu’s small DV cam doesn’t creep an inch from its fixed focal point, sequence by sequence, once we get settled in the scene. It’s a technique which normally blares “student film alert!” yet thanks to a combination of strong Czech beer and the tale’s emotional crescendos and swoons, I was pulled in mightily by the picture’s first quarter-hour.

Normally, I don’t appreciate this kind of artifice, though in Liu’s case – again, unsure whether it was due to the lingering effects of those brewskis I drank — I liked how Oxhide’s message crept up on me like that, drawing me in gradually. It made me admire director Liu’s clever use of her camera to mask the obvious budgetary shortfalls which would otherwise permit her to decorate her sets more lavishly and convincingly. Instead, whether we’re staring at a printer-adorned desktop or at a fixed position towards the family couch, for instance, the action takes place well away from the camera and we’re forced to listen intently for clues and cues. Liu’s long, sometimes twenty-minute, exposures draw us magnetically into Oxhide’s story by forcing us to rely – most unusually for a film – upon our ears rather than our eyes. It takes a while to get into, yet once your brain acclimatizes itself to the unchanging reality that her camera will never track along with her characters – Liu (as Bei Bei), mother (Hui Lan), and father (played by Liu’s real parents) — you drop all annoyance and begin to enjoy the story. You sharpen your listening skills and imagine the things you might not be seeing behind camera rather intently.

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Readers who have been diligently monitoring my RSS feed over this past week will know I’ve been drawing richly from the deep well of film gems which is Chris Jones Vimeo channel.

You know, I’m funny like that; when I really fancy something I tend to go long. I get downright streaky. I’ll tinker with something, push its envelope, and go dangerously into “burning the midnight oil” territory until I’ve just about learned as much as I can from the thing under the microscope. Those videoblogs on offer at the Living Spirit site are remarkable examples of how to keep your dedicated audience engaged about your film long after your production has wrapped and your film’s in the can.

And – for the record — I’ve been learning a heck of a lot. Chris Jones appears to be one of the indie film community’s truly remarkable – yes, remarkable, folks – online and offline personalities. Like I’ve been sporadically commenting below some of his videos at the site, it’s astonishing how Jones has gained industry notoriety as a director – the film industry’s equivalent of the all-American quarterback, or in European soccer parlance, the A League striker – while it was as a film producer that he cemented his reputation within indie circles. Admire the poise, the concentration, and the sheer outspokenness (no “ums,” “uhs,” or other oral hesitations) as Chris describes the mechanics of several stunt scripted sequences in Genevieve Jolliffe’s Urban Ghost Story clip:

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For the past couple of nights, I’ve been this close to burning straight through the midnight oil while catching up a series of long vidclips at London-based production company Living Spirit’s Vimeo Channel. If you’re drawing a blank right about now on Living Spirit, it’s because you’re not making the mental connection between it and standout British indie sensation Chris Jones, director of the award-winning short Gone Fishing.

Over the next couple of days, I plan on doing even more full-court blogging about the independent film movement, in general, along with a generous slathering of commentary about several of the streaming materials I find while trawling around sites like Chris’ and others’ in search of well-done, well-assembled films.

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Funny how referrals work, you know? I was simply blowing though Jan Wong’s sensational China Whispers: Searching for Forgiveness in Beijing a couple of weeks back and stumbled upon Aussie author Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.

Given how I suffer from an incurable case of ostologie, I leapt at the chance to snatch up my copy of Funder’s coming-of-age travelogue as soon as I returned to the Golden Burg (Prague). And – sports fans – I’m pleased to announce that I whipped through this one equally as quickly.

Get a look at this author, will ya?

Yowzahs!

But getting completely serious again (for just a moment), let’s pay due respects to Funder’s stalwart effort to compile a truly quality piece of non-fiction writing. Spliced together over the course of approximately seven years of painstaking personal research – both behind and in front of the Wall — Stasiland (affiliate link)  is the author’s attempt to give a distinctly human face to the one-time formidable, cunning, and truly thorough state security apparatus, the Stasi, by going way behind the headlines and monstrous rhetoric to the far reaches of the former German Democratic Republic’s frontiers. It was here where Funder would uncover stories of people who suffered torturously at the Stasi’s omnipotent devious hands.

A Divided Germany

The Stasi’s Emblem

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Today’s post is going to be less a straight-ahead book report, kids, and more of a mambsy-pambsy writer’s statement about how this war-era novel, Sarah’s Key made me feel, deep deep inside.

I polished off the read in just a single sitting. Four hours, baby, cover-to-cover (approximately 320pp). I’m not normally that speedy, but the story held me in its vice-like grip from round about page ten and didn’t let go until the very last sentence. No guff. Now would I kid you about something this serious?

Why have I opted for the gushier jelly-like consistency of a “emotional statement” today as opposed to my usual hardboiled prose? Well, I suppose it’s just because I woke up this morning feeling that I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Better reviewers than your not-so-humble blogger here have assembled sensational reviews about Tatiana de Rosnay’s

bestselling French Occupation-era piece over the past couple of years and change, so if you’re keen on a plain vanilla-flavored stepwise plot summary, I’m sure you can click around for one of those.

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It’s been a couple of days since I polished off Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s excellent primer, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (affiliate link). Two days later, I’m still somewhat disturbed by what I read in its section about the infamous guerrilla strongman Mao Zedong (Mao Tse’tung), and the best way to work through this is via the blog, so that’s what I want to talk about today.

As most of you will already know from my previous review of Wasserstrom’s book, he had chosen to write it with a unique question and answer style. One of the several questions Wasserstrom posed was whether (or not) Mao Zedong was truly evil, whether he could be stacked up alongside both Stalin and Hitler, not necessarily the dictators of his day, as a trio with an equal lust for chaos, subversion, bloodletting, and untrammeled power. In answering, Wasserstrom alludes to the controversial Jung Chang and Jon Halliday biography (pictured above) Mao: The Unknown Story (affiliate link). In doing so, I felt Wasserstrom hadn’t altogether comprehensively responded to his original question, sadly.

In short, he notes how the jury is still out about the true nature of the Mao Zedong historical record, despite Mao’s vile framing in the Chang and Halliday biography according to the copious examples the biographers supply as clear examples of the unbridled evil which Mao engendered at the apogee of his power. According to the Chinese recollection of things, Mao “was 70% good and 30% bad.” How the nation arrived at these comparative percentages during the early ‘80s reform era remains a mystery even to Chinese minds, however let’s list some of the controversial aspects of the Mao legacy which remain in dispute amongst scholars until today:

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I’ve long-admired Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom’s China writings for the way in which this author succeeds in making the country’s more obscure bits that much clearer for the novice China enthusiast or budding Sinologist.

Rather than further mystify the country’s infamous “exoticness” to Westerners and cast his readers further into doubt in copping to that most annoying of journalist/blogger catchalls like “if it’s one thing for certain, nothing is ever what it appears to be in China and everything changes constantly,” Wasserstrom distances himself from the usual scholarly bluster and navel-gazing by employing a novel Q&A approach in getting his book’s premise across. China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know indeed attempts, as its title promises, to include just about everything anyone needs to know about China.

Leaving aside for the moment the discussion about the quality of the material to be found inside its covers or about Professor Wasserstrom’s throw-down (though I love it!) that what you’re about to read is “what everyone needs to know” about China, the book’s written using concise, accessible, easy-to-digest paragraphs.

This Socratic technique alone places the book firmly into front-of-mind awareness for the novice China reader. Those finding themselves armed with only the most rudimentary of knowledge about that juggernaut nation to the East will walk away, as Wasserstrom surmises “…[knowing] a few more basic things about the people of the PRC than they did when they read its first pages.” Old China Hands, too, might appreciate this book as a ready reference, and perhaps even those claiming “expert” status about the country will be pleasantly surprised to discover how the book challenges several of their rigorously-held assumptions. As for myself, someone who considers himself a novice in chinoisierie, it achieved its mission masterfully. At a compact 135pp, I agree with scholarly reviewer Susan Shirk who claimed that the book “…provides the essential knowledge that intelligent citizens need to have about China…[that] can be read in less time than it takes to fly from the U.S. to China!”

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Many thanks to University of California Irvine (UCI) professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom for this excellent book referral, among the half dozen or so titles he’s already suggested since we’ve met. Oh, wait, you say you don’t know who Professor Wasserstrom is?! Then you need to take a moment and look at some of these clever titles before you carry on reading. When you’re done, hop on over to The China Beat for a sampling of what the good professor and his China blogging colleagues in chinoisierie Kate Merkel-Hess and Kenneth L. Pomeranz have in store for you.

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