Ash Is Purest White

Cohen Media Group | Release Date: March 15, 2019

7.2	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 36 Ratings

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DlrlmJul 19, 2019

Why do these movies get such great reviews? The ending sucked just like most films.

1 of 5 users found this helpful14

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hnestlyontheslyOct 7, 2019

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Ash is Purest White takes an excellent thirty minute drama and stretches it past the bounds of good taste and believability into an epic saga that tests the patience of polite indie theater goers. I am fairly sure that this is supposed to be a dark comedy, but the points when we would laugh in any other film sort of don’t work, because the tone is so unclear–thinking of scenes like the funeral tableau for the crime boss early on, with the ailing mother and the earnest and flamboyant ballroom dancers honoring their coach. The film careens into absurdity with the part in the desert toward the end.

The story does not tumble spontaneously like a rollicking epic so much as it grinds out its seismically slow plot with no apparent interest in story development. Crimes lead to jail time lead to weirdly edited water-bucket chores to a potentially excellent search and confrontation scene and sort of unravels again after the hotel room and a burning newspaper.

If it weren’t for the fact that Friend of Wife says that the director, Zhangke Jia, is married to the star Tao Zhao, I’d say that I don’t really understand how any of this came together at all, but vanity projects are unfortunately alive and well in this country too, for good and for ill.

I maintain that the trailer to this film is one of the slyest misdirections I have ever witnessed. The trailer and online summaries of the film abruptly cut off at around the 30 min mark of the actual movie, and at the time of viewing Friend of Wife had found that some of (few) lukewarm to negative reviews talk about the sudden shift in story at this point, the grueling six-week long run-time, and the lack of character arcs.

Ash flirts with the supernatural without much (any) preparation. There’s a weird amount of product placement from the egregious use of apps to the unncessary proliferation of flashy phones. The love story is a false choice between an emotional recluse and a conman. The only Christian figure in the whole story turns out to be a liar and a cheat. Probably not worth your time by this point unless you’ve been waiting for a Chinese sequel to Boyhood.… Expand

0 of 2 users found this helpful02

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