Jia Zhangke, Platform (2000)

The next couple posts will highlight the films of the best Chinese director whom you’ve probably never heard of, Jia Jiangke. First a little history lesson: the history of Chinese film in two paragraphs looks like this: Starting in the 1950s, Chinese film was defined by a Communist Realism movement- lots of heroes in Mao-suits, rising suns and long soliloqueys (often sung) about how great life was as a Communist.

Then Zhang Yimou comes along in 1987 and wins the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with Red Sorghum (Hong Gao Liang), thereby putting Chinese film and the so-called Fifth Generation Directors on the world map. Zhang follows up with Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), all three of which are characterized by slow-moving, largely-depressing plots, amazing cinematography, all set in the feudal past but serving as largely anti-Communist allegories. Zhang became Public Enemy Number 2 behind rocker Cui Jian, which even further heightened his popularity amongst Western film critic set.

What’s missing in all that were filmmakers who focus on what China is today- real stories about the Mainland Chinese who are emerging from the Communist primordial soup into the modern world of fat only-children and middle-class television-induced bliss. Jia Jiangke and his 6th generation cohorts are focused on this world. Platform perfectly shows the struggle for modernity of Chinese citizens in the transitional period of the 1980s, when China was opening up to the West but hadn't quite figured out yet the implications of this "development". This transition is most difficult for the hundreds of millions of Chinese rural laobaixing who simply didn't have the skills to do anything beyond the manual labor of farming and mining learned during the Mao years.

Jia tells his story through a rural dance troupe of 20-somethings who desperately want to be modern (one gets a perm, another brings back a cassette tape of pop music to the village) but who are also stuck in the old ways. Their actions are awkward but pure. The slow pace of the film allows for plenty of pause of the viewer to interpret the subtext of the action (and in many cases non-action of the main characters). In one great scene where a boy and a girl are arguing about their relationship and whether they should consider themselves a couple, the characters walk back and forth behind a wall. In another scene, the youths are in a truck and offer to give a ride to the old cadre because its "faster"; the old cadre rebuffs their offer and is shown walking up a steep hill. In both cases, the images are actively supporting the words and actions of the characters.

This film is not for Jerry Bruckheimer fans, or even fans of Jerry Bruckheimer on lithium. But for those with a little patience and an eye for subtely, Platform will give the viewer a bird’s eye view into a China in a gawky stage of adolescence on the growth path to modernity.

And what happened to Zhang Yimou? Well, in the late 1980s, the PRC government started to get PR-savvy and realized that it was a lot easier to make Zhang rich and leverage his power as a film star than to fight him. Since then, Zhang has directed Turnadot, the opera showing in the Forbidden City in 1999, he's directed directed huge budget Hollywood epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and today is preparing to direct the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. Wow. How’s that for a symbol of the Modern China?

Carol Reed, The Third Man, 1949

In any discussion of the greatest film of all time, many people are quick to mention Citizen Kane. While that may be true especially for the advances in cinematography and technical filmmaking that are on display in Citizen, another film with Orson Welles, Carol Reed's The Third Man, should certainly get a mention in this discussion.

From the opening credits, which feature a close up of Spanish zither strings vibrating to the film's theme song, Carol Reed seems to be telling the viewer, "Be prepared for your perspective to be manipulated like these strings". Orson Welles plays Harry Lime, the title character, and he is well remembered for the cuckoo clock soliloquey (*Careful: Link contains spoilers) which Welles wrote as well as his storied entrance into the film. However, in actuality Welles' screen time is minimal.


In my mind, this film is driven by the wonderful script of Graham Greene (back in the days when serious novelists like William Faulkner would write screenplays as a foot in the door to the serious literary world), the solid lead performance by Joe Cotten and the artful film noir direction and cinematography of Carol Reed and Robert Krasker. This is one of those films with images that are so powerful and pleasing to the eye that you'll want to hit 'pause' and take in frame by frame this world full of shadows and smattered with intense patches of light.




And oh what a great finish the Third Man delivers. Not only does it contain a great climactic chase scene through the sewers, which was totally ripped off by Andrew Davis' use of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, it contains a poignant last scene, which has been mirrored in countless other films since then.

Sam Mendes, Jarhead (2005)

Sam Mendes won the Academy Award for Best Director for American Beauty (1999), a film he made when he was only 33 years old. While this seems amazing, there are numerous examples of a director's first film being one of his/her best: John Singleton's Boyz in the Hood (1991) and Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1987) come to mind.


Mendes, however, is no "one hit wonder". His Road to Perdition (2002) , which followed Beauty, was a stylish noir and Jarhead is perhaps the best film about the life of the modern warrior to date. It combines the depth and sarcastic wit of American Beauty but takes on a much more serious topic, putting the viewer in the shoes of the US Marines during Operation Desert Storm.



Mendes' take on modern warfare acknowledges its predecessor Vietnam-era films (clips of Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Dearhunter (1978) are part of Jarhead), while also highlighting the modern Marine's dilemma: trauma comes not from the killing but the non-killing. High-tech military equipment have dimished the modern warfighter from one of a killing machine to one of a front-line scout whose primary role is to prep the battlefield or clean-up after the battle is done.



In one scene, the Marines in Jarhead watch Coppola's Apocalypse Now not as an anti-war statement on the fog of war but with youthful enthusiasm, cheering the scenes of US soldiers attacking the Vietnamese. Later these same soldiers find themselves in a position which mirrors the "Who's your commanding officer" scene in Apocalyspe. Jake Gyllenhaal's character Swafford hears a helicopter descending on the "battlefield" of flaming oil fields and playing a Doors song. While the scene in Apocalypse attempts to compare the fog of war to a drug-induced hallucination, Mendes' Marines are living in a completely different world. Swafford very lucidly quips "Can't we even have our own music?"; his character does not see any glory in battle and resents this feeling of inability to affect the war's outcome.


Still, these Marines do share at least one trait with the Marines of yesterday. Both remain faithful to the Corp, even after returning to the U.S., the experience of war has left an indelible mark on the rest of their lives. The difference is that the boredom that they experience back at home is juxtaposed to the boredom they experienced on the battlefield. Finally, speaking of boredom, check out this clip where some guy spliced together every time one of the characters in Jarhead drops the f-bomb... not sure but this may just rival Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) for some sort of "Most F-bombs in a Film" record here.

John Cassavetes, Shadows, 1959

With the proliferation of the Internet and low-cost means to produce movies, independent film has fully entered the mainstream. Sundance has become more of a photo-op for Hollywood's 'Who's Who' to wear their latest skicaps, than it is a venue to introduce innovative new filmmakers such as when Steven Soderberg made his debut with Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989).

Today's independent filmmakers can all thank John Cassavetes for becoming the grandfather of the independent movement. Cassavetes' directorial debut, Shadows, is remarkable on multiple fronts. First, Shadows is simply the coolest American film you will ever see made prior to 1960. Its uncompromisingly different than anything that was made up to that point, anywhere in the world. If Shadows had been a French language film it would have been known as the founding film of the French New Wave (Godard's Breathless wasn't issued until a year later).

However, because this film also deals with very American topics such as inter-racial dating and the Beat movement, it is solidly an American classic; you expect Neil Cassidy and Kerouac's "On the Road" crowd to show up and hang out with the Shadows protagonists as they roamed the streets of New York City. You'd be hard pressed to find a black protagonist in almost any other film of the era; keep in mind, this film was made almost a decade before Sidney Poitier played his infamous role in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)!

Finally, there's a real feeling that the characters are not acting but are actually living the life portrayed on the screen. Jazz music underscores the film and gives it its pace, at one moment slow and reserved, the next moment bursting with energetic passion, sometimes even with violence. The sound quality and scratchy-ness of the film is sub-par but just having the opportunity to watch Shadows in any format is a treat.

Back to the Past

Bono once said that “Every artist is a cannibal. Every poet is a thief”, a quote which I think he stole from Picasso. This statement may seem self evident to every student at USC Film School but to the average movie consumer, our opinion of what’s new and innovative in the film we just viewed while eating a large tub of buttered popcorn is often subject to rash overstatement. We are easily impressed, as evidenced by the fact that we’re up to the fourth installment of the Saw horror series.

One of the reasons for this is that most people don’t watch many old movies so, with the exception of a handful of classic films which have spanned generations of viewers, most of us don’t really know what’s come before us. I spend a lot of time watching old films, which I find in most cases fascinating. Old films are really used in two major ways by modern directors and movie execs:

The first is the least interesting objective of pure revenue generation / exploitation with the primary example being sequels. When Disney saw an opportunity to slap a modern face on the classic Parent Trap (1961) and released a “modern” version of it in 1998, their primary motivation was the dollar sign. In most cases, sequels are marginally successful from a financial standpoint but result usually in watered-down imitations from an artistic standpoint.

What’s fascinating is the second use of old film: when a great director uses their film to open a dialogue with a director of a classic film by borrowing elements of older films which inspire them while adding new value to it. Most people were blown away by Ridley Scott’s futuristic vision of the Earth in Blade Runner (1983), a screen shot of which is shown on the right. However, many elements of Scott's (and Philip Dick) vision were contained and clearly influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), as shown below. In fact, Metropolis is clearly the ground-zero film which influenced not only Blade Runner but a whole host of favorites such as Back to the Future (1985) and Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and The Matrix (1999). While most people have not seen Metropolis, Robert Zemeckis, the Coen Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers clearly have.

Finally, no discussion of re-visiting old films would be complete without Quentin Tarantino, the self-professed film junkie who may be most adept in the world at taking old film concepts, stealing the best parts of them and creating a truly uniquely new and modern product from them, a la Pulp Fiction. Indeed, generations of future directors will be using his style of non-linear storytelling for many years to come.

Bottom line: there are a ton of great old films out there and hopefully this blog can serve to highlight some of the ones which have aged well and are worthwhile for a wide range of today's movieviewers to watch.

Birth of a BlueStar

Virtually every US-born, Gen-X male, whether he likes movies or not, has been profoundly influenced by Star Wars. I am no exception. It’s in my DNA. Watching Star Wars is my earliest childhood memory of the movies and needs to be the starting point whenever I think about why I like movies, what they mean to me and why on earth I’d ever want to start a blog.

Even today, almost 30 years after the event, I can recall one particular Star Wars experience in great detail. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car with my father driving, looking over the dashboard at the dusk sky, heading west on Route 40 in Catonsville, MD toward the Westview Cinema. My sense of anticipation was palpable. My father had asked me if I wanted to see a movie (which of course I agreed to) but he would not tell my which movie we were going to see.

As the cinema’s giant billboard came into view, I scanned the movie titles as quickly as my 7-year old reading comprehension would allow. I became a bit disappointed. The only movie I recognized or even remotely wanted to see from the list was Star Wars, but we had already seen it. As I shot a quizzical glance across the seat towards my dad, he confirmed with a nod that our movie destination for the evening was indeed one that we had already visited. I was excited but stunned- “Is it even legal to see the same movie twice?”

I don’t remember any details of watching Star Wars for the second time, but this memory is a great starting point of my experience with the movies because it also occurred during a crucial transition point in film history. In 1978, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall beat out Star Wars for the Best Picture Oscar; it marked the waning of low-budget, independent art-house films in the mainstream and the beginning of big-budget Hollywood’s tidal swell to mainstream box office dominance in the 1980s. VCRs also came into prominence beginning in 1980, both changing the way America watched movies and solidifying a once-radical notion: that, Yes, its ok to watch movies multiple times.

1980s: Hollywood Offensive
During the 1980s, our family went on a prolific theatre-going movie consumption tear. My claim to fame is that I’ve seen in the theatre virtually every PG and PG-13 rated movie released during the 1980s. My brother was born in 1979, and he can probably make a similar claim at least for the late 1980s; we weren’t allowed to see R-rated movies, and I turned my nose up at G-rated kids stuff. As a result, our family movie watching interest was planted firmly in the middle ground of “Parental Guidance Suggested”.

Of the top 10 highest-grossing movies each year of the 1980s, I’ve seen every single one of the PG films in the theatre (see http://www.80s.com/Entertainment/Movies/TopGrossing/). The good news is that there are a ton of great (or at least very watchable) PG movies in that list: the Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones trilogy, the Karate Kid series, the Rocky series, the Back to the Future series, the Ghostbusters series and great one-off films like E.T.: Extra Terrestrial and Goonies.

On the other side of the coin, I also watched in the theatre some of the biggest pieces of garbage produced in the 1980s. These include Mannequin (how did Mannequin 2 ever get made?), Breakin’ Two: Electric Bugaloo (which I saw at the same Westview Cinema, thankfully without my parents), Zorro the Gay Blade, Howard the Duck, Tron, Ishtar and the tail end of the Smokey and the Bandit series (the first one was rated ‘R’ so my parents must have had to catch me up on the intricate plot details). While it seemed wasteful to burn my parents’ hard-earned money to see these stinkers in the theatre, the irony is that I remember enjoying almost every one of them at the time.

Why did we see so many movies? Probably for the same reason the rest of America goes to the movies. We watched to escape the rain during weekend camping trips in Pennsylvania. We watched as our pre-dinner entertainment on Fridays at 5pm (the latest time for the matinee price). And we watched to escape the doldrums of everyday life. Another fond memory I have is going with my friends one summer weekday afternoon to watch Rocky3, only to find my dad sitting in the corner in the theatre by himself in his work clothes with popcorn in hand; nothing solidifies a deeper bond with Dad than watching Sylvestor Stallone mumble “Ain’t so bad” again and again as Mr. T pretends to pummel him with countless jabs to the midsection.

Dad-organized trips to the theatre consisted of choosing a movie that usually started in 15 minutes or less from when we made the decision. We’d dash into the car, with 12-oz cans of Coke stuffed into our jackets to avoid the 300% mark-up at the concession line. We’d order the colossal tub of popcorn which Dad would control and prohibit us from eating until the start of the previews (we were on occasion given a sample kernel or two to whet our appetites). As soon as the lights dimmed and the curtains were pulled back, we’d dive in, often devouring the lion’s share of the bag before the actual film started. At this point, our parched butter-infused tongues forced our attention to the next task: stealthily, soundlessly popping open our cans of Coke in the dark silence of the theatre. After the movie, we’d usually drive to pick up dinner, rarely talking about what we’d just seen.

Mom-organized trips were much more pre-meditated. We’d head out with plenty of time to drive to theatre, find suitable parking, buy tickets, buy concessions (which sometimes actually entailed the subversive task of purchasing a beverage), and find appropriate seats. Afterwards, we might even (gasp!) talk about what we had been watching on the screen for the last two hours.

Developing Our Favorites
By the mid-1980s, everybody had a VCR and we were no exception. In addition to our frequent trips to the theatre, we would also rent a considerable number of movies from the local Blockbuster and record movies from television. We slowly built a collection of favorites which we watched over and over until they were etched deep in our minds. Because we only had one television and VCR, watching time was split between my brother and me. Given the seven-year difference in our age, our tastes were very different.

My two earliest favorites were sports movies: Victory, the greatest soccer movie ever made and Hoosiers, the greatest basketball movie ever made (perhaps with the exception of the 1970s cult-classic The Fish that Played in Pittsburg). I don’t think I’ve ever seen Victory in the theatre; its improbable plot features Sylvester Stallone as a POW American goalie, Michael Caine as the English POW and team captain, the great Max VonSydow as the “good Nazi” and Pele as a Trinidadian refugee who stars on the Allies team. The officers in the POW camp acted like it was the most normal thing in the world that Pele lived in their camp, “Cool. The greatest living soccer player in the world just happens to reside as a prisoner in our camp. Let’s take on a team of German All-Stars in Cologne stadium in Paris and stage an escape at halftime from the training room pool”.

Hoosiers, I first viewed at the Seven Hills 10 theatre in Aurora, CO, and would eventually watch it so many times that I would mouth all the lines a second or two before they were spoken. I dissected the film uncovering some of its few plot inconsistencies (The secret of how Buddy mysteriously returns to the team after Coach Dale threw him out for insubordination a few scenes earlier was finally revealed to me when the missing scene between Buddy and Gene Hackman showed up on the “Deleted Scenes” section of the Vintage Hoosiers DVD which was only issued several years ago.)

Some children encounter the problem of secondhand smoke in the family. I was oppressed by the malady of second-hand Goonies. The Steven Spielberg classic was my brother’s favorite, and he watched it incessantly. I can’t complain too much though; nothing can better enable you to win Gen-X friends and influence people at a party than belting out line-by-line Sean Astin’s soliloquy in the well about Chester Copperpot from Goonies. “It’s OUR time. It’s OUR time DOWN HERE!”. My brother’s other favorite was Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986), the extremely slow moving fantasy tale which featured an aging David Bowie and a young Jennifer Connelly. That giant flying Muppet still haunts me to this day.

My dad’s taste was a mixture of the revered and the despised. He liked all the classic “guy” genres, science fiction (Star Wars, and the television show Quantum Leap), war movies (The Dirty Dozen, Bridge over the River Quay, etc), cop movies (the Dirty Harry series, Beverly Hills Cop- we only got to see the PG-13 BHCs) and Westerns, especially Westerns. This gave me exposure to some of the great films in the cowboy genre but it also left one giant elephant in the room – Centennial. This epic mini-series actually runs for 352 hours, two thirds of which seemed to include silent pans across the mountainous prairie landscapes ending in zoom takes of a pensive Kris Kristofferson or Bruce Boxleitner.

1990s: Exploring the Auteurs
The start of the new decade saw me ship off to college down the road in Boulder, CO where I took a couple classes on film: one on Chinese film history and another class on Ingmar Bergman’s greatest hits. This was my first exposure to film theory- the realization that the great directors put so much thought into every frame of film was eye opening. I now knew just enough to be dangerous.

At the time, Roger Ebert, a CU-Boulder alumni, would come back once a year and dissect a film over the course of a week. During the four years I was there, Ebert covered Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Oliver Stone’s JFK, and John Demy’s Silence of the Lambs. These events took place during the course of a week in a darkened theatre in which Ebert would stop the film every couple minutes or seconds to provide commentary. Additionally, anyone from the audience could call out “Stop” at anytime and ask a question. I found it fascinating to walk through frame-by-frame of SOTL looking for religious symbolism, or learning how Oliver Stone used flashes of light reflecting off of Kevin Costner’s glasses to highlight when a new “truth” about the plot was revealed.

During these years, I inhaled foreign films and arthouse films to the annoyance of my roommates who would often find me monopolizing the television by watching some obscure film in a foreign language. The true moment of epiphany came however in the autumn of 1994; I had moved to Taiwan to continue studying Mandarin Chinese at Taiwan National University. I read a bulletin on campus that said the NTU film club would be screening the films of someone named Kieslowski throughout the week.

I watched an afternoon screening of Blue, the first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Colors Trilogy. I tried to watch Blue, a French-language film, using my remedial French language skills to listen to the dialogue while using my remedial Chinese language skills to follow along with the Chinese subtitles below. While my linguistic comprehension failed to illicit complete understanding, I was blown away by the visuals and the music, so much so that I stayed for the second showing a half an hour later. I repeated this exercise twice over the next two days, as I watched White (which is half in Polish) and Red, the finale. When I finally emerged bleery-eyed from the theatre, I became the ranting campus evangelist for Kieslowski to any local or expat who would listen.

In Taiwan, I also joined the National Film Archive in Taibei which basically entailed paying a monthly fee for unlimited access to their film catalogue comprised of VCR tapes of Chinese, Taiwanese and Western films. You had to watch them while sitting at a desk with a television and VCR; Through the film archive, I also gained access to a cool artsy local crowd of Taiwanese who were members.

Once when I was drinking tea with some archive regulars at a local tea shop, I went on a rant describing how Apocalypse Now was one of my favorite films. As I attempted to educate my Taiwanese friend on how Apocalypse was based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he surprisingly countered that I was only partially correct. He claimed that the film is actually also based on another book called The Golden Bough and that the book was actually shown for a brief moment in Colonel Kurtz’s lair. This was in the early days of the Internet but I had a friend back at the university campus in Colorado who went to the library (the pre-Google days) and confirmed that the Chinese stranger was correct.

The Rushmore Test
After returning to the US from living abroad for many years, my film tastes have probably also become more US centric again, mostly independent cinema. My current affinity is with the new pack of younger American directors such as Wes Anderson, Sophie Coppola and P.T. Anderson who are on the cusp of mainstream society but aren’t quite apple pie and lemonade.

Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) is my current favorite film. I thought it was nearly perfect- it (and all Anderson’s films, really) offers a hilariously funny depiction of highly-realistic human interactions which are masked beneath an enjoyable veneer of post-modern absurdity. Unfortunately, its also highly derisive- some people think Rushmore is so absurd that's its boring.

If only allowed one question to ask a new person before forming my opinion of them, I would ask them what they thought of Rushmore (Lost in Translation is a pretty good surrogate for the Rushmore test). Those who loved it, I would consider as best friend potential. For those who hated it, my knee jerk reaction is to proselytize- I rent Rushmore, go to their house, stand-over their shoulder while they’re watching it and whisper in their ear, “This next part is hilarious!” seconds before the scene plays out. You might have guessed that this doesn’t work, at least initially. But over time, real friends will at least understand my side of the story; otherwise, I discard them like tattered Tango and Cash movie posters in the dumpster behind the local Super-20 theatre complex.

A Short Conclusion for a Long Winded Opening
Today, most of my film watching is done through Netflix, which is sad in a way: going to the theatre is really one of the few activities which is both communal and highly individualized. On the other hand, Netflix is a perfect way for people like me to delve deep into the long tail of video store economics and gain access to obscure films from the 1960s or 1970s that just don’t make it onto the shelves at the local Blockbuster.

I’ve created this blog for several reasons: First, I wanted to record my thoughts on films after I watch them, mostly so that I don’t forget and accidentally rent them again. Second, on the odd chance that a fellow Rushmore-phile stumbles upon this site amidst the million other movie sites, perhaps they can find solace in this little Rushmorian oasis. And finally for everyone else, maybe my words might somehow influence your decisions the next time you obsessively need to re-order your Netflix queue. Or am I the only one who does that?