- Actors: Tien Miao, Kang-sheng Lee, Yi-Ching Lu, Ann Hui, Shiang-chyi Chen
- Directors: Ming-liang Tsai
- Writers: Ming-liang Tsai, Pi-ying Yang, Yi-chun Tsai
- Format: Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC, Import
- Language: Mandarin Chinese
- Subtitles: English
- Region: (US and Canada This DVD will probably NOT be viewable in other countries. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
- Number of discs: 1
- MPAA Rating:
- Studio: Fox Lorber
- Release Date: Feb 4 2003
- Run Time: 115 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B00007KK1K
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
The strange, elliptical movies of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang (The Hole, What Time Is It There?) defy encapsulation. A description of The River will tell you about a female elevator operator, her pornography-selling lover, and her husband who goes to gay bathhouses. Her unhappy scooter-riding son runs into an actress he knew a few years earlier; she brings him to the set of a movie she's working on, where the young man gets a role as a corpse floating in a river. But none of that amounts to a plot in any conventional sense, and that summary doesn't capture the slow but hypnotic pace of Tsai's movies, or how the seemingly ordinary images will burn themselves into your memory. The lack of conventional action will frustrate some viewers, but others will find deadpan humor and an eerie cinematic poetry. --Bret Fetzer
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
slow agonying fast forward-button movie watching experience,
By A Customer
This review is from: The River (DVD)
i love artistic movies...but what happened to this one? it's a strange movie indeed. viewing from an artistic point of view, it may make some sense, but with lots of forwarding. if you like slow artsy movie, watch "scent of green papaya" instead.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Another dud from an overrated director.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The River (DVD)
...Ming-liang Tsai's films drag along endlessly with no direction and, quite frankly, no real acting. The River is a story which could have been easily and effectively told in 30 minutes, but instead it drags on for two hours. Scenes are needlessly drawn out and tell the viewer rather little. This is not avant-garde or alternative film making...
5.0 out of 5 stars
duh...the reviewer apes the film unintentionally,
By A Customer
This review is from: The River (DVD)
it's amazing to me how you can summarize this film so matter of factly and made it through it, but can't realize that your emotional response to it was forecoded by the director. do you think he really wanted you to be mesmerized in the western-commodity-entertainment sense of a viewing experience? to fully appreciate tsai's masterpiece, we have to develop a new viewing strategy descendant from antonioni, ozu, etc. if you need a unifying thread to titillate your sense of linear narrative continuity, try the ubiquity of water in its myriad forms and how that relates to the despair and utter alienation of the characters both constricted by a colonized city that has grown too fast to maintain and the tyranny of the oedipal family scenario as it is linked to the very same capitalistic regime. it is a profound meditation on what happens to the spirit in this highly specific and contextualized allegory shot through with mise-en-scene punning and starkly lyrical use of a poetics of absence. try to get on an equation with the artist not just foist your own expectations on the work and then its secrets will flourish.
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