Oscar season is upon us, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has named their award recipients. Kudos to giving some shine to Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E which I saw by my lonesome self on a late August afternoon at the Pacific Place movie theatre in Hong Kong. I saw that right before Dark Knight, which was the flick that I was really jonesin’ to watch, and somehow walked away after both viewings more impressed by the sublime and perfectWALL-E.
I was more taken aback by the selection of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (山峡好人) as the winner of the best foreign film, not least because this was a movie released almost 2 years ago here in China, and had clearly fallen off my cinematic radar screen. Still Life is a good film, Jia is still the paragon of modern China neo-realism, and this and his other pictures continue to demonstrate how much awesome acting talent there is in this massive country. Still, it’s not one of Jia’s best, and if I remember correctly my initial reaction when I saw the film was that he had extended a little too far into the realm of precious flourish. Where his animated vignettes worked as an ironic counterbalance in his much better The World, the telephone tower that turns into a 3D rocket that blasts off into the night sky is just a baffling distraction. For the most part I agree with Chi Tung’s review of the film for Shanghaiist, particularly about Jia’s affectation of meaningful despondency. The thing is, he does this in all his films, and to a much better result.
Compared to some of the other foreign language films I’ve seen of late (notably 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) and with my keen interest in checking out Waltz with Bashir, which happened to win the best animated feature award from the LA critics, Still Life just seems a bit like an undershoot. Jia Zhangke should not yet be trading on his reputation.
