Something to watch tonight: Monday 11 March

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao, 2019)

Today’s recom­mend­a­tion is a stone-cold neo-noir clas­sic. It played the 2019 New Zealand International Film Festival and I was able to pre­view it for RNZ:

The closest thing to a genu­ine mas­ter­piece I saw in pre­views for this fest­iv­al was Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake, a Chinese noir – a Chi-noir, if you like – that holds atmo­sphere, social polit­ics and superb struc­tur­al con­trol togeth­er to make some­thing wonderful.

I missed Diao’s last pic­ture, Black Coal, Thin Ice in the 2014 fest­iv­al due to ill­ness and I have regret­ted it ever since. The Wild Goose Lake makes up for it.

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A gang­ster sum­mit goes wrong and one of the lead­ers (Hu Ge) finds him­self on the run, framed for a crime he didn’t com­mit. His enemies try and lever­age his wife, not real­ising they have been sep­ar­ated for years, and the over-it femme fatale (Gwei Lun Mei) sent to find him sees an oppor­tun­ity for her own advantage.

Beautiful, inspired and aware of its her­it­age but not behold­en to it, The Wild Goose Lake is superb.

The pro­duc­tion com­pany is called Omnijoi and I want that to use that word as a tattoo.

Also included in that fest­iv­al pre­view were Andrew Garfield in Under the Silver Lake (I was “left cold”), the restored ver­sion of Koyanisqaatsi, the lovely doc­u­ment­ary Martha: A Picture Story (about pho­to­graph­er Martha Cooper), the “dif­fi­cult but ulti­mately heart­warm­ing” Knife+Heart, MO TE IWI: Carving for the People, and the har­row­ing drama set in post-WWII Leningrad, Beanpole.

Where to watch The Wild Goose Lake

Aotearoa: Streaming on Brollie (free), Kanopy and Beamafilm (if your lib­rary sup­ports them)

Australia: Streaming on Brollie, Prime Video and SBS On Demand (with ads)

Canada: Streaming on Hoopla

USA: Streaming on Hoopla and Kanopy

UK: Streaming on Mubi

Referrals update

One of the reas­ons that I’m still here on Substack is that the refer­rals sys­tem they have built is bring­ing new read­ers and I don’t take that for granted.

Congratulations to sub­scriber MC of Wellington who tops the table for refer­rals which means he gets a free month of his paid sub­scrip­tion and also a brand new Blu-ray of the 35^th anniversary edi­tion of Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (cour­tesy of Madman Entertainment).

You are invited to click the but­ton above, invite a friend to join the com­munity, and get your­self some rewards.