Alternasian

Link again!

2008-07-10T05:41:00.002+02:00

Nope No new review ready this time either. I've been working alot latley. Hopefully I'll finish a review sometime this weekend. There's so many fun films to write about. In the meantime here's yet another link for you.
Jasongray:Jason Gray is a japan correspondent for screen international as well as a freelance writer on japanese cinema for other publications including Japan Times. He even played a ramones memeber in Linda Linda Linda!
With all that to his name you'd think hed be financially secure enough to shell out $10 a year or so for his own domain name, but anyway his blog is nice for sure.

Another Link & The same cup of tea

2008-07-06T16:08:00.002+02:00

Yet another good review site.

LoveHKFilm:Unsuprisingly this site focuses on Hong Kong cinema but they also write reviews about other asian cinema as well. It's a very good site with reviews that are well written and have just the right mixture of humor and serious criticism to them.

Links & tea

2008-07-06T15:42:00.002+02:00

A cup of green tea and a new link for the page.

A Nutshell Review:This is a a blog about singapoeran film. The guy who runs this blog seems to watch pretty much every film that gets made in his home country. So if you're interested in seeing what comes out of this small but interesting country check his blog out.

Singapore Gaga - Review

2008-07-01T23:10:00.000+02:00

Singapore Gaga is a 2005 Singaporean docu made by a Singaporean director about Singapore. It also takes place in... Singapore!

As far as documentaries go this one does not really do a whole lot of documenting per se. It's more of a personal take on Singaporean life by Tan Pin Pin. What she has chosen as a subject is the sounds and music of her home country.

The film starts with a lonely busker playing old time music to no one in particular in the subway and from there on we get to met more buskers, an avant garde toy piano player, school kids cheering in Arabic, old men who sing in Latin, the woman who is the voice of Singapore’s subway, the country’s most famous ventriloquist, and many more.

As you can guess from the above I think the main goal of the film is to show in a quirky fashion the uniqueness and diversity of this small country.

In this I think she succeeds, she got me stoked to visit if I ever get the chance. I mean a small country with that much ethnic diversity, and they speak English as main language? Sign me up!

Back to the film itself, is it any good? It has it’s bright spots and it’s not so bright ones I guess.

Even though she was aiming for a free going style the editing seems somewhat chaotic to me. She cuts to and from the various people in a very disorganized fashion. Some that I found more interesting I could have certainly spent a longer time with.

However she does manage to cram a lot in to a 55 minute long little film. If you want to learn something about Singapore this is not a good film to watch but if you want to get the feeling of country as shown by a native who clearly loves her home it does an excellent job.

You can visit the homepage for the movie at www.singaporegaga.com. There is also a trailer you can watch there.

Links and nap time

2008-06-29T04:14:00.004+02:00

It's just before bed time but I wanna add something to the page. Lacking the energy to finish the review I'm working on I'll just add another link for now.

Asian cinema:this generically titled page has a nice look to it and has a bunch of well written movie reviews by two Danish guys who write in English. They cover all kinds of movies and it's an enjoyable site to give a quick browse. Confusingly enough it's a sub domain to their fan page dedicated to Taiwanese born actress Shu Qi. To be honest I don't really care much about her...

Time to hit the snooze.

Jonathan Ross' Asian Invasion - review

2008-06-24T17:46:00.007+02:00

Asian Invasion is a three part miniseries made for BBC by British TV personality and renowned Japan- and asianophile Jonathan "Wossy" Ross. In the three parts Ross packs an array of colorful suits and visit in turn Japan, Hong Kong and Korea to give an overview of each country’s contemporary cinema.

Each one hour episode contains a quick rundown of specific conditions that has shaped the cinematic output of the country, showcases of various genres of films, clips from said films and interviews with some important directors.

Similar in style to Ross' japanorama series the tone is fairly light and there might be a few to many wisecracks instead of actual insights into the subject and for the real enthusiast(that would be me) there are some annoying omissions and poor choices.

Criticizing new Japanese filmmakers for not having enough depth and emotional content by showcasing films like Casshern, Ping Pong and the Calamari Wrestler hardly seems fair.

Most enjoyable of the interviews are easily the ones with Ryuhei Kitamura and Stephen Chow simply because these are conducted in English and with Ross and the interviewed director interacting face to face. All others are made talking head style and with an interpreter providing a voice over.

These are to me a big problem the voice over is always heavily accented and in some cases just sound plain stupid. Having a regular native English voice or subtitles would have been much preferable to me.

Some of the other directors do however provide more of an insight into their filmmaking the Ki-Duk Kim interview in the Korean episode is particularly interesting as Kim talks a lot about the conditions that his films are made under.

In short I think this is a decent distraction much like Japanorama but to really learn a lot about these countries and their cinema you should probably look elsewhere, you might even have to read a book.

As far as I know Asian Invasion is not available for purchase but you just might be able to find it anyway me thinks...

EDIT: you can actually find the whole thing on youtube as well as all of his 3 season Japanorama series. Don't think I would have the patience to watch all of it like that though.

Karaoke Terror - Review

2008-06-21T17:00:00.004+02:00

Karaoke Terror is a Japanese film from 2003 directed by Tetsuo Shinohara. It's original Japanese title means "The complete show era songbook", slightly less catchy but also a bit less idiotic sounding.

The script is apparently based on a novel by Ryu Murakami, an author who has himself also dabbled in filmmaking a couple of times. I've read a few of his novels but not this particular one. His biggest claim to fame for most western film viewers is having written the script for Takahashi Miikes Audition.

Karaoke Terror tells the story of two groups of karaoke aficionados who end up in a brutal cycle of murder and revenge against each other. Basically there's Murder, plotting, dining and slight reminicising over a lost friend. All this in an escalating cycle of violence. Oh, and of course there's song and dance too.

The first gang that we get to meet is a group of young men who seem to have little direction in their life but their shared karaoke passion. Any and all glimpses into the characters life outside of their respective groups are of the snapshot variety. These young men like to drive out with a van to an abandoned pier where they perform their song and dance numbers in full costume. A slight sense of clockwork orange might appear upon watching their initial performance.

One of the group’s members by the name of Sugioka makes an unsuccessful attempt at picking up an older woman on her way home from her luxury shopping trip, upon rejection he instead slashes her throat.

This is where the ball is set rolling as the woman is revealed to be Midori Yanagi a member of a group of middle aged divorcees who are all named Midori and who all of course love karaoke.

This film has a somewhat odd structure. There is no clear main character, even though we are treated to an early voiceover from one of the young guys he is quickly relegated to a peripheral character for much of the film.

The focus then shifts from one group to the other several times throughout the film as they plan their various murderous revenge plans, an activity that seems to promote bonding way better than the karaoke.

These group interactions together with the outlandish murder scenes are the main source of the films humor as well as any social commentary one can find in the film. The basic plot is treated in a very self consciously ridiculous manner. A couple of minor characters are used to provide plot advancing deus ex machinas aplenty.

Personally I would have to say that my main enjoyment of the film came from those group interactions. some of the scenes between the Midori's were particularly hilarious. As someone who's seen his fair share of Asian movies of the quirkier variety I didn't feel this movie ever really put its foot on the gas pedal into sheer insanity nor does it ever flesh out its characters enough to make me care for them as individuals.

It's still an amusing watch though and though it's 112 minutes in length it didn't feel at all long to me. One thing though: there's just not enough karaoke!

As per usual here's a trailer I nabbed from youtube:

Now the world's more refined japanophiles are collectively holding their breath for the American filming of coin locker babies one of Murakami's best novels.

link & well nothing...

2008-06-07T10:44:00.005+02:00

Nothing to eat or drink right now so I'll just add one link:

Thaicinema
This site provides good information, reviews and news updates about Thai films in Thai and english language(though a few pages don't seem to be available in english). This is a country I myself have not seen much from. Only some films by Pen-ek Ratanaruang and well... Ong-bak.
I have to say i really question their decision to make every new page open in a new browser tab tough...

Now if only had pie.

Summer's Tail - Review

2008-06-06T14:34:00.002+02:00

Yvette(Enno Cheng) has a heart condition that keeps her from school. She spends her abundant free time strumming her guitar, writing songs and caring for her cat Summer.

Summer's tail(xia tian de wei ba) is a 2007 film from Taiwanese director Wen-Tang Cheng.

This is a film that portrays youth in fairly bright colors without being anything like a teen comedy. Yvette hangs out with her best friend ace student Wendy(Hannah Lin) and together they meet and respectively fall in love with two boys by the names of Jimmy(Bryant Chang) & Akira(Dean Fujioka). Jimmy is good student who has fallen in love with one of his teachers while Akira is a Japanese boy who spends most of his time cutting classes and practicing football by himself.

If you just look at the contents of this movie it actually has a ton of drama in there. The two Boys have their problems with school, Yvette's bad heart and two little kids who have to live with their alcoholic father after their mothers death.

Perhaps my tolerance has risen a bit when it comes to these kinds of things due to watching a lot of films with drama and romantic content from China, Korea and Japan(who all know how to lay it on real thick), but to me this film never descended into pure melodrama. I think the movies fairly loose and relaxed structure and colorful cinematography helped lessen the blow.

The parts that stuck with me were instead those showing the beginning parts of infatuation between the four teens, mostly set by an irrigation channel next to a rice field. The four actors all work together pretty well and these scenes have a nice pace to them.

In the end this film those not amount to anything earth shattering, but to me it was 98 pleasant and well spent minutes and that's really all I demand from these types of films. Here you have a trailer for the film, I think you should watch it. In fact I think you should watch the entire thing!

Mission Statement

2008-06-02T00:03:00.000+02:00

I just wanted to write a bit about exactly what it is I am trying to do with this here page. In english there's a rapidly growing amount of info available on asian cinema, clearly I'm not the only one who has found a lot to love in these movies that come from a part of the world pretty different from our own.

In my own native language which is swedish there is significantly less. yet i will write in english simply because swedish is just not big enough in the world, and I want to be able to communicate with as many parts of it as possible. This will be only the fifth post in the just over two week long life of this page. I work a full time job but I will be sure to pick up the pace from now on and keep working on this thing. Hopefully I can get in contact with more people who share my passion. From now I will also start working to get people to visit me.

A lot is written about older asian cinema and about newer genre cinema like horror, martial arts and various kinds of highly stylized and/or violent films. I don't frown on any of these. In fact I enjoy them all a great deal. However, I am also fascinated by more realistic and down to earth films, films that deal with aspects of contemporary life in asia. While I am no expert on asian culture these still draw me in for some reason. I feel that that more needs to be written about these films in english and i will do my best to do a small piece of that writing.

I will try to include my own thoughts about the films I write about, not just a quick plot presentation and a thumbs up/down.

That's about all for now I guess. Oh I also promise to never ever be this dry and unfunny again. Sounds good?

Links & Sushi

2008-06-01T15:17:00.000+02:00

Whilst eating some sushi from a sushi bar I haven't tried before the time has come to put up a couple more links here. This time It'll be some swedish language sites. So if you don't speak that particular lingo i'm sorry but you're out of luck.
Portland Street
This site has tons of reviews and various other stuff like news, actor biographies and more. The focus is mainly on. martial arts movies, horror, monster movies, cult cinema and the like.
Ambivalent Future
A good swedish blog about japanese films by a guy who calls himself executive koala.

The machine Girl - Review

2008-05-31T22:55:00.002+02:00

Well what can one say about The machine girl(Kataude Mashin Gâru)? It's a stupid movie for sure. However criticizing this movie for being stupid is comparable to criticizing a pornographic movie for having to much sex or maybe slamming a Tsai Ming-liang flick for not having enough dialogue.

The story is simple enough: normal young schoolgirl Ami(minase yashiro) lives a simple life alone with her younger brother yu(Ryôsuke Kawamura) after their also perfectly normal parents committed suicide after being framed for a murder they didn't commit. whilst Ami is busy impressing her best friend with her basketball skills(though her friend ain't exactly Bruce Bowen on the D). Her kid brother is being mercilessly bullied by the son of a Yakuza and his gang.

After the bullying reaches it's obvious violent end Ami swears revenge(revenge while still wearing her school uniform of course) and.... well there's your movie. Now just ad as much blood and general silliness you can imagine and you've got a pretty good idea. Oh and she loses her arm and gets it replaced by a machine gun prosthesis.

Films like these are sort of a guilty pleasure for me. I watch them when i can't really think of anything better i want to watch. what's good about the machine girl is that it archives it's goals pretty well. It wants to be mindless trashy entertainment and in the best scenes it certainly is.

What I don't much like is that it's so self consciously stupid. For some reason I always find more charm in cult films that had some sort of intention beyond being trash more fascinating than the type of films that set out from the get go to be cult movies. There's also nothing really Japanese about it. Sure there's plenty of "Japanese" things like sushi & ninjas & stuff like that. But the wonderful world of global film making as it is to day there's been so much cross pollinating going on that it's hard to even know who came up with any specific piece of weirdness first. It's almost like thanks to Tarantino, Miike & co we now have a cold war style arms race of exploitation going on in the movie world.

The machine girl seems to be made very much with a western audience in mind since it has made a tour of film festivals in the US & Europe and is already out on DVD with subtitles and English audio(wich you should avoid like the plaugue) but will not premiere in Japan until august this year.

So in short watch this as the mind- & tasteless entertainment it is but if you want to see something more unique you probably need to check out some non-exploitation movies made more for asian audiences those movies are the reason why I'm a fan of asian cinema.

If you are one of the few who have not seen it yet you can check out this here trailer. it has many of the funniest parts.

links & Coffee

2008-05-21T04:04:00.000+02:00

whilst drinking my morning coffee I've added a couple of links to the site. More will come soon. The two are:
Midnight Eye
Big time authority on japanese film. Their site looks real nice and has reviews and interviews and various other bells and whistles.
Korean film
Basically the same thing but for korean film(duh). Has perhaps even more information but their site is well... kinda boring to look at.

I will put up some swedish language links as well when i get around to it. probably gonna actually finish some film reviews first though.

And we're off

2008-05-15T22:57:00.000+02:00

Hi anyone and everyone.
I created this place to get a chance to write about one of my growing obsessions. Southeast asian movies, the quirkier the better. I'll write about films I have seen, films i plan to see and anything slightly related to issues somewhat related to said films. All the while i will attempt to be mildly amusing. It's no easy task for sure but I will do my best.