It took a while, but
Happy 1000th fan!
If you aren’t following the list yet, you might discover a gem or two!
Archives For zhang yimou
I’ve just published a list of 100 songs in Chinese (mostly Mandarin, but also Cantonese… and maybe Hokkien… can’t be sure of that) that’s a great cheat sheet for anyone wanting to show off their knowledge of the scene. There’s definitely a wide variety of artists, so you’re sure to find something you enjoy.
Visit YAM Magazine for the list with a link included to the YouTube playlist.
Oh, Happy Chinese New Year! Let’s start my (supposedly) bad-luck Goat Year with the now-mandatory Letterboxd list of my film collection~
I have a really weird history with films– born in the late 80s, you’d think I would’ve grown watching loads of 90s kids stuff, but I actually grew up with a lot of Silly Symphonies (which were released in the 30s) and loads of Disney 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s stuff, plus a lot of more grown up 80s movies. Poltergeist, The Thing, The Fly and The Stuff were particularly scary stuff (and I’m pretty sure I was scared of yogurt or white stuff at some point).
I don’t ever remember buying any original VHS tape, except for the rare birthday gift of a Disney’s Sing-Along Songs chapter or that X-Men tape I have. My first DVDs buys were Coyote Ugly, She’s All That and Loser — you can’t blame me. I was a 15-year-old girl. The collection grew bigger, and possibly exploded during my years abroad. I’m nearing my 500th movie.
This is the first time in my movie-counting life that I’ve seen over 50 movies by the middle of the year. As a general number, I picked 48 a year, to make sure I -at least- watched one film a week for my end of the year list.
There’s a LOT of bad and meh movies so far, but there’s also a decent Top10. Not unbelievable, but decent. It’s a working one that would do for a Dec.31 or Jan.01 publishing date. LOL
I also made a [nomination] list of all my favorite foreign things of the last decade. If I had included all movies, general suspects would have applied (eg. Children of Men, Dancer in the Dark), but still remains a very ME list. I hope you like the selection, and don’t hesitate in suggesting films to watch.
I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!
A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.
The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.
Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.
1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies
I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.
After some flame from their compilation of 135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema [1], Flavorwire is back with a new compilation~~~ this time around focusing on faces, their emotions and their beauty… to relative success. I don’t think I could fault them… I had enough with Wong Kar Wai (included multiple times), multiple Zhang Yimou shots (and a double appearance of Gong Li to boot!), there was Park Chan Wook, Guillermo del Toro, Leslie Cheung’s face.
It was a thing of beauty.
The only face I could possibly suggest would have been Greta Garbo’s last shot on Queen Christina, but I’m content.
Flavorwire.com made a video titled 135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema, after asking their readers what were “the most beautiful movies ever made.” The result is okay, I guess. I still don’t think that I’m as moved by Terrence Malick films as others are…
There was also some Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai added in there, alongside Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — which was one of my picks for most iconic movie images. xD
In any case, there was some Noboru Shinoda (and therefore, Shunji Iwai) missing. The Hana & Alice ballet scene [1], just as Love Letter, as well as EVERYTHING on Picnic [1], and every single frame in All About Lily Chou Chou — they’re all perfect. LOL
I put together my lists of Top15 Movies, Bottom15 Movies, as well as my Top15 Albums from 2011.
This is a superficial post on The Flowers of War.
You can also check my post on propaganda films — Propaganda: Movies and their Message ~ and you are more than welcomed to flame me for liking “rubbish” films or liking China, whatever. LOL
I honestly liked The Flowers of War, it had its faults of course… as any and many a film does, but I totally think that the shameful 29% in RottenTomatoes is undeserved. It’s… with all my honesty and my unbiased, a solid 70%. All of that aside, wow– these are beautiful. If only the film could have been promoted with these pictures~
They’re the heroes~
