Treebeard rouses the Tree-folk against Isengard and the forces of evil. The hobbits escape and meet Treebeard, the Ent, secret master of Fangorn. The Riders of Rohan appear, led by Éomer the Marshal, and they destroy the orcs. Merry and Pippin are kidnapped by orc-soldiers and they are taken towards Isengard, while Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are in pursuit. The story begins with the repentance and death of Boromir, who has tried (unsuccessfully) to wrest the ring away from Frodo. In a sense, "The World" is about a story that never really begins.The Two Towers is composed of Books 3 and 4, recounting the deeds of the company after the breaking of the Fellowship of the Ring. I still don't understand the ending." I was not only afraid to ask him what he didn't understand about the ending, I was afraid to ask him what he thought the ending was. Where will it lead? What plans can they make? And is China unique in offering this kind of employment as a dead end? Ask a clerk at Wal-Mart.Īfter the screening, I rode down on the elevator with the great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Jia Zhangke seems to think they are even unhappier than their ancestors is hard labor better than pointless labor? Consider the romance between Qun and Taisheng. Now the young generation wears uniforms and costumes and occupies a replica of the modern world. In China, the grandparents of these characters no doubt worked in rice fields or garment sweatshops, or as street vendors. It is a movie about people doing boring and badly paid work day after day while being required to look happy. This is not a movie about an amusement park threatened by a bomb, or populated by colorful characters, or made into the object of satire. There is integrity in a movie that refuses to pump up melodrama where none belongs. At first I felt like someone who had spent a humid afternoon at The World and wanted to know, "Can I go home now?" Then I became invested in the backstage story, which emerges slowly and in uncertain pieces. Either you will fall into its rhythm, or you will grow restless. On New Year's Eve, the park originates a telecast that will be seen "by one billion viewers worldwide." The same mythical billion who also don't really watch the Oscars. There is an irony that foreign tourists are visiting a theme park where poor Chinese wander dubiously among miniatures of a world they will never be able to visit. There is a sense that someone is getting rich somewhere in China, but not the owners and operators of The World. Is she cheating on her husband in Paris, or does he even remember her? Both Taisheng and the dancer Tao ( Zhao Tao) come from the same small town, and remember it with nostalgia mixed with hopelessness if The World offers them dubious futures, their childhoods seemed to offer none. Meanwhile, Qun has a sort of an affair with Taisheng (Chen Taisheng), a security guard. Two Russian dancers arrive, and their passports are confiscated by a man who assures them "they will be safer with me." Later we see Anna ( Alla Chtcherbakova) in a club, where she appears to have become a prostitute, probably against her will. But passports seem to lead to The World, not away. Now he is in Paris and she hopes for a passport. The dressmaker Qun ( Huang Yiqun) is married to a husband she has not seen for years he was part of a boatload of illegal immigrants to Europe, one of only six to survive. They live in shabby rooms hidden away behind the gaudy attractions, and dream of someday visiting the countries whose citizens they impersonate. He is concerned with the people who work in this park, changing their costumes in order to become now an Italian dancer, now a camel driver. His plot keeps most of the tourists at a distance. He doesn't yearn for the days of Chairman Mao, but he doesn't find the emerging China much of an improvement the nation seems trapped between two sterilities. But "The World" has been made in China by Jia Zhangke, a director who has been in much trouble with the authorities - not because he embraces the West, but because he mocks modern China for trying to become Western in such haste. Or you can board a jet airplane that never leaves the ground, which lends a certain jollity to the instructions about how to use your seat belt and the oxygen masks.Īn American documentarian like Errol Morris would visit this world and find easy humor in its stunted grandiosity. How do you visit these miniature tourist attractions? There is an exhausted two-car monorail that creeps along its elevated track.
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