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 one rainy, boring afternoon?
The movie is a medium-budgeted sci-fi, romantic comedy based on a novel of the same name, and it's being produced by the colorful Haruki Kadokawa who is a blessing to journalists everywhere because of things like this (from Variety):
"Speaking to reporters at Nikkatsu on Friday, Kadokawa said he first read the 2002 novel while in prison on drug charges and that, though the theme seemed heavy, he saw 'a strong comic element in the material' that he plans to underline with 'a large helping of CG effects'."
Could Kadokawa be the last great showman left? I mean, who else says they optioned a novel because it was good prison reading?
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're American, you have to wait until April when Kino is releasing a collection of his shorts (recommended) and his feature BOOK OF THE DEAD (which isn't my thing, really. A bit too stately.)
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.
Still from FIVE ELEMENT NINJAS.
Linn was working with Media Blasters on its upcoming Shaw Brothers releases, doing audio commentaries and producing extra feature material. I'll try to find out the status of the discs, but in the meantime at the bottom of this page there's links to an interview with him about these releases, and an interview with him about Chinese nationalism in martial arts films which, while not authoritative (and Linn would never claim that it was) makes for some fun reading.
And, in case you're curious, here are the titles Media Blasters have picked up from Shaw:
Five Elements Ninjas AKA Super Ninjas
Heroes Two
The Master
Challenge of the Masters
Martial Club
The Deadly Duo
The Brave Archer
The Ten Tigers of Kwangtung
Black Magic 2
Flag of Iron
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 commercial success in the marketplace.
This is not the Wong Kar-wai we're
talking about here.
His director's statement for AS TEARS GO BY is forgotten next to his headshot where he looks like a newly-hatched chicken, all gangly neck and over-sized head, putting on a serious face that's not quite working. A few years later he's trying on his sunglasses for DAYS OF BEING WILD making this statement in the write-up:
"I loved the cinema as a child. The attraction was that I could always lose myself in that re-created world: to cry, to laugh, to get angry, to feel deprived...and I enjoyed these films tremendously. I really do not think it matters if my films are critically well received or not. What is essential is that I want my audience to leave the cinema having enjoyed the film, and that means the whole world to me."
"I really do not think it matters if my films are critically well received or not..." that's sort of the opposite of today's Wong Kar-wai. I wonder what happened.
Four years later he's back with ASHES OF TIME and CHUNGKING EXPRESS and he's ditched the sunglasses and is wearing a great big smile in his photos. Of CHUNGKING EXPRESS he says that the original title was CHUNGKING JUNGLE but it's the write-up for ASHES OF TIME where you get a sense of a totally different director than the cool, in control, icon who can put the Cannes Film Festival on pause at will.
"Initially I wanted to get in touch with Louis Cha. He got to have some ideas regarding the history of these characters that he didn't put into the novel. But unfortunately I couldn't find him...I had wanted the film to be some kind of a journey. I wanted it to begin in Qinghai, the mouth of the Yellow River, and go all the way to Hukou. But that's too difficult. We couldn't afford that. Besides, you don't ask actors like Leslie Cheung and Lin Chin Hsia to make a road movie. So I had to stay put in one place."
There's more but you get the idea: every motion picture super-stud started out as an insecure little guy, including Wong Kar-wai.
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 you could make a trailer like the one for ART OF THE DEVIL 3 (now with English subtitles). This is the kind of trailer that makes you freak out and sends you crawling under your desk trying to scrub what you've just seen out of your eyes. You've been warned. It's heinous.
Jason Gray reveals that Takeshi Kitano is already in production on his new movie about a painter who can't sell his work.
Korea's THE CHASER has become the break-out hit of the year in Korea thus far, and it's all set to either get much bigger or fade away this week as it expands. Mark Russell has a review and here's the trailer.
Wisekwai has written a positive-with-reservations review of the indie Thai horror movie THE 8TH DAY which has a trailer up online.
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:
CELL PHONE DETECTIVES
Does this photo
make your soul
die, too?
Gah! Just look at those horrible things.
Not since the Manhattan Project have so many talented people been involved in a project so morally bankrupt. Takashi Miike, Shusuke Kaneko and Mamoru Oshii are getting together to direct a 51 episode TV series. I can't bring myself to even type up the series description, so here's Variety's take:
"The stories revolve around detectives who probe digital-network-related crimes and a teenager (Masataka Kubota) who helps them with the aid of his trusty, "Transformers"-like cell phone."
Digital Network Related Crimes? The dreaded DNRCs? Thank goodness there's finally a department to deal with all those people who steal the minutes from my monthly plan. And the "Transformers"-like cell phone has a name. Would you like to know it? It's "Phonebraver 7." The series premieres on April 2 at about the same time that Softbank is starting to sell Phonebraver 7 cell phones.
Commercial interests have always been a part of the entertainment industry. I'll even grant you that commercial interests are the driving force behind the entertainment industry. But, dear god in heaven, do we have to be so blunt about it? Why not just let Miike and the rest of them direct Softbank ads? Why hide it in a TV show? And if you want to argue with me that this show could possibly be good, then I'd like to draw your attention to this photo from the recent press conference, courtesy of NipponCinema:
A schoolgirl, a detective wearing dark glasses and a trench coat, Kubota holding up Phonebraver 7 while making Serious Face and Miike smirking. If recipes were written with pictures instead of words then this picture would be the recipe for disaster.
Part of my distress comes from the fact that along with the rest of Subway Cinema I've spent the last three months programming this year's New York Asian Film Festival and I think I've hit my limit on low to medium budget horror, fantasy and sci-fi films. Few of them feel original, and for the most part they're crafted with all the care and imagination you'd expect from a bunch of anonymous flicks designed to be rushed out for a quick sale at AFM or Cannes.
Omigod, look out, it's got legs!
Kill it. Kill it!
That's not to say there aren't some entertaining films in there, but too often you get a kick-butt opening scene, followed by an hour and twenty minutes of watching the film crawl up its own bottom until it implodes in a supernova of "who cares?" spraying "why bother?" schrapnel into my eyes. And it hurts me, sometimes.
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. Here's one:
"...the story revolves around a pop star and his twin and how they're trying to track down and murder the mother who abandoned them in a coin locker as, you guessed it, babies..." (Maboroshii Blog)
"COIN LOCKER BABIES...tells the tale of two unwanted infants abandoned in adjacent train station lockers at birth...Following a stint in an orphanage and some serious hypnotherapy, the pair are then raised as brothers before moving to Toxitown, a polluted city full of freaks and hustlers...Once there, one of the brothers becomes a transvestite rocker looking for fame and love, the other a pole vaulter whose girlfriend encourages him to destroy Tokyo." (Time Out London)
Novice filmmaker but experienced self-promoter, Jordan Galland (who has since gone on to write, direct and produce ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE UNDEAD), was originally the co-writer with Sean Lennon and he was also set to direct (no longer true, according to IMDB). Not much happened with the project, although during that time Galland's band (Dopo Yume) appeared in a fashion spread in Vogue and were quoted in Vanity Fair saying, "If you want to understand Dopo Yume...then read Ada." That would be Ada by Vladimir Nabokov. That would also be the kind of thing that would get your burned at the stake if you said it pretty much anywhere else on earth except in Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, the movie moved along, bubbling up in a flurry of news items in 2005 before once more lapsing into silence, although it now has three writers attached to it besides Mr. Galland. Which might explain some of the possible script changes hinted at when there were ads posted in New York City for production assistants to work on the film back around 05. But since 2005...silence. Over at the Maboroshii blog there's news that it's bubbled up once more, plus the estimable Mr. Rucka has links to a Sean Lennon video that's supposed to include camera test footage made for COIN LOCKER BABIES. Also, while at the Smithsonian a couple of weeks ago to present a screening of MONGOL, one viewer reports that during the Q&A Tadanobu Asano confirmed that he would be playing Gazelle in COIN LOCKER BABIES but the viewer said he "did seem kind of tentative about it."
So...will 2008 see production of COIN LOCKER BABIES? Or will 2008 be much like 2007. And 2006. And 2005...and 2004...and 2003...and 2002...
(Thanks to Jason for sending in some of this news, and thanks to Kristen and Nick for the rest of it)
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 from Master Zhang's wife, in fact), dropped out of school, became an aide to a Nationalist general, was fired when he dropped his rifle which then discharged, worked on a cargo ship, engaged in some fabric smuggling, was arrested by the Japanese and forced to watch executions and told he was next in line, was finally freed through personal connections, went back to work for the army, was the victim of two assassination attempts by unknown communist agents, fled South, lost his first wife to cancer, lost both his parents to air raids, and wound up fleeing the country leaving behind two sons whom he didn't see until they were adults.
He moved to Hong Kong, became a chef, had Jackie, moved to Australia, and wound up enjoying a fabulous retirement courtesy of his son, who made more money than he knew what to do with during his career. He passed away at the age of 93 from prostate cancer. Jackie was out of the country working when it happened.
Three generations of Chans at Charles Chan's
birthday in December, 2007.
The half death mentioned above is that of Lydia Shum or, as she's known in Hong Kong, Fei Fei. The portly television actress died last week and the outpouring of sentiment has been pretty remarkable, although given that she's been a permanent part of the Hong Kong TV landscape almost from the time Hong Kong first had TV, maybe it's not so surprising, after all. Vancouver has declared Fei Fei Day to pay tribute to the actress (June 1, 2008), a memorial tribute concert will be held at the Hong Kong Coliseum on March 2 and the Hong Kong Film Archive will hold a retrospective of her movies from March 7 - 16 and they're going all the way back to movies she made as a teenager like DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER (1962) and TEDDY GIRLS (1969).
But since China and Hong Kong have declared that they won't give any posthumous honors to Fei Fei, we'll let the mayor of Vancouver, who is honoring her with her very own day, have the last word:
"Her generosity and commitment to supporting community causes has set an example for all of us. More than the dark-rimmed glasses and trendy hairstyles, we will remember and celebrate her warm heart and wonderfully good humor."
I'd argue that "trendy" might not be the best word to describe her hair, but otherwise that's as fitting a tribute to her as I can find.
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.
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 into submission with their elbows, knees, fists, feet and thighs.
No, no, no. Not FLASHPOINT...
...FLASH POINT. It's two words.
And now FLASH POINT is getting a theatrical release on March 14. From what I've heard this will be a ten print release, hitting screens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It'll be the first theatrical release of one of the Dragon Dynasty titles (THE PROTECTOR came out on DVD under Dragon Dynasty but was a Weinstein Company release theatrically, I believe), although there seems to be another label, Third Rail Releasing, that will be handling FLASH POINT.
FLASH POINT: it's like a big, cheesy plate of nachos punching you in the face.
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