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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Category Archives: Asian Cinema

April 15, 2013 Vulgaria

By Spank The Monkey

VulgariaMules

You may be familiar with the cinema technology known as D-Box – a small number of screens in the UK have already been fitted with it. It’s one more way of reducing the film experience to a theme park ride: a cinema rigged with motion control seats that shake, tilt and vibrate in ways defined by the movement on screen. Generally, it’s used to add realism to action movies, wobbling the viewer as things crash and explode in front of them.

Later this year, a Hong Kong studio is set to release the first 3D pornographic film using the D-Box process. This should tell you everything you need to know about the territory’s attitude to sex on screen. Even more so when you discover that the film in question is 4D Sex & Zen, the latest entry in a franchise previously discussed in these pages. As I suggested back then, you get the feeling that erotic film in Hong Kong hasn’t really grown up yet. So when you discover that one of the biggest local hits of the past few years has been a bawdy comedy called Vulgaria (just released on home video in the UK), you begin to fear the worst. But you shouldn’t. 

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February 1, 2013 Once Upon A Time In Japan

by Spank the Monkey

Once Upon A Time In Japan

This year’s Japan Foundation film season – entitled Once Upon A Time In Japan, and touring the UK’s arthouse cinemas from today – has a historical flavour to it. All of the films are period pieces of one type or another, showing how Japanese filmmakers use stories of the past to say things about the present day.

Much of the programme hasn’t been seen in the UK before, unlike last year, so I can’t give you quite as comprehensive a preview as I did in 2012. We can’t discuss Hula Girls, the latest example of the Japanese genre in which young people bond during unfashionable physical activity. (See also: Waterboys, Swing Girls, Tits Volleyball.) We have to pass over Kaidan Horror Classics, a portmanteau film featuring big name directors like Hirokazu Kore-eda and Shinya Tsukamoto. Most regrettably, screeners were not available for Bubble Fiction: Boom Or Bust, in which Hiroshi Abe tries to solve Japan’s economic crisis with a time-travelling washing machine. How can the other seven films in the programme stand up against a synopsis like that? Well, let’s find out.

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December 19, 2012 Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid

The-Raid4

by theTramp

 2012 in film has been the sort of year, for me, where the best films have not been the most memorable. Three films stand out in terms of memorability; TED – a one joke movie about a teddy bear that can talk and also smoke, take drugs, drink and is consistently horny, made by the makers of Family Guy and memorable mostly for two great cameos. Killer Joe – a film with so many flaws that you can list them as you watch it, but the central performances are so great that you don’t care. If Matthew McConaughey doesn’t get an Oscar nod for this then quite frankly he’s been robbed. To my mind Killer Joe is the most chilling on screen character since Mitchum’s Harry Powell and that is a comparison I do not make lightly. Finally, and the subject of my ‘best of 2012’ is The Raid.

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November 26, 2012 The Hometown Trilogy

by Spank the Monkey

Thanks to the London Film Festival, I have a uniquely skewed perspective on the career of Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke. I’ve seen two of his movies there – his 2004 drama The World, and his 2010 documentary I Wish I Knew – in what would turn out to be among the very few screenings they ever received in the UK. And I’ve even briefly been in the same room as the man himself, when in 2000 he attended an LFF panel on the challenges facing Asian independent filmmakers.

But his famous films – the ones that made his reputation, and actually got a proper cinema release over here – well, somehow those have eluded me over the years. So just in time for Christmas, Artificial Eye have repackaged the three films that introduced Jia Zhang-Ke to the world: the loosely-related collection that’s nowadays referred to as The Hometown Trilogy.

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September 21, 2012 Tales from the Land of Gold: Zipangu 2012

Clare Dean experiences Japanarchy in the UK.

Somi – The Taekwon-do Woman

It’s Friday evening and I find myself eating Sushi in an old Lambeth workhouse.  Not something Charlie Chaplin would’ve done but then he never got the chance to go to the Zipangu Film Festival.  This was the third annual festival and the first one held at the Cinema Museum in Kennington (and former workhouse home of Chaplin when he was a small boy).

Zipangu is a different kind of festival. You might not see the latest Japanese big budget, sword fighting epic or an in-depth Ozu retrospective, but you will see something unusual or little-seen and it’s not always the traditional representation of Japan that you might expect.

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July 30, 2012 #KeepAsianCinemaInUKCinemas

by Spank the Monkey

Himizu

Last month in London, the HK15 Film Festival provided a rare opportunity to see old and new Hong Kong movies on the big screen. It was organised by the people behind the Terracotta Far East Film Festival, which I’ve previously covered for this site. At the Closing Gala, festival boss Joey Leung insisted that the profile of Asian cinema needed raising in this country. To that end, he gave the audience a Twitter hashtag to use: #KeepAsianCinemaInUKCinemas.

There are a few problems with that. Firstly, it’s a hashtag that could easily be misremembered in a variety of ways, which reduces its effectiveness as an indexing tool. Secondly, at 27 characters it takes up around one-fifth of the maximum length of a tweet, and doesn’t leave much room for anything else. But even if we ignore those concerns, it’s possible that what we’re dealing with is too big for a mere hashtag.

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July 4, 2012 London Indian Film Festival 2012

Indy Datta reviews of some of the highlights of the festival’s third year

Opening Night Film – Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 (Anurag Kashyap, 2012)

Anurg Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots was by some way the most accomplished film I saw at last year’s festival, and after Gangs of Wasseypur played in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes earlier this year, I was hopeful that it would show up at this year’s LIFF.  Frustratingly, what we got was just the first half of the 5-hour film, and with no news as yet of British distribution, I have no idea when, if ever, I’ll see the second half. This isn’t one of those complaints about small portions of terrible food; Gangs of Wasseypur is bold and ballsy film making that delivers and delivers and delivers.

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June 12, 2012 Monoglot Movie Club: Japanese Screens

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Hello Kitty Sadako. Yes, it’s an actual thing.

I’m full of Asahi in a Tokyo restaurant, and I’m drunkenly attempting to explain the concept of Monoglot Movie Club to one of The Belated Birthday Girl’s Japanese mates. If Miki is pretending to be interested, she’s doing it incredibly well, to the extent that she asks me a question I’ve never been asked before: “If you don’t understand the language, how do you choose which films to see?”

Regular readers will know that most of the time, that isn’t a problem. In the last few countries I’ve visited, it’s actually been a struggle to find one or two local films to watch. Japan, however, is another story. Their film industry is as busy as ever, although you’ll find many people – myself included – are concerned at just how much of their production slate is taken up with remakes, adaptations and sequels. During the two weeks I spent there on holiday, there were over a dozen Japanese films in cinemas vying for a spot in this article. And really, the procedure’s the same as it would be back home: start with the trailer.

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May 2, 2012 Monoglot Movie Club: LOLs of Arabia

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Some countries make this job easy. When I’m travelling, I usually have to rely on a combination of Google Movies and individual cinema websites to get a decent idea of what local films are playing. Time Out Abu Dhabi, however, does all the work for you: its film listings allow for filtering by cinema, genre and language. So all I need to do is ask the site to show me the places and times where Arabic language films are being shown, and I’m home and dry.

Unfortunately, that’s where they stop making this job easy.

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April 17, 2012 Terracottadammerung 2012

by Spank The Monkey

Mostly Film’s coverage of the 2011 Terracotta Far East Film Festival contained more than its fair share of drama. Aside from the concentrated dose of Asian cinema that Joey Leung and his programming team reliably deliver, there was also the element of jeopardy which came out of my watching 11 movies in 50 hours, immediately after a transatlantic long haul flight. Still, I stayed awake. Unless I didn’t and dreamed all those films I wrote about, of course.

No such issues for the 2012 festival: I’ve rearranged my work schedule so that I’m not going to miss any of the films this year. However, there’s a downside to that: I’m not going to miss any of the films this year. Between Thursday night and Sunday night, I’m now committed to sixteen movies, several masterclasses and a party. What the hell was I thinking? I’ll barely have time to finish this introduction before I

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