Trailer for BLOOD TIES
Posted by Stefan at 6:15am.
Posted in Trailer Alerts , Thriller, Drama, Action, Horror, Asia.
It’s been somewhat quiet on the Singapore front, but here’s something that should interest you Twitch folks!
Some years ago a group of friends and I dabbled with short film making, plunging ourselves headlong into an insane 48 hour competition. That same competition had yielded Nicholas Chee and Randy Ang’s short film which clinched top honours, and they had gone on to make the feature film Becoming Royston. Chai Yee-wei was one of the participants in that very same contest, and a few award winning shorts later, look where he is today as well, with a feature film under his belt too, waiting for a 3rd quarter release this year. As for my friends and I, well, erm, that’s another story for another day…
I’ve followed Yee-wei’s shorts film in recent years, having seen them either online at competition websites, or at local film festivals. While most of them were genuinely funny comedies, one short film stood out - Blood Ties, which was screened at a local film symposium in 2007. It was mentioned during the Q&A then that there were plans to expand the short into a feature, so fast forward to today, a release date has been set - September 10!
The synopsis is currently somewhat thin, and reads
Many people believe that when a person dies, the spirit will return home on the 7th night. After Shun was brutally murdered, his spirit returned to possess his 13 year old sister to exact his revenge. On the 7th night, blood will flow and just deserts will be served.
And if a picture can tell a thousand words, then this recently released trailer has already piqued my interest with its excellent production values, being such a tease with promises of the supernatural, gore, and a murder-mystery wrapped under a tale of revenge. What more, it stars Asian veterans such as Kenneth Tsang and Cheng Pei Pei!
I can’t wait!
Jeon Ji-Hyun, now known as Gianna for this international film, trades her demure demeanour for something that action junkies will probably find reason to cheer about - having a beautiful heroine kick some serious butt with her near-invincibility and possessing a blade that cuts through vampires, monsters and demons like hot knife through butter. But seriously, do we need another half-vampire, half-human hybrid being for the big screen, even though this has anime roots?
Rather than Fireball: Muay Thai Dunk (yes the Singapore release had this additional subtitle), this could have been more aptly titled as Firebrawl: Anything Goes, and I mean that in a nice way. We know enough of how sports and martial arts can coexist in movies, either in comical fashion like Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer, or played in a more deadpan, idol-movie like manner with the Jay Chou vehicle Kung Fu Dunk. Joining their ranks is this latest action film directed by Thanakorn Pongsuwan, which fuses an illegal underground basketball league, and Muay Thai fighting.
While Sell Out! had comedic segments on death, dealing with the desire to film those whose life is about to expire for a reality show, This Too Shall Pass was quite uncanny in that it resembled that kind of film being made, albeit for different reasons, and minus the outright comedy.
White Days by director LOOI Wan Ping is more of an experimental feature, being raw, unscripted, shot in black and white and like all most independent filmmakers in Singapore, enjoy liberal use of the still camera coupled with long takes. The film tells the story, or more like a snapshot in the lives of its three protagonists - Chris Yeo, Vel Ng and Daniel Hui, in what would be art imitating life, with some fictional elements thrown in as Daniel would admit in a Q&A session later, about being “depressed” throughout the film, walking around aimlessly leaving flowers on the roadside, or burying himself in a book, as negative reactions toward a friend’s passing. Fans of Daniel Hui (the director turned actor here) will also spot (or more accurately, hear) one of his short films being used in this one.
When Li Xinyun comes on screen as titular character Dada in the very first minute, you could almost hear a collective gasp amongst the audience. She looks like a cross between Vicky Zhao and Shu Qi, more the latter thanks to those bee-stung lips that assisted her titular character very much in dripping sensuality in almost every frame she’s in. Helping too are a fitting tank top and a short pair of shorts to accentuate her fair limbs.
Like James Leong and Lynn Lee’s Passabe, Jason Lai’s documentary Brother No. 2 touches on similar themes of reconciliation, but not just after atrocities committed in a village, but an entire nation with almost 2 million perishing under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the late 70s. It’s genocide that the world had turned its back on when it happened, only to wake up in recent times, and to pursue justice against humanity after some 30 years.
If there’s one thing I learnt / have reinforced after the movie, is how ubiquitous the Korean swear word which sounds phonetically like “shee-bal” can actually be. It’s more versatile than the English language’s F-word, and the Korean one can be used to describe a whole host of bodily parts both male and female, with colourful adjectives strung together as well. Either that, or the person subtitling the show has some really colourful imagination to tag some appropriate swear words of his/her own liking, in order to spice up the dialogue for non-Korean speaking audiences.
During the mini-seminar session, director Amir Muhammad mentioned that Malaysian Gods had been passed without cuts back home, but also not permitted to be publicly screened. It’s no surprise to this as he admitted, given the buzz the authorities had unwittingly created because of their banning of his earlier film The Last Communist. Strategy-wise, Malaysian Gods had adopted the same approach as Amir’s earlier documentaries, which consists of visiting the actual sites where the movement had began and demonstrations had occurred, and interviewing people in talking heads fashion in a more natural setting. There’s a slight departure here though, where interviews are not with figures directly involved in the events presented here.
If not for the sex picture scandal, this film would have been released about a year ago, and would likely have solidified Edison Chen’s position as box office draw given his stellar performance in the crime-action flick like Dog Bite Dog and pop idol fare such as Initial D. But we know what had happened over the span of a year, though I suppose the decision to hold this film back would have helped it in increasing the curiosity surrounding it, given it’s likely his last / first performance since the scandal.
It’s been a six month wait for the second and final half to John Woo’s magnum opus Red Cliff, and for those familiar with the classic but have not watched the first installment, the director doesn’t waste time in bringing you up to speed with an excellent summary, so much so that the transitional technique used was carried over to the main movie proper. And for those who complained about the pigeon soaring over the sky overseeing a football game at the Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) camp, there’re perfect explanations for those too.
The success of the Infernal Affairs series, and high profile projects like Confession of Pain would have made Felix Chong and Alan Mak household names in the Hong Kong crime thriller genre. Their latest offering with Lady Cop and Papa Crook not only comes with a somewhat cheesy title (in English at least), but gone are Andrew Lau’s involvement as one third of the famous trio, and the familiar gloom and doom that draped their more famous films as well.
The tattoos on the body, the Polaroid snaps, the notes scattered around the house, and the smoking gun evidence? Short term memory loss, happening every 15 minutes. If this doesn’t seem like Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Memento, then I don’t know what does. Written and directed by A.R. Murugadoss, I don’t see much of a nod of acknowledgement to Nolan’s work, and falls back on the fact that this is a Hindi remake of Murugadoss’ own Tamil movie of the same name Ghajini, produced in 2005 (Nolan’s was in 2000), which joins the ranks of films having their titles named after the chief villain.
If you look at the last 5 movies in Donnie Yen’s filmography, I feel that his better works had resulted from his collaboration with director Wilson Yip. In Painted Skin and An Empress and The Warriors, he was relegated to supporting roles, with the former being ineffectively cast against type, and the latter playing second fiddle to the leads Kelly Chen and Leon Lai. With Yip, he’s the able star of the show, and in each of the movies, was put to do what he does best – numbing arse kicking action, with SPL sparring with Sammo Hung and Wu Jing, Dragon Tiger Gate having to lead Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue battling bad hair days, and introducing some wildly kinetic Mixed Martial Arts action in Flash Point. So how does his latest collaboration with Wilson Yip fare?
It was in 2005 that the 