Kang-sheng Lee

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Excerpt from “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship” by Tiago de Luca, originally published in Cinema Journal Vol. 56, No. 1 (Fall, 2016)

A limping woman (Chen Shiang-chyi), with a broom in hand, walks into an empty cinema auditorium framed in a static long shot. She enters the frame from the right, walks up the stairs while slowly sweeping the floor, crosses the upper part of the auditorium, and then climbs down the stairs on the other side and leaves the frame from the left, an action that lasts nearly three minutes. Read More »

Explores the background behind an adolescent (Lee Kang-sheng) extorting money from other adolescents.Read More »

When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »

Gu Changwei’s Longtou—shot documentary style—features a series of characters who dwell on the realities of expectation, punctuated by a series of memorable shots (a cat stalking and jumping onto an air conditioner unit; an elderly man dragging a series plastic bottles; a weight-lifter practicing his moves and a child blowing bubbles) and nice use of music.Read More »

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It made me think of the Third Man, just the structure of how the story unfolds, like as if Rollo Martins was a married couple on their honeymoon stumbling onto the tail end of No Pockets in a Shroud.

I actually picked this up because I always love John Ireland’s villain in Railroaded. and he definitely didn’t disappoint as the he-man hero husband in this one. In fact everyone did a great job – keep a look-out for the sinister, serpentine woman & her hell-spawn spouting poison in the street, a grand single-scene supporting performance. Well I liked it anyway, I doubt she got any awards, but true artists never do! Actors like that lady prefer to live in the shadows…Read More »

Synopsis:
Critically-lauded but somewhat distant drama from Ann Hui.

Review by Kozo (taken from Love HK FIlm):
Award-winning political drama from Ann Hui treads on rich territory and results in a noble, but emotionally lacking effort. Using the work of real-life activist Father Franco Mella (played here by Anthony Wong) as a guideline, Ordinary Heroes moves from the plight of the boat people through the tragedy at Tiananmen Square with a sweeping view of political activism in Hong Kong.
The situations and storytelling are top notch but ultimately the film proves a better portrait than a story. The film doesn’t try to educate viewers about Hong Kong’s political history, and instead concentrates on a long-unrequited romance between Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-Sheng and Loletta (now Rachel) Lee. Sadly, that plotline proves of tenuous interest, which isn’t helped any by Lee Kang Sheng’s obviously dubbed acting. The relationships, while affecting, don’t truly reach a conclusion in the film, which is sad because it seems that Hui is reaching for one.Read More »

Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It’s dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?Read More »

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Kang lives alone in a big house, Non in a small apartment in town. They meet, and then part, their days flowing on as before.Read More »

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Filmmaker Ming-liang Tsai sits with Lee Kang-sheng in a house as they have a discussion.

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This conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse Lee Kang-sheng illuminates one of the great actor-director collaborations in cinema history.Read More »