Johnnie To's pickpocket movie, SPARROW (apparently there's no "The" in the title), is at the Berlin Film Festival and so Mr. To finds himself once again all over the Chinese media. Sina.com did a four-page interview with Hong Kong's King of Directors and a sharp-eyed reader graciously translatd and summarized the contents:
- it's well-known that To rarely works with a complete script, and his actors often don't seem to have a clue on set about what's going on (Josie Ho talks about this in a recent interview). Some notable exceptions are RUNNING OUT OF TIME and LINGER, his recent romantic bomb (read a bad review). In the Sina interview he says he wants to work with more complete scripts, as in LINGER, which had a script by Ivy Ho (COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY). Um, maybe not such a good idea. He also said he wants to be more of a "literature director" but that he thought his first attempt at this, ELECTION, was unsuccessful. I think "literature director" is a direct translation and I'm not quite sure what it means in reference to ELECTION.
Simon Yam looking good in
Sparrow.
- the Sina interviewer asked To if he'd seen Peter Chan's THE WARLORDS. To then began praising Chang Cheh's DYNASTY OF BLOOD and asked the interviewer if he'd seen it. Then he said that he would never direct a period martial arts movie unless it was really, really, really special. He also is completely uninterested in THE WATER MARGINS as a film project, and that the only part of that story he cares about is Gao Qiu.
- the interviewer challenged To's previous statements that he would stay in Hong Kong by pointing out that he'd been directing movies for Mainland companies recently like TRIANGLE and LINGER. To said that in order for his company to survive this is what he has to do. He said that he'd like to return to making more personal movies in ten years, then he re-stated that he still considers THROW DOWN his best movie (and I totally and completely agree - THROW DOWN is completely underrated).
HAF, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, has released their list of projects for 2008 and it's an impressive line-up full of big deal directors and producers like Hideo Nakata, Park Chan-Wook, Sabu, Ning Hao, Bong Joon-Ho, Nonzee Nimibutr and Fruit Chan (producing). The 25 projects are all at different stages of financing and they're all looking for funds so they can move into production. They'll be shopped around at this year's Hong Kong Filmart. Here's my take on the projects that look the most promising and, full disclosure, I was one of the folks hired to work on assembling the HAF project book so I feel unusually close to it this year.
The projects that I most want to see reach the screen:
7 DREAMS - Ning Hao (CRAZY STONE) wants to make a flick that does for time travel what SAVE THE GREEN PLANET did for UFOs. A ridiculous comedy about a young loser contacted by the future survivors of a nuclear apocalypse who are now hiding on the moon and who task him with the job of preventing armageddon. Oh, and they also want him to keep their colleague from turning into an old maid. Smart absurdism that needs his nimble touch.
DETOUR - I wasn't a huge fan of Alexi Tan's BLOOD BROTHERS but I really, really want to see this. Tan directs (and Terence Chang produces) a taut action flick about a rundown hitman who gets caught in a massive traffic jam in Macau on his way to wipe out a paranoid loanshark. He looks at the car next to him and his target's in the back seat. He decides to rub him out on the spot. Complications ensue. The whole movie seems to be a running shootout taking place in this massive traffic jam and all I can think of is the heist scene from HEAT, pumped up with Hong Kong kineticism. Call me fanboy, but I want to see it.
FUGITIVE CLUB - a knotty suspense film about four kids who fake a murder and then call the police as an elaborate prank. Things go hideously wrong and with editor/producer Daniel Yu (producer and editor of CRAZY STONE) on board and Zhang Yimou's screenwriter, Tang Xiru, making her feature film directorial debut I've got high hopes that this will be a good genre flick from China, rather than an elaborate art film.
MOTHER - Bong Joon-Ho (THE HOST) has a "why didn't I think of that?" premise: a young, asocial loser is made the scapegoat of a horrific murder and his hard-headed mother has to figure out who really did it to keep her son from being railroaded into prison. It seems to be a rural gothic, like Bong's MEMORIES OF MURDER, but with a stubborn mom in the lead role. I'm a sucker for this kind of flick.
ROMANCE RENTAL - the pitch is AMELIE meets Taiwanese social upheaval in the 1980's as a young girl whose views of the world are entirely formed by romance novels goes off to university in Taipei and gets caught up in Taiwan's sexual and political revolutions. It sounds to me like a politicized version of MEMORIES OF MATSUKO.
The craziest project of the bunch, and I mean it's so off-the-wall that I don't know how it's going to turn out, but I sure as hell want to see it, is SECRET OF THE BUTTERFLY from Thailand's Nonzee Nimibutr. The director of NANG NAK and OKAY BAYTONG starts his flick as a horror movie about a woman who kills her lovers and ends it with a lesson in evolutionary biology and the complete eradication of all men on earth, as women discover how to give birth asexually. Imaging Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE except with ooky biology and gore at its heart instead of bloodless ghosts and you have an idea of what he's trying to accomplish here.
The big names in this line-up are associated with a variety of projects and here's the basic rundown:
Fruit Chan is producing WHITE NIGHTS, a Chinese flick about a love triangle set in a city-sized coal mine.
Wong Kar-wai's Jettone Productions is producing (via his longtime producer Jacky Pang) a hitman flick called BLOODLINE directed by Brit Richard Jobson and by Nicolas Roeg's son, Luc Roeg.
Pang Ho-cheung is directing THE BUS which is a meta-movie about a true life incident where a man raped three women on a long distance passenger bus trip and no one stopped him or helped the women. His take on the project: he's filtering the incident through a director making a semi-improvised movie about the assaults.
Sabu is directing DANCING MARY, a Hong Kong-set film about a bureaucrat trying to cleanse a city property of an evil spirit. Half the movie seems to take place in the afterlife and I really want to see Sabu's take on the land of the dead.
Hideo Nakata of THE RING is directing GENSENKAN, a bittersweet comedy about an American woman trying to turn a Japanese inn into a hip hotel and the characters who are hiding out at the inn who all cross each others' paths. Also, he's got a book in the works called A FOREIGN FILMMAKER'S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD about his work and his struggles in Los Angeles, and I'm dying to read it.
Li Yang of BLIND SHAFT is directing MANG LIU about kids coming to the city to find the parents who abandoned them when they moved away for better jobs. Things don't work out well for them, needless to say.
Kentaro Otani, director of NANA, is making TSUTENKAKU about two people who have given up on life who awaken to reality when they prevent the suicide of a transvestite. It sounds strange, but Otani demonstrated with NANA that he can make the thinnest sounding concept feel like a massive epic.
Park Chan-Wook has apparently attached Song Kang-Ho to play the priest-turned-vampire of his untitled vampire movie which sounds way better than I thought it would be.
Im Sang-Soo is directing a Paris-set film about a Korean immigrant whose cynical, sexually-hyperactive existence is challenged by a series of terrorist bombings.
It's an amazing line-up and there are far more movies in the HAF project book than I have time to write about here.
The Chinese indie flick LOST IN BEIJING opens in the US today and it’s already the most important Chinese movie of the year, not so much for its content but for its fate. Released in November 2007, “Lost in Beijing” became one of the highest-grossing indies of the year in China, but on January 3rd SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) posted notice on its website that it was pulling the movie’s exhibition license for distributing deleted scenes on the Internet, entering an unapproved version of the film in the Berlin Film Festival, and for engaging in improper promotion of the film. Producer Fang Li read about the fate of his film online, where he also learned that he had been banned from filmmaking for two years.
This is the first time SARFT has pulled the license of a movie already in distribution, and it's had a chilling effect on the Chinese film industry who will probably respond by retreating into the politically safe past and making even more period martial arts movies. It is also, according, to Fang, a victim of the Political Bureau’s plan to culturally clean up China before the 2008 Summer Olympics. Fang Li was kind enough to give us an interview for a piece about the movie's fate in the New York Sunwhich you can find here, but presented below is the complete interview.
Paco Wong, Wu Jing's manager and the producer of SHA PO LANG and FATAL CONTACT, gave an interview in December, 2007 saying that he was going to be producing a new movie in 2008. Then he sort of blew everyone's minds by saying that Wu Jing would not only act in the film, but would direct it as well.
(Thanks to the sharp-eyed reader who sent this in)
Dennis Law, the corporate bigwig at Johnnie To's Milkyway Image, the producer of ELECTION and ELECTION 2 and the the director of the Wu Jing vehicle, FATAL CONTACT continues what will certainly come to be known as his "fatal" series with FATAL MOVE. I don't have enormously high hopes for this flick since I didn't really enjoy FATAL COMBAT in the slightest, but the huge ensemble cast of this dark gangster drama actually feels kind of exciting. There's Simon Yam and martial arts legend Sammo Hung in the lead roles, then Danny Lee plays a cop (again) in his first movie in four years. Wu Jing has a part, as does Jackie Chan's bodyguard, the high kicking Ken Lo. Three Milkyway character actors - Wong Tin-lam (Wong Jing's dad), the master of the quiver, Hui Shiu-hung, and Lam Suet - round things out. Also, longtime Milkyway regular Maggie Siu (THE LONGEST NITE, PTU, ELECTION) gets a substantial-looking part as well.
Whoa! It's 1994 again!
In a promising sign, Easternlight is handling the movie, so we're assured that it'll hit some minimum level of quality. Oh, and the movie is rated Category III, Hong Kong's equivalent of NC-17.
I can predict the future on this one now. A run in Hong Kong where it makes about HK$5 or HK$6 million, followed quickly by a sale to the Weinstein Company's Dragon Dynasty label and it's out on a two-disc special edition in early 2009. Okay, I'm cheating. That's exactly what happened with Law's FATAL CONTACT.
Not sure if we mentioned this already, but Shinya Tsukamoto's incredible NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE gets a direct-to-DVD release February 19 in the US. It's the first title from the Weinstein Company's Dimension Extreme label that I'm aware of and here's the box art:
These days, reveling in North Korean kitsch is about as old hat as you can get, but there's something so completely unhinged about the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble that I must speak. Named after a village where Kim Il-Sung personally machine-gunned thousands of Japanese occupiers in a revolutionary frenzy, the PEE (as I like to call them) are a massive band that plays only electronic instruments in a shocking physical frenzy of revolutionary proportions. Comrade Musicians are decked out in silver sequined tuxedos while Comrade Interchangeable Lead Singers wear organza death-gowns from hell as they perform in front of a massive Hypno Wall that flickers and pulsates and sends subliminal "Activate!" signals to sleeper agents all over the world as the curtains, stage floor, and proscenium arch freak out in a spastic light show that was clearly designed to weed out the epileptics in the audience. The musical style is a lunatic mash-up of oompah-band beer garden beats, operatic vocals cranked up like power drills and buggy, sparking electronic organs squeezed and tortured until they short circuit in a sonic eruption of bleeps and blarts. Every note is clearly played by people who've not only received the Manchurian treatment but are also bombed out of their minds on a powerful pharmaceutical cocktail of super-strength Prozac and military-grade speed.
Love the PEE for their
dope beats, not their
whack album art.
Check out their videos on Youtube and join the PEE army:
I don't know the name of this song but it might be the most representative of all of PEE's music as it contains soaring, insane vocals, a nose-bleed-inducing use of lights, a menacing shouted chorus by Comrade Keyboard Players and an ample garnish of electronica relish. Also, the enormous fabric flower on Comrade Interchangeable Lead Singer's left shoulder is clearly covering up a bullet wound incurred while on a secret mission to the West.
I spit rhymes, PEE-style.
At the conclusion of "Look At Us" the PEE traditionally transform their instruments into sophisticated laser cannons and use them to destroy all weak-minded reactionary scum in the audience. Warning: do not stare directly at the Hypno Wall during the introduction to this rousing number.
"Socialism is Good" is probably one of their more restrained numbers but it offers one of the only trips behind the Wall O'Keyboards so you can see the lunatic fingers of the Men in Silver.
Yes! We feel the power of PEE in our
Revolutionary Ba-Donka-Donk.
Plenty of other PEE classics like "Is the Dear Leader Healthy?" (trick question) and "My Happy Country" are also available on Youtube.
I haven't read much about 37-year-old director, Gan Xiao'er, from Xin Village in Henan province, especially not on film sites. Gan has had to shoot his films without official permits, his subject matter has been controversial, he runs the risk of official punishment for making his films and he's had to distribute his latest flick himself, all of which are the trials and tribulations that are normally catnip to the arthouse crowd who require their Chinese directors to come with these kinds of outlaw credentials these days. So why hasn't he been embraced by these folks?
Well, maybe because he's a Christian who's making movies about Christianity.
His first movie, THE ONLY SONS (2003) got a decent review in Variety and was screened at Rotterdam, Vancouver and Pusan. His second film, RAISED FROM DUST is about a Christian woman whose husband is suffering from liver disease but the mounting hospital bills are crushing their family and her faith allows her make the decision to let him die in order to pay for her daughter's education. The only review I can find is this one from translated from Thai to English by the folks at Limitless Cinema:
"This film is about a poor woman who has a sick husband staying in a hospital and a daughter who can’t pay tuition fees. What’s surprising is that the film contains no melodramatic scene. This is a low-budget film, full of static shots and stillness. The images seem to be transfixed by the empty atmosphere of rural China. Every scene is so natural, so life-like and so long that it can be a torture. The film is like a documentary without an ounce of sentimentality. We rarely see a close-up scene of the heroine. The story doesn’t seem to move forward. There is no music. Even in the climactic scene, we can only hear a sound of the wheels from her vehicle. This is not a kind of slow-but-deep films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s, nor a kind of slow-bittter-humorous films as Tsai Ming-liang’s. But this is a film of stillness and silence which is extremely hurtful and powerful."
From RAISED FROM DUST.
With 130 million Christians in China worshiping at both official and at underground churches (which are caught in what Gan describes as a manufactured conflict) there's a significant Christian population in China and Gan screened RAISED FROM DUST at several local churches which mostly criticized the film for being downbeat and not containing enough praise and worship. Gan wants to make seven Christian films which he describes as his Seven Seals and he says that he has to make movies about Christianity if he wants to talk about the lives of the working class in China:
"No Chinese films have dealt with the spiritual lives of farmers ... but I'm not willing to shoot [a film about] a farmer without any spiritual activity because it's not the way he is in real life."
The most interesting thing to me about Gan's films are that they're coming from a point of view that's less concerned with dogma and theology and more with the role of spirituality in everyday life, something that's almost totally absent from most modern Chinese films. And he can sound downright dangerous at times.
“The most important thing is whether a person has something to hope for inside. I think a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam or others, has a major role because it tells us that in the eye of God, we are very precious.”
Reinforcing the value and dignity of human life no matter what your class or social standing is an important element of some of the more muscular brands of Christianity that have historically been concerned with social justice, in particular Liberation Theology that served as a powerful call to arms in Latin America, South Africa and Haiti in the 20th Century. Despite being heavily criticized and later disavowed by the Vatican, Liberation Theology was an essential part of many social justice movements around the world and it made the Catholic Church a leader in places where the poor needed more than a few hymns and prayers once a week. Heck, if it wasn't for Christian churches the Civil Rights movement in the US may never have reached critical mass. So hearing Gan talk about the essential dignity of human life and hearing his plans to make five more movies, one wonders, could Liberation Theology be getting a second wind in China? Because the most politically radical thing I can imagine the Mainland Chinese upper and middle classes not wanting to hear is, "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first." China doesn't have any room these days for a revolution.
(If you're interested in hearing Gan speak and seeing RAISED FROM DUST, NYU's Center for Religion and Media is hosting him in New York City on February 15 for a talk called "The Cross and the Camera: The Films of Gan Xiao'er followed by a screening of RAISED. Go here and scroll down for complete information.)
"This underground film, made without permits, was shot in the director’s own home village in Henan. It uses mainly non-professional actors, with many village folks playing themselves. One of them, known as Brother Lu, is a hooligan-turned-church elder. During his wild youth in the 1980s, he was into fighting, gambling and visiting prostitutes. Despite his track record, he was once trusted to collect electricity bills in the village.
“But instead of turning over the money to the electricity bureau,” Gan laughs, “he spent it in a singing and dancing bar, causing a black-out in the whole village.”)
A big "Yargh!" for pirate radio stations was issued in Hong Kong yesterday when the High Court rejected the Hong Kong government's bid to extend their injunction against Hong Kong's pro-democracy pirate radio station, Citizens Radio. "Mr Justice Hartmann said he could not see how airing programmes would affect public safety by interrupting emergency channels," the South China Morning Post reported.
Citizens Radio is a pro-democracy station that began broadcasting illegally about three years ago from Mongkok and can be heard all over Kowloon and on the internet. It broadcasts mostly call-in shows and occasional talks with local legislators and does so illegally after its application for a broadcast license was rejected by the HKSAR government with no reason given back in 2005. It most recently ran afoul of the law when the 76-year-old legendary legislator and democracy activist, Szeto Wah, appeared on the station to discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre in May, 2007 and suddenly found himself charged with "knowingly becoming involved in the use of unlicensed communications equipment in order to transmit radio signals." Counter-charging the government with selective prosecution he vowed to go to jail before he'd admit wrongdoing. Eight other individuals have been charged due to their involvement with the pirate station.
Hong Kong's favorite pirate.
After being slapped with the injunction while their case over the legality of their transmissions and the station's counter-claim that the denial of their license violated their freedom of expression wound their way through the courts, Citizens Radio broadcast in January of this year for one hour to give details about an upcoming march calling for democratic reforms. No one was arrested, but police officers at the station handed out copies of the injunction to everyone who participated in the show. Then, later in January, Eastern Court magistrate Douglas Yau Tak-hong ruled that the denial of the broadcast license was unconstitutional and that all charges against the station and its guests should be dropped. However, he suspended his ruling after the prosecution informed him that the government would appeal the case.
Now that the extension of the injunction has been denied by the High Court, it looks likely that the case will eventually be dropped or slowly fade away over the next few months. Most heartening of all has been the fact that the approval ratings for the normally popular Secretary for Justice Wong Yan-lung dropped from 76% to 67% during this prosecution meaning that Hong Kongers are watching how this case is handled with great interest.
But a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum are due to Hong Kong's High Court for ruling that the routine government blah against pirate radio stations (they may interfere with emergency broadcast signals and thereby endanger public safety) is about as firm an argument as a one-eyed pirate playing hop skotch on a peg leg made of noodles.
This is a complicated story with lots of suits and counter-suits so you can read the original coverage here:
30% of Korean musicals hitting the boards in 2008 will be "movie-cals": big, flashy song n'dance shows based on movies. While a lot of them will be the same old Broadway shows we're all familiar with, like HAIRSPRAY, a whole slew of them will feature Korean pop stars and TV heroes hoofing it through musical numbers based on homegrown (read: Korean) flicks. There's no SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE musical in the works, unfortunately, even though that's a movie that should have been a musical in the first place, but here's what you can expect:
And oddly, musical versions of the American indie flop, SPITFIRE GRILL, will hit theaters as will NINE, a musical based on a play inspired by Fellini's 81/2.
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