Ju Dou, The World, Chan Is Missing, & It Happened Here

Ju Dou is Gong Li being gorgeous. Well, I can't think of one single film with her in it that isn't her being gorgeous. Not a bad career. The use of color is also quite impressive, although the DVD itself was pretty weak. Lots of scratches on the print.

The World was a film about a theme park in Shenzen that has a New York area (with WTC, pointed out with something only slightly less than gloating), a Taj Mahal, a Vatican, the Pyramids, and an Eiffel Tower. It's about the lives of the workers in the park, who have to do dances from around the world and wear silly costumes, along with occasionally playing Africans, which apparently is a little on the touchy side for them. The actors were actually fairly good for non-professionals, or at least actors mainly in Zhang Ke Jia's other films. It was somewhat good, but I was more interested in the Russians imported and who had their passports taken away than the main storylines.

Chan Is Missing starts with a Chinese cover of Rock around the Clock but with changed lyrics about inflation. I knew I was going to find the movie interesting. It was another film with non-professional actors, and the last Asian one in this post. The acting is pretty bad, and there were a lot of mangled lines that clearly were mistakes but left in. But the script is actually pretty interesting and occasionally pretty funny. The look at FOBs assimilating or not in San Francisco is something I found endlessly engaging. The discussions of differences in linguistics and Chinese food really are what make the film worth seeing. But the DVD was all messed up due to rain, maybe? My mail was soaked and the Netflix packages were wet through.

It Happened Here again has non-professional actors, and this one is about as bad as Chan Is Missing for occasionally extremely stilted performance, but the idea is so fascinating, and the execution, from a technical standpoint, that the film is a must see. It's about what may have happened had the Nazis invaded England in 1940, and then had to withdraw most soldiers to counter the Soviet menace a few years later and the nascent resistance force. That the Nazi flags seemed so natural on the buildings and the England SS uniforms was just extremely unsettling. The Nazis in the film are just as disturbing as real life Nazis, and the use of actual footage of English fascists is effective. Also, I hate when DVDs don't have main menus.