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A Chinese Ghost Story
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Last edited by Adventure Man; 10-12-2018 at 01:39 PM. |
#2
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This happens to be one of my favorite movies. It's a lot of fun, fast-moving. Runs the gamut of emotions, quirky, silly, beautiful, sad. And it feels like a perfect folk tale come to life--like a living storybook.
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#3
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I should mention that the most recent DVDs feature a "remix" that changes many of the original music tracks around. The audio has been altered quite a bit. If you can find it, I recommend seeing the original version of the film in monaural sound. It's flatter, but the music and sound effects tracks are the way they were when the film was released. The Fortunestar DVD from the mid-1990's is the original version.
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************************ Friend....gooooood! Last edited by crabapple; 12-23-2006 at 08:30 PM. |
#4
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Last edited by Adventure Man; 10-12-2018 at 01:39 PM. |
#5
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I remember the first time I saw this, back in the 90's, I was transfixed. For the first hour, the film sort of straddles a difficult line--you don't know what the hell is going to happen next, whether things are going to take a turn for the horrific, or suddenly become romantic/sensual. And the music score is the running thread that keeps you glued to this indecisiveness. It kind of reminded me of Alan Parsons' "Ladyhawke" soundtrack, punchy splashes of synth-rock laid over a story that takes place in a mythical bygone age.
Producer Tsui Hark's "Vampire Hunters," made fairly recently, is a good companion piece to this--a harder, more violent take on similar subject matter, and incorporating some fresh digital effects. It was nice to see Hark's people up to their old tricks but using new tools. I thought the first ten minutes of "Vampire Hunters" was some of the most intense filmmaking I've seen in years. It's such a neat opening scene that the film never tries to do better for the rest of its running time.
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#6
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Last edited by Adventure Man; 10-12-2018 at 01:39 PM. |
#7
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Not to go on about "A Chinese Ghost Story," but the first thing I noticed was charming about this one was that several people are cut into several pieces BEFORE the opening credits are over.
It seemed to reenforce a rule employed in making "feel-good" movies. In order to make the audience feel really good, you first have to make them feel bad. You need a hell to pull them out of. So in its poetic way, the opening scene here establishes that this is a hard world we're peering into, a frightening and unpredictable world that frequently gets ugly. So when our protagonist wanders into the haunted forest, we already feel that threats in this movie may prove to be quite real.
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************************ Friend....gooooood! |
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