Ye Liu

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City Of Life And Death Trailer


Set in China 1937 around the battle of Nanjing. The Japanese army has just taken the capital city of Nanjing and what was to follow the citizens could never envisage. In the weeks following the takeover thousands of Chinese POW's and citizens were brutally treated and murdered.

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Postmen In The Mountains Review


Excellent
If you want to make a grown man cry at the movies, give him a story about an estranged father and son who reconcile and come to love and respect each other before it's too late. Postmen in the Mountains is such a tale, told amidst the stunning mountain scenery of China's remote Hunan province. It's a simple and moving story, a walk in the woods that leads to a beautiful and uplifting conclusion.

The unnamed father (Rujun Ten) is a rural postman whose job entails humping a huge backpack full of mail on a three-day walk through the mountains, stopping at all the tiny villages along the way. He's done it several times a month for 25 years, never missing a trip. Now the postal bureaucrats have forced him into retirement because his legs, ruined by the arduous route, have started to give out. As the film begins, the father has passed the route on to his son, and the son is ready to make his first trip.

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Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Review


OK
One has to wonder what gave Sijie Dai the impression that his screenplay for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress -- an adaptation of his own best-selling novel and co-scripted by Nadine Perront -- was structurally sound. About three-quarters of the way into his story, and in one of the more baffling and ineffectual transitions to be found in recent movie memory, Dai jerks his narrative forward by two decades literally in the blink of an eye. The sudden shift only makes Balzac's weaknesses in the character department that much more glaring. As we watch his characters, aged now by makeup, and reminiscing about their teenage years after a long separation, we become aware of how superficial our understanding of them actually is. That awareness robs his flash-forward technique of any poignancy it might otherwise have had and points perhaps to his lack of fluency with the film form.

Set amid lush mountains in an isolated region in China in the early 1970s, Dai gives us a gently paced semi-autobiographical account of two teenage boys, Ma (Ye Liu) and Luo (Kun Chen) who arrive at a Maoist camp for "re-education." Because they are the offspring of the "reactionary" elite -- the very class that Mao sought to purge during his Cultural Revolution -- the boys are prescribed a daily regimen of lugging buckets of shit to fertilize the local rice fields alternated with tedious shifts in a copper mine. Through Dai's eyes, though, what ordinarily might be a rather bleak portrayal of suffering is viewed through rose-tinted lenses. The Communist Committee chief of their village (Shuangbao Wang) is, true to fashion, a by-the-book ideologue. He wants to come off as a hardliner, but he's won over easily enough by Ma's claim that the Mozart lieder he plays on his violin is, in fact, a tribute to Mao. This would be fine if it led to a more complex dynamic between the chief and the boys, but this cheeky repartee goes no further.

Continue reading: Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Review

Ye Liu

Ye Liu Quick Links

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Ye Liu Movies

City Of Life And Death Trailer

City Of Life And Death Trailer

Set in China 1937 around the battle of Nanjing. The Japanese army has just taken...

Postmen in the Mountains Movie Review

Postmen in the Mountains Movie Review

If you want to make a grown man cry at the movies, give him a...

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Movie Review

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Movie Review

One has to wonder what gave Sijie Dai the impression that his screenplay for Balzac...

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