At bafooz's insistence, I closed off and started up the new year with a dose of Im Kwon-taek. It was marvelous seeing Choi Min-sik of Oldboy fame in a startlingly different role as Owon (吾園, or Jang Seung-up), a genius painter, eccentric drunkard, and, as this biopic would have it, the soul of Korean art.

Owon's lifetime spans a period of political upheaval in the latter half of the 19th century. Not being familiar with modern Korean history, and informed only briefly of major events by the storyline, what emerges is, of course, the personal. The tragedy of Owon's life is partially his rootlessness -- he is constantly being left or leaving. Some of the most memorable scenes involve paintings "commissioned" by acts of separation. His paintings render value to his departures, ritual pieces offered in confirmation of his absence. He may not be much of a man to his kisaeng or servant boy, but when he's gone, the piece of art left in his place can be worth some money. They want the art, but they don't want the artist.

In part, his personality is to blame. But while his talent is easily recognized, his body never seems to comfortably inhabit his world. So in a sense, as fanciful and crudely rendered as his mythical "death" scene is depicted here, it's totally appropriate to the artist and his legend.

I love that King Hu is so unclassifiable. Is this a Taiwan film? Hong Kong film? Does it matter?

I'm up against a major deadline this week, so I have nothing more to say about this.

A rich, compassionate hunchback named Wu Sheng (played by HK pop star Teddy Robin, born with a congenital deformity which is exploited in the plot) falls in love with a poor blind girl, Miss Zhuang (played by Qin Ping). Escaping an oppressive and abusive home life, Miss Zhuang likes to spend her days at the seashore, which is where she meets Wu Sheng. Captivated by her beauty, Wu Sheng turns her into his charity case of sorts, taking her in and sheltering her when something traumatic happens to her. He decides to pay for a surgical operation that will restore her sight -- but plagued by doubts that she'll still love him once she's able to see his physical deformity, he leaves on a plane before she ever gets a chance to see him.

Professional stewardess, gracious "air hostess" by day, party girl by night. I think this was the first Grace Chang film I had ever seen, and it was a pleasure to revisit it. The significance of these full-color on-site sequences makes so much more sense now, despite the relative conservativism of the plot.

I think Grace Chang actually does push the limits of what a "modern girl" should be in some interesting ways. She's not willing to compromise her career for marriage -- at all. In fact, when her first attempt to resign from the airline is misunderstood as her willingness to accept domestic life, this only irritates her character, Ke Lan-ping, even more. Ke resolves to follow through with her career, even if it means having to swallow her pride and control her temper.

Another thing that makes her appealing as an actress is her ability to straddle some rather unexpected "extremes" of character. She has the wholesome and pure smile that fits the airline's standards -- the same "natural" smile that must be trained to other stewardesses. She has explosive bursts of energy channeled in two ways -- through song and dance, or through angry, verbose tantrums.

The range of her emotion as an actress is pretty impressive, especially when contrasted to Roy Chiao. His stiff, masculine reserve comes from his utter lack of expression. Yi Wen even resorts to shots of the back of his head for most of his key sequences. Funny and awkward.

With its all-star cast, wild soundtrack, innovative editing techniques, and beautiful array of colors, and occasionally rather sensitive portrayals (despite somewhat incredible plot twists), this has become one of my favorite movies. Maybe I'll come back and explain in detail, some other time.

Self-conscious meta-cinematic references from his beginnings: HHH clearly situates this story in the early 1960s by cross-referencing Oyster Girl (1964), Fire Bulls (1966), and Orchids and My Love (1965). Interestingly, the setting is clearly labeled as 1962 -- partly, I think, to appease censors who were concerned that this would present a picture of a woefully "underdeveloped" Taiwan to international audiences in the 1980s. I'd like to think HHH was purposely using these anachronistic references to remind audiences that the idea of uniform and linear progress is baloney.

2. Vicki's Hat [小琪的那頂帽子]

Beautifully, gorgeously shot at times. This seems to be the segment that gets the least attention -- and indeed, I don't know anything else that the director has done (I'd have to look it up). However, the pedophilic overtones of the friendship between the Japanese pressure cooker salesman and Xiaoqi creep me out every time. Gotta say it! Actually, having been on the receiving end of similar attention before, I kind of understand that there's a cultural basis that's not as wrong as it seems (like, he's not about to commit statutory rape)... but I still wish they could've toned that down a bit.

3. The Taste of Apples [蘋果的滋味]

This one improved with time; it was better than I remembered it. The visual starkness of the 白宮 against the 土土的 Jiang family is especially effective in cinematic form.

I first saw this at the Golden Horse Film Fest amongst a crowd that chuckled both knowingly and nervously all throughout the film. I've been curious for a long time about what prompts that laughter, that inevitable feeling of staginess, corniness, datedness, etc. that affects one as they watch these relics of a bygone era. Why do we laugh, why can't we help but mock the cultural products of that era, when historians, authors of scar literature, etc., didn't make it seem possible to laugh and poke fun back then?

One of my favorite quotes in the film comes from an artist who grew up during the Cultural Revolution Era:

当时，很高兴 [去看那些样板戏]。都很喜欢，特别是红色娘子军。因为他们穿得很少。穿得比较少。有大腿。那些斯宾有退漏在外面。 我们小时候最早的，对异性的那一个欲望是从样板戏开始的。 救灾革命里面发现了有一些真正的有生命的东西。

I really liked the modern day street dance interludes. Maybe I'll come back to explain why and clean up this entry, later.

It's a pity that the "Model Opera" version (样板戏) of Red Detachment of Women has garnered so much more attention than its predecessor, Xie Jin's dramatic rendition filmed more than 10 years earlier. Xie's version was also the first winner of the CCP's Hundred Flowers Award for films. As much as I might want to roll my eyes at this propagandistic story of an abused female servant's liberation and revolutionary education as a member of a Communist guerilla troupe on Hainan Island, I have to admit that this film was technically superb on a number of levels. The story even has a stylistic flair and suppressed erotic subtext that reminds me of some of the more notorious female revenge flicks of the time. Yet, the film insists on its own agendas, both political and aesthetic, offering a portrait of revolutionary identity formation that links the local to more universalist, internationalist aims.

Qionghua, the aforementioned peasant girl, exudes a fierce energy that threatens to exceed the bounds of the screen (not to mention the limits of realism) from the very first encounter. Her diehard spirit is recognized by Hong Changqing, a CCP guerilla troupe leader masquerading as a moneyed overseas Chinese entrepeneur. He purchases her from her former household and sets her free in the jungle so she can make her way to the nearby liberation army camp. Qionghua and Changqing's paths cross again when she, along with a newfound friend Honglian, finally joins the ranks of the Red Detachment of Women, a special unit comprised entirely of downtrodden, 物產階級 women fueled by a collective score to settle with the feudal masters of their peasant past. Changqing assumes the role of her comrade-in-arms and mentor as he teaches Qionghua to subsume her individualistic desire for revenge under the larger effort of revolutionary struggle.

It's one of those inevitable contradictions of female liberation as depicted through the patriarchal lens of party policy, I suppose... Females, peasants, children, the illiterate, ethnic minorities -- all these subaltern "classes" make for easy ideological appropriation. And if the story includes a character that rolls all these categories into one -- well, that's narrative gold. These "women" sing with such shrill voices at times, they do seem incredibly young to me, even as the film emphasizes their transition into a more militant womanhood. The line between Han Chinese and a generic sort of tropical "Other" isn't so clear either, but the setting must have seemed rather exotic to contemporary audiences then as it does now, what with monkeys as household playthings, strange tropical fruit, and giant palms silhouetted against iridescent skies. The people who live here become defamiliarized by association. They're portrayed as being beyond the easy reach of central KMT control -- not that the KMT ever had much "central" control, let alone any presence on this island off the coast of Guangdong, which apparently had garnered a reputation as a Communist hideout as early as the 1920s. Nevertheless, such depictions serve the dual purpose of skewering KMT inefficiency while simultaneously permitting Hainan Island to stand in for the "lost" island of perhaps, just maybe, Taiwan.

Anyway, there's a lot going on in this film... For example, there's also a strange, recurring economic theme that ironically can't be stripped completely from a film that purports to espouse the ideal of a classless future (i.e. the coins that Hong Changqing gives to Qionghua as her "travel money" when he frees her after purchasing her -- the same coins that she later returns to him as her party application fee). There's this theme of transformations and camouflage -- I'm thinking of when the women soldiers "disguise" themselves as peasants so they can infiltrate the home of their former landlord, Nan Batian, or the way Changqing dons this veil of money which protects him from interrogation, which allows him free passage between civilian and "liberated" territories... Nobody is exactly as they seem, like Honglian who is initially thought to be a man or Nan Batian who is perhaps the least dynamic character but still quite slippery in his own ways. But of course, anyone who dons a Communist uniform is always 100%, undeniably good. Even Qionghua's biggest mistake -- her overzealous attempt to assassinate Nan Batian -- is committed while she's in undercover civilian dress. And finally, there's all the spectacular, blockbuster explosions, large crowd scenes, grand military manuevers executed on epic scale. This was a very carefully crafted movie, no doubt about it, deserving of its title as a Chinese "classic", but like the characters within, it's definitely not something that can be taken at face value.

This film narrates the liberation of Tibetan peasants from a corrupt monastic system. The living Buddhas of this new era wear caps adorned with red, five-pointed stars. Wherever they pass through, shackles are broken and roads are built. They hand out tin mugs and freely share food and water with even those deemed the most untouchable. They offer ponies for peasants to ride, instead of riding peasants like human ponies. Who else could these saviors be but the People's Liberation Army?

A lot has changed since I first saw this four years ago...

Wish I had been mediadiarying when I first saw this documentary about eight years ago or so. At the time, I was going through a run of documentaries on the 1960s and 70s, counterculture, Vietnam War and revolutionary movements. I remember thinking this was one of the better ones... don't know why I thought so then, but now I appreciate it partly because true to its title, the film cuts off right at 1969. It leaves the story hanging, acknowledging the impossibility of a tidy conclusion -- the filmmakers don't even finish the People's Park Movement episode, and instead of following a typical narrative trajectory where the counterculture went to shit after Woodstock and the discofied, drug-addled 70s, this documentary remains focused on a specific region (Berkeley, mostly centering on student activism, Oakland and the Black Panthers, and San Francisco hippies) and decade.

Are there problems with this presentation? Sure... it's a pretty white story, even with the jump to Black Panther history and Bobby Seale's animated anecdotes. It barely touches on the global picture, though allusions are made to Japan, France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Mao's Little Red Book as routed through San Francisco Chinatowns. As stated, one objective of these activist groups was to make the cost of overseas war the ungovernability of the home front. The domestic front really is the emphasis here.

My thoughts on this are too complicated to record in detail right now... (copping out).

國家何辛, 有此優秀之子弟
本校何辛, 有此卓越的學生
教育何辛, 得以他們樹立大勇之楷模
興漢深深體念, 教育乃立國之根基
有良好之教育, 方能培養出優秀之青年
報效國家, 繼往開來, 勇往直前, 再接再厲
為我中華民族延續千萬年之生命!