Trouble Makers (GuangRongDe Fennu), Oct. 17th

At: Billy Wilder Theater (Hammer Museum-UCLA)

Info: 7:30pm, $9 general, $8 for students and seniors, can be reserved on-line for an additional $1

Website: New Chinese Cinema

In the mood for Chinese Cinema? The Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater is hosting Trouble Makers (the English translated title). A promising movie about a villagers overcoming their corrupt officials / gangsters to take back their village. The theater is large and awesome (click on the link above to view website) and the movie is in Mandarin with English subtitles.

“The film is suffused with a Rabelaisian poetry of vulgarity and joyful playfulness, but also a somber streak—as tragedy, limited horizons and backward sexual politics keep seeping under the humor, in a way that brings to mind the Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me or Pop 1280. In spite of its happy ending, this dark comedy had to wait a long time before being approved by the censors. Unrest in the countryside, villager riots, peasant revolts—these are current Chinese realities that the powers-that-be don’t like to talk about. For his first feature, screenwriter-turned-director Cao Baoping demonstrates an absolute mastery of the medium, with a rigorous mise en scène that produces a claustrophobic feeling, uncanny for a depiction of the countryside. The acting is excellent, especially Wu Gang as Guangrong, a first-rate actor too often underestimated.

Based on ‘Village Operation’ by Que Diwei. Producer: Zhang Yaoli, Cao Baoping, Cindy M. Li. Screenwriter: Cao Baoping. Cinematographer: Tao Shiwei. Art Director: Lou Pan. Editor: Cao Baoping. Cast: Wu Gang, Li Xiaobo. Presented in Mandarin dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 103 min.”