September 18, 2014
Poseidon of the East (37)
Aside from using kanji in their writing systems, Chinese and Japanese are grammatically and phonologically unrelated, with Japanese classified in the oddball Altaic language group that includes Korean, Mongolian, Turkish, and sometimes Finnish.
"Shouryuu" is the Japanese approximation (or on'yomi) of "Shanglong," which is how his name would be pronounced in Chinese. "Naotaka" (尚隆) is how it's pronounced in native Japanese (or kun'yomi), and would be entirely unfamiliar to his listeners.
"Shouryuu" is the Japanese approximation (or on'yomi) of "Shanglong," which is how his name would be pronounced in Chinese. "Naotaka" (尚隆) is how it's pronounced in native Japanese (or kun'yomi), and would be entirely unfamiliar to his listeners.
Labels: 12 kingdoms, epic chinese movies, japanese, language, poseidon
February 16, 2012
Pilgrimages
In chapter 14 of Serpent of Time, Ryô joins a group of pilgrims headed to Mt. Kôya, the final stop on the Shikoku Pilgrimage.
Visitors to Mt. Kôya can retrace the course of the original women's pilgrimage, although only one of the temples survives to this day. On the map for the Koya Sanzan Route, the ruins of the Ryûjinguchi are next to the Daimon Gate. Mt. Benten is in the upper left.
Going on pilgrimages is popular form of participatory tourism in Japan, actual religious devotion not required. The most famous is the Shikoku Island pilgrimage, a walking tour of the eighty-eight temples established by, or devoted to, the Buddhist monk Kôbô Daishi.
Like the lesser-known Kumano Kodô pilgrimage up the Kii Penisula to Mt. Kôya (Kate's suggestion, by the way), the remoteness of these ancient routes from the Tokyo and Osaka megalopolises has largely preserved them intact.
Speaking of Shikoku, horror writer Masako Bandô has made Shikoku the equivalent of Steven King's Maine. Inugami, based on her novel, is a gorgeously-shot film, with heaps of gorgeously-shot sex and nudity and a wildly perverse Oedipus Rex plot.
The plot of the tamer Shikoku (the kanji in the title are pronounced the same but mean "death country") is based on the actual Shikoku pilgrimage. Judging by the movie, it's a campier, X-Files sort of actioner.
Visitors to Mt. Kôya can retrace the course of the original women's pilgrimage, although only one of the temples survives to this day. On the map for the Koya Sanzan Route, the ruins of the Ryûjinguchi are next to the Daimon Gate. Mt. Benten is in the upper left.
Going on pilgrimages is popular form of participatory tourism in Japan, actual religious devotion not required. The most famous is the Shikoku Island pilgrimage, a walking tour of the eighty-eight temples established by, or devoted to, the Buddhist monk Kôbô Daishi.
Like the lesser-known Kumano Kodô pilgrimage up the Kii Penisula to Mt. Kôya (Kate's suggestion, by the way), the remoteness of these ancient routes from the Tokyo and Osaka megalopolises has largely preserved them intact.
Speaking of Shikoku, horror writer Masako Bandô has made Shikoku the equivalent of Steven King's Maine. Inugami, based on her novel, is a gorgeously-shot film, with heaps of gorgeously-shot sex and nudity and a wildly perverse Oedipus Rex plot.
The plot of the tamer Shikoku (the kanji in the title are pronounced the same but mean "death country") is based on the actual Shikoku pilgrimage. Judging by the movie, it's a campier, X-Files sort of actioner.
Labels: buddhism, epic chinese movies, history, japanese culture, movies, religion
June 23, 2008
The Emperor's Shadow
When's the last time you saw an actual Hollywood epic? I mean, when the vistas were vast, and casts of thousands weren't pixels? We're talking David Lean territory, and the only place to find it these days is in China, where the historical epic is alive, and, well, really epical.
The Emperor's Shadow again focuses our attention on Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, protagonist of The Emperor and the Assassin, ostensible good guy in Hero, and first (if temporary) emperor of all of China. A George Washington kind of guy, about whom there's always another inspiring bio-pic waiting to be made. That is, if George Washington were a brilliant, Solomaic, ruthless, and by today's standards, completely sociopathic dictator. With a refined taste in music.
British historical fiction makes for better comparisons. Think Richard III meets A Man for all Seasons, with shades of Hamlet and a Jack the Ripper ending. Wen Jiang does look a bit like a lean Henry 8th. This time around, though, Thomas More is a musician. The soon-to-be emperor-of-everything wants his childhood friend, Gao Jianli (who shows up like Rasputin in all these historical dramas), to compose for him a national anthem. I mean, really, really, really wants him to.
Of course, the king got him to court in the first place by conquering his country and slaughtering everybody he ever knew. So this Thomas More is doing everything he can to get the king to kill him and the king keeps having to come up with good reasons not to, all the while inspiring him create Great Art.
Complicating the king's life is his daughter, a pretty bent nympho dominatrix who would rather not marry the psycho son of Ying Zheng's number one general. I can't comment on the actual facts, but I'm pretty sure history takes a back seat to soap opera and spectacle in this version. Yes, the occasional kingdom falls to armies of millions, but unlike The Assassin and the Emperor, the emphasis is on court intrigues, not that boring nation-building stuff.
Still, every twenty minutes or so you are treated to a scene that makes you sit up and say: Holy Freaking Cow! Nature's violence dwarfs man's while rivers literally run red with blood (for some reason, two thousand year-old war crimes are so much more entertaining). It leaves you wondering if you're supposed to love Ying Zheng or loathe him. It's hard to conclude that director Xiaowen Zhou wants you to loathe him, despite the rivers of blood.
This moral ambivalence lends the film a weight heavier than its substance justifies. After all, Ying Zheng tried so damned hard, and barely lived to realize his vision of a united China when it faded like the morning frost. "It's all about Hearts & Minds," he lectures the neurotic and self-destructive Gao Jianli over and over again. "That's what your anthem should do." Yet it seems to have been a tune he never could quite hear himself, not until his world was laid waste all around him.
The Emperor's Shadow again focuses our attention on Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, protagonist of The Emperor and the Assassin, ostensible good guy in Hero, and first (if temporary) emperor of all of China. A George Washington kind of guy, about whom there's always another inspiring bio-pic waiting to be made. That is, if George Washington were a brilliant, Solomaic, ruthless, and by today's standards, completely sociopathic dictator. With a refined taste in music.
British historical fiction makes for better comparisons. Think Richard III meets A Man for all Seasons, with shades of Hamlet and a Jack the Ripper ending. Wen Jiang does look a bit like a lean Henry 8th. This time around, though, Thomas More is a musician. The soon-to-be emperor-of-everything wants his childhood friend, Gao Jianli (who shows up like Rasputin in all these historical dramas), to compose for him a national anthem. I mean, really, really, really wants him to.
Of course, the king got him to court in the first place by conquering his country and slaughtering everybody he ever knew. So this Thomas More is doing everything he can to get the king to kill him and the king keeps having to come up with good reasons not to, all the while inspiring him create Great Art.
Complicating the king's life is his daughter, a pretty bent nympho dominatrix who would rather not marry the psycho son of Ying Zheng's number one general. I can't comment on the actual facts, but I'm pretty sure history takes a back seat to soap opera and spectacle in this version. Yes, the occasional kingdom falls to armies of millions, but unlike The Assassin and the Emperor, the emphasis is on court intrigues, not that boring nation-building stuff.
Still, every twenty minutes or so you are treated to a scene that makes you sit up and say: Holy Freaking Cow! Nature's violence dwarfs man's while rivers literally run red with blood (for some reason, two thousand year-old war crimes are so much more entertaining). It leaves you wondering if you're supposed to love Ying Zheng or loathe him. It's hard to conclude that director Xiaowen Zhou wants you to loathe him, despite the rivers of blood.
This moral ambivalence lends the film a weight heavier than its substance justifies. After all, Ying Zheng tried so damned hard, and barely lived to realize his vision of a united China when it faded like the morning frost. "It's all about Hearts & Minds," he lectures the neurotic and self-destructive Gao Jianli over and over again. "That's what your anthem should do." Yet it seems to have been a tune he never could quite hear himself, not until his world was laid waste all around him.
Related posts
Hero
The Emperor and the Assassin
Labels: china, epic chinese movies, history, movie reviews, ying zheng
May 26, 2008
The Emperor and the Assassin
The Emperor and the Assassin is epic in both length and subject matter. The film takes almost three hours to tell the story of the emperor Ying Zheng and his battles to unite the six kingdoms of China in the 3rd century B.C. At the time, the most expensive Chinese movie ever made, it's an effort that could not be duplicated by Hollywood for ten times that. The grand sweep of palaces and battlefields (not sets, the real thing), thousands of extras (and a sparing use of mattes here and there) provides for the kind of stunning panoramas that I suspect loses much on the lowly television screen.
It starts out as Henry V and turns into Richard III as the emperor goes increasingly off his rocker and is driven to use all means to achieve his ends. It's not hard to read in political allusions to Mao, and one scene is awfully reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. On the other hand, it also caters to the present regime's unification ideology as a divine mandate.
The title comes from a plan hatched by Ying Zheng and his consort, Lady Zhao, to create a pretext for an invasion of a neighboring kingdom by staging an assassination attempt. But that's only one of the plots in this tangled web. You'd need a scorecard to keep track of who's double-crossing who, and whose allegiances are where, and who everybody is related to. As the emperor grows increasingly ruthless and paranoid, Lady Zhao seems to abandon the pretext and would very much like to see him dead, though her motives are hard to read throughout. She chooses her assassin, Jing Ke, and then falls in love with him, but this isn't exactly clear either. Is she setting him up, and does he know he is being set up?
I don't think the allusions to Richard III are accidental, such as the murder of two children who could contend for the throne. By the end, Ying Zheng has become quite the bloody tyrant, he violence and the body count grow a bit numbing, and the plot proves ultimately anticlimactic. Sort as if Richard (or Macbeth) ended with him taking power, and then a brief postscript filled in the rest. Which is how this movie ends. Again, I suspect the problem is the lack of historical context for we uninformed westerners. The postscript tells us that Ying Zheng did consolidate the kingdoms of China, but then only a decade later the Qin were overthrown by the Han, who established the first true dynasty.
Ying Zheng was the guy entombed with the thousands of terra cotta soldiers. Makes sense after watching this movie.
It starts out as Henry V and turns into Richard III as the emperor goes increasingly off his rocker and is driven to use all means to achieve his ends. It's not hard to read in political allusions to Mao, and one scene is awfully reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. On the other hand, it also caters to the present regime's unification ideology as a divine mandate.
The title comes from a plan hatched by Ying Zheng and his consort, Lady Zhao, to create a pretext for an invasion of a neighboring kingdom by staging an assassination attempt. But that's only one of the plots in this tangled web. You'd need a scorecard to keep track of who's double-crossing who, and whose allegiances are where, and who everybody is related to. As the emperor grows increasingly ruthless and paranoid, Lady Zhao seems to abandon the pretext and would very much like to see him dead, though her motives are hard to read throughout. She chooses her assassin, Jing Ke, and then falls in love with him, but this isn't exactly clear either. Is she setting him up, and does he know he is being set up?
I don't think the allusions to Richard III are accidental, such as the murder of two children who could contend for the throne. By the end, Ying Zheng has become quite the bloody tyrant, he violence and the body count grow a bit numbing, and the plot proves ultimately anticlimactic. Sort as if Richard (or Macbeth) ended with him taking power, and then a brief postscript filled in the rest. Which is how this movie ends. Again, I suspect the problem is the lack of historical context for we uninformed westerners. The postscript tells us that Ying Zheng did consolidate the kingdoms of China, but then only a decade later the Qin were overthrown by the Han, who established the first true dynasty.
Ying Zheng was the guy entombed with the thousands of terra cotta soldiers. Makes sense after watching this movie.
Related posts
Hero
The Emperor's Shadow
Labels: china, epic chinese movies, history, movie reviews, ying zheng
May 05, 2008
Hero
Like Napoleon, Ying Zheng's administrative and social reforms far outlived his own short reign. He died a natural death, but entwined with his biography—and illustrative of his life and character—are the stories of the many assassins who tried very hard to make it even shorter. When the people trying to kill you are revered as much as you are, hey, maybe you're not everybody's favorite cup of tea. The hagiographic depictions of Ying Zheng in Hero conveniently avoid this nagging little fact.
The assassin who almost succeeded, coming close enough to tear Ying Zheng's sleeve with his dagger, was one Jing Ke, the historical antecedent for two of the protagonists, Broken Sword (Tony Leung) and Nameless (Jet Li). The movie begins with Nameless arriving at the Imperial Palace claiming to have killed China's Most Wanted, and requesting as his reward an audience with the emperor. To bolster his claim, he recounts before the emperor in detail how he disposed of them.
Director Yimou Zhang borrows heavily from the Kurosawa's Rashomon, beginning first with Nameless's narrative and then retelling it again from the perspective of each of the people involved. However, unlike Rashomon, where in the denouement Kurosawa produces a reliable eyewitness, Zhang's hyper-stylized version casts aside the idea that an objective reality need exist. Which would be less problematic were we not talking about an historical figure.
This is the third biopic made about Ying Zheng in the last decade. The Emperor's Shadow (1996) and The Emperor and the Assassin (1999) take less fanciful (though no less melodramatic) views of the same material. But they also paint a portrait of Ying Zheng that, at least based on my reading, is fairly accurate.
Ying Zheng was, to be sure, a first-order Napoleonic figure, but also one with the temperament of Nero and the management style of Shakespeare's Richard III. He was the nutcase buried with a terracotta army to protect his immortal soul, which, if the Confucians at the time had any say about the matter, needed much protection. (Ying Zheng and the Confucians shared a mutual loathing, the big difference being that what Ying Zheng loathed he had summarily executed.)
Hero, in contradiction of fairly well-established facts, depicts Ying Zheng as, well, misunderstood. It is, if not in intent then certainly in outcome, an unabashed paean to Hobbes's Leviathan, a tribute to the thankless job of being an enlightened despot. You can just see China's modern-day neo-coms nodding their heads in earnest agreement. Yeah, it is tough being Darth Vader and having to hold the empire together all by your lonesome.
And yet. It is hugely entertaining. The only really depressing thing about Hero is just how much it reminds you of George Lucas's uninspired and unimaginative arguments for the opposing Lockean perspective, the natural rights of man and all that. Hero is the anti-Star Wars.
Besides, it's hard for me to disparage a film in which linguistics factors so prominently in turning the protagonists towards the light (or rather, towards the Dark Side). I mean, how cool would it be if Vader didn't say to Luke, "I am your father," but instead, "I'm going to standardize orthography across the Empire!" And Luke said, "Hmm, you've got a good point there." No kidding, and it's actually a more profound statement than anything Lucas came up with.
To be fair, Yimou Zhang, whose previous films at times ran afoul of Chinese censors, set out from the beginning to make a wuxia fantasy in the spirit of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, not a historical biopic. So forget all of the above and treat it the same as those chrome-plated Arthurian cinematic extravaganzas that have zero to do with history and everything to do with what we like to pretend about Anglo-Saxon history, including the silly sword & sorcery stuff.
Yimou Zhang has done much more than choreograph ballet-like fight scenes and assemble casts of (digital) thousands. There is as well the sheer, breathtaking vastness of the locations (these days, no one does vast like the Chinese), all magnified many fold by Christopher Doyle's stunning cinematography. Every time the narrative changes perspective and a new version of events is introduced, the entire color scheme changes--clothing, lighting, sets--from gray to red to blue to green to white.
This isn't subtle stuff at all, and could be seen to spill over into artistic self-indulgence. We're talking about vivid, primary colors, palettes of paint thrown across the screen. But, then, this isn't exactly subtle storytelling. And who cares when it's so gorgeous to look at.
And speaking of gorgeous things to look at, the beautiful Maggie Cheung and the handsome Tony Leung, as two of the conspiring assassins, steal the second half of the movie with performances so over the top, so operatic, as to demand a Puccini or Verdi to really do the material justice. Jet Li, on the other hand, has never emoted much as an actor and here he doesn't at all, so it's hard to care too much about what happens to him.
But at least what happens is so very cool to watch, as is this movie.
Related posts
The Emperor's Shadow
The Emperor and the Assassin
Labels: china, epic chinese movies, history, movie reviews, ying zheng