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ASHES OF TIME (1994) - d. Wong Kar-Wai
Woo! Horse-fucking meets the Shaw Brothers! Does fun get any more fun?
In case anyone is still confused about this, Chinese names are surname first, given name second. Wong is the 'last' name, so it's first. Kar-Wai is the name his parents gave him. So, if you ran into him on the street, it's 'Yo, Kar-Wai, what up, ace?' not 'Yo, Wong.'
So yeah, Señor Wong takes on a King Hu-style swords and more-swords epic, delivering the costliest film to that point in Hong Kong history, its content enough to make the timid weep. If you haven't seen a Wong Kar-Wai movie before, this isn't the place to start. 'Chungking Express' and 'Fallen Angels' are much simpler introductions to his aesthetic, and, if you believe all the oohs and ahhs from the world of world cinema, 'In The Mood For Love' is his masterpiece. Any of those movies will do... As a quick primer, there's a heavy debt to early Godard (is there any other kind?) running through his work. The temporal shifting, restless camera, and general disregard for the constraints of trad narrative are all hallmarks of the French New Wave. Wong's narrative, generally, is less beholden to Western ideas, and doesn't often lend itself to the genre workouts Jean-Luc and his boys were so in love with. This movie does see Wong putting some time in at the genre gym, but anyone who's watched 'Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater' can tell you that Aristotle and 'Poetics' aren't part of the average chop-socky dialect, so any tropes - beyond slicing and dicing and a dash of honor - 'Ashes of Time' explores aren't gonna matter much to us western types.
I'd seen the movie before, but it's become a recurring theme for me recently, as I get to know my Netflix queue, that a lot of the movies I saw between, say, 18 and 22 weren't the viewing experiences they should've been because I was pretty consistently drunk and/or stoned.
Back to the timid weeping part...
Emphasis on the word 'time' in the movie's title. It only runs for 100 minutes, but it's not 100 mins with a ton of pace. That's not to say it's boring, it isn't, but it does require patience if you're coming in expecting a fight scene every four minutes. The real difficulty I think most people are gonna have is that it's just damned weird. It's constantly on the verge of making sense, but, honestly, feels like it's only on the verge as an excuse to get even stranger when the spirit moves. Somehow, it all fits together, but you have to be paying pretty close attention if the storyline's an important part of your enjoying the proceedings. Also, there's cross-dressing and horse-fucking.
About the DVD - I have a serious suspicion that the disc is transferred from the same VHS tape I rented back in Berkeley about seven years ago. There's even a point where you can see something clearly goes wrong with what looks to be the tape (it could be a film fuckup, but the glitch looks very cassettey). Anyway, you can still tell that Christopher Doyle shot the film as awesomely as ever, and at least the image isn't atrophying further, but you can't say that this über-muddy version's doing anyone any justice. Someone made the genius decision to take a 1.85 movie and shift the picture up to the top half of the screen. This makes it easier to fit the subtitles in, sure, but the bottom half of the screen is gray instead of black. And the subtitles themselves are pretty fucked up. The translation's more or less fine, and I can deal with a few spelling errors, but sometimes things are onscreen for a good long while, and then sometimes you seriously have to make sure you're not blinking when dialogue pops up. Headachey.
Bottom line, this is the problem with 'Ashes' being a kung fu movie. The company that put the DVD out is called CAV Distribution and Replication Services (as opposed to, say, Criterion Collection) and, from what I saw on the site (www.cavd.com), they mostly churn out braindead fighting films with names like 'Blooded Treasury Fight' and 'Fatal Flying Guillotine,' and probably are without the resources to release this baby right. They do have most of 'Star Blazers' on DVD, so they aren't all bad... Anyway, the benefits of having the movie out at all definitely outweigh the negatives of the poor release, but hopefully someone comes along someday and does a super-ultra-deluxe version.
Again, horse-fucking.
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