Mike Thomason wrote:Attention: Brian -- scroll up, dude! I wrote some brief snippets!
Thanks for the heads-up! I don't often take the time to read back through these things, but when I do, I usually discover your posts have suddenly grown a bit.
Haven't seen EYE IN THE SKY in it's entirety yet,
but did catch a very big chunk of it in a music/DVD store downtown. I usually try to avoid watching the TV while I'm in there because they're always playing new releases that I've yet to see, but I think I found this one more compelling that you did, but obviously I have to reserve judgment until I've seen the whole thing.
Got UNDERCOVER just recently, and have had GANGS 2001 for an eternity, but haven't watched them yet. Interesting take on GANGS, though I think you've got your subjects reversed in this sentence
:
You've gotta love this hokey little morality plays disguised as throwaway exploitation that Hong Kong produces sometimes, don't you?
Think I'll move that one up the priority list now (which may or may not have been your intention
). Which reminds me, did you ever get around to watching FING'S RAVER? Practically a sister film to GANGS, based on what you've written about it. Personally, I love this stuff (in context, of course), and the
truly dismissive reviews I've found (unlike yours) seem written by people who clearly took them way too seriously.
Definitely not in the same camp about HAUNTED KARAOKE, which I watched just a few weeks back, so I guess it's safe to debate. Michael Tao would definitely not be my first choice for wacky either, so I'll agree there, but Wayne Lai definitely would, and I thought he was good in this. The fact that it's rooted in a real-life tragedy actually earned it points in my book for having the balls to take this approach to such a tragedy. Only in Hong Kong, I suppose. Of course, if they cut the goofy green-light horror elements and turned it into some sick Category III horror-show-cum-Danny-Lee-police-procedural where his cops beat the arsonists with phone books, then it would've been a bit more transgressive, and offensive. Oddly enough, this reminded me thematically of LAST GHOST STANDING (which came later, I know), only with a bigger budget. And that one was definitely an opinion splitter, too.
kiliansabre wrote:Azumi - I've caught most of Ryuhei Kitamura's work. This would probably be my second favorite behind Versus. A lot of fighting throughout and it was dramatically satifying as well. Sort of felt like Japanimation brought to life at times in regards to characterization. No real review for it, but if you like Versus or anything else by Kitamura you will definitely dig it.
Picked up a copy of The Princess Blade but haven't watched it yet. Donnie Yen apparently did the fight choreography which should be interesting depending on which mode he was in for it.
My first exposure to Kitamura was VERSUS at a film festival premiere years ago. Loved it, but grew less fond over the years, mainly because of it's length. Couldn't deny the guy's fondness for genre films, though. ALIVE was great to look at, but sooooo pretentious and talky and I thought he blew a great opportunity with that last GODZILLA movie. Again, great visuals, but not sure they needed to be on crack. Weird, too, that GODZILLA came along after AZUMI which, like you say, is probably one of the best live-action anime-style movies ever, and shows such a strong maturation of his skills. I think he really nailed it with this one, and the timing of many of the gags was so much better than in any of his previous features.
Thought PRINCESS BLADE was better than I was expecting for whatever reason at the time. I'm not a big follower of Japanese swordplay stuff, but the addition of Yen made me curious, and the action doesn't disappoint. My girlfriend loved this, as did her sister later on, so perhaps you might find it worth sharing...
My own Asian cinema watching of recent vintage has been a mixed bag of Hong Kong stuff, three of which are:
TRUE LOVE 2003: Latest in the long line of CALL GIRL movies ('88, '92, etc.) is probably the closest Hong Kong cinema has ever come to producing an Albert Pyun experience. It's ungodly how long scenes are extended in this. In one part, an old dude sips booze for nearly
two minutes before keeling over. That's
all he does. He just keeps on sipping. Later, a hooker waits in a hotel room, silently, for
another full two minutes, before anything happens. A film like this forces you to put all the other HK shot-on-video productions in a new perspective, which is a good thing, as a great many of them don't deserve the dismissive scorn often thrown at them. Decent cast, slick production values, but absolutely nothing to latch on to. But you know what? It probably made a profit for it's makers in DVD sales considering its low budget, which was probably the only reason for it's production in the first place. Despite the Cat. III rating, there's absolutely no nudity, and the sex scenes are the
only scenes that
aren't protracted beyond all reason. Go figure!
HERO OF BEGGARS: here's one that caught me totally by surprise. Considering it's a Michael Hui movie, I actually shouldn't have been surprised, since I do admire his brand of comedy, and this is an ideal showcase for it, plus he's backed up by strong comic turns by Sandra Ng and Alfred Cheung, both great comedians in their own right. They don't get as many of the laughs as he does, which is a tiny disappointment, but there are so many nicely-designed vignettes here that it's tough to carp. They all play jobless former PLA soldiers forced to fend for themselves, eventuallly making their way to Guangzhou, then Hong Kong, crossing paths with gangster Michael Chan in both places. Has a smilar vibe to HER FATAL WAYS, but has a lot more sympathy for the characters, and allows them to win the day without the aid of Hong Kong counterparts, while keeping them naive enough that local audiences could still have sense of superiority.
LOVE IS NOT ALL AROUND: Thematically, this steals so much and so blatantly from Korean soap operas you might just as well go to the sources. Where LOVE @ FIRST NOTE was a fun piece of bubblegum that had no pretentions beyond being a feature-length infomercial for Paco Wong's stable of pop talent, this one, similarly intentioned, overextends its reach. Pretty people having pretty, contrived romantic issues set to pretty (good) Cantopop tunes, but the director is so taken by the narrative trickery in his screenplay ("hey folks, here's
another flashback so you can see what
really happened there!"), his characters are forced to operate entirely on false assumptions and mixed signals. A little of that makes for good tension in any film, but here it's the
whole film!, and it's all in the service of a rather arbitrary twist ending. Love the music, as always. But that's probably not enough in this case. YMMV, as they say.
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