Spirited Away (Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki)
I remember watching the first work of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, it seemed to be "Castle in the Sky". The persistence of dreams, with a faint sadness, makes people can't help it. Later, I watched his "Hal's Moving Castle", "The Wind Rises", "Porco Rosso", and the last one was "Spirited Away". In the episode "The Wind Rises", Miyazaki once said: "Animation, like airplanes, is a cursed dream." "Cursed dreams" actually portend the inherent tension in Miyazaki's works. As a master animation artist with sustenance, he creates an unusual fairy tale world where the dream begins. Once I was a single anime reader who was influenced by "Robot Cat", but time has stopped to this day, and there are only two animation works that move me the most - Takahata's "Tomb of the Fireflies" and Miyazaki's "Spirited Away". "Spirited Away" tells a wonderful dream with beautiful pictures, but it is a ukiyo-e about courage, friendship, and emotion. The whole story is based on Miyazaki's own childhood memories, so it carries the innocence, beauty and loneliness of childhood, that is, those monsters are also cute and cute, without any sense of violation. Chihiro leaves her parents and meets a strange world, learns to help each other, cares, treats others with kindness, breaks the loneliness in her heart, and finds herself. Her youthful relationship with Bai Long is portrayed beautifully. As Grandpa Boiler said: Don't you understand? This is the power of love. Because of love, so fearless loneliness and fear. Perhaps everyone has good memories of childhood in their hearts. In Spirited Away, Bai Long once he says that once a name is taken away, there is no way back home. This is actually very meaningful, the importance of naming. Without a name, it is equivalent to losing yourself. Especially in modern society, once you lose your name (status symbol), people can't prove themselves, people's roles in society become suspicious, and the police are not polite to you. It is impossible to forget what happened, but I can't remember it for the time being. Temporary forgetting can sometimes become permanent forgetting. Remembering everything in the past, whether it is joy or sorrow, is a part of life. "Spirited Away" tells us a story of self-salvation with the beauty of dreams. At the end of the story, leave a blank space of imagination, leaving an inexplicable melancholy.
"Day beauty" (French director Louis Buñuel, starring Catherine Deneuve)
"Daytime Beauty", also known as "The Wraith of the Green House" and "Daytime Beauty", is the representative work of Spanish director Buñuel, produced in 1967. The story is not complicated, a bored beautiful woman secretly goes to pick up guests, satisfies her inner desire for indulgence, and obtains self-identification. But director Buñuel handles the story mysteriously, like a dream. Such a subject matter can easily be made into a cheap pornographic story, but Buñuel is uniquely imaginative, almost using a magnifying glass to calmly and severely examine human nature, unveiling the warm veil of the middle class and revealing a mediocre and tedious side. In "Day beauty", the director makes a bold visual presentation of women's desires and masochistic mentality, and the coldness of the heroine Catherine Deneuve is in contrast to her desire and indulgence. Elegance and evil, blandness and passion, intertwined. It is worth mentioning that Catherine Deneuve also played a wonderful role in the famous French New Wave director Truffaut's "The Last Subway". In fact, after watching the whole film, you will feel that the director is not criticizing, but a compliment to women's pursuit of imagination. The title has two meanings, signifier and signifier, and the daydream it refers to seems to be a metaphor, perhaps all this is just the heroine's own imagination, but it did not actually happen. Of course, imagination is a kind of power, and women's liberation has always begun with imagination.
"Big Fish Begonia" (Chinese director Liang Xuan fantasy animation)
Some fish can never be shut down because they belong to the sky. Some people live in pain forever, because the effort may not be rewarded. The story between mermaids, the intersection of water and earth, is always worth recording. The domestic animation "Big Fish and Begonias" tells a story about life and love, because there is love, in order to resurrect the dead, in order to make life full of luster. Everything in the world is encounter. The idea for the animation comes from Zhuangzi's "There is a fish in the north of the earth, and its name is Kun. The size of the carp is unknown to thousands of miles. From Zhuangzi's words, a fantasy world is deduced, which is parallel to the human world and can reach the human world in some way. The painting style of "Big Fish and Begonias" is beautiful and remarkable. However, it can be seen that there is obviously the shadow of the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, those fantastic and grotesque animals and plants and the shape of the faceless gods, and even the narrative structure of pure love, all have a surprising resemblance to "Spirited Away". It is also inevitable that domestic animation, in addition to "The Haunting of the Heavenly Palace" and "Three Monks" has a complete Chinese style, the current animation, it is difficult to get rid of the influence of Japanese painting style. "Big Fish and Begonias" blends the grandeur of life with beauty, and pure love flows through it bit by bit. We have to go through countless tribulations before we can meet again in this world. This theme is not new, but the way the story is told is the focus. Most of the literary and artistic animations mostly touch people's hearts with the persistence of love, but unfortunately, in the world, love is only illusory. In the face of the cold reality, love seems pale and weak, lighter than the feathers.
The Gunsling Pianist (French director François Truffaut, starring Charles Aznaf, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berg)
An anonymous pianist, Charlie (the protagonist's name is a tribute to Chaplin), passively gets involved in the complex entanglement of his brother and gangsters. The beginning of the film is very thrilling and suspenseful, but it quickly turns into a small talk about women between two strangers, which is full of subversive meaning. The second feature film of the famous French New Wave director Truffaut, "The Shooting the Pianist", which combines suspense and love tracking and discussion, is both a tribute to the American B-grade film and a tribute to Hitchcock. But "The Gunsling Pianist" refuses to become a gangster film or a romance film, Truffaut's focus is not here, he made a film that looks like a genre film into a fresh and unworldly anti-genre film, guiding the viewer to get rid of the original visual expectations, constantly integrating literary inner monologues, mixing hollywood comedy, popular drama, psychological drama, thriller, love drama and other modes, in the form of tragedy and joy and imagination to complete a complete film experience, but not necessarily related to the real world. Charlie and the beautiful waitress Lina (a rare beauty), but a spring dream, the end of Charlie still returns to the anonymous tavern, originally dust, returned to dust. For the portrayal of marginalized people in society, "Gun Pianist" seems to be at ease, and the sense of loneliness and alienation is clear and palpable.
Jules and Jim (French director François Truffaut, starring Jeanne Moreau and Oscar Weinel)
French director Truffaut's 1961 work "Jules and Jim" is still evocative to this day. Although black and white films are like the end of the old times, human nature and feelings rarely change. The love entanglement between Catherine and Jules and Jim is still there in the present. The heroine Catherine's dedication to love, her maverick youthful personality shows the pioneering nature of the rebellious youth of the sixties. As a representative of French New Wave cinema, Truffaut used "Jules and Jim" to reflect on the mythical love of young people in the lost era. The shot of Catherine running together on the bridge with Jules and Jim is a classic picture in the history of cinema, romantic, free and unrestrained. The sudden death ending makes the film condense an element of black humor, as if it is a reflection on past love. After the release of the film, word of mouth doubled at the box office, establishing the historical status of New Wave films.
City of Philharmonic (American director Damian Shazelle, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling)
"Philharmonic City" is a song and dance film about dreams and love. The story is not new, the ending is out of vulgarity, but there is no kind of sadness and sorrow, quietly flowing in the depths of people's hearts. And in the world, the earth is desolate, and the moon and stars are rare. The dream chase that we once had, the love memories of the past, let us relive in the way of images, and resurrect our passions and dreams. Director Damien Chazelle prints the narrative of the film with the reincarnation of four seasons, which is beautiful and beautiful, and the song and dance are excellent. Whether it is the brisk and humorous dance between the heroine Emma Stone and the male protagonist Ryan Gosling, or the free-spirited jazz, which is perfectly integrated with the narrative of the image, Emma Stone's final review seems to be lingering and cannot be dissipated for a long time. Everyone can see the breath they have experienced in the image, and touch the softest part of their life. I didn't expect that the song and dance film could be made so wonderfully, so touchingly, and the director's handling method was admirable. Damien Shazelle did not tell the whole story to the audience like the average film director, he left a blank space, leaving room for imagination, leaving the viewer to fill in the good or sad memories by himself. Some people have watched it several times and are still immersed in it, evoking memories of the past. Perhaps, that is the greatness of love, the eternity of love. Midnight dreams come back, tears.
"Mermaid" (Chinese director Zhou Xingchi, starring Deng Chao, Lin Yun, Zhang Yuqi)
After Zhou Xingchi's work "The Mermaid" broke the box office record of Chinese films, it left a huge figure that illuminated the image space of The Chinese language. However, "Mermaid" does not tell a new story of modernity, the so-called environmental core is eclipsed in its Chow Sing Chi-esque comedy section, the utopian feelings of mermaid love have only become a deformed and exaggerated action scene, and Zhang Yuqi's sexiness is like a nonsense version of a color ring. Of course, the theme of traditional Chinese values, cloaked in the cloak of marine environmental protection, celebrates the alienation of human beings in the era of commercialization, and its theme more or less implies the appeal of modernity. However, the scene spectacle and visual exaggeration created by the film only prove that Stephen Chow is a director who is extremely commercially minded and keen to capture the topics of the film of the times, but is overly simple and artistically stretched. This may be because we have too high a demand for Stephen Chow, and his original comedic style has brought us too much joy. Sometimes I wonder what a movie is, or what kind of movie is a good movie.
The Genius Catcher (American director Michael Glendag, starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Feith, Jude Lowe)
Although a good friend said that the movie "Genius Catcher" is not very good, I still want to see it. This is probably related to the story of the film, which tells the story of various feuds between the genius American editor Max Perkins and the genius writer Thomas Wolff. And I happened to have read the two books "The Editor of Genius" and "Angels, Looking Home", and I was very interested in Perkins and Wolff. The film was directed by Michael Glendag and starred Colin Feith, Jude Lowe, and Nicole Kidman. In the narrative of the image, the two geniuses sparked and were full of passion, so there were two masterpieces of "Angel, Looking Home" and "Time and River". But after watching the movie, I think that wolf's girlfriend played by Nicole Kidman is very pitiful, she actually sees the problem, but there is no way to solve it. I don't know exactly how the relationship between Perkins and Wolff in history is, but in the film, I see the gay relationship between the two geniuses, especially in a scene in the film where Wolff rests his head on Perkins' shoulder, and the picture is too beautiful to look at directly. The film is full of details about the creative mentality of talented writers, and it is ready to come out. Probably, many writers want to meet an editor like Perkins, but you have to have the talent of Wolff and Fitzgerald.
"Peerless" (China director Zhuang Wenqiang, starring Chow Yun-fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jingchu)
The always heroic and dashing Fa Ge is actually just a fictional "painter", and he is actually just a humble police officer number 28818. In fact, when I saw half of it, I felt a little problematic. Even if Fa Ge plays the role of a gangster or a killer gambler, no matter how fierce his heart is, he has a bottom line of kindness and righteousness. For example, Xiao Ma Ge in "The True Colors of Heroes", Xiao Zhuang in "Two Heroes of Blood", and Li Aji in "Jianghu Love". The fierceness and indiscriminate killing of innocents in "Peerless" are obviously not the "character mode" of Fa Ge, and the reverse behind is only the "original source" of Fa Ge's image. However, there is another set of narratives hidden in "Peerless", that is, the blank image of the real painter. In fact, "Peerless" has a three-layer narrative mode, Fa Ge's "painter narrative" belongs to the first level of fiction and imagination, but also supplements the details of Li Wen's narrative; Li Wen's (Aaron Kwok) "painter narrative" is only the emergence of the second level, the real protagonist of counterfeit money, the real "painter narrative" is actually Ruan Wen. Nguyen Van's "painter's narrative" is low-key and silent, hidden under an iceberg, as if it were just an inconspicuous background. At the end of the story, Nguyen Van's light-hearted sentence "He used to live next door to me" subtly left a variety of aftertastes. Nguyen Van uses Lee's love for her to take control of everything about the counterfeit money syndicate. The pawn is always a pawn, the painter behind the scenes, can be light and light, can be "three generations of counterfeit banknotes" and safe and sound. The "painter" behind the scenes can paint leisurely in a secluded mountain forest when the pawn is crushed to pieces (if a sequel is made, then Li Qian's death is also a narrative trap). She is still imagining the broader market for counterfeit banknotes, and the so-called "traveling exhibition" is just a worldwide extension of the counterfeit money business. Peerless, meaning pun, hidden needles in the cotton.