红酒·绿茶 / Red Wine & Green Tea / Vin Rouge et Thé Vert

看好电影如读好书，不仅娱乐，更加引人思考。在这方面，美国电影一向乏善可陈。记忆中最后一次给我留下印象的就只有时隔九年原版人马重聚的续作“ Before Midnight（2013） ”。发现这部让人耳目一新的“ Captain Fantastic（2016） ”纯属意外。 Viggo Mortensen饰演的父亲Ben带着六个孩子在华盛顿州的深山老林中过着与世隔绝的原始生活，每天劳动采食打猎，打水烧柴，自给自足。然而与阿米希部落（Amish Community）不同的是，他们在烛火下读的书，不是《圣经》，而是《量子力学》《战争与和平》等等人类历史留下的精华。Ben与他的孩子们亦师亦友，每天的训练项目身心兼备。虽然在美国，你却看不到超重的人；Ben的孩子们各个强壮如运动员。虽然在美国，你却看不到沉迷于社交网站、电子游戏、真人秀、垃圾食品、甚至毒品的小孩；Ben的孩子们都把时间花在了劳动和读书上面。 先不问这样的嬉皮士家庭可不可能存在，这个如柏拉图《理想国》般的非常家庭立刻让我陷入了思考：现代社会让人类不用再花很多时间去觅食，可人们把省出来的时间用来做什么了？现代生活的各种便利，真的让人们变得更健康、更快乐了吗？人们在得到现代生活的便利的同时，失掉了什么？值得吗？父母应该怎么做，才能让子女不陷入现代社会的各种陷阱，荒废大好青春年华？ Ben偶尔出山，交换一些山上没有的物品，同时借用小店的电话与外界保持必要的联系。一天，一个电话让Ben泪流满面，以至于第二天带全家出远门。这个非常家庭在现代美国的历险记就此展开。可想而知，许多我们司空见惯的事物在这家小孩的眼中都变得新鲜离奇。他们的独特视角不得不让我们重新掂量很多我们默认的选择。 影片的配乐特别对我的胃口：Glen Gloud的Goldberg Variations，Yo-Yo Ma的Bach Cello Suites。最出彩的是影片最后一个民谣版的“Sweet Child o' Mine"，喜欢音乐的朋友一定不要错过。 故事的最后，Ben意识到他的教育方式走到了另一个极端，决定让孩子们自己作选择。孩子们英明地选择了一个令人满意的折衷，从此过上幸福的生活。 虽然我知道整个故事都是真人童话，但如果你也是家长，就很可能会跟我一样，无比希望美梦成真。

After watching "The Counselor (2013)" by Ridley Scott on Netflix, I couldn't help but searching online desperately for meaning. A blog post named  "The Counselor: Frequently Asked Questions." struck my eyes with its first question: Q: What the fuck did I just watch? Exactly! I felt so vindicated. The blogger went on to try her/his best to make sense of this film, like a kid trying to put together pieces of a broken porcelain vase. It was a nice try but it just doesn't hold up. I agree with the blogger that the overwhelmingly negative reviews can be largely blamed on a bad advertising campaign, which sold this film for something it is not: an action thriller. When the audience find out in the end, they felt cheated and negative reviews ensured. However, I wasn't a victim of false expectation; I watched the film with little prior knowledge except for the short, cryptical synopsis on Netflix. All I knew was that it was a Ridley Scott movie starrin...

As a long-time Tintin fan, I was so excited to learn that Montreal would be the first to screen The Adventures of Tintin (2011)  in North America. So I wasted no time, "not a moment to lose" as Tintin would say, in buying the tickets online at my favorite downtown movie theatre,   Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal . I was a little bit concerned because the title of the movie was presented in French, "Les aventures de Tintin", but after 3 years living in the very bilingual city that is Montreal, I have got used to people switching between or mixing English and French all the time. "It's downtown, the heart of anglophone culture", I said to myself, "even if they were so obliged to show Tintin in its absolutely original tongue, French, they would at least  show it with English subtitles to be politically correct." I was dead wrong. In hindsight, I was in denial that I made a mistake. Even when we walked into the room with a "VF" sign,...

If you live in the United States long enough and watch movies a lot, you would certainly be disappointed by the stupidity of the mainstream Hollywood flicks. With their enormous budgets and gigantic marketing machinery, unfortunately, stupid Hollywood flicks dominate the world, not to mention the States. That was why I loved The Charles , a cozy independent movie theatre which shows some fantastic films that falls into one of the following categories: low-budget, independent, foreign and art. I always felt my brain was working again after I saw a movie in The Charles. If you are a movie junkie in US, you would certainly want to live in one of the following two cities: New York and Los Angeles. Why? Because these are the places they put up some movies and decide whether they will show it nationally. As you can imagine, many good but not so popular movies never made it to the next step. Thanks to technological advance, they would be made into dvds so those who like it could see it eventu...

Saw the much anticipated Ang Lee film "Lust, Caution" in the Charles Theatre . The reaction from the general public in United States differed a lot from the Chinese community: While the Americans, with their proud lack of history, yawned it as "yet another period drama with some sex", as exemplified in this New York Times review , the Chinese, with a much wider historical context, paid a lot more attention, to say the least. The film is based on a (very) short story by Eileen Chang (张爱玲), who in turn based it on a true story. Unlike the real life heroine, who was allegedly a determined patriot and femme fatele , the protagonist in the novel and the film was reluctant to be a spy and confused from the struggle between sense and sensibility. Do I really care which government I am living with? Aren't good meals and good sex all that we want? Asked Ms. Chang, who was a longtime mistress of a high ranking official in the Japanese-supported collaborationist govern...

It might not be the other way around but of all the people that I know, those who have a good taste in food would hardly be bores. I grew up in a place where food was one of the most important things in everyday life and whether you were good at it could make or break a relationship. So it's not surprising that Sichuan or Szechuan Cuisine becomes the most popular, and ubiquitous, cuisine in China, from Beijing to Tibet. What amazed me was that not only did people in my province know how to enjoy good food, but how well everybody was in making it. In fact, from early on I knew for a fact that my parents were just about average when it came to cooking and my sister and I would even complain about it from time to time. Looking back, we took too many things for granted. Not every kid in my town grows up to be a chef, of course. But to enjoy and to appreciate a good meal is the least I can do. If you are the same, you would probably enjoy "Ratatouille" , a story about a rat wh...

Nobody has thought a story about a lavishing French queen can be so modern, American and feministic until Sofia Coppola 's "Marie Antoinette" . Half through this movie, when I started to get a little bit tired of her luxurious life style and extravagant fashion taste, I couldn't help wondering: am I watching a lost episode of "Sex and the City" ? No, I don't have a problem with SATC. (In fact, I am a fan of the early seasons of it, i.e., before it was unfortunately transformed into a hyped-up soap opera by its own star, Sarah Jessica Parker.) The reason I brought up SATC was that it shared, I think, a lot of ingenious perspectives as well as self-obsessive ignorance with this movie. First of all, it was a bold artistic move to use rock music like Bow Wow Wow 's iconic "I Want Candy" as the theme song while Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" was included so reluctantly. The moment I noticed that, I knew it was not going to be the movie...

I felt so guilty after watching the stupid movie "300" at the enthusiastic urge of my friend. The only way to justify my action was the realization of this hilarious review by A.O. Scott, a veteran film critic for NY Times. The truth is, sadly, that stereotype sells and stupidity prevails. Lots of filmmakers wasted their gift (and our money) on projects that may be artistically interesting, but intellectually boring, naïve, absurd and/or insulting. It's so univesal that you don't have to try hard to name a few: "Hero", "Memoirs of a Geisha", "The Barber of Siberia" all fall into this category. Fortunately time will do its justice. Let those stupid movies be washed away by time like plastic bags be blown away by the wind.

M. Night Shyamalan might not agree but "The Village" (2004) was, to me obviously, a political satire of Communism, a profoundly flawed and hopelessly naive social theory. The fact that a self-appointed "best ever" human society had to be built on lies and determent of "Those We Don't Speak Of", which properly refered to the overwhelming propaganda and ferocious censorship every Communist regime had to rely upon, was ironically sad. Even if the decision of living an eighteenth centry Communist-like life was made by a group of benevolent and presumably wise people like your parents or grandparents, the movie posed the thought-provoking question without asking: Do I or do I not have the right to choose my own way of living? To me, it is out of question.

We had an " Oscar Night" party in my apartment and witnessed "Brokeback Mountain"'s unbelievable loss to "Crash" in the Best Picture category. And congratulations to Ang Lee , one of the best Chinese directors of our time and now the most successful in Hollywood!

Saw a few good European movies recently. Two in French: "Les Invasions barbares" (The Barbarian Invasions) and "Comme une image" (Look at me); two in Spanish: "La Mala educación" (Bad Education) and "Hable con ella" (Talk to her). They successfully catched the subtlety of human relationships (as opposed to Hollywood-style phony emotions) and delivered a strong sense of humanity through (extra)ordinary eroticism. Probably only "Before Sunset" and "Before Sunrise" can be mentioned here for American cinema.

Once you spend a substantial amount of time (wasted) on public TV, you will get to know a lot of commercials, some of which I found very entertaining. In order to reinforce the viewers' memory without boring them, a series of commercials delivering the same message through various situations or characters within a predetermined form becomes popular: CapitalOne, Geico, MasterCard, Volkswagen, among others, are using it quite successfully. For example, a MasterCard commercial will inevitably enumerate three merchandises each followed by its price and the fourth thing, usually not a merchandise at all, and its price: priceless. Then it concludes with the catchphrase: "There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's MasterCard." (An interesting episode actually mocks itself by saying "blah blah blah: blah dollars" three times.) Unlike MasterCard, which has been running its commercial series for a long time, Geico started quite recently. T...

When I was watching "Sunset Blvd." , I couldn't help thinking of "Mulholland Dr." . These two films resemble each other in not only the names and locations but also in their equally witty plots, profound satires and powerful casts. Of course the latter, after fifty years of evolution of film as an art and as an industry, is more sophisticated in technologies and story-telling techniques which are unique to films as opposed to, e.g., plays. It is a pleasure to compare them.

Saw "Not Another Teen Movie" again and felt it was really underestimated. They put a lot of efforts in this "teen movie of all teen movies" and you would appreciate it much more if you were familiar with/tired of all the teen movies and their clichés it was referring to/laughing at. Accidentally saw another teen movie "Mean Girls" by Lindsay Lohan. You still get tons of those clichés but teens/we just can't get enough of them, can they/we?

Watched "Chicago the Movie" on cable. It was a nice adoption which exploited advantage of the forms of both motion picture and musical play. The cast was stunning for any film and Zellweger (Roxie Hart), Zeta-Jones (Velma Kelly) and Gere (Billy Flint) were more at home when playing the "movie" part of this film, as expected. Comparing to "Chicago the Musical", their on-stage singing and dancing were only good enough for themselves even though Zellweger and Zeta-Jones were way better than Gere and Reilly (Amos Hart). I liked the smooth transition between the movie part and the play part and how they purposefully blurred the line. By the way, after watching the musical, someone was accusing the play for repeatedly using actors/actresses for small characters instead of hiring more people. To me that was totally a joke; it was exactly one of the pleasures I had when watching the play, that is, to see how painstakingly economic the playwright was trying to be ...

March of the Penguins Originally uploaded by nuance1979 . "March of the Penguins" is the single movie you should not miss this year. What was amazing was not only the story itself, but how those National Geographic photographers caught it on tape. Told by Morgan Freeman, who has a painful but affirmative voice, a perfect choice. I've also got a poster of this film. :)

Watched "Closer" for free! Natalie Portman was stunnning in this film; so was Clive Owen.

Went to Charles Theatre alone for legendary Hayao Miyazaki 's latest film "Howl's Moving Castle" . A masterpiece! Incredible imagination and very nice music!

Finally watched "Super Size Me" , a film which has been on my list for a long time. Amazing! One of the best documentaries I've ever watched! Given the situation I know about how fast food is corrupting Chinese people, especially kids, I can't help wondering if this film has been translated into Chinese. If not, I would like to volunteer.

Watched an outdoor film on Saturday night. The movie was bad; I was there not for the movie but for the moon, the stars, the grass and the fireflies. What a cool night!