A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, September 19, 2025

Streetwise (Na Jiazuo, 2021)

Li Jiuxiao and Huang Miyi in Streetwise

Cast: Li Jiuxiao, Huang Miyi, Yu Ailei, Yao Lu, Sha Baoliang. Screenplay: Na Jiazuo. Cinematography: Li Jia Neng. Film editing: Jinlei Kong. 

Bleak in concept but often lush in execution, Na Jiazuo's debut feature, Streetwise, centers on the lives of three young people in a city in Sichuan in 2004. Dong Zi (Li Jiuxiao) works with his friend Xi Jun (Yu Ailei) as a debt collector for a man known as Mr. Four (Sha Baoliang), getting beat up as often as not by the people they try to collect money from. Dong Zi takes on this unpleasant job to pay the hospital bills for his father (Yao Lu), who is a handful of his own, constantly in trouble for gambling. Unfortunately, Dong Zi also has a bent for trouble, getting involved with Mr. Four's ex-wife, Jiu'er (Huang Miyi), who runs a tattoo parlor. Streetwise is narratively somewhat choppy, and it takes patience and attention to sort out the connections among the characters, but it repays that attention with some vivid characterization and a real feeling for the atmosphere of a dead-end city.   

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