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

Search This Blog
Showing posts with label The Grandmaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Grandmaster. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai, 2013)

Zhang Ziyi in The Grandmaster

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Jin, Song Hye-ko, Yuen Woo-ping, Wang Qingxiang, Zhao Benshan, Shang Tielong, Chin Shih-chieh, Wang Jue, Chang Chen. Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai, Zou Jingzhi, Xu Haofeng. Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd. Production design: William Chang, Alfred Yau. Film editing: William Chang, Benjamin Courties, Poon Hung Yiu. Music: Stefano Lentini, Nathaniel Méchaly, Shigeru Umebayashi. 

A luminous Zhang Ziyi haunts every frame in which she appears in Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, which somewhat distorts the story, which is based on the life of Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), the kung fu grandmaster best known perhaps in the West as the teacher of Bruce Lee. But anyone expecting the flash and dazzle of Lee's movies will be confused by Wong's dreamlike romanticism, merging scenes of action into a tale of doomed love against a backdrop of the history of 20th-century China. Wong struggles to bring coherence to a number of narrative threads, many of which involve the philosophical underpinnings of the various styles of martial art, but unless you're a devotee of the practice, it's best to let the lush filming and scoring carry you along. 

Posted by
Links: , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)