posted by f8daniel on February 28, 2011 | 18 comments
After all the lessons about 盗梦空间，what's with the total absence of discussion. I know you all care about this! I'm watching the CCTV6 rebroadcast at the moment (北京时间2月28日11点46分)and it's already won two. 加油！都怪泡泡中文的腐败！
Will check it out. Wasn't actually aware they were getting televised. :(
@f8daniel,
But I heard it didn't win 最佳电影奖!! Although I like King's Speech a lot as well, someone in Popup tower may have got his heart ~~
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
@Echo,
唉，我还是没有看完国王的演讲！我到现在只看了一半电影。到目前为止我很喜欢这部电影，我觉得是电影最佳的方面就是《杰弗里·拉什》的演讲。这部电影由于作家和制片人和导演都是英国人所以电影的幽默方式比美国的有文化修养的。虽然我喜欢这种有文化修养的作品不说可是我没想到一个二十四岁的中国女孩子能欣赏阳春白雪，真带来了一个惊喜。了不起！
Did "How to Train Your Dragon" get a China release? It got robbed at the Oscars. Got nominated for Best Animated Film and Best Score, but won neither. IMHO it should have won Best Score, rather than "the Social Network".
Echo and I saw it at Sanlitun in Beijing, so it was definitely in theaters. Hard to say how widely it was distributed though, since I think it came out around the same time as the Confucius flick, which was pushed pretty hard by government and media.
I was bummed to see that "Winter's Bone" didn't get anything. I saw that while I was back in the States over Christmas and was really, really impressed: it's a bleak little movie, and hard to summarize, but it left an impression in a way that not many movies I've seen recently have.
@trevelyan Isn't it an adorable little movie? I feel like it's a response to xenophobia, and I call it a hugely successful one. Plus, the dragon is cute.
@Brendan My only exposure to Winter's Bone is a recent Wayne's World revival in which Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey giggle about the title.
@palafx,The script and voice acting were both fantastic. And the dragon was cute too, although it bothered me after the fact that the film was a bit fascist at heart, inducing social cohesion at the climax by rallying everyone around new acts of violence against a bigger dragon. I felt sorry for the poor thing, especially since all it wanted to do was eat and hide out in its cave.In other news, I just looked up the winners and it turns out Christopher Nolan won his awards for cinematography, and sound editing and... sound mixing? Is this for real? I feel appalled for the Academy just hearing this. And Nolan and the cast have to be in a state of shock. Here they makes the best film Hollywood has seen in years and get the shaft because... because.... (head explodes).
@Xiao Hu,
哈哈哈，谢谢！好莱坞的电影有时候有点儿重量不重质，英国的很多电影好多了，Inception也是，King's Speech也是。我看电影是越来越挑剔了。
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
I must admit that I am a bit shocked to realize that you guys were actually serious in your praise of Inception. Until now I wanted to believe that it was just another Rick Astley bit :-) Not that Inception is not an OK movie, actually it's quite enjoyable, but fail to see what's so great about it. Cinematography, sound editing and sound mixing sounds just about right for me as the categories for which Inception was standing out. All the rest was somewhere between OK and pretty good. What categories do you think it should have gotten awards for? Direction? Acting? :-) [and in general I really appreciate De Caprio's acting, but there he was cruising].
Otherwise, during the holidays I watched the dragon animation with my brother and his kids and I found it very enjoyable. I sort of agree with David in that I did not quite understand why the giant badass creature had to be destroyed (but in fact the entire subplot about that creature did not make much sense at all)
@jyh,We may have been tongue-in-cheek with the dialogues, but I genuinely enjoyed Inception and would have given it best film, director and screenplay. Certainly best screenplay.My somewhat unorthodox reading is that Michael Caine plays God and we're meant to understand the film as Cobb's allegorical journey towards faith. The short version is that limbo represents the mortal world and Matthew 7.24 explains why building castles on the beach is such a bad thing. Throw in the sophisticated water imagery (it represents the subconscious) and a films-are-dreams-too subtext and Nolan has given us a film that's not only fun as a mind-twisting heist film, but amazingly intelligent too. It absolutely rewards repeat viewings.I've chatted with people who couldn't identify emotionally with the characters, which is a fair enough critique. And Echo keeps referring to Leo as 怪叔叔. But I didn't have either problem and suspect that the issues most people have with the script are really failures to understand what it is doing.
@trevelyan
What really took the movie from "alright" to "amazing" for me was the credit song. Did you recognize Jonsi from Sigur Ros? I did. Movie about vikings: "Okay then." Movie about vikings followed by Icelandic post-rock: "SHEER GENIUS".
There are supposed to be sequels in the near future, as the movies are based on a series of children's novels.
@jyh - I didn't have as strong a reaction to the movie as David did (though I did enjoy it, and ended up watching it once with him and Echo and once with my girlfriend), but Inception did make me go back and reread Borges, first in Andrew Hurley's translation and then in the Spanish, and anything that can make me go back and dust off a seriously mothballed language has got to be good. For what it's worth, I think the two are similar only insofar as that they start with a relatively simple (but neat) idea, work that idea through to its logical conclusions, and then leave matters where they are. I don't think it would make my Top Ten, but it's a pretty good movie.For what it's worth, and while I haven't seen all of the movies nominated, the one that really left an impression on me is Winter's Bone. I couldn't really say why that was: it's a pretty unrelentingly grim little movie, and it bears - thankfully - more or less zero relationship to the life I've lived or the people I know, but I'll find myself thinking about it every now and then, which is more than I can say for most films. I enjoyed watching The Social Network, but ultimately it didn't do a lot for me. It's very well-made, and well-acted, and well-written, but there were a lot of things about it that just didn't ring true to me, and it seemed to be trying just a little too hard to be a Citizen Kane for the internet generation.PS: David is sincere in his love for Rick Astley, too. Pass it on.
@Echo,
我看电影本来就很挑剔。我觉得好莱坞的电影越来越矫揉造作的，尤其是情节和对白方面的。现在的作家不看重现实，虚幻太随便，就是说一个作家想要故事情节发生某些事情一定要发生。无论可信不可信，对现在自恋的好莱坞作家不重要。因此现在的好莱坞大片儿包含了太多缺乏创意，怪不得电影这么无法令人信服。
以下就是一个恰当的例子:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_Pass_(2011_film)
@trevelyan
I did not say that the movie was bad. I simply was not as impressed as you guys seem to be. In fact, one of the things that really bothered me about Inception I often find enjoyable in other movies: How it skillfully combines elements and ideas from many books, transposing or tweaking them enough that I couldn't quite identify the source anymore, to the point that it really itched. On the other hand, one thing that I never like, and for me was overwhelming in Inception was the impression of being in a third-person-perspective video game with a bunch of generic cardboard NPCs and 2-3 "quest" NPCs. Michael Caine is of course one of these "quest" NPCs. You see him as God; I see him as Quest NPC #1 who just stands there, waiting for you to bring back Item#23 so that he can give you a hint on how to proceed to the next plot point.
@brendan
Yes, Borges is one of the authors that Inception kept nagging me about, but also Lovecraft (his "Randolph Carter" series of novellas), and a number of SF authors (Dick, for sure, authors of the "jack-in" cyberpunk persuasion, etc.). Inception did not specifically push me to reread anything because I watched it abroad, and by the time I was back to my books other stimuli were driving my re-read urges (I re-read a lot, fragments or chapters). I guess our views on Inception are not *that* different. I think it's a pretty good movie that I would not mind seeing again. It's just that *something* that I could not quite put my finger on kept annoying me. Nothing like my strong negative reaction to any Tim Burton movie, but I remember being remember being annoyed throughout the movie, both times I watched it. :-)
@jyh - I've been meaning to go back and reread Lovecraft for a while - the last time was probably about ten years ago, though in recent years China Mieville's novels have given me the idea that I really should go back and look over Lovecraft again. I've got a few books in the to-read queue at the moment, and a more or less ungodly amount of translation work (including a very cool project that might get announced here once it's done), but I've been planning to take a vacation in May, so...Interesting that you mention Tim Burton. I didn't care much for most of his recent stuff, but enjoyed Big Fish immensely; then again, I'm a sucker for magical realism, even in celluloid form. (To which end, by the way, I always recommend 韩少功's work, particularly 马桥词典, which was translated by Julia Lovell as "A Dictionary of Maqiao.")
@Brandon - For me Arkham House's volume "At the Mountains of Madness" contains some of the very best of Lovecraft's work. Some unknowable horror stuff, but also the witch house story and the cycle of Dunsany-inspired Randolph Carter "Dreamland" stories. I really loved those and they had a huge impact on me when I first read them, in French, circa end of high-school. Agree Re. Mieville, "Perdido Street Station" is one of my favorite SF novels of the last... Blast, I went to check the date and it came out more than 10 years ago, and then the other one I was going to mention among best "in last 10 years" (Swanwick's "Iron Dragon's Daughter") is even older. Well, at least Gene Wolfe had the usual bunch of great books in the last 10 years. Thanks for the 韩少功 recommendation. I will definitely try.
Regarding Burton, the tragic thing is, I generally tremendously enjoy good magical realism. I have high respect for Burton's vision and skill. Unfortunately there is something about the aesthetics of his movies that completely creeps me out in a not-enjoyable-at-all way (compared, say, to Burton's big influence, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," which creeps me out in a good way). It's something about color and the arrangement of objects. What I feel is a combination of nausea and the impression of going back home to find it has been burglarred. :-)
@jyh, @Brendan,
Loved Perdido Street Station but didn't enjoy the sequels as much as Brendan did. If you're a sci-fi fan you might be interested to hear that 江苏教育出版社 has translated a number of Dick's works into Chinese. The quality is up-and-down as with the originals, but I really enjoyed their translation of Man in the High Castle:
http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=8661334
Share your thoughts on Burton. As far as Nolan goes, I was actually turned-off a bit by Memento, and didn't come around until seeing The Prestige.