84

Like free falling through the loud, endless tumble of a waterfall. So sharp and sensual and scintillating it'll cause your brain to shatter. Hark sprints past Wuxia conventions in favor of subversion within fantasy. Simply a delicacy; pastel injected and pre-packaged with sweat along its skin.

everything tsui hark imagines he achieves, not even touching the density of thought or ethics or feeling, this is an accomplishment beyond words.

Two trans girls visit a town where everyone is horny but come into conflict with a powerful volcel warrior (dir. Tsui Hark, 1993)

I do want to say something of substance I guess. It's fucking incredible? Even on a dvdrip the vibrance of the lighting is stunning to behold. Besides like Hausu I can't remember having seen another live-action movie so awash with color. That plus Tsui Hark's freeform camera movement (always floating and gliding and flipping) gives it that great fantastical feel. It plays like a living myth, if that makes sense. It makes sense to me. I dunno. I love movies so much!!!

Tsui Hark merges the punk outrage of his early films with the lavish effects-driven wuxia of his later, much more successful works in this pointed denunciation of the hypocrisies both sexual and racial of China's religious traditions, the backward superstitional blindness of Taoism and the calcification of Buddhism into a rules-based organized structure that has forgotten the most basic rule of all major religions and moral philosophies: "Be excellent to each other."

More here.

This movie is so fucking iconic everyone go watch it now

"he's bullshitting for the laws of heaven!"

Some girls wanna be human AND be horny AND keep their gigantic, magical snake tail, no matter what the principal, societal authority says, YA KNOW??!!!!

The puritanical nature of religious order. 

Hark is such a poet and Green Snake is really quite the poetic cinematic fable. What if the “evils” are our greatest possibility that we keep away because of fear and repression? And because of this tight grip the established order has created, how have we distorted our greatest of connections in the love of each other? To the point we can’t even see our own hypocrisy when it’s staring us in the face? Hark not only makes a convincing argument but also paints a film so sexy and full of love that you can’t help but be convinced he got it right. 

This film also just envelopes all of your senses, the sensuality oozes off the screen and Maggie Chueng like always is breathtaking to watch as our vessel to understanding how humanity has constricted our possibility. It’s so close to masterpiece. Love it all the way around.

Fuck your tradition.

Pretty astonishing in a technical level. There’s more wire work on the camera than on the performers, and the color pops like few movies I’ve ever seen.

It all goes to support the way it reinvigorates the oft-boring energy of the classic Wuxia tradition. White becomes Green. Monks become indecent. Demons become empathetic. New Hong Kong may not be as religiously upright as Old Hong Kong feigned that it was, but it’s more compelling and much more honest.

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

A XIANXIA MASTERPIECE

I started this movie and kept waiting for the dream sequence to end. It doesn't. Green Snake is a constantly shimmering, sensual, ethereal art house action film steeped in misty imagery. It's a major departure from the brick-and-mortar aesthetics of Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China, but still possesses his visual fluidity. It has a lot of fluidity, actually. Wind, water, garments, and camera moves are all uniformly liquid. Even the color palette obeys the softer hues of watercolor paintings. It defines its visual theme early and keeps it in constant flux. Great stuff.

Si THE BLADE est un cauchemar enflammé se déroulant dans la poussière de la Chine hyperviolente du wu xia, GREEN SNAKE m'apparaît comme son envers (bien que tout aussi cynique). Soit, le rêve érotique (littéralement mouillé) d'un moine assoupi trop près des lotus ; Maggie Cheung en démon-serpent, qui teste les limites du didactisme de la pensée bouddhiste ; du révisionisme mythologique menant à un combat de dieux n'ayant finalement que faire des humains engloutis sous leurs pieds. Et ces agencements de couleurs (ces verts, ces roses!) à faire tomber les yeux de la tête. Quoi demander de plus? Content de finalement plonger dans Hark.