Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

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

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It was the first time of Jia Zhangke to visit three gorges dam, and meantime he was filming about his artist friend, Liu Xiaodong painting the portrait of demolition worker in Si Chuang, Feng Jie. The year of 2006, the monstrous project, three gorges dam was built up on Yangtze River, and the public attention was staying on the side of how will bring the interest to offspring. Nevertheless, behind the national glory, the project itself still remains controversies and generated a group of immigrants called three gorges immigrants who originally lived in the town near the dam that government forced them to move away. Feng Jie is the one of the little town on Yangtze River surrounded by mountains that had to be demolished. The male protagonist, Han was the mining labor in Shanxi, now coming to Feng Jie to seek for his escaped wife and child. Doubtlessly Han was the common figure as a migrant worker in china, and a witness of the transitional life of locals. On the cruise, Han was sitting among workers that the camera captured their indifferent expression while they were looking out toward Yangtze River. Han was one of them, a poor worker who many years ago brought his wife, after having a kid his wife ran away from Shanxi. Feng Jie was alike the ruins of Pompey. At the moment of Han holding the old address of his wife, he was staring blankly to the river. The old town already buried under the water. It is the first hint of transition on the riverside. The nurse, Sheng Hong is an outsider akin to Han, looking for the reunion with his husband. Two years ago, his husband came to Feng Jie working as the manager of demolition and had an affair with a woman. Along the riverside, eventually her husband met and asked Sheng to dance. She left Feng Jie, and divorced without blaming on her husband. There are more symbolized scenes, like the death of the local ambitious and naive young man, and Han and his wife watching the building collapsing as if the end of the world comes. When Jia interpreted his movie, he said, "As tourists here, we still can see the remaining sight of green mountains and moving rivers. Though if reached the land, walked past the street, and entered into families in vicinity, you will grasp there was a bunch of people living in modernity, but remained such poverty. Over one million immigrants had to leave their own land, and two thousands year town was demolished instantly. It seems irrelevant to us as tourists, but at the bottom of our hearts we also suffered what the locals suffered by dramatic transition on life within these years."

I knew little about the work of director Jia Zhang Ke, and Still Life (or The Good People of the Three Gorges) provides me with an excellent introduction to his work.Several films have been done to depict the changes, to the lives of many residents, associated with the Three Gorges project. Still Life is one of them but also uses this backdrop to tell two stories of man-women relationship, its disintegration and possible reconciliation.The movie is slow moving, but at a pace relevant to the sentiment being conveyed. The camera work is great. Acting, most likely by non-professional actors, was solid.I was in the Three Gorges area some 10 years ago before the commencement of the Project, and could relate to the scenery and people in that area. The film was done without excessive sentiment, and director Jia took his time to tell the stories in an unpretentious and yet elaborate fashion.I highly recommend the film, and will seek out Jia's work in the future.

Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia's latest film contains a wealth of fascinating real-life imagery. Still Life was filmed during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China and it reveals to Western audiences the astonishing destruction that this entailed. The submersion of the scenery and settlements of the valley floors proceeds in phases during the film. White lines are painted on buildings and cliff-faces to forewarn of the next projected rise in water levels; residents are forced from their homes at short notice. Buildings are torn down using sledgehammers and hard human labour, creating a bizarre landscape of broken masonry. Rubble, the raw material of the future, is carted along narrow city streets by overloaded lorries and dumped onto a fleet of cargo ships. In the wake of all this activity there lie towns and communities divided literally in two by the swelling waters.Still Life is an amazing documentary of the construction of the Dam, but its narrative is disappointingly weak. So many of the characters that fill the screen are isolated or antagonistic or exploitative, from the man hawking foreign currencies to the architect proudly admiring the new bridge across town. Jia chooses to focus on two main characters, creating two loosely intertwined plots. In the first, a husband and father searches for his wife and daughter who left him some fifteen years previously, whilst in the second an abandoned wife searches for her missing husband.These are potentially interesting stories, but they proceed at a pace that is slow even by the standards of Jia's other films. Much of the drama in these stories precedes the film itself and the camera often lingers on unmoving, unspeaking subjects. The effect is one of inertia, at first strangely engrossing, but eventually frustrating. Possibly in an attempt to alleviate the slow, slow pacing of Still Life, Jia introduces some quirky asides (watch out for the spaceship taking off), but these jar with his documentary-like approach to film-making. Rather more effective are the 'still life' moments that crop up periodically throughout the film, momentarily framing day-to-day objects such as cigarettes or tea.Although achingly slow at times, Still Life does make some interesting observations. It is intriguing to see how pop culture, transmitted by television and radio, now provides the icons for young Chinese people, where once one might have expected the songs, the sayings and the thinking to derive from Communist figureheads. The boy singing romantic pop ballads and the young man imitating a TV cop show character are symbolic of a very different culture among the young people of China. As with Jia's other films, the ideology and rhetoric of the Communist Party are largely absent, making a sort of cameo appearance when an old-fashioned workers' song plays as the ring tone on one character's mobile phone.On the other hand, we see very little protest against the construction of the dam under the gaze of the Communist Party. This is not a slight against Jia, however, since it would have been very difficult to portray this without the government intervening against his film. The unflattering portrayal of the Dam's construction and its debilitating influence on people are a wake-up call to the severe side effects of Progress.

I watched Still Life yesterday night, it was recently released over here in Germany. It's a fantastic movie with gorgeous photography and possibly because the lives, lifestyles and scenery depicted in Still Life were so completely alien to me, it felt like a documentary. Great soundtrack, too. I was literally spell-bound, the movie drew me in completely and I felt quite dazed when I walked out of the cinema. I'd watched the movie with a friend and we got talking about our reactions to the film. I would have loved to quiz the rest of the cinema audience as to their reactions to the movie.Still Life received a good bit of positive press over here in Europe (at least in those magazines/papers covering foreign movies/world cinema) but I also know several people who watched it and left halfway through because they were bored and 'there was nothing happening'. And I bet that this was a fairly typical reaction of the average European/Western cinema-goer. Yes, there is an almost total absence of sprightly dialogue or exciting action (unless you count the two UFOs...) and if you grew up with the classic Western/US style of film-making and your usual film fare is whatever Hollywood movies are shown at your local cinema, then Still Life will come as an unpleasant surprise, maybe because it is simply too different in visual style, content, pace and imagery to the average European/Western movie.Personally, I think there should be more of these type of films over here. I really hope Still Life will be released on DVD in Europe otherwise I'll have to order it from a website or something and hang the expense!