Movie Reviews
‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: An Intimate, Affecting and Dogma-Free Portrait of Chinese Immigrants in Working-Class New York
![‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: An Intimate, Affecting and Dogma-Free Portrait of Chinese Immigrants in Working-Class New York ‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: An Intimate, Affecting and Dogma-Free Portrait of Chinese Immigrants in Working-Class New York](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BSP_KEYIMAGE-H-2024.jpg?w=1024)
It’s become something of a movie fashion to forestall the title credits until well after an establishing sequence, if not deeper into the film. But when the title appears onscreen in Blue Sun Palace, at the half-hour point, there’s nothing self-consciously stylish about it: It marks a dramatic, ground-shifting change in perspective, a gut-punch of a narrative fracture, and one that writer-director Constance Tsang executes with assurance.
At the helm of her first feature, Tsang has made a sharp and tender story about dislocation, centering on a trio of hardworking Chinese immigrants in New York. In the movie’s first 30 minutes, Tsang draws us into the intimate orbit of her expatriate characters: a construction company employee and two colleagues at a massage parlor. Then, the sudden absence of one of them sets everything askew. Absence is the current that drives the narrative: absence from family, from homeland, from purpose. The world these characters inhabit, within an enclave of Flushing, Queens, is a place of in-between, captured in the evocative half-light of Norm Li’s cinematography, suggesting the cool-hot glow of the title’s blue sun. The poignant chords of Sami Jano’s elegantly lean score further fuel the angsty mood.
Blue Sun Palace
The Bottom Line Low-key and gripping.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
Cast: Wu Ke-Xi, Lee Kang Sheng, Xu Haipeng
Director-screenwriter: Constance Tsang
1 hour 57 minutes
The Blue Sun Palace is a restaurant outside the movie’s main New York setting, making its appearance late in the proceedings. It’s in another, unnamed restaurant that the film kicks off, without ceremony, in a remarkable sequence. The eatery itself is barely seen, Li’s camera moving between Hunan native Didi (Xu Haipeng) and Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), from Taiwan, holding them close as they dig into spicy chicken and fall into each other’s gaze.
It will be a while before we know their names, or who they are to each other. There’s a sense of established emotional intimacy between them, but at the same time they’re still getting to know each other. Eventually, the likely deduction is that he’s been a client of hers at the massage parlor she runs. When he speaks of his loneliness, his words are muted and restrained, and her eyes well with compassion, the play of feeling on Xu’s face breathtaking. This is not your standard first date. But it is a turning point, the infatuation deepening during an entranced karaoke duet. Didi and Cheung’s morning-after pillow talk is a beautifully played depiction of awakening and connection, mischievous and light even as it delves into the weightier territory of hopes and dreams, a conversational turn sparked by a calendar photo on Didi’s wall.
For Didi, some of those dreams involve Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), her closest friend at the massage parlor and the third key character. Amy is a gifted cook, and she and Didi talk of opening a restaurant together. In the meantime, they, along with Josie (Murielle Hsieh) and Fei (Zheng Lisha), spend their days and nights massaging the bodies of their male customers. A sign on the front door warns, “No Sexual Services,” but exceptions are made — sometimes grudgingly. And, as one tense scene demonstrates, not every client is respectful, to put it mildly.
As to the business’ unseen proprietor — it’s unlikely that the four women have ownership stakes — the movie offers no information or hints. There are a couple of other instances where Tsang could have made the narrative details less hazy, although these lingering questions don’t unmoor the story or lessen its impact.
What is clear is the bond among the parlor’s four women, the sisterly humor that gets them through the workaday hours and helps them withstand the overall sense of displacement. In ways both obvious and offhand, they nurture one another. The feast Amy prepares for Lunar New Year evokes fond and tearful memories of home for Josie. In the here and now, Didi’s maternal warmth is the glue holding everything together. But things break apart, and, as one character notes, “It’s funny how quickly the people you love become strangers.”
Picking up the story after a specific cataclysm and an unspecified length of time, Tsang turns her focus to the question of how to go on, and whether devotedness can devolve into clinging to what’s gone. Amy, obsessed with repairing a ceiling leak, worries it like a wound. Cheung, who has only one friend at work (Leo Chen), fields mirthless calls from his wife and daughter in Taiwan that are always about money, nothing else. When he takes Amy to the restaurant from the opening scene, you might call it a dramatic version of an Annie Hall joke, the bit where Alvy’s attempt to duplicate the romantic hilarity of a lobster dinner with Annie falls numbingly flat with another woman. Cheung’s disappointment aside, for Amy the fraught dinner gives way to the simplest and most difficult realization of all: “I just need to change something.”
While Xu’s compelling vibrancy suffuses Blue Sun Palace, her co-stars offer thornier portrayals. Playing in an unpredictable register, Wu (Nina Wu) gives pulsing life to Amy’s wary brittleness and its eventual melting. Lee, the longtime muse of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, carries Cheung’s yearning and joy, his guilt and sorrow, in a performance that’s all the more gripping for being measured and contained.
As to the resolution of these characters’ story, it remains an open question in the subtly moving final scenes. In massage parlor reception areas and backrooms, working-class restaurants and karaoke bars, Tsang and her strong cast, with superb contributions from production designer Evaline Wu Huang, have captured something evanescent and life-giving, and grounded it in kitchen clatter and workplace chatter, the gritty day-to-day.
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Movie Reviews
What If Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway Had a Mother-Off, and We All Lost?
![What If Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway Had a Mother-Off, and We All Lost? What If Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway Had a Mother-Off, and We All Lost?](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/42e/400/be8a0afe183d6c758ed14eb122b9e6d913-mother-instinct-neon.1x.rsocial.w1200.jpg)
The strange case of Mothers’ Instinct.
Photo: Neon
There’s a new movie starring Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway out this week, which is normally the sort of thing you’d expect to have heard about. But, after its release in the U.K. months ago, Mothers’ Instinct is slipping into U.S. theaters with as little splash as an Olympic diver nailing a triple somersault tuck. The film, a thriller directed by Benoît Delhomme, is getting the treatment typically reserved for a disaster, which is a shame, because I’ve been dying to discuss it with someone, and that’s hard when no one has any idea what you’re on about. Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences. Mothers’ Instinct is a remake of a 2018 Belgian film adapted from a novel by Barbara Abel, and watching it, you can appreciate exactly why these two major actors signed on to star in it. Funnily enough, those same qualities go a long way toward explaining why the movie doesn’t work.
Mothers’ Instinct isn’t camp, but it’s close enough that if you squint, you can almost see a version of the film that tips into something broader. Of course, if you squint, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate how immaculately Chastain and Hathaway are costumed. They look incredible — not like two 1960s housewives, which is what they’re playing, so much as two people who keep switching outfits because they can’t decide what to wear to the high-end Mad Men–themed party they’re headed to later. As Alice, Chastain is styled like a Hitchcock blonde in pin-curled ash updos and cardigan sets, while as Alice’s neighbor and friend Céline, Hathaway is given a Jackie O. look that involves a shoulder-length bouffant, pillbox hats, and gloves. They’re cosplayers in a gorgeous, airless setting, adjoining houses on a street that might as well be floating in space, the husbands (played by Anders Danielsen Lie and Josh Charles) vanishing to work for long stretches. The artificiality of this intensely manicured re-creation isn’t to any particular end, which gives the whole movie the air of a Don’t Worry Darling situation in which no one ever wakes up to the twist, instead sleepwalking through a stylized dream of Americana.
In fact, while Alice is restless over having given up her job as a journalist to take care of her son Theo (Eamon O’Connell), and Céline gets ostracized by the community after the death of her son, Max (Baylen D. Bielitz), Mothers’ Instinct isn’t actually all that interested in the pressures of living under a repressive 1960s patriarchy. Instead, it’s about another time-tested theme, one that’s best summed up as: Bitches be crazy. The perfect sheen of its surfaces — Delhomme, who’s making his directorial debut, is a cinematographer who started his career with The Scent of Green Papaya and has since worked with everyone from Tsai Ming-liang to Anton Corbijn — is paired with a score that shrieks unease from the opening scene, in which Céline is thrown a surprise birthday party. The source of this suspense isn’t revealed until later, after Max takes an unintended swan dive off the porch and the women’s friendship is threatened by grief, guilt, and suspicion. Is Céline in mourning, or does she actually irrationally blame Alice for what happened while developing an alarming fixation on Theo? Is Alice right to be suspicious of her bestie, who’s unable to have another baby, or is she being paranoid because the mental illness that previously resulted in her hospitalization has returned? Is it odd that two feminist actors jumped to participate in a film that traffics so freely in unexamined stereotypes about women and hysteria?
Not, it seems, when the opportunities to stare coldly into space or look on in glassy betrayal are this good. I’m not trying to sound snide here — the characters in Mothers’ Instinct have no convincing inner lives at all, but the exterior work of the actors playing them is choice stuff. When Alice and Céline are getting along, Chastain and Hathaway nuzzle together supportively like long-necked swans. When things start to go south, Chastain opts for an aloof distance with stricken eyes, while Hathaway prefers a labored smile that drops as soon as she’s alone. Theirs is a brittle-off no one can win, but both try their hardest anyway. The effort reaches its crescendo at Max’s funeral, where Hathaway’s enormous eyes glimmer through the barrier of a black lace veil and Chastain tilts her face up so that the elegant tracks of past tears can gleam in the light. The scene ends with Céline collapsing in anguish while Alice rushes her tantrumming child out of the church, an explosion of drama that would be so much more effective if the movie had left any room for modulation instead of starting at 10 and staying there. Mothers’ Instinct gets much sillier before it ends, but given how little it establishes as its baseline tone, it doesn’t feel fair to say it goes off the rails. Rather, as Hathaway stares brokenly into the dark and Chastain tears apart her nightstand drawer in panic, what comes to mind is how great a set of GIFs this movie will make someday. That’s not much, but I guess it’s something?
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Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Twisters – Kenbridge Victoria Dispatch
![Movie Review: Twisters – Kenbridge Victoria Dispatch Movie Review: Twisters – Kenbridge Victoria Dispatch](https://www.kenbridgevictoriadispatch.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2024/07/Twisters-Banner_WEB.jpg)
Movie Review: Twisters
Published 11:15 am Friday, July 26, 2024
1 of 3
Let me immediately cut to the chase (pun intended) and answer the question you’re all wondering. TWISTERS is a fun and entertaining summer blockbuster, but it in no way holds a candle to its predecessor TWISTER (1996). Still, the CGI is intense, the sound design is loud and immersive, and the lead performances — especially from Glen Powell — are sure to wow.
Following a horrible tragedy, meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has spent years out of the storm chasing business. She now lives in the largely tornado-less New York City, using her innate understanding of storm systems to direct weather alerts. But when her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) begs her to join his privately-funded start-up, which is designed to use military-grade radars to learn more about tornadoes and save communities in Oklahoma, she agrees to give him a week of her time. It’s not too long before “tornado wrangler” influencer Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) enters the scene with his ragtag group of weather enthusiasts, creating a competition between scientific research and entertainment. Each group races to be the first on the scene, with Kate and Javi seeking to model the tornado and Tyler trying to get the most likes on social media. But can the two groups find a way to work together or will the competition be more vicious than the tornadoes?
I am admittedly judging myself for caring too much about a summer blockbuster’s plot, because that’s not really what any of us sign up for with these films. But the various encounters with tornadoes begins to feel slightly repetitive and creates pacing issues, making a two-hour film feel like its runtime. And for some reason, it seems like there is something missing when it comes to portraying the sheer terror of experiencing F5 tornadoes, unlike the original film; the main set pieces were not as memorable.
The film does little to make you care about whether the characters live or die, relying on Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s chemistry and natural charisma to do the heavy lifting. The second Powell steps out of his gigantic truck, with his cowboy hat and belt buckle sparkling in the sun… sorry, I just lost my train of thought… and that’s what TWISTERS is hoping. Powell’s magnetism is sure to knock you off your feet and distract you from the film’s middling plot. And while Edgar-Jones’s performance is more muted, due to her character’s battle with PTSD, she brings an important level of humanity to the film and a character to both see yourself in and root for. More than that, her chemistry with Powell is off the charts and will certainly leave you wanting their relationship explored more in a sequel. The supporting characters are not given much to work with and as such, don’t really engender much concern when they are in deadly situations.
One element of TWISTERS I liked more than TWISTER is it showed the emotional and financial toll tornadoes ravage on communities. Of course, that is an element of the first film, but TWISTERS does a great job showcasing the speed in which tornadoes can overtake and devastate a community, both in loss of life and loss of property. This, juxtaposed with the “fun” in chasing storms brings a real human element to the film. I also want to give a shoutout to the movie not having any sad animal scenes (apart from a possible run-in with a chicken). So for all of you sickos excited to see another flying cow, this isn’t for you.
TWISTERS is the exact kind of movie you need to see in a theater so you can get the full experience. Where else can you admire the cinematography, get immersed in the sound design, and lose yourself in Glen Powell’s cowboy hat and million dollar smile? I saw it in a Dolby theater and was blown away.
There is no end credit scene.
My Review: B
Movie Reviews
Raayan Telugu Movie Review, Dhanush, Sundeep Kishan
![Raayan Telugu Movie Review, Dhanush, Sundeep Kishan Raayan Telugu Movie Review, Dhanush, Sundeep Kishan](https://www.123telugu.com/content/wp-content/themes/123telugu/images/logo.gif)
Movie Name : Raayan
Release Date : July 26, 2024
123telugu.com Rating : 2.75/5
Starring : Dhanush, Sandeep Kishan, Kalidasu Jairam, Aparna Balamurali, SJ Surya, Saravanan
Director : Dhanush
Producers : Kalanithi Maran
Music Director: A. R. Rahman
Cinematographer: Om Prakash
Editor: Prasanna GK
Related Links : Trailer
Raayan is Dhanush’s 50th film as an actor and his second as a director. The film released in cinemas worldwide today amid moderate expectations. This review explores how the film performed. Read on.
Story:
Kaartavaraayan aka Raayan (Dhanush), enjoys a quiet life in Anjanaouram with his brothers Muthuvelaraayan (Sundeep Kishan), Maanikyaraayan (Kalidas Jayaram), and sister Durga (Dushara Vijayan). Their tranquility is shattered when Muthu gets into a fight with the local don Dorai’s (Saravanan) men, setting off a dangerous rivalry. Sethuram (SJ Suryah), another gangster, steps into the fray with a deadly plan to eliminate Raayan. What drives Sethuram’s desire to kill Raayan? Who is Raayan beneath the surface? What is his true purpose? The film unveils all these secrets.
Plus Points:
Expectations were high when the film was announced, as it is directed by Dhanush. Besides his intense acting, Dhanush demonstrates his directing skills neatly.
Sundeep Kishan takes on a significant role and delivers an exceptional performance with his portrayal of a character with grey shades. His scenes with Dhanush and Aparna Balamurali are enjoyable.
Dushara Vijayan is unexpectedly strong in her role, which becomes more intense in the second half. SJ Suryah, as usual, gives an exemplary performance. Aparna Balamurali, Selvaraghavan, and others perform decently in their respective roles.
Minus Points:
The movie doesn’t offer much that’s new for viewers. Dhanush presents a routine story with very few twists, but the slow-paced screenplay diminishes the story’s impact.
There is no strong hook to illustrate the conflict between SJ Suryah and Dhanush. The reasons provided are unconvincing, and SJ Suryah’s potential is not fully utilised.
The film caters mainly to action movie enthusiasts and may not be suitable for family audiences due to its violent content.
Prakash Raj’s character lacks originality, and Varalaxmi Sarathkumar has minimal relevance to the plot. Additionally, including more emotional depth might have improved the film. The second half feels dragged out, with unnecessary scenes added to extend the film.
Technical Aspects:
As a director, writer, and actor, Dhanush displays his skills, but as a writer and director, he could have crafted a more engaging story. The sluggish second half could have been tightened.
Given the high expectations, AR Rahman’s work is noticeable but slightly disappointing. The cinematography by Om Prakash is decent, while editing by Prasanna GK could have been better. Production values are satisfactory.
Verdict:
On the whole, Raayan offers nothing new but remains passable due to the strong performances by Dhanush, Sundeep Kishan, Dushara Vijayan, and SJ Suryah. The action scenes are adequate but not suitable for family audiences. The lack of a strong hook point and a dragging second half are notable drawbacks. If you still decide to watch it, manage your expectations accordingly.
123telugu.com Rating: 2.75/5
Reviewed by 123telugu Team
Click Here For Telugu Review
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