9月 23, 2012

絕境中的生命力

低俗喜劇 (2012)

彭浩翔的話題新作《低俗喜劇》一開場就大剌剌宣稱自己的低劣嗆俗、不堪入人耳目,且自嘲這不僅是需要「家長指引」的輔導級作品,更會是「家長指責」的下作電影。在電影一開場、貌似正經八百的校園座談中,電影監製杜惠彰(杜汶澤)果然沒幾秒鐘就大爆粗口,直接以生殖器、陰毛類比製片一職,來戳破會談現場的莊重。

本片故事基本上相當平鋪直敘,在會談現場由電影監製所啟動的倒敘中,講的是面臨無片可拍窘境的三級電影製片,如何在內地大哥的資金挹注下,翻拍多年前讓大哥驚艷的情色片。

但如果《低俗喜劇》僅只於此,那也沒啥好講好看的。彭浩翔宣稱,這部電影有個重要任務,是對於當前港片向中國觀眾靠攏這一趨勢的抵制;所以本片是包藏不少禍心的,將簡單故事線包裹起來的,是對中國電檢制度、內地普通話電影、以及港片親中等等現象的挑釁。

9月 19, 2012

The Intimacies of Four Continents

"'New World' people of the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonized Americas created the conditions for modern humanism, despite the disavowal of these conditions in the liberal political philosophy on which it is largely based. Colonial racial classifications and an international division of labor emerged coterminously as parts of a genealogy that were not exceptional to, but were constitutive of, that humanism. Freedom was constituted through a narrative dialectic that rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or contradiction. The 'overcoming' of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas. In this sense modern humanism is a formalism that translates the world through an economy of affirmation and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom. The affirmation of the desire for freedom is so inhabited by the forgetting of its conditions of possibility, that every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its burial, by the violence of forgetting. What we know as 'race' or 'gender' are the traces of this modern humanist forgetting. They reside within, and are constitutive of, the modern narrative of freedom but are neither fully determined by nor exhausted by its ends. They are the remainders of the formalism of affirmation and forgetting."

Lisa Lowe, "The Intimacies of Four Continents"
Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History

9月 17, 2012

看片小記: 超急快遞 (Premium Rush, 2012)

穿著血紅T、黑色及膝短褲、頭頂單車安全帽的年輕男子慢速飛越銀幕,摔倒在柏油路面。時間往回拉到當天下午約九十分鐘前,我們看到這位年輕男子富神采而專注地踩著單車在曼哈頓大街奔馳;酷愛駕著單車低空飛行的威利是不尋常的快遞員,他的單車沒有變速器,也不裝煞車;他要風馳電掣,不休止地向前衝刺。

在電影不斷的交錯插敘回溯下我們很快得知,威利與在同一間快遞公司服務的女友凡妮莎鬧不愉快、另一位同事曼尼總是找他麻煩;威利在傍晚接到一個特急件的快遞任務。接下來的九十分鐘,他的人生將因此捲入牽扯貪污惡警與一紙高額票子的一連串驚險。

9月 10, 2012

9月 05, 2012

看片小記: 陸上行舟 (Fitzcarraldo, 1982)

因在南美洲建造鐵路致富的實業家Brian,夢想在亞馬遜叢林深處蓋一座歌劇院,並請當代最頂尖的聲樂家Enrico Caruso前來表演。Brian領著輪船Molly Aida號逆流而上,很快地屢遭險阻。就在船員幾乎離棄殆盡時,Molly Aida號遇上一行原住民,並在他們毫無來由地答應協助下,由Brian指揮,開始扛輪船翻越山嶺的瘋狂工程,是為陸上行舟。

超過150分鐘的電影《陸上行舟》,大約用了最後三分之一的篇幅,完整鋪陳這一段路上行舟的浩大工程,並刻畫了Brian與船長、廚師等三人和原住民的相處與互動。