Powerful

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Looking at the box, I got the impression that this was going to be some wonderful, fascinating movie with great wonders and visions. I checked it out of the library, expecting fascinating viewing. After a half hour of disappointment, I gave up and turned it off.The movie starts off showing a Japanese salaryman having to take the place of a colleague who had fallen sick to go to China to check out a precious stone mining operation. Never having been to that country, he first rides a train, then is taken in a decrepit van, which stops when a yakuza joins. The yakuza roughs up and threatens the salaryman over money that his employer failed to pay him, but upon realizing the salaryman's mission, opts to join him on the journey.Unfortunately the movie fails to make us interested or excited. We don't care about any of the characters, and the ugly scenery got too boring. Maybe everything would have redeemed itself later, but by then it was too late.

Miike has a pretty solid pattern. He makes films for a distinctly Japanese audience, teasing out some issue or two that seems culturally rooted. This is his context. He shifts it into a magical, cinematic world and imagines scenes as episodes within this containing structure.So we get impressed by the big idea — moreso if Japanese — and also impressed by some of the episodes, those that work. Oddly, the general audience thinks that Miike prefers violence but I think he will simply do anything that has cinematic power that fits his large-small vision.Japanese have a strange relationship with the mainland. They know they (the main "race" on the islands) originated in Korea. The urge is to project back beyond that and posit a people who came as a group from some magical location deeper in the mainland. This story in the large hangs on the myth that the race came from a remote mountainous region in China, Yunnan. It isn't quite China, with the people and traditions being a melange of China, Tibet and Indochina. A dear Japanese wise man explained to me that the indigenous people on the islands came from Polynesia and had a "horizontal" cosmology, while the later migration from the mainland — being mountain people — had a vertical cosmology. This subtle insight advises all sorts of things: architecture for one, cinematic composition for another. In this case, it includes the myth that the proto-Japanese could fly.Here we have two stereotypical characters (plus one who appears briefly) on a quest to find this magical source. The film is clearly in two halves. The first half is reality-based and full of jokes. Then in the midst of a flood after crossing mountains, the thing takes a shift into magic. They are transported the final leg by harnessed turtles, itself referencing an ancient story.Into this they carry all sorts of things associated with Japan (by modern Japanese), and little of it makes sense in this new place. A simple view will see a simple ecological message, but that is not the case here. It is about what is pure; its attractions and curse. The final scene is very nice, but what matters is the narration of our "reporter" right before that. The longing is pure.Li Li Wang, plays the woman at the center of this place. She is amazing.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

A yakuza and a businessman travel from Japan to a remote village in the Yun Nan area of China. A vein of jade has been discovered there for which both the businessman's company and the yakuza whom the company owes to have taken interest to. However what starts out as a business trip motivated by petty means, soon evolves in a mystifying elegy atop the Chinese mountains.There is a sense of mystery and contemplation in Bird People that combined with so many lovable quirks reminded me of the great Tom Robbins and his work. It turns out the first of the Bird People fell from the sky. But who are they? The first half of the movie that involves the trip to the village is episodic in nature and more funny and laid-back; a road trip in essence but the images of poor, rural China and its beautiful nature carry the same affection that Emir Kusturicha films Yugoslavia with. The second part takes on a more contemplative tone as both the yakuza and the businessman become infatuated with the serene beauty of the remote village.Bird People is in turns funny, poignant, touching, sentimental, melancholic, mysterious but above all it's a beautiful, poetic movie. There are sudden busts of violence that remind us this is still a Takashi Miike film we're watching, but it is a far cry from the ultraviolence of his other work. I daresay it's even better (in a different way). The way the images, pacing, score and story mesh together, you realize you're in the hands of a master cinematician. If it turns melancholic and nostalgic during the end, it's because Bird People is ultimately a movie about people that want to be free of the things that bind them; the luxury of letting go. Some of them succeed, others don't. But in this case, it's the journey that matters.

Takashi Miike is the living definition of the word "indefatigable". In a career that began in the early 1990s, he has directed a staggering number of films in a mind-boggling array of different genres, from horror to family films, even a musical (!); but Miike is probably best known for his Yakuza (Japanese gangster) films. The likes of FUDOH, ICHI, and DEAD OR ALIVE, with their over-the-top violence and surreal (often disgusting) setpieces, are Miike's chief claim to fame. In one respect that's a pity, because every once in a while, Miike will produce a wild card, and BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA is a film that fits into that latter category. The man character is a young Japanese executive named Mr. Wada (Masahiro Motoki), who is sent by his boss to a remote region in the wilds of China to survey a supposedly rich jade mine. He is joined on his trip by a Yakuza named Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi), who plans on taking the jade as payment for some outstanding debts on the part of Wada's boss. After they are taken as far as the train will go, Wada and Ujiie are met by their guide, the absent-minded Mr. Shen (scene-stealer Mako), who takes them through the rugged, unsettled terrain of rural China, first on foot, and then on a raft pulled by several huge sea turtles. When the three men finally reach their destination, a village left untouched by the ravages of industrialization, Wada and Ujiie have a few epiphanies that will prove to make leaving rather difficult. It sounds like a simple story, and it is, but there's something about this film that makes it great, but that I find hard to articulate. No doubt the startlingly beautiful cinematography by Hideo Yamamoto has a lot to do with the film's hypnotic quality. And then there's the genuinely touching story of two men who discover a whole other side to themselves that they were never previously aware existed. And finally, the film's deft blend of genres is seamless: it shifts gears from a screwball/buddy comedy to a jungle-bound adventure to an existential rumination on identity and civilization, finally ending on a dream-like note of perfect serenity. There is one scene of Yakuza violence that seems inserted to remind us that we're watching a Miike film, but it's fleeting and, compared to some of what can be found elsewhere in his films, it's utterly tame and inoffensive. There's also an ecological message packed into the mix. So, final verdict: for fans of Miike who wonder what else the man is capable of, I highly recommend BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA, surely the gentlest and most poignant of all the man's movies (at least that I've seen). For the truly open-minded aficionado, there is much to be enjoyed here.