Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


November 2005 activity

Total Log Entries: 41

Total Comments: 15


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Everlasting Regret / Changhen ge / Hong Kong/China / 2005

After some unimpressive efforts in recent years – the muddled multi-character contemporary drama Hold You Tight, the plodding realism of the gay-empowerment melodrama Lan yu – this promised to be a return to form for Stanley Kwan, a return to the genre and setting of Red Rose, White Rose. Sadly it’s a film that, in spite of its fine feel for the architecture of interior space and for the psychology of its female protagonist, doesn’t work. The narrative is jumpy and disjointed (a reflection of the difficulties of adapting Wang Anyi’s novel that runs from the late 1940s to the early 1980s); the aging, or rather lack of aging, of lead actress Sammi Cheng is completely unconvincing; the narrative climax is misjudged; and music (including, bizarrely, extracts from Ozu films!) is very badly placed.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
24 Nov 2005 12:48 PM | Submit Comment


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