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 Green Green Grass of Home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Green Green Grass of Home. Show all posts

Thursday, July 31, 2025

The Green, Green Grass of Home (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1982)


Cast: Kenny Bee, Chiang Ling, Yen Jing-Kuo, Meifeng Chen. Screenplay: Hou Hsiao-hsieng. Cinematography: Chen Kun-Hou. Art direction: Chi Kai-Cheng. Film editing: Liao Cheng-Sung. Music: Huang Mou-Shun. 

The cheerful naïveté of Hou Hsiao-hsien's third feature, The Green, Green Grass of Home, reminded me of the old Hollywood movies in which a city slicker comes to a small town where both he and the local yokels learn a few things from each other. In Hou's movie, Da-Nian (Kenny Bee) comes from Taipei to a village to teach school and immediately encounters unfamiliar attitudes and manners. Unabashedly sentimental, Hou's movie is laced with some comic scenes featuring mischievous kids, but it harps too much on a message about the necessity of being close to nature and it repetitively features an icky pop song that sounds a lot like a soft drink commercial. But it's beautifully filmed, and at its best, it affords a glimpse of what daily life might have been like in a Taiwanese village. 

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