Tuesday, August 28, 2012

They Shot Pictures #7: Hou Hsiao-hsien


I was happy once again to join Seema on the They Shot Pictures podcast, this time to discuss Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien.  We focused on A Summer at Grandpa's, Good Men, Good Women and Millennium Mambo, but we tried the impossible task of covering all the rest of his career as well.  Included are my rambling rants about the state of contemporary film scholarship and melodramatic vision of cinema as the solution to all of life's problems.  I'm pretty sure we also conclude that anyone who doesn't like Millennium Mambo is either a reductionist grad student or a horrible, healthy person.  You can download the episode from Sound on Sight or through iTunes.

(Apologies for being echo-y)

Monday, August 27, 2012

This Week in Rankings


Play While You Play aka Cheerful Wind - 20, 1981
The Green Green Grass of Home - 18, 1983
A Summer at Grandpa's - 11, 1984
The Time to Live, The Time to Die - 2, 1985
Dust in the Wind - 5, 1987


The Puppetmaster - 3, 1993
Good Men, Good Women - 2, 1995
Goodbye South, Goodbye - 3, 1996
Flowers of Shanghai - 5, 1998
Millennium Mambo - 1, 2001
Three Times - 2, 2005