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Ashes of Time Redux

 
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summertime



Joined: 16 Dec 2004
Posts: 923

PostPosted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 3:28 pm    Post subject: Ashes of Time Redux

Everybody Wong/Cheung Tonight

Ashes of Time Redux is impossible to follow, but you’ll be so dazzled by its beauty

Published January 15, 2009 by Paul Matwychuk in Screen Review

ASHES OF TIME REDUX
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Starring Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Cheung. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Jan 16-20.
****


“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go back into time?” asks Maggie Cheung in the closing minutes of Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, a re-edited, re-tinkered-with version of his dreamlike 1994 martial arts epic Ashes of Time. None of the characters in the film can go back into the past, but they spend many long hours brooding over it — over lovers they abandoned, brothers who died at the hands of bandits, painful memories of romantic disappointment, to the point where some of them are even willing to drink a glass of “magical wine” that it’s said allows you to forget your past entirely.

All this is valuable time that they could probably more fruitfully spend honing their swordsmanship, but then we would be deprived of the sight of just about every iconic Hong Kong movie star of the period — Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, both Tony Leungs — sighing in raptures of longing, their faces photographed at the height of their glamour by Wong’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose eye lingers on clouds of desert sand, ripples distorting the mirrorlike surfaces of various ponds, the dusk sky as seen through an opening in a tent, and once in a while a gout of blood spewing from a swordsman’s gut. Doyle does for Wong in this film what Ennio Morricone did for Sergio Leone in his classic spaghetti westerns: add a sensory element that lifts the story elements into the realm of myth.

It’s a good thing that Ashes of Time Redux doesn’t rely solely on its storytelling too — I would be lying if I said I followed even half of what happens in this movie. It’s about a man, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), who lives alone in the desert, occasionally taking work as a swordsman-for-hire and occasionally farming out the work to others. Over the course of the year, he’s visited by various clients, including a blind swordsman, an old friend, a penniless girl looking for vengeance, and, most memorably, Murong Yin and Murong Yang, a brother and sister who separately hire Ouyang to do jobs at cross-purposes from one another and who turn out to be the same person. All of their stories turn out to be interconnected, but please don’t ask me to draw you a diagram.

But as in most Wong Kar-Wai movies, plot is secondary to mood and visuals, and Ashes of Time Redux offers one unforgettable, dreamlike image after another. (You won’t believe how much mileage Wong and Doyle get out of the light shining through the birdcage hanging in the centre of Ouyang’s shack.) This is a movie that seems to have been created in one long, unending fit of rapture. There are swordfights, and they’re choreographed by Sammo Hung, but they’re filmed so elliptically and obliquely that anyone looking for another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will be sorely disappointed (although Ashes of Time’s mixture of fighting and romantic longing was undoubtedly a huge influence). The real “action” here is the visual splendour contained in the shots of Carina Lau sitting on a horse, or a candlestick falling, falling, falling, down to the floor.

Would it be wonderful to go back into time? With Ashes of Time Redux, Wong Kar-Wai has, and he’s returned with something close to a masterpiece.


http://www.seemagazine.com/article/screen/screen-review/everybody-wongcheung-tonight-1797/
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summertime



Joined: 16 Dec 2004
Posts: 923

PostPosted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 3:30 pm    Post subject:

FILM

Ashes of Time Redux

Opening This Week

Josef Braun

Ashes of Time Redux
Written & directed by Wong Kar-wai
Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Leslie Cheung
Fri, Jan 16, Sun, Jan 18, Tue, Jan 20 (7 pm)
Sat, Jan 17, Mon, Jan 19 (9 pm)
Metro Cinema (9828 - 101a Ave)
****1/2

Coming to Ashes of Time only in its re-tinkered incarnation poses a challenge to those of us seeing the film in light of Wong Kar-wai’s so frequently sublime body of work. A martial arts tone-poem shot by the incomparable Christopher Doyle, featuring a heady array of Hong Kong cinematic royalty armed and in flowing robes, it was originally released in 1994, yet existed for most Wong fans as an elusive enigma, a merging of idiosyncratic auteurism and genre dynamics that promised to be dynamite, and maybe an unfulfilled box office breakthrough. But I’ve seen the new Ashes of Time Redux twice now, and I’m still not so sure what to make of it. Once we establish that any Wong film is far more exciting than most films, I think this particular film has a lot of trouble bearing up critical scrutiny.

The melancholia induced by obsession with the past permeates much of the densely woven emotional and intellectual textures of Wong’s work, perhaps most stunningly in his 2001 masterpiece In the Mood For Love. Yet memory’s stratagems can be rendered as thin a trope as anything else. The allure of oblivion in Ashes of Time Redux is announced outright in the voiceover upon which the film seems vastly over-dependent. It never assumes the weight or nuance radiating in Wong’s other explorations of the theme. I adore the sheer notion of the old friend (Tony Leung Ka-fai) who visits the lonesome swordsman-for-hire (Leslie Cheung), carrying a bottle of magical wine that makes your past dissolve. But, even after 90 minutes of flashbacks within flashbacks and various encounters in deserts and swamps, landscapes linked only by the peculiarly toned, super-saturated colour palate, I’m not sure that we wind up with anything more than notion itself.

If I seem to be avoiding story, it must be said that Ashes of Time Redux, despite the Lois Cha source novel, is decidedly unconcerned with narrative cohesion. There are characters, and there are moods. I don’t know that either shifts much. There are propositions, most memorably one made by two siblings who apparently share the same body, one of whom tries to hire someone to kill the other. There’s some fighting, and Wong’s camera placement here is especially inspired, framing only sections of a teeming battle scene so that steel slashes or combatants hurl across the screen only to vanish. The poeticized action, lacking in violence, is something to see, if not feel. Its imagery is more durable than those of another character slashing a mirror-like lake—she can’t find a worthy sparring partner, so she practices against her own reflection—which gradually succumbs to aesthetic cliché through overuse. Though it’s not nearly as corny as Frankie Chan and Roel Garcia’s boilerplate score, the closest the film ever comes to bending to genre by far.

So there are many issues, of taste, of reliance on gloss, both figurative and literal, of using immutability as a cover for lack of substance. And there are many arguments to made for the film’s purity, spectacle and meditative rigor. But let me say this, especially for anyone who makes Ashes of Time Redux their first Wong experience: it may be enough to be dazzled by the fluttering light and unearthly colours and Maggie Cheung’s cameo, but don’t buy for a minute that Wong can’t deliver all this and much more. V


http://www.vueweekly.com/article.php?id=10779
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katwoman64



Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 662
Location: roma, italy

PostPosted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 3:01 pm    Post subject:

Hi,
Thank you Summertime for these reviews.
I think that Wong Kar Wai's work is, in cinema, what Picasso's Cubism did in painting:
In Picasso's artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed and re-assembled in an abstracted form— like we do when we think of objects-, instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicted the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject as we can grasp its image in our mind's context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. In Picasso the background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, that is also one of WKW distinct characteristics. In a similar way WKW never has a linear storytelling but "impressions of a story", I.E. the desert seen from the flap of a tent is more a remembered desert then one actually seen. Picasso firstly breaks the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones.
As Picasso represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in a similar way WKW tells not a "linear story", but one as we can mull over in our mind. There we have one million images in our mind all at once. There is no difference between the beginning and the end, all the images are simplified to shapes, sounds, colors that compose a coherent story plus some of our feelings or judgements. Picasso's new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be visualized in painting and art. WKW's films are doing the same to our idea of a filmed story.
Bye
Kat
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summertime



Joined: 16 Dec 2004
Posts: 923

PostPosted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 7:19 pm    Post subject:

You're welcome katwoman64, and thanks for those insightful comments Smile
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katwoman64



Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 662
Location: roma, italy

PostPosted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 1:02 am    Post subject:

Hi Summertime,
wanted to add that Wong Kar Wai has practically shot one only neverending charming film in more than 11 titles on a 20 years span, from 1988 with As Tears Go By to today. Love, desertion, pain, the need to go on: feelings analyzed mostly as ties between humans, being them gangsters, androids, players, policemen or anonimuous people. The photograph transforms life in a dream. And it feels just right, because mind doesn't shoot photographs. It paints pictures. I mean, when we think of some event, we think it sad or happy depending of the moment in our life: if it is a good moment we tend to remember mostly the good part of every memory. In the same way, if we are down, we remember just the dark side of a thing.

WKW is an emotion teller, always on the verge to implode. He doesn't tell a story. He produces vibrations by the means of a careful and not self serving aestethic recherche.

I look forward to see Ashes of Time Redux and the next IPman film. I can't imagine what he can come up with.
Kisses
Kat
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katwoman64



Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 662
Location: roma, italy

PostPosted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 12:27 am    Post subject:

Hi,
after seeing the AoT-Redux trailer, I wondered if Tony and his colleagues found strange or uncomfortable to see themselves working side by side to Leslie Cheung or if, on the contrary, it made them bittersweet happy. Later in the day I was listening to one of Mahler's Symphony. One of the most beautiful things ever written from man. And then I thought: some things simply transcend the limits of time and space...
Bye
Kat
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Paul



Joined: 29 Mar 2005
Posts: 144
Location: Tokyo

PostPosted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:04 am    Post subject:

Hi everyone.

Ashes of Time Redux has been released in the UK on DVD and Blue Ray. Has anyone here watched it yet? How does it compare to the original and what's different?
_________________
"On the stage he was natural, simple, effecting. Twas only when he was off he was acting".
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Safran



Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 1322
Location: Austria

PostPosted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 2:44 pm    Post subject: Ashes of Time Redux

Hello Paul

Could watch AoTR on "Viennale" (Vienna Filmfestival) last autumn with some young, filmmaking students and WKW fans.
What is different ?
Apart from better/best quality :
-Much more strong colours (less of the soft brown and sand shades) for some critics too much - some like it - some regret.
-Partly new music/soundtrack (Yo Yo Ma) and
-some details have changed, but I cannot remember exactly anymore.

For me fortunately the same base - still the wonderful, confusing, bewitching movie - one of WKW´s best - with Hongkongs most gifted (and most beautiful) actors. Best of all unforgettable Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai of course!
Everytime I watch (the old version), I discover something new and my Diagram develops and disentangles - I love WKW´s misterious enigmas
and we european "cineasts" are challenged to study asian/chinese history, legends, myths, symbolism.
Hope you will enjoy - please tell me your review!
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katwoman64



Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 662
Location: roma, italy

PostPosted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 4:11 pm    Post subject:

Hi!

Quote on Wong Kar Wai style of narration:

" SCHWARTZ: Your films have such a sense of rhythm, even though the narratives can be complicated. One thing I love about your narratives is that you don’t have a feeling like everything has to be tied together and explained. In Chungking Express, there is a gangster drama in the beginning, and then another section that’s a cop story. Usually when we see different stories in a film, they all kind of tie together, but you don’t work that way.

WONG: I have my logic. (Laughter) Like for Chungking Express, my idea is it’s a day and night. The structure is very identical, and then I just put it as days and night intertwined like this.

Days of Being Wild started with, like, three different story lines. But at the end, they will just meet together. I just wanted to show that within a certain period of time, it’s like you see changes through the unchanged, or vice versa."
_________________
“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”

Sadako Sasaki
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Info



Joined: 27 Jan 2003
Posts: 1691
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 7:39 am    Post subject:

Official Website: http://www.sonyclassics.com/ashesoftimeredux/index.html

And Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ASHES-OF-TIME-REDUX/22597378156
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summertime



Joined: 16 Dec 2004
Posts: 923

PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 3:34 am    Post subject:

DVD - Ashes of Time Redux

Winnipeg Sun

About time for Ashes redux

By BRUCE KIRKLAND

Last Updated: 6th March 2009, 1:42am

When Francis Ford Coppola re-engaged Apocalypse Now for his Redux version, he finally made the visionary anti-war film he admits he had neither the courage nor the power to create in 1979.

When Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai went back to his influential martial-arts film, Ashes of Time, it was simply to save the original 1994 elements from destruction after a film company bankruptcy.

In the reconstruction, however, the director had an epiphany: He could subtly rework Ashes into a better film with a vastly superior DVD.

Ashes of Time Redux debuted on DVD this week. The original film appeared as a 1998 DVD, a botched effort that left fans of the "wuxia" style of martial-arts movie feeling abused.

That wrong is righted now.

BIG CHANGES

For his Redux, Wong re-edited sequences, corrected technical mistakes and added elements such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma's music. The vague story -- a lovelorn desert swordsman negotiates kills for other itinerant warriors in ancient times -- is still as perplexing as ever.

Both versions of Ashes of Times are melancholic, time-shifting, tone poems. Visual cinema is given pure expression, especially in Christopher Doyle's cinematography.

Yet, historically, Ashes of Time ushered in a new era of Hong Kong and Chinese cinema that produced wuxia films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Hero trilogy. Ashes also shows how Wong could create his modern romantic masterpiece, In the Mood for Love.

Meanwhile, the new DVD celebrates the director, and key collaborators, as never before. The doc Born from Ashes shows how this Redux was done while an extended Q&A with the reclusive Wong reveals the filmmaker as an engaging personality who amusingly busts his own myths.

http://www.winnipegsun.com/entertainment/movies/2009/03/06/8647206-sun.html
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Paul



Joined: 29 Mar 2005
Posts: 144
Location: Tokyo

PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 11:50 am    Post subject:

Thanks to everyone for the reviews and details on the Redux.
I also read that Leslie Cheung's action scene from the beginning of the movie was also cut.
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katwoman64



Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 662
Location: roma, italy

PostPosted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 11:57 am    Post subject:

Hi everybody,

this is not mine, but I found it somewhere on the net and I found it interesting, so I post it here:

<Wong Kar Wai mostly uses Jin Yong's work as a starting point for his personal vision of the wuxia world, where memories are more painful than battles against hordes of swordsmen, and men give themselves up to fate and are destroyed by their emotional distress. This is a world where heroism doesn't matter, where stripping one's emotions to become "stronger" (like the traditional wuxia heroes) takes away the heroes' soul and leaves them scarred forever.
He took a de-humanized world (where heroism was often more important than sentiments) and injected humanity into it. We're presented with allegedly invincible men who turn out to be people who crumble under the pressure and pain of rejection and memory.
About the story? What's important is the mood Wong Kar-Wai creates, and the air of sorrow we feel coming in waves from each and every character. Ashes of Time is a very intelligent work, mixing melodrama with a deconstruction of many of the genre's formulas and clichés. >

Hope you enjoy it
Bye
K
_________________
“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”

Sadako Sasaki
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