Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Looney Tunes short, the 1940 Calling Dr. Porky starring Porky Pig , directed by Friz Freleng.
Although Porky is supposed to be a physician, the chair in his office is actually a dentist's chair.
The staff at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour ts taking the month of August off, ( I unfortunately, am stuck here in the city.) Before they left, they chose a few thing for us to watch - today it's a recent 'Weird Al’ Yankovic and His Bigger & Weirder Band perform for a NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
'Weird Al' Yankovic plays a fresh set of songs for the Tiny Desk
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1993 bio drama, The Puppetmaster, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, and starring Lim Giong, Li Tian-lu, and Tsai Chen-nan. The film is based on the memoirs of Li Tian-lu, Taiwan's most celebrated puppeteer.
Hou Hsiao-hsien aims to weave a personal history to counteract the usual limitations of period movies, filtering a decade-spanning account of his country’s recent past through the perspective of puppeteer Li Tien-lu, whose life story unfolds under the backdrop of almost half a century’s worth of upheaval during Taiwan’s occupation under Japan.
Having the real Li himself intermittently appear and directly narrate his story is a great device, one that helps to root it all within a firmly ground level perspective, this story eschewing big events and key players to instead focus on an ordinary man as he lives his life alongside them.
Hou attempts to take back the “official” top-heavy view of history for something more intimate; to this end, Li’s story is used as a prism through which the filmmaker can examine broader ideas, in the process providing a measured portrait of Taiwanese life under colonial rule that manages to feel quite balanced in its day-to-day focus, zeroing in on his subject to make what could have been sprawling and overstuffed instead much more focused and precise..
Please find a very comfortable chair, dim the lights, and join us here at the ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we moving film: The Puppetmaster.
Please don't forget to turn on the closed captioning.
The film mostly covers the Japanese occupation and how the film’s protagonist worked as a puppeteer and used his skills as a folk artist to survive. It’s a fictionalized history (mixing the real with the invented) and uses other actors to portray the hero at different times of his life; it’s told in the formal style of the ancient Chinese ways of storytelling. Its vibrancy is in the filmmaking skills of master director Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose slow moving pace and long takes accent his minimalist style of directing.
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