Category Archives: movies seen

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

LO
“You must decide. You might get tired of this life. You might begin to miss your family. If it were our daughter, we’d look for her too. She would miss us. Jen… I want you to be mine forever. I will make my mark on the world. I will earn your parents’ respect. We have a legend. Anyone who dares to jump from the mountain, God will grant his wish. Long ago, a young man’s parents were ill, so he jumped. He didn’t die. He wasn’t even hurt. He floated away, far away, never to return. He knew his wish had come true. If you believe, it will happen. The elders say, “A faithful heart makes wishes come true.”

LI
“I’ve already wasted my whole life. I want to tell you with my last breath… I have always loved you. I would rather be a ghost, drifting by your side… as a condemned soul… than enter heaven without you. Because of your love… I will never be a lonely spirit.”

JEN
“Do you remember the legend of the young man?”
LO
“A faithful heart makes wishes come true.”
JEN
“Make a wish, Lo.”
Lo pauses.
LO
(closing his eyes)
“To be back in the desert, together again.”
Jen smiles, turns, and leaps into the clouds.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), based on the novel by Wang Dulu.

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)

Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian Marxist from Slovenia, the academic superstar, delivers a spectacular lecture on the Freudian psychoanalysis of cinema. From Hitchkock, Eisenstein, Marx Brothers, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch, and many other classics, he explains the replacement images that have rosen from the Id to the screen of the super ego, repressed, aggressive, mortified, idealized, but above all full of sexual desire. In a way it takes the first chapter of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types, in which he psychanalyzes world literature, and applies its method to the art form of the 20th century. If you don’t understand Freud, it is hard to recognize the artistic layers in these movies. Brilliant.