WORDS ARE USELESS, WORDS SAY NOTHING

Updated word count on The Everlasting: Part II is 78,513 words, bringing it to a grand total of 131,763 words over 361 pages. That's already 100 pages more than the original draft of Cut My Hair. The CLAMP books are between 30,000 and 40,000 words.

Last night I saw Zhou Yu's Train, Gong Li's first film since 1999, when she made The Emperor & The Assassin and Breaking the Silence. Only seeing her back on the screen can explain how wrong it is that she's been gone so long. Li has a singular presence, at once erotic, sad, and soulful. In Zhou Yu's Train, she plays two roles: a woman searching for the truth behind a poem, and the subject of those poems. In many ways, they are one person, as Zhou Yu's story, as we see it, is really the other woman's imagining of it.

The first time Zhou Yu and the poet make love features the most beautiful poetic film image I have seen in ages. We intercut between their passion and shots of the train that connects their two cities, building to a crescendo of movement as we pull back in the poet's sparse room to see that the world outside their window is passing by at full speed, that the whole house is rumbling, having become one with the train. The metaphor comes to life visually.

Really, the whole movie is like a poem. It's puzzling, with lots of gaps between the lines that the viewer has to fill in. Our desire to do so is really our desire to watch Gong Li.

Current Soundtrack: The Primitives, "You Are The Way" single

golightly@confessions123.com * The Website

[to leave comments, click on the time-stamp below, then scroll down on the new page] – All text (c) 2004 Jamie S. Rich