Wow! Such a good movie.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Jinming and Zhaoyang travel around illegal mines with marginalised, friendless individuals, people who won't be missed, killing them underground and faking a mine collapse, so they can collect the compensation. The scam works well till their youngest ever recruit, fresh-faced Yuan, starts to grow on his 'uncle' Jinming, leading Zgaoyang to make a fateful decision.Yang Li fashions a gritty, realistic tale from naturalistic performance and uncompromising locations. Life in the mines seems so severe, so sapping, that there is a tinge of release around the untimely deaths of the victims. The camaraderie and ephemeral nature of life as an itinerant worker is shown in all its banal and brutal detail. Families exist at the end of a phone line. The banter crackles with humour. Women are bought and paid for. Drink, cigarettes and gambling fill out the days. Bosses are amoral misanthropes.This picture certainly jars with the 'new China' currently feted in Sunday glossies and in-flight magazines. Strong plot, and with a social conscience, this is an interesting fusion of social realism and plot-driven film-making. Highly recommended.

Two men befriend itinerant workers in order get them work in the mines posing as a relative... then they kill them and, as family, claim compensation.After a successful score, the pair find a fresh-faced youth just come from the country and take him under their wing planning to start over again - but their new protégé is a genuine innocent, and their relationship shifts around him until it becomes clear that their plan won't run so smoothly this time around...I've seen this described both as an art-house character drama and as a kind of noir thriller, and while neither description is wrong both ideas of the movie lack something. It's neither - it's just an excellent film.If it's a character drama, it scores: all three central characters are brilliantly played and have the idiosyncratic, sometimes inconsistent feel of real people. You laugh with them and feel for them, even when sometimes you shouldn't.If it's a noir it also scores: bleak, honed to a sharp point and without an ounce of fat on, it's a mesmeric film in which the viewer is compelled to keep watching... in spite of the inescapable feeling that it's not going to end happily.On the other hand, it's visually a world apart from the majority of Chinese art movies. With no music to relieve the realism, it eschews sumptuous visuals in favour of a raw, documentary style which pays off from the first scene, impressing on the viewer the mundane nature of its characters and how chilling simple their plan is.Unlike most noir flicks, it's not overtly a thriller. Events unfold at their own pace, without the careful buildup and the climactic peak of the traditional thriller, and the murder and crime are presented as a part of these men's lives rather than the central subject of the film.The central subject of the film is people, and that's where this film's unique impact lies. Not a film noir and not an art film, this is just a fine film which also happens to be a work of art.

People in academia noted that the creating non-fiction writing classes are increasing, faculties expanding, publishers finding new markets and interests.Same in movies. After seeing this motion picture, looked up the director. He spent two years as a documentary's for a German TV station. Now I understand why Blind Shaft has this documentary feel.For example, there is no background music. No Hollywood pyrotechnics, no Italian melodramatic musical background. The opening three minutes that leads to the movie title makes clear what kind of movie this is: slowly, we see a mine camp, operation, machinery, miners with helmets slowly getting out of the shacks, and entering the elevator shaft. As the elevator descends deep in the mine, the camera is directed upward, and the shaft opening with its sky becomes smaller and smaller as the elevator descends. At the same time, the portion of the screen that is black becomes bigger and bigger. There is no background music, just the noise of the mine elevator descending. Then, two Chinese calligraphy characters appear in red. It's the title: "Blind Shaft".Many scenes of outdoor markets. Many scenes of society. Many scenes of migrant workers traveling, looking, finding work. Many scenes of workers sending remittances back to their villages, now populated only by women, grandmothers looking after children. "All the men left the village looking for work", it is quoted.A boy stands in the market holding a sign: "Admitted to high school. Need money to attend". People leave money in his can.Negotiations between people are constantly made, about money, about things, wants and desires. Money is traded. Lot of human interaction.After seeing all the Chinese movies about beautiful mountains, pastures, glorified past, and other fantasies, see this realistic movie with its documentary's flavor.

BLIND SHAFT (Mang Jing) Aspect ratio: 1.85:1Sound format: Dolby DigitalYang Li's indictment of rural poverty and safety issues in the Chinese mining industry features Qiang Li and Wang Shuangbo as a couple of itinerant laborers who make a 'living' by befriending poor, unemployed travelers and taking work together in unsafe coal mines where they murder their newfound 'friends' and make it look like an accident, forcing unscrupulous mine owners to ensure their silence with a series of generous pay-offs. Their downfall is precipitated by the arrival of young, innocent Wang Baoqiang, with whom the two men form a paternal alliance and whose impending death fills Qiang with dreadful foreboding.Either you like this kind of defiantly 'arthouse' stuff or you don't, and this one gets off to an unpromising start by asking us to empathize with a couple of heartless monsters who not only murder a man in cold blood, but use his death to line their own pockets before flushing his ashes down the toilet! But the movie picks up with the arrival of virginal Wang, a genuinely charming kid whose naivety and innocence stirs feelings of compassion within the two protagonists, leading to an ironic twist in the tale. Professionally assembled and shot on location in the heart of China's rural landscape, this is much more naturalistic than the clinically beautiful films we're used to seeing from Chinese filmmakers. Not for all tastes, but rewarding for those willing to stay the distance.(Mandarin dialogue)