Markgway wrote:Masterofoneinchpunch wrote:Do you have the original time?
About 97m.
Thank you. This film does not have anywhere near as many action scenes which usually helps me in seeing a bad pal transfer
.
Back to complaining about City on Fire: read the second chapter "Reeling in the Years" and now almost done with the third "Whose Better Tomorrow."
What I do like about the book is the interviews done for it. I am certainly highlighting quite a bit of it. Unfortunately, too much is on attacking capitalism and quoting Marx. When I first heard the complaints on the book I thought it was exagerated, but she and Hoover draw from the same well too much. I find it interesting that the main reasons Mandarin speakers came here after the war was "wishing to escape Chiang Kai-shek's censorship policies" and yet while later mentioning "A third wave of people began flowing into the colony following hte establishment of the People's Republic in 1949..." yet never mentions in this section Mao by name.
Some interesting quotes from the second chapter (yes I'm picking on a little bit, but still having fun with the book; I probably made a few mistakes here and there transcribing):
"...commercial studios fostered possessive individualist values associated with consumer capitalism while exploiting the Chinese diaspora's curiousity about its culture and history."
"...despite the glaring inequalities present in the colony, movie audiences continued to grow."
"His words have a striking similarity to Marx's description of "the transformation of the laborer into a workhorse, [which] is a means of increasing captial, or speeding up the produciton of surplus value..."" [there is a block quote here that goes on for awhile.]
"provides a disturbing visual reminder of Marx's words."
"...whose consideration of women and sexuality not only deconstructed the ways that cinema 'naturalizes' socially constructed masculine fantasies and ideologies but also problematized essentialism of a 'heterosexual division of the universe.'"
"As Marx noted, the methods of early captialism were 'anything but idyllic.'"
"As Homi Bhabha points out, 'cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in reltion of Self to Other.'"
"...what Uma Magal calls the 'reverse angle' of global cinema."
"...that Ackbar Abbas calls 'postcoloniality that precedes decolonization'"
"...what Michel Pecheux calls 'identification'"
"...affirm Horkheimer and Adorno's depiction of the culture industry as amusement, diversion, and distraction."
The book seems to cover mostly movies from the 90s and the more well known of the earlier films: the third chapter is on
A Better Tomorrow,
A Better Tomorrow II,
The Killer and
Hardboiled.