Three Times
by Hsiao-hsien Hou
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Chen Chang, Fang Mei, Mei Di, Qi Shu, Su-jen LiaoDirector: Hsiao-hsien Hou
Brand: Genius
Cinematographer: Ping Bin Lee
Writer: Hsiao-hsien Hou
Editor: Ching-Song Liao
Producer: Ching-Song Liao
Producer: Gilles Ciment
Producer: Hua-fu Chang
Producer: Wen-Ying Huang
Writer: T'ien-wen Chu
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Taiwanese Chinese (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Silent, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-26
Audience Rating: Unrated
Model: 79540
Studio: Ifc
Product features:
- A rapturous and beautiful love story set in three different eras - a pool hall in 1966, a 1911 brothel and present day Taipei. Stylistic and true to life of the times, Hou Hsiao Hsien brings to life the culture of each period as the tales unfold. Critically acclaimed for its wisdom, cinematic style and storytelling it is a must see for any true lover of cinema. (Mandarin and Taiwanese with English
Movie Reviews of Three Times
Movie Review: A summation.
Summary: 5 Stars
Whenever someone says a film is "a critic's movie," the charge is tantamount to the admission: "I don't care to 'think'. In fact, I'm so emotionally walled-off -- possibly as a result of exposure to our diseased American popular culture suffocating the global semiosphere 24-7 -- that I refuse to budge that single instant which might allow myself to open up to the possibilities outside of the so-called 'way movies should be', and what all the clip-packages and trailers announce I should expect and join in lauding." Would these same folks (who wear their ignorance like sham folksy wisdom, or the crust of an ersatz salt-of-the-earth set of mores) begrudge a painting for not telling a story, -- insofar as it's at odds with "'mere' illustrations"?
Probably.
Hou's latest film is a masterpiece, something like his seventh consecutive one. It's a triptych of stories (which is to say, of situations, the small moments of love in blossom and struggling against circumstance -- which is all to say: of lives lived) that relates the poignance, quietude, and soul in great love's first 20-something pop. As always, Hou sets his own pace, hypnotic, charged and adrift, and shaded with a nuance that telegraphs its meaning via the mise en scène [ie, staging in the frame space] perhaps moreso than through any dialogue spoken. Here's the same couple, more or less (handsome and sly Chang Chen; Shu Qi, beaming, detached, and opiate-cool, her beauty exploding off the screen), loving each other three different times in different moments in time -- in the 1960s, 1920s, 2000s. This IS cinema mastery, you'll see it when you see it -- but not even to ALLOW oneself to respond on a visceral, never mind intellectual, level to these stories (yes, they're no less stories than those of Annie Proulx) is surely some willful abdication of humanity. In short, 'Three Times' is the languid, slow-boil romance to Wong Kar-wai's feverish romance. Yes, "romance" high and true -- that gesture Hollywood abandoned somewhere along the Gulf+Western pipeline.
A magnificent introduction to Hou Hsiao-hsien's films. Work your way backward from here -- 'Café Lumière,' 'Millennium Mambo,' 'Flowers of Shanghai,' 'Goodbye South, Goodbye,' 'Good Men, Good Women,' then skip the DVD of 'The Puppetmaster' because it's likely botched, lament the absence on DVD of 'City of Sadness' and 'Daughter of the Nile,' and finally move on to the four-film boxset from Taiwan (English subtitles included) of his first four features: 'The Boys from Fengkuei: All the Youthful Days'; 'A Summer at Grandpa's'; 'The Time to Live and the Time to Die' (supreme masterpiece); and 'Dust in the Wind' (masterpiece). This is one of the world's greatest living filmmakers -- and one of the greatest in the history of movies.
Summary of Three Times
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