Almost 08/08/08!!!

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?):

Barack Osama

Don't know why but all I seem to be blogging about these days is the Golden Child (on second thought, Coming to America is a more apposite Eddie Murphy reference here). I definitely want Obama to become president because he wins on fun factor (remember when Jesse Jackson was prompted to say "I want to cut his nuts off"? -- that's funny politics). McCain is a little too Manchurian Candidate to be a laugh. Thing is, you couldn't find a joke funny enough to make about him like the one The New Yorker made about Obama and his wife. OK, so two funny/terrifying things: people who can't take a joke and Michelle on the View. What is up with that show? It should be re-named Desperate Housewives in the Sexless City. Ick. Glad I was never in a sorority. Gross.
I guess none of those "loyal" bleeding hearts who love The New Yorker remembered the March 2008 cover from not too long ago or indeed the Radar cover from back in November 2007 when people thought that Giuliani (The Man Who Forgot To Run For President-Giuliani or was it The Man Who Got Too Lazy To Fundraise-Giuliani?) would be the man to challenge Hillary. Yeesch, lighten up people! Have these devoted readers of The New Yorker ever met New Yorkers? Ya gotta love any identity group who would carpet bomb Madonna's car with pebbles and other Central Park debris because she has disgraced their beloved Yankee so appropriatly named A-Rod (OK, this story is admittedly reported from the same Radar of the dubious magazine cover--i.e., can you really trust people who thought Giuliani was The One?).

OK, people who can laugh at what is funny about racial stereotypes should check out Russell Peters' comedy act Outsourced (funny guy living in L.A., he would be Canadian wouldn't he...):

Springtime for Hitler

Haven't had time to post anything, but here is another one from the BBC for the wax lovers: 'Waxworks Hitler Beheaded in Berlin'. Not quite as odd as the woman who pinched the Oceans Thirteen wax figures or nearly as heroic as Paul Kelleher who beheaded a statue of Thatcher back in 2003, but pretty weird all the same.

Big Brotha

Is it finally over? My god, I am SO sick of hearing about Billary vs the Junior Senator from Illinois. She should divorce Bubba and get Obama to nominate her as his next Supreme Court Justice and then she will have lifelong power, which is what she seems to crave more than anything else. And just when this painfully long, tedious "election" of popularity has finally come to a possible end, it has been announced that the 9th season of the crapola-thon Big Brother has begun in the UK. That has always been the beginning of summer in London in my mind, which is becoming mush from all this democracy. Wonder how things are going in Zimbabwe...

Karma karma karma chameleon

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'.

Jesus Christ Superstar

What the??? Drudge Report has called it 'Obama Mass'. I wonder if they are serving fish and loaves. That's quite a bill for the Rent-a-Crowd company he's going to have to pay...


This reminds me of the Gospel of Debbie, which anyone raised Catholic has to read for a good laugh.

The Air I Breathe

Better than the Hollies song. IMDB reports that the director - Jieho Lee - had to go to Harvard Business School so that his Asian parents would let him become a director. Good thing he persisted. One of the best US films I've seen in a long time. The Wiki entry said that most US critics gave it negative reviews which just goes to prove the continued idiocy of film critics in that country. It is a four part story in which every character is interlinked with the others (think Babel, but much better and without the grotesque bourgeois pomposity of trying to address 'world events' and tick off every global market in the most superficial way). I guess the cinematography is far too beautiful (Brendan Fraser sequence captures the magic of Leon Lai in Fallen Angels and rolls like Clive Owen in WKW's BMW ad, which also features Forest Whitaker) and the plot requires too much thought for an American audience with ADS. Crying shame. Bad reviews make for lily-livered investors and Jieho Lee is a good thing - managed to get one of Sarah Michelle Gellar's best performances since Buffy and Forest Whitaker is heartbreaking as a chump. The Good Doctor - Mark Kermode - was supposed to review it yesterday but ran out of time, pity (however, watch Mark's review of Rambo on Youtube, while you're at it watch his hilarious rant about Tarantino).

You speaka my Englisha?

No time now for comments but here are two highlights from Munich and Rome.

I wonder if it's a German dollar store? I bet you it's full of CCMs. And, no, it's not just the Chinese who have trouble with language. Check out the Italienglish below (very nice cafe though). If you are really that intrigued you can also read this BBC report on US misspeaking and inarticulacy and see this guy's site for laffs.

May Day! May Day!

Lots since the beginning of May: so first Red Ken gets booted out of office by Conservative goofball Boris Yeltsin Becker Johnson (yes, he does look like the love child of that grotesque orgy), then a rather pathetic may Day parade goes down the streets of London - I counted very few people, lots of young white shirted men stopped in front of Starbucks (unknowingly I think) and gave the good ol' left handed salute. The photo to the left is the guy in yellow who follows at the end of the parade and rolls up the police tape. He is the personification of Post-Socialism. The answer to the question 'What comes after Socialism?' is: the police state. Then a few days later Hillary decides that she's going to go the way of Milosovic and pander to bombing someone for political popularity. The verdict is in, get ready for President McCain (hey, he will be less reactionary than Hillary). Thank god for this item from Kaiju to cheer us all up - Wong Kar-wai has had Yoyo Ma re-score Ashes of Time!!! Oh, yes, and Rain beat Colbert for Time Mag's 100 most influential people, which leads me to ask what the heck has happened to the USofA?!

The Political Absurd

Sad day folks, especially if you are Italian. Is it the hair implants? The canzone or the general fact that the man is a crook?

The Filmic Sublime

This clip from Jia Zhangke's Still Life makes up for all the bad movies I've seen this month. Just to set it up: a woman has been searching across China to find her husband to ask for a divorce. She finally finds him and they are talking to each other in this dilapidated tenement block and sharing a piece of candy. What happens next is as close to the sublime as I've seen in film in a very long time.

'Yo veo dead people' or Beetlejuice en espagñol

Had loads of caffeine last night to get hyped up to see the 'super scary' The Orphanage. Super scary as in: What has happened to people's taste?!?! I checked the reviews again this morning to make sure I hadn't imagined them. Still a 4.3/5 star rating and still lots of reviewers going on about how scary and moving it is. Not super and not scary. OK, freaky social worker with bottle lens glasses and Geraldine Chaplin (offspring of legendary Charlie) as a psychic were creepy enough but that had nothing to do with horror, social workers and children of very famous people are just creepy by definition. So I am still left wondering what is the hype all about?! You can't be both a horror film (which is how this film has been pitched by Warner Bros, whose corporate finger prints can be seen all over this movie) AND be a moving fairy tale, that's a very tough combo. And for those of you who didn't see every next scene coming a mile away: you need to spend more time in the cinema!!! This isn't even Guillermo del Toro, but a GdT production (i.e., here's a bunch of consolation money for not winning the Oscar for the truly deserving Pan's Labyrinth, which IS a very moving fairy tale without being a horror film). El Orfanato is essentially a fluffed up Mexican version of Beetlejuice (which I do rate highly) featuring a mini-Donnie Darko without bunny ears or a reworking of the unbearably pretentious The Others by Alejandro Amenábar (which is the original Spanish Beetlejuice). As far as 'we are dead people trapped in an old creaky house with doorknobs that turn in the dark by themselves' scary the ropey old black and white Deborah Kerr vehicle The Innocents (1961) still haunts:

What was scary was getting off the night bus and seeing my neighbor standing there sending off a friend. That's uncanny considering there are millions of people in the city of London. Also ran into friend's parents at the bus stop the other day and they were visiting from New York. Bus stops as portals: next horror film scenario after the mutant pandas and giant penguins stories...

Happy Bank Holiday!

OK, so Easter is a big scam like all other holidays, except we get an unusual number of days off so hooray. The big JC dies so let's eat huge amounts of chocolate bunnies, eggs, marshmallow chicks, etc. and stuff ourselves silly because Christmas was a while ago now: 'whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there will be obscene gorging involved'. Hey pass that body and blood of Christ... Protestants said that Catholics were essentially cannibals because they were so hung up on the whole transubstantiation business. Vampires too in that case.

Anyway, Easter in London this year was full of freak snow storms that melt on contact. It's like fake snow or something. One minute it's a blizzard, next minute it's just another cold, dank, gray English winter day. I think I'm trapped in someone's snowdome... This Easter I went to a baptism which was followed by biblical amounts of drinking and a very nice lamb (of God?). Then read this story about a praying dog bumping up numbers at a Buddhist temple, so now the verdict is in: organised religion is full of freaks from fundamentalists to UFO worshippers (yes, this reminds me that the last time I was in the USofA I saw a 'documentary' on TV about UFOS in the Bible, no you couldn't make that kind of crap up...). We can thank the 'History' Channel for this enlightening programme (official brainwashing machine of the American Right and producers of the equally dubious History of Britain with Simon Schama)...

Oh, on the topic of documentaries and in keeping with all that seasonal redemption yada yada, went to see Rene Vautier's most excellent Afrique 50 (1950) at the Tate Modern Paradise Now film series. The Tate clips were uneven ranging from the poetic sublime (Moholy-Nagy's film The Old Port at Marseilles) and the political sublime (a piece on the S.C.U.M Manifesto) to the outright stupid (both contemporary video artists should be tied up in an auditorium and forced to watch their own self-indulgent crap for 24 continuous hours). But Vautier's terrifyingly prophetic film is still amazing and well worth the watch if you can handle the clip without subtitles, puts Fritz Lang's Metropolis to shame (and that is one of my all time favourite films, I even liked Giorgio Moroder's remake too). OK, not to end Easter on a downer, here's a clip of baby pandas to cheer everyone up (even if I think they are being cloned en masse in Chinese labs, fantastic horror film scenario in the making here and yes, the first two victims of the mad GM panda will be those two giggling girls in the clip)...

Super Simpsonize Me

It's been a very long couple of weeks and there are many things to report on and nowhere obvious to start so I combined two highlights: Slavoj Zizek's pay-per-view lecture series Ideology Embedded at Birkbeck in London and the Simpsonizer. Well, at least that's what I wanted to do, but for a man who is everywhere all the time, it is strangely hard to find any hi-res photos of him, so you will have to do with this one of me.

Zizek's lectures were nuts as usual, but two memorable quotes include:
1. 'When I'm ready to take questions, I will distribute them'.
2. 'Without 1968, there would have been no Bill Gates'.
Highlights included:
Analysis of the 'ideology glasses' scene in John Carpenter's They Live; identity vs. representation as demonstrated in the 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' scene in Cabaret; comparison of Joan Baez singing 'Joe Hill' and Terminator 2 and the theme of martyrs and posthumous collective organisation in the line 'what they can never kill went on to organize'; explanation of the dialectic through the birdcage trick in the Prestige; naming La Vita è Bella and Schindler's List as two of the world's all-time worse films (too ignoble to merit links); analysis of Lenin as a good matchmaker in Reds. I'm sure the book will be out soon, the guy writes them like most people eat candies.

Chicago Baywatch

Obama being very Hawaii Five-O here. I dunno, I find this disturbing. Not the lack of clothing, but the strangeness of this guy's body. Does that man have magic clothes that slim him? Some weird Harry Potter coat for making you look 5 sizes smaller? If so he should market it to Hillary's so-called middle-aged, middle-class women voter base. Maybe he wears a girdle? Like I said, it's kinda disturbing. Not as disturbing, mind you, as how much weight John McCain suddenly gained while I wasn't looking (or maybe I just had a false memory of him being a skinny guy, and I was never looking all that closely anyway)...