#Cantonese movie

[xlockscreenx]

Chungking Express (1994) | Lockscreens

[teafiend]

This ending to “Comrade: Almost a Love Story” (1996) hits as hard as it did more than two decades ago. Hopeful and poignant, it was the perfect ending 👏🏽

The movie is so, so fabulous ⭐️

An oldie favourite, I am struck anew by how stunning and accomplished Maggie Cheung is 🌸🤩👏🏽

#甜蜜蜜

[davidwontstopwritingsongs]

so in cantonese it's called 奇異女俠玩救宇宙. lets break that DOWN

the tweet i saw about it translated it as "wacky woman fucks around and saves the world". is that an accurate translation? well… yes and no.

let's start with 奇異. you'll also notice it in films like doctor strange (奇異博士). a rough translation would be wacky/weird, yes. or strange if you will. but it also has connotations to magic, the supernatural, interesting things, things outside the realm of reality. something singular, unique. and that fits with the film so well.

女俠 next. 女 means woman. not very much to say here. 俠 if you google it would mean something like brave, hero, etc. not a huuuuge amount to analyse in this part apart from the fact that 俠 is used in the title of every single superhero movie (spiderman is 蜘蛛侠, iron man is 鐵甲奇俠, so on and so forth) so i guess a cantonese person seeing this movie title would assume it was somewhat superhero-y. ("to be fair, it does have quite good action scenes" - my friend who had to have this post infodumped to them at 2am before i decided to post it on tumblr)

NOW THE NEXT BIT. THE BIT THAT INSPIRED THIS UNHINGED 2AM DEEP DIVE. 玩救. THIS IS WHERE THE FUCKS AROUND AND SAVES THE WORLD BIT COMES FROM. 玩 means to play. 救 means to save. so she's playing around and saving something. cool.

but wait, because this is actually an EXTREMELY CLEVER PUN. you see, 救 is pronounced "gou" in cantonese. you want to know another word that is pronounced "gou"? and not just after you fuck around with tones, but actually in the exact same pronounciation? 夠. now what is the significance of that you may ask?

玩救 itself is not a word/phrase. 玩夠, however, is. same pronounciation so it fits into the wordplay. 玩夠 means literally to have "played enough/finished playing". basically you're done, you're moving on. but that is the centre of evelyn's struggle! she doesn't think she's done anything with her life, she constantly rues the fact that she could have done so much more and she didn't! evelyn HASN'T 玩夠 life yet. she wants to do it all, to live all those lifetimes. and it is through living all those lifetimes and finding enlightment that she 玩夠, and thus is also able to 救 the universe.

and then 宇宙 is universe. like the whole universe. there's only one universe in this translation. i'm not quite sure how you would articulate multiple universes in cantonese.

anyway the person who made this title translation was IMMENSELY clever

[don-dake]

↑ Fake 倉頡 Congkit/Cangjie keyboard in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).

The funny thing is, the 倉頡 keys (and placement) are accurate enough; it is possible the 艸 character is used in place of the more commonly seen 廿.

But the other keys (like the numeral keys 一、二、三, etc. accurately translated they may be) being either unnecessarily rendered in 漢字 (Chinese characters), or placed wrongly (like the 刪除 “delete” where the 逗號 “comma” key usually goes), or just bizarre (like what are 火八 “fire eight” and 火九 “fire nine” keys?), makes this obviously a joke keyboard! 😹

↑ Another imagining of the TND fake keyboard.

The naming and placement of the keys here at least matches up more accurately to a hypothetical, totally 漢字 keyboard.

(note the 逗號 key next to the 一 (M) key, rather than the 刪除, and no weird 火八、火九、火十 keys placed randomly, like shown in the movie prop!)

Actually…I wouldn't mind having a keyboard like this, just for the kicks! Unnecessary and pretentious it may be! 😹

↓ Examples of real 倉頡 keyboards.

[1o1percentmilk]

CHANG JIANG QI HAO APPRECIATION

[wlwcatalogue]

Five Days of Yam-Pak Movies ～ Bonus: Madam Yun // 芸娘 (dir. Chu Kea/珠璣, 1960) - starring Yam Kim Fai (任劍輝) and Pak Suet Sin (白雪仙)

Click below for more information + some commentary!

Outline & Scene Summary Inspired by Shen Fu/沈復's Qing Dynasty autobiography Six Records of a Floating Life/浮生六記. Madam Yun focuses on Shen Fu (Yam Kim Fai) and his wife Yun (Pak Suet Sin), who live in married bliss with their children at the former’s familial home. However, they fall foul of the machinations of Shen Fu’s younger half-brother, who has designs on the inheritance, and are summarily kicked out. The young family struggle to adjust to their poverty, but their plight is worsened by Yun becoming chronically ill; these desperate straits result in Shen Fu having to leave his family behind in search of paying work. Thankfully, after all his efforts he is able to find a benefactor, and the family is reunited under one roof (which is, sadly, not what happened in real life). In this early scene depicting the calm before storm, Shen Fu is trying to write a poem, but struggles to find the right words to finish off a line. As he is musing, his wife sneaks up and writes in her own suggestion, delighting him with her scholarly wit.

Although the movie as a whole is pretty dour, the first few scenes really stood out to me as a lovely (if inadvertent) depiction of an F/F couple being happily married with children, especially as Pak’s character is not reduced to being a mere mother or housewife, and the focus remains on the love between the pair. It’s also notable that the source material is known for being a rare depiction of a loving marriage in Chinese literature, and the earlier 1954 film adaptation specifically cast two actors who frequently played married couples (namely Cheung Wood-Yau/張活游 and Pak Yin/白燕; see source). The casting of Yam-Pak for this movie indicates that the studio was confident the public would embrace them as not only a romantic pairing, but specifically the ideal of a married couple.

Note: Six Records of a Floating Life is very much worth reading, not only because it's a vividly-drawn portrait of everyday life in 19th-century China (floral arrangements! exam LARPing! complaining about how touristy Hangzhou's West Lake is!), but also because it contains queer elements. There are references to Yun having a relationship with another woman (and asking her husband to take her on as a concubine, lol) and being attracted to other women, none of which are mentioned in this movie.

Links:

My post about Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin being queer icons

Full movie on Youtube

[splinteredsoul]

Limbo (2021)

dir. Soi Cheang

[baddawg94]

Jackie Chan

Michelle Yeoh

1992’s “Police Story III”

[strawberryplanetradio]

Fallen Angels (1995)

Soundtrack

Forget Him - Shirley Kwan

[kiramarch]

All memories are traces of tears.

[elemonpie]

Do u know what i hate about globalization? If my husband ever cheats on me with our married neighbor ill never find out cause he wont get us same bags in different colors that are only available in Japan when Zara exists

[unreadpoppy]

the thing about being the only neurodivergent person in your friend group is that whenever you have to make a group decision, if you have to go against the group because of acessibility, you're going to loose.

My friends and I are going to watch a movie this month and everyone wants to watch it dubbed and I'd rather with subtitles. Why? 1) because people can be very loud and if someone is talking next to me and there's no subtitles, I will miss part of the movie and won't understand what's happening. 2) I think I might have some of that audio processing stuff cause I swear when I watch stuff dubbed it takes me so long to understand what's going on without a subtitle, I will miss important plot points or characters names and it won't be a good experience and since dubbed movies don't come with subtitles, I just get lost. 3) When the sounds get too much to me, at least I can focus on the writing to follow along

But because my friends don't like watching things subtitled, I lost in the vote and when my friend said the cinema we chose only had dubbed I reacted with a crying sticker and someone very aggresively was like "girl if you want to watch it subtitled go watch alone cause no one here wants to" and then I had to fucking explain that man, I'm going to go watch it dubbed cause i'm not gonna make anyone watch it subtitled.

'cause unlike neurotypicals, I'm used to having to be unconfortable for their fucking sake.

And it's like, if I try to explain, it's always like well you can handle it y'know, my needs get dismissed as nothing because why would everyone else bend and break for me when I can just "take it"? Like if dubbed movies just came with subtitles, my life would be so. much. easier. It's why I'm okay with watching stuff dubbed AT HOME, cause I can put the subtitles anyways.

I'm lucky enough that I managed to convince people to not sit all the way in the back (they wanted to sit in the last motherfucking seats, which are closer to the sound machines which means that everything is way worse for me and also, even with glasses, my eyesight is still gonna be worse all the way in the back when compared to like, the middle row).

[kaxen]

I keep getting Chinese spam texts and it's like joke's on you, I can't even read that!

[tranquildr3ams]

The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊, 2022)

The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊, 2022) #TheSparringPartner #Crime #Drama #Thriller #HKFilm #AsianCinema #Film #Movie #Review

The Sparring Partner (2022) Director: Cheuk Tin Ho Cast: Alan Yeung, Pui Tung Mak, Louisa So, Michael Chow, Jan Lamb, Gloria Yip Based on a shocking case in real life, a young man partners with his friend to murder and dismember his parents. Pleading not guilty to the crime, defense attorneys face each other as nine jurors grapple with the truth. – IMDB Based on the 2013 Tai Kok Tsui double…

[don-dake]

I got reminded of this scene from 《尋秦記》 (2001) ↑…

as I was watching Demolition Man (1993) ↓ and its “seashells” scene recently!

Context (for anyone who hasn't watched either):

In 《尋秦記》 (A Step into the Past), a cop (Louis Koo) from the future (2001) is zapped back in time to a little before the establishment of the 秦朝 (Qin Dynasty, 221 BC – 206 BC), where he finds toilet habits to be not what he expected…

Demolition Man has this cop (Sylvester Stallone) who was cryogenically frozen in a dystopian world in 1996 and wakes up in the year 2032 where the world's (or at least the US of A) toilet habits have changed drastically.

So wait, does that mean the toilet situation in the world of Demolition Man is no better than the primitive times of the (almost) Qin Dynasty? 😹

P.S.: I still have no idea how the piece of what looks like a broken piece of pottery, or the “seashells” actually work! 😹

[siulongbao]

when ur a gaysian and you have homophobic parents so you've been in the closet and afraid to date your entire life :)