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.

Review:
Mahjong (1996) is in many ways Yang’s greatest Satire, but has, at the same time, the beating pulse of a real dramatic story. In plays on the perception of Taiwan by foreign entities, urban locales, love, father/son relationships, and of course, themes of business & greed that Yang most vehemently loathes. The story is told through a variety of different viewpoints, but we are centered on a small gang of friends/hustlers, apparently led by Red Fish (Tang Congsheng), and consisting of Luen-Luen (Ke Yulun), a gentle-hearted translator, Hong Kong (Chen Chang of Crouching Tiger fame), a ladies man who is able to charm his way into any woman’s pants, and Little Buddha (the same actor who played “Cat” in Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day), a fake Feng-Shui expert who is used in the gang’s various scams. A French woman named Marthe (Virginie Ledoyen) – Yang plays very craftily on the similarity of the name ‘Marthe’ with ‘Matra’, the defunct subway system in Taiwan that is milking the city of its funds – comes to urban Taipei looking for her “lover”, a British man named Marcus. The plot eventually shows us Marthe’s eventual relationship with Red Fish’s gang (and Luen-Luen), but also reveals a variety of interesting narrative twists and turns concerning Red Fish and Hong Kong.

The performances in this piece are great, and Yang really seemed to get a lot out of his actors. A lot of critics complained that the acting from the foreign thesps were inferior, but their performances weren’t bad at all, and added a diverse and invigorating “global” flavor to an otherwise “Asian”/Taiwanese film. There is a great quote at the end made by the actor who plays Marcus, where he reflects on how Taiwan will be the height of “western civilization”, a political and philosophical reflection on Yang’s part. Also, Nien-Jen Wu (he played NJ, the lead, in Yang’s Yi-Yi) has a nice turn as a ruthless Taiwanese gangster/hit-man – you really begin to see the breadth of Nien-Jen’s skill as an actor: he’s really talented.

In addition, Ke Yulun (who made a guest appearance in Yi-Yi as the military-uniform-clad “Soldier” who Lily cheats on) puts out a great performance as a tortured interpretor, drawn by love to Marthe. Tang Congsheng (he’s also in Yi-Yi, in a blue-shirt at the N.Y. Bagel Cafe) is also fantastic, and seems to be, in more ways that one, Yang’s vehicle in expressing rage against financial/capitalist-driven greed.

The final violent outbreak by Tang Congsheng’s character Red Fish is beautifully executed, and Yang could not use violence in a more perfect way. It is a great moment of cinema and is perhaps the most pure, honest, cathartic and emotionally-intense venting of range I have seen in any film of recent memory (or ever, for that matter).

Well, in addition, there are many nice city shots of the bustling urban Taipei, excellent humour (the part where Angela’s trio of women, wanting to “share” Hong Kong and paralleling Hong Kong’s gang in wanting to share another, previous girl is hilarious), finely-executed suspense camera-work, and some crackling dialogue. The dialogue, as sharp and satirically-witty as it is, is perhaps what I most admire about the piece. It constructs the film with a structure that is at once a strong narrative-driven story and a scathingly brilliant satire. This work may be hard-to-find and a very, very rare piece (as most of Yang’s works are), but if you’re able to get your hands on it, you will not be disappointed. I hope it is able to live on as a classic piece in its own right, because it is definitely one of the major works of Yang’s oeuvre.

Ma.jiang.1996.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 0 min
Size: 	4.46 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 616 kb/s
BPP: 	0.341
Audio
#1:  	Multiple languages 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s (Criterion Collection USA Blu-ray (2025))

https://nitro.download/view/1CEE86B512ABE14/Ma.jiang.1996.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-KG.mkv

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

The post Edward Yang – Mahjong aka Couples (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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

A.Confucian.Confusion.1994.Edward.Yang.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 9 min
Size: 	2.97 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 826 kb/s
BPP: 	0.208
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/38F0CF7C6B9FA8D/A.Confucian.Confusion.1994.Edward.Yang.576p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264.mkv

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

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