Earlier this year my girlfriend and I came back from or woke up after a heavy night out and basically ground to a halt in front of the telly with some crisps and some beers. It was one of those days where we had a bit of a residual glow and were in a slightly odd, vulnerable but receptive state. Didn't really know what to watch but there was a pile of dvds by the box that this guy had burned for me, they all had foreign names and they were pretty much unrecognisable to me, just meaningless strings of letters. To be honest it felt as though most of them might be a bit too challenging right now, too much on that vibe of worthy art-films that we'd be pleased to tell people we had seen, but which might demand a little more in the way of concentration and engagement than we were able to give just at this moment... but neither of us said that, maybe we were too strung out to even do that. So the long and short of it was that we stuck in Kaili Blues - a simple name written in black pen on an otherwise blank cd - and wondered where, if anywhere, it would take us. Probably nowhere at all we thought... but we were very wrong. To this day I can't quite say if it was the film or our mood, in fact I have no doubt that ultimately it was the two together in perfect sync that made the thing affect both of us so profoundly. I'm fairly sure I've written about the film itself before here but, as a reminder, afterwards She Who Must Be Obeyed immediately said that it reminded her strongly of Tarkovsky... now Tarkovsky's basically my favourite director and that of half the world too so of course he's often imitated, and every hipster with a camera who makes a slow (and no doubt boring) movie cites his work as their main influence, rather unwisely I tend to feel cos nine times out of ten the films are nothing like his, and even those very few that are suffer greatly in comparison.
Kaili Blues is indeed one of those films with very little in the way of plot, a sumptuous mish mash of lush green forests and neglected farm equipment rusting in front of stunning mountain backdrops... a collection of zones where nothing very much happens, and of course it happens very slowly. And it's magical.
Anyway, the point is that this guy who made that film is called Bi Gan, this is what it says on wikipedia
During his college years, Bi watched Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, later stating in an interview, "Cinema can be different [from mainstream films]; you can make what you like. What I had seen up to that point were mainly Hollywood films. What I was taught was pretty boring."[6] Because of this particular film, he made up his mind to pursue filmmaking. "Before that, my parents and my relatives thought I would become jobless after graduation since I didn't want to do anything.
Anyway, this is in this thread cos he's got a new one out and the reviews are saying it's amazing. Word on the street is that it might even be better than the new killer from Guy Ritchie - basically I'm totally wet-tipped with anticipation. One slight catch though, the film is in 3d and, as far as I can gather, the majority of 3d cinemas here tend to be used to show blockbusters, I'm actually getting worried about whether I will be fully able to catch it as Bi intended. Something that is keeping me tossing and turning at night, waking up in sweat covered sheets saying "No, noooooo, please no".