First look at new Miike

Takashi Miike's summer 2008 release, GOD'S PUZZLE (or PUZZLE OF GOD), has released its pressbook and below you can find scans that show just enough to make it look somewhat interesting. The movie, set for a June 7 release, features Hayato Ichihara (NEGATIVE HAPPY CHAINSAW EDGE, ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU) playing twins who hook up with Mitsuki Tanimura (THE CHASING WORLD, CANARY) to unlock the secrets of the universe and to build their own universe. Who hasn't done the same thing [...]

Puppets! Puppets! Puppets!

Kihachiro Kawamoto is right up there with the Quay Brothers as one of the world's great stop motion animators. I've seen a few of his projects and while they don't get my blood pumping they're undeniably beautiful and technically exquisite. Jasper Sharp over at Midnight Eye has organized a massive, touring retrospective of his work that will crawl all over the United Kingdom from March 15 - May 15 of this year, starting off at the Watershed Media Center in Bristol. If you [...]

Linn Hayes RIP

Linn Haynes died a few days ago in a car accident. He was 32 years old. Linn was passionate about martial arts films and a constant presence in online fan communities where he brought a wealth of knowledge to the table and was generally a calm and sane voice of reason in the boiling scrum of shouting and flame wars that message boards can all-too-often become.

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Before WKW was WKW

One of the greatest untapped resources on the planet are the Hong Kong International Film Festival catalogues. Spanning the entire modern history of Hong Kong films they feature interviews with filmmakers, director's statements and assessments of the state of Hong Kong cinema by critics on the ground writing as it happened. Pick up a catalogue from the early 90's and you get to see Wong Kar-wai before he put on the sunglasses, when he was just a nerdy young man trying to find commer [...]

Little nuggets

There are two kinds of trailers for horror movies. There's the kind for Kelvin Tong's RULE #1 which stars Shawn Yue who seems to be in the Early Daniel Wu phase of his career (ie, appearing in every other movie coming out of Hong Kong). This is the kind of horror movie trailer that features some neat-o imagery, a lot of atmosphere and sets up some kind of mystery that you just know will have a twist ending where everything we think we know turns out to be wrong. Meh.

Or [...]

We will all die now

Does anyone know where this planet is plugged into the wall? You can tell me. It's okay. All I want to do is find the plug and yank it out of the socket so our entire species can die in the freezing darkness. Why am I feeling cranky? Is it the global warming? Man's inhumanity to man? The continued existence of Vanity Fair? Is it the blues? Because is there really anything so bad that our entire species needs to die?

Yes, there is.

It's called:

Coin Locker Babies reborn

COIN LOCKER BABIES, the Sean Lennon/Tadanobu Asano/Asia Argento flick based on Ryu Murakami's freaky novel of the same name, is one of those projects that first reared its head waaay back around 2000 and then disappeared, reappeared, swapped directors, and juggled the cast in the intervening 8 years so much that it'll make lightning shoot out of your navel just thinking about it.

The Ryu Murakami novel it's based on has been described to me a couple of different ways [...]

One and a half deaths

We give Jackie Chan a hard time around here, but yesterday his father passed away and so, even though I have some photos of Jackie riding a pony in some extremely silly togs, I won't be putting them up out of respect for his loss.

Jackie's dad, Charles Chan Chi-peng, was born in Shandong in 1914 and his story is that of millions of Chinese who grew up in pre-1947 China. He learned martial arts from Master Zhang at a young age (receiving most of his pugilistic education [...]

Edison, we hardly knew thee

Edison Chen has retired from showbiz. Just when he had finally delivered a career-making performance in DOG BITE DOG his hobbies (hosting celebrities over to his house, photography, not understanding how his hard drive works) put the kibosh on his career.

Whoa, a picture of Edison made of all his headlines.

That's a heavy statement, man!�

Flash Point goes theatrical

It's not a particularly deep movie, but Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen's FLASH POINT contains some of the most jaw-dropping action ever put on film. Yen basically puts every fighting style known to man into a blender, whips it up into a frothy energy drink and then pours about a gallon of it down his throat. He's like some kind of angry, possessed, hyperactive chihuahua and the last half hour of this movie is just a terrifying catalogue of all the ways a human being can pound you int [...]

Nuggets

- Lydia Shum died Tuesday. She was 60 years old and had been a constant presence on Hong Kong Television and in movies for most of her life. Recently her health had been drastically declining.

- Daniel Wu has wrapped his shooting on Derek Yee and Jackie Chan's SHINJUKU INCIDENT. Also, he visits a sex museum.

- An interview with Bong Joon [...]

China, howz ur Olympics going?

Hong Kong is still preoccupied with the Edison Chen photos (21 days on the front pages of the major newspapers and counting) but over in China it's all Olympics, all the time. Which isn't such a good thing, actually. As South Korea discovered when it hosted the 1988 Olympics (read an overview of the cultural and economic effects of the games on Korea) you're getting the full attention of the world on you when you host the Olympics and that's like a big, strong searchlight sh [...]

Shaw action figures

Toy Company NECA is releasing a line of action figures based on characters from Shaw Brothers movies. Characters from KID WITH THE GOLDEN ARM and EIGHT DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER will be up first, as will an action figure named Yank #6. I want that one!

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Love and Honor re-release

Variety Asia covers the story that Funimation and Eleven Arts are teaming up to release Yoji Yamada's LOVE AND HONOR in April of this year. That's awesome news, and great for the movie but, um, why are they releasing it again? Back in November, 2007 Funimation released LOVE AND HONOR all on its own in the US. I guess that release didn't do too well because none of the big internet sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic seem to think it happened, but here's the reviews tha [...]

Johnnie To is Jerry Lewis?

Johnnie To's SPARROW screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the first round of American reviews�hit the internet like this. Variety's Derek Elley praises it for its casual, breezy charms and calls it, "...a skittish, playful divertissement that looks set to divide his loyal fanbase." Elley also compares it to Johnnie To's THROW DOWN only without the "gravitas." Screen Daily's Lee Marshall adds more ice to the soup saying, "...in the end the plot an [...]

PTU from Dragon Dynasty

This crept up out of nowhere: Dragon Dynasty's release of Johnnie To's PTU. It's both dubbed and subbed, and the packaging ain't bad, although I'm sort of curious about the helicopter and the exploding building - and look: another gun in Simon Yam's hand. This is starting to become a pattern. There's no mention of special features and I can't find anything about the release on their official site but it streets on March 25.

Rubber Lover director back

Shozin Fukui built his reputation as the kind of guy who isn't allowed to date your daughter on just two movies, both released in the early 90's: 964 PINOCCHIO (1991) and RUBBER'S LOVER (1996). He's pretty much vanished since then (a few films a couple of years ago that no one paid much attention to) but now he's got a trailer for his latest movie floating around up on the YouTubes. It's called THE HIDING, and Nippon Cinema says it's "...a home invasion movi [...]

Three great trailers

First up, Nippon Cinema has the trailer for HEY JAPANESE! DO YOU BELIEVE PEACE LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING? Six storylines tangle around one another in suburban Tokyo, as 58 different characters overlap, from two shoplifting schoolgirls fighting to the death in a convenience store to a rock star on his way to Tokyo in this Ryotaro Muramatsu (LOVE HOTEL) flick. It looks as delicious and watchable as KAMIKAZE GIRLS or SURVIVE STYLE 5+.

Kaiju Shakedown