After firing a colleague, the head of a PR company begins to question her lifestyle and values.

A.Confucian.Confusion.1994.BluRay.1080p.Remux.AVC.DTS.MA.5.1-STAF.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 9mn
Size:	21.1 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1920x1080
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	21.5 Mb/s
Audio
Chinese 5.1ch DTS XLL @ 1 876 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EDE820534E06F15/A.Confucian.Confusion.1994.BluRay.1080p.Remux.AVC.DTS.MA.5.1-STAF.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Min Nan
Subtitles:English, Chinese, Japanese

The post Edward Yang – Du li shi dai AKA A Confucian Confusion (1994) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

It’s a two-episode run of the Taiwanese TV anthology series Eleven Women, produced by actress Sylvia Chang. The idea—to have several younger directors make episodes about contemporary Taiwanese life, centering on female protagonists—was modeled after the Hong Kong TV productions (such as Below the Lion Rock) that kickstarted the HK new wave. And indeed, it started the careers of not only Yang but several other important figures who would go on to pioneer the Taiwanese New Wave.

Yang’s episodes were adapted from a short story by Di Yi. The title is “Floating Weeds” (literally, “Duckweed”).

2.40GB | 2h 28m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/CE9B44D2DED98C4/Yang_Floating_Weeds.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/CBE8899EEC23FA1/Yang_Floating_Weeds_v4.srt
or
https://fikper.com/FxS5IRCFUH/Yang_Floating_Weeds.mkv
https://fikper.com/sM60fBbE0t/Yang_Floating_Weeds_v4.srt

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English,Chinese (traditional)

The post Edward Yang – Eleven Women: Floating Weeds (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Two friends who haven’t seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.

Dennis Schwartz wrote:
The earnest drama about a disturbed family is the debut film of Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang (“Yi Yi”/”A Brighter Summer Day”/”Taipei Story”), who co-wrote it with Nien-Jen Wu. Yang, who died in 2007 at age 59, is credited with launching the Taiwanese New Wave in his debut feature. Though well-presented, it seemed too long and only covering soap opera material. Through its confusing use of flashbacks with constant revelations about family life, secret lovers and constant shifts in the way the main characters behaved over the years, it’s made to seem deeper than warranted. A Hollywood studio star in the 1950s like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck could knock off satisfying sudsers like this one with regularity.

The jaded Qing Qing (Terry Hu) is an internationally renowned concert pianist who returns to Taiwan from a European tour and reunites after thirteen years with her estranged childhood friend from Taipei, the disillusioned divorced housewife just starting a new business, Jia Li (Sylvia Chang), for an afternoon chat over tea. They reminisce about old times. Qing Qing during those school days had dated Jia Li’s aspiring to be medical doctor brother Jia Lin (Zhuo Ming Xiang), forced by dad to follow in his footsteps even though not suited for that career. Through flashbacks we meet Jia Li’s family: her imperious and womanizing doctor father rules the family, and orchestrates arranged marriages for both his children. This messes up Qing Qing’s relationship with Jia Li’s brother. Not willing to wait for her father to choose her a groom, Jia Li elopes with her ordinary teenage boyfriend De Wei (David Mao) and later successful businessman.

The pic goes into some developments about the relationships that the Taiwanese viewer will get and react to, but probably not a foreigner. Which makes the pic a bit of drag, though not without a few interesting developments such as its tale of a disappearing man and the ability of the hurt Jia Li to overcome these hurts and change for the better. The melancholy humanist pic entertains in the same ennui urban dramatic tone of an Antonioni romancer, but without the heft of the Italian master.

3.51GB | 2h 46m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B51F80D35E015BC/Hai_tan_de_yi_tian_(1983).mkv
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/89cfab10da3a2/Hai_tan_de_yi_tian_%281983%29.mp4

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Edward Yang – Hai tan de yi tian AKA That Day on the Beach (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The lives of anonymous strangers become intricately intertwined in this 1986 effort by late Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang. Following the sudden death of his superior, a doctor frames his colleague in order to succeed as the clinic’s director. The doctor’s writer wife, meanwhile, is experiencing a mid-life crisis, struggling to finish her next novel while surrendering to the advances of an ex-boyfriend. Elsewhere, a hippie photographer randomly snaps a delinquent girl escaping from a crime scene and becomes obsessed with her. The girl is locked up at home by her mother, and begins making random prank calls, which in turn affect the lives of the doctor and his wife.

The collage of chance encounters in The Terrorizers vividly portrays the degenerating psychic life of the Taipei city dwellers through disjointed narrative and multiple storylines. Set for brief moments against an eye-catching poster of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? on the wall, the irony constructed by Yang turns out to be all the more poignant, considering how his quiet characters never really speak up amid their simmering rage, before boiling over completely. Similar treatment is given to the film’s supposedly dramatic plot elements, such as extramarital affairs, police raids and violence, which are delivered with unusual calmness and tranquility.

As with many other examples of Taiwanese New Wave cinema in the 1980s, The Terrorizers realistically records the people’s private sentiment at a specific moment of Taiwan’s rapid socio-economical transformation. Nevertheless, the film’s depiction of the experience of urban ennui and desperation remains largely universal. No matter how one sees fit to interpret the film’s double endings, Yang’s vision of urban life looks all but doomed. The director once explained that this is essentially one tragic ending – that somebody would inevitably be hurt – told in two different ways. For a bleak story narrated without any comic relief, it is a fitting conclusion that is at once profound and disturbing.

2.68GB | 1h 49m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/20EBFA600817EA0/Edward_Yang_-_(1986)_The_Terrorizers.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Min Nan
Subtitles:English

The post Edward Yang – Kong bu fen zi aka The Terrorizers (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Lung, a former member of the national Little League team and now operator of an old-style fabric business, is never able to shake a longing for his past glory. One day, he runs into a forme teammate who is now a struggling cab driver. The two talk about old times and they are struck by a sense of loss. Lung is living with his old childhood sweetheart Ah-chin, a westernized professional woman who grew up in a traditional family. Although they live together, Ah-chin is always weary of Lung’s past liason with another girl. After an argument, Ah-chin tris to find solace by hanging out with her sister’s friends, a group of westernized, hedonistic youths.

Andrew Chan wrote:

To appreciate just how bitter a pill Edward Yang was serving up with Taipei Story, it helps to understand the sarcastic fake-out embedded in the film’s Chinese title. Lifted from a poem by Tang dynasty master Li Bai, Qingmei zhuma translates literally as “Green plum, bamboo horse,” a phrase that, like many classical idioms in the language, distills human experience to a tableau of emblematic objects that can be savored by the mind’s eye. Here the experience being described is one of kismet—an eternal love that evolves out of the carefree games of childhood and preserves its innocence even as the companions age. Seeing these words on a marquee in 1985, the year the film was released, the average Taiwanese viewer would have been primed to expect the kind of escapist melodrama that commercial Chinese-language cinema had excelled at for decades, or at least something in tune with the treacly hit ballads of lead actress (and Yang’s first wife) Tsai Chin. But instead of the pastoral, ever-blooming romance evoked in Li Bai’s lines, what we get is the dry chill of urban malaise. Andrew Chan for Criterion

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky  wrote:

Co-written with Hou and Hou’s longtime writing partner, Chu Tien-Wen, Taipei Story is like so many Yang films in that it doesn’t pinpoint the contradictions of modern living in characters so much as in what they navigate on a day-to-day basis: environments, spheres of couple-hood and family life. It paints a picture of a mid-1980s Taiwan awash with conflicting American and Japanese cultural influences. Yang is obsessive about cataloging and contrasting these: the music of Michael Jackson (both heard and referenced) versus the huge neon Fuji Film billboard that provides an arresting backdrop for several scenes; Lung’s preference for a karaoke bar over the faux Anglo-American “pub” favored by Chin’s wannabe-yuppie friends; the repeated references to baseball, the quintessential American pastime that is now arguably more popular in Japan. But because Yang almost never uses close-ups, but instead relies largely on medium-wide shots that can accommodate two or more characters, these things are seen as surroundings—part of the mise-en-scène, a term and concept that has sadly fallen out of fashion. It is the world in which Lung and Chin exist, framed lucidly by Yang and his cinematographer, Yang Wei-Han. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky for A.V. Club

http://nitroflare.com/view/5F384C2F38B040C/Qing.mei.zhu.ma.AKA.Taipei.Story.1985.720p.BluRay.x284.AAC1.0.pirata00.mkv

Language(s):Min Nan | Mandarin | Hokkien
Subtitles:English

The post Edward Yang – Qing mei zhu ma AKA Taipei Story (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Master Taiwanese director Edward Yang spins this intricate and complex yarn about life’s everyday crises. The film focuses on N.J. Jian (Wu Nien-jen), a noted writer/director in his own right), his wife Min-min (Elaine Jin) and their two children, teenager Ting-ting (Kelly Lee) and young Yang-yang (Jonathan Chang). Their middle-class existence seems stable and secure until a series of incidents throws all of their lives out of kilter. The misfortunes start at the wedding of Min-min’s ne’er-do-well brother A-Di (Chen Xisheng), when his jilted ex-girlfriend Yun-Yun (Zeng Xinyi) bursts into the proceedings and lambastes the bride. Upset by the ruckus and feeling unwell, Min-min’s mother goes home early only to suffer a stroke and slip into a coma. After the wedding, N.J. runs into his first love, Sherry (Ke Suyun), who is married to a rich American. This chance encounter shakes N.J. to his very foundations, forcing him to reevaluate his life. At the same time, N.J.’s computer company deliberates on whether or not to collaborate with a renowned Japanese games designer, Ota (Issey Ogata), sending N.J. to Japan to negotiate a contract. Confronted by her mother’s coma, Min-min also takes stock of her life and finds it lacking. On the brink of a nervous breakdown, she suddenly joins a religious retreat. In Japan, N.J. warms to his potential business partner Ota, spending long evenings discussing life and love in hip Tokyo jazz clubs. There, N.J. also meets up with Sherry; they relive old memories and flirt with infidelity. At the same, Ting-ting, who quietly blames herself for her grandmother’s coma, learns her first hard lessons about love while Yang-yang causes trouble at school and wrestles with the truths of the adult world. This film won the Golden Palm for best direction at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and was an official selection for the 2000 Toronto Film Festival.

http://nitroflare.com/view/9E3034DEF51A2DC/Edward_Yang_-_%282000%29_Yi_yi.mkv

Language(s):English, Min Nan, Hokkien, Mandarin, Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Edward Yang – Yi yi (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
It’s only natural that Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day begins with a shot of a barely-lit light bulb. On the set of a movie, a director reprimands an actress for harping on the color of her dress. “This is a black and white film,” he says, one of many references to the symbolic darkness that overshadows the milieu of the film. A Brighter Summer Day is itself in color, but it may as well be monochrome. Much of the film’s action takes place at night or inside dimly lit interiors, and it’s not unusual for the characters to be confronted by light and its almost political implications. Some of the best images in the film (young boys staring at a rehearsal from a theater’s rooftop; a basketball bouncing out of a darkened alleyway) pit light against dark—a fascinating dialectic meant to symbolize a distinctly Taiwanese struggle between past and present. From weapons to watches, objects similarly speak to the present. Like the light, these objects are constant reminders that the past can’t be ignored and must be used to negotiate the present.
In his article on Edward Yang for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum praises A Brighter Summer Day’s novelistic qualities and the way with which the director realizes a “a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the ’90s.” The film takes its title from a lyric in Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (the singer himself once bemoaned the island’s unknown status to the world) and loosely revolves around the death of a young girl by a male classmate. Over the course of the film, Yang evokes the way the military regime in Taiwan has disconnected the island’s people—men and women desperately trying to figure out a way to relate to each other and their children despite the constant meddling (whether punishment or validation) of the government. In what is arguably the film’s most memorable scene, a young kid in military school asks his teacher, “What should I do?” The emphasis on the “I” is important here and is indicative of Yang’s concern for the country’s oppression of its people and the limits of their personal freedom. Because Yang’s compositions are so uncomplicated, it’s easy to dismiss the director as a better storyteller than visualist, but that’s to ignore the remarkable way he uses his camera to posit all sorts of emotional and political confrontations. It’s in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang’s aesthetic (see Yi Yi for more proof) and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark. – Ed Gonzalez © slant magazine, 2004.

http://nitroflare.com/view/21517CDFDDAD0A8/Edward_Yang_-_%281991%29_A_Brighter_Summer_Day.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Min Nan, Shanghainese
Subtitles:English

The post Edward Yang – Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian AKA A Brighter Summer Day (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.