By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Chuan Lu
Starring: Hideo Nakaizumi | Ye Liu | Yuanyuan Gao
Country: china, hong_kong
Year: 2011
Running time: 103
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124052/
Toni says: “We drove up to Boston on a Friday night from RI in traffic to see the one week only CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH up at the Kendall.
“Maybe it is the use of black and white to show the sadness or represent the past minus the slow burn factor, but it remind me a bit of THE WHITE RIBBON, a masterpiece, and perhaps, this is just short of a masterpiece at 4 1/2 cats with music and shots lingering just a bit too long; however, unlike
some war period pieces, who in closing credits see that these were indeed real people that died or survived in this massacre in Nanking, China in 1937.
“This is the opposite of a date movie and with the lingering of the violence you see on the screen, it borderlines horror but it is as you are an observer of what is going as if you are there in the background. It is at times hard to watch when you see what happen to 300,000 people who were killed including 20,000 women who were brutally raped to the point where they would rather be dead. I will say that based on what did happen they could have been more brutal and then I would have walked out…I still warn folks that this is a tough film to watch but builds and has characters of a Greek tragedy like and the making of a gritty epic. The film does a good job of showing good people that have to allow things happen beyond their control (John Rabe for example from Germany who tried to help the people in the camps) or a different look at very bad people like one of the soldiers that tortured these people who occasionally has a conscience…
“It is definitely worth watching but you have to ready to be able ‘go to war’ to watch it. I will add that there was a gentleman sitting in the front row at our screening (I can’t make this up) that literally every 10 minutes, called out ‘cocksucker’ referring to the head Japanese soldiers in Nanking. I gave it 4 1/2 cats and was somehow by the end moved to quietly clap and a few others in the theater did the same because I had made it through a brutal war.”