haipei

The true story of the scriptwriter of this film is handled with reserved but sincere sentiments, just like Hou’s A Time to Live (1985). The difference is, that the memory in the latter is like a shadow enshrouded by the becoming awareness of death, but in this movie, the lived memories are like specks of dust on the land of the grandfather’s yam field, while the wind blows through the valley, bringing the sound of the train whistle.

70 _0%

The Terrorizers (1986) - Rated 18 May 2025

Like Antonioni, Yang’s depiction of anxiety and alienation between characters are the characteristics of the city. The film begins with the gunshot: an unknown man lies on the ground and neighbors are blind to this. It also ends with the gunshot: the betrayed husband ends his life in he’s unable to keep up the pretenses about his wife and job. But those scenes with grids are easy to fall into rigid. And the discussion on fiction/reality could have been more thoughtful.

75 _0%

Yannick (2023) - Rated 27 Apr 2025

Yannick is the one who broke in the awfully-written comedy and foisted his real-life context into the theatre space, the one who hijacked everyone through his gun to obey his dominant arrangement, but also the one who indulged in his playwright's dream come true, which is an ecstasy before the tragic end - before the theatre broken in by the guns held by the real power apparatus.

50 _0%

The Book of Solutions (2023) - Rated 25 May 2025

Probably this film is an 'apology' from Michel Gondry to his team

82 _0%

Medea (1969) - Rated 24 Mar 2025

The Japanese sangenkin 'played' by Argonauts and the Tibetan buddhist sacred sounds during Medea's rituals, which are two popular exotic symbols in 1960s, along with the classical plot of 'barbarian' revenge on the 'civilized' deception, construct the theme of critiquing colonization. All these happen in a world without magic, where 'new barbarism' is everywhere.

55 _0%

Hors-Saison (2024) - Rated 25 May 2025

The scenes are beautiful. It uses a lot of plots to depict the cowardice of Mathieu, blocking my possible empathy for this story of an affair. The best part is also the ‘tipping point’ - which gives Alice enough courage to embrace her desire - that the old lady narrates her true love with another woman, and the day of their wedding.

75 _0%

Doppelganger (2003) - Rated 20 Mar 2025

A hybrid of horror genre and comedy, the awkwardness of which is repeatedly (and intentionally) highlighted by these juxtaposed threefold scenes during the middle of the film. Of course, the so-called “AI” prosthesis looks like a torturing apparatus, and it's not the user's "strong will" that control it, but the parameters adjusted by the researcher-personality of the splited character. The best scene depicting the schizophrenic discharge is the “AI” chair jumping (sensor removed) into the sea.

70 _0%

El (1953) - Rated 25 Apr 2025

It may not be considered a perfect movie, but it is indeed a proper case of psychiatry. It explains the interplay between the external and the internal through the pathological behaviors of obsession, delusion, and, of course, paranoia. With the obsessional idea on the land and the woman (who then became the substitute for the former), he projects all inner causes of failure outward, in a way abusing the mechanism of projection, which is also repression.

80 _0%

A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) - Rated 23 Mar 2025

A childhood autobiography of early Hou in his 40s. From the eyes of the main character - kid to youth - ordinary fragments express the homesickness that shadowed the migrant family: grandma's naive insistence of back to China, father's 'disposable' bamboo furnitures for expected short stay, mother's chattering on their early years...When they died one by one, as the young Hou got to perceive death, this shadow became a fateful repression.