Reviews

Music

Bass singer strikes again

Zhao Peng, a young singer in his 20s, has released a new album showing off his astounding voice. Unlike his previous albums that mainly featured rearranged songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this album, Let's go bass again - Zhao Peng and the Jingtangmu Band, presents several original songs for which Zhao composed the music and wrote the lyrics.

Death (Shang) is dedicated to the "dying" earth. The opening chords strike one's ears and heart, dragging the listener down and out of the madding present to the Gobi desert where a withered tree stands. The singer then bursts forth, lamenting the lives that once thrived but have all disappeared.

Compared with older works, the new album shows Zhao at ease with generating harmonious and impressive music.

In 2004, Zhao's debut album Human Bass I: Shining Days was an instant hit among Hi-Fi fans, who are still using the album to test their acoustic systems. Hailing from Northeast China, the 1.88-m-tall performer is considered a rarity in the country's pop music scene. But it's a pity that his own music has only made up a small portion of his albums.

Liu Jun

Film

Love in the Time of Cholera

Directed by Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Benjamin Bratt

Javier Bardem's starring role in this horrifically boring festival of middlebrow good taste points up a general fact about his career, which the Oscar best supporting actor in the Coen brothers' film No Country for Old Men briefly obscured. He can be a completely terrible actor. With his dreamy, fish-eyed gaze and purring voice, he is unbearably mannered and self-conscious.

Directed by Mike Newell and adapted by Ronald Harwood from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1985 novel, the film is set in late 19th-century Colombia; where cholera becomes a queasy metaphor for the sickness of love.

Its hero is moonstruck telegraph operator Florentino, and in Bardem's hands this character becomes one of the most annoying passive-aggressive types imaginable.

While still penniless, he falls for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the beautiful daughter of a wealthy but boorish new-money businessman Lorenzo Daza (John Leguizamo). Daza cruelly forbids the match and instead steers her towards cultured, handsome Dr Urbino (Benjamin Bratt). They are married, not very happily, and poor Florentino grows old keeping the flame of love alive in his heart.

It is only 50 years later, when Fermina and Florentino are both ancient, that he can put the moves on her. So far, so adorable. But wait. Florentino hasn't exactly been keeping himself chaste for Fermina, and even given that such a thing wouldn't be reasonable for any normal red-blooded man, this story gives him a startling consolation prize. He becomes an absolute babe magnet. Something in that spaniel-eyed inner hurt has the senoras flinging themselves at him.

Florentino is shown getting it on with women, more than 600 by his own self-congratulatory count. We are expected to sigh and swoon while Florentino finally has his narrative cake and eats it, eventually climbing into bed with Fermina.

But we never see his sagging body. The stately parade of young actors dressed up to look old in period costume at the beginning of a film is a worrying sign of its forthcoming pomposity and conceit: radiating an entirely unearned sense of awe at setting out to tell someone's important life story. This film is plainly supposed to be life-affirming and life-enhancing, a classy literary date movie for the educated classes. It actually looks smug and tacky and dull: a softcore Captain Corelli. A film to be strictly quarantined.

The Guardian

(China Daily 03/27/2008 page20)