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.