Lawbolisted Powerful

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

w-prince It was the first time of Jia Zhangke to visit three gorges dam, and meantime he was filming about his artist friend, Liu Xiaodong painting the portrait of demolition worker in Si Chuang, Feng Jie. The year of 2006, the monstrous project, three gorges dam was built up on Yangtze River, and the public attention was staying on the side of how will bring the interest to offspring. Nevertheless, behind the national glory, the project itself still remains controversies and generated a group of immigrants called three gorges immigrants who originally lived in the town near the dam that government forced them to move away. Feng Jie is the one of the little town on Yangtze River surrounded by mountains that had to be demolished. The male protagonist, Han was the mining labor in Shanxi, now coming to Feng Jie to seek for his escaped wife and child. Doubtlessly Han was the common figure as a migrant worker in china, and a witness of the transitional life of locals. On the cruise, Han was sitting among workers that the camera captured their indifferent expression while they were looking out toward Yangtze River. Han was one of them, a poor worker who many years ago brought his wife, after having a kid his wife ran away from Shanxi. Feng Jie was alike the ruins of Pompey. At the moment of Han holding the old address of his wife, he was staring blankly to the river. The old town already buried under the water. It is the first hint of transition on the riverside. The nurse, Sheng Hong is an outsider akin to Han, looking for the reunion with his husband. Two years ago, his husband came to Feng Jie working as the manager of demolition and had an affair with a woman. Along the riverside, eventually her husband met and asked Sheng to dance. She left Feng Jie, and divorced without blaming on her husband. There are more symbolized scenes, like the death of the local ambitious and naive young man, and Han and his wife watching the building collapsing as if the end of the world comes. When Jia interpreted his movie, he said, "As tourists here, we still can see the remaining sight of green mountains and moving rivers. Though if reached the land, walked past the street, and entered into families in vicinity, you will grasp there was a bunch of people living in modernity, but remained such poverty. Over one million immigrants had to leave their own land, and two thousands year town was demolished instantly. It seems irrelevant to us as tourists, but at the bottom of our hearts we also suffered what the locals suffered by dramatic transition on life within these years."

bobt145 Jia Zhang-ke has given us a marvelous capsule of China rarely seen on film.His searching husband and wife cross paths looking for their respective mates after years at the only moments the story could have been told.Before the Three Gorges Dam, none of the metaphoric, yet very real destruction of the old towns would have been taking place and three months later they would all be under water.The cinematography allows us to slowly absorb the beauty of the spot on the Yangtze River where the dam is being constructed, while the stark lives of demolition workers play out in contrast.The new China is a runaway engine of modern economy and it is tossing countless lives aside with its speed.These aren't views shown in the films of the previous generation of Chinese directors. Made recently enough to have a direct connection to today, we see a country where cell phones bring the same changes to the people who use them as they have here. We hear and feel the influx of popular music in a land where traditional music is so beautiful.And most of all, we see how the people affected by the future flooding survive, bouncing sometimes numbly from home to shelter as they are evicted from locations with 2,000 years of history.This is a personal film for the director and that too says a lot about the strides the Chinese society has taken since the days of Chairman Mao and even Tiananmen Square.Ever since I figured out the plot line of "The Sixth Sense" after five minutes because of giveaways in the trailer, I have resisted them. If I'm in a theater, fine. But I don't go looking for them.DO NOT see the trailer before the film. Three of the very best and most surprising scene are given away in a short, 50-second promo.But do see the film. Very good.

kraken-840-129508 The film is shot in and around Fengjie, a town in Sichuan Province upstream from the 3 Gorges Dam Project and due to be flooded. The existing town was being demolished and the people relocated to "new Fengjie". The landscape of the river and the Gorges dominate the filmThe film follows 2 stories. Sanming is a coal miner from Shanxi who comes to Fengjie to try to find his ex wife who ran away 16 years previously. He wants to meet their daughter. He locates her brother on a ship in Fengjie who advises him to wait until his wife's ship returns. He joins a gang of labourers demolishing buildings and lives in a boarding house while waiting for his ex wife.Shen Hong is a nurse whose is trying to track down her husband Guo Bin who came to Fengjie 2 years ago. She has someone else in her life now and tracks down Guo Bin through his friend Wang Dongming so she can persuade him to divorce her. These stories run in parallel with each other but the characters never meet.The photography and the pace of the film make the viewer slow down and look for details as the camera unhurriedly pans across a vast landscape. The view is of the river dominated by precipitous hills, with the blocky concrete shapes of modern housing clinging to the slopes. In the context of the Three Gorges Dam project, a vast undertaking affecting millions of people, so the camera captures the vastness of the landscape that humans are struggling to tame. The landscape is a constant and oppressive presence that refuses to go away. The river flows on regardless of what people do.The characters are frequently filmed simply in front of the camera with the view of river and hills in the background maintaining the feeling of the vastness of nature and the smallness of people, reminiscent of the style of traditional Chinese ink painting.When scenes change away from landscapes, the people are framed up in the empty windows of abandoned houses, overlooking demolished buildings, or up against piles of rubble. The chaos of demolition contrasts with the efforts of the people to maintain the routines of their lives, eating, working, sleeping, socializing. The camera in its slow long takes of people looks for details in their lives. These are not heavily made up characters, in fact they are shown just as they are with the rough hewn physiques of manual labourers, bad teeth, scars from the school of hard knocks. The camera lingers like an observer on individuals, allowing the audience time to get to know them and their mannerisms.The dialogue between the personalities is sparse and reticent, with long pauses in which all the unspoken questions are aired and acknowledged. An example of this is the conversation between Sanming and Missy Ma when they meet after 16 years of separation. In this brief exchange this couple find they still have a future together. The undercurrent in these conversations is like the undercurrent of the river, hidden but acknowledged and always moving on. Further on in a scene in a derelict building Ma offers Sanming a White Rabbit toffee which he accepts bites in two and share it with her. With this simple gesture they agree to reactivate their relationship. As they do, suddenly a tall building in the far background is blown up and collapses, suggesting the end of the old and the potential for a new start.The soundtrack compliments the film and provides reminders of themes. A traditional song plays as the tourist ships moves up through the Gorges but it is interspersed with the sounds of demolition. The background to the characters is punctuated by horn blasts from ferries and ships moving out, a scene of labourers hammering down walls has a soundtrack of machinery overlaid onto it. The soundtrack maintains the pace of the film giving the audience a feeling of relentless movement, of the progress of events. In the interaction between the couples, romantic music is heard.The film is rich in symbolism. The characters for liquor, tea, cigarettes, and toffee appear at critical junctions and mirror traditional Chinese elements of life like rice, cooking oil, fuel and salt. Attributed to "Chinese Wasteland" by Shelley Kraicer http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs29/feat_kraicer_still.html accessed 07/09/2010There is a scene where Shen Hong walks past men are rhythmically hammering to no purpose at an abandoned industrial plant. Both Sanming and Shen Hong in their quest for resolutions to their respective relationship problems encounter a young boy wandering aimlessly singing a romantic songThe director wanders into the surreal at times, with the appearance of a UFO streaking across the sky behind Shen Hong. In the restaurant where Sanming waits for his friend, there is the incongruous sight of actors in full Chinese Opera costumes playing Nintendo games The strange building Hong can see from Wang Dongming's apartment, suddenly becomes a rocket ship and blasts off when she turns away, and, at the end of the film as Sanming and his friends are leaving, he turns and sees the incongruous sight of a high wire artist walking a wire strung between two buildings in the process of demolition.Dominant impressions I got from this film were a sense of the vastness of China and Chinese society, the smallness of the humans on the landscape, the relative insignificance of their hopes and dreams. Progress seems like a juggernaut, relentlessly moving onward, pushing aside the people and their hopes for a good life. The river serves as a metaphor for progress. The illuminating factor is the quiet courage of the people as they deal with the circumstances they have to live with, and despite these adverse times push on with their efforts to have a good life.

Alea123 I watched Still Life yesterday night, it was recently released over here in Germany. It's a fantastic movie with gorgeous photography and possibly because the lives, lifestyles and scenery depicted in Still Life were so completely alien to me, it felt like a documentary. Great soundtrack, too. I was literally spell-bound, the movie drew me in completely and I felt quite dazed when I walked out of the cinema. I'd watched the movie with a friend and we got talking about our reactions to the film. I would have loved to quiz the rest of the cinema audience as to their reactions to the movie.Still Life received a good bit of positive press over here in Europe (at least in those magazines/papers covering foreign movies/world cinema) but I also know several people who watched it and left halfway through because they were bored and 'there was nothing happening'. And I bet that this was a fairly typical reaction of the average European/Western cinema-goer. Yes, there is an almost total absence of sprightly dialogue or exciting action (unless you count the two UFOs...) and if you grew up with the classic Western/US style of film-making and your usual film fare is whatever Hollywood movies are shown at your local cinema, then Still Life will come as an unpleasant surprise, maybe because it is simply too different in visual style, content, pace and imagery to the average European/Western movie.Personally, I think there should be more of these type of films over here. I really hope Still Life will be released on DVD in Europe otherwise I'll have to order it from a website or something and hang the expense!