LOOKING FOR A PAGE-TURNER

bodyguards and assassins

all-star cast

Big alarm today. I had a long string of messages from friends saying they'd had a friend request from me, knew it was not me, saying: You've been hacked. My head went blank. I couldn't do anything. A Hong Kong film in the mail today, Bodyguards & Assassins. It rides the borderline between historical drama, year 1906, and kung fu excess, which wasn't so bad. Plenty of blood-letting, but quietly with knives and swords. Hong Kong films before Hong Kong went back to China, year 2000, had more gunshots than words in the script. They had become ridiculous. You can only do so much dramatically with continuous guns going off. Mainland China isn't a place to encourage guns. Seldom see guns in a mainland film unless it is military. I liked Hong Kong films somewhat before 2000, for the hyper-action that transcended plot. Who ever heard of a plot? Hong Kong thrillers have changed dramatically for the better since 2000. They have become more involved with mind. You have the gangsters and the detectives playing mind games, saving guns for punctuation. I've seen some that have remarkably complex mind games going back and forth. It's like they have become chess games of the mind. This film today had a number of current Hong Kong actors. Andy Lau is a superb actor, just as good a director, has made countless films. He played in The House of the Flying Daggers, among the most beautiful films of my life, with mainland actress Zhang Ziyi, who was also in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, another of the great ones made by Ang Lee. A mainland director, Zhang Yimou, has made a string of what I put up there among the most beautiful films ever, allowing that there are many. He made Raise The Red Lantern with Li Gong, an actress who steals my heart in every film I see her in.

 

li gong

in raise the red lantern

 

I sat in my home entertainment chair holding Caterpillar wondering what to do about the facebook hacking. That kind of thing puts my head in a knot and it feels like a bale of cotton between my ears. I needed Time Out. A couple hours of jumping, kicking, fighting, stabbing, slashing, mixed with beautiful Chinese clothes, a hyper-dramatic telling of an historical event I'm interested to know about, to see dramatized. It was the time of the end of the dynasty and China reduced to nothing after the Japanese, Europeans and Americans bled it dry. It was the time of revolution all over China. This was a failed attempt in Hong Kong in 1906, maybe notable for being the first of a long string of failed revolts that eventually succeeded with Mao. It was the right movie to see for the moment, an escape movie when I wanted to escape from, delay going through figuring out how to change password on facebook. It's all I can do to surf the thing. Getting down into all those boxes of doing this and that, I'm a slow learner because it's too much. I clicked here and there, all of it leading me to nowhere, except finding by chance I could not repeat, there are several people on facebook with my name. I had no idea. Even using the lower case j. Mine happened by mistake. When I saw later what I'd done, I said leave it. Stumped, I called friend Lynn, who had sent notice of the hacking and recommended changing password. She told me the trick, I thanked her, and it was easy from there on. She suggested making it complex so a robot can't find it easily and changing it every other month or so. I dislike complex passwords. It's time to get over it and join the modern world one more step. I don't mind. I feel like I have some understanding of the changes going on and embrace the changes. The changes I don't like so much have to do with how everything is done in detail now, minute, exacting, complex detail. It gets tiresome.

 

zhang ziyi and andy lau

in the house of the flying daggers

 

It makes me want to turn off the computer and read some more about Marcel Duchamp. Yesterday, driving into town for groceries, I dropped a couple of books in a plastic bag into the library's outdoor return box. They were selling a large table full of books, a dollar for as many as you can get in a bag. I'd been wanting to find something to read that is a page-turner. I wanted to dive into something that became obsessive until it's finished. I tried a Tom Clancy and John LeCarre. All I learned from first page of each one is why I've never read them. I could not read 700 pages of Tom Clancy prose unless I was in jail and there was nothing else but a Billy Graham book. I dropped them off in the return bin. Give Doug something to wonder about in the morning. I did not want to throw them away. An awful lot of people like reading these two writers, so let one find it. So much for my page-turner. I started reading in the Duchamp book by Pierre Cabanne, and it is my page-turner. I've read a little bit about Duchamp, none of it really satisfying. I like Cabanne's writing, he gives an understanding of Duchamp the man, the individual human being, people he knew, places he went. I dive in when I open it and stay there until a good stopping place. Every page has fabulous color pictures. My ultimate picture book. It really is a plus to have such good reading illustrated so profusely and profoundly. Next I'll get into a big picture book about Constantin Brancusi, Romanian artist in Paris. This book I can sit and look at pictures in without end. The text is by two Romanian artists whose apartment was above his in Paris. They painted and he did sculpture. They knew him better than anybody they knew. He was the same as family with them, expats in a foreign language. They could talk their home language together. This book, too, has good, interesting text. I've read around in it, though not yet straight through.
 

constantin brancusi

bird in space

black marble

 

I can get used to reading texts in art books. I have several I bought for the pictures and paid the text no mind, all of them. I did read the text in The Art of Zen, by Stephen Addis. Great big Wow. Again, illustrated with sublime art on every page. I can get used to this. I have plenty I know will be excellent reading. One I know has good text is about Kurt Schwitters, whose art I love, and I know I'll love the text. One about Larry Rivers. Two about David Hockney, one by Hockney himself. I'm looking at the future of my reading. I've come to a place that fiction doesn't really do it for me like it used to. Non-fiction doesn't draw me anymore either. Even history reading doesn't draw me much in this time. Brancusi next. Every time I have laid eyes on a Brancusi in a museum I have felt in touch with the holy. I feel in touch with grace, like walking behind a good dog on deer trails through mountain forest. I've been wondering what to do about my malaise with being bored by reading largely. Feeling that way with movies too, waiting for one to astonish me and it seldom happens anymore. At this time in the life I have no interest in anything but art, to appreciate it. Another good art book I love is Minimalism, by James Meyer. No extensive text, but very informative paragraphs with each work and artist. Beautiful book. Yes, it is time to dive into my art book collection for good page-turning reading with beautiful pictures on every page. One on Robert Motherwell too. This solves my reading issues. It would be interesting to read a history of Persia, but I believe I'd like reading about Robert Motherwell's art a bit more, now, in this present mind. I've always, until today, seen my art books as picture books, uninterested in the text. I wanted the images raw without art-crit in my head. A little bit of reading, for context, Harold Rosenberg, biography of Whistler. Never even considered reading the text in the art books. I've suddenly learned they can be quite good reading, and just like in first grade, lots and lots of color pictures.      

 

zhang ziyi

in the house of the flying daggers

 

 

 

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THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS - ZHANG YIMOU

Watched The House Of Flying Daggers again tonight with my friends from Georgia visiting for a few days. It's my friends the Carpenters, Lucas and Judy, from Conyers, Georgia, off I-20 east of Atlanta. Daughter Meredith and her husband Greg, here from San Francisco, came with them, and Greg's mother, Ruth, from Chicago. We ate a good meal prepared by Meredith and Greg, PhDs in biology and chemistry, respectively, as good in the kitchen as they are in the laboratory. Meredith is working in a new field involving DNA from ancient teeth, like Leakey's Lucy, that kind of ancient. I'd left about a dozen DVDs there last time Lucas and Judy were here. Greg and Meredith chose The House Of Flying Daggers. I was happy to see it again. Haven't seen it in a few years. Looking at what I love about it, I find it is largely a visual fest of colors and flowing lines. The story is simple and complex. It actually is both. It's very simple. And it's rather complex. Early on, Judy asked of one of the actors, Takeshi Kaneshiro, "Is he a bad guy?" I didn't know what to say. I never think of characters in terms of good guys and bad guys. I just watch and see what happens. I said I didn't know. I've seen the film half a dozen times, but never thought of him as a good or bad guy. Now that it's over, I can't see that either word has meaning for his character. He was both and neither.


It always does me good to see Zhang Ziyi in any film she's in. I believe she had a small, but notable role in Lust-Caution, the film of the underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s. She was the ninja girl who stole the sword and flew through the air with it in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. She had a role in The Hero with Jet Li, most memorable in the sword fight among the trees full of falling red leaves blowing around them in the wind, her last scene. I think it's Maggie Chung who defeated her in the scene of swirling reds. Zhang Yimou, the director, makes some gorgeous films, lush with colors, with flow, with feeling. His stories are minimal, yet emotionally complex. In a big gray palace with huge columns, silk draperies of yellow-green suspended from the ceiling made a flowing labyrinth for a sword fight between the king and a would-be assassin. In The House Of The Flying Daggers, the sword fight at the end happens in a landscape of autumn in full color. Snow starts falling as the sword fight goes on. By the time the fight is over, the snow is about 4 inches deep. Another time, I watched the brief documentary, the Making Of, that goes with the film. Zhang Yimou said while they were filming the sword fight the snow started falling and he decided to go ahead and keep on filming as the snow fell. It made a scene that was out of this world and very much of this world.


The visuals in varieties of forest in autumn, vertical dark lines with the pointilist orange and yellow dots of leaves among them, vertical white lines with pointilist yellow leaves. Then there is the bamboo grove of vertical green bamboo poles with leaves growing up high in the canopy. Running through the vertical green lines, soldiers in green uniforms striding through leafy air above, chasing Zhang Ziyi and her partner, Takeshi Kaneshiro the good guy/bad guy. She's in love with him, but the other one, Andy Lau, is in love with her, has waited for her 3 years. They're the ones who sword fought in the end. At the beginning, they were army buddies stationed together, men loyal to the emperor, or so we believed then. Much deception going on, which is uncovered, step by step, by sequence of events, until at the very end all deceptions come clean. Andy Lau played the man in waiting for three years, a member of the House of the Flying Daggers, also a spy inside the Chinese army. In Hong Kong, Andy Lau is a director of some good men-with-guns films, romantic comedies, and he acts in several of his films. He's one of the Chinese actors and directors of note in this time. He makes a good gangster movie. Search his name at netflix and a long list of movies come up.


By now I've seen most of Zhang Yimou's films, all the ones I can find at netflix, each of them several times. They're the kinds of films I watch a second time before returning them. Landscape is important in all his films. This one used the landscape of forest from the inside, then at the end seeing it from a meadow outside the forest. In a forest like the horses were running and walking through, no limbs were on the ground, no low-growing limbs, the ground evenly carpeted in fallen leaves at the same time the trees are full of colored leaves. The entire screen is covered with golden reddish orange of autumn leaves on the ground and in the trees, vertical dark lines of tree trunks, a man in a purple robe riding his horse through the scene, sometimes walking, sometimes running. Zhang Ziyi wears a flowing yellow-green outfit -- can't call it a dress, can't call it a robe -- running through the bamboo forest of vertical green lines just a shade darker than her clothes. He, the Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, wore purple through the scenes of vertical green lines and the scenes of the vertical dark lines with the golden ground below and leaves above.


I hold Zhang Yimou up there with other directors like Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, Kristof Kieslowski and Roman Polanski of Poland, Andrei Tarkovsky of Russia, several from France, Kurosawa of Japan, Peter Greenaway from England, Lars von Trier of Denmark. I know before I start a film by Zhang Yimou, I will be satisfied all the way through it, every scene. He also made Raise The Red Lantern from a short novel by Su Tong. He enhanced the story visually, made it a fest of colors and shapes, beautifully dressed people moving among the symphonies of both brilliant and dull, warm colors around them that sometimes are cold. His film, Ju Dou, with Gong Li, happens in a place that dyes silk red. Red silk banners hang drying and flowing in the breeze through much of the film. The first time I saw it was without subtitles. Saw it later with subtitles and all I missed was names and relationships, like uncle, cousin, like that. I've seen Raise The Red Lantern several times and read the novel, know the story fairly well. It's time to see it without subtitles. I may want to look at other of his films without subtitles. I find I see the colors and compositions much better without the words to read. I don't mind reading them, but that time I saw Ju Dou without subtitles was memorably beautiful. It taught me I don't need to understand literal meanings. The tone of voice of what the actors are saying often carries the meaning. I like to hear the Chinese language too. I hear it best without subtitles. The House Of The Flying Daggers would be good without subtitles. The visuals tell the story and words fill in the blanks.


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