edward yang Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Taiwanese-born filmmaker Edward Yang, who passed away this past June at the age of 59, stood on the verge of possibly revitalizing cinema. In 2002, Sight & Sound magazine -- disappointed with the results of its every-ten-years poll of the all-time great films, conducted a new poll consisting exclusively of films made in the past 25 years, from 1978 to 2002. The entire top ten was made up of older films from the 1970s and 1980s, except for Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990), Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) and Yang's Yi Yi (2000). Yang's film was the only one from the 21st century to make the list, and since it was the only one of Yang's films to receive theatrical distribution in the West, that means that it's the only one that a majority of the voters had ever seen.

Yang completed only seven feature films and one short "segment" in his all-too brief career, and I've only managed to see two of them. Yi Yi topped my list of the year's best films the year I saw it -- and stands a good chance to do the same on my upcoming best-of-the-decade list. I also managed to see A Brighter Summer Day (1991), in its full four-hour version, thanks to a website called www.superhappyfun.com that sells a DVD-R dupe of an old laserdisc for only $16. The picture is scratched and the subtitles leave a bit to be desired, but this film is even more complex and intriguing than Yi Yi. Set over the course of most of a year in 1961, A Brighter Summer Day deals with a subculture of Mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan after the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. A printed introduction explains that their children are now living in a state of uncertainty and have taken to forming street gangs for a sense of safety and control.

Last week I wrote about the late Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, but after I posted my column, I made a startling discovery. Over the past two months, we lost two more masters, the African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who died June 9 at age 84, and the Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, who died June 29 at age 59. As with Antonioni and Bergman, I was lucky enough to have reviewed the final films of both filmmakers, Sembene's Moolaade (2004), and Yang's Yi Yi (2000), and I gave each a four star rating. In fact, I'd rate Yi Yi as perhaps the finest film of the decade so far. Unlike Antonioni or Bergman, these two never received any Oscar nominations and so their deaths did not rate headlines. I suppose if I had been more diligent about combing the web for movie news, I would have found out about them earlier.

Also this week, Buena Vista posted two decades' worth of movie reviews from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's various TV shows, including all the "guest critics" from 1999 and Siskel's "replacement," Richard Roeper. I've been addicted to this site since it debuted last Thursday, looking up my favorite movies from mid-1986 (where the reviews seem to begin) to early 1999 when Siskel passed away. Like many movie buffs my age, I grew up with Siskel and Ebert and learned a good deal from their show. It's wonderful to see Siskel again, as well as a younger, more vibrant Ebert, arguing with passion about movies they genuinely care about.

• Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang passed away at the age of 59. Film journalists from all over wrote tributes to this filmmaker, who's work was vastly under-appreciated by American audiences. This weekend, why not rent Yang's most well-known film, Yi-yi, which won the director Best Director at Cannes in 2000. Yang never completed another feature; he was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after winning at Cannes. Maybe now his work will finally be more well-known here in America.
• If you're looking for more DVDs to fill up your weekend movie-watching, Peter Martin (who, as you may have noticed, recently joined the team here at Cinematical Indie) has a solid roundup of the latest indie flicks coming out on DVD.
• Fans of the Matt Dillon-starrer Factotum, based on the book by Charles Bukowski, will be glad to know that director Bent Hamer has a new film in the works in his native Norway. The film, called O'Horten, is about a train engine driver named Odd Horten (played by Bård Owe), and it's likely to hit the fest circuit next year.
• Actor/environmentalist/friend-of-Al-Gore Leonardo DiCaprio has been busy promoting the film The Eleventh Hour, which he produced and also narrates. Leo showed up doing the intro for the film's trailer, which is up on the official MySpace page for the film.
• If you've wondered lately what former talk-show host Phil Donahue's been up to (and hey, who hasn't?) you'll be thrilled to your toes to know that he's directing a documentary about Iraq (there just haven't been enough of those lately, have there?) This one, titled Body of War, does take a different angle -- Donahue criticizes not just the Republicans on the war issue, but goes after the Dems, too.
• Also: New details about Young Victoria, Michael Moore takes on Wolf Blitzer and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Once Upon a Time in Seoul promises some action, and the Edinburgh Film Fest announces its lineup.

• Claude Brosset (1943-2007) - French actor who appears opposite Jean Paul Belmondo in L'Alpagueur, Les Corps de mon Ennemi, Flic ou Voyou and Le Marginal. He also appears in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, Costa-Gavras' Un Homme de Trop and Tavernier's Capitaine Conan and L.627. He died June 25 in Pontoise, Val d'Oise, France. (IMDb.com)
• Leo Burmester (1944-2007) - Actor who who played 'Catfish' in The Abyss (pictured). He also appears in Lone Star, The Legend of Zorro, The Last Temptation of Christ, A Perfect World and The Devil's Advocate. He died of leukemia June 28. (Playbill)
• Brian Finch (1936-2007) - British screenwriter, mostly for television (Coronation Street), who wrote 2005's Heidi, which featured Max Von Sydow. He died June 27. (The Independent)
• Anita Guha (?-2007) - Indian actress who portrayed Hindu goddesses in Sampoorna Ramayana, Tulsi Vivah and Krishna-Krishna. She also starred as the title character in the hit film Jai Santoshi Maa. She died of heart failure June 20, in Mumbai. (Variety)
• William Hutt (1920-2007) - Canadian actor who appears in Norman Jewison's The Statement and John Frankenheimer's The Fixer. He also provided his voice for the sci-fi pic The Shape of Things to Come and multiple documentaries. He died of leukemia June 27, in Stratford, Ontario. (Variety)