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Sunday, October 12, 2014

Good Men, Good Women - A Film Review



I saw Good Men, Good Women at the Moving Image museum , and really enjoyed it a lot. It's from the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, who the museum is paying tribute to. I saw one of his movies a couple of years ago, Three Times, about a love story told in three historical time periods with the same actors as different people. His movies have this touch of humanity that I really like, where scenes are slow, are about small details with people and their lives, and the storytelling has a very artsy, unlinear way of being presented. 

In this film, it is about an actress who is preparing to act in a 1940s-set movie about real-life Taiwanese revolutionaries who came to China to join in the anti-Japanese resistance, only to suffer in China after the war due to political activities of the 1950s. The actress is having flashbacks to her life with her deceased boyfriend, a handsome rogue with criminal connections, while also imagining herself acting in the film yet to be filmed.The film-within-a-film parts are in black-and-white, while the present day(1995) parts are in color. 

The movie doesn't have a huge plot to it, but I found it fascinating, and I really do like the kinds of artsy movies that came out of 1990s East Asia that were experimental and hip and played around with storytelling. I really like Wong Kar-Wai, for example, for Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, 2046, and Happy Together. I will probably checkout more of Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies, since I like his style so much.

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