The world film project
Oct. 4th, 2019 11:14 amSo ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jack and I hatched a plan to expand our cultural horizons by watching films from as many different countries as possible. We're working our way down the list of countries from the biggest by population. I don't expect we'll get very far; we don't watch more than half a dozen films in a typical year. But even if we watch films from 20 new countries we wouldn't have seen otherwise, that's still a win.
Of course, we ran into an edge case at the very first step because it turns out that a lot of famous "Chinese" films are in fact made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And I'm reasonably convinced that Taiwan ought to be defined as a separate country, and HK probably too. We ended up with House of flying daggers, directed by Yimou Zhang, which is at least partly Chinese from China.
I enjoyed House of flying daggers. I loved the stylized and very beautiful martial arts scenes, and the amazing costumes, and the chemistry between Jin and Mei. And I loved the first two thirds of the plot, where everybody is multiply double-crossing everybody else. I particularly liked that Mei gets to be a hyper-competent martial arts fighter, not just a damsel. What I didn't love was the ending where it turns into a stupid love triangle, and Mei ends up sacrificing herself for no particularly meaningful cause, since the jealous man who is in love with her kills her true love anyway and it doesn't particularly help the rebellion.
We plan to watch an Indian film this evening. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend? I have a somewhat low tolerance for explicit onscreen violence, and for a date we'd prefer films that aren't about horribly depressing bits of history. Otherwise, even if it's a really obvious classic there's a pretty high chance I haven't seen it, thoughjack might have (we didn't pick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for China, since he's already seen that.) Equally we've left it a bit late to plan, so ideally something we can stream instantly this evening, rather than something we'd need to order from the internet.
(I wouldn't say no to recommendations from the next several large countries. I think we can probably come up with an US American film on our own, but I have no idea what's good from Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan or Nigeria.)
jack and I hatched a plan to expand our cultural horizons by watching films from as many different countries as possible. We're working our way down the list of countries from the biggest by population. I don't expect we'll get very far; we don't watch more than half a dozen films in a typical year. But even if we watch films from 20 new countries we wouldn't have seen otherwise, that's still a win.Of course, we ran into an edge case at the very first step because it turns out that a lot of famous "Chinese" films are in fact made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And I'm reasonably convinced that Taiwan ought to be defined as a separate country, and HK probably too. We ended up with House of flying daggers, directed by Yimou Zhang, which is at least partly Chinese from China.
I enjoyed House of flying daggers. I loved the stylized and very beautiful martial arts scenes, and the amazing costumes, and the chemistry between Jin and Mei. And I loved the first two thirds of the plot, where everybody is multiply double-crossing everybody else. I particularly liked that Mei gets to be a hyper-competent martial arts fighter, not just a damsel. What I didn't love was the ending where it turns into a stupid love triangle, and Mei ends up sacrificing herself for no particularly meaningful cause, since the jealous man who is in love with her kills her true love anyway and it doesn't particularly help the rebellion.
We plan to watch an Indian film this evening. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend? I have a somewhat low tolerance for explicit onscreen violence, and for a date we'd prefer films that aren't about horribly depressing bits of history. Otherwise, even if it's a really obvious classic there's a pretty high chance I haven't seen it, though
jack might have (we didn't pick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for China, since he's already seen that.) Equally we've left it a bit late to plan, so ideally something we can stream instantly this evening, rather than something we'd need to order from the internet. (I wouldn't say no to recommendations from the next several large countries. I think we can probably come up with an US American film on our own, but I have no idea what's good from Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan or Nigeria.)
