Coming Very Soon: Oscar Submissions "Burning" and "Border"

NYFF/TIFF screenings from Nathaniel R

"My what lovely posters!" he said, as he struggled to decide how to review two pictures that are best seen cold, knowing as little as possible. "But people don't buy tickets / get excited about movies without knowing something," he reasoned with himself about reviewing both South Korea and Sweden's Oscar submissions which are opening in US theaters very soon.

"Okay, okay," the purist in him, responded. "I'll say a little something about each but only if I can limit my discussion to the posters! People absolutely shouldn't watch the trailers." "Deal" his practical self muttered rolling his eyes, having been through this existential crisis of movie blogging numerous times. "Proceed..."

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"Shadow" leads the Golden Horse nominations

Good news for fans of Zhang Yimou. His latest film Shadow, which we quite liked at TIFF, leads the 55th annual Golden Horse nominations which focus on Chinese language cinema. The higher Shadow's profile gets the more eyeballs it will theoretically find once Well Go, releases it in US theaters. It's definitely worth seeing in a movie theater since it's a visual spectacle. China still hasn't named their Oscar submission so we hope it's going to be Shadow which was released at home yesterday, the last day of eligibility for Oscar's Foreign Language Film submission requirements.

Interestingly enough, Hong Kong's Oscar submission Operation Red Sea received NO nominations whatsoever. 

A full list of Golden Horse nominations is after the jump with links to reviews for the few films we've seen...

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NYFF: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Late in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation Stockard Channing's character, at her wit's end, says, "I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience; how do we hold onto the experience?" That's how I feel about writing up my thoughts on Bi Gan's dream-adjacent Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was an experience. An out of body one, sorta. How do I turn that experience into words?

Luo (Huang Jute, whose handsome face we come to know from every angle) is haunted by what else, a lost woman (played by Lust Caution's Tang Wei, for a time anyway), and he wanders the damp earth and the the even damper underworld and everywhere damp in between trying to find her - trying to hold on to fractions of dreams and memories; who can tell which is which here? It's all fractured - time, space, sound...

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Two Visual Triumphs Seeking Distribution: "The River" and "Shadow"

Since we're already deep into NYFF - thanks to Murtada and Jason for this excellent reviews (I'll join them shortly) --  I must accept that all the full reviews I had planned for things without release dates I saw at TIFF just aren't going to happen. But several films we caught are hitting theaters soon so they will get reviews: A Star is Born (10/5), Beautiful Boy (10/12), Border (10/26), and Boy Erased (11/2). In the meantime here are the final two TIFF films I must pinpoint because they don't have distribution yet but they totally deserve it.

Shadow
I'm calling this one 'camp without color,' because we always think of "camp" as something innately colorful, don't we? Director Zhang Yimou (House of the Flying Daggers) gifts for visual spectacle remain undimmed and this time he organizes his mise en scene around the duality of the yin yang symbols as well as inkwash paintings...

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NYFF: A Family Tour

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival

Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.

The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...

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