Year of the Dragon, viewings and musings

Happy Lunar New Year everybody,

Year of the Black Dragon. Yup, time to pop in "Black Belt Jones" (1974.) Seriously, the holiday is a great time to catch up on movies and television because people invariably put something on the tube whilst guests come over for food and fellowship. This year we're heavy on TV serials and festivities kicked off last week with NHK's 2011 historical doroma "Tempest" starring Nakama Yukie (of TV Asahi's _Trick_ fame.)

Based on a novella by author Ikegami Eiichi published in 2008 that was later adapted into a successful stage play (also starring Nakama in dual roles), "Tempest" centers of the independent kingdom of Ryukyu--modern day Okinawa plus some surrounding territory--caught in between the Chinese empire to the West and the Satsuma Domain in the East, a powerful fief on present day Kyushu that possessed semi-independence from the Tokugawa shogunate, during the waning years of the last dynasty on the island. Gorgeous actress Nakama Yukie spends about 2/3 of the 10-episode series in drag as the plucky daughter of formerly powerful political household (her ancestors were rulers of the first and second dynasties of Ryukyu) that has ambitions of restoring themselves to greatness; since her brother has little ability or ambition for high politics, Nakama pretends to be a male eunuch adopted by her father in order to pass the civil service exams leading to official appointment in the national bureaucracy.

The best parts of the series are those centered on palace intrigues where Nakama must negotiate elaborate court decorum to tease out a subtle resolution to a potentially insurmountable problem--such as when she uncovers an elaborate scheme within the royal household to embezzle funds from the treasury; when she must bust an opium smuggling ring based out of the royal storehouses; where she must expose a Manchurian eunuch who tries to inveigle himself into becoming de facto regent of the country when he positions himself as the tutor of the newly installed fourteen-year old crown prince. The less interesting parts are the ones dealing with international diplomacy--the fate of shipwrecked British sailors who come onto the island after a savage storm; Commodore Perry negotiating with the royal court to set up a land lease scheme for a future American naval base; the Japanese government, united under the Meiji Emperor, annexing Ryukyu and re-naming it Okinawa prefecture.

Nakama plays a male eunuch for a majority of the series eventually becoming grand councilor or prime minister of the country before she is exiled whilst preventing the island kingdom from becoming a pawn of the Chinese; she later returns to the court as country girl who inadvertently becomes a royal concubine on the eve of Japanese machinations to take over the kingdom. Once ensconced safely within the royal palace she temporarily masquerades as her former eunuch persona in order maintain Ryukyu's independence and stem further national crises.

Superb production values and great showcase for lots of local Okinawan screen talent--Nakama Yukie hails from the island--with a theme song provided by the Okinawan-born Namie Amuro. The only really rough patches are: 1) egregious use of of bad CGI in stark contrast to the naturalistic style of the series. Off the top of my head I can recall two particularly glaring examples. The first is the scene where Nakama reveals herself to be a woman instead of a castrated male eunuch to the ladies of the Inner Court--the female-only, harem-like part of the palace reserved for the Queen Mother, concubines, and court maids. Instead of a tasteful shot of her nude back and the shocked reactions of the ladies gathered around her, Nakama does full frontal (and a thousand haam sup lo reading this just passed out from spontaneous nosebleeds) but with light emanating from her bosom and lions--or, in more crude terms, breasts and crotch--smoke radiating from her body, and ropey CGI dragons swirling in the background whilst her unfurled hair flutters in the wind (the scene takes place inside!) No joke. Also pretty bad is a scene depicting the death of character who, after chanting a final ritual prayer, jumps up in the air and shoots off into the stratosphere (Nakama's character arches her head back as if she were street magician Yamada watching Prof. Ueda doing one of his super air leaps) whilst the smiling faces of other major characters greet the person during their ascent through the clouds.

2) Suspension of belief is a must in such productions because Nakama's simply too gorgeous and it's kinda tough buying her as a dude--even with the so-called "butch" voice she employs whilst in drag--and when dolled-up as a palace lady, it's kinda incredible that no one realizes the two are one (until her character gets pregnant there is an elaborate charade with hidden chambers--her very own Bat Cave, as it were--and Nakama changing into her superhero outfit as eunuch prime minister.) Those two problems coupled with a rushed ending--the final episode could easily be stretched into a series of its own--are pretty conspicuous. Nonetheless, the best episodes are nos. 1-9 and provide solid family entertainment.


_Tempest_ starring Nakama Yukie as Concubine Manazuru (left) and Eunuch Son/Sun.

With Yachigusa Kaoru as the Queen Mother (far left); Katase Rino as the Queen's chief hand maiden and mistress in charge of the Inner Court; Takahashi Kazuya as Ryukyu's King Shoiku; Takaoka Saki as the king's bitchy sister and chief shaman/prophetess for the kingdom trying to protect Ryukyu in her own way; Tsukamoto Takashi (lead hacker student in "Battle Royale") as Nakama's right hand man and life-long colleague; Tanihara Shosuke as the Satsuma samurai ambassador to Ryukyu upon whom Nakama holds a life-long crush; Gackt as a prevy Manchurian eunuch trying to assert Chinese control over Ryukyu in order to commute his exile from the Forbidden City; Wakamura Mayumi as the Queen and later, Queen Mother; Kaneko Noboru as Nakama's long lost brother; Uehara Takako as Concubine Mamina, Nakama's close ally and booster from inside the Inner Court who was chosen to be one of the royal wives at the same time as Nakama (they are married to Takahashi and Wakamura's son); and Okuda Eiji as Nakama's late father who was executed at the start of the series for treason/possessing illegal foreign books (really part of Nakama's personal library given to her by real life British medical missionary Dr. Bernard Jean Bettelheim [portrayed by voice actor Charles Glover.])

Also with standout performances by Okinawan actresses Nikaido Fumi (b. 1994) as a teenage maid in the Inner Court who eventually becomes its ruling mistress and Taira Tomi (b. 1928), "living protector of Okinawan performance arts" who serves as Nakama's household maid and adoptive mother of sorts. When I get married and have children one day I hope some producers make a series of Nancy Drew-like mysteries with Tomi-sama and Fumi-chan as a grandmother-granddaughter crime fighting duo who travel around Japan solving tough cases. Would be especially great if I had plucky daughters of my own who were into detective fiction and brain teasers.


Cast of "The Tempest" stage play that premiered early last year.

Trailer for "Tempest 3D," a theatrical movie utilizing the same cast as the TV show, coming out later this month (I sincerely hope they're not planning on editing down the 500+ min. show into a 120 min. film):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkDeW3S0yWA

This post has been edited by Yi Lee on Jan 24 2012, 05:50 AM

Takako Uehara is a member of Speed, a four-girl J-pop group, also from Okinawa.

Speed recently performed at the FNS Music Festival on Japanese TV (b'cast live on Dec. 7, 2011).

Here's a shot of Uehara in the audience, in the middle, with Speed lead singer Hiroko Shimabukuro on the right.

They're enjoying Ken Matsudaira's performance.

Here's a shot of Speed's performance, where they were joined by AKB48:


I covered this and the New Year's Eve music festival, Kohaku Uta Gassen, on my blog:
http://madara-blog.livejournal.com/

This post has been edited by Brian Camp on Jan 23 2012, 03:12 PM

Hola,

More LNY media goodness to come. This year went all touristy and went on a very Chinese mini-vacation by going to visit Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee with my mother--a big fan of the "Cat King" (Elvis' Chinese moniker) since her teenage years in 60s Kuala Lumpur. Noting particularly Asian about the trip save for spending an afternoon at the Belz Museum of Asian and Judaic Art, eating at a Chinese soul food joint, and visiting the King's old karate studio (now a hipster dive bar called the Hi-Tone Cafe.) Still have a large pile of discs to watch and since we're so heavy on TV serials this year (plus old Siao Fong-fong movies), they'll be rolling out over the next month+ or so.

Anyway, the Delta is one of the relatively unknown cradles of Chinese-American culture in North America outside the famed centers of San Francisco and New York City (not to speak of equally significant Honolulu Chinatown scene) so had a neat time following up on diasporic culture while simultaneously tracing the tale of how a small town boy from Tupelo, Mississippi moved on to Memphis and somehow became a global superstar in the process.

G'day everybody,

LNY viewing continues. We follow _Tempest_ with 2009 Singaporean TV serial _Little Nyonya_, which was re-shown last year on Straits terrestrial television despite being on DVD w/English subs for awhile. Celebrating the 45th anniversary of the founding of Spore's ubiquitous broadcast media conglomerate MediaCorp, a lot of money and talent were invested into this 34-episode series making it one of the most extravagantly produced programs in the history of Singaporean television (and ranking up there in international visibility alongside 1998 adaptation of _The Return of the Condor Heroes_ starring Christopher Lee and Fann Wong.) If you're a diehard fan of Asian weepies, this one laced with nostalgia over Straits heritage and old fashioned storytelling sensibilities--where the heroine in both virtuous and beautiful; her enemies are uncritically conniving and dastardly--is definitely one to catch. It's also the one that shot TV star Jeanette Aw (pinyin: Ou Xuan) into the stratosphere after a decade of journeyman's work in many a supporting role.

Starting in the 1930s and concluding in the present-day, _Nyonya_ chronicles the life of several Peranakan families--affluent families with a strong Chinese cultural slant who were born out of a series of diplomatic marriages between Chinese nobility and Malayan potentates stretching back to the Ming Dynasty (though the term nowadays just denotes anyone who possesses mixed Chinese-Malay ancestry.) Peranakan males are called "baba" while females ones, "nyonya." The series, with a strong Dickensian feel, is loosely inspired by the fairy tale of Cinderella and feels a lot like _Nicholas Nickleby_ if its main protagonist were Little Dorrit.

Jeanette Aw plays two main roles: in the first third of the series she is the deaf-mute daughter of Huang family concubine Xiang Yun--one of the "elder sisters" of Singapore's entertainment industry--who is treated barely better than a maid by her in-laws; in the second two-thirds of the series she assays the grown daughter of said girl--who was killed during the Japanese occupation of Malaya--and is equally abused by her surviving blood relatives but rather than succumbing to the same fate as her late mother, strives to make something of herself and improve her lot in life whilst her rotten relations spiral down into self-inflicted oblivion. Jeanette Aw's first character is loathed by the ladies of the household because she is the product of a rape; infelicitous master Yan Bing Liang forces himself onto servant Xiang Yun but marries her out of remorse (Xiang still earns the eternal enmity of first wife Lin Meijiao and Yan's older sister Guan Xuemei who view her as a "vixen temptress.") Jeanette's second incarnation is the daughter of the above woman, who had been disowned from the family when her mother eloped with Japanese photographer Dai Yangtian rather than going through with an arranged marriage to sadist businessman Desmond Sim (Shen Jinxing), a baba educated in England who has become a successful local powerbroker first collaborating with the Japanese during the occupation and, after the war, with the British colonial government of S'pore.

I'm not Peranakan--my Chinese family were some of the political agitators whose "grassroots activism" led to Singapore's expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in the 1960s--but I'm nonetheless fascinated by the series for its depiction of some truly traditional cultural practices. For instance, my late father was the son of a concubine. So was an undergrad sifu as well as another friend's grandparent, a woman, who herself was married to a Chinese warlord from the Republican era and had to deal with the whole mistress/concubine issue in person. It's not really discussed except in dry cultural histories of the era but there's a whole elaborate ritual culture associated with that bygone practice (like not being able to call your mother "mom" but instead addressing your father's first wife as this, how you relate to other blood relatives and household servants, etc.) Throw in some art deco style and fashion, vintage jazz, the template of rising/declining family fortunes over several generations and you have a really compelling TV show.

More on _Little Nyonya_ after everybody gets to see the series in the coming weeks. But at this point, quite enjoyable and well worth seeking out (also, lots of sumptuous traditional food on display as nyonya are expected to be good homemakers and excellent cooks of the special Chinese-Malay fusion cuisine characteristic of their class.) Only 15 episodes in and will report more once this thing concludes.

A current New Year's release from HK, ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 2012, with Donnie Yen and Sandra Ng, is playing on 42nd Street in Manhattan. On Wednesday evening, I was waiting to buy a ticket to HAYWIRE at the theater across the street from it when I remembered that ALL'S WELL was playing at the AMC Empire. I pulled out my newspaper to check the showtimes only to learn that I'd missed the 7PM show by half-an-hour. Had I remembered sooner and checked the paper sooner, I would have blown off HAYWIRE and gone to see ALL'S WELL instead. I probably would have come out ahead that way.

Hey Brian (and everybody else),

Yeah, it's not LNY without a Raymond Wong "All's Well" movie (HK's own holiday "Carry On" franchise?) I'd still check it out if you've got the time (not that I have seen it; I'm waiting for DVD rental like most everybody else without ready cinema access.)

Wong's looking awfully long in tooth nowadays. In contrast to his boyish Cinema City days, I guess becoming a big time producer means all night drinking sessions plus so much casting couch hanky panky that he looks like somebody's wasted and depleted reprobate uncle in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Thankfully, since 2011 at least, he's found the perfect on-screen foil in mainland actress Yan Ni who does strong-willed, middle aged society ladies really well. I'm still waiting for somebody to make an adult themed, comedic drama starring Eric Tsang & Teresa Mo plus Raymond Wong & Yan Ni as a pair of well-to-do couples on holiday in the south of France that slowly morphs into a Alain Resnais movie about missed connections and lost (relationship) opportunities.

If you're doing the home viewing LNY bill, "Hot Summer Days" (2010) and "Love in Space" (2011) are probably the cream of the recent crop even though those two pictures aren't strictly "LNY comedies" per se. Moreover, "Summer Days" has a cameo by a major star who has all but stopped making movies at this point (hint: the actor was once married to French director Olivier Assayas.)

(To everybody): To anybody doing LNY home viewing, the 2011 Bollywood road movie "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara," set in Spain, is also worth a spin on the old disc player. "Summer Days" or "Love in Space" plus this and a nice meal would make for a great weekend get-together.

Hey everybody,

Finished watching _Little Nyonya_ last night a few days after the official end of the LNY holiday. Have a pile of discs still to watch so this isn't the end of this thread yet. Anyway, just a few parting comments on the S'pore serial for those that might be intrigued enough to go out and rent (or purchase) it.

34-episodes is a pretty long viewing commitment. If you just want a taste, the first 12-episodes with Jeanette Aw (Ou Xuan) as mute-deaf Juxiang set before WWII can be viewed as a self-contained story. The last 22-episodes with Jeanette as daughter Yueniang set after the war are classic "weepie"; the Juxiang arc is a more restrained historical drama while the Yueniang one is a careening melodrama filled with all sorts of plot twists and surprise developments.

Of geographic note, the series takes place mostly in Malacca, Malaysia with only some parts set in Singapore. I don't think I made that clear in my earlier comments.

Although Jeanette Aw became really famous with _Nyonya_, Joanne Peh (Bai Weixiu)--Miss Singapore 2002 finalist--won the best actress prize at the 2009 Star Awards beating out her _Nyonya_ co-stars. Neat gal and if you can catch it, her 2010 8-part travel documentary _An Activist's Journey_ (in Mandarin) is well worth a look. Recalling the Josephine Siao thread and Siao being one of Hong Kong's "seven princesses" of Sixties Cantonese dialect cinema, Jeanette and Joanne are two of MediaCorps' "Seven Princesses" of local television fame (along with _Nyonya_ co-star Felicia Chin [Chen Jingxuan.])

The show's opening theme song "Ru Yan" [Like a Bird/Swallow] was sung by Olivia Ong (Wang Liting.)

Lastly. if you're a big fan of this series and 2003 South Korean serial _Dae Jang Geum_ [Jewel in the Palace] starring Lee Young Ae, mainland producers bought the remake rights to _Nyonya_ and have relocated it to Peking, China starring Jeanette. The new emphasis is on traditional Chinese medicine and cookery instead of Peranakan culture (hence the _Dae Jang Geum_ mention.) Playing on PRC television right now with its Straits debut this upcoming May.


Seven Princesses of Singaporean television: Rui En (left), Felicia Chin, Fiona Xie, Jeanette Aw, Joanne Peh, Jessica Liu, and Dawn Yeoh (right.)

This post has been edited by Yi Lee on Feb 7 2012, 04:51 PM

Hiya everybody,

Finally, our first feature film for the concluded LNY holiday. "Un Cuento Chino" [Chinese Take-away/A Chinese Tale] (2011) is a whimsical Argentine tragicomedy starring Ricardo Darin set in Buenos Aires. The eccentric and somewhat gruff owner of a small hardware store, Darin leads a drifting, empty life whose sole source of pleasure seems to be cutting out bizarre items from the newspaper. One day while taking a lunch break near the airport he witnesses Ignacio Huang, a Chinese migrant visiting Argentina in search of his uncle, being thrown out of a taxi cab. Both men do not speak each other's language and Darin grudgingly takes in Huang was a boarder not realizing the Chinese national's unspoken back-story is one of the freak news items in his scrapbook collection of weird news of the world stories. This isn't really a spoiler since the movie opens with this scene: a few years before the start of the story toymaker Huang loses his fiancee in a freak accident--whilst proposing to her, a cow falls out of a cargo plane and ends up killing her (believe it or not, the falling cow bit is "based upon a true story"!) After the Sichuan earthquake wipes out the rest of his family, Huang goes overseas in search of his last blood relative. Anyway, the sad-faced Chinese migrant and his plight sparks something in Darin forcing him to come to grips with his own past and the unrequited love Muriel Santa Ana, a neighbor's sister from the countryside who visits the city specifically to see Darin, has for him.

For those into charming dislocation narratives with a touch of Chinoiserie, this is a solid addition alongside titles like "Thousand Pieces of Gold" (USA, 1991); "Waga jinsei saiaku no toki" [The Most Terrible Time in My Life] (Japan, 1994); "Augustin, roi du Kung-fu" [Augustin, King of Kung-Fu] (France, 1999); and "Kinamand" [Chinaman] (Denmark, 2005)--pretty wide assortment of genre mentioned there, mind you. (Still waiting to catch last year's Sino-German collaboration "I Phone You.") Anyway, waiting for Aki Kaurismaki to make one of these types of movies one day featuring Chinese tourists lost in Sweden.


Huang and Darin (right) at the premiere presser. On R4 NTSC DVD with English subtitles. Huzzah!

This post has been edited by Yi Lee on Feb 10 2012, 06:31 PM

Hey hey hey,

The third series for the LNY was TVB's big hit from last year: _Ghetto Justice_, which does feature English subs BTW. This 20-episode show combines the legal procedural, courtroom drama, slice of life snapshot of working class Hong Kong, and a little bit of buddy comedy to make an entertaining show with a touch of TVB didacticism thrown in for taste (though, to be honest, Shaws co-productions with MediaCorp and Astro have been even more nanny-ish if you can believe it.)

Starring San Francisco-born Kevin Cheng (Zheng Jiayin) as a formerly high flying barrister who, after a personal epiphany, gets off the fast track to partner and becomes, instead, legal advocate for the poor and downtrodden in Sham-Shui-Po (Hong Kong's very own Akihabara.) Staffing a grassroots advocacy center founded by his mate Sam Lee (Li Canchen)--in his TVB debut--the scion of a powerful hotelier family who has forsworn profit over "social justice" alongside Kevin's wet-behind-the-ears cousin Alex Lam (Lin Zishan)--having graduated from playing smart aleck yoof punks in many a Stephen Chow movie--the solicitor son of a well-known local jurist. Joining them on occasion is their pal Eddie Kwan (Guan Lijie), a plain clothes cop who provides expertise on various criminal science issues. On the female side of things is Myolie Wu (Hu Xing'er) as a high-strung barrister from humble roots that first serves as Cheng's legal nemesis but slowly becomes his grudging love interest; Joyce Tang (Teng Liming) as the middle-aged working class defendant on a case who Alex Lam falls head over heels over; and Sharon Chan (Chen Minzhi) as a call girl that has returned home to Hong Kong and whom Sam Lee eventually fancies.

It's kinda like "case of the week" meets Chor Yuen's "House of 72 Tenants" (1973)/Eric Tsang's "72 Tenants of Prosperity" (2010.) Though entertaining family fare--this show had 90+ rating in Hong Kong during its initial run--I wish it were more realistic sort of like the Inspector Morse/Inspector Lewis series on ITV that were so full of local character and detail (or is that just me getting nostalgic for my wasted youth spent in England?)

Also, with a neat bass heavy hip-hop theme called "No Time for Regrets" by Miami-born MC Jin (Au-yeung Jin/pinyin: Ouyang Jing) and Singaporean soul artist Tan Hanjin (Chen Huanren.) The background musical cues are kinda quirky with hip-hop electronica present but the show is actually more heavy on things like blues guitar and country & western twangs. Sonically the show reminds one a lot of the catholic anime series _Cowboy Bebop_ (1998) and it's not to difficult to see Kevin Cheng patterning his performance off of Bebop's Spike Spiegel character though I think a stronger case could be made for Cheng riffing off of Takashi Sorimachi's turn in _Great Teacher Onizuka_ (1998), which was hugely popular throughout Asia during its initial broadcast run.

Of note, Tan Hanjin has been the architect of all the "wanskta" (as opposed to gangsta) rap that's percolated though Hong Kong in the past decade--first on those hilarious Jordan Chan "Night Life" singles from the early 2000s down to Eason Chan's (no relation) recent stuff and beyond. Having grown up in the American Deep South and being steeped in the music found here, particularly gospel and blues-based "urban" genres (was raised in working class Pentecostal churches featuring little old black ladies that could really belt out a tune; also, remember listening to a lot of college radio when hometown boy-made-good Ludacris was just an undergrad disc jockey at Georgia State University.) Despite Jin and Tan's considerable skillz I don't think their work entirely passes the two-part "ear test" for contemporary hip-hop: 1) would a stripper dance to their stuff and 2) would a DJ for a haute couture catwalk spin their tunes for a fashion week strut? How hard would it be to get those two in a room with DJ Qbert and Kid Koala to make some truly epic mash-ups? As it stands, their theme for the show isn't really either "ghetto" or "justice [oriented]"--the series' Chinese title would translate into something more like "Streets of Rage" (what that they had sampled Yuzo Koshiro's 16-bit background music?) Neat experiment and edgier than TVB's usual fare but all the parties involved have a long way to go before approaching New Wave media from the early 1980s that were truly focused on the plight of the SAR's invisible working classes (not to speak of Golden Age Cantonese dialect cinema.) Considering that this is a TVB production, though, I see it as a promising step in the right direction.

Anyway, the show cleaned up at the Anniversary Awards plus a sequel series is currently in the works. Definitely work seeking out if you love your Asian telenovelas (and you people know who you are.)


Why does everyone have such a constipated look on their face in this promo poster for TVB? Also, the show's spoiler-ish intro segment:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjgwMjYzNzQw.html


Aiya! MC Jin (right) and Tan Hanjin do lo-fi and unplugged.

This post has been edited by Yi Lee on Feb 14 2012, 07:42 PM

Hey everybody,

Today's LNY backlog film is 2011 Sino-German co-production "I Phone You" courtesy of a visit to the local Chinatown video store. A delightful if somewhat insubstantial truffle, Jiang Yiyan stars as a sassy flower delivery girl from bustling megalopolis Chongqing. After a torrid one night stand with European-based businessman David Wu in a five-star luxury hotel, he sends her an expensive iPhone as a means of keeping in touch with her. Jiang soon discovers that Wu has been playing phone tag with her from Germany and decides, on a whim, to visit her beau by booking a direct flight to Berlin. She's greeted at the airport by Wu's German muscle, Florian Lukas (dude has bulked up since "Goodbye, Lenin" [2003]), who has been instructed to keep Jiang away from the missus and to get her immediately back onto the next plane bound for Chongqing. Only able to secure a booking for the following day, Lukas checks Jiang into a budget motel and keeps close tabs on her.

A shifty employee quietly pockets Jiang's cash and passport, which she finds out about the next morning. Not speaking a single word of German (but able to use her iPhone to do rudimentary Deutsch translations), the plucky Jiang gives Lukas the slip and ventures out into Berlin by herself looking for her one and only. And with the exception of an unexpectedly dark re-encounter between Jiang and Wu, the film is a charming, breezy tragi-comedy of misunderstandings that doesn't fully become a cliched tourism promo for either Chongqing or Berlin. This is the movie "The Transporter" (2002) would have been if Luc Besson had eschewed making an actioner and chosen, instead, to do something along the lines of "2 Days in Paris" (2007) and seeing how much chemistry he could generate with both Shu Qi and Jason Statham on screen together.

Directed by Tang Dan, a Chongqing native herself who has lived the past fifteen years in Berlin, "I Phone You" was made from a script by veteran German filmmaker Wolfgang Kohlhaase and was supposed to be Tang's film school MFA thesis but luckily got backing to be expanded into this quirky little picture. The film's Chinese title means something along the lines of "Sealed by Love" but cleverly is also a homophonous pun for "Love Crazy" and the Chinese word for "iPhone." Definitely worth seeking out if it shows up at the local picturehouse or rental shop shelf.


Ingenious product placement! Anyway, on R2 PAL DVD sans English subs (but with German ones.)

English-subbed trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqf7v2UP0xw

This post has been edited by Yi Lee on Feb 22 2012, 09:19 AM

Luckily for us, Besson stuck to his original plan.

This post has been edited by Brian Camp on Feb 22 2012, 12:16 PM

Hola Brian (and everybody else),

No doubt the Transporter franchise has been, in it's own way, a satisfying cycle of action pics in addition to being a boon to Mr. Statham's chequebook. However, I think they've also had the unfortunate side effect of further typecasting the actor as stoic, career-minded toughs whose on-screen lives are largely bereft of romantic companionship.

In my mind's eye I kinda want to see Jason Statham do a variation of his _Transporter_ character alongside Shu Qi riffing off her performances in the Feng Xiaogang _If You Are the One_ movies (now being adapted into a CCTV sitcom not starring her and Ge You.) You know, a couple in the final stages of an increasingly strained relationship who try to rekindle their love for one another in an extended road trip only to, I dunno, whatever the screenwriter and director decide to with those two actors plus their (hopefully interesting) plot threads.

Those two certainly had a certain spark between them on screen and I'd like to see what could come of it without the conventions of action film enplotment pushing the narrative towards a kinetic conclusion. Same thing with Statham and Saffron Burrows in "The Bank Job" (2008); I guess I'm too much of a rom-com fan for my own good.

Hey hey hey,

This is the sixth and final entry for the LNY media entries for this past new year's holiday. Whilst everyone else in the viewing circle is going bonkers for Asian television serials, a handful of us sat down for some neo-masala action starring Indian megastar Salman Khan in 2010 film "Dabangg" [Fearless.] I have a love/hate relationship for Salman. "Dabangg" is a perfect example as to why: in this feature he's on and giving it his all. Unfortunately, he's got a lot of personal charisma and sometimes he just mails in performances (looking obviously very bored to viewers) relying on his personal charm plus outsized star persona to fill in the blanks in characterization. Thankfully, in this outing he's "all in" just like those early films from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made him a star in the first place.

In "Dabangg" Salman stars a self-styled "Robin Hood" corrupt cop in a podunk town located somewhere inside the northern badlands. Deeply resentful of his step-father and idiot step-brother (played by Khan's real life younger brother, film producer Arbaaz Khan) who treated him like dirt growing up, he relishes being a thorn in their collective sides. Most of the time Salman is corrupt jerk until he catches sight of gorgeous pottery vendor Sonakshi Sinha (in her film debut; also, looking like she could pass for Monica Bellucci's little sister in this one), who prompts him to be less of an asshole towards his estranged family and the general public at large. Anyway, before Salman can remake himself into a decent member of society, enter corrupt political boss Sonu Sood who has a grudge to settle with Salman (who unfortunately shook down one of Sonu's thuggish goons at the start of the film) leading to an over the top revenge scheme involving a healthy dose of terrorism, assassination, and frame up leading to Salman taking matters in his own hands and laying down the law proper.

Of all the new-style masala films coming out in the past few years by Bollywood's king khans--Aamir, Shahrukh, Salman--this is probably the best of bunch among the trio of "Ghajini," "Om Shanti Om," and "Dabanng," respectively (though SRK's 2011 "Don 2" is all around amazing.) Capital entertainment, see this one with the largest screen possible and the sound cranked up to eleven. Probably a lot glossier than the old school masala pics of the 1970s and 1980s, "Dabangg" is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the contemporary revisionist takes on the genre plus enough of a throwback that it'll get fans jazzed up to search out those films (sort of like SRK's "Don" got people to reconsider Amitabh Bachchan's original caper film.) Just like "Don 2" was a Christmas-time treat in 2011 (it played in Atlanta!), "Dabanng 2" slated for global release Christmas '12 looks like it'll be quite the holiday event too (oh, please play in Shanghai when I'm over at my big sis' place for the holidays.)


Salman + 'stache = Dabangg!

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO6t9p1HoWI
Disc: http://www.amazon.com/Dabangg-Salman-Actio...n/dp/B00435RZ56