Another day, another film that's quite hard to talk about. Maybe I've just been picking challenging ones to watch recently, or maybe I'm just zonked lately. Maybe both.
Either way, A Touch of Sin was a film I liked a decent amount, and I loved some parts of it. As a whole, I can't say I entirely loved it, but I think I mostly appreciated what it was going for, and found the execution to work a good deal more than it didn't.
It starts off feeling genuinely unpredictable and surprising. The first half-hour plays out sort of like a better version of Falling Down (which is a movie I still kind of like). But that story is one of four, and three others follow in its wake, with each revolving around a different character trying to get by in modern-day China.
More so than being a direct exploration of violence, I feel this is more a look at the downtrodden in society, and the way that perhaps violence intersects with such lives, once they reach a certain level of desperation (that could be entirely preventable if we changed the way the world worked and how most people got treated).
As such, I find the premises for A Touch of Sin emphasizing violence/crime to be a bit misleading, and I wish I could've approached this as more of a slice-of-life drama/anthology film. I think it's particularly ridiculous that this is labeled as an action movie on IMDb and Letterboxd (violent acts and people dying do not equal "action" by any means).
Some of that's not the fault of the film, of course, but it could've been a reason I spent much of the film trying to get a grip on it. Other parts were effortlessly gripping, and though I wasn't properly prepped to entirely get into it, I liked what I could dig from it. It's certainly impressively made (bar two very noticeable shots where shadows/reflections of crew/cameras are visible), and the acting is strong, too. Its relevance to today and its novel structure more than makes this worth checking out, and I may return to it one day more ready to fully absorb what it's going for.
(It's also interesting how this came out the same year as The Wolf of Wall Street, and has a final scene/shot that's rather comparable).
Either way, A Touch of Sin was a film I liked a decent amount, and I loved some parts of it. As a whole, I can't say I entirely loved it, but I think I mostly appreciated what it was going for, and found the execution to work a good deal more than it didn't.
It starts off feeling genuinely unpredictable and surprising. The first half-hour plays out sort of like a better version of Falling Down (which is a movie I still kind of like). But that story is one of four, and three others follow in its wake, with each revolving around a different character trying to get by in modern-day China.
More so than being a direct exploration of violence, I feel this is more a look at the downtrodden in society, and the way that perhaps violence intersects with such lives, once they reach a certain level of desperation (that could be entirely preventable if we changed the way the world worked and how most people got treated).
As such, I find the premises for A Touch of Sin emphasizing violence/crime to be a bit misleading, and I wish I could've approached this as more of a slice-of-life drama/anthology film. I think it's particularly ridiculous that this is labeled as an action movie on IMDb and Letterboxd (violent acts and people dying do not equal "action" by any means).
Some of that's not the fault of the film, of course, but it could've been a reason I spent much of the film trying to get a grip on it. Other parts were effortlessly gripping, and though I wasn't properly prepped to entirely get into it, I liked what I could dig from it. It's certainly impressively made (bar two very noticeable shots where shadows/reflections of crew/cameras are visible), and the acting is strong, too. Its relevance to today and its novel structure more than makes this worth checking out, and I may return to it one day more ready to fully absorb what it's going for.
(It's also interesting how this came out the same year as The Wolf of Wall Street, and has a final scene/shot that's rather comparable).