I never would have thought there was any 'milk' in those candies in the first place so it is all the more shocking that they some were made with melamine tainted milk. Americans will get on their moral high horses again and rant about those sneaky slanty eyed Chinese all the while failing to remember who it is clamouring for super-cheap consumable goods. I remember back when White Rabbit candies were a novelty and honkys would try to peel off the rice paper. Heheheh. Speaking of whiteys... Elsewhere in today's lack of serious news reporting: Marc Quinn proves that cliches are hugely profitable. His uber-crapola Siren (solid gold statue of Kate Moss in yoga pose... poor man's version of Hirst's equally crapola diamond encrusted skull) can now be added to the list of lame-o sculptures of unworthy celebs and should be paired with Daniels whathisname's Britney Spears Monument to Pro-Life sculpture. Neither can top Jeff Koons' truly inspirational Jacko and Bubbles (above). Quinn's and Edwards' one-liners are sad, shoddy gimmicks. OK, who cares, everyone is all geared up for the great debate on America's Got No Talent.
From the producers of Calamari Wrestler comes this postmodern journey into the psychic life of... Executive Koala. Cute on the outside, but does he have a split personality? Is he a brutal killer, an innocent victim, an overworked salary man trying to get by, or just a man in a suit? Watch it now at crunchyroll.com.
OK, this film is totally whack, I mean beyond Machine Girl whack. But it's actually kinda spellbinding. Whereas Machine Girl was just buckets of fake blood and a pretty limp storyline, this might just be one of the lost masterpieces of indie cinema left to be discovered. The best part has got to be when the courtroom dream sequence is reduced to a musical. I think this undoes all the pain that was caused in my brain from having to witness Richard Gere in Chicago. The bit about inserting nice memories was also a nice nod to Strange Days, Ghost in the Shell, and Paprika. Part Donnie Darko, but also thoroughly existential. The kungfu scene at the end kicks Keanu Reeves' butt - is it OK if a girl gets completely slammed against a wall by a koala bear? The completely absurd ending would have left Brecht in utter awe. Nice one... definitely to be watched completely wired on Coke and gummi bears.
Beyond John Edwards' and Georgia's respective meltdowns, it's been a slow month for shocking news, but here's an alarming comparison of anatomies: Hawaii Five-O Part II vs. Small Guy Trying To Look Big
Nice V-neck tan line Obama...
Also, all the hype about Dark Knight was mostly hype. Great effects, but it wasn't dark enough and what was up with the Darth Vadar/Batman voice over? But everyone in that film has been cursed: Edison Chen had all of his porn stolen from his pink Macbook and uploaded onto the internet by mysterious "Kira", Heath Ledger OD'ed (who, by the way and with respect to the dead, does not deserve an Oscar - crazy is easy to play, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon was much more impressive), and then Morgan Freeman got into a car accident. But what gives - Edison Chen is so completely STILL in Dark Knight. When Morgan Freeman gets to Hong Kong (what a fantastic waste of money for a great shot of Batman standing above Central) he is greeted as he enters the skyscraper by... yes, Edison, speaking perfect English (obviously) while everyone else is speaking Cantonese and "Lau" inexplicably speaks Mandarin (inexplicable because Lau is a Cantonese surname; Liu is the Mandarin equivalent - maybe it is a nod to Andrew Lau or Andy Lau?). Anyway, so I checked up online and some reports say he was supposed to be a cop, others insist that Chin Han replaced him as Lau, which would make him the bad guy instead of a cop. Anyway, all's well that ends well. I knew he'd be able to pull a Hugh Grant on this one. Gillian too. Fools, people in sex scandals sometimes even become president. I wonder what John Edwards will be doing next year...
OK, go away for a couple of weeks and the biggest wedding since Charles and Diana happens under your radar - Tony Leung and Carina Lau (wedding announced some time a couple of weeks ago) finally wed after dating for almost 20 years. Not big for most people but FREAKING big for HK, China, and Taiwan and that's over a billion people + so important for 1/4 people in the world. Wong Kar-wai and William Cheung 'curated' the wedding (whatever that means). ON the topic of The Talent Mr Leung, began watching pirated RED CLIFF DVD in Toronto, but it was, as the Pacific Mall salesgirl told me, only 'camcorder quality' so not even '90% DVD quality'. I like old school hand held pirated DVDs because it preserves the sense of the cinema as a public space - e.g., you can hear everyone laughing their heads off when the actors say something ridiculous that will just appear very 'Oriental' in the official DVD (e.g., any glossy but lame-o Zhang Yimou martial arts film). It's good to have a clued-in public present to judge how silly things are (I think I've been reading too much Gramsci this week, but on this see also Laikwan Pang). Back to John Woo's The Battle of Red Cliff: in one scene, Tony Leung's and Takeshi Kaneshiro's characters challenge each other to sing but then have a gu-zheng-off instead (contest on flat stringed instrument... last seen in Kung Fu Hustle) and everyone in the audience got the giggles. Sadly never made it to the end so can't report on film but watched it with my teenaged cousin who kept substituting everyone with Lord of the Rings characters (hee hee). But hey, it's John Woo so we can count on trustworthy themes - brotherhood, blood, and diagonal shooting (hmm, that will be more difficult with axes and cross bows but I'm sure he'll manage).
ps. here's a follow up to previous blog courtesy of Vanity Fair featuring John and Cindy McCain (can you take someone named Cindy seriously?):
This just in - Sharon Stone blames China quake on bad Tibet karma. Mwahahahaha. So, I guess in 2001 when her husband, Phil Bronstein, got bit by a komodo dragon in the LA zoo was it payback for her entire filmic career? Hey, she just doesn't want anyone 'to be unkind to anyone else'. 'They're not being nice to the Dalai Lama who is a friend of mine'...
Well, do us a favour, stop making movies. That would be very kind to us all. BTW - My cousin provided me with the all-time best review of Basic Instinct 2: 'it was a good architectural tour of London'.
I remember you used to say this to differentiate between crazy celebs like Whitney Houston who end up coked off their faces and marrying boy band has-beens and perky up and coming pop tarts like Britney Spears. Poor Britney, what went wrong? Can't help but feel sympathy for her because she is so freaking nuts. I remember back when she was savvy and sane enough to have made the video for Lucky (life imitating art...) But over all it's a bad week to be a celeb, especially if you are Edison Chen (who, like Britney, has been reported to be suicidal this week, although much of these details are likely to just be salacious HK tabloid fever). Although porn-from-your-laptop is never something you want to leak out to the world, Edison has plenty of other things to be ashamed of like his bad R&B rapping in Cantonese. Oh yeah, and he owned a PINK MacBook. Edison was slated to be in the next Batman, but it looks like that film is cursed with bad luck.
p.s. Hey, doesn't any of this remind anyone of the internet photo-plot of Beyond Our Ken starring the very same afflicted Gillian Chung (and Daniel Wu)? IMDB plot outline reads: 'A month after Wai Ming broke up with Ken, she finds nude pictures of her on his website. To get back at him, she teams up with his new girlfriend'. You'd think she would have learned... more life imitating art.
p.s. no time now to plug most excellent HK director Pang Ho Cheung, maybe another time (see Isabella if you get a chance, saw it two years ago at HKFF and PHC was there with Chapman To)...
I'll be in Rome of all places at the beginning of Chinese New Year so here's a final farewell from the pigs. Safe travels to everyone on the move (especially all those people stranded in frozen train stations without heat in China).
Mwahahahahaha... see full scoop here and for info on the real Jeff Ma and Mike Aponte. Not sure who Kate Bosworth gets to play (and yeah, you can ignore Aaron Yoo in the corner on the left, it would have been impossible not to have at least one authentically Asian guy in any random selection of five MIT students). Trailer also suggests that Kevin Spacey's agent still thinks he's an actor and not just the director of dubious stage productions at the Old Vic in London.
p.s. For those of you who are not familiar with Ma & Aponte, they were the MIT nerds who scammed the casinos in Vegas and got caught but now all have stellar professional, non-nerd careers (whoohoohooo, capitalism keeps the world spinning and spinning!).
Ha ha ha, just saw this ridiculous US distribution poster for Teng Hua-tao's most fantastic would-be Wong Kar-wai'ish, would be 'horror' film The Matrimony (Chinese title literally says: 'there are ghost inside my heart' and yes first two US posters on top make the movie look way scarier than it actually is). In spite of all the 'would be's it's a really good film - excellent ending (although you have to be sharp or you'll miss the whole point), Rene Liu is great, and well, I don't know why Leon Lai keeps getting screen time... He makes the ghosts look more alive than the humans. Best Leon Lai casting: Fallen Angels where Wong Kar-wai has him play a totally expressionless hitman. Genius. perfect use of his wooden face. We'll see what the ambitious new Chen Kai-ge film will bring where LL plays an opera master (me, I'm thinking, LL's face covered in what will essentially be expressive stage makeup, kind of reminds me of Tom Cruise 'acting' with a mask on in Vanilla Why, I mean Sky).
It's not really a 'horror' film but part of that distinct Chinese genre of ghost films like Stanley Kwan's Rouge, which would have hugely disappointed any horror fanboy expecting gore. Ditto for the Bing-Bing-a-thon here. On this note also check out Johnnie To's Linger (Chinese title: 'fly away butterfly'). You can watch the un-subtitled original version on Youtube but don't read the synopsis if you don't like spoilers [correction: you could have watched it if you had been fast, it's been removed: here's the trailer link instead]. I can't vouch for Vic Zhou's acting (this is his first feature film after a successful run of Taiwanese soap operas), but he is good eye candy for the run of the movie.
Did I mention this is Johnnie To? I guess you wouldn't expect him to do a simple love story, one of the people would have to be dead right? And there are also motorcycle chases involved. The posters makes Li Bing Bing look dead, but young Vic Zhou actually plays the corpse. It's not bad, a little like a passive aggressive version of Ghost, which is one of my father's favourite film. Hmm, that was possibly THE worse promo for a film anyone has ever made. Ugh, in fact, I think I've convinced myself out of liking the movie with that unforgivable remark... (apologies to Johnnie To).
And I have to say, I think Li Bing Bing wins hands down on this one.
Oh and for all those F4 fans weeping from their temporary hiatus, they have a new album out, I think it's called 'Waiting for You' or waiting for you to make us some more money...
It used to be that if you couldn't sleep you would just lie there in the dark until some acceptable hour (e.g., 7am) when you could forgive yourself for getting up so early on a Saturday. Today is one of those days >:[ However, with the internet you can find out all sorts of interesting and entertaining things like North Korea's Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble (PEE for short - thank you Kaiju Shakedown). If this doesn't wake you up fully I don't know what will, it's like drinking 20 espressos at once with crack and then swimming naked through icy waters.
Do you think these guys are winning the war for communism in the world?
Yikes. I never really liked the beach until I lived in LA. OK, big cliche but what do you expect. The air pollution there makes for the coolest multicoloured, stain glass like sunsets that would make a Nexus 6 cry. But these photos from China that my uncle sent to me confirm why I dislike beaches in general.
One of the best and most memorable lines in The Graduate is when Mr. McGuire tells Ben (Dustin Hoffman's character) 'there's a great future in plastics'. The film's still fantastic because of: 1) the young Dustin Hoffmam; 2) Katharine Ross; 3) Benjamin's car; 4) Mrs. Robinson's coat.
Hooray for China for banning plastic bags. Booooo for China for human rights abuse, but nobody these days can claim a clean record (even Canadians are getting unjustifiably tasered in airports...). In Italy they charge you 5 cents for every plastic bag you get from the grocery stores; at the Whole Foods in LA they used to give you something like 3 cents back for every bag you brought with you; in American Beauty the most beautiful thing the kid next door ever films is a plastic bag in the wind (loser); in the UK there is no mandatory recycling of any kind and you often can't even get proper recycling bins (uber-lame). Note to self: take photo of ridiculous paper recycling bins near home... Anyway, good for China for cutting down on plastic bags, now let's see if they can manage to do something about the poisonous air.
Happy Fat New Year! 2008 is a very lucky number so it should be a good one. For everyone in Europe make sure to schedule a 01 June 08 party, those in N. America can do Jan 06 08 party for luck and everyone can have a blast this 08 Aug 08 - 168/888, either way it sure beats 04 April 04 when we were in the early stupidity of the War in Iraq.
Here are some highlights from the end of the year and some random vids, etc. that I remembered seeing this year:
Cute in 2007:
Otters holding hands (MILLIONS of people seem to have watched this clip and one of the otters was apparently saved from the Exxon oil spill ages ago)
The evil eye baby
I know it's like America's Funniest Home Videos stupid, but it still makes me laugh everytime I see it. Reminds me of the 'Whatchoo talkin' about Willis' look. Hooray for Gary Coleman: child star turned security guard turned politician. To think this man coulda been the Governator if the votes had been skewed in California 2003 (he did come in 8th just after Larry Flynt). It renews my faith in American democracy when an Austrian body builder, a disabled porn publisher, a child star, a porn star turned cook named Mary Carey, a game show winner, a Sumo wrestler, and a Socialist all run for public office in order to run an incompetent, lame duck politician out of office. Hooray for California! Making democracy safe for the world.
Standing cat (this is an old one, but who doesn't love a standing cat?!)
Very cool in 2007:
The power of collectivity
Matrix ping-pong
Also quite old, but I was reminded of this when I saw it shamelessly ripped off in a London play earlier this year (Tom Morris and Emma Rice's rather boring A Matter of Life and Death; see, however, Katie Mitchell's excellent Women of Troy if you get a chance):
Very very in 2007:
So today I looked up CHINGLISH after having been sent various images from the site over the year by my brothers and to my shock some over 1,700 photos have been uploaded by 500+ members since I last looked at the site. The one here is my favourite of the... well, first couple of pages (I couldn't make it through page 5). There are many more classics, but this is a pretty ironic one. Thanks to brappy for the upload (see similar at Crappy DVD Covers). Compare with the actual movie poster (for those of you who haven't seen the movie, Bill Murray and not Dustin Hoffman is in the film; it's set in modern day Tokyo and not well, some green park in the past; there are no dogs in the movie, but there is a karaoke bar).
Just in case you are wondering what this movie is about, I will quote the blurb from the DVD cover above:
'the Bill is a television for over spirit star, he much uper the spout year, just connected to clap luckly recently a whisky television advertise, for taking this advertisement, he arrived at Tokyo. Summer with( card benefit with – John) is a photographer( tile – thunder ratio west ) who young wife who husband, busy with the work to always neglect her, so she arrive at the relax by taking stroll of Tokyo.'
No those are not typos, yes it is all lost in translation. When the movie came out people said it was slow, boring, self-indulgent, and racist about the Japanese. I think, however, it perfectly catches that sense of dislocated tourist ennui that overwhelms you when you have overstayed your welcome in a foreign land. As for the 'racist' interpretation - has anyone ever actually seen Asian variety shows?! I think the one in the movie is pretty tame (Sofia nailed that one on the head). It's one of my favourites (good soundtrack, good colour and lighting, great ending) although you really should be a damn good director if your dad made American Graffiti, The Conversation,Apocalypse Now, and the Godfather trilogy. Very Happy New Year:
The awesome Taipei 101 New Year 2008 fireworks display (you may ignore the excited ooh'ing and ahh'ing of the crowd in the video, but the image is still pretty fantastic):
There's also a gajillion Brokeback Mountain spoofs out there, here's just one:
p.s. Have since seen BLOOD BROTHERS and as much as I love the cast (Daniel Wu, Chen Zhang, Liu Ye, Shu Qi), the original John Woo film is still light years better. This version is aesthetically perfect, but it has lost all of the politics and poignancy that made Bullet in the Head one of THE best all time movies about Vietnam without it being just another stupid war movie. If you haven't seen Woo's film, all the other Vietnam films are just macho fluff. This is kick you in the head (bullet in the head) raw. NOBODY can top Tony Leung's acting, although Jacky Cheung playing wacko is a pretty good second here. And by the by, that scene in Bourne Ultimatum where Jason Bourne has to shoot the guy in the FBI room, way better done in Bullet in the Head guys...
Also of exceptional note is Ning Hao's Crazy Stone(the now already old and much celebrated surprise blockbuster)... sorry trailer is in Chinese only, but it's a jewel heist gone very wrong, which was produced by Andy Lau's most worthy First Cuts production company...
This is better than hair implants, which make you look like a ragged Barbie doll. This is too funny and if only you didn't have to give credit card details I would encourage everyone to do it. I'm sure someone can find a free one, but I don't have time today to scour the internet for something so silly.
A coke bust? No, it's fake salt (industrial salt passing for table salt). I LOVE this story. My uncle already told me about these kinds of scams going on it China, but here it is again. It's almost as entertaining as the recurrent Taiwanese parliamentary full-on rumbles.
I remember drinking KLIM as a child, which was a cheapo Taiwanese rip off for powered milk (KLIM for the slow-witted is milk spelled backwards).
This "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" rip off is pretty funny too (the Chinese by the way makes the proud claim that it is "Made in Taiwan").
Wong Kar-wai and Clive Owen. These were the good days before Blueberry Nights and the big Hollywood sellout (WKW signed on with Fox after all...). The other night someone complained to me that British men either look like Ricky Gervais in The Office or are prone to premature balding. Yes, but then there is Clive Owen who redeems everyone concerned. This was a BMW ad he made with Forest Whitaker and post-plastic surgery Mickey Rourke, the music is the fantastic song Unicorno sung by Charly Garcia Y Mercedes Sosa.
