Monga; 艋舺

Gangster themes are contemporary Hong Kong and 1920-1940 era Shanghai period drama perennials. Every few years a new one emerges. Monga, however, is a Taiwanese endeavor and it is quite brilliant and so watchable.
"Monga" is a Taiwanese aboriginal pronunciation.  It loosely means a place where small boats gather and used to be the name of an old town district in Taipei. Adjacent to 西门町, a tourism hot spot today. This cluster is where the 1970-1980ish early commercial development began.
For this type of movie you can almost imagine the mosaic of colorful characters and how they lived lives blurring the thin line between right and wrong. However, this movie is directed by Niu Chenze (钮承泽), the child actor-turned director whose acting we have seen in this blog: Growing Up. Allegedly he has himself lived a quasi-gangster life at one point in his youth. Seemingly volatile and jumpy (having even earned a well-deserved honorific Bean/Beanie), Niu is by all means a passionate director excels at using modern cinematic phrasing and maneuvering ensemble casts. In recent years nobody seems to have surpassed his attempt in telling the contemporary urban tales.
He might just become the Scorsese of Taiwan.
The movie is a true homage to youth, adventure, ambition and loyalty. I really liked all of the characters, from the formidable mafia boss who dons a shower cap to cook to your average blessed-by-ignorance ruffians.
Featuring some of the the most promising Taiwanese actors today: Ruan Jintian, 阮经天 (middle) as Dragon, the scarily disciplined number two and the real Meyer Lansky of the group; Zhao Youting 赵又廷 (second from right) as Mosquito, the fatherless new kid who valiantly and comically fought school bullies over a piece of chicken leg in the movie's much-acclaimed long opening scene;  Huang Denghui, 黄镫辉 (first from left) as the rash chubby guy of the group and Chen Handian, 陈汉典 (not pictured here) as the opposing gang's miserable gadfly who got his orifices glue-shut, literally. Huang and Chen are also very cool improv actors all over Taiwanese TV shows.
The only part I found less satisfying was the theatrically far-fetched subplot in which a frequent patron of Mosquito's mom's hair salon, another gangster figure and played by the director himself, turned out to be Mosquito's long-lost father.

Chinese subtitles; Enjoy the movie

A Chinese Ghost Story; 倩女幽魂

If you have a morbid fear towards ghost stories like I do, let me assure you that A Chinese Ghost Story will make you laugh! Few movies are the perfect blend of comedy, romance, action, period drama, and yes, ghosts.
A branch of the Chinese culture has always been dominated by ghosts, reincarnation, Yin-Yang divide and the after-world as they are important themes in both Buddhism and Taoism. Ghost stories as a movie genre have flourished as well.
The story was adapted from a short story out of a collection of 491, all ghost-themed, called 聊斋志异. So well-known is this book that in China it would be almost impossible to locate a person who has never heard of it. You will run into plenty of Chinese movies based on stories out of this book. Unfortunately the original author was prolific but highly unsuccessful during his lifetime in Qing dynasty.
Here's the gist of the movie: A lovely bookworm (宁采臣) took a nasty job as a debt collector. While seeking shelter in a deserted thousand-year old temple, he ran into whom he thought was an otherworldly beautiful girl. She was in fact, from another world: a ghost spirit in the "Yin" domain waiting to gather enough "Yang" essence by trapping and sapping healthy young males, in order to reincarnate back into physical existence. The bookworm, clueless of her scheme, foolhardily tried to rescue her out of the temple and her controlling grandma, a hermaphrodite ghost sort of, and a monster tree ghost, running a quasi female ghost brothels so that a cut of the "Yang" essence the girls sapped can be supplied to support her own transformation away from the afterworld.
If you are interested in ancient Chinese culture, I highly recommend this movie. The dialogues, choreographed actions, costume design, special effects and acting are all superior. Some even said that this movie reinvigorated the Hong Kong film industry, in a doldrum at the time, with a newly charged form of period drama.
This movie, made nearly 30 years ago, remains a classic.
The male lead was played by the one-and-only Leslie Cheung (张国荣). Cheung, before his untimely 2003 death due to severe depression, had achieved almost every highest honor in every possible field an Asian entertainer could've attempted. I will introduce more of his films in the near future. 

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the movie.

American Dreams in China; 中国合伙人

A more literal translation would be "Chinese Partners".
I see this movie as a tribute to those dare to dream.
An elitist whose father and grandfather had both been educated in the states, a country bumpkin with horrifying accents and a poetic long-haired hippie: three friends met as freshmen in the fictional Yanjing University in what seems to be the immediate post-cultural revolution Beijing in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
At the time there was such a thirst for knowledge as the decade-long cultural revolution had closed the door of higher learning to practically everyone except a few proletariat with approved background.
I have heard moving tales of how people formed long snake lines outside of libraries for hours before the crack of dawn just to secure seats to study all day. Today, I think it's not an exaggeration to say the few things that can still command such display of enthusiasm are iPhones and concert tickets (not the classical music kind mind you).
Like most students from top universities, the three friends dived into their dogged pursuit of the Chinese brand of the American dream: to score high on standardized admission tests such as the TOEFL, GRE and GMAT and through the studying process to be as linguistically and culturally prepared as possible. The goal was to go to America for graduate studies. Undergraduate and direct prep school admissions for non-immigrant Chinese students didn't become more of the norm till the 21st century.
Getting a student visa was brutally difficult for Chinese students back then even though all of the applicants went into the U.S. consulate offices had already been accepted and some even with guaranteed academic scholarships. And for those lucky few granted visas, many didn't flourish as their later counterparts would. 1980's just wasn't the time for Chinese yet!
This is exactly what happened to the elitist. He fed lab rats at Columbia University while telling friends he was conducting research; his piano-playing girlfriend worked in a laundromat while telling others she was tutoring piano in Long Island.
Meanwhile back in Beijing, two remaining friends started a small enterprise, borderline illegal at the time, to teach English, for commercial profit, to U.S.-bound students how to score high on standardized tests. Demand for test preparation was so high that one makeshift classroom quickly mushroomed into auditorium-sized lectures. Elitist abandoned his own dream of "making it" in America to join force and help thousands of Chinese students realize their own. The three friends would eventually take their company a NASDAQ-listed public one.
Heavily based on the true story behind the formation and rise to fame of New Oriental, the US-listed Chinese educational service giant with the appropriate ticker EDU, this movie is an homage to all of the post-Cultural revolution, Deng Xiaoping-era first generation of daring Chinese business leaders such as Sohu's Charles Zhang, Vanke's Wang Shi, Alibaba's Jack Ma and of course, New Orient's Michael Yu.
Three of the China's currently most bankable actors star as the three friends: Huang Xiaoming (黄晓明), Deng Chao (邓超), Tong Dawei (佟大为). 

Chinese subtitles with lots of English dialogues. Enjoy the movie.

Growing up; 小毕的故事

You will never truly understand post-war contemporary Taiwan till you have watched this movie.
Towards the end of 1940s, the nationalists started to retreat to Taiwan. An overwhelming 1.5-2 million population made of mostly military personnel and their families landed there, expanding the island's total population by one quarter.
The solution for immediate accommodation was to throw all rank-and-file into blocks and blocks of tiny and connected residences sharing maze-like walkways, cooking fumes, noise from disciplining children and in many cases, even bathrooms.
These residential quarters are called 眷村 (Juancun). There were close to 700 of them in its heydays. Although literally means villages made of relatives a few degrees removed, 眷村 are really made of related non-relatives or unrelated relatives. Residents were only related in a sense that all the fathers served in the army together and were relatives because every few doors down the alley, there might be another family sharing the same ancestral roots. For Chinese, roots are traced back thousands of years and ancestry is such a relative term.
The most poignant contemporary Taiwanese subculture was born!
眷村文化 (Juancun culture) is a pastiche of Chinese regional and provincial cultures, dialects, cuisine, Peking opera, homesickness, customs and conventions frozen circa 1949. Part military base, part immigrant ghetto, part melting pot and part crucibles, Juancun culture originated as nostalgia out of denial but evolved into cohesion and resolve out of choice. So many of today's prominent figures in Taiwan came out of Juancun that its influence is still gathering momentum.
The story of Growing Up talks about a boy's experience in Juancun. As a child born out of wedlock, he moved there with his mom after she married a much older man with a reliable government job and a promise of giving the boy a good education. The stepfather proved to be kind and decent. However, the little boy only grew increasingly morose, insecure, recalcitrant and hostile by the year as if to personify the aggregate frustration of all Juancun dwellers. Facing mounting desperation, the mom kills herself as a quiet wake-up call for her son.
The movie was based on a novel of the same name. Zhu Tianwen (朱天文), its author adapted it into the screenplay. The actor playing the adolescent boy, Niu Chengze (钮承泽) has grown up to be a reputable Taiwanese director whose work I will introduce more very soon.

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the movie.

Perhaps Love; 如果•爱

Perhaps Love was lauded as the first major original musical movie in modern Chinese cinema. If you happen to like musicals with a Faberge egg-like love triangle plot to match, you will indeed find this film spectacular.
Bearing some semblance to Moulin Rouge!, Perhaps Love is nevertheless very Chinese. Some of today's Chinese vernacular become indelible thanks to the characters. 文青, (short for 文艺青年), is a collective term for artsy youth. Cultured, petit bourgeois, slightly disenfranchised, they are ardently interested in careers in the entertainment and creative writing industries. 北漂 (bei piao, literally a northbound floater) is a 文青, typically from either humbler background or smaller towns, bravely uproots him or herself to migrate to Beijing (北京) chasing the dream. Incidentally, there's also 横漂(heng piao), a person practically on standby 24/7 for auditions, gigs as extras at China's own Hollywood 横店, an entire Eastern town, 2.5 hour train ride from Shanghai, made of clusters of filming bases with permanent thematic sets.
Our characters are the essence of the current generation of artsy youth who strives for a life less ordinary, less programmed than what their parents had lived in the pre-capitalistic China. Through the dreams of these floating artsy youth, modern Chinese consumerism is finally emerging.
I'm not a fan of musicals but have always been a fan of works by director Peter Chan (陈可辛, Chen Kexin in pinyin).
Chan attended college in the states. But after taking his first summer job in Hong Kong as director John Woo (吴宇森) 's translator and key grip in the early 80s, he dropped out. The rest is history.
Chan has the observation and patience of an anthropologist. One of his early works Comrades: Almost in Love, made in 1996, is a classic depicting the 97 HK syndrome, is a film to which I will dedicate a separate post one day.
The cast is made of three well-respected actors with singing background. One of them, Jacky Cheung (张学友), with a stature in HK's Canton Pop so significant that in Asia, his clout and fame easily rivals that of U2's Bono. The impossibly handsome Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武) and the very talented Zhou Xun (周迅) also star.

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the movie.

A Bite of China; 舌尖上的中国

Not only is this seven-part documentary on culinary culture (食文化) a nonstop visual feast, it is an excellent reference on how food evolves and adapts, like every fabric of the traditional Chinese society.

Typically on culture, history or socioeconomics, Chinese documentaries make even better sources than movies for mandarin learning.

Chen Xiaoqing (陈晓卿), the main director for this series happens to be the editor-in-chief for the Chinese edition of Time Out magazine and no doubt a veteran foodie (吃客 or 老饕 in Chinese expressions. Former more conversational and the latter more in writing). Several prominent food critics in the bigger China region joined force consulting for this undertaking. 

The production team shot in over 70 locations spanning 30 provinces of China. Every piece of material and every dish showcased had to first pass the muster of the team. 

The series was released in 2012 to much critical acclaim. A second series was released earlier this year and a third one currently under preparation.
Not chronologically connected, each independent episode focuses on one topic and builds mini stories around it. Not all episodes are totally unrelated either. Episodes 3 and 4, for example, drew inspirations from ways to preserve and transform materials. Episode 10, kind of harkens back to episode 1 as the wide array of ingredients available became front and center one more time.

In order not to ruin your appetite, I'm only offering some highlights for the first episode:

Scouting for matsukaya mushroom in Shangri-la near the Tibetan Plateau; digging up wild winter bamboo shoots (冬笋, dongsun) in Zhejiang (浙江); Scooping up lotus roots (莲藕, lianou) from drained riverbed, curing hams with local gourmet-grade salt, Episode 1 Introduced some of the basic ingredients that Chinese city folks take for granted. Wait till you see what time-honored simple delights the locals prepare out of these material. You will no longer be content with the canned or frozen generic version flooding most of the so-called Chinese restaurants in America.

They made quite a stir in China even. Price of 诺邓火腿, a type of Chinese prosciutto from Yunnan province (云南) introduced in this episode, more than doubled since this series!

After watching this series, you will only exclaim, "Chinese food has never really arrived in America!"

Episode 1 - Gift from Nature; 第1集 自然的馈赠

Episode 2 - Story of Staples; 第2集 主食的故事

Episode 3 - Inspiration to Transform 第3集 转化的灵感

Episode 4 - Tastes of Time; 第4集 时间的味道

Episode 5 - Secrets of the Kitchen; 第5集 厨房的秘密
Episode 6 - Harmony of Flavors 第6集 五味的调和
Episode 7 - The Land We Live On 第7集 我们的田野

Chinese subtitles; Bon Appetit

Each episode runs about 50 minute long. There might be one or two annoying commercials to put up with at the beginning. As a bonus, you will find 100 recipes in Chinese on the site.

Surveillance 1-3; 窃听风云 1-3

These installments of three are some of Hong Kong's crime action thriller genre at its best in recent years. A trio of male leads, played by veteran character actors 刘青云，吴彦祖，古天乐, recurs in the original and two sequels as vastly different characters. There are no logical plot connection between the three movies except for the dominant financial crime theme and the creepy, chilling, sometimes hair-raising high-tech surveillance games as the enabler.

As essential a language to many Hong Kong movies, the trilogy effortlessly deals with price manipulation, insider trading, shady real estate development as well as cops, mafia, street gangs and the thin line that divides them.
The last installment had just won the best screenplay, actor and supporting actor awards at the 34th Hong Kong Film Award in April, 2015.

The official English title was advertised to be "Overheard" which, I'm sorry to say, is flatout incorrect.

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the movies:
Surveillance 1; 窃听风云 1
Surveillance 2; 窃听风云 2
Surveillance 3; 窃听风云 3

Three Summers; 三个夏天

A lovely coming-of-age art house film, Three Summers took place in one of the tiny archipelagos off of Taiwan.  A succession of stories over three summers centered around a pair of siblings were told through the narratives of a bumpkin-like, tomboyish, tanned-to-the-bone island native: the adoring teenaged younger sister of the duo. The big brother (played by the incomparable Tony Leung Chiu Wai, 梁朝伟, or Liang Chao Wei in pinyin, in one of his best subdued, nuanced, pre-superstardom appearances), who had ventured off to make it big in Hong Kong, suddenly returned with a mysterious arm injury at the beginning of the first summer.

Part of the siblings' ancestral home serves as an eco-summer camp dormitory housing a dozen students. Campers farm, fish, swim, garden during the day and recite poetry, light Kongming lantern on the beach at night (孔明灯, hot air balloon-like paper lantern invented by famed military strategist 诸葛孔明 from the Three Kingdom era circa 220-280. Originally used as a means of communication, Lighting the Kongming lantern has become a well-wishing activity among the youth). Summer over summer, friendship and loyalty formed, love and disillusion interludes, dreams nurtured and crush nursed. 
A mosaic backdrop of Taiwan's ascend as an Asian economic tiger, through the campers and her big brother, our young narrator starts to yearn for a life of more than just marriage, fishing boats, maybe of college, office buildings, clubs and pizza. 
The pace of the movie is slow but comfortable. If most teenage-themed films are whitewater rafting, this one is a bamboo float meandering down a babbling brook. If you have seen one too many American teenage flix, you will no doubt find this film refreshing.
I'm not sure how seamless the brother's arc blends in here except it makes part of an authentic story. Turns out he was beaten up for taking up with a Hong Kong mafia's mistress. 
Screenplay by the one-and-only Sylvia Chang (Zhang AiJia, 张艾嘉). This is one talented lady whose many works as an actress, writer, producer and director we will sure to visit again and again. Supposedly the director Ang Lee (李安) once said this was his favorite indie film.

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the film.

Postmen in the Mountains; 那人那山那狗

This turn-of-the-century gem covers the underrepresented motif in modern Chinese cinema: rural mailman. 
Our eighteen-year-old protagonist has just failed the annual college entrance exam (yes it is highly competitive. For rural youth often one in a hundred shot). He decides to take over his retiring father's country mailman route for one good reason: in his world, civil servants are more respected and enjoy benefits and pensions that ordinary farmers can't.

The father and his fiercely loyal dog decide to accompany the young man on his first journey to show him the ropes.
Neither technology nor infrastructure has reached the hinterland of Hunan. Postman's job is as tough as it was back in Song Dynasty! A round trip takes days to complete on foot and on foot only, not to mention all the wading, swimming, climbing along the way and the unbearable solitude for hours on end. Like most men of his generation, the father is ill at ease bonding with his own offspring. So taciturn was the old man that at times he seems to have been carved out of wood. Yet all the life lessons, outdoors, courtship, dreams and regrets were quietly meted out along the trip.
The residents served by the route are as lovely as any. It is refreshing to see amidst China's breakneck economic development, such innocence still exists.
Mostly shot on location in the western part of Hunan province. (Description of Chinese geography should never be so naked by the way. Almost all locales have aliases and nicknames to be properly paired depending on the context. Western part of Hunan for example, would be called 湘西.)
One can practically smell cured meats and spiced air right off the screen. Sounds of singing crickets and images of verdant mountains linger days after you watch the movie. There's not one unnecessary scene.
Excellent acting chops displayed by both actors. Making his screen debut while still a student at the prestigious Central Academy of Dramatic Arts (中央戏剧学院) and incidentally, a classmate of Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙) fame, Liu Ye (刘烨) has since established himself as one of the most versatile leading men of his generation. Teng Rujun (滕汝骏), Liu's much less-fortunate, low-key alumnus whose early career was sidelined by the cultural revolution, played the role of the father and won the best supporting actor award.

Chinese subtitles. Enjoy the movie

Intro 介绍

With increasing legions of mandarin learners and Chinese culture enthusiasts, the generally available modern Chinese cinema in the U.S. remains immutably commercial, predictable and overreaching.
Watching good movies is one of the best ways to study a language and capture the zeitgeist.
In the past few decades, Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan have all produced an amazing amount of excellent films.
In my blog, I plan to share with you as many precious Chinese films, documentaries and other media as possible. I shall endeavor to scout the Mandarin-dubbed, Chinese-subtitled version in most cases to help those language learners. A brief contextual explanation about the plot, director, actors and the significance of the film will be provided. You may also find names, places and expressions in Chinese symbols blended in as I believe this is an effortless way to learn for those linguistically bent.
Hope you find my blog useful and movies enjoyable.