juzuxinxiang

"Lanling" is an ancient myth. It is about a boy, Prince Lanling of the Phoenix Tribe, who is too pretty, too androgynous to lead his people. But with a mask he carves for himself from magic wood, he is able to slay his enemies. His new identity quite literally grows on him and becomes his worst enemy. "Lanling" is seemingly inaccessible, breathtakingly beautiful, directed by Sherwood Hu, who studied film and theater in China and New York.

This spectacular epic film set in China's distant past and filmed in a remote area of Yunnan Province with a cast drawn from the Bal, Yi and Naaxi minority peoples is like no other from China. Influenced by Kurosawa, Bergman and Coppola, WARRIOR LANLING seeks to restore China's sense of its own cultural origins: the "Phoenix" (shamanistic, often matriarchal) heritage which was largely stamped out by the dominant "dragon," or yellow earth, culture that later evolved into centuries of patriarchal Confucianism. Enormous battles between warring tribes, rituals from a primal myth involving a boy and a mask, chthonic rites and dances are all stunningly filmed. Though it risks ridicule at moments of mytho-poetic over- kill, WARRIOR LANLING is the most visually kinetic film in Telluride and introduces a prodigiously talented new filmmaker, Sherwood Hu. －－Tom Luddy

Sherwood Hu's remarkable Hamlet, Prince of the Himalayas, better even than Kosintsev's Renaissance-court version and at least as good as Throne of Blood, here at last a Hamlet that makes emotional sense of the plot and the back story. Ophelia drowns pregnant, Claudius is Hamlet's biological father and Hamlet Senior was about to kill the adulterous Gertrude when the timely ear-drop regicide saved her, and now, a riled and baleful ghost, he whispers big lies to the dithering prince who dares not slay Claudius for fear of the truth of his genesis. It shows us with force and ardour what, in an ancient, galloping, tribal, horn-hatted society of bellicose chieftains and drawn broadswords, Usurpation and Regicide mean, and Royalty too, by God.

And all this, amazingly, is achieved with a bare five hundred words of Shakespeare's text but many looks, nuances, flashbacks, nightmares, faces in mist, and mountainside Eisenstein compositions that give you, in subtext, the great words back. No better film of the Bard exists I fear, having racked my brains and searched my emptying memory, not Welles's, Olivier's, Polanski's, Kurosawa's, Branagh's, Brooks's, Wright's, Hall's, Reinhardt's, though Kosintsev's Lear is in the league and Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, curiously (Brando, Gielgud, Mason, Garson, Kerr, Pate, the harsh, electrifying Louis Calhern), on a fortieth viewing still in the outer ballpark. This young man Sherwood Hu (whose name sounds like a novel by Charles Kingsley), an American Samoan Chinese based in both Beijing and Frisco, is already as good as the greatest cinema deities -- Eisenstein, Bergman, Bresson, Fellini.