As you may have seen I’ve been dabbling in a little anime lately, trying to find interesting ones that speak to me. I can’t remember what tipped me off to A TREE OF PALME (2002), but it’s one I found interesting, first because it has an unusual style and transports us to a distinctly strange fantasy world, then because it has a complex mix of tones and emotions that speak to the experience of being human and what not. Two things I enjoy in cinema.
I went in blind, and the first scene after the credits made me think it was gonna be kinda like DUNE. It’s night time in the desert, a blue-skinned warrior lady is being chased by goggled men driving mechanical spiders through the dust storm. They are transporting something covered in burlap that I’m afraid looks very much like a giant penis. The lady decapitates one of her pursuers in self defense but gets swarmed by some plants like the thing they’re transporting, which turn out not to be penises, but weird moving cactus things called Bolas. (read the rest of this shit…)
Chen Kaige is an acclaimed Chinese filmmaker I have no familiarity with. Too classy for me, I guess. Now I finally watched one, but not one of his famous ones from the ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s his 14th film, a straight up kung fu movie from 2015 called MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. And the reason is because it’s based on a book by Xu Haofeng, who wrote Wong Kar Wai’s 
