Raise the Red Lantern is easily the best Zhang Yimou film I've seen. I will always be fond of Hero. Partly for nostalgic reasons but also because, like Sherick said, the talent of the martial artists here is immense. Zhimou's later efforts in the wuxia genre I find a little tiresome, although they are absolute visual treats.
For the great wuxia films I turn to King Hu, Cheh Chang, Yuen Woo-ping, Tsui Hark and those guys.

Also, boys, watch for the release of The Assassin. It is amazing!

I have! It's solidly in third place among those three, but still excellent. Are there any other films in that vein I should check out? I've seen Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame. That was pretty good, but obviously not in the same league as those others. Great action sequences, well shot and all, but a much less emotionally moving story.

Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin.
If you're at all interested in finding out more about where these films came from, watch the classic wuxia greats: Dragon Inn, A Touch of Sin and Come Drink With Me. King Hu is where it's at, and I'll take one of his classics over any of the recent ones, no matter how well they are shot.

I think you meant A Touch of Zen?
I thought that was a tad long, I have to admit. I think I was a bit tired and was expecting something specific instead of being open though. There's more humour in it than in the recent films though, which is always good.

Hu's films are truly insane. Need to catch more of them.

Oh yes of course I meant Zen. A Touch of Sin is the Jia film, which is also brilliant.
Anyway, AToZ is definitely long but I never thought it overstayed its welcome. I still think it's the best of its kind and can't wait for the Masters of Cinema blu that's coming out soon.

Who has seen Macbeth? It was riveting. In a weird way at times. Scots are mad fucks. Quite a few peeps walked out. I would love to know how macbeth plays out in arabic subtitles. It must gall that no one important is actually scottish in this cast.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/macbeth ... interview/

Holy jonas, Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece! They could have made a 6 hour version of this and I would have watched it. I'm going to have to read the book because I've heard it's untranslatable to film, but if even the cliff notes are this good, it's amazing. This is an example of how a big epic action packed thing can also be serious cinema in the 2010s. The relations among all the different eras are so interesting and you have to actively add em up and find connections in your own mind. Love it. It reminded me of reading Kafka on the Shore, only more complex.

When I first heard about Cloud Atlas I was pretty excited then I saw the reviews for it and I was less so. I didn't realize that the mid range meta-ratings were because of the movie was kind of polarizing. Maybe I should give it a watch then.

definitely recommend it. I can see why it would be polarizing. I doubt I took everything in on the first viewing, and a lot of people don't like that. but I didn't take everything in the first two times I watched The Godfather either...

cloud atlas is well worth watching.

other recent things

I watched that Frequencies movie on Netflix. kind of interesting movie about people of different kinds of intelligence trying to talk to each other/live together but it lost me with its "secret of the universe" bullshit. also it's one of those things that just looks like your average too-well-shot low budget indie. These characterless high definition looking indies make me long for Bujalski's early 16mm films all the more. I would rather look at Inland Empire than another film that looks like this.

You know what I mean:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22VVuQI4kgc[/youtube]

also finally got around to The Babadook which is intense and does its job. It's scary and stylish from an excessive space rather than a retro restained space which is refreshing. I'm not in love or anything but you might as well watch it.

also AI: Artificial Intelligence I have confirmed is Spielberg's best film imo. I'm pretty sure my interpretation of it is predictable, but there's next to nothing wrong with that film. I'm very suprised at how low its critical aggregates are.

also Fred Wiseman's At Berkeley is a more important 4 hours than whatever tv show you feel like bingewatching

AI is easily my favorite Spielberg film from this century, and I like all the stuff about it that people seem to hate, Osmond's performance, the flesh fair, the ending, I will never understand the hate this movie gets, maybe it's because many Kubrick fans are huge anti-Spielberg snobs and vice versa many Spielberg fans don't get Kubrick, but I don't buy the whole narrative that their styles are incompatible, sure they're very different but they're not polar opposites, I imagine the people who say they are opposites are the same people who buy into the tired "Kubrick is cold" and "Spielberg is sappy" narratives and don't look any deeper into their films than that, most of Kubrick's films have really intense emotional moments, they're just not expressed with the same generic language with which emotion is usually communicated to the audience, most films use the same bland language, a language audiences are not only acustomed to, many of them are dependant on it, because they aren't familiar enough with the possibilities of film to accept any other cinematic language, so anything that doesn't completely walk them all the way through on how to respond to what they're seeing and hearing is "vague" or "pretentious", Kubrick's aesthetic approach is calculated and detached, but that doesn't mean his films are emotionless. And vice versa I think people far too often overlook the darker and more cynical elements in Spielberg's films, because they're there.

I think the reception of this film shows how superficial people's understanding of Kubrick and Spielberg really is, it's assumed that all of the dark stuff in AI is Kubrick and the "sentimental" stuff is Spielberg, when Spielberg says it was exactly the opposite, the ending was exactly what Kubrick wanted, I don't even understand how that ending is so easily written off as typical Spielberg, did we watch the same fucking movie? Because I've never seen such a bittersweet ending in a Spielberg movie before, and that's including fucking Schindler's List.

I read a RYM review that said that only stupid people would be moved by the ending, I guess I'm stupid because I'm a sucker for it every time.

this is one of the best boo boo posts of all time

Yesterday I made a post saying Robert Deniro can't act and I wish he would die already.