Wellwellwell.
As one of the people who bought the lovely Korean boxset of the two “Death Note” movies, I was eagerly awaiting the Korean release for the Death Note spin-off “L: Change the World”.
And it arrived in a nice 3-disc edition, but to my dismay without English subtitles. Darn…
But loyal forumer “TheDoug” was kind enough to investigate, risking his own wallet. And he survived to tell us all that this edition does, in fact, have English subs, and showed the screenshots to prove it.
YesAsia has even changed their listing of this title thanks to the remarks he made to them.
Stellar job, thanks “TheDoug”! Most appreciated.
The New York Asian Film Festival completed another successful run more than two weeks ago. By all rights, this review should have run before United Red Army had its North American Premiere on the fest’s last day, but it took me this long to wrap my head fully around it. My apologies. I an currently self-criticizing my actions.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.
The dates, facts, and figures come flying out of the introductory section of United Red Army like a machine gun, accompanied by a hypnotic musical theme, shooting down any possible suspicion that director Kôji Wakamatsu intended to make an audience-friendly film about the Japanese student movement of the late 60s and early 70s.
Indeed, the tone is so strident that you feel guilty for not taking notes, as though a class were being taught and you were not properly prepared to answer questions asked by the deep-voiced narrator. Initially fascinating, the tone and pace becomes off-putting, frustrating, and finally wearisome. Suddenly, though, you notice that Wakamatsu has been sneaking in brief dramatizations of the student movement’s evolution that have grown longer each time they break up the narrated documentary footage. Almost before you realize it, you’re caught up in a brutally gripping dilemma facing sincere individuals.
In short, you face the same situation as the real-life characters depicted in the film.
Continue Reading "NYAFF Hangover: UNITED RED ARMY Review"...
When you create a film that manages the difficult feat of winning the hearts of both critics and the public alike, pulling in serious box office coin while also managing a near-sweep of the local equivalent to the Oscars, there’s only one thing to do: make a sequel. Luckily for us, Takashi Yamazaki’s original Always: Sunset On Third Street was so full of rich characters that any excuse to pay a fresh visit to Third Street is more than welcome. All of the ingredients that made the first film such a rousing success are also in full effect here and while the sequel might lose a little something simply due to the audience now knowing the formula and what to expect it more than makes that up in the pleasure of seeing our favorite characters continue to develop and grow. There is, after all, something to be said for a director that knows what his audience wants and then proceeds to give them exactly that.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA: ALWAYS, SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2 Review"...
Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to Feng Xiaogang’s The Assembly, a film built around Communist Chinese military campaigns of the forties and fifties, is that he has created a film that completely and utterly transcends politics. Technically astounding, with battle sequences orchestrated by the team behind Korean hit Taegukgi - sequences that match or beat anything ever put on screen by big budget Hollywood, Saving Private Ryan included – the heart of the film never gets lost in the spectacle, the soul of the piece anchored in an astounding central performance from Zhang Hanyou.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA: THE ASSEMBLY Review"...
And the hot streak continues for Johnnie To. While the latest from the prolific action auteur lacks the blistering intensity of the Election films and the extreme high style of Exiled it reunites him with a pair of favored collaborators - screenwriter and co-director Wai Ka Fai and star Lau Ching Wan - and the result is an entertaining, surprising piece of work anchored by a powerhouse performance from Lau.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA: MAD DETECTIVE Review"...
The award winners for the 2008 edition of the New York Asian Film Festival have been announced and, with a drum roll please, here they are:
This year the New York Asian Film Festival gave two sets of awards this year. One was the Audience Award that we give every year, selected by the audience, then, for the first time ever, we had a jury who gave out five awards, including a Grand Prize.
The winners of the jury awards for the New York Asian Film Festival 2008 are:
- Winner - New York Asian Film Festival Grand Prize
SAD VACATION directed by Shinji Aoyama
- Honorable Mention and Best Ensemble Cast
SPARROW
STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKES
- Best Visual Achievement
Lee Myung-Se for M
Joko Anwar for KALA
- Outstanding Achievement
Koji Wakamatsu for UNITED RED ARMY
- Best Debut Feature
Ryo Nakajima for THIS WORLD OF OURS
For the Audience Award we would like to list the top five winners:
1) FINE, TOTALLY FINE (Winner of the Audience Award)
2) ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2
3) KING NARESUAN 2
4) PUBLIC ENEMY RETURNS
5) SPARROW
Congratulations to all the winners, and a final thank you to our jurors:
Vincent Musetto (film editor at the New York Post), John Mhiripiri (Coordinator/Big Cheese of the Anthology Film Archives), Dave Fear (film critic for Time Out New York), Maitland McDonagh (film critic for TVGuide.com and author of several books on film) and Benson Lee (director of PLANET B-BOY).
Call Johnnie To’s Sparrow proof positive that the acclaimed director can do pretty much whatever he sets his mind to. Yes, he frequently strays from the gangster and action pictures that have made his reputation internationally and has a number of romances and comedies to his credit. But in the past when To has strayed from the gritty high octane pictures he is best known for he has generally stayed within the bounds of other genres popular within Hong Kong cinema. But Sparrow, this is something else entirely. A film made by a man who clearly loves film, Sparrow is a film that belongs to another time and another place, a film that owes debts to European art film of the sixties and the mainstream musicals of Golden Age Hollywood. This is a film that’s all elegance and grace, a classy pickpocket caper that puts Simon Yam in a role that could easily have been filled by an Astaire or Kelly.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA: SPARROW Review"...
Thank God for English subtitles. Yes, the latest from Japanese cult icon Takashi Miike, his spin on the spaghetti western, is technically already in English but thanks to the vast majority of his performers speaking no English at all and having to deliver their lines phonetically trying to watch this film without subtitles would have been an exercise in pain. With them, however, the film is a loopy explosion of energy, the most overtly crowd pleasing effort from the prolific cinematic freak show since Zebraman. Bright, brash, violent, and intentionally camp Sukiyaki Western Django is that rarest of things: an intentional cult film that succeeds on all fronts.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA Report: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO Review"...
The near future. Tokyo’s police force has been privatized, the new private force authorized to execute justice on the spot. The officers are both hated and feared but are a necessity in a world plagued by ‘engineers’, mutant creatures that generate powerful weapons from any significant wound on their body meaning that they become more dangerous the more that you fight against them. The only way to stop an engineer is to cut out a strange key-shaped tumor that exists somewhere within each one of them, a task that falls to specialized sword wielding hunters within the police force. And the leading hunter on the force is Ruka - played by Audition‘s Eihi Shiina - a beautiful, self destructive woman plagued by memories of her suicidal mother and slain father who has brought down fifty engineers to date.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA Report: TOKYO GORE POLICE Review"...
[Yes, it’s just as good on second viewing. Yum.]
With only five feature films to his credit thus far it seems a bit premature to say that Adrift In Tokyo is writer-director Miki Satoshi’s masterpiece. He’s got a lot more film left in him, after all, and who knows what he’ll come up with next. But, by god, he’s got a hard road ahead of him if he expects to top this one, a film that any director of any nationality would be proud to have on the resume.
Continue Reading "FANTASIA Report: ADRIFT IN TOKYO Review"...
On the 15th of August 2005, Japan celebrated the 60th anniversary of the end of what they call “The Great Asian War”, which we call “The East Part Of World War II”. Many of these celebrations were taking place in and around Yasukuni, a Shintoist shrine where thousands of swords were created for the officers of the Japanese army. It also holds the remains of a vast amount of Japanese soldiers who died during the “Holy Wars” fought for the emperor, holy wars including that big one 60 years ago.
The Yasukuni shrine made the news several times between 2001 and 2006 when Koizumi Junichiro, then the Prime Minister of Japan, made well-publicized yearly visits to the shrine. This to the abhorrence of many Chinese, South Koreans and indeed Japanese, because Yasukuni also houses, even actively WELCOMES the remains of tried war criminals. According to fanatical Shintoists, these people have done nothing wrong and are to be considered heroes, who served Japan with valor under its God-emperor Hirohito. Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits were seen by many as an approval of this view.
Chinese director Li Ying went to the Yasukuni shrine in 2005 and made a film about the controversy surrounding the 2005 visit by Koizumi. He shot footage of rallies, petitions and ceremonies and managed to speak the sole surviving swordmaker of Yasukuni, a nonagenarian who allowed him to film the actual process of making a sword. Edited together with archive footage and pictures this became the documentary “Yasukuni”.
Although both sides get plenty of screen time to voice their opinions, the end result was deemed too controversial to be shown in Japanese cinemas until it got itself a reputation as something you needed to have seen, if only to show you supported the right of Freedom Of Speech.
So is it good?
Well, after a very slow start it gets interesting, and frankly that is all a documentary needs to be to start rolling.
More after the break.
Continue Reading "NYAFF Report: Controversial Documentary YASUKUNI Review"...
There is little doubt that Korea’s Lee Myung-Se is one of the purest cinematic talents working in the world today. His grasp of the language unique to cinema is staggering, his ability to merge cinematography, editing and sound unparalleled. The man is a flat out technical giant. That said, his devotion to form often leads to some problems with story and while with M Lee irons out the tonal problems that plagued The Duelist to craft one of his most unified and focused works to date the film is so heavily constructed that the highly structured form obscures the emotional core of the story resulting in what is arguably his least accessible film thus far.
Continue Reading "NYAFF Report: M Review"...
Ehm… tell me if you’ve heard this one before: an anthropomorphic version of Death walks amongst people, with God-like knowledge and powers, but when he takes a closer interest in some of his subjects he suddenly gains new insights about what “life” and “death” mean.
There is nothing new in having death itself or one of its helpers show up as a human figure in movies, although it is slightly more original to give it the starring role. Every time it happens, though, invariably such a film will try to tell the audience that life is bittersweet yet worth living. Which, frankly, is like saying the sky is blue, the sun is hot and rain is wet. The sheer obviousness of the topic (for why else would you have Death feature as a character?) makes it a dangerous one: all too easily you get an end result which is too sentimental, too serious, or both.
Does Kakei Masaya’s “Accuracy of Death” avoid this pitfall? Not entirely, as the alternate title “Sweet Rain” aptly predicts.
Is it worth watching though? Oh yes…
And the biggest reason for that is Takeshi Kaneshiro, who basically saves the movie with his performance as Chiba aka. “The Grim Reaper”.
More after the break…
Continue Reading "NYAFF Report: ACCURACY OF DEATH aka SWEET RAIN Review"...
Meet Dai Saito. He’s your typical, working class shlub in Japan. There’s never quite enough money, there are few prospects for the future, he hardly ever see his daughter, and his grandfather suffers from dementia. But there’s more! Dai Saito is also Dai Nipponjin, the sixth generation superhero who grows to enormous size when exposed to electricity to battle the monsters rampaging across Japan! Too bad nobody cares ...
Continue Reading "NYAFF Report: DAI NIPPONJIN Review"...
Who wants tickets to see Action Boys for free at the New York Asian Film Festival? You do! Yes, and you over there, sir. And also you. Yes, I know. Well, thanks to the benificence of the powers that be at the NYAFF we’ve got three pairs of tickets to give away to the film and you can stake your claim by . Winners will be drawn at random Monday.
