Two unemployed slackers, neither with job prospects nor motivation, hang out in sheltered town in China trying to make sense of their aimless and uncertain futures. As youths, they struggle for individual freedom and the social responsibility that comes along with it.
[Music] has the ability to connect with everyone, and perhaps international audiences will connect with the Chinese youth of Unknown Pleasures for the exact same reason.
Hard to turn away from, but also damn hard to sit through ... there is a difference between inspiring a sense of alienation in one's audience, and merely alienating them
I understand what was being done and being said, but in the end it just fails to captivate its viewer. The shots are just too long and the characters are not interesting enough for a two hour movie centered around character development. Shooting this on digital video was a nice choice, but that's about the best thing I
can say about this. It was the only sense of realism that worked. The influences of this are bright as day and it's easy to conclude that they are all movies i'd rather have watched instead of this.
Jia Zhang Ke is one of the most talented young directors working today. This might be my favorite of his work, perhaps because I can relate to its characters the most. I love his gritty neorealist style that captures the lives and problems of people in a time and place that is undergoing huge social and economic
changes. The story is about two teenage boys with no goals, directions, or future. They have no jobs and little money. They feed off of pop culture such as Pulp Fiction and Chinese pop songs, when their lives couldn't be farther away from these distractions. Jia's pacing and plotlessness might turn off some viewers, but his concern is realism, which he uses to capture the social-economic alienation and spiritual malaise of the one-child-per-family generation.
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