The Banquet - Song of Loneliness

(The Banquet. Directed by, Feng Xiaogang)
The Banquet (released as legend of the black scorpian in America) is a Chinese film set in 10th century China at the end of the Tang dynasty and is loosely based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. It follows the life of a banished prince, Wu Luan, and the two women who love him, cold Empress Wan and Qing Nu, a young naive lady-in-waiting. I loved this entire film, but the scene I'm going to write about occurs near the end of the film (spoiler alert!) in which most of the main characters die. Some context first though.
Basically the current emperor usurped the throne by killing his brother and then married his late brothers widow, Empress Wan (yes the same one in love with Wu Luan) and wishing to keep his hold on the throne, endeavours to kill his nephew. He cannot, however, do this openly for fear of retribution from the court, but more importantly, from the Empress.
At the beginning of the scene the emperor believes he has succeeded and the empress, wishing to exact her revenge, poisons the emperors wine with a mixture of cyanide and scorpion venom, unsurpassed in toxcidity except by "the human heart". But before the emperor has the chance to drink, Qing Nu comes forward wishing to perform a tribute to the 'late' prince who was a lover of music and the arts. Out of pity, the emperor offers her a sip of his wine, much to the horror of her brother and father (a curent and former general) who are in league with the empress and know that the wine is poisoned.
The song Qing Nu sings is the prince's favorite, a Yue song of lonliness and unrequited love. She performs it wearing the bloodstained mask that the prince always wore when he was performing.
The reason I love this scene so much is because of its simplicity, there is hardly any movement except for the simplest dance moves and almost no music, just the voice of Qing Nu crying out with a lonliness that is palpable in her song.
The camera switches angles repeatedly as is circles around Qing Nu and the masked person she is dancing with, the dance brings them close together, intertwining withought ever really touching, always apart, except for in the last moment when Qing Nu slowly collapses from the poison, and the masked dancer catches her.
Removing first Qing's mask then his own, Wu Luan reveals himself as the dancer to comfort Qing while she dies, her blood a shocking contrast against their white clothes. The saddest part is that for perhaps the first time in years, in Qing's last moment, Wu Luan no longer feels lonely.
Music Swells to replace the silence when Qing Nu dies and the prince is left in tears and Qing's brother desperately repeats the promise he made to her, "brother loves you, no one can harm you."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjhg53GGd3U

Film Texts as Prep for Lantana

The Seventh Seal:
We watched a clip from the beginning of this movie. In it, a man (probably a knight judging by his clothes) is confronted by death who is represented by a tall figure in dark clothes with only his death-white (ha) face showing. I liked that death was represented as something shadow-like that would be on your heels for all your life. The thing that I liked most about this video however was the way that the knight managed to cheat death, with chess! The knight challenged death to a game of chess, claiming that he had learned of death fondness of chess in a painting, suggesting that this particular situation had happened before, and someone had lived to tell (or in this case paint) the tale. I think chess is a good analogy for the game of life in this movie, it's all about tactics and skill, you have to be smart and always a step ahead to survive, the kind of game that death would like. What I couldn't tell properly from just the start of the movie and what I'd like to fnd out is whether or not death is represented as evil, because when you think about it, death in itself is neither good nor evil, it is simply the necessary and inevitable ending to life.


All or Nothing:
For this movie, we watched a clip from somewhere in the middle of the movie, just after the son in the family was hospitalised for having a heart attack, despite the fact that he is still quite young. The husband is obviously depressed, and this is highlighted by his hunched over posture the camera angle, it only films him on the side, like he's trying to hide. The only time we see him front on is when he is confronting his wife about whether or not she loves him. The majority of the clip is the argument between the wife and husband, the husband feels depressed and overwhelmed whereas the wife feels let down, married to a lazy husband that makes her do all the work. By the end of the scene both the wife and the husband are crying, it's a rare and honest look into what it is to be human.



The Umbrella's of Cherboug:
Another clip from the start, the Umbrellas of Cherboug is a french film the entirety of which is sung, with no spoken dialogue. The scene we watched was of two lovers singing their farewells as the man goes away to serve in the army. It's obvious that he doesnt want to go and that she doesn't want him to go, but they have no choice. Both of the actors do a good job, their sorrow obvious in their voices and in the song. The song itself could have been sadder I suppose, but it matched very well with the colours and setting in the film and besides it's not goodbye forever...or is it...






Don't Look Now:
This was an interesting clip, again from the start of the movie it begins with a girl and her brother playing outside while their father and mother are inside. As the girl wanders around playing, she loses her ball in the water and, trying to retrieve it, drowns. As the movie builds up to this, it was interesting to note that the actions of the parents seemed to mirror that of her and her brother (eg. when the girl throws her ball, her mother also tosses something). Colour plays an important role in this film, especially the colour red. The girl is dressed in a striking red raincoat wheras her surroundings are dull colours, all dark greens and browns. The father first realises something is wrong when he spills his drink on some sort of inked glass depicting a churches stained glass windows and a figure in red with only their back visible. The drink causes the blood-red ink to spread over the glass, visibly distressing the father and causing him to go check on his kids only to find his only daughter under the water. The film slows to slow motion as it shows the father try in vain to save his daughter.


Walkabout:
Another clip from the start of the movie! The opening scenes of this movie spend a great deal of time filming the city and the way it chokes, tags and supresses everything that is natural. There is even a shot of a teenage girl and her younger brother swimming in a pool when the ocean is only a stones throw away. The clip focuses on the girl and boy and their family. The tension between the mother and father is obvious, they stay in different rooms of the house and barely acknowlage each other. There is a dramatic shift in the movie when the father takes his children out to the desert, presumably for a picnic. The desert is a huge contrast to the forest of huge buildings the family is obviously used to, suddenly finding yourself in such a flat, hot and harsh environment would take a bit of adjusting. The clip ends rather dramatically and disturbingly when the depressed father attempts to shoot his children before burning himself to death in his car, a shocking end to a clip full of contrasts and surprises.

Superman and Paula Browns New Snowsuit.

This is a short story that I thourally enjoyed. It was well written, thoughtful and interesting from beginning to end, really my kind of story. It is about a young girl and her transition from childhood into, not so much adulthood, as the age of knowing, the loss of her innocence. She was forced to eat the forbidden fruit and unwanted knowledge came to her. The story is told through her eyes and begins with bright lights and technicolour dreams in which superman comes to teach her how to fly. She even plays superman games with her best friend at school and Sheldon, the loner "mama's boy" who always plays the villain. Sheldon does however bring quite a disturbing element into their games, the girl mentions that he could come up with the most inventive tortures and that he even spends his spare time pulling the wings off flys and watching them struggle. This suggests to me that little Sheldon might turn into a sciopath one day. Anyway the girl's world starts to shift as the story goes on and she describes the start of the war and the air-raid drills that the children must take part in at school. The last day of her untainted childhood comes on Paula Brown's birthday. All the children on the block are invited, including the main character, despite the fact that (according to the main character) no one really likes Paula all that much because she is "bossy and stuck-up." After Paula spends some tims showing off her presents, including an expensive new snowsuit from Sweeden, the children are all taken to see Snow White at the cinema after cake and icecream, but here is where the story becomes disturbing again. Before Snow White, the cinema plays a propaganda movie about prisoners of way in Japan. The girl watches in horror as the prisoners are first slowly starved, then brutally shot as they try to escape with the Japanese laughing and stamping above them. That night, instead of superman, the girls dreams are invaded by Japanese soldiers and the groans of dying men. The last straw comes comes for her when she is playing tag with Paula and the other children. At one point in the game, Paula manages to trip and fall into an oil slick, spoiling her brand new snowsuit. Eager to find a scapegoat to shift the blame, Paula accuses the main character of pushing her. It only takes. A second for the other children to join in, shouting "you did it, you did it," taunting her with the thoughtless cruelty of those who don't yet believe in consequences. Running home she has a brief respite with her mother and uncle whom she says bears an uncanny resemblance to superman, but this ends when a neighbor tells the girls mother that her daughter pushed Paulaand should therefore buy Paula a new snowsuit. The girl tells the truth and denies this of course, but of course one of the most unfair and frustrating things about being a child is that adults will hardly ever believe you, even when your being sincere. In the darkness on her bed that night, having been exposed to the cruelties of life and having been failed by both her mother and uncle, all of her dreams and childish fancies that she had painted to brighten the dark blackboard of life were all rubbed away, and she was left with nothing but harsh reality. All in all, I think that this was the best short story that I have ever read, it was dark and thought-provoking, so right up my ally ;).

Snowdrops

In class we discussed a Welsh short story called 'Snowdrops.'I'm in two minds about this story. When I first read it, I didn't enjoy it very much because it was too simple and emotionless. however I read it again and rethought my attitude. The story is simple because it is written from the perspective of a six year old boy, and really its simplicity makes it a good story. If the story had been complex and full of emotion, it would not have accurately portrayed the life of that boy. Another thing the story did was highlight the differences between the adult world and the world of children. Throghout the story, the adults try to keep their world seperate from the children, in order to protect them. The main character in this book, a six year old boy displays the innocence and naivety of young children throughout the entire book, his parents do their best to protect those qualities in him by keeping things from him, such as not telling him when someone dies (in this case his teacher's boyfriend). He also has the high expectations of a child, when his teacher, Ms Webster, tells him about a certain type of flower, a snowdrop, he imagines something that looks like a snowflake, delicate and beautiful. When Ms Webster tells the children in her class that she is taking them to see the snowdrop flowers, what she really wants to do is watch the funeral procession of her boyfriend go past the school, but she can't tell her class that because they are just children. When the boy first sees the flowers, he is dissapointed by them, untill he "began to see their fragility... he imagined them standing all night in the dark garden holding bravely to their specks of white." In a way, the snowdrops are an analogy for the boy, he is the white petals and the people around him hold him up bravely. This is why he is so shocked when Ms Webster starts crying in the garden, watching the funeral, because she is one of the things that holds him up. You could say that whatever was holding Ms Webster to her stem had let her go, and if she could fall, so can the boy.

My Reading History

HARRY POTTER (J.k. Rowling)

When I was little, I didn’t enjoy reading very much, I was good at it but it was a chore, something that I had to do because of school. Then my godmother got me Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. At first I just pretended to read it, so as not to hurt her feelings, but then one day when I was really bored, I picked up the firs book and started reading, and ever since then I haven't stopped




ROALD DAHL
 When i was younger, I fell in love with Roald Dahl, I think I probably raed most of his childrens books. The first one was the BFG, which my teacher read to the class, and James and the Giant Peach was read to me by another teacher. My favorite Roald Dahl books would have to be The Witches, Matilda and Danny, the Champion of the World.







Emily rodda
 
Emily Rodda was the next author that I absolutely fell in love with, definitely more than Roald Dahl. The first book I ever read by her was The Forests of Silence the first book in the first Deltora Quest series. They were extremely popular at my primary school, and their popularity was why I read The Forests of Silence, problem was, their popularity also made them hard to find in the school library, so I could never really read them in order, that is untill my beloved mother (swear I'm not being sarcastic there) got me ALL fourteen books, in all three sereies, in three seperate harcover books! In year seven I started reading some of her other books, particularally the Rowan of Rin series (not as good as Deltora Quest, but also good) and The Key to Rondo. Even today I can still read and thourally enjoy my favorite books by Emily Rodda.




The Obernewtyn Chronicals (Isobelle Carmody)
I have read a lot of books, probably well overa hundred by now, but none, except for a few, tend to make any lasting impression on me, I can be reading a book and think it's really good, but most of the time I'll look back on the book and wonder why I got so excited about it. This is not so with The Obernewtyn Chronicals. I first started reading them in year seven, and I remember I got up to about the fourth book, The Keeping Place, when I got bored with the series and stopped reading it, the books got too long, too complicated and too hard to read (what a stupid year seven I was). Just recently I started reading them again, and I just love them now, I think I had to grow up a little before I could really understand the books, and it didn't help that I had to wait five years for the sixth book, but that book, The Sending, did eventually come out, and now I've read all six available books and am eagarly awaiting the seventh. (you may have noticed that there are eight books in the picture above, the fifth book was split in two). I love this series because it's complex and compelling, and so different from most of the books written for young adults today, it's not just a soppy romance novel masquerading behind the fantasy genre.




The Hunger Games Trilogy (Suzanne Collins)
I first read The Hunger Games in year eight, the year before we studied it in school, my reasoning back then was, I'd heared it was good, so I wanted to read it before school ruined it (no offence Mr Harrison because the books ruined themselves). This is one of those books that when I first read it, it was the most amazing book ever, but looking back on it now, I really wonder why I liked it so much. The first book was ok, but the second was a bit unnecessary in my opinion and the third book is frankly the most depressing book I have ever read IN MY LIFE. It's as though the author sat down and thought "they want me to write another book but I'm out of ideas, hmmm I know, I'll kill everyone!" Anyway, pointless ranting aside the reason these books are on this list is because they basically started a tradition between me and my friends. Whenever one of us finds a book worth reading, we spread the word and share the books with eachother, so that we can all read it, talk constantly about it for weeks and rant about how the movies are completely wrong! We've shared lots of good books together like The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices by Cassandra Clair and Divergent by Veronica Roth.




Tess Gerritsen (crime fiction/ medical thrillers)
It's only recently that I got into the crime fiction genre, and Tess Gerritsen is resposible for that, already I have over ten of her books. What makes her books better than most, and especially her medical thrillers, is that for a while, Gerritsen was a practicing doctor, so she actually knows what she is talking about. Most of her books feature the same characters, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examinar Maura Isles (otherwise known as The Queen of the Dead). *sidenote, don't watch the tv series Rizzoli and Isles, is sucks and the characters are not like the book characters at all* (and again with the ranting) I'd highly recomend Tess Gerritsen to anyone and thanks to her, I've dicovered a whole new genre of compelling thrillers.




The Maze Runner Trilogy (James Dashner)
I absolutely LOVE this trilogy. I discovered the maze runner throgh one of my friends and I immediately fell in love with it. It was compelling (i really like that word don't I), thrilling and you never knew whether or not a griever was waiting for you just around the corner. The second book was just as good, if not better and even more unpredictable. The third book is not out in Australia yet (much to my dismay) but if the ending of the second book was anything to go by, this third book should be amazing. These books are part, sci-fi, part post-apocalypse thriller, part psychological thriller, part action novel with just a dash of romance thrown in. Now, I'm a hopeless romantic at the best of times, but when almost every single young adult, and even adult novel has more romance than any other genre, it's nice for once to read a book where love isn't the main theme.