"Soulmate" is a gorgeously shot, tear-stained love letter to female friendship that also provides a fascinating look into contemporary, urban China.Two other new Chinese films, the stop-motion CGI film L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties (爵迹) and the romance I Belonged To You (从你的全世界路过), will play at the Waterfront from September 30. Tickets and showtime information for all movies is available on the theater's website. The theater is located at 300 West Waterfront Dr. in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead (map), across the Monongahela River from Greenfield, Squirrel Hill, and the rest of Pittsburgh.
Ansheng (Zhou Dongyu, "Under the Hawthorn Tree") and Lin Qiyue aka July (Ma Sichun) have been friends since childhood but they find the currents of life pushing them in different directions. Ansheng is a rootless free spirit while July is a studious careerist. Their relationship becomes complicated by the presence of Su Jia-ming (Toby Lee), a man emotionally torn between the two of them.
It all culminates in a rather surprising ending while along the way director Derek Tsang offers glimpses of the back streets of Shanghai and Beijing, away from the gleaming skyscrapers and sprawling factories that are often the image of China these days.
The setup is lean and clean. A flattened deer, mowed down in a quarantine zone in Seoul where some kind of chemical spill has occurred (echoes of Bong Joon-ho’s 2007 enviro-horror film, “The Host”), springs back to life. Then, in just a few swiftly efficient scenes, we meet a harried hedge-fund manager and his small, sad daughter (Gong Yoo and an amazing Kim Su-ahn), see them settled on the titular locomotive and watch in dismay as a vividly unwell last-minute passenger lurches onboard. And we’re off!Showtimes aren't posted on the theater's website, but they do appear on a Facebook post:
Sprinting right out of the gate, the director, Yeon Sang-ho, dives gleefully into a sandbox of spilled brains and smug entitlement. (“In the old days, they’d be re-educated,” one biddy remarks upon spying an undesirable fellow traveler.) As zombies chomp and multiply, an assortment of regular folks face them down while furthering an extended critique of corporate callousness. The politics are sweet, but it’s the creatures that divert. Eyes like Ping-Pong balls and spines like rubber — I’d wager more than a few chiropractors were required on the set — they attack in seizures of spastic energy. They’re like break-dancing corpses.
9/30 - 9:45pmThe theater is located at 644 Broadway Ave. in McKees Rocks (map), a few miles west of the North Side.
10/1 - 4:00pm
10/2 - 3:00pm & 5:00pm
10/3 - 7:15pm
10/4 - 7:15pm
10/6 - 7:15pm
Digital media, and the Internet in particular, have fundamentally and irreversibly changed daily life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, current approaches to the politics of digital culture, which are often firmly based on examples from the West, largely fail to comprehensively address the multifaceted situations in digital-age China, whose unique and contradictory position between post-Socialism and neoliberal Globalism has remarkably complicated the contested relations between control and freedom, between the technological and the socio-political. To engage with these problems, this workshop brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including political science, law, film studies, communications, anthropology, and sociology, to broaden the theoretical and methodological scopes that may adequately address existing and emergent political questions regarding China’s burgeoning digital culture. The workshop examines how relatively ordinary occurrences, the everyday censorship of political or non-political content, the decision to circumvent the great firewall, posting a legal question online, or reading pollution-monitoring microblogs, creates China’s digital political culture in diverse and distributive manners. Engaging with both the macro-social and the microindividual, the papers in this workshop draw on a variety of methods including big data, interviews, surveys, archival research, close readings, and critical theory to interrogate digital political life in China, which is simultaneously rich and restricted, diverse and particular, connected and isolated.Presenters hail from nine different universities, including the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and the Friday and Saturday events will be held in the University Club at 123 University Pl. in Oakland (map).
