Asian Cinema - While on the Road

Another Great Blog to Read

2011-04-25T23:50:00.000-05:00

Popping out of the dusty woodwork again to make mention of another film Blog that was recently brought to my attention. Hong Kong Rewind is centered 100% around HK films. Michael Thomason has been threatening me for years to get this up and going and thankfully he finally did. Michael already has about 70 reviews up and I am pretty sure he has loads more in reserve. He covers the new films, the classic films, the undeservedly obscure films and the very much deserved obscure films. What more can you want? Michael is a well-known internet presence and has also written professionally for years about HK films for numerous film magazines. And it's all coming to you free and easy. So tell your friends and neighbors that a new Blog has come to town.

Hong Kong Rewind

Just a Quick Note

2011-04-12T04:14:00.000-05:00

I am just surfacing momentarily to catch my breath and mention that an old friend and fine writer has begun a Blog of his own about film. Michael Wells has been one of my favorite writers for ages now leaving his wry comments on various forums and publishing insightful articles in New York papers. Now you can get him on a regular basis. At least I hope so. You can find his Blog - which will definitely have lots on Asian films - at Everyone Likes Movies. Go. Read. Be Delighted. Thank me later.

Everyone Likes Movies

Red Eagle

2010-10-15T04:51:00.000-05:00

Red Eagle

Director: Wisit Sasanatieng
Year: 2010
Country: Thailand
Starring: Ananda Everingham

In another lifetime and in another galaxy not far from here I used to help program the New York Asian Film Festival and one of my annual duties was to check in with Five Star Production Company to see if the film Red Eagle would be ready for our festival. This went on for five years and every year the answer would come back “Not yet”. It was a long gestation, but the film finally hit the screens in Bangkok last week with a publicity bang. Red Eagle is a modern updating of a very beloved film character from a series of films in the 1960’s played by then action superstar Mitr Chaibancha. The films and Mitr gained even more legendary status when he died doing a stunt in what turned out to be the final film in the series in 1970.

That wasn’t the reason though that the NYAFF was so excited about the film since none of us had seen any of those old films. Our excitement stemmed from the fact that the director put in charge of the project was Wisit Sasanatieng, whose film debut Tears of the Black Tiger in 2000 was simply one of the most marvelously inventive and playful blasts of color and design ever put to canvass. His 2004 follow-up Citizen Dog was also awash in colors and eccentricities and this created a certain cult status around the director in the West. In 2006 his third film, The Unseeable, was released and it disappointed many fans in that he backed away from the eye-popping color palette of his two previous films to deliver an old fashioned atmospheric haunted house tale that was miles away from the current typical blood and entrails Thai horror film. What all three films had in common besides a clear love on Wisit’s part for old Thai films was box office failure. They all bombed. More Westerners have probably seen his films than Thai’s. This recently had Wisit saying that after those three films he had to have a commercial success or no one would invest in his films anymore. He went on to say that he would have loved to have made Red Eagle in the same style as the old series but that would never work for today’s audience. This film needed to make real money and not just be a film festival favorite. This background brings us to and explains to a large degree Red Eagle.

Though Red Eagle has a few splashes of style (with a Bond like opening sequence and credits) and a few drops of humor, it is overall a very standard conventional angst ridden super hero film along the lines of Batman or The Punisher. It is surprisingly violent with decapitated heads and arms flying around like awoken bats in a dark cave. The narrative is simplistic and the characterization is almost non-existent. Red Eagle is out for vengeance in an angry sullen morphine addicted manner, but very little of his past is shown and he never engenders any sympathy or understanding. He is a cipher behind his mask and his muted expressions. The other characters are all from the stock storage room – the young cute cop out to get him, the evil doers behind their masks, the girl who loves him for unknown reasons and a bunch of salacious corrupt politicians who litter the landscape.

What makes the film work though to a large degree is that Wisit fills the running time with one action sequence after another and they are fairly well done. In particular, when you consider that the budget though high for a Thai film is still miniscule compared to an action film made in Hollywood. Wisit had to make a decision I suppose at some point whether to use a high profile leading man or one of Thailand’s many action stars. He went with the former choice in Ananda Everingham, one of Thailand’s best known young actors – but one clearly not up to snuff in martial arts. Therefore the film is very closely and quickly edited and I would have to assume doubled. Even so, the action sequences are theatrical, imaginative, suspenseful and are like waiting for a bus – there is another one coming right around the corner. The standout sequence is when Red Eagle is pitted against a paid assassin, Black Devil, and their combat takes them across the rooftops of the city, crashing into and demolishing a department store and fighting on top of a falling elevator. It is a pretty terrific set piece. But when the action stops, the sludge begins of ill-fated romance, social issues, corrupt politics and silly cops.

What really came as a surprise was the ending – there isn’t one ala Ong Bak 2. Sitting there I was beginning to think that this was going to be a very long movie because there were loads of bad guys still to be killed, when suddenly the film announces that this concludes Part 1. I thought it was an in-joke regarding the serial nature of the old films – but nope it was really the end and the lights were coming on. I don’t know if Part II is already in the can (a quick glimpse of the next film – morbidly Red Eagle is on a ladder trying to board a helicopter – i.e. how Mitr died - was shown) or whether the success of this film will determine whether it is made. But Wisit has already made noises that Red Eagle will be his last film and one senses that he is very burned out. Maybe critical success came too early.

My rating for this film: 7.5

The Trailer: I didn't write much about the plot of the film, but you can get a sense of it from the trailer.

Of little interest to any one else, but I was passing a sidewalk pirated dvd sale the other day and came across a few dvds of interest. First, it is always nice to see Hsu Chi anywhere - was so surprised and delighted when I realized she was in I Love New York a few weeks back - and it was a kick seeing a mention on the Ping Pong box - a fabulous Jpaanese film - of NYAFF!

Green Snake Soundtrack

2010-10-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

Seeing a Tsui Hark film reminded me that I was still sitting unceremoniously on the soundtrack to Green Snake. It is a great film and has a great soundtrack. This isn't all of it but it is most of it.

Back like a Bad Baht

2010-10-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

Geez, has it really been that long since I last did a post for this Blog? How time flies when you are in a coma. Well, not a coma exactly but a period of such infinite lassitude that I may as well have been. I have been woken from my crusty-eyed slumber by the news of two Hong Kong films suddenly washing ashore here in Bangkok. It is almost like being in Hong Kong. But better. After cruising the Internet like a sneaky Peeping Tom, I got the impression that one of these films was being treated like raw sewage that had seeped out of a septic tank while the other was being judged with somewhat mixed reactions. Perhaps because it has just been so long since I last saw a Hong Kong film, I may be too easy on both of these – one of them clearly is as shallow as a quickly dug grave in the dead of night but it is somewhat saved by fine production values, an almost coherent story, a few solid action sequences and an actress who I have been infatuated with for over a decade. The other film may have a suspect political message that echoes the one in Hero, but it is otherwise a fine piece of work and worthy of giving the director a Comeback of the Year Award.

And as exciting as these films are, Reign of Assassins is coming soon – that is the John Woo/Michelle Yeoh wuxia. Once upon a time from the 1960’s through the 1980’s Hong Kong films were shown all over Asia on a regular basis, but with the decline of Hong Kong films and the muscle of Hollywood marketing those days are long gone. So it is a real thrill to see three of them coming to town in such a short space – and also a pleasure to see Michelle starring again in a big Hong Kong film. Besides this good news, the Thai film Red Eagle opened this week in theaters. Red Eagle is directed by the same fellow who made the greatest Thai film of all time, Tears of the Black Tiger, and has been on the radar of film fans for years now. It is a super hero film based on a character from Thai movies made decades ago.

So what is going on in Bangkok, you are probably not wondering – well basically rain for over four months now. But on the bright side, the Red Shirts are basically gone though they remind us of their presence from time to time by setting off bombs around the city – they blew up an apartment building the other day. On the other hand, Central World Mall which they partly burnt down in May has amazingly opened its doors to business.

I came across this fun exhibit that is at the Emporium Mall on the top floor – a very cool display of spirits all exhibited in these dark small rooms with creepy music invading your mind.

Someone put together this mural of depictions of Thai ghosts.

A mother with her beautiful baby.

And an image that should be familiar to all Hong Kong movie fans.

I went by Paragon Mall today and came across this long line that literally went out the mall and far down the street. Were people lining up for Red Eagle?

Not quite – but instead the opening of this - which makes me wonder how many years it will take for Thai’s to become as fat as Americans.

I was very excited to discover that Maggie Q is starring in an American TV show called Nikita and with the magic of the Internet I was able to watch the first episode. It should be called Nikita: Just when you thought there would be no more remakes of La Femme Nikita. Nikita is out to bring down the organization that made her a killer. Not great but as long as Maggie Q wears a bikini every episode, I am in.

Oh, that’s right, the movies. I knew there was a reason for this post.

The Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
Director: Andrew Lau
Year: 2010
Starring: Donnie Yen, Donnie Yen, Donnie Yen and some other people.

The Legend of the Fist begins with a slick conceit that it is never able to shed in a film that glistens much more than it glowers. The character of Chen Zhen who was portrayed by Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury and Jet Li in Fist of Legend was if you recall killed in both by the Japanese – but this film posits that Chen Zhen did not die but is alive, well and killing Germans in Europe during WWI. Wow. Who would have thought? Chen has joined some other 140,000 Chinese to assist the Allies in the trenches by carrying supplies and the wounded, an historical aspect of the war that is in fact based on reality. In the opening prologue to the film, Chen and his fellow Chinese are pinned down by a nest of machine guns and in easily the best scene of the film Chen parkours himself up buildings and one step ahead of the trailing bullets to wipe the Germans out. This sets you up badly for a much stodgier film to follow.

After the war (and after China has been screwed once more by the West in the Versailles Peace Treaty), Chen returns to Shanghai to find out that the Japanese have infiltrated all aspects of the city and are clearly intent on military conquest. He is part of an underground resistance and as his cover he mysteriously manages to become a partner in a nightclub with Anthony Wong - and a homage is quickly paid to the nightclub’s namesake, Casablanca, in a song salute. No Ingrid Bergman here though – just a slinky chanteuse named Kitty (Hsu Chi) who ingratiates herself with every man who crosses her scent. Soon the Japanese put together a death list of hundreds of Chinese and Chen takes to a masked disguise like a super hero to fight them. Not all that successfully as history bares witness to.

The production values of the film are top notch as tends to be Lau’s trademark - though for the most part Shanghai is kept to a street outside the nightclub – and the film’s narrative covers a painful and interesting aspect of history – even if greatly fabricated here. One senses that Lau wanted to tell a bigger story – one that encompassed more of the resistance to China but a narrative thread that concerned rival Chinese armies in the north is quickly aborted (and poor Shawn Yue given short shrift) in order it seems to make it an all Donnie show.

Where the film falters most lies basically in the performance of Donnie Yen who plays Chen like a mixture of the ghost of Bruce Lee, a 1930’s smiling matinee idol and a heroic Batman looking down on Gotham. It is a 90 minute exercise in preening. This of course isn’t unusual in Donnie Yen films but one might expect a director as heavy hitting as Andrew Lau to be able to reign him in a bit. Where Lau may have exercised his control unfortunately is in the action – which after the first sequence is generally nothing to shake in your pants about. There are a number of short quick jolts in which Chen demolishes his opponents but it isn’t until the final confrontation – that again goes back to the dojo thus mimicking the two previous films - that the audience gets a lengthy brawl. But one somehow lacking in tension or the wow factor.

But the major gripe aimed at this film by critics and fans is the negative depiction of the Japanese and the Westerners. And there can not be any doubt that the Japanese are all portrayed as nasty monsters and the British as racist idiots. In truth, this on its own terms didn’t really bother me all that much. I mean my guess is that most British officials in Shanghai at this time were racist and treated the Chinese quite badly – and the Japanese may not have all been evil but they were well on their way to murdering over ten million Chinese, 300,000 in Nanking alone. So no crocodile tears from me for the way these characters were portrayed in the film. What is a little more nefarious and worrisome though is the nationalistic anger at foreigners that seeps through the film at the present time when China is on the rise and pushing its weight around the globe – with Japan being a recent victim of their threats. Whether this is a co-incidence or another example of Hong Kong filmmakers placating and playing up to the Mainland is hard to say – but if so, one can begin to say goodbye to the independence of filmmaking in Hong Kong.

My rating for this film: 5.5

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
Director: Tsui Hark
Year: 2010
Starring: Andy Lau, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Carina Lau, Li Bing Bing

Let’s just come out and say it – this is the best Tsui Hark film since The Blade in 1995. The seeming decline in Hark’s work over the past fifteen years has been the subject of many a fan and critics sad soliloquies. How could the director/producer who brought us Peking Opera Blues, Shanghai Blues, Chinese Ghost Story, Green Snake and Once Upon a Time in China suddenly be unable to grab us with his films anymore. Where did the magic go? Every new film brought out mass prayers that maybe this film would be the one to get him back on the right track. But films like Tristar, The Legend of Zu, Black Mask II and Seven Swords instead brought a tear to our eyes. Time and Tide has its fans but to me it was a cold convoluted film with a few superlative set pieces. It isn’t really surprising - he had a great run for fifteen years and how many artists last that long at the top of their game. Genius burns out faster than mediocrity.

Still his films were the reason that so many of us initially found our way into Hong Kong films and so we hoped. What made his films so wonderful is hard to pinpoint because they were all so different in most ways, but the one element that underlie all his classics was a heartfelt sentimentality that never felt cynical – whether it was the friendship of three women fighting for Chinese freedom or two strangers pining for one another over the years or a bookish scholar who finds the courage to follow his love straight into the bowels of hell to save her. It was this untarnished sentimentality that seemed to disappear from his films – whether it was a reflection of the hardening of this world or perhaps a hardening within himself, who can say – but without it his films seemed cold and distant - clinical exercises in filmmaking but without the passion.

I can’t say that Detective Dee entirely reclaims that sentimentality – I don’t even know if it would work for today’s audiences – but one does sense that Tsui has reclaimed his passion for filmmaking. This film is a craftsman at work creating a tense, fast moving narrative that never flags for a moment and constantly surprises with inventive scenes and characters. It is a fun wild ride like his films used to be. Perhaps darker, perhaps more serious but a carnival ride nevertheless. Tsui immediately throws his audience into the spectacle of the Tang Dynasty in 690 right after Empress Wu (Carina Lau) has deposed yet another son and claimed the throne for herself. A woman taking the throne doesn’t sit well with many in the palace as well as in the military and it seems only a matter of time before they strike at her. A giant Buddha is being built (with Tony Leung Ka-fai being the main architect) right outside the palace and when two of the planners apparently catch fire from their insides, the Empress calls for the return of Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who she had imprisoned years ago for being a traitor, to solve the mystery.

Don’t think of Detective Dee (a.k.a. Judge Dee) as he is generally presented in films or history (he really did live during this period) or even in the mystery novels of Robert Van Gulik as a scholar who works his way cerebrally though investigations. Tsui makes him an action hero as well – much perhaps not coincidentally in the same vein as Sherlock Holmes was portrayed by Robert Downey. This is a good thing as assassins are constantly trying to kill him and his agility saves him on numerous occasions. He is given two assistants to work with – The Empress’s able right hand woman (Li Bing Bing) and a cruel albino who seemingly takes pleasure in taking lives – but are they really trying to help or hinder Dee’s investigation. Who can be trusted? No one, is the answer.

Full of a myriad of slick action scenes, the standout is a lengthy set piece that occurs in claustrophobic caverns beneath the earth with killers popping out of everything and everywhere. It is exhilarating and fluid – like the old Tsui Hark could do with his hands tied behind his back. The performances are all topnotch – Andy Lau showing a vulnerability behind his nobility, Carina displays just a pinch of humanity within her cruel iron hand, Li Bing Bing is graceful, beautiful and ultimately touching, Tony bounces beautifully between humility and anger and it was just nice seeing small parts for two actors from back in the 1980’s – Teddy Robin Kwan and Richard Ng. Great sets, costumes, pacing and characters - it is almost like being back in the 1980's.

What seemed an unnecessary add-on though, was a last minute political message that echoes the one in Hero and caused so much controversy then – one that is imparted by Detective Dee to the Empress – yes you are cruel, yes you have killed many people who opposed you – but you are a strong ruler and keeping the country together is what counts - so keep on ruling. It felt like a commercial for the Communist government in China and seemed so out of place – so did Tsui have to throw it in there one might wonder to appease the Mainland?

My rating for this film: 8.0

Ong Bak 3

2010-05-30T12:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I finally made it to Ong Bak 3. I had been on my way to see it a while back when the troubles began and the Sky Train was shut down. It is barely showing anywhere now so I was glad to catch it in time. Bangkok seems to getting back to normal at least for now. I walked down to the area where the Red Shirts had encamped a few days after they were driven out and it was as if they had never been there. Everything was cleaned up and all the stores had re-opened with busy shoppers inside. There still remained two very visible scars though – the burning down of a big section of Central Mall and for some inexplicable reason, the burning of the Siam Movie Theater – one of the few remaining small independent theaters in Bangkok that played a nice eclectic group of foreign movies. A real shame. Wise Kwai pays tribute to this theater here.

Ong Bak 3
Directors: Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai
Year: 2010

One might conjecture that the narrative arc of Ong Bak 2 and Ong Bak 3 was a reflection of the troubles that director and star Tony Jaa had going on in his personal life during the making of these two films. During the production of Ong Bak 2 there were numerous on and off set problems with Jaa disappearing at one point and rumors of a possible nervous breakdown. This created major dissonance between Jaa and the Sahamongkol production house that has been behind all of Jaa’s films. But things were patched up and Jaa along with his mentor Panna made Ong Bak 3 (a direct sequel to the second film but no relation to the first in terms of story). Ong Bak 2 is full of angst and pain and the sequel begins in the same manner – but by the ending Jaa’s character has come to terms with who he is and is at peace. Regrettable this resolution does not make for a particularly compelling film and Ong Bak 3 is a disappointing simplistic jumble of mysticism, brutality, action, Buddhism, revenge and redemption.

Ong Bak 2 ends jarringly with Tien (Jaa) being captured by the killers of his father and imprisoned primed for torture. This film takes the story up right from that point with Tien being literally broken with bone crushing techniques. Tien is saved at the last moment – the sword getting ready to descend with a horse rapidly approaching cheap scenario – by an order of the King and turned over to a monk for repair. Tien’s tormentor, the ever smirking Prince (Saranyu Wongkrajang) soon gets his just desserts at the hands of the even more evil Bhuti Sangkha (played by the terrific Dan Chupong – Dynamite Warrior, Born to Fight) who impressively appeared near the end of Ong Bak 2 as the Crow like fighter. Tien is made whole again – not only externally but more importantly internally – and he begins to accept the teachings of Buddha. But Bhuti makes one mistake – he messes with Tien’s female childhood friend – and now Tien has to face an entire army of killers.

None of this is particularly interesting – a martial arts revenge/redemption story that has been enumerated hundreds of times all over the world but it is made even less compelling by stereotype sketch characters – the good monk, the loving innocent girl, the evil menace, a stiff lipped hero. But come on – let's face it, no one watches a Tony Jaa film in expectations of narrative complexity – we come to see asses kicked in multiple ways and here is where the film truly is a let down. If memory serves me correctly, there are five action set pieces – one with Jaa taking on his tormentors, one with Bhuti killing all of the Prince’s men, Jaa in another small combat number against some of Bhuti’s men, the large set piece against the army and the finale one-on-one against Bhuti – and none of them really excite. Perhaps I have seen Jaa and his bag of martial arts tricks once too often but nothing here felt original. In Ong Bak 2, Jaa displayed a number of martial arts styles that were astonishing – but all the choreography in this film is basically one guy charging Jaa and getting crushed – after the first 20-30 victims it all gets a bit repetitive. Even the final showdown was less than inspiring because by then Tien was almost Buddha like and nothing could beat him. Jaa seems a lot more interested in sending a message than in generating excitement. My advice to Jaa would be to bring his films back into contemporary times and to find his sense of humor again.

My rating of this film: 6.0

Other than this, the only other films I have seen of late are the Matt Helm series from the 1960’s starring Dean Martin. The Matt Helm series of books written by Donald Hamilton was America’s answer to James Bond, but minus much of the Bond razzmatazz and save the world scenarios. Based on my reading of three of the books that the films are based on, the plots are very basic and to the point and the 150 pages or so are easily read in a day or two. In the books, Helm is an assassin for the US government. He gets an assignment to kill and amid various complications he completes his job. In their day the Helm books were quite popular and not surprisingly four of books were brought to the screen all starring Dean Martin.

A worse selection for this character is hard to imagine. In the books, Helm is a tough terse cynical operator – but Martin plays him basically like Dean Martin on a golf outing at the Playboy Mansion. He is a lady killer and no woman can resist his slight charms. In those rare moments when he is not ogling or seducing women, he tries to stop the villains but his assignment is almost an inconvenience. The films only have a passing resemblance to the book plots as well – for example in The Wrecking Crew (1969) in the book Helm is sent to Sweden to kill the communist head of a secret cell, while the film has something to do with a gold robbery and lots of gadgets. In fact, the films are little but gadgets, bushels of women and Martin smirking. They are plain awful and one can’t feel a bit disheartened that the Matt Helm character was given such short shrift – someone needs to bring the real Matt Helm to the screen.

From a strictly cheesy pop 60’s perspective, the one plus for today’s viewers are Martin’s female co-stars – some of the more popular babes of that era – Elke Sommer, Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Tina Louise, Senta Berger, Ann Margaret, Camilla Sparv, Stella Stevens and Daliah Lavi.

The same thing seems to have happened to the one incarnation of the Modesty Blaise books. The books are great fun – pulp fiction somewhere between the Doc Savage books and the Bond series – tough hitting, gritty but a bit preposterous. But the film Modesty Blaise made in 1966 is so full of pop pretentions that it is painful to endure it. Modesty too needs a high budget reworking on the big screen.

Bangkok Adrenaline

2010-05-19T02:08:00.000-05:00

As armored vehicles break through the barricades, black smoke billows in the not too distant future and helicopters patrol overhead, a mournful feeling has dropped down upon the city. Things may be coming to a head here. It is all very sad that it has come to this and one has to wonder if this will turn out only to be the beginning of something much worse to come. Over the past few decades so many countries have been torn apart by civil war, but generally these conflicts have been caused by ethnic or religious differences – in Thailand it is a more old fashioned cause – a class divide between the elite and the poor. The disparity of wealth here is enormous. By setting up their headquarters in the center of the glitzy malls, the Red Shirts seemed to be making a point – we may not have the money to shop here but we can take it by force if we have to.

Anyway, in an attempt to get back to the focus of this Blog, here is a quick review of an interesting if not particularly well-made hybrid Thai film called Bangkok Adrenaline.

Bangkok Adrenaline
Director: Raimund Huber
Year: 2009
Duration: 85 minutes

Produced and written by a group of Farangs (i.e. Westerners), the film hops on the Parkour/action film bandwagon with some fine action set pieces that zip around Bangkok with a sense of fun and flair. Unfortunately, the script is a mess and the story is at times nearly incoherent. When the film isn’t flying, it is dead in its tracks with not nearly enough action to make up for its failings. First time director, Huber, shows his inexperience with numerous pointless scenes, extraneous shots that come to nothing and a pace that falls into lulls that seem to have no purpose other than adding to the running time. It also perhaps makes the mistake of adopting a lot of broad slapstick Thai like humor that didn’t feel even mildly funny to me.

Now to be fair, the DVD that I watched had the four foreigners badly dubbed into Thai and the subtitles may have made the film more confusing than it really is. According to Wise Kwai, the original soundtrack was in English but when it was released into Thai theaters only a Thai dubbed version was shown. A DVD in the UK has the original soundtrack, but the one I ended up with was purchased in Chinatown in NY and may be of questionable legitimacy.

As best as I could understand, four foreigners (Daniel O’Neill, Conan Stevens, Raimund Huber and Gwlon Jacob Miles) live in Bangkok and are doing their best to make ends meet by either theft, go-go dancing or fighting. But it’s not enough and one night they end up in a gambling den where they make the mistake of winning too often. The Thai boss doesn’t take kindly to this and threatens their lives unless they help him with a job – kidnap the lovely daughter (Praya Suandokmal) of a wealthy crooked businessman. They successfully do this but collecting the money is a different matter as the father has an unending number of martial arts minions to send after the quartet.

The revelation of the film is actor Daniel O’Neill, who has been doing stunt work for nearly a decade appearing in films such as Gen X Cops 2, Naked Weapon, Twins Effect, Tom Yum Goong and The Bodyguard 2 – but here he is front and center of the action set pieces with a dazzling array of Parkour and martial arts skills. In particular there are two lengthy chases through the streets, alleyways and roof tops of Bangkok that seem to be highly influenced by the Tony Jaa chase in the first Ong Bak. O’Neill’s moves are equal to Jaa’s though he doesn’t show nearly the power that Jaa has. It is impossible to evaluate his acting skills in this dubbed version but he clearly has the looks to become a leading action actor.

My rating for this film: 5.0

PS – it sounds like it may be over for now in Bangkok. The Red Shirt leaders appear to be calling a halt to their protest. Where it goes from now will be seen, but at least this may be thankfully coming to end without a last horrendous spasm of violence.

Bangkok is heating up

2010-05-14T11:24:00.000-05:00

And that's not the temperature. A few days back it looked like an agreement was about to be reached between the Government and the Red Shirts, but all hell has broken loose with the shooting of a top Red leader. From a friend's rooftop, we could see and hear from Lumpini Park all the smoke, blasts and gunfire going on. Earlier, I was on my way to see Ong Bak 3 when I realized that the Skytrain had been shut down and the streets barricaded. Soldiers are all over Farangland, well equipped but how well trained is to be seen. It was a bit worrysome seeing one solider leave his automatic weapon leaning against a wall and going off to buy some food at a street stall! Nice souvenir that would have been! If my air-conditioning was working better, I'd just stay home and order in - but I need to get out. Went to McD's for an ice cream cone and Farangland looked more like Zombieland - not a lot of people around. The oddest thing though that I saw today was a line of about 25 colleged aged farang females walking in single file with two chaperones looking after them. A class trip to Bangkok in the middle of a possible civil war? What genius thought that one up?

Sam Hui Movie Theme Songs

2010-05-11T04:37:00.000-05:00

God, it's hot in Bangkok. Walking outside is like shoving your face into a microwave on the defrost setting. Daily living seems to consist primarily of getting from one air conditioned setting to another. It is so hot even some Thai's are visibly sweating. Adding to this is that the air con in my apartment is as lukecool as relations between Sandra Bullock and her husband. So with even less energy than usual, I haven't tended to this Blog garden and may not do so until it cools down to around 35 celsius (95 farenheit) or my air con is fixed. But it's easy to put up a little music, so here is Sam Hui singing 12 of his movie theme songs.

Welcome to Thailand

2010-04-29T21:44:00.000-05:00

I arrived in Bangkok almost a week ago to the news that a few hand grenades had been tossed into the Sky Train here killing one person and injuring over seventy. Other acts of random violence between the Red Shirts and the authorities crawl across the TV news every day but being here it all feels a bit surreal really. A fifteen minute walk away from my apartment that overlooks the city from the 30th floor, the Red Shirts have set up camp amidst the luxury malls and the five star hotels, but here in Farangland life goes on as always; bars full of jovial drinkers, restaurants offering spicy curries, bar girls offering something quite different and stalls selling cheap trinkets to red faced tourists from all over the world. Yesterday, after finally getting over jet lag and my back from hell, I wandered down to Siam Square where I had heard the Red Shirts were dug in behind barracades of tires, barbed wire and sharpened bamboo sticks. I found that but overall it was very anti-climatic. I was anticipating masses of raised fists facing a wall of implacable soliders with guns in hand - but it felt more like a lazy Sunday afternoon picnic. People snoozing under the shade of cover from the sweltering heat and food vendors everywhere trying to make a baht. I think these food vendors have made out best in all of this. No cops, no soldiers and not really a lot of Red Shirts. Whether this whole thing will blow away or turn into The Year of Living Dangerously will be interesting to witness. I was here for the last coup when I chased after tanks going down the street, the airport shutdown and so why not now.

In celebration of being back, here are four songs from a Thai group called Carabao, who for decades have sung about the dispossessed and disenfranchised here.

Last Four Tracks from Disc 1 of HK Film Songs

2010-04-18T22:43:00.003-05:00

Here are the final four tracks of the CD of Hong Kong movie themes. I wish I was better at telling you which films they come from. I have known a few and though many of the songs are very familiar, I just can't say for sure what film they were from. I won't be getting Disc 2 up for a while I expect, as I am headed off to Bangkok in a few days for a period of indeterminate time. That is of course assuming that the city is still standing. It seems to have cooled down a bit this week but things could get messy. If so, my plan is to spend a lot of time by the pool and eat a lot of green curry chicken shipped in by a restaurant down the street.

If you want to listen to all sixteen tracks at one time - go here.

The Next Four Tracks

2010-04-16T08:19:00.000-05:00

Here the next four tracks in the HK film compilation CD that I have. Sorry for being such a slackard of late.

Another Four Songs from the HK Movie CD Compilation

2010-03-27T07:01:00.002-05:00

Sampling of Hong Kong Film Songs

2010-03-25T12:48:00.000-05:00

I am in the midst of one of my lazy periods. They come and go. But to give this Blog a small pulse, here are four selections from a two disc CD of Hong Kong theme songs. These four are pretty familiar but I would likely mistake which films they are from, so I will leave that to those who know best.

Celebration!

2010-03-22T11:15:00.001-05:00

Thank God the Health Care Bill has passed. Now maybe all the Tea Party nutters out there can go back to doing what they do best. Sleeping with their siblings and masturbating with their guns. And now that it will pass into law, we can finally tell them that Yes, this is in fact a Government takeover of the health care system in the USA - soon to be called the USSA. By the end of the week plane loads of Chinese and Cubans will be arriving to take over our medical care services. And Yes, it is also true as your hero Glenn Beck said that Obama is setting up Gulags out west in which to place all the anti-government protestors. But in this case, the purpose will actually be to teach you to read and write beyond your current third grade level. And to think for yourself. I know it will be difficult but someday you will be thankful when you can finally get that job you have dreamed about bagging goods at your local Walmart.

In celebration of this moment in time when Congress did the right thing for a change, I give you a touch of cheesecake.

Crawling Out of the Attic Space - Another Bollywood Horror

2010-03-04T17:30:00.002-05:00

The other night I had dinner with a neighbor and she asked me whether I missed being a part of the New York Asian Film Festival. Not really I answered, only that I no longer had the opportunity to watch obvious classics like this film I came across on YouTube.

And that video led me to this bizarre Raquel Welch video.

Ok – time for another Bollywood horror film review. I can only put it off for so long with pointless videos of girls with large chests.

Jadu Tona (Black Magic)
Director: Ravikant Nagaich
Year: 1977
Duration: 124 minutes
Music: Hemant Bhonsle

I never ever got around to seeing The Exorcist because when it came out there were all these stories about people in the audience having seizures and epileptic attacks – nothing I wanted to chance. But thankfully now that I have seen Jadu Tona I feel that I never have to see The Exorcist. Jadu Tona has a possessed young girl who throws up on the camera lens and rolls her eyes a lot and I bet Linda Blair didn’t even dance on the ceiling as this one does. So what could The Exorcist have that this film doesn’t? Though I doubt if any audience member in India had a seizure while watching this - unless it was caused by laughter and that wasn’t from the comic relief believe me (though the film has plenty of that for anyone who cherishes that art form - think mental institution=crazy people=comic relief). O.K. so this film wasn’t exactly a scare fest. In fact, the scariest thing about it was a roomful of children and dolls celebrating a birthday in a musical number but that is a personal bogeyman of mine.

The film actually has a terrific cast with the chiseled chinned Feroz Khan looking manly, Reena Roy as the love interest, Prem Chopra who was one of the great sneering villains of Bollywood playing a concerned father for a change, Ashok Kumar, a true legend in the 1940’s and 50’s doing his duty as an Inspector, Aruna Irani who has been popping up in a lot of films I have seen lately doing a basic walk through, Jeevan who is another perennial villain actually being a villain and of course what would any film be without the hilarious antics of Jagdeep. And let us not forget Baby Pinky who portrays the possessed girl as if her allowance was cut off and she throws multiple fits. Two of the playback singers are Asha Bhosle and her daughter Varsha Bhosle (who has since become a right wing nutty Hindi columnist and suicide attempter). So this film is by no means a “B” film, it just feels that way.

Aamir (Prem Chopra) is bringing his two daughters Varsha (Reena) and Harshu (Baby Pinky) to visit his parents in a small rural village where superstitions still run deep. A poor man stops their car on the road and tells them that before entering the village they must pray at the base of the Banyan Tree or bad luck will follow them. Being modern city dwellers, the family of course poo-poo’s this and continues on their merry way to the village where the radio is playing the theme song to Hawaii 5-0. Harshu, who is shaped like an over stuffed vegetable dumpling, goes off to explore while her big sister reads Harold Robbins, a sign I have noticed in Bollywood films of crass modernity. Harshu goes into the fields and performs a musical number for which the Song Gods of India quickly punish her for the crime of subjecting an audience to this sight. Such things should not be allowed in any film industry.

She then wanders into an old ruined house where a ghost tricks her into allowing her to be possessed by him as he has some unfinished business on his mind – revenge. Harshu begins having these little jerking eye-rolling fits but while the villagers want to bring in a priest (Premnath) to chase the evil away, the family just puts it down to silly behavior. Back in the big city of Bombay, they take her to a psychiatrist Dr Arya (Feroz) who diagnoses her as having a multiple paranoid personality and scoffs at the crazy idea that Harshu could be possessed. But not surprisingly he pays many house calls on Harshu and then spends his time with Varsha as he unleashes his masculine and hairy chest on her. He continues to scoff even after Harshu walks on the ceiling, likely kills a man by strangling him and attacks Arya when he takes her up in his little plane – always a wise thing to do with either a possessed person or one who has a multiple paranoid personality! Enter Inspector Jolly Goodman (Ashok) with his irritating habit of initializing everything – i.e. good morning=GM, I need to take a leak=INTTAL – who instantly knows this little vegetable dumpling is behind murder!

This film gets so close to that elevated status of “so bad, it’s good” but sadly just misses the mark even with a rather fun whacked out last 20-minutes of murder, walking on the ceiling, scorpions and exorcism or as Inspector Jolly Goodman would put it “20-miniutes of MWOTCSAE”.

My rating for this film: 3.5

8 from Gigi Leung

2010-03-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

I've been scanning all the photos that I picked up at the Hong Kong Photo Shop way back in March 2009 over these past few days. I'll put them up along with film reviews over time, but meanwhile I thought I'd put up a few of Gigi Leung. Funny, I was never really a fan of hers when she was at her peak of popularity in the mid-90's with those 100% films, but with time things grow on you and with me it sort of turned with her role in A War Named Desire. Terrific film and she was great in it. Looking back I think she represented to me the beginning of the "Idolization" of Hong Kong film - a trend that took off in the 90's with the marketing and packaging of young fluffy fresh faced idols into all aspects of the entertainment world - most of them so lacking in actual ability that the first strong wind blew them away never to be heard of again. But compared to many of those that came after her, Gigi is a heavyweight and has been able to stick around for fifteen years now. She hasn't been in many films for the past few years due to taking care of her brother, but that along with a lot of charity work just speaks good of her. Like many of the Hong Kong singers, Gigi has had to sing in both Cantonese and Mandarin to reach a larger market. Down below are three selections from her Mandarin CD Love Songs for Myself (2006).

Another Soundtrack but from Thailand

2010-03-01T14:48:00.000-05:00

If for some reason you have yet to watch the Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger, you really should give it a go at some point. Directed by Wisit Sasanatieng in 2000, it is like nothing else you have seen and it would have made my Best Films of the Decade list if I had bothered to put one together. It is a loving surreal tribute to older Thai films and the soundtrack reflects this with a load of old fashioned laments, some of them from songs written back in the 1940's. Here are the songs that have vocals - probably not to everyone's taste I expect but very evocative of another time and place.

Can't Stop the Bollywood Horror!

2010-02-26T18:17:00.005-05:00

One more Bollywood horror film in the bag. Thanks to the Hot Spot website for pointing me in the direction of a few of these films that I had never heard of.

But first here is a song that you can listen to while you read my fascinating, life changing and insightful review! This has zippo to do with film or with Asia. I just came across it the other day and the chorus has been rattling around in my head ever since "Bye Bye Mr. Thompson". I figure this could be like a Japanese horror movie and if someone else listens to it the curse will move from me to you. The group is called the Biquinis.

Red Rose

Director: Bharathi Rajaa
Music: RD Burman
Year: 1980
Duration: 137 minutes

Produced in the same year as Phir Wahi Raat (reviewed a few days ago) in 1980, Red Rose also has among its cast Rajesh Khanna, Iruna Arani and very likely that same psychotic black cat. In Phir Wahi Raat this cat had revenge on its fur ball brain and went for the jugular, but the last we saw of the cat, it was being swung around by its tail being readied for space travel. So it is with relief that it shows up again in this film as crazy as ever and still going for the throat and with a taste for blood. Red Rose is an odd grimy subversive film that breaks many of the then conventions of Bollywood – unfaithful wives, unfilial daughters, wanton middle class women willing to have sex for advancement or money, a disdain for religion and a main protagonist who is a serial killer.

What makes it all the more surprising is that this protagonist is portrayed by none other than Rajesh Khanna, once the romantic idol of millions. Termed by most sources as the first Superstar of Indian cinema, he first hit it big with Aradhana in 1969 and went on to a number of successive blockbusters with his smooth velvet appeal numbing the hearts of Indian women everywhere. But time caught up with him quicker than most like a cruel host running out of seconds for supper. India was going through political and social ferment in the 1970’s and this soon was reflected in the films and the rising star of the “angry young man”, Amitabh Bachchan who pushed Rajesh to the sideline - and then in the mid-70’s audiences began preferring the more natural romanticism of Shashi and Rishi Kapoor. His off-screen life was in tatters as well – his well-publicized marriage to the very young Dimple Kapadia had fallen apart, he had gained a reputation for being difficult on the set and heavy drinking and age had taken some toll on his once boyish looks. He was at a career crossroad and so he very admirably was willing to take a chance on playing a blank psychotic killer in this film and allowed the director to often film him in the most unflattering manner possible – up close with his pores looking like giant potholes in New York City, distorted at times, always looking like he needed a shower and over all creepy like a subway molester. Admirable because Heroes very rarely played negative roles in those days in Bollywood though it has become much more common of late. This shattered every Rajesh archetype there was. And he is good at being a tightly wound creep – just the small things he does like smugly opening and snapping shut his cigarette case to some Tchaikovsky tune, the way a cigarette hangs languorously out of his dead mouth, the void in his eyes, the way he spits out the word “beautiful” – he is devoid of nearly every human emotion except anger and . . . perhaps love.

On the surface Anand (Rajesh) might seem like a good member of society – owning an export company, maintaining a beautiful plush red themed home, giving to charity, growing red roses in his garden, a faithful servant (Om Shivpuri) – but his life really revolves around the hunting of women – tracking them, seducing them, bedding them and then killing them all documented by a hidden camera. The director shies away from showing any of the murders in any graphic sense – a strange choice but perhaps that was going too far 30-years ago. Late in the film a fair amount of background is related to show where his hatred of women comes from and why he wants to kill and kill again. This is of course good for the rose garden. He eyes up as his next target Sharva (Poonam Dhillon), an innocent girl right out of the village whose “creep radar” hasn’t developed yet in the big city. She works at a fabric store behind the handkerchief counter and he begins to court her by buying one handkerchief each day and drooling over her like a baked glazed ham. But Sharva is different from the other girls who he easily led into bed – a good girl and a virgin – and virgins can’t be killed in these kind of films can they? Sure virgins are good fodder for sacrifice or for the regeneration of youth by sucking their life force out, but the "virgins don't die" cliché still takes place today in films like the recent Hollywood Taken – good girl lives, tramp dies. So the only way he can seduce Sharva is by marrying her but underlying this is the possibility that he has actually fallen in love with her but it is too late for happy endings. Their wedding night turns into one pulsating murderous evening where seduction becomes the last thing on anyone’s mind. One tip for you newly weds out there, once you discover your husband is a psycho killer, don’t stop to pack a suitcase – just get the hell out.

This could have been a pretty terrific film, but like most of these Bollywood horror films I have seen it is just too long and there is an easy 30 minutes here that could have been whacked off with no loss. And not that I am a gore hound by any means, but the audience needed to see some of his killings and the tension around that. There are only two song interludes sung by Asha and Kishore but they were truly not needed and felt pointless – both projected from the imagination of Sharva, first when she falls in love and then when she waits patiently at home on their wedding night not yet aware that her husband is as he says “planning games for tonight”. But I love the gritty grotty manner this film was shot – using montages to disorient, oozing close-ups to upset, discos that are dives, streets that are dark and empty – there is a just a smidgeon of Taxi Driver and Cruising (1980) that permeates the style of the film like a sweaty night. Red Rose was a remake of the director's Tamil 1978 film, Sigappu Rojakkal, starring Kamal Hassan and Sridevi. The Tamil version was quite successful but not so the Hindi remake.

My rating for this film: 6.0

Here is one of the two songs.

A few posts ago I mentioned that there were some Russian Sherlock Holmes TV films made in the early 1980’s and I was tempted to buy them. I didn’t but much to my happiness I found them at my local library and watched two of them during yesterday’s snow storm. I have to say that I am glad I didn’t buy them really – 6 DVDs for $80 – because though I suppose they are interesting for the fact that they are Russian productions (in Russian obviously), these two at least treaded some all too familiar ground – The Hound of the Baskervilles and the meeting up of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty at the falls. There really wasn’t anything new added to these stories and they do drag a fair amount. It would have been a lot more interesting if they had taken these two beloved characters and transposed them to the 1890’s of Mother Russia and come up with new stories involving the Czar, the socialists, Rasputin and so on. That period is the setting for the fascinating detective novels written by Boris Akunin, a Russian author, who has two very different detectives in his writing stable – Erast Fandorin who is sort of a Sherlock Holmes type with a bit more taste for adventure and intrigue and then set out in the far reaches of Russia is Sister Pelagia, a nun who likes to stick her nose into conspiracies and murder. As his books slowly get translated into English I just gobble them up. It is important though to read these in the order of release because they build on previous books.

Sridevi and the Snake Dances

2010-02-24T21:36:00.004-05:00

While I decide which Bollywood horror film to watch next, I thought I'd put up a quickie post because I am being paid by quantity, not quality - sort of like Toyota.

Here are two pictures of Sridevi from the coffee table book, Bollywood - Popular Indian Cinema. It has loads of great photos inside and is a great fallback for me when I have nothing else to put up here. Sridevi was enormously popular in the 1980's but one has to wonder whether she would have a chance in today's lean mean Bollywood with thighs that would be at home on the offensive line of the New York Giants. She really didn't have the classical looks, but she sure had energy and personality and that won her hordes of fans and great affection. She could do straight romance, but was always best as kind of kooky and lovable. Like in Mr. India where she goes undercover in this scene to steal a secret. Beware of Indians in blackface and note the villainous white fellow - he is Bob Christo, one of the very very few Caucasians to actually have a career in Bollywood, always playing a mean spirited rotter of course. But the most astonishing thing about Mr. India is that the director, Skekhar Kapur, was to later go on and make two Queen Elizabeth films starring Cate Blanchett. I may be mistaken but I don't recall there being anyone in blackface in those films.

The creepiest film she made, though totally unintentionally, had to be Lamhe, where Anil Kapoor (who also was her co-star in Mr. India) falls in love with her as her much older guardian because she is the spitting image of her mother who he loved but never won and is now dead. It is considered a great romance but made me queasy as hell. Yup, he wins her love in the end. Even creepier than Nagina, where Sridevi plays a snake woman, you might ask? Actually, I'd love coming home after a hard day's work and having my wife do the snake dance for me. And then asking "What's for dinner honey?". The baddie blowing the big pipe with the crazy eyes is Amrish Puri, the psycho priest in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Of course, Indiana hated snakes so I am not sure how he would take to Sridevi's dance. Weird how she gets smacked at the end of both songs.

For some unexplainable reason, I have not seen the film pictured below - Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja and my DVD is sitting in Bangkok taking in the warm weather while we are expecting more snow tomorrow. Get the shovel out. Maybe I'll have to watch a Carmen Miranda movie instead.

Some Hong Kong Posters

2010-02-23T22:35:00.000-05:00

I am finally getting back to putting up those posters from the HK Film Archive Calendar - on sale still - I realized on my last trip that this calendar is good forever because there are no days of the week on it - just the date and the month. So buy one next time you are in town and impress all your friends and neighbors. Here are ten posters taking them up to 1969.

The Horror Continues - SSSSHHH

2010-02-22T23:01:00.001-05:00

Here is another in a series of Bollywood horror films that I plan to post on. This is a more recent production than the last one – Sssshhh from 2003. I have no idea what the film title has to do with the film but Sssshhh is the kind of sound I make after a third beer. I am not a great drinker needless to say. After one beer I am feeling fine, by the second beer I am getting sleepy and on the third beer I want to discuss politics. That is always a sign that it is time to stop.

But before that, I need another happy Shammi moment. This one from the classic An Evening in Paris, where he woos the wonderful Sharmila Tagore on a helicopter, a boat, skis and on land as only Shammi can. Why didn’t I learn to romance a girl like this? Of course, in this country it’s called stalking.

Sssshhh
Director: Pavan Kaul
Year: 2003
Duration: 166 minutes

Malini (Simone Singh) is having a bad hair day on the squash court. First her back hand is out of sorts, then a ball she slams like a 45 slug just misses sideswiping her face on the rebound and next her buddy Sunny falls dead against the glass door covered in blood. As if that isn’t enough, an ethereal voice out of the darkness tells her she is next on the cutting board of life. And so she is, as a person hiding behind a laughing clown’s mask catches her in the deserted building and slices and dices her like a raw onion. It is a very effective beginning to this rarity – a Bollywood slasher film. In fact, a musical slasher film. Just what the world needed. Not a campy one, mind you but a straight up slash and gore film with musical numbers. I had my doubts about the camp aspect when the film jumps right from Malini’s corpse to a musical interlude/credit sequence in which all the background dancers were carrying blades on them – but no this is actually a fairly decent if waaaaay too long slash and splash film (kind of like if Annette, Frankie and friends were being gutted).

Back in 2003 Bollywood was hitting the skids and there were a number of attempts to give audiences something different and so a few films like this came out. The films are clearly greatly influenced by that I Saw You Last Summer type of film – young good looking actors who nearly all come to bad ends and one of them is doing it. That is certainly the case here – a group of new actors with the exception of Dino Morea who had been around a few years trying to make it as a Hero in “A” films but never quite getting there. He is handsome enough I expect but there is just something intangible missing – you can’t warm to this fellow – he is the kind of person I would not trust to hold my bag lunch while I ran an errand. But the big news in the casting was Tanisha in her film debut. Tanisha probably figures she can go by one name because it didn’t hurt her sister too much – that being Kajol. It was her first film so it is unfair to judge her acting skills and I haven’t seen her in anything since so I won’t – but my guess is that if she was say Tanisha Smith instead of Tanisha Mukerjee she would not have gotten within a mile of the studio. Nothing wrong with using connections though and she is cute, well built and from certain angles she has a definite resemblance to the great Kajol.

It is six months later and Malini’s sister Mahek (Tanisha) is still in a state of shock and cries every time she sees a squash racquet. She lives with her mother and goes to nearby Simon College where she has a small clique of close friends. Let me introduce them to you since we will be seeing a lot of them in the next 160 minutes. There is Rocky (Dino) who is the group tough guy – giving lip to the cops but clearly smitten by Mahek. His nerdy buddy Rajat (Gaurav Kapoor) – these kind of films always have one – gives him love advice but seems to take none himself. Mahek’s best friend is Gehna (Suvarna Jha), a tough talking no nonsense girl who may have a thing for Rocky or maybe for Mahek – hard to tell. Then there is Nikhil (Kushal Punjab) and his girlfriend Rhea (Tina Choudhary) who seem like love birds, almost too much so. Finally, there is the new kid in class, Suraj (Karan Nath), a quiet guy who is immediately attracted to Mahek as well. One of these nice people is very likely a psychotic killer. But which one? The film keeps you guessing till the very end as they decide to play Ten Little Indians and begin to die one after the other. At one point or another I suspected everyone – even Mahek’s mother, the cops, the neighborhood dog or maybe even Kajol out to stop her baby sister before she replaced her. So at some point I was right!

Coming in at nearly 3 hours is just too long for a suspense film – the viewer can easily weary long before the end of Mahek continuously escaping this killer who is out to get her in his crazy clown mask. But the individual set pieces (i.e. murders) all work fine and the actors are all charming and attractive and the locations are stunning. I am not sure where the first half takes place – somewhere up in the hills of India but good Lord it is gorgeous. I’d love to visit. And never leave. Then at the halfway mark the group decides to take a holiday from death and go to Thailand! So there are some nice shots in Bangkok and then off to one of Thailand’s magnificent Koh’s – islands – where you feel like you could spend a month just looking at the beautiful clear water and the stunning rock formations. I think it was Phi Phi Island where other films have been shot – the Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun, being one. Sadly, our little group thought they were stuck on a deserted island where they could get no help. I kept wanting to shout out – just walk a mile in any direction and you are sure to run into hordes of sun baked red Europeans drinking beer in the bars.

The music comes from Anu Malik, one of the current day’s most prolific composers, and it is fine if nothing I need to hear again. The songs are placed well though so as not to interrupt the build up too much – my favorite being when they get to Thailand and see a sign advertising Punjabi Night at the local disco! I know that’s where I always am on Friday nights in Thailand!

Punjabi Night. Don’t miss it if you visit Thailand. Sorry - crummy quality.

My rating for this film: 6.5

There are three other films I just wanted to mention. One is another Euro Spy film but the other two are from those budget public domain DVDs. Those $5 DVDs are really nice treats – some truly obscure films that on occasion are good finds. Just take a look at the cover of Liane, Jungle Goddess and tell me if there is one guy out there who would not plunk down $5 to see what was inside! Made back in 1956 by a German production company and shot in both Africa and Germany, it stars Marion Michaels as a white girl discovered in the jungle by a safari headed by a young Hardy Kruger (who was later to star in some major Hollywood films such as Hatari, Flight of the Phoenix and A Bridge Too Far). Like good white Christian people, they can’t have a white girl living among the savages though she seems to be having the time of her life swinging on vines, climbing trees like a cat and having a baby tiger as a pet. So they take her back to Hamburg where they find out she is the heir to a fortune. Neat how that works out. But Marion Michaels is Nymphet squared – totally cute – a little Bardot in her pouty face and Wikipedia claims that she was only the second German actress to appear nude in a film. Though barely visible, she clearly is here beneath her long blonde hair, but what is even more peculiar for a 1956 film is that it opens with a tribal dance routine with all the female natives topless. It always amazed me how nothing risqué could be shown on TV back when I was growing up unless the subject was black and from Africa and then showing nudity was fine because they didn’t really count as people. Here in fact is a lobby card showing such. Any way the film is totally harmless and also co-stars cult icon Reggie Nalder as the villain. Marion was apparently jailbait at the time of the filming – 16 years old – but I had no idea so please don’t set the police on me. The most curious thing about her life though is that she defected to East Germany – not too common an occurrence I imagine. There were two sequels to this film and in 1996 there was also a TV film biography made about her life. She died in 2007.

The other bargain basement DVD was Shadows Over Shanghai. I buy anything with Shanghai in the title. It was made in 1938 and was for its time interestingly very anti-Japanese invasion of China. A few Americans are caught up in the Japanese occupation of Shanghai with lots of stock footage of the bombing of the city (or some city). They are looking for a way out with both the Japanese and a Russian agent trying to stop them from delivering the McGuffin to Chinatown in the USA. The only actor that I have heard of in the film is James Nolan who won a Supporting Actor award in the 1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ok - but not really recommended.

Before I get to the Euro Spy film, here is a Blog dedicated to spy movies and books. I like the looks of it and it mentions that the lovely Maggie Q is going to star in a TV La Femme Nikita series. I don’t know exactly why but that gets me a little bit excited. Good old Maggie Q.

A few posts back I made mention of the Euro spy series with Ken Clark starring as Agent 077. There is a third in the series and I watched it today – Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966) – and I’d say it is the best in the series – action from the get go when a nun brings back the clean laundry to two monks and whips out a machine gun and shoots them down – and Clark is much less smarmy than in the other two films. But best of all, the femme fatale is played by the willowy blonde Daniela Bianchi, not seen by me since the fade out in From Russian with Love. I am intrigued by some of the other titles in her filmography – The Tiger Likes Fresh Blood, Operation Gold, Requiem for a Secret Agent, Your Turn to Die, Dirty Heroes and Operation Double 007. She was the runner up to Miss World in 1960 but I don’t know if choosing these parts was a great career path. Anyway, as Lady Chaplin she is the number one killer for a wealthy industrialist with power ambitions and an arsenal of nuke missiles. She is very good and very ruthless at her job, but then she has never had to deal with the masculine charms of 077! Stopovers are in London, Madrid, New York and Paris.

All of the 077 films had those slightly overblown early Bond-like theme songs – this is the one from Special Mission Lady Chaplin, sung by Italian pop star Bobby Solo.

Another Hong Kong Soundtrack Sampling - Viva Erotica

2010-02-21T00:49:00.008-05:00

It has been a while since I put up a soundtrack so here is one from the Leslie Cheung/Hsu Chi/Karen Mok film Viva Erotica produced in 1996. That was when I saw it as well and so honestly I recall very little of the music except the rousing surf guitar piece that I think opened the film. The soundtrack CD has a mysterious 24 selections on it which confuses me a lot since the film could not have had that much music - so I think there may be music on the CD that is not in the film but I think the ones I have included were. I thought it was a clever film and a nice step upward for Hsu Chi to appear in an edgy somewhat arty film about a serious director being forced to make a Cat III film for money. Hsu Chi's Mango character is wonderfully vulnerable, ditzy and desirable. Here are six selections from the soundtrack. I'll keep it up here for a week or so and then move it to that other Blog where all the music is being stored by a friend.

The music has been moved here.

Wow - a new Hong Kong review site! I didn't think anyone was crazy enough to do that any more. It's like buying stock in suspenders. It looks like Bullets over Chinatown has been around for a few months but I am as always late to the party. Welcome. Any one who has the nerve to review The Mystery of the Big Boobs is alright by me!

I have continued my gentle tiptoeing through Euro genre films from the 1970's - this time into Italian crime films. Two US distributors - Blue Underground and No Shame - have picked up a number of these films and put out very fine DVD's and at least in my slim pickings so far, made good choices of films. The 1970's was a chaotic time in Italy where crime was an enormous problem - the USA was going through something similar - and this led to a lot of cops and robbers films about society trying to fight back - we had our Dirty Harry, Italy had their share of tough cinematic cops stomping on criminals as well. The production values of the films are topnotch - these are not cheapy knockoffs - with great stunts, loads of realistic shoot outs, frenetic chases on foot, car, motorcycle, helicoptor and even planes, funky music, fascinating location shooting and needless to say some beautiful actresses. Not knowing anything really, I have been very pleasantly surprised at how good these films are.

Heroin Busters (1977), directed by Enzo Castellari - is fairly conventional in plot terms as the police try to bust a heroin ring but it is well executed. David Hemmings (11 years after his classic Blowup) works for Interpol and is attempting to plant one of his men (Fabio Testi, an action star in Italy) undercover in the gang. Fast moving with a terrific ending that is a giant set piece as Fabio is chased by the gang all over town, in the Metro, in a historical site and on motorcycle. Excellent film. And it begins in Hong Kong! English soundtrack only.

The Trailer:

Gambling City (1975), directed by Sergio Martino - is a different kind of crime film, one without cops - just criminals of different shades. Luca (Luc Merenda) strolls into a posh illegal gambling casino in Milan and wins a bucket full of money with some slight of hand. The big boss of the casino notices this but instead of beating Luca up invites him to become one of his in-house gamblers - 10% to Luca, the rest to the house. Only one rule - don't lose. Luca doesn't lose at cards, but instead loses his head by seducing the boss's son's girlfriend (the astonishingly green-eyed and beautiful Dayle Haddon). This leads to all sorts of twists and a grand finale of a chase along the highway with the Mediterranean below. Again excellent. English and Italian soundtrack.

The Trailer:

Colt 38 Special Squad (1976), directed by Massimo Dallamano - is a suspenseful and frantic film with the cops looking for bombers. Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi, another stalwart in these kinds of films) becomes obsessed with tracking down a crime lord after he kills Vanni's wife in return for Vanni killing his brother. Vanni forms a special squad of tough guys who are allowed to use the Colt 38 and they are put to the test when the crime lord begins blowing up the city and promises to continue till he is paid off. Not a fat minute thrown in - the film is all business with hair breath chases and shoot outs. Oh, and Grace Jones pops in to sing a song at a nightclub! English and Italian soundtrack.

The Trailer:

Street Law (1974), directed by Enzo Castellari - has a great reputation on the Internet from what I read but was actually my least favorite of these and brought on some impatience on my part. But I admit it was shallow of me - I was looking for a Death Wish knockoff (as the DVD hints at) but actually got a more layered and realistic story. It begins with a bang - a lot of bangs - as we witness Italy falling into a crime state with robberies and murders becoming a daily diet. Carlo (Franco Nero, an action icon in both crime films and westerns) is taken hostage during a bank robbery and afterwards swears revenge. He sets out to get it by tracking the robbers down even though his girlfriend (Barbara Bach in a pretty bland role) begs him not to. But every time Carlo comes face to face with violence he shies off - at times actually cowering - realistic probably but not what I was looking for in an action revenge film. English soundtrack only.

The Trailer:

Bollywood Horror on the Loose

2010-02-19T22:44:00.004-05:00

I guess it is time to actually watch a few Bollywood films and not just put up pictures of their actresses! I almost always enjoy a Bollywood film once I actually start to view it, but I often find it hard to motivate myself to do so. I think it’s simply the length that puts me off. I can watch one Bollywood DVD or two from practically anywhere else – or as of late five episodes of Peter Gunn. But as I mentioned, once begun I usually am glad I did so. That was certainly the case with this film that I must have bought strictly by the cover because I don’t recall reading about it anywhere and it doesn’t really have any of my favorite actors. It is an old fashioned horror film from 1980. For the most part mainstream Bollywood has stayed clear of horror films with a few exceptions - though recently the industry has begun to broaden its genre taste to include a little sci-fi and a few horror films.

In particular, Ram Gopal Varma has tried a few times to give the horror genre a kick start but without a lot of success. This isn’t to say that horror films don’t exist in India – they do but they come from niche players like the Ramsey Brothers who have been producing low budget scares for a few decades. Some of their films have been packaged and distributed by Mondo Macabre, but that sort of thing isn’t really up my alley. But after enjoying Phir Wahi Raat, I looked through my collection and came across a couple other films that fall ever so gently into the horror bucket and I expect to watch them over the next week or two.

But before the horror, a little happiness. A few years back I reviewed a Shammi Kapoor film titled Jaanwar that was light and fluffy just the way I like my Shammi films. There was one dance number in particular that I loved for its obvious Beatle influence, for the way it continues to rev up the speed and the rapid head shaking, for the way a 34 year old Shammi plays a college student dancing like a fool and for the way Rajshree tries to shimmy in that tight gold lamé dress. I came across it on Youtube the other night and as always it brought a big fat smile to my face.

As did these two Bollywood photo sites.

Indian Vintage Actress Photos

3rd Floor Bollywood Album Covers

Phir Wahi Raat
Director: Danny Denzongpa
Year: 1980
Duration: 145 minutes

Danny Denzongpa, who was one of Bollywood’s best known acting villains, tries his hand at directing for the first (and I believe last) time and perhaps to be in tune with his creepy screen image, he creates a spooky tale of madness, murder and mystery. The few mainstream horror films that came out of Bollywood in this period are by comparison to horror films from other countries very low key conservative affairs, as is this one. There is no splattering of blood or ravaging of female flesh – just atmospherics, a lot of fog and an eerie suspenseful soundtrack from R.D. Burman – but it works reasonably well. Think more Rebecca than Freddie Kruger.

Perhaps one reason that horror has made such a small impact in Bollywood is that taking a break from the narrative for a musical number is not only incongruous but also a death blow to the mood that has been built up, but here that isn’t really too much of an issue as most of the songs come early in the film and one is used very effectively to produce mood. What the film unfortunately is unable to withstand though is another Bollywood convention – the dreaded comic relief. The first half of the film is pure story – a slow build to possible insanity or mischief – and much of the second is an o.k. reveal – but for some reason Denzongpa decides to throw in an over acting comedian named Jagdeep who on his own comes within an inch of destroying the film and certainly hands it a deep wound. Watching this guy with his bug eyes and frenzied gesticulations for an extended period of time could make a blood vessel burst. What on earth was Denzongpa thinking? Was cheap comic relief such a convention that to ignore it was considered box office poison? The one positive thing I can say about modern Bollywood films is that to a large degree these comic relief actors (and there were a lot of them) seem to have faded from sight.

Asha (who goes only by the name of Kim and who gained some cult fame two years after this in a film called Disco Dancer!) is having bad dreams at night. Scream inducing dreams. In them she is locked in a room in the cellar and her crazy aunt is trying to strangle her. Night after night. Not all that surprising in that as a little girl Asha witnessed this aunt murdering her mother and has never gotten over it. The aunt died in an insane asylum, but she is alive and well in Asha’s dreams. Her nightly screaming is getting on the nerves of her classmates at college and so along with her friend Shobha (even with pigtails, a 28-year old Aruna Irani looks a bit too mature to play a student) go visit the neighborhood psychiatrist, Dr. Vijay (a slightly plumpish Rajeesh Khanna past his idol popularity stage). As soon as the door closes, Doctor and patient run into each other’s arms and I fully expected them to burst into song. They didn’t. I could have used a song but instead Dr. Vijay uses the latest psycho babble technology to delve into Asha’s troubled mind by placing an electronic device around her head that soothes and hypnotizes her. He says “Tell me every single detail of your childhood” and I thought to myself – this could be a very long movie – but fortunately she skips right to the good part - the murder in the family mansion on a dark and stormy night years ago. None of this really seems to help Asha much but he also gives her a nice hug.

The college soon boot both Asha and Shobha out of school for breaking the rules and so where does the good Dr. Vijay suggest they go – of course – to her family home in the middle of no where and where the wind blows like a banshee, the curtains kick up a storm, the chandelier shakes, rattles and rolls, wolves howl and the caretaker and his hot daughter, Gauri, talk of ghosts and look highly suspect. What good therapy! The horror follows her – or maybe it was just waiting – but lamenting songs play across the wind, broken windows shatter her nerves and a hideously scarred woman walks the hallway at night. No one says it out loud but everyone is wondering - is Asha going crazy like her aunt. Then Jadeep comes crawling out of a dingy comic hole and you want to shoot him – but the film is saved near the end by a crazy over the top ridiculous action scene and a guy wildly swinging a revengeful black cat by the tail. Two thirds of a good movie. The six songs by Burman are serviceable but not all that memorable – one has a nice Spanish trumpet introducing it – but what Burman does really effectively here is the background music – constantly changing and mood inducing. The playback singers are the usual Burman crew of Asha, Lata, Kishore and Mohd. Rafi – the best in the business.

My rating for this film: 6.5

Here are two of the songs on Youtube. Nothing to get overly excited about, but why not. In the first Rajeesh shows us some safe driving tips and in the second there is some truly bad and weird camera work going on.

The Return of the Perils of Pauline

2010-02-17T20:28:00.002-05:00

I have been spending so much time looking at naked women in order to see these Pauline Chan DVDs that I feel like I need to confess my sins. Is there a Blog confessional that I can visit? Pauline’s breasts by now are basically imprinted on my soft and mushy brain. But as I said to YTSL, some one has to do the dirty work and it may as well be me. At my age how much damage can it really do? I am confident my neck twitch will go away soon though I am not so sure about the stammer I have acquired. And I think I probably had this heart murmur already. Though the Cat III films of the early 1990's are not mentioned in polite company any more, in their squalid way they too are a part of the legacy that was once the most exciting film industry in the world. They should not be forgotten. Anyway, if you dare - three more from Pauline Chan.

Erotic Ghost Story III
Director: Ivan Lai
Year: 1992

As in her life, Pauline Chan had so few happy endings in her films. If she played a prostitute as she did so many times, she usually came to a bad end. If she played a villain or a witch she always got her just desserts. If she played an avenging sister, she still came up short. Maybe she had her fate written on her face. It was a sensuous yet slightly libidinous and scornful face that would always end up on the wrong side of the tracks. It was the kind of face that men might lust after, but rarely love. So it was nice for once to see Pauline Chan smiling at the end of this film – having sex sure – naked, of course - but still smiling.

This is the third in this film series dealing with the supernatural and sex and sometimes supernatural sex. The first two films had some connection but this one seems to be unconnected to those – more along the lines of Chinese Ghost Story but with a lot more writhing and moaning. What all three films share are solid production values and a story of good vs. evil in the supernatural world that spills over into the real world. Chu Chung (Cheung Ging-fa) is wandering the land with his betrothed (his family’s choice, not his) following him in men’s garb wherever he goes. It appears that he is doing his best to escape marriage and his family, but he has to come to her aid when a group of men realize that she is in fact a she and attempt to rape her. The two of them find refuge in an old forlorn and forsaken temple where they find a miniature monk (Shing Fui-on) trying not to become a dog’s dinner. They save him and help restore him to normal size. The woman Hsia-hui (Chik King-man) goes off to take a bath making most male viewers wonder to themselves – why on earth is he trying to run away from those – I mean from her.

Inside the temple Chu spots a painting of a woman on the wall and is instantly smitten. No, this is not a remake of Laura – not even close. The monk – Reverend Wick – tells him that the girl in the painting is in a way station between heaven and hell and he can help Chu get there but that he must be back before the incense burns out or he will be stuck for eternity. Sure why not. Inside he finds a glamorous setting – a sexual Disney Land with dwarves and nightly entertainment included. Everyone is getting it on and eternity doesn’t seem like long enough, especially when he meets the lady in the painting – I-Meng (Pauline) who beds him faster than a meal at Burger King. But like Disney Land there is a dark side beneath all the frivolity – her Ladyship (Otomo Rena) who wants to get the power to break out of this place and conquer the world. And Chu is just a mere pawn in her terrifying hunger for power - and the meat of her enemies. At one point to weaken her Ladyship, Reverand Wink does a Fantastic Voyage by getting small and going up her um um you know um. Oh, never mind. For this sort of film, this is highbrow stuff – every one glistens and shines – the colors are bright and cheery – and with Phillip Kwok doing the action choreography the fighting and wirework is better than one might expect in a film that is primarily a sexual romp.

My rating for this film: 6.0

Escape from Brothel
Director: Johnny Wang
Year: 1992

To be honest Escape from Brothel is a bit of a schizophrenic hoot that I enjoyed quite a bit. It jumps around from sex exploitation film to slapstick comedy to melodrama to sadistic violence to brutal action like a freewheeling pinball with no rhythm or reason. One minute a transvestite peeper in the women’s locker room, the next hung up like a piece of meat and being strangled. You try not to think about it too much and just go along with the ride. Director Johnny Wang is best known as an action actor, showing up in loads of Shaw Brother films, almost always as the heavy, but I notice in looking at his small filmography as a director that he was behind two other low budget action films that I quite enjoyed – Widow Warriors and The Innocent Interloper. So even though Escape from Brothel is known primarily as a Cat III bump and grind show, the action is very solid and very rough. As is the sex now that I think about it.

Pauline Chan doesn’t even get through the opening credits before she has to show her money makers to the audience and the same goes for her co-actress Murakami Rena who stares at her nude reflection in a mirror in the same way I look through a window at an Indian buffet – with pure delight. Hung (Pauline) and Ann (Rena) are practitioners of the noble art of making a man happy – in other words prostitutes. They work for Mama Suzi (veteran actress Pak Yan) who introduces them to Mr. Chou (Stuart Ong) one night as an airline hostess and a secretary who need a little spare cash. He happily obliges and takes them both for the Charlie Sheen like price of HKD 50,000. He brings along a sex book so that he doesn’t forget what to do – sort of like Sarah Palin having to write “Energy” on her hand so she won’t forget what she is supposed to say – a cheat sheet of sorts. Among his bag of tricks is the “Pushing 2 Carts” position followed by “Graceful Ladies Sitting Like Buddha” and finally “Hero Raising Arms to Drum” Exhausting work for all. Later when he realizes that the two girls are just ordinary low paid working girls, he reaps his revenge by having the two girls work each other over with a baseball bat – internally if you get my drift.

Hung has a boyfriend Sam (Alex Fong) back in the Mainland who has no idea what she is doing – but this changes when he is tricked by some friends to sneak into Hong Kong and participate in a phony robbery/insurance scam. Everything goes wrong though with a foreigner being killed and Sam on the run – not just from the cops but also from Billy Ho (Billy Chow) who set the whole thing up and now wants to clean up the entire mess. We were earlier introduced to Billy in one of Hong Kong’s more infamous action scenes. He is in bed with Sophia Crawford (one of the gwielo action actresses who came to HK in the 80’s and 90’s for work) when her “husband” and a friend come in and demand payment. Not from Billy Chow – one of the really terrific underrated action figures of this period – he demolishes the two men and then has to deal with a nude leg kicking Sophia. I wish I had been a fly on the wall for that scene. Sam shows up at Hung’s apartment and hides in the closet only to realize very quickly what his girlfriend does for a living – in the most graphic of ways – but Billy tracks him down leading to a simply splendid furious final fifteen minutes of pounding, gutting, burning, falling and more pounding. Good to the last drop.

My rating for this film: 7.0

A Man of Nasty Spirit
Director: Jeng Wai-lung
Year: 1993

You know that a film is confused when Pauline Chan is the only person who keeps their clothes on and when actor Dennis Tang plays the good guy. Having Pauline stay fully attired in a Cat III film goes against the grain of common decency – that is why we are here. It is like going to a Clapton concert to listen to the bass player. And Dennis Tang always plays the bad guy in films; either a Triad snake or as in Behind the Pink Door, a sleazy rapist. This film made little sense in general but this role playing switch threw things into total confusion for me. There is really nothing much that comes to mind to recommend this film to anyone who has a life – fortunately I don’t so I plodded along till the end. There is a fair amount of sex but its so low budget all they could afford were women with small bosoms! They must charge by the ounce over there. Here is the plot as best as I could figure it out.

The maniacal Pope is the head of the Happy Religion. In truth though only he, his henchwoman (Lau Hoh-man) and his two henchmen seem to be happy because they are having sex most of the time. As part of the sex ritual, the henchwoman does a nude snake dance that was not quite up to the standards set by Waheeda Rehman in the film Guide. The other followers don’t look all that happy at all, but this being a cult they still follow the orders of the Pope. There is some nonsense at the beginning of the film where the Pope steals the top half of a book that will give him immense powers, but the bottom half of the book is retained by Dr Yue (Jack Lung) who then writes it in with invisible ink on the back of his master’s little girl, Bao. Later Bao is kidnapped by Pope and taught by him to fight and fly and is kept a virgin in case of emergency. But he is unaware that her back contains the secret for world domination because it is invisible of course!

You see Pope has a little vitamin deficiency. If he doesn’t have sex with a virgin every full moon he will age rapidly and die. The nearest village has to provide these girls but they are running low. When the Pope has sex with them, he transfers all their life force to him – leaving them dead of course but he is revitalized and always gives a cheer like a college frat boy in his first drinking contest. One such virgin has been chosen but the night before her rendezvous with destiny, her boyfriend comes to her and says he wants to die too, but she says well since I am going to lose my life tomorrow why don’t we do it – and he sensibly says “ok. That would be better than me dying”. So Pope gets spoiled goods – where is the Consumer Protection Agency when you need them – and has to take one of his stocked virgins instead. Ok – so where are Pauline and Dennis in all of this you may wisely ask. Pope has an inner evil woman and every now and then he manifests himself as a female – Pauline, who for reasons known only to herself dresses like a British Magistrate or Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge. Dennis just shows up and falls for Bao (Chan Choi-lan), who has grown up to be quite the poppy strumpet and has big goo-goo eyes for Dennis. This is probably not a film that anyone involved chose to include on their resume.

My rating for this film: 3.0

Pauline Chan

2010-02-14T19:27:00.004-05:00

Happy Chinese New Year! What could be less appropriate than a write-up on Pauline Chan in celebration! But nevertheless, here it is.

Whether Pauline Chan was ground down like processed meat by the Cat. III industry or was always ready to crack like a cement sidewalk is difficult to know, but it’s hard to deny that towards the end of her life it completely spun out of control in a series of bizarre episodes, drugs and self-immolation. Born in Shanghai in 1973, she moved to Hong Kong along with her mother in 1985. First she entered modeling at the young age of fifteen and in 1990 tried to gain her fame in the well-tested path of beauty pageants by getting into the Miss Asian Pageant. Next step, acting. Of a sorts. First she appeared as a TV hostess on a Mahjong quiz show on ATV though apparently she didn't have a clue how to play. But then right out of the shoot, Pauline was all about being in Cat III films and with her provocative body and her cruel sensuous mouth she was a natural. In 1992 and 1993 she bounced from one Cat III film to another and her comely breasts became as common a sight as the Peak Tram. Between these films though, she also became popular enough to land some juicy roles in non-Cat III films – the wonderfully loony Flying Dagger, an assassin with a flame thrower bra in Stephen Chow’s From Beijing with Love or as a degraded prostitute in Girls without Tomorrow. She was only 18 years old when she began in films, but right from the get go she looked older than her years with oodles of experience, cynicism and toughness etched into her face.

But as her Cat III career wound down partially to guys moving on to newer breasts in the business and to the fact that the Cat III genre began to fall out of fashion, she got fewer and fewer roles. So what does a HK actress do when her career begins ebbing – find a sugar daddy of course and Pauline found a wealthy one in the form of a much older Taiwanese tycoon. After that relationship ended in 1997, Pauline just seemed to lose it and her behavior became more and more suspect – beating up people, taking her clothes off in public and trying to kill herself during an interview. Then in the midst of all this she had a baby of all things – it was too much and within a month of the baby’s birth Pauline jumped from the 24th floor of her hotel – ending her life where it began – in Shanghai in 2002.

I only have a few pictures of her. I wish my photo dealer would supply me with more because though I don’t really find her attractive, I do find her compelling in a weird tragic way.

Picts

Much to my surprise I found that I had nine of her films in my collection that I had never watched. I just don't know if I am more surprised that I have them or that I haven't watched them! After watching seven of them my head began to spin and I had trouble remembering what month this was, so I stopped. Here are reviews on four of them – the rest to follow when the Moon Goddess rises in the East.

Behind the Pink Door
Director: Lam Gam-fung
Year: 1992

This is one of the more tepid rape/revenge films that I have ever come across. That sub-genre of revenge films has certain rules that you have to follow – horrible victimization followed eventually by gut wrenching cathartic satisfaction at the fate of the rapist or rapists. This film leaves the viewer on a totally downbeat anti-climatic ending that puts forth the moral position that you should not take the law into your own hands no matter what. What the hell. No, not in these kinds of films – that is the entire purpose of their existence – that sometimes you have no moral choice except to reap revenge. Of course that isn’t the only reason for this film to have been produced. The other one is nudity and sex and on that front this film delivers in spades with numerous sexual trysts occurring that often have nothing to do with the narrative. Just good old fashioned exploitation. Nothing wrong with that of course but as a warning the sex is squalid, rough and rather wretched.

Lyon (Matsukaka Hiroko) is driving home one evening when her car breaks down on a deserted road and she looks for help. This being Hong Kong of course the first car that drives by is full of leering men who take her to the side of the road and rape her. She calls her boyfriend (Alex Fong) and her sister Wella (Pauline Chan) to come get her and wants to initially go to the police. But her boyfriend Chin is a cop and thinks it will look bad that as a cop he could not protect his girlfriend and so he says he will take care of things. Lyon discovers that she has caught a venereal disease but unlike Pauline Wong in Her Vengeance or Chen Ping in The Kiss of Death who grab revenge like a strangled chicken, she just kills herself.

Since Chin knows by this time who was behind her rape, you would think this would send him off in a killing fury, but he wants to jail them for some of their other illegal activities and bides his time like a two-bit Hamlet. It is up to Wella (a bar hostess who is rightfully assigned to the “Big Bust” group!), to set the spider sex web for her sisters rapists. But after so much trashy exploitation, you might be expecting a snap crackle pop ending but for whatever reason the filmmakers go soft just when they needed to go for the jugular. This was one of Pauline’s first films in the business and there are a few nice close-ups of her face and of course the required gaze at her breasts. Alex Fong had already been acting for about five years, but I have to say this is some ghastly acting here on his part – it wasn’t really for another few years till he was able to bring some substance to a role.

My rating for this film: 4.5

The Girls from China
Director: Barry Lee Ying-yok
1992

Hong Kong is a tough place to crack. Like New York City, if you can make it in Hong Kong you can make it anywhere. This is especially the case if you are a young innocent school girl coming from the Mainland to make a go of it. And even more so if you happen to be endowed like a piñata at a sweet sixteen birthday and the target of every lustful man in the city. Chow Ying (Isabelle Chow) arrives in Hong Kong by train from Beijing (to the tuneful ditty of “I Was Born in Beijing”) with stars in her eyes and optimism in her heart. She is going to stay with her Grand Uncle – but within a few days all her dreams are debris along the road – they have porno sitting in her room to watch (not that she seems to mind actually), one of her relatives is having sex by the poolside, another relative tries to molest her, she moves out to a small apartment where a tenant peeps on her in the communal shower, in a store where she finds work the manager (Leung Gam-san) tries to rape her and when that doesn’t work she is framed for theft and fired. Ya, Hong Kong is a tough town. But the tough bounce back.

Chow Ying finds a port of call with a sympathetic male friend but he is just a psycho in waiting and has a nasty habit of secretly videotaping his bed time reading. He tells Ying that she is his forever and can never leave – just the words she needs to hear . . . to get the hell out as quickly and quietly as she can. From here though it is all up – she gets a job as an insurance saleswoman but is unable to sell a single policy until she runs into an acquaintance from her home town – Fung (Pauline Chan) who seems to have made a success of it in Hong Kong. How? The old fashioned way – she “makes use of my gifted body” but she tells Ying not to get the wrong idea – she is no prostitute because she only keeps company twice a night! Interesting distinction. But she gives Ying good advice – if you want to sell, use your sex appeal and soon Ying is going up in the top of the insurance pops. But that is chicken feed compared to how she does when she meets an old customer (Leung Hah-shun) from her first job – an elderly man that none of the other clerks would help and she did – he turns out to remember her and to be head of a giant conglomerate and within two minutes of meeting her switches all the company’s insurance needs over to her. And she turns her body over to him. Complications ensue – but where there is a will there is a way to deal with old blackmailing boyfriends.

The only real reason to watch this film is to drool at the delights of Isabelle Chow, but it’s a darn good reason. She is a knockout. She has a beautiful clean cut impish face and a body that as the saying goes “dreams are made of”. And she shows lots of it. She first gained some Cat III notoriety with Sex and Zen in 1991 alongside a woman and a lucky flute and then appeared in a few other Cat III films – a couple non-Cat III films – and disappeared from the film scene. It is all mystifying. Why did she get into Cat III films and where did she go so quickly? My guess is she found a husband, but I can’t find out anything substantial about her on the Internet, so if any one knows let me know. And just for strictly information purposes, Pauline’s role is fairly small with only one quick jump in bed scene where her assets are momentarily visible.

My rating for this film: 5.0

Slave of the Sword
Director: Chu Yen-ping
Year: 1993

For the first fifteen minutes of Slave of the Sword one might easily be under the impression that they were watching your basic traditional early-90’s wuxia – people floating in the air, a symphony of clashing swords, bottles of spurting blood, heads being sent off in different directions than the bodies, cold blooded assassins waiting for their payment, an evil white-haired eunuch with a wicked laugh and so on. Then suddenly you are faced with a naked female nipple being imbibed upon by said assassin and not long afterwards Pauline Chan is unceremoniously rolled out naked from a carpet to a room full of waiting courtesans who inspect her body and pronounce it ready for consumption. Perhaps, this isn’t exactly your traditional wuxia.

But then this isn’t your traditional director. This is Chu Yen-ping, the mastermind behind such delights as Golden Queen Commandos, Pink Force Commando, Seven Foxes and Fantasy Mission Force. Chu Yen-ping is probably responsible for the acting nadir of more actors than the plague – Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh and Jackie Chan being the most famous – but in truth even if they were forced to work for Chu due to pressure brought on by scowling men with tattoos, aren’t we rather glad they did? His films are often such incompetent, incontinent messes that they are sometimes glorious. Sadly, that isn’t really the case here. The film almost makes sense and that is usually a bad sign for Chu’s films and it is lacking in his typical excesses such as Brigitte Lin attaching a machine gun to her amputated arm. That was a movie moment to cherish. Slave of the Sword is more of a Freudian examination of children working out their desertion anxieties as adults – with swords, poison, throttling and ripping out of tongues. All covered in Psych 101.

Brother Yun (Jackson Lau) and Sister Hon (Joyce Ngai) are paid assassins – give them payment and they will kill anyone and bring back their head as proof. In their spare time they like to lick each other’s wounds and other parts of each other’s anatomy. Their pay master is Eunuch Li (Max Mok) who has a lot of enemies out there and wants them all dead. One of them is the father of Wu Nien (Pauline Chan), who puts on a nice dance show in taverns around the countryside at 7, 9 and 11 pm. Reservations not needed. Why the old father of a tavern entertainer is killed is a mystery but it sets Wu Nien on a rapid descent into rags and a dirty face – but then she is kidnapped and sold to the local Madam – also our Sister Hon who is clearly a multi-tasker. The film quickly devolves into a pale imitation of Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan as Wu Nien goes from victim to victimizer as she cuddles up with Sister Hon much to the displeasure of Sister Hon’s former lesbian lover. It is slowly revealed that all the main characters are tied together by childhood and all of them are still really pissed.

My rating for this film: 5.0

Hunting Evil Spirit
Director: Fong Yuen-shing/Fong Yau
Year: 1999

The women who entered the Cat III film industry did it for their own reasons and on their own volition, but even so there are times when you have to feel awfully sorry for them. Sure, getting naked is part of the business and you have to expect a bit of pretend torture, a bit of embarrassment, some tomfoolery and of course a fair amount of simulated foreplay and sex – but still, there should be limits to any one’s endurance. And that should be having to get naked and entwined with Charlie Cho. Cho was practically an institution in these types of films from the 1980’s through the 90’s – his leering lip licking smile is almost as much a Hong Kong landmark as the Convention Center. How this came about I can’t imagine but if the Book of Guinness Records has a stat for simulated sex in movies, Charlie Cho’s name would have to be there (unless Elvis Tsui beat him out by a whisker) beside it. Cho is the kind of guy you would avoid sitting next to on the subway and if for some reason you had to then you would want a long shower as soon as you got home. Not that he is an ugly fellow – he just gives off such sweaty hentai vibes that you just want to look at him out of the side of your eye. No doubt, as I have heard about Elvis, in real life he is probably a wonderful guy with a loving family but I sure would not accept an invitation to dinner at his house.

In Hunting Evil Spirit, lucky Charlie gets down and dirty with three different actresses – in one instance for a really lengthy and graphic grappling that had me reaching for the fast forward button. He was not shy, nor was she. Maybe she is Mrs. Cho. He plays Mr. Chen, an owner of a swimsuit and underwear manufacturing company and he makes good use of the models that parade about – but his true passion is Pauline (Pauline Chan) one of his designers. She has a boyfriend though and wants nothing to do with Charlie and this frustrates him so much that he naturally turns to a Taoist priest to aid him in his time of need – “I want to fever” he tells the priest who goes by the apt name of Black Magic (Fong Yau, who also gets co-directing credit if the word credit can be used here). No problem – fever you will – and he sends Chen’s spirit off to rape Pauline – who thinking this must be a dream, enjoys the experience more than one would hope.

Later though she begins to worry – could this have been a supernatural experience and so fortunately her boyfriend (Andy Dai) has a female cousin who is a witch. Don’t we all. Suchi (Otomo Rena) has an ever more powerful witch sister (Alvina Kong) named East Evil (which sounds like a bad business decision – would you go see a witch with the word “evil” attached to her?) but she is in Thailand getting a remedial course after Black Magic bested her in an earlier encounter. Mr. Chen wants more of course and so the two wizards battle for the possession of Pauline’s body but then Black Magic throws in the Blood Spell and all bets are off. Lots of nudity and cheap special effects are on hand – the only really magical thing we witness are Pauline’s supernatural breasts in a shower scene (among others) – where oddly she keeps her panties on – maybe something she picked up from a Harry Potter book to ward off evil spirits?

My rating for this film: 4.0

The Last of the Bollywood Dream Babes

2010-02-10T17:27:00.001-05:00

Snow finally comes to NYC! There has been a ton of it to the south of us and a ton of it to the north of us but we are finally getting a little bit today. It looks so pretty. For another few hours anyways.

Well, I am down to my last few pictures from the gossip magazines. There were none in them of Rani for some reason - she seems to avoid the cameras better than most - so sorry for that.

Priyanka Chopra has pretty much everything going for her - looks, personality, smarts and good timing. She jumped in along with Lara Dutta to fill a void as a number of other actresses either retired or got too old to play college girls - in BW guys can continue playing college students well into their 30's while most of the women have to stop around 30. Sometimes it gets a little silly. Priyanka (a former Miss World) and Lara (a former Miss Universe) duked it out for a while but Priyanka seems to have come out on top. Lara used to live right here in NYC (and dated Derek Jeter) for a while before she went back to give Bollywood a go. A friend used to know her slightly and have lunch with her on occassion - said she ate like a horse - but I just want to know why I wasn't invited! You don't think she would have preferred me to Jeter? Four pictures first from Priyanka and two from Lara.

Here the two of them battle for the love of Akshay Kumar in Andaaz. Poor guy.

Neha Dhupia is another Beauty contestant winner - a worrysome trend that so many of the new actresses come through either that route or through modeling - you get the looks certainly but not necessarily the acting talent. Neha isn't bad really and is very charming - but my favorite film of hers was actually a Japanese one called Natu Odoru Ninja Densetsu that starred the Japanese comedy group UriNari (which included Vivian Hsu) and the film also had Yukari Oshima as well. I didn't see it but apparently she was in the Chris Kattan show called "Bollywood Hero".

Yikes, another Bollywood star kid - Sonam Kapoor - this one being the daughter of Anil Kapoor and the niece of producer Boney Kapoor and actor Sanjay Kapoor - and let's not forget the niece to Sridevi! That is called an In. You just tell us what movie you want to debut in. She has won a bunch of Newcommer type awards already.

And the final entry in the Bollywood Babes Sweepstakes is the lovely and demure Vidya Balan. Though fairly new to the scene - her Hindi Debut was in 2005 - Vidya seems to be an old fashioned type of actress - a throwback to the 60's in that she looks best in a sari and prefers not to reveal a lot of flesh - the good girl of Bollywood.

Here she is with Saif Ali Khan in her Award winning debut Parineeta.

One side note regarding that film Deadlier Than the Male - the penny finally dropped last night - duh - this was an update on good old Bulldog Drummond. Bulldog Drummond was a series of novels written by Herman Cyril McNeile back in the 1920's and 1930's portraying the adventures of Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, who is independently wealthy enough to spend his time going after criminals. In the first four novels Drummond's main adversary is named Carl Peterson - the name of the bad guy in Deadlier Than the Male and one of the later book titles is The Female of the Species about a female killer looking for revenge against Drummond.

Drummond has been portrayed by various actors since the silent days - Ronald Coleman two times, Ray Milland one time (before he hit it big), Ralph Richardson, Tom Conway (brother of George Sanders and who had his own film series, The Falcon), Walter Pidgeon and finally Richard Johnson who seems to have been the last Drummond thus far. But the most famous Drummond was played by John Howard in seven films from 1937 - 1939. And co-incidentally it turns out that I had three of the old Bulldog films - all cheapies on public domain DVDs - the one with Milland and two of Howards. Watched them last night. All come in at around an hour duration and are not bad at all. Milland is a bit too maniacal in his approach but Howard gets just the right tone. Some fine co-stars show up as well - John Barrymore, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish and two regulars - Drummond's butler is the wonderful E.E. Clive and his best friend is the dithering Reginald Denny. Enjoyable little treats for $5.

Bolly Babes Continued and More (or less)

2010-02-09T16:25:00.002-05:00

Word for the Day - purblind - which I came across in a Saint short story - as in "fit to govern this purblind country". I like the sound of this word but doubt if I will ever get it into a conversation and if I did people would just give me a puzzled look. Meaning - 1) having poor vision or nearly blind, 2) slow in understanding, dull.

Get your disco dancing shoes back on! Three Bollywood disco songs all sung by the great Nazia Hassan. Nazia was born in my first stomping ground - Karachi, Pakistan in 1965 and was first discovered by actor Feroz Khan for his film Qurbani. She was fifteen years old at the time and sang Aap Jaisa Koi, which was picturized in the film by Zeenat Aman. The song and film were big hits. In the same year she sang for a film that was all disco - Disco Diwane - and the title song was an even bigger hit in the disco crazy country. Two years later she sang in Star and had a hit with Boom Boom. Interestingly, her brother Zoheb Hassan sang the male vocals for Star and Disco Diwane. Sadly, Nazia died in 2000, leaving behind quite a legacy of music but also of spending much of her time helping poor children all over the world.

Not that anyone has seemed particularly interested in these Bollywood actresses, but one of the really nice things about getting into Bollywood films and the personalities that surround it is that there is an enormous amount of information about them on the Internet - in English. After trying to diligently piece together information on Hong Kong stars for years with a snippet here and a sentence there - this is easy - most of the actors are on Wikipedia and current gossip about them is rampant on the Internet - and there are loads and loads of blogs about Bollywood - way more than on Hong Kong films. Check Beth Loves Bollywood for a great list of links. And now apparently, many of the actors have begun blogging and twittering themselves - so if you want to know what Amrita Rao had for breakfast you can do so!

If I was a betting man I would have lost a bundle on Katrina Kaif making it big in Bollywood. She showed up a few years back - half British, half Indian - not able to speak Hindi worth a damn - like an orphan in a storm. Her buoy was Salman Khan who grabbed her after his Aish fiasco and paraded her around Mumbai like a prize cocker spaniel. With his clout he was able to get his girlfriend into some films in which she looked quite awkward I thought and I figured she would be gone before my dinner was digested - but in fact she has become a big star with a number of box office successes. So I admit to knowing nothing. And she has thankfully outgrown Salman like a bad haircut and moved on. So good for her.

The best actress in India? Almost by universal accord it is Kokona Sen Sharma. She began her career in what is termed the "parallel cinema" of India - i.e. films with no musical numbers. You may know her for Amu, which had a small theatrical release in the states or Mr. and Mrs. Iyer which received huge accolades for its story about two people caught up in a Hindi-Muslim communal riot. But she made the move eventually to Bollywood films, while still keeping one foot outside in "parallel" films.

Most of you HK film fans must recall Mallika Sherawat for her short but memorable part in Jackie Chan's The Myth back a few years. At that time she was topic number one in the Bollywood rags, but they have moved on to some degree to new actresses coming down the turnpike. Whether deserved or not, Mallika got a reputation of being a cute nitwit who exposed much more cleavage than talent - but cleavage usually works for me.

Finally for today, another actress who is just on the scene who I know nothing about other than what I read on the Internet - she started off making films in the Tamil and Telugu industries before coming to Bollywood and having a big hit in an Aamir Khan produced film - Jaane Tu . . . Ya Jaane Na. I just like her waifish anime doll look - something you don't see a lot of in Bollywood.

Nothing much watched other than a Psycho film deja vu moment. Picked up the DVD with the 1937 and the 1952 versions of Prisoner of Zenda on it. The first one has the stronger cast - Ronald Coleman, Madeleine Carroll, David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith and a forbidding Raymond Massey (this guy is so dark and creepy sometimes that it amazes me what an incredible Abraham Lincoln he was) - and while the second is no slouch with Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Jane Greer and James Mason it doesn't feel quite on the same star power level.

But what is so weird about these films are they are really one film - only one is in color and has a taller leading man. It's the exact same film - the exact same script - the same everything. Talk about lazy and trying to cash in on a classic - because the first one is highly recommended if you haven't seen it - a true Hollywood classic adventure romance film that is dashing and heroic - that old fashioned stiff upper lip duty thing - a man has to do what a man has to do - and Coleman and Carroll send off real sparks. Coleman was a huge star back in the 1930's but seems largely forgotten these days - but I love his clipped British accent, his restrained acting style and a sense of real decency in films like Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, Random Harvest, The Talk of the Town and If I Were King.

More Bollywood Picts and Euro Spy Shenanigans

2010-02-07T18:05:00.002-05:00

Here is a factoid I was unaware of till last night. I began reading some of the short stories of The Saint written by Leslie Charteris back in the early 1930's. So I looked him up on Wiki and found out his real name was Leslie Charles Bowyer-yin, born in Singapore to a Chinese father and English mother. He later moved to the US but get this:

"However, Charteris was excluded from permanent residency in the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law which prohibited immigration for persons of "50% or greater" Oriental blood. As a result, Charteris was forced to continually renew his six-month temporary visitor's visa. Eventually, an act of Congress personally granted him and his daughter the right of permanent residence in the United States, with eligibility for naturalization which he later completed."

Not one of our proudest moments in history.

Here is the song for today. It is not exactly a classic and it's from a film that you probably want to keep your distance from - a 1985 Bollywood version of Tarzan - called in fact Tarzan! During this song Jane (actually Ruby) does everything in her bag of womanly tricks to let Tarzan know she is available to swing on his manly vine but he is oblivious to all her come-ons.

The pictorial line-up for today begins with the lolitaish Jiah Khan. She came to prominance as a discovery of director/producer Ram Gopal Varma, who does all those great crime films - kind of the Johnny To of India - but not quite as consistent. For many years Varma's muse was the wonderful Urmila and he starred her in many films - but at some pont they went their own ways and since then Varma has "discovered" a number of young starlets wanting to get into show business and he gladly showcases them, tries to be a Svengali character to them and then drops them and moves on to his next "discovery"- with all the gossip rags making it clear that the girls paid for their brief moment of fame with as much effort off stage as on. Jiah was one of those.

and just for the heck of it - Urmila who has gone on to do the finest acting of her career post-Varma.

An Urmila vs Jiah dance off.

Bollywood is legendary for having the children follow in the footsteps of their acting parents. It is almost expected of them - I think they already have a script ready for the not yet conceived children of Aishwarya and Abhishek Bachchan - and when their debut finally makes it to the screen the hype is totally nutty. One of these children of the Stars was Esha Deol - daughter of two legends - Hema Malini and Dharmendra. The expectations were gigantic and there was no way she could match them and most of her early films bombed. As time has gone by though I came to like her as her acting improved and she began looking better as the dream machine took over. Many actors in Bollywood are basically just thrown in to headlining films with zero acting experience or training due to family connections or looks - and they either sink or swim. She is still treading water.

Another child of a big star who is just about to make her bow is Sonakshi Sinha, the daughter of Shatrughan Sinha. Fortunately for her, she must take after her mother.

Her father:

As you no doubt know, India has a number of different film industries, the biggest and best known coming out of Mumbai formerly Bombay and so Bollywood. Down south there are other industries with their own actors, directors and language - and whenever an actor who has started down south comes to Bollywood to make their debut it is a big deal and the magazines are full of articles on whether they will make it - often with an underlying subtext that Bombay is where the big boys play. But many famous actresses took this path - Waheeda Rehman, Jaya Prada and Sridevi to name the ones I know. The latest is Asin, who was chosen by Amir Khan to star with him in Ghajini. It was a big success as his films tend to be and she is now on her way.

I watched a few more Euro Spy films yesterday, both from 1965. Agent 077 of the CIA. There were a series of three of these films starring Ken Clark, who interestingly is an American who appeared in Hollywood films like South Pacific and Attack of the Giant Leeches, but when he could not make it big he moved to Europe where he became a star of action films in the 1960's. This migration to Europe happened with a number of American actors - either former stars past their prime or young actors unable to hit it big in the USA. The most famous was of course Clint Eastwood who became such a big name after his Spaghetti Westerns that he was able to return to Hollywood and become what he is today.

Most of them though are like Clark who you never hear of again really if you are from here. These two films would be really terrific except for two big drawbacks - the dialogue is insufferable and Clark's character is constantly hitting on women in this really glib, I am too cool, manner that it is really off putting. That may have played well back in the 60's but now it seems so tiresome. The plots are ok - one of them a clear ripoff of Thunderball - but what makes them enjoyable is the action which for 1960 white man stuff is quite good and the location shooting is terrific as 077 whizzes around from Paris to Madrid to Athens to Istanbul - all cities I love. There is a great rooftop chase that takes place in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. And there is of course lots of the prerequisite eye-candy on hand in the form of lovely European actresses.

In From the Orient with a Fury a.k.a. Fury on the Bosphorus, Malloy (077) has to track down a scientist who has invented a ray gun that makes everything disappear. Girls pop up all along the way and in the end the cavalry in the form of the co-operative Turkish police save the day. In Mission Bloody Mary, a nuclear bomb is stolen and is being sold to the Chinese. Again many girls pop up along the way! Fun enough that I ordered the third in the series, Mission Lady Chaplin.

I am not sure if Deadlier than the Male (1966) would count as Euro Spy though it came out of England - written by Jimmy Sangster of Hammer fame - as it clearly has a Hollywood sheen to it and excellent production values. It is tough getting old - you forget things - like that I had already seen this film - which I realized as soon as Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina come out of the ocean in bikinis and shoot some fellow with a spear gun. They are assassins - part of a female union of assassins - but all reporting of course to a male, who remains in the shadows for much of the film. Richard Johnson who hits just the right notes in this, investigates. Colorful and fun.

Since I know of at least one person from Istanbul who reads this Blog, here are a few captures of Istanbul. In one you may notice the two posters in the background - always curious I Googled them - Safiye Filiz was a Turkish actress and Zennube seems to have either been a 1965 Turkish film or a song.

And just because this is my Blog - here are two photos I took in Istanbul some ten years ago. It is an amazing city to wander around in. Highly recommended as a place you get to some day.

and two from my father circa 1966

More of the Same

2010-02-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

Just killing time and some more Cyber space.

Tragically, India had its disco era as well - I guess there was no escape from this - but some of the music and movies that disco influenced are a lot of fun. The most famous is Disco Dancer - a total hoot if ever there was one. Not to be missed by man, plant or animal. Here is the disco anthem that I dance to before going to sleep at night - I am a Disco Dancer.

And here are a few more Bollywood actresses who are hitting the silver screen these days.

Bipasha Basu almost singlehandedly brought steamy sex back to Bollywood a few years ago. During the 1990's Bollywood had gone very family oriented, but Bipasha was able to turn that on its head - sometimes playing the heroine and sometimes the villain. Many have followed in her lustful footsteps since.

Mugdha Godse is very new to the scene but made a big splash in last year's film, Fashion. A film which Beth Loves Bollywood has these kind words to say about "Fashion is among the worst films I have ever seen, any language, any culture, any decade, whatever. It's dreadful". Sadly, I already own it and I can't decide if that review makes me want to see it less or see it more!

Preity Zinta is just a doll - giant dimples you could fall into and a sparkling personality that shows up on screen. She also was one of the few gutsy actors who stood up and spoke out against the crime gangs who were trying to infiltrate the industry. I first crossed paths with her in Dil Se and I was mystified that Shahrukh turns her down to date a terrorist - but I guess eveyone has different taste.

Here is a cute video of her from the film Soldier, in which she falls unknowingly for an assassin. The dating scene is getting very difficult these days.

Another new face on the Bollywood scene is Neetu Chandra who has gotten the right wingers in India raging against her for doing a few risque photo shoots - one intertwined with another woman. But I would not say anything to her face as she has represented India in the International Taekwondo Championship. I say get her over to Hong Kong where she will be appreciated.

On to a few YouTube videos I tripped on yesterday. I have always had a weakness for the girl groups of the 1950's and 1960's - The Chiffons, The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Shangri-las - lovely harmonic vocals about broken hearts and newfound love. But now I realize that there were Japanese girl groups as well and I am totally torn between joining the fan club for the Triangles or the fan club for the Candies. I feel all a dither!

The Triangles:

or The Candies.

Still Cruising on Empty

2010-02-05T17:52:00.003-05:00

So yesterday I go into a local barbershop for a well-needed haircut and all three of the Russian barbers are glued to the TV set watching Ong Bak 2. In Thai with English subs. Cool. I am impressed - Thai film and Tony Jaa are actually reaching an audience here. Then we start talking about the film and one of them goes "those Chinese sure can fight". Chinese, I ask? "Ya, that's Chinese they are speaking and that's Jackie Chan". I go back to getting my hair cut.

In the 1960's western rock music influences began invading Bollywood film music and some of it is actually pretty fun in a retro way. Here are two such songs - one could almost have come from a group like Herman Hermits and the other from the King.

I got a request from the peanut gallery for some pictures of Akshay Kumar. Akshay is Bollywood's number one action star and has been around for nearly two decades. A lot of Bollywood males pretend to be action stars full of swagger and roundhouse cuts that miss by a mile, but Akshay is the real deal - very athletic and often doing his own stunts.

And now back to the Babes of Bollywood.

Kangana Renaut is a fairly recent addition to Bollywood - hitting it big quickly with a few revealing (by BW standards that is) performances.

Deepika Padukone hit it big in her Hindi debut Om Shanti Om with Shahrukh Khan. Beginning your career playing opposite Shahrukh is like hitting the lottery. Born in Copenhagen, a former model and very good badminton player. She is a beauty.

Malaika Arora is famous primarily for one item number in Dil Se. An item number being a big dance number by a woman who is brought into the film specifically and only for that single dance. Dil Se was one of my first BW films and I was unaware of all of their film concepts and recall being totally confused by this song because it transitions from a scene at a railway station with Shahrukh flirting unsuccessfully with a girl right into the top of the train number. And I was trying to figure out if it was the same girl he had been flirting with and how the hell they they landed on top of a moving train!

and in case you are the only person on earth not to have seen this video, here it is.

And here are two photos of Amrita Rao, one of the rare cleavage impaired cuties of late. Her best film was also with Shahrukh Khan - though not as a love interest - in Main Hoon Na - a very fun film.

and here is a silly video from MHN. College just the way I remember it. The interesting thing about this song picturization is how few edits there are - very unusual for a Bollywood video these days.

Lately, I have been dipping my toes into the murky pool of Euro spy/heist films from the 1960's and 1970's. Enjoyable stuff on one level, but often mediocre on another level as so many of them were basically low budget imitations of what was coming out in the USA and the UK. I came across these two heist films the other day and enjoyed them probably more than I should have. They are more about pop style than anything else with silly plots and sillier characters, but there was a lot of that going on in the 60's. The films are Seven Golden Men (1965) and Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1967). These Italian productions star Phillippe Leroy as a dapper criminal mastermind and Rossana Podesta as his sultry minx of a girlfriend and partner in crime. In the first film they (and their gang of six men) steal a mountain of gold from Credit Suisse in Geneva and in the second film they kidnap a Latin American Communist dictator and steal a boat full of gold. Light as a molecule with a catchy lounge music soundtrack and a swath of mod fashions adorned by the marvelous Rossana who changes outfits and hairstyle in about every scene.

Here is a sampling of the soundtrack of the first film:

and the trailer for the second film:

I admit to developing a bit of a crush on Rossana. And why not?

On Cruise Control

2010-02-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

I am going into cruise control for a few days and primarily just putting up some pictures. When I went for Indian buffet last week I did my usual stop for the latest Bollywood gossip rags. These magazines are total rubbish for the most part and in general consist of stars ratting each other out or denying that they are having sex with their co-stars. I get them for that reason of course because I need to know who Kareena Kapoor is sleeping with (Saif Ali Khan if you need to know) but mainly for the pictures of the stars. The female stars. Now I could post some of the pictures of the men like Sanjay Dutt . . .

but I admit to prefering pretty pictures of pretty women and I still stand by my assertion that India has the best looking actresses in the world as of now. So over the next few days I am going to be very lazy and post some photos gathered from these magazines. But before I do that, a few other items of note. In the comment section of the Cinema Epoch post, Brian Hu was kind enough to mention an article he wrote on these DVD's two years back and knowing you probably don't read the comments as religiously as I do, I thought I would give the link here. It's an excellent article and gives a good map on which ones to buy.

By the way you may or may not note that much of the music that I had on this Blog has vanished for reasons I went into earlier - but through an amazing coincidence it has all shown up on another Blog run by who knows. So if you ever want to listen to some of that music, you can still find it here. And as musical company on this read, here are two fun songs from Bollywood.

I read over on Glenn's A Pessimist is Never Disappointed Blog that The Twins are reuniting for a concert in April. There is a God. We can only pray that Twins Effect 3 is in the works. Or maybe Just One Look . . . Again. The scary thing is that Glenn mentions that they are approaching 30 years old! How did that happen. One day you are a summer breeze, ten years later you may as well have a death curse. But wait a second. If they are almost 30, how old must I be? Let's not think about that. The Twins will be forever young. And forever cute. I figure if this is happening, world peace is not far behind and who knows maybe the Republicans will vote for health care reform! Nah. Let's not get crazy. Any way I for one am happy that Gillian is on her way back - what happened to her was a bad rap - I mean who hasn't video taped themselves having sex with Edison. Right? Right?

And then over on Asian Fanatics Forum, someone posted that Gigi Lai is two months pregnant and after having trouble conceiving for a while one thing she did was change her name to "Li Jia Er" which apparently phonetically comes close to meaning "my ovaries are open for business". A few other folks seem to think this story may not be true but most people were shocked that she changed her name. But this is what cracked me up. Her husband is Ma.

"Ma reportedly decided to buy another luxury residence for Lai as a gift after Lai was found to be pregnant and will bring her to pick out a place once the their child's condition is stable. Ma had previously bought his wife a villa, a yacht and a luxury car worth a total of about HK$17.2 million (S$3.1 million), spent HK$20 million (S$3.6 million) to expand his brother-in-law Lai Ying's beauty salon business."

What the hell. He clearly doesn't want a crying baby anywhere near him! Anyway, it is good to know that Gigi married well. Hong Kong actresses have their own 401K plans - marrying rich. Btw, I am changing my name to "Win Lottery".

Back a post or two I mentioned in the comments section that Dev Anand became very un-cool in the 1970's. One reason for this is he began an awful habit of wearing terrible head gear like this from Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Take a toke man. Your hat will look like a garden.

I made it to my first film of the year in a theater - $8.50 matinee showing! Sherlock Holmes. Ya, it's a bit late to talk about this film. Practically the only person in there. I enjoyed the film certainly even if the whole homosexual subtext was a bit much (wink wink). I mean, what is the big deal. Of course they were gay. Holmes and Watson were products of the British school system. Cricket and showers. But though I was caught up in the very neat reproduction of late 1800's London, I still had a nagging annoyance whispering inside my head - why is it that every film just has to get louder and louder and faster and faster to please audience goers. Frigging video games are killing thoughtful film. This wasn't at all a smart film and Holmes was all about being smart in real life terms. A few weeks ago I sat down to watch some of the old Sherlock Holmes TV shows from 1954 starring Ronald Howard (son of Leslie) and there is actually more smarts in a 30-minute episode then in all of this film - but not quite as many explosions. Yet I liked the film and hope for a sequel, so what can I say? Best Sherlock Holmes film in my opinion - Murder By Decree. There are actually a bunch of Russian Sherlock Holmes films made in the late 1970's/early 1980's that I have been tempted to buy but have not been able to pull the trigger.

So the pretty pictures. Let's start off with Kareena Kapoor, grandaughter of the great Raj Kapoor. She used to be all curvy and seductive but for whatever reason has gone on the Cecilia Cheung diet.

Next we have Kajol, the actress who really got me into Bollywood films. She married, retired, had kids and has come back but without quite the splash I was expecting. That final picture is of her and her hubby - an actor. His watch must weigh as much as Kareena now.

One trend in Bollywood over the past few years is actresses who are willing to flaunt it and actresses who have the bodies to do so. Celina Jaitley and Sameera Reddy as proof in the pudding.

and finally we end with a touch of class as I like to on this oh so classy Blog! Aishwarya.

Two from Zhou Xuan

2010-01-31T18:37:00.001-05:00

Cinema Epoch has released nearly 20 pre-1949 Mainland Chinese films onto DVD over the past few years. Not being particularly knowledgeable about this period in film, I can’t really access whether most of these films are considered classics or not – though even I have heard of a few of these such as Song at Midnight, Spring in a Small Town, The Spring River Flows East and Street Angel. A list of their available films can be found here. A number of the DVD releases contain two films which isn’t a bad deal at all. From the two films I have watched so far, it seems evident that the print sources were not cleaned up and so there are plenty of scratches, occasional poor contrast and missing frames as one might expect from old films like this. It does appear that a few of the DVDs have essays within, but that wasn’t the case with the two I looked at which is a shame because knowing so little about the films, the directors, the actors and the industry it would have been nice having some context given. It especially would have been great if they had translated the credits so I could name the actors, but no such luck. Still it is obviously a terrific opportunity to see many films that have never been available and to get a small peek into the dream machine that was once Shanghai. If anyone has seen and enjoyed some of the other films on the label, feel free to recommend them to me.

Both films that I looked at starred the legendary Zhou Xuan, who was born in 1918 and died at the age of 39 in 1957 in Shanghai. Her life was rather a sad one full of broken relationships, broken promises and mental breakdowns. But she is still cherished today though not so much for her acting as for her singing and is nicknamed “The Golden Throat”. Though she was not the first actress/singer to appear in Chinese film, Xuan is credited by many for popularizing Mandarin pop music in films. Her acting ability seems in dispute – Stephen Teo refers to her as a “rather poor actress” but I thought she had great presence in a film I saw at the HKIFF two years ago, Secrets of the Forbidden City (1948), which was one of her final films and I think she is charming in Street Angel. I admit though that in Dream of the Red Chamber, her character nearly disappears in a state of ennui. The best write-up I found on her was on the Chinese Mirror site.

Here are two quickie reviews on these last two films that have been released by Cinema Epoch.

Dream of the Red Chamber a.k.a. Dream of the Red Mansion
Director: Bu Wancang
1944

Previously, I had already seen two film versions of the classic 18th century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin about the lives and eventual downfall of a privileged Beijing family. It is a book that is near and dear to the Chinese soul and even has a term for the study of it, Redology. There have been many other film versions of the novel as well as TV series and Chinese Operas about the subject. From what I have read about the book, it contains numerous plot lines about a large number of family members, but the three film versions I have seen – this one and the two from the Shaw Brothers (1961, 1977) – focus primarily on the tragic romantic triangle between Jia Baoyu, the young heir of the family, and two of his female cousins – Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai. These three films for the most part ignore the rest of the family except as to how they impact this trio.

The story is I am sure familiar to most of you in one form or another so I will be very brief. Baoyu is a very immature young man who very much prefers the company of the women and female servants in his family (“woman is made of water, man is made of mud”). A cousin, Daiyu, comes to stay with the family after her mother dies and she and Baoyu are attracted to one another though in a teasing flirtatious manner. Later the other cousin Baochai shows up as well and a mild pouty competition breaks out between the two women for Baoyu’s attention, but he clearly has been won over by Daiyu. But Baochai’s mother connives to set up a marriage between her daughter and Baoyu and the inevitable tragedy ensues for one and all.

This version unlike the two Shaw films is a straight on drama – not a Huangmei Opera as were those two films (though Zhou Xuan who portrays Daiyu does sing two snippets of songs) and thus it has more time to explore a little around the periphery of the story – in particular showing and strongly hinting at Baoyu’s sexual relations with his female servants and the trouble this causes. Interestingly though, as in the Huangmei versions Baoyu is played by a female. The world shown in the film is completely feminine – other than Baoyu, men rarely intrude and their presence is clearly not wanted. So in that respect it is a rather fascinating glimpse into what goes on behind the private walls, but overall unfortunately the film is much too slowly paced and generates little passion at all. The actors all look too old for this adolescent love story and Baoyu is such a spoiled petulant brat that it is hard to take his love seriously – or that of the women for him. He tragically is unable to grow up until it is too late leading to an ending which is actually the strongest part of the film. Zhou Xuan appears to basically sleepwalk through her role and her fate brings out little emotion from the viewer. I’d recommend either of the Shaw versions over this one. One other version that I would love to see is the 1952 Modern Red Chamber Dream directed by Yue Feng and starring Li Lihua as Daiyu , Ouyang Shafei as Baochai and Yan Jun as Baoyu and is according to Teo a modern day Marxist interpretation of the classic story.

As you may have noted, the film was made in 1944, well after Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese in 1937. Many actors and directors fled Shanghai for other parts of China/Hong Kong or simply refused to work for the Japanese who attempted to continue the film industry. The Japanese set up a coalition of film companies that was called Huaying and the company produced over 100 films during the war years. After the war ended there were many charges of collaboration thrown at many actors and directors who had continued to work under the Japanese, but many of them such as Zhou Xuan, Li Lihua, Ouyang Shafei, Nancy Chan and Bai Guang seemed to have escaped unscathed for the most part – but often wisely moved to Hong Kong.

In the HKIFF book, “Cinema of Two Cities: Hong Kong – Shanghai” there is a fascinating article on the Shanghai film industry during this period. Though the Japanese (with one intriguing exception) tried to force the film industry to focus on films with a pro-Japanese view, for the most part the films made were basic genre entertainment films. One Japanese critic disdainfully wrote “70-80% of the films were about triangular love and family affairs” – Red Chamber fitting this description fairly well. The director Bu Wancang did not fare quite as well. He had been a very popular director for years. One of his hits was Mulan Joins the Army in 1939 starring Nancy Chan. It was a patriotic film about repelling foreign invaders but it was made in the foreign concessions of Shanghai – films that were termed “Orphan Island” films. But once the Japanese took over those areas in 1941, Bu made two propaganda films for the Japanese and after the war his career never got back on track because of the dark cloud he was under. Interestingly, the Japanese attempted to do the same thing once they occupied Hong Kong but everyone refused to co-operate and no films were made.

Street Angel
Director: Yuan Muzhi
1937

Street Angel was a real hook to the cranium from right field as I wasn’t prepared for what an amazing film this is. Not so much for the story which likely falls very neatly into the leftist social realism films of the period, but for the marvelously inventive technique and cinematic eye of the director Yuan Muzhi. This is particularly impressive in that he was only 28 years old at the time and that Street Angel was only his second film – the first by the way sounding more than a little compelling – a dark urban musical called Cityscape (1935). Yuan came from a theatrical background as an actor and this clearly influences his use of the actors in this film. Cinematic influences pile up as well – primarily from the silent era – from the Russian directors to the German expressionists to the sly comedy of Chaplin are all mashed together in this visually delicious potluck. It almost seems as if Yuan is making a silent film with sound – many scenes play out in wordless pantomime and the strongest moments are those of dramatic gestures or stark expressions caught in the amber of the lens. He neatly uses sliding frames sometimes to transition from one scene to another or in one wonderful instance the camera zooms up the opening of a trombone to come out in another location. After the Japanese invaded, Yuan left for Yanan where he joined the Communist Party and after the Civil War, he became quite a big honcho in the film bureaucracy in China. I am not sure if he directed any other films before he died in 1978.

The film begins in a chaotic montage of neon signs, street scenes and nightclub carousing until it settles first on a tall grandiose building only to slowly pan down to the slums of Shanghai where a festive wedding parade is making its way through a narrow crowded street with a marching band leading the way. One of the trumpet players is Chen (Zhao Dan) who is having trouble with the water in his instrument and having his friend Wang (Wei Heling) accidentally stepping on his feet. The shots careen around some more in a montage of onlookers sticking their faces out of windows and doors until the camera settles on a young woman waving to Chen. This is Xiao Hong (Zhou Xuan) who soon has to quickly rejoin her accompanist Wen inside a tea house where she is a singsong girl looking for customer requests. She is clearly not thrilled to be doing this or being with Wen as she plays constantly with her hair and seems totally uninterested in her song. Nevertheless, the songs became giant hits and Zhou Xuan was on her way to being a legend. The lyrics of the songs are shown on screen and were apparently done karaoke style back then so that the audience could sing along and we can happily watch the bouncing ball!

Whether it is not clear from the subtitles on the DVD or whether scenes are missing I can’t say, but from reading other sources it seems that Xiao Hong and her older sister Xiao Yun (Zhao Huishen) have escaped from the Japanese in Manchuria and have settled in Shanghai – but in a circumstance where they are clearly very subservient to a married couple who put them up. This couple makes Hong sing and makes Yun do even worse – she is a street walker always in the dark and on guard from police arrest. How this all came to be I am not sure. Yun’s profession has made her extremely bitter and something of a pariah to her neighbors – but Hong still loves her deeply and Yun is very protective of her little sister.

Gu, a gangster, shows an interest in Hong and her “guardians” set out to sell her to him. Chen though takes her away to another part of town along with his friend Wang and they try and plan their future. Yun later joins them as well and Wang begins to fall for her, but Gu and Wen track them down and tragedy occurs in a strangely abrupt and somewhat inconclusive ending. The final shot is another pan of the statuesque building where the film began as if to say the little lives down below on the street just don't matter.

The story is not really clichéd but certainly basic, but everything else makes it the classic it is considered to be. Yuan keeps the film from being too oppressively dark with numerous comic scenes and moments of bonhomie between friends – but clearly his leftist politics are showing. The use of lighting and shadows and the acting is very silent film stylized with broad expressions and dark eye shadow, but very effective – Zhou Xuan is utterly beguiling as the innocent impudent singsong girl with multiple impish expressions crossing her face faster than cars on a freeway, Zhao Huishen as the older sister plays the role almost as a wilting melancholy flower and some of the static shots of her are decimating, Zhao Dan is by turns comic and moving. Zhao Dan had quite the interesting life – during the war he was arrested by a warlord and kept in prison for a number of years, after being released he returned to Shanghai and stayed on in China after the Civil War. He became a well-regarded actor through the 1950’s in some important roles but he was arrested during the Cultural Revolution and jailed for five years. He died in 1980.

Here are three songs from Zhou Xuan.

Wow, some good news for me. Yesterday I received $40 for Jury Duty! That’s my first paycheck in four years! How many DVDs will that buy I wonder?

And I just have to throw in how pleasant it was seeing Obama take the Republicans to school the other day and give them a spanking that should make them sore for weeks. What a bunch of pasty robots in that room with the personality of a lead pipe. I love the way they whined about all the great plans they had to solve everything that no one was paying attention to. Obama had to be polite of course to some degree but I kept hoping he would say – well you guys were in power for 8 years – where were those great plans then? As Ralph Kramden would go "Hummmana Hummmana Hummmana".

Paper Panties and Other Tales of Depravity

2010-01-27T22:58:00.002-05:00

I will get to the paper panties later. First a quick announcement. I think I will have to take down some of the songs I have put up. I always figured that as long as they were not downloadable, no one would really care and maybe no one will. Or more likely no one will notice. But I read on another Blog (with a different Blog hoster) that several sites that did similar things were shut down without even giving the Blogger a chance to remedy the situation. Everything gone. I don’t think I have to worry about the older music but I think this weekend I will delete the music from Milkyway and the music from the Blue Hearts and Linda Linda Linda. So if you want to listen to that stuff one last time, do it soon.

Hey, how come no one told me that Patrick Galloway had a Blog going? He wrote a couple books on Asian cinema that I have read – Asia Shock and Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves – and quite enjoyed. He seems to update it regularly as well and not just use it as a marketing tool. I’ll add it to my Blog Links. Am also going to add, The Chinese Mirror, which I guess has been around for quite a while but I just never noticed it. There is a ton on early Chinese cinema and I think it is really exciting seeing Blogs like this one and Durian Dave’s that focus on the old films and old actors. A few years ago there was nothing around about this stuff. I hope there is much more in the future. If there is anything else out there I should add let me know – I just don’t focus sometimes.

Talking about music that I probably should not put up, as soon as I saw this still from a 1956 film titled Sunrise I thought of In the Mood for Love for some reason and thought about the music that plays as Maggie walks towards the room where they are playing mahjong and smoke is swirling in the air.

Today I went to Lexington and 28th street where there is a block of Indian stores and restaurants. Had Indian buffet and afterwards could barely walk across the street to the DVD store where I actually picked up some new Bollywood movies. I haven’t watched much new from India for the past year or two – focusing more on older films from the 60’s and 70’s. And I haven’t blogged at all about those recently – mainly because the ones I have chosen primarily by the cover have been dull affairs and not worth the effort. Like Baazi from 1968. Dharmendra plays a cop righting wrongs, the damsel in distress is Waheeda Rehman and Helen twinkles her toes – it sounded great but is an enormous bore and just plain stupid. The only interesting factor – and a doubtful one really – was that it was my first brush with the legendary comic Johny Walker who appeared in about 100,000 films during his very long career. He was discovered while driving a bus and chatting humorously with the customers. A producer thought he was funny, introduced him to the director Guru Dutt who had Walker test as a drunk – he did it so well that Dutt nicknamed him Johny Walker. I mean this guy is famous like Chaplin is famous over here, but if this was an example of his comedy I don’t get it. Clearly, comedy travels less well than any other film genre but this made me wonder if I was still on planet earth.

But buying these DVDs today got me thinking about all the lists I have come across of late – greatest movies and so forth. I know I could never list my top 100 films but if I tried the one Indian film that immediately popped into my head was Guide from 1965. Simply an amazingly thought provoking film with some stunning musical sequences. It too stars Waheeda. Her snake dance is lovely. I wish this clip was better quality.

Here by the way is a picture of snake charmers that used to come into our back yard in either India or Pakistan way back when to entertain the kids.

On the other hand my guess is that the film, Khawb-e-Hasti from 1934 would probably not make my Top 100 but I wanted to put the picture up anyway.

Last week I made another plunge into the Brooklyn Library’s video films and came out with these. Some comments.

“Why does your husband call you Lambchop?" "Because sometimes I wear paper panties." I am not sure I even get that but it is one of a barrage of leering, smirking jokes in one of the most peculiar films I have come across in a good while. On its surface one might expect that this 1964 Billy Wilder film would be your conventional romantic comedy with perhaps a little more buzz than you would get from say a spunky Doris Day “I really just want a husband” film that people were used to back then. Most of these early 60’s romantic comedies were as dangerous and taboo as a day game at Wrigley Field – in the end all the conventions were met head on and marriage was in the wings waiting. But Kiss Me, Stupid starring Kim Novak, Dean Martin and Ray Walston is a salacious pizza in the face of everything tasteful and expected. Wilder was taking a crazy swing at Hollywood’s morality code with this insidious and subversive look at marriage and sexuality. Back in 1964 large studios just didn’t take chances like this, but either Wilder’s reputation got it through or someone forgot to read the script. I can see almost see Takashi Miike doing a remake of this but with a lot more bodily secretion. But Wilder misjudged his market badly – first the Catholic Decency League did one of their massive protests against the film basically saying anyone who saw it would end up in Hell and then the critics savaged it like a bloated piñata and finally no one showed up to see it. But seeing it today, it is a gas – a really weird totally amoral one because you can’t help watching it through the time prism of 1964 and thinking what the hell were they thinking.

Dean Martin plays a Vegas crooner and actor who likes the dames a lot but a conveyor belt of cocktails even more – and the character’s name is Dean and he is part of the Rat Pack – so basically Martin is playing a rancid parody of himself and doesn’t seem at all embarrassed by it. He has to drive to Hollywood for an appearance on a TV show. He makes the mistake of stopping off in a small town called Climax (get it) where two frustrated song writers (Ray Walston and Cliff Osmond) sabotage his car so that they can get a chance to sing their songs to Dean. But they know Dean likes women and Walston worries that he will go for his very pretty wife (Felicia Farr – who was married to Jack Lemmon, who Wilder really wanted to play Walston’s part but he was busy). Walston picks a fight with his wife – on their wedding anniversary – so that she will go stay at her mothers and in her place he brings in a waitress/part time hooker from a nearby dive – this being Kim Novak who will do anything you want for the whole night for $25. $25. Talk about inflation. So he tries to pawn off his made-up-wife on Martin to have sex with in a really really creepy way – meanwhile his wife comes back and thinks he is fooling around and so sets out to have her own fun. And she does. With Dean. And Walston ends up in bed with Novak. And everyone is better off for it. No nodding to the Hollywood code back then that you have to be punished in some way for infidelity. And smutty innuendoes throughout. I think my mouth was agape much of the film. Interestingly, after Lemmon turned down the role Wilder brought in Peter Sellers to play it and he did until he had a heart attack. Some say it was just an excuse to get off the set because he was going crazy with the script.

Elizabeth Taylor sure was a knockout back in 1952 when Love is Better than Ever was released. I know her basically from her 60’s films – Cleopatra, Taming of the Shrew, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – when she was on her forth or fifth husband, had become more Rubenesque in her form and had become something of a celebrity caricature – but back in 1952 she was exquisite. Just perfect. This film was directed by Stanley Donen in between Royal Wedding and Singin' in the Rain, but this one doesn’t approach either of those classics on any level. It is kind of a frivolous romance about a tough New York agent who is only committed to good times finding himself falling in love with an innocent Connecticut dance teacher of little urchins. It plays out pretty much as one expects – older man gets young hottie. Off the set some not so nice things were happening to the leading man, Larry Parks. He had been called up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and forced to admit that he had once been part of a communist cell. And he gave names. He was ratted out in turn by none other than Lloyd Bridges. Bridges of course went on to Sea Hunt fame and to spawn Jeff and Beau – Parks basically never worked again except for a little bit in television.

I had to do it one of these days. Not because I really wanted to but because these films are a part of film history and in their time they were enormously popular. I am speaking of course about the teaming up of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in seven musicals during the 1930’s and early 1940’s. This style of musical – her rich operatic soprano and Eddy’s rich formal baritone – has been parodied hundreds of time – in particular the film (Rose-Marie) in which Eddy plays a Canadian Mountie and they sing to each other in the wilderness. Before this, MacDonald had appeared in two Lubitsch musicals – Love Parade and The Merry Widow – that were huge hits as well. So I co-incidentally picked their first film – Naughty Marietta (1935) – in which Jeanette plays a French princess before the guillotine started doing away with aristocratic heads and she is so loved by the peasants that they cheer her and join her in song. But her evil uncle wants to marry her off to some old obese Spanish lord and so she skips off in disguise as a commoner to New Orleans – which the French hadn’t sold yet. There she meets a rugged mercenary and sparks fly, songs are sung and of course eventually love comes. In the meantime though, Louis the XIV has sent his army after her because he too wants a little bit of fun with her. Actually this wasn’t so bad after all – no true Gitmo material here – rather corny fun. Don’t sue me if you play this and it damages your eardrums! Sweet Mystery of Life.

A few posts back I mentioned the magazine article listing what they thought were the Top 100 Spy films and I was able to cross one off the list that I had never seen – The Mask of Dimitrios starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Both of these actors almost always played character roles – Lorre the small sweating “don’t turn your back on him” dangerous man while Greenstreet was the larger than life snake charmer. Both were together most famously in the 1941 Maltese Falcon trying their best to stab Bogart in the back. Here though they are in the lead roles. A body washes up on the shores of the Bosphorus and is identified by the police as Dimitrios – a swindler, a blackmailer, a killer, a smuggler and everything bad. Lorre is a Dutch writer of detective novels and he gets it into his head to track down the details of Dimitrios‘s life which takes him all over eastern Europe and finally to Paris. He meets the mysterious Greenstreet along the way who also wants to find out how Dimitrios died. Shadows and odd camera angles abound in this nifty noir that seems part Maltese Falcon and part The Third Man. Initially, I had assumed that it was very influenced by the style and story of The Third Man until I noted the date it was made – 1944 – and realized that it came out five years prior to that film.

And just a quick mention of three other musicals I watched. Flirtation Walk has the two big co-stars of many of those Busby Berkely films – 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933 - Dick Powell and the big sweet eyed Ruby Keeler – and I was expecting a lot of fun musical bits. But this film is a bust with some fairly lame musical numbers and a lamer dramatic narrative. By the way, if there are any noir hounds reading this – watch Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944) – one of the best ever and his Marlowe is one of the best as well. But if Flirtation Walk was a disappointment that was nothing compared to Yolanda and the Thief (1945) starring Fred Astaire and directed by Vincent Minnelli. When you talk about the history of Hollywood musicals, these two names are at the top of the list – so how could this film be such a celluloid abomination. Well first you create an absurd story about a rich young woman just out of the convent believing that a conman (Fred) was her guardian angel – then you basically don’t let Astaire dance much – and when you do they are in these gaudy god awful pretentious big numbers that put me to sleep. And of course once again the old guy gets the young hottie. Ain't life wonderful. Ay, just awful. I still love Astaire though and always will. The trailer for a film that is “the most spectacular ever conceived”!

Thankfully I left what turned out to be the best of these three musicals for last – I Love Melvin – just a simple New York City tale with lots of location shooting (especially Central Park) that starred two of the three legs from Singin’ in the Rain – Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. There is nothing fancy here – just a plain old love story that is mild and sweet – but Reynolds is adorably cute and O’Connor sure can dance. He never really made it to leading man status because of his average looks but few people could dance (or skate) better in Hollywood in the 50’s. This came out right after Singin’ in 1953. One early number in which Debbie – who plays a dancer on Broadway – is a football being tossed, carried and kicked around is pretty amazing. It appears that the film is available from the Warner Archives. Here is a much too long trailer.

Finally, just a picture my father took somewhere in India back in the late 1950’s. Note the film poster way in the back.

Is Hujan Panas the Greatest Movie Ever Made?

2010-01-25T21:26:00.000-05:00

Probably not, but I sure want to see it and find out for myself! It's been a rainy day here and so I have been bored. So I went wandering on the Internet - looking for music by Helen Li Mei on CD with no success - and that accidentally led me to three Youtube videos of this Shaw Brothers Malaysian film from 1953. As most of you probably know, the Shaw Brothers had a film operation going in Singapore/Malaysia before they did in Hong Kong. They owned a large chain of theaters and produced films for the local Malays and imported Chinese films for the Chinese population. This whole world of Shaw films is extremely unknown to most of us, but apparently some of them must be playing on Malaysian television or put out on VCD there because there are various clips on YouTube of some of them.

Initially, most of the directors were of Indian descent. One of the most important ones was B.N. Rao who began working for the Shaws in 1953 (the film company was called Malay Film Productions) and made Hujan Panas in that same year. Rao was also the first director to make a horror Pontianak film. What also makes this film interesting is the song writer, choreographer and performer, P. Ramlee. Ramlee wrote hundreds of songs for the screen but he also became the first successful Malay director, beginning in 1955 until his early death in 1973 at the age of 44.

Here are three musical videos I found of the film - the first is a wonderful attempt at a girl's high school Busby Berkely stage number, then a lovely nightclub performance from one of Malaysia's legendary singers Siput Sarawak and then finally Ramlee himself doing a funny little song that I can't get out of my head.

All this info is from the excellent book, Singapore Cinema by Raphael Millet.

Ah, so many movies to see! Now on with the show.

Las Vegas

2010-01-25T17:03:00.003-05:00

For the past few months I have been in a total retro mood - old movies, old music, old mystery novels, old pictures. I think I know why I have sunk into this deep pool of nostalgia to explore the past but I won't get into that. Just a sense of time passing too quickly. Steve was nice enough to send me the link to this Blog of historic photos and I have enjoyed looking at them. And it made me think of some photos my grandfather took back in 1962 on a trip to Las Vegas. Kind of interesting to see just how much it has changed since then. I just wish we had the same cars now though! I never was very close to my grandfather - partly because my family lived overseas for most of my first 17 years but also because he was a tough old bird who didn't have a lot of kind words for anyone. But he was a fanatic Boston Red Sox fan and I recall during home leaves listening to the games on the radio with him on hot summer days on the porch looking out on the backyard and sipping lemonade. My grandmother though was an angel. Not a cross word crossed her lips in her 89 years. For no particular reason, here are the photos I found of his trip to Vegas. I wish I had known them better.

Cathay Remembrances

2010-01-25T00:55:00.012-05:00

I was cleaning up my kitchen cabinets the other day and came across a PR package that Cathay had been shopping around the film markets a few years ago. At that time they still had some mild hopes that they could get the same buzz for their films that the Shaw Brothers were getting for theirs. Not a chance of course. No foreign distributors were interested in old Hong Kong dramas, musicals and comedies which is what 90% of Cathay's catalogue of films are. Not too long after that film market, they ceased even releasing any more films to DVD. I guess there wasn't even much of a market among the Chinese for these old films.

From 1956 till they stopped production in the early 1970's, Cathay produced over 250 films. Initially, Cathay claimed that they would release 150 of these onto DVD, but in the end only around 45 films made it to that medium. To people who love film and in particular love Hong Kong film it was a real shame because in many ways Cathay was the crown jewel of Hong Kong film studios for about a decade until their main competitor the Shaw Brothers (both primarily Mandarin language studios) overtook them with their martial arts films. Cathay wasn't able to adjust to the audience's changing taste and so slowly became irrelevant. But for a few years they had some of the best directors, best composers and best scriptwriters in the business - and in my opinion an astonishing array of charismatic and talented actresses that the Shaw Brothers never equalled. From today's perspective, the Cathay films may feel very old-fashioned and at times a bit hokey, but they still have a sentimental heartfelt elegance, charm and verve about them that I really take to.

Inside this PR package were 11 by 8 photos of ten films. Here they are along with song and video.

For reasons that absolutely mystify me, when I embed individual links for the song, it always defaults to the final song on the post. So every link plays the exact same song. That makes no sense to me but I can't fix it. So I have grouped all the songs together at the bottom of the page.

Mambo Girl (1957) - this is the film that made Grace Chang a star. It is probably the best musical to come out of Hong Kong and also includes a nightclub performance from Mona Fong. It co-stars Peter Chen who seemingly made a habit of showing up in nearly every musical of Cathay's and later the Shaw Brothers - and as the young sister there is Kitty Ting Hao, who later had a rather tragic life. It is a marvelous film that made me understand why Grace Chang was a legend and so beloved.

Here is the famous opening sequence from Mambo Girl that introduced Grace to the world.

Her Tender Heart (1959) - another Cathay classic melodrama about family relationships starring Lucilla You Min. She won a Best Actress Award for this film.Wang Lai (also pictured) was to continue in films until 1992.

I don't think Lucilla was considered a singer, but here she is. This is contained in the Pathe 100 set of CDs.

Song at the bottom of the page.

Escort Over Tiger Hills (1969) - Cathay made an attempt to jump on the martial arts bandwagon that the Shaw Brothers had mastered but generally with little success as they simply didn't have the action choreographers or physical actors who could do it. This is suppose to be the best of their films in this genre (I have not seen it) and starred Roy Chiao who had been in numerous Cathay dramas and comedies since the late 1950's. After leaving Cathay, he appeared in some of his most famous films - The Arch and three films with King Hu, A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones. His final film was in 1999.

Cinderella and Her Little Angels (1959) - a very congenial romantic comedy starring Peter Chen and the legendary Linda Lin Dai. Lin Dai had become a star in her debut in 1953, Singing Under the Moon, for the film company Yung Hwa. Over the years she starred at both Cathay and Shaw until her suicide in 1964.

The same goes for Lin Dai - not a singer as far as I know and this duet sort of proves that. This must be from a film but I am not sure which one. This is also part of the Pathe 100.

Song at the bottom of the page.

The Greatest Civil War on Earth (1961) - this very amusing comedy tackled an issue that had become a part of Hong Kong's social fabric in the 50's and early 60's - the huge influx of population into Hong Kong from the Mainland after first the Japanese occupation and then later after the Civil War. The locals spoke Cantonese and the Mainlanders spoke Mandarin (thus leading to two separate film industries) and this as well as other cultural differences were at times points of real life conflict. This film plays with this idea and in the end concludes that no matter what, we are all Chinese. Starring two of Cathay's best characters actors as the fueding fathers (Liu Er Jia and Leung Sing Po), it also has Kitty Ting Hao and Christine Bai (the major female star of Cathay's Cantonese division) as the daughters.

Air Hostess (1958) - with its deep hued Sirkian colors and cheerful songs, this is one of the most delightful commercials for air travel ever made as the viewer follows the loves and lives of Air Hostess's serving coffee and tea in the Asian skies. In the late 1950's Hong Kong was rapidly changing from a sleepy British trading port to a major modern city and a number of Cathay films proudly showed this social and material progress. The picture below seems an odd choice as it focuses on two of Cathay's lesser stars - Kelly Lai (who popped up years later in In The Mood for Love) and Dolly Soo Fung rather than the two big stars in the film, Grace Chang and Julie Yeh Feng. Kelly Lai was an archetypal Cathay leading man - urbane and diffident - with Peter Chen, Chang Yang, Cheung Ching and Tien Ching all falling into this same pattern. This played fine as long as Cathay stuck with its contemporary settings and the genres they specialized in - and as long as the women were the focus of these films with the males basically being foils - but when it came time for Cathay to try to catch up with the Shaw Brothers in action films, they found their cupboard bare of leading men who could do that sort of film.

Grace manages to find a song to sing in just about every country - forget where this one was - Bangkok perhaps?

Our Sister Hedy (1957) - another terrific sentimental film about family and the changing attitudes of Hong Kong as exemplified by the differences of the four daughters - from the traditional to the freewheeling. The film was a breakout for both Julie Yeh Feng and Jeanette Lin Cui. Peter Chen, Kelly Lai, Chao Lei and Tien Ching are all on hand as the boyfriends who are basically background material to the female actresses.

Julie did release some music but often her singing voice was dubbed in films - which annoyed her greatly. There is an entire CD from Pathe of her songs. This is from the film It's Always Spring.

Ditto

In the film It's Always Spring, Julie and another sexy Cathay actress, Helen Li Mei are competing singers - but though the studio had Julie sing her own songs Helen was dubbed by another singer. She may not be a great singer but she did release some music and this song - from the Pathe 100 - is pretty nifty.

Ditto

Wife of a Romantic Scholar (1967) - though Cathay is known primarily for their contemporary - often middle class - settings, they produced a number of period costume films - but only a couple made it on to DVD. This one stars Jeanette Lin Cui, Annette Chang and Chao Lei, who seems to have bounced back and forth between Cathay and Shaw. Jeanette was to make her last film for Cathay the following year and soon retired after that upon marriage.

And yes, the Pathe 100 also includes a song from Jeanette who as far as I know didn't have much of a singing career. This may be from a film, but I am not sure.

Ditto

Wild Wild Rose (1960) - Grace Chang had always been the good girl, the good wife, the good person in her Cathay films so she jumped at the opportunity to take on a very different kind of role - perhaps the best in her career as a sultry nightclub singer who rips your heart out (a version of Carmen with some of the music as well). She attacks the role with a voracious sensuality that shocked her fans at the time, but the film is now considered one of the 100 Greatest Chinese Films.

Here is Grace doing her best Carmen.

Sun, Moon and Stars (1961) - this was one of the few Cathay attempts at an epic big budget movie - told over two films - it is the story of three women and their involvement in the Sino-Japanese war. The three are Grace Chang, Lucilla Yu Min and Julie Yeh Feng.

At one point in the film the character played by Grace entertains the troops with this stirring song. Ditto.

Lets Go French!

2010-01-16T22:25:00.001-05:00

Pourquoi? Well, why not. A change of pace is good for me every now and then and I'll tie it in somewhat gingerly to Hong Kong film. I try not to be one of those American's who like to snigger about the French every time they disagree with the USA on something because there are lots of things I love about the French - Paris is the greatest city in the world to walk around in, their movies can be very cool New Wave or post New Wave, I could eat profiteroles all day and all night, a female French accent gets me every time, they almost make smoking look like something I should be doing, Inspector Maigret, cafe's where you can sit for ages without a waiter giving you the evil eye, Godard for saying "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." and French pop music from the 1960's.

Two female singers from that period in particular are my favorites. One is the amazing Francoise Hardy who began singing in the early 60's with a melodic pop/folk style that is very mellow and very catchy. I've been addicted to her music for years now and have almost everything she has done. When she first hit the scene she was nicknamed the "Yeh Yeh Girl" for her jaunty pop energy in songs like "Oh Oh Cherie", but her style quickly matured and so did she. She recorded regularly into the 1970's and from then on till the present day on a much more intermittent basis. There are a number of YouTube videos of her, but here is one of my favorite songs of her's, Une fille comme tant d'autres.

My other favorite French singer? None other than Brigitte Bardot. If I was forced to chose who was the sexist woman in the world, I think Brigitte circa 1960 would be it. I am not sure if the term "sex kitten" was created for her but it should have been. Her sex appeal is atomic. Many of her early films were straight out fun romantic comedies with a large dose of Bardot sizzle. I came across a video of one of these films in the Brooklyn Library the other day and took a look at it. It is Une Parisenne from 1957 and it doesn't seem to be available on DVD. She co-stars with Charles Boyer and Henri Vidal in a totally infectious and charming silly comedy about newly weds sorting out their concept of fidelity the French way. But Bardot was a good singer as well - not great but she chose her material well for her voice and released quite a bit of music in the 60's. Her most famous song is probably one in which she duets with Serge Gainsbourg called Bonnie and Clyde (later covered by Luna). One DVD I would highly recommend to anyone who is a fan is a compilation of some of her TV appearances called Divine BB and this YouTube video is one of those songs. She is so cute in this.

So let's bring in the very faint Hong Kong connection to French music. I have yet to see it but in one of Johnny To's latest films, Vengeance, he casts one of France's most famous singers, Johnny Hallyday, who has been around forever. I actually realized that I have one of his CD's - so though I doubt it, but just in case anyone was curious about what he sounded like, here for your listening pleasure are two songs of his.

I am not sure if the use of a French actor is in some small way To paying homage to the great French director that he admires so much and that perhaps influenced if not his style perhaps his fascination for crime films, Jean-Pierre Melville. I am slowly going through Melville's all too small filmography - Le Samourai (which of course influenced John Woo as well), Le Doulos, Le Cercle Rouge (Woo is a big fan of this one as well) and the absolutely brilliant Bob Le Flambeur. Last week I caught up with Un Flic (1972), a nifty very compact crime thriller shorn of any fancy adornments. Four guys rob a bank (two of them being American actors Richard Crenna and Michael Conrad, of Hill Street Blues fame). One of the gang gets wounded and their plans slowly begin to unravel with the sleek handsome cop Alain Delon tracking them down. Catherine Deneuve is the femme fatale - attracted to both Crenna and Delon and vice versa. Action films have changed so much since then - Melville has quick shootouts and quick deaths - no bullet ballet stuff going on. At one point Crenna robs a parcel of drugs by boarding a speeding train from a helicoptor - probably pretty fancy stuff back then but you can imagine what a director would do today to pizzazz it up 1000% with special effects. This was Melville's last film as he died the following year at 56 years old.

And just for the heck of it, one more YouTube video of Brigitte singing and showing her famous cleavage!

Anita Yuen - Photos and Two Film Reviews

2010-01-14T19:38:00.001-05:00

The other night I was cleaning up the links on my website (Hong Kong Cinema – View from the Brooklyn Bridge) as I try to do from time to time. In most of these past clean-ups one or two links may have gone dead, but this time around there was a whole passel of them. It always makes me sad when a web site goes silent – to some eerie graveyard in the Internet Beyond where they cry on each other’s shoulders and ask what did I do wrong? I thought I’d live forever. For many of these sites there was someone who had poured their heart and time into them and I always wonder what happened – too busy with life, disenchantment with Hong Kong film, sudden death, mental breakdown, a jail sentence or simply a sense that no one really cared about their site. I don’t even check on my traffic stats because I don’t want to know how few people visit this Blog. I can’t handle the truth! One of the really big ones to vanish is Kung Fu Cult Cinema which had been around for years and was a terrific site. Where did it go? New ones of course spring to life – usually in Blog form these days – that are great reads – the cycle of life. Someday in the probably not too distant future, it is my guess that upon birth everyone will receive an email address for life and a Blog/Facebook page to detail their exciting lives.

Today five old Egyptian films on DVD showed up. Just what I needed, more films to watch! But I am curious to see if the Golden Age of Egyptian film was really so golden.

Everyone loves spy films don’t they? If so, there is a magazine from the editors of American History at newsstands that lists their 100 favorite spy films. As one would expect there is plenty of Bond, John Le Carre, Harry Palmer and Hitchcock on the list but there were a load of films that I wasn’t familiar with at all and will over time have to track down. Each film gets a one page write-up but for my taste there were way too many spoilers – but I guess that is the difference between writing for a history magazine rather than for a film magazine. In history there are no spoilers. Oh, I can’t tell you who won the Civil War because that would spoil it for you! Not surprisingly there were not many films mentioned from Asia - the only one being Lust, Caution coming in at number 38. How could they have ignored Angel with the Iron Fists from Hong Kong or The Great Gambler from Bollywood!

Here are the Top Ten:

The Third Man
North By Northwest
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Goldfinger (my favorite Bond film)
Our Man in Havana
The Manchurian Candidate
Smiley’s People
Pickup on South Street
The Lives of Others
Notorious

Now on to Anita.

Beginning in 1993 Anita Yuen ruled the Hong Kong film universe for about three years before her flame began to dim among allegations of exhibiting strange behavior on the sets and before the Hong Kong audience moved on to other actresses as audiences tend to do in our ADS society. Everybody wanted a piece of her for a while though – she was Hong Kong’s “It Girl”, the winner of the 1990 HK Beauty Pageant and everybody’s sweetheart with her patented short hair style, easy toothy grin and unbounded pixie like energy. She could make you cry and she could make you laugh with just an expression or a tear in her eye. She was to some degree representative of the Hong Kong women of the 1990’s or at least how they wished they were – spunky, smart, sympathetic, stylish and self-reliant and all of her best roles were set in contemporary times in which these traits could be displayed.

Almost from her entry into the film industry, she was able to get into high profile films (quickly becoming a favorite of the UFO film production company) – first in 1992 with Days of Being Dumb and Handsome Siblings. But it was in 1993 when she broke through as a star with He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father and especially in Ces’t La Vie Mon Cherie where she reduced audiences into slobbering quivering masses of jelly. This was also her first teaming up with Lau Ching-wan and the two actors would go on to co-star in a number of films over the next couple of years. In 1994 Anita appeared in 13 films, 9 films in 1995 and 6 films in 1996 as her production numbers began a sharp decline. Compare this with her output in all of the 2000’s - 8 films thus far as she has shifted her work load to television.

Some of her other classic films are From Beijing with Love (1994), He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (1994), The Chinese Feast (1995) and Hu-Du-Men (1996), but there are many others of all kinds that she appeared in. Such as the enjoyable action films, A Taste of Killing and Romance (1994), Crystal Fortune Run and Thunderbolt (1995) or comedies like He & She (1994), Tricky Business (1995) and God of Gamblers 3 (1996) – and dramas like Crossings (1994), Golden Girls (1995), Tragic Commitment (1995) and The Age of Miracles (1996). She was really quite the phenomenon and I can’t think of any actress since who captured the affection and attention of a city like she did if only for a few brief years. Maybe The Twins but of course there were two of them.

Here are a bunch of pictures of Anita – 1, 2, 3

And two reviews of films that were among her more obscure ones in 1994. Probably for good reason!

Tears and Triumph
Director: David Lam (Girls Without Tomorrow, Gigolo and Whore 1 & 2)
Year: 1994

Not long after the box office success of Ces’t La Vie Mon Cherie, Anita Yuen and Lau Ching-wan were paired up again in this film but without quite the artistic or financial success. This is a very talky family drama that never allows itself to soar emotionally and keeps its narrative to a slow dense crawl. It is a poorly written script that may have worked better on a Hong Kong soap opera than on the big screen. What makes one stay with it though is simply the easy going chemistry between the leads and the fresh faced loveliness of Anita with more delectable close-ups than Big Mac servings at your local McD’s.

Ming Jun (Anita) is a single (pre-marital as the subtitles put it) mom who has managed to work her way up through the corporate structure to being a division head with the respect of everyone. In flashbacks we see that her old boyfriend Se-cheng (Frankie Lam) did a runner as soon as he found out she was pregnant because he feared this would tie him down and hurt his career. Then one day her boss (Wai Gei-shun) gathers everyone together and tells them that the company has been sold to the wealthy Xie family and that they will all have two new directors, the son and the son-in-law of the family. Ming Jun is soon introduced to the son-in-law and she is shocked (though the audience less so as this film turns into co-incidence central) to see her old boyfriend who managed to marry into the Xie family and has his sights on running it one day. He is your basic scumbag – first he tries to talk Anita into becoming his mistress with a house way out in Stanley and then sets her up for a fall within the company by planting evidence of criminal wrongdoing on her.

In the meantime though the son Shi-wen (Lau Ching-wan) shows up and takes about a nanosecond to fall in love with Ming Jun. Who can blame him really? And nothing deters him from her – not the kid, not the charges, not finding out who the father is, not the family’s disapproval – nothing – because he is a boy in love. The family though is a snake pit as it turns out - Shi-wen’s mother is a second wife (Hui Fan) and the first wife (the legendary Pak Yan) wants the control of the company to go to her daughter (Tamara Guo) who is married to the scumbag. The talk comes faster than bullets in a John Woo film and I was having a hard time keeping up with all the backstabbing – but throughout Anita shined like a firefly on parade. Others appearing here are Cutie Mui Siu-wai as Anita’s buddy, Donna Chu as the doctor and co-incidentally Shi-wen’s sister and Chung King-fai as his father.

I was surprised to see that Shi-wen's house had an entry very much like mine.

My rating for this film: 5.5

When Anita and Lau Ching-wan first kiss in dramatic elevator fashion, the music playing in the background is this terrific song from Faye Wong.

The Wrath of Silence
Director: Frankie Chan (Burning Ambition, Outlaw Brothers, Fun and Fury)
1994

The one thing about Frankie Chan films is that he likes to keep things moving and he does that at light speed in this totally nutty totally illogical psycho serial killer crime tale. I think Chan’s theory of film making is that if the movie never slows down the audience can’t catch it and thus realize they have a rat instead of a fox in their hands. But taking that into account, this fruitcake of a film has some scenes of pure adrenaline pleasure. It also has some pedigree. Frankie Chan was perhaps best known as a martial arts actor (Prodigal Son), also as a composer (Ashes of Time and a ton of others) and then as a director of mainly B action films. He brings along his co-composer of Ashes and Chungking Express Roel Garcia to write the music for this one. Doing the action choreography is Mars of the Jackie Chan School. And then in the cast he has Anita Yuen, Takashi Kaneshiro , Ha Ping and Maggie Siu. Not bad at all. Even Jackie Chan makes a cameo of sorts in a Bo Bo Tea commercial. Of course on the other hand Emily Kwan is doing her horny suspect beating cop bit – generally a solid hint that the film leans to the trashy side.

Anita Yuen plays Mei, a beautician to the dead, who is clearly on the edge of cracking up as she sews up their injuries by candlelight and converses with them because they can’t gossip. She is following in the footsteps of her dead mother in this career choice, but it has made her a social pariah as no one wants to be close to someone who touches the dead for a living. At home, life isn’t much better, her younger sister (Helen Au) is mentally challenged and as irritating as any actress could make her, but Mei feels very protective of her and had promised their mother to take care of her. Mei has turned their apartment into this bizarre convoluted maze of moving walls and hidden closet doors in order to sometimes keep her sister under control – and it turns out to be very handy later on. She is seeing a psychiatrist – Patrick Ko (Takeshi) – who uses close dancing as therapy and analyzes how Mei reacts to his pelvic thrusts – not a therapy I am familiar with. He also keeps a sharp knife out within the grasp of his patients – not probably recommended either.

A horrific serial killer is on the loose in Hong Kong. Pal (Tan Lap-man) likes to take them to rooftops, beat them up, rape them, kill them and throw money at them for servicing him. He also keeps cockroaches in his pocket and lizards and tarantulas at home. Hopefully, none of you are dating someone like this. Yes, your typical bug-eyed maniacal grinning Hong Kong psycho. His next victim is Mei’s sister and though the audience is sort of glad she is gone, this is the final crack in Mei’s psyche and she goes into killer mode. The problem is that Patrick was on the scene and tried to stop the killer to no avail but everyone thinks he is the serial killer. Mei isn’t about to wait for the cops and tries killing him with everything in sight – knife, poison, axe and to top it off she happens to be carrying a cross-bow. Eventually though the truth is revealed to her and she teams up with Patrick’s lawyer cousin (Maggie) to take on this demented force and the final fifteen minutes is a frantic cat and mouse whirlwind of swirling walls, twirling blades, near escapes and total ferocity. It is a great finale and Anita looks surprisingly nice in loco mode.

My rating for this film: 6.5

Days and Nights

2010-01-08T19:42:00.002-05:00

I keep meaning to watch some HK movies and put up another review or two along with some pictures of an actor but life keeps getting in the way. Or maybe I just keep finding frivilous things to do so that I don't have to watch any movies. Like my self-imposed project to divide the music on my MP3 player into the years 1963 - 1975. It took days but it is finally done. The biggest year in terms of the number of songs you ask? Well, yes I know you could actually care less but still it was 1967 with 495 songs - an astonishing year of creativity that hasn't come close to being equalled. It was actually the year I discovered rock music. Living in Afghanistan you didn't exactly get the latest hits from back home (The Kingston Trio was big in our house), but that summer my older brother visited us from university and brought along Sgt Peppers, Surrealistic Pillow, The Doors and The Kinks's Something Else and I was sold on the devil's music.

Last week I watched my first film from Egypt and enjoyed it so much that I ordered a few more from what is termed the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema, the 1940's till the end of the 1950's. After that Nasser nationalized the film industry and it quickly went downhill as those things generally do. From what I can gather, most films were quite conventional, contained moral lessons and had happy endings. Many of them also had music and Days and Nights (Ayam Ou Layali) had all of this plus a lot of glamour and style. With the many songs popping up the film reminded me of Bollywood films during the same period - great black and white photography and a thick layer of Western elements throughout. Directed by Henry Barakat (who directed loads of films in his lifetime, 1912 - 1997) in 1955, it stars one of Egypt's legendary male singers, Abdel Halim Hafez (1929 - 1977), and his mellow singing style is terrific - sort of an Egyptian Perry Como. One song Ana Lak Ala toul is pure lush romance - later I found out it is a classic. Another song Toba (Never Again) is so catchy I had to watch it several times.

It is a simple romance from which basic moral questions arise - what is more important, your loyalty to your family or holding to your principles. Yehia is brought up by a step-father who married his mother after she divorced her husband for his drinking problems. Though there is no great love between Yehia and his step-father, he is given a good upper middle class upbringing with an education in university. One day while rowing, he spots Samia (the stunning Iman, a Lebanese actress) on her balcony and immediately knows she is the girl for him and so begins to woo her the old fashioned way - through song from below. All appears headed for a happy ending until Yehia's no good older step-brother who likes his booze and his belly dancers in that order kills someone in a hit and run car accident. The police think the offender is Yehia's friend and so Yehia who was in the car is then faced with a delimma - turn in his brother and destroy his family or watch his friend be ruined. Not that I need to get into yet another film industry (and there doesn't seem to be all that much available anyway with subs), but this was a really enjoyable glimpse into another time and another place that feels very much to have vanished.

And furthermore

2010-01-05T18:33:00.000-05:00

That was short and sweet. I guess no one loves me. Not even the jury duty system. After one day they tell me to go home and stay there and just when I had found a perfect place to take a nap in. I am used to getting that treatment from women but not from city hall! I actually did get as far as Jury Selection on one case but in a really weird creepy way it was a malpractice suit that very much mirrored some stuff that has been going on within my family so they let me go. But jury duty in Brooklyn isn't so bad any more. Soft seats as compared to the hard benches that made sleeping really difficult the last time there. Wide screen TV's showing the news all day (someone killed by an Amtrak train, a drunk school bus driver, a gunfight in a courtroom, freezing weather hitting Florida - all things that should have been avoided if Obama was only doing his job and making the world a perfect place!), but best of all they now provide Internet access! So I spent much of the day reading LoveHK Film's list of the top 50 Hong Kong films of this past decade. A very nice list indeed and I would say for the most part the films are all worthy of being seen and are a great starting (and maybe ending) point for people who want to catch up on what Hong Kong has been up to for these past ten years.

The list was comprised of some 150 people sending in their top 10 films and so it has a lot of variety and doesn't miss many of the true classics. I didn't send in mine actually because I felt I had seen so few films from the past three years that it would look kind of shakey, but after looking at the films chosen it seems clear most of the contributors stopped much of their Hong Kong viewing about the same time I did - or there just haven't been many good films recently. Of the 50 films it turned out I have seen 45 of them. So I will put together my list now. But before getting to that I wanted to mention a few films that didn't make it to the top 50 and at least in my opinion are more worthy than some that did (and some that to me don't really belong as they are really more Mainland or Taiwanese films).

From 2000

Spacked Out
A War Named Desire
Double Tap

From 2001

From the Queen to the Chief Executive
La Brassiere
Visible Secret

From 2002

Runaway Pistol
So Close
Inner Senses

From 2004

Dumplings

From 2006

Dog Bite Dog
Heavenly Kings

From 2008

Besieged City

So if you add these to the 50 films you really have a great list to get started. And I guess what is striking is that even in this down decade of Hong Kong film when production budgets have hit rock bottom and the number of films released has dropped considerably, Hong Kong is still making some remarkable films. Sometimes I need a reminder.

So this would be my Top 10 Hong Kong films of the Decade!

10. (tie) Just One Look and Dumplings
9.   Spacked Out
8.   Chinese Oddysey 2002
7.   Infernal Affairs
6.   From the Queen to the Chief Executive
5.   In the Mood for Love
4.   PTU
3.   Running on Karma
2.   Exiled
1.   Kung Fu Hustle

Welcome to 2010

2010-01-04T18:24:00.002-05:00

and may 2009 rest in peace. Not a great year for me and many others. So here is crossing my fingers that this year will be a better one. As usual, I had an incredibly exciting New Year's Eve - staying in with my parents to watch Dick Clark. It just doesn't get much more fun than that. My mother stayed up mainly to see Dick Clark as she was under the impression that he had died. Even after seeing him, she isn't really certain he isn't. My guess is that they defrost him every year now for one day and then put him back into the deep freeze. This way he will be around for 1,000 more New Year Eve's!

Not much really going on. No New Year resolutions on my part other than inventing a drug that will reverse aging. And of course dating Hsu Chi. I have that one every year. The only real problem is that I read that she doesn't plan on dating till 2012 when she has some free time. Geez, I hope I am still single then. It is really cold here in New York City. I think I will go to the bank and withdraw a wad of money and just have food delivered till March and never go out. Except I have jury duty starting tomorrow. I hate jury duty. Sending people to jail sucks. I may steal a 30 Rock idea and go dressed up - maybe as Hello Kitty. Or Elvis Tsui in Eternal Evil of Asia. Dickhead if you have forgotten. I want to get back to Asia where it is warm and the curries are hot. Except by the time I can go air travel may be prohibited or I may have to go through a rectal exam to get on the plane. I actually am old enough to remember flying trans-Atlantic on Pan Am when they had silver ware and fold out beds. Now its spead your cheeks please. Wider.

My big project so far this year is to divide all my music on my MP3 player into playlists for the years 1963 -1975. So I am using Wiki for information on what years songs came out. It still astonishes me how much is on that site. Pretty much everything. I am checking tomorrow to see what I had for dinner tonight. I am sure someone will be adding that. Here was a surprising musical tidbit I came across. Everyone knows the Supremes and all the hits they had. But did you know they actually put out individual albums in which they covered the songs of The Beatles, Sam Cooke, country music, Rodgers and Hart and all the songs from the musical Funny Girl. How weird is that. Does anyone have any of those albums I wonder?

Ok, ok I am clearly wasting time here because I got nothing. The only Asian viewing I have done of late is when I came across a Youtube video on a Thai Blog. It is by this Thai-English teenager called Jeerawan and she has a whole load of self-made videos in which she basically does nothing but look cute and dance cute. Very cute. Cute is really taking over the world isn't it? And women pretty much have a monopoly on it. One of her videos has had over 60,000 hits on it. She gives make-up tips on it. Maybe I need to start doing that on this Blog. The world has gone crazy, but then I couldn't stop watching her videos either. I've lost it too. Next I'll be watching reality shows. Shoot me when that happens.

I have done a bit of old Hollywood movie watching recently. A few B films that I enjoyed. You know how when you buy something on Amazon they nicely tell you that people who bought that product also bought so and so. I have actually discovered some terrific obscure books, music and films that way. This time it was a series of Nancy Drew films from the late 1930's starring a spunky Bonita Granville. Everyone knows Nancy Drew of course - while boys like me read the Hardy Boys growing up, the girls read about Nancy Drew putting her nose into trouble constantly. These were great fun with Bonita dashing about in her splashy coupe and nifty hearwear. The oddest scene was when she and her friends go to a Chinese restaurant and don't have enough money to pay the bill. They have to sing their way out and launch into a razzamadaz version of Little Bo Peep. All four films come in one DVD package for $21.

A few weeks back I went to see The Invisible Man at Film Forum and so I naturally followed that up by buying the Invisible Man set which has four other films about invisible people. All four of these are sort of second rate but still fun primarily for the terrific cast of character actors. The Invisible Man Returns (1940) stars Vincent Price as a man framed for murder. Fortunately, his friend is the brother of the original Invisible Man and he is able to become invisible and escape to look for the real killer. But this drug of course makes you go nuts after a while. Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Cecil Kellaway co-star. In the same year The Invisible Woman was produced but this one is strictly for laughs and claims no connection to the original. John Barrymore (in one of his last performances) plays a nutty scientist who discovers a way to turn people invisible and asks for a volunteer through an ad in the paper. A lovely blond answers because she wants to turn invisible to slap around her nasty boss, but some gangsters are also interested. A terrific B cast of Virginia Bruce, Charles Ruggles, Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch) and as the bumbling bad guys you have Oscar Homolka, Donald MacBride, Edward Brophy and Shemp Howard (who was to become one of the Three Stooges a few years later). Not many of these names may be familar but if you watch many films from that period their faces would be.

The third in the set is The Invisible Agent (1942) in which the nephew (Jon Hall) of the original Invisible Man gets ahold of the serum and uses it to spy on the Nazi's in Berlin and saves the United States from being invaded! Not great as the spy is bit of an idiot, but it has the sleek sultry Ilona Massey as the femme fatale and a leering Peter Lorre doing his Japanese thing again (Mr. Moto) as a spy after the serum. Finally, there is The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) the weakest of the lot with Jon Hall looking for revenge and getting a scientist (John Carradine) to turn him invisible. The set of 5 films is going for $23. It also includes the original.

That reminds me - Film Forum here in NYC is doing a 30-film retrospective of Akira Kurosawa this month. Wow. I have seen most of Kurosawa's samurai films, but as far as I can recall I have seen none of his other films. I should be spanked. Hopefully, I can make amends this month.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-23T18:44:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas to one and all. May Santa leave you many goodies under the Christmas tree or in your stocking. My tropical interlude is over and I am back in the frigid cold but I did manage to miss the biggest snowstorm of the century (so far!). I kind of regret that actually. There isn't much in my Christmas bag to hand out this season I am afraid, but I do have the lovely Mona Fong singing Jingle Bells to us. This was in Hong Kong Nocturne and I expect this song was done by Mona before she became Run Run's main squeeze. Mona appeared in only a couple films singing (Mambo Girl being one), but her singing voice was heard in many more. She is still going strong today.

and continuing with my recent theme of music from long long ago, here are a few songs from the wonderful Rebecca Pan who Wong Kar-wai fans know very well from her performances in Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. Back in the 1960's she was one of Hong Kong's top entertainers singing in all sorts of languages and performing around the world. Here are a few selections from her 101 Songs CD set. Best Wishes to all of you.

Some Selections from The Actress Soundtrack

2009-12-14T14:04:00.005-05:00

Ah, it is 85 degrees with a sun as bright as a new born grapefruit. I am working on my Louis Koo, but chances are I am going right past that look into red. A color that doesn´t really suit me. I uploaded a few musical tracks before I left and will get some of these up over the next week. I am starting off with four tracks from a film directed by Stanley Kwan, The Actress a.k.a. Centre Stage. It details the tragic story of perhaps the most famous Chinese actress from the 1930´s in Shanghai, Ruan Lingyu, portrayed by the delicate and elegant Maggie Cheung. It is definitely one of Maggie´s top performances.

A bit of this and a bit of that before leaving

2009-12-09T21:43:00.003-05:00

On Saturday I am off on holiday! Even though I haven’t been working for quite a while I still like to think of it as a holiday when I leave the country. Getting away anywhere, anytime is a holiday of sorts.

I think most of us have something from our childhood that we cling on to for nostalgic reasons – of times when the only responsibility we had was getting home for dinner on time. For some it’s baseball cards, for others Hello Kitty – for me it is Tintin, the intrepid boyish reporter that the Belgian cartoonist Herge created back in the 1930’s and who is still popular today. I’ve got all the books (20 or so of them), have purchased a number of Tintin t-shirts in Asia and recently picked up a slew of his animation DVD’s in Thailand. I recall getting into Tintin way back when I lived in Turkey and a Pakistani friend who lived behind us introduced me to Tintin (pronounced like bon-bon as a Belgian corrected me once). He travels all over the world seeking stories and adventure with his best friend Captain Haddock and his faithful dog Snowy. Much has been written on Herge who as I discovered didn’t exactly lead an exemplary life – some racial prejudices that were later erased out of the Tintin books, a philanderer and a collaborator with the Nazi’s after they took over Belgium. But besides being a racist, a cheat and a traitor . . he wasn't such a bad guy! You try not to think about that stuff though and focus on Tintin who is always loyal to his friends and always ready to rush off on another adventure no matter where it takes him – from Tibet to the Congo to the jungles of South America.

Cool stuff when you were a kid traveling all over the world yourself and feeling a long way from home. Much critical analysis has also been written on Tintin's sexuality suggesting that he was gay (he never is remotely interested in women) and that he represents a last remnant of a European imperialism that took on in Kipling’s words “the white man’s burden”. No matter, he has fans all over the world though in America he is still only vaguely known – but that should all change in 2011 when Spielberg comes out with his first Tintin movie with others to follow. My t-shirts will be worth millions! The film is I believe a combination of The Secret of The Unicorn and its sequel Red Rackham’s Treasure. I can’t wait. But I guess I will have to!

Speaking of the “white man’s burden”, one of the two films I saw yesterday at Film Forum in the continuing James Whale retro was filled to the gills with it and it’s interesting to see how certain films age so badly because of changing attitudes. Green Hell (1940) had a great cast – Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Vincent Price, George Sanders (doing his usual lady man’s bit) and Joan Bennett as the damsel in distress - but it was hard not to wince at times as they all go exploring somewhere in Central America looking for Aztec treasures with the poor natives doing all the hard work as they sit about and drink martinis and make goo-goo eyes at Joan. When they find the ruins – which Fairbanks interestingly compares to Angkor Wat – they are in awe but then proceed to basically blow huge holes in it to find the treasure! But that is probably how people thought back then and so in a sense this film can be viewed as a periscope into the past.

The other Whale film was a doozie – The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) – a great adventure tale of intrigue, deception and swordsmanship. As far as I can recollect from reading my Classic Comic version of it this film resembles the book as much as I do Brad Pitt but I don’t think any of the film versions really do. In middle age, the four Musketeers mount up for one last fling with death. Great stuff.

Park Slope, the neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn, could be known as Nanny City – in the afternoon the sidewalks are filled with nannies of all nationalities pushing strollers with white babies of good means. Today I overheard one nanny from Central America teaching the little boy in her care how to say penguin as she pointed to four of them on a window - pronouncing it “peeee-win”. Cute. She should be teaching him words like “La revolucion” though.

And here are some photos of actresses from a more recent age – Anita Mui and Fennie Yuen. Anita was all class and Fennie all cutes. Both great in their own way and making films in Hong Kong back in a time when females actually had good roles in movies.

Anita - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I love Anita's headgear - she always had so much style and she must have had a closet bigger than the New Territories to keep all her clothes.

Fennie – here and here

To go along with the photos I promised myself to watch some of these older films I have lying around and this one has both actresses and turned out to be a great choice – the very amusing Trouble Couples directed by Eric Tsang.

Trouble Couple
Director: Eric Tsang
Year: 1987

Talk about an Idol gangbang – the Happy Troupe Girls meets the Grasshoppers in a wonderfully amusing teenage romp with Anita Mui and Eric Tsang trying to be the adults in the class – good luck. At the time of the film The Grasshoppers hadn’t really found fame yet but were soon to become one of Hong Kong’s biggest boy bands. They formed in 1982 but it wasn’t until 1985 when they had a stroke of luck while winning the New Talent Singing contest. Anita Mui, who was a judge, took a liking to them and asked them to be her back-up dancers and perform in concert with her. In a sweet musical montage, they are shown performing with Anita on stage. As far as I can tell The Happy Troupe Girls were a group of some very adorable teenage actresses who were starring in a number of teenage romantic comedies (often produced by Cinema City) - Fennie Yuen, May Lo, Charlene Chan, Ann Bridgewater and Loletta Lee - and a combination of them often appeared together in films like The Happy Ghost series or Fantasy Island. They are like little kittens in a box – you just want to take them home.

All of this cuteness in one film may seem like overkill but to my surprise the film is actually quite funny at times – good sight gags, excellent comic timing and witty dialogue that someone took the trouble to translate very well into the English subs. On top of this throw in a number of cameos from actors like Sandra Ng, Shing Fui-on, Wong Jing, Clarence Ford (director of Naked Killer), Ha Ping, Wu Fung, Charlie Cho, Hui Ying Ying (a veteran actress with credits going back to 1955), Fung Ging-man (with credits going back to 1937!), Helena Law Lan and Ann Mui (Anita’s sister). It is the kind of film that 20-years later you can simply enjoy for the actors involved. Tsang directed this towards the end of his very successful stay at Cinema City.

Anita plays Tai, the older sister and proxy mother to her three much younger sisters – keeping a roof over their head with her restaurant business and keeping a wary eye on their innocense when the inevitable suitors come round. She is every young sister’s nightmare – a harridan, a grouch, a slashing tongue and apparently on the verge of becoming a mean spirited spinster. When an older employer makes approaches to one of the sisters, Tai scares him off and says to her “losing your job is better than losing your virginity and ruining your life” The young sisters (Fennie Yuen, Charlene Chan and Ann Bridgewater) just want to have fun and romance and they find it easily – Yee (Ann) with a radio DJ (Matthew Wong) and Sam (Charlene) and Sai (Fennie) with three classmates at high school (the Grasshoppers – Calvin Choi, Remus Choi and Edmund So) – they just have to sort out which two of them get the two girls!

But there is a snag – big sister – so the solution is of course to find her a man – a complete loser who would want to be with her and so they go looking for someone committing suicide. They think they find their man (Eric) as they see him break up with his girlfriend (Sandra) who has found more security with a gangster (Shing Fui-on) who has made her mother a bookie and her uncle a heroin dealer. They talk him into courting their sister though he has reservations – she is a ‘laundry board” – but who else will have him. Along with the help of the girls and the boys he launches on a gargantuan plan of courtship that will have him pretending to be a mob boss, a lover in the rain, stabbed in the stomach, pretending to have had sex with Tai and so on. All is fair in love and war and this is closer to war than love. But it is all in goofy fun with enough cuteness to curl your toes.

My rating for this film: 7.5

Bigger screen captures here.

And as a bonus for getting this far – you have the incredible opportunity to listen to songs from . . . The Happy Troupe Girls! In this case the trio of May, Fennie and Charine. I had never actually listened to this till today though I bought it years ago – it was just one of those impulse buys that bankrupt so many of us! Just don’t shoot me. This isn’t exactly Anita singing.

FYI - Film Titles for the Three Shaw Brother's Song Compilations

2009-12-08T02:59:00.000-05:00

At some point I am planning on putting up a bunch of selections from three Shaw Brother's song compilations but thought it would make sense to include at least the film from which it came (forget the song title or the singer) but the film title is not on the CD in English. So I went through the time-consuming and eye-straining process of trying to match up the Chinese title on the CD with that in the HKMDB or the book The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study (though like an idiot I remembered having this late in the process). Much to my surprise I actually was able to do this and so thought I would put them up here in case anyone else has those CDs and didn't know the film titles. It is probably already up somewhere on the all-mighty Internet but please don't tell me if this is the case! This was a pain in the head.

But by doing this research it hit me again how many of the Shaw films didn't and may never make it on to DVD and many of them sound right up my alley. I think Celestial released the majority of the martial art films as those sparked the most interest and buyer dollars but in truth it was all the other genres that most intrigued me - melodramas, musicals, adventure, historicals. I remember that at the Chinatown DVD store where I spent much of my retirement money Paul used to kid me that he only ordered one copy of a bunch of titles because he knew I would be the only person to buy them! True.

I was a sucker for anything with Peter Chen, Paul Chang Chun, Betty Loh Ti, Diana Chang, Lily Ho, Julie Yeh Feng, Angela Yu Chien, Jenny Hu, Essie Lin Chia, Tina Chin Fei, Betty Ting Pei, Lucilla You Min (pictured at top of page in the 1958 Love with an Alien) and two of Dave Durian's rightful obsessions - Fanny Fan and Margaret Tu Chuan. Yup, for the most part all the sleek sexy sirens of Shaw. And there are loads of films in which they appear that never made it to DVD - and of course besides those there are all the films made in the 1950's of which only a handful were remastered and none as far as I know of their Cantonese division usually starring Patricia Lam Fung (pictured above in the 1961 Manhunt) . Hey, Celestial I want to see films like Oh Boys, Oh Girls (1961) with Paul and Margaret or Three Dolls in Hong Kong (1961) with Paul, Pat Ting and three Japanese babes or The Lady and the Thief (1963) with Peter and Pat. I don't know if they are any good but I want them!

Greatest Hits

1. The Dancing Millionairess - 1964

2. Till the End of Time - 1966

3. The Singing Escort - 1969

4. Love Without End - 1970

5. Love Without End - 1970

6. The Black Forest - 1964

7. Hong Kong Nocturne - 1967

8. My Dreamboat - 1967

9. Swan Song - 1967

10. Moonlight Serenade - 1967

11. Moonlight Serenade - 1967

12. That Tender Age - 1967

13. Sing High, Sing Low - 1967

14. The Millionaire Chase - 1969

15. The Black Forest - 1964

16. The Black Forest - 1964

17. The Black Forest - 1964

18. Hong Kong Nocturne - 1967

19. Hong Kong Nocturne - 1967

20. My Dreamboat - 1967

21. My Dreamboat - 1967

22. Moonlight Serenade - 1967

23. Moonlight Serenade - 1967

24. Moonlight Serenade - 1967

25. The Warlord and the Actress - 1964

26. The Warlord and the Actress - 1964

Timeless Favorites

1. When the Clouds Roll By - 1969

2. Diary of a Lady Killer - 1969

3. My Dreamboat - 1967

4. The Second Spring - 1963

5. Till the End of Time - 1966

6. Swan Song - 1967

7. Love Without End - 1970

8. Song of Tomorrow - 1968

9. Song of Tomorrow - 1968

10. Come Drink With Me - 1966

11. Come Drink With Me - 1966

12. Come Drink With Me - 1966

13. Dragon Creek - 1967

14. Swan Song - 1967

15. Swan Song - 1967

16. Susanna - 1967

17. Susanna - 1967

18. The Rainbow - 1968

19. Forever Diamonds - 1968

20. The Enchanted Chamber - 1968

21. The Enchanted Chamber - 1968

22. Torrent of Desire - 1969

23. Torrent of Desire - 1969

24. Raw Passions - 1969

25. Love Without End - 1970

26. Flower in the Rain - 1972

27. Till the End of Time - 1966

28. Song of Tomorrow - 1968

29. The Second Spring - 1963

Romantic Classics

1. The Lark - 1965

2. Till the End of Time - 1966

3. The Black and the Blue - 1966

4. The Venus Tear Diamond - 1971

5. The Price of Love - 1970

6. Mist Over Dream Lake - 1968

7. The Singing Killer - 1970

8. The Lark - 1965

9. The Lark - 1965

10. The Lark - 1965

11. The Black and the Blue - 1966

12. Love Without End - 1970

13. Song of Tomorrow - 1968

14. Blue Skies - 1967

15. Dragon Creek - 1967

16. Unfinished Melody - 1969

17. Unfinished Melody - 1969

18. The Orchid - 1970

19. The Price of Love - 1970

20. The Price of Love - 1970

21. Love Across the Seas - 1973

22. The Joy of Spring - 1966

23. Till the End of Time - 1966

24. Poison Rose - 1966

25. Poison Rose - 1966

26. Lady Jade Locket - 1967

It is interesting (to me at least) that so many of the films that I associate with Shaw musicals didn't make it on to any of these CD's - Hong Kong Rhapsody being the major one but also nothing from Love Parade, Les Belles, The Yellow Muffler, Tropicana Interlude, Linda Lin Dai's Love Without End and many others. Perhaps there were more CD compilations in the works that were also dropped for lack of interest.

Here is one selection from Timeless Favorites - from a 1968 film called Forever Diamonds with Peter Chen and Pat Ting Hung that never made it on to DVD.

Just YouTubing Today

2009-12-07T17:48:00.000-05:00

I actually spend next to no time on YouTube but I went there in seach for something that now I can't even recall - but while there I jumped around a bit to see what they had on some of my very favorite HK films and found a few fun things that I thought would make for a very easy lazy Blog post! And I wanted to see if I could embed a YouTube video as well. It should be easy since every one does it.

First up is Shanghai Blues, easily one of my top five HK films. Without context these two clips won't mean much but first up is this tiny little montage that Tsui Hark pulls out of his hat that has a perfect emotional resonance of war, remembrance, loss, hope, despair and peace - all in Tsui shorthand to the tune of Shanghai Blues. I basically went to the HKIFF earlier this year just to see this film on the big screen. I will put Sally Yeh's version at the end of the post.

Again without context the finale of Shanghai Blues won't mean much but it is a classic run for the train scene as the girl you love goes away thinking you don't love her- we have all been there - with Kenny Bee, Sylvia Chang, Sally Yeh, Loletta Lee and Woo Fung all making an appearance. Oh, and to make it really special it is in French!

Brigitte Lin in Swordsman II is breathtaking - probably her most iconic and memorable role as a man turning into a woman falling in love when she isn't destroying the world. This musical montage is all Brigitte.

Just a Peking Opera Blues trailer. The best film from Hong Kong and maybe anywhere. It always makes me smile to watch this.

And finally another one of my favorite films that I feel the need to see every year, Chungking Express. I am not sure who put these musical montages together but they did a terrific job. The first is to the tune of Be My Baby by the Ronettes and the second to U2's Where the Streets Have No Name.

And as promised, Sally singing Shanghai Blues from her movie themed CD - of which I will get more up at some point. Btw - Peking Opera Blues above is also Sally singing.

Another Soundtrack Sampling - Once Upon a Time in China

2009-12-06T16:18:00.006-05:00

It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in New York City as I sit here with an open box of clementines keeping me company (and somewhat sticky) as I type this up. I am sure it is chilly outside but with the sun streaming through the window it is toasty. I feel like a cat on a windowsill barely being able to keep my eyes open. Ah, it is less than a week to go till I head off to warm southern climes where a pool and many juicy mangoes await me. My pool reading arrived yesterday via Amazon - two French pulp novels of yesteryear - Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief by Maurice Leblanc and Fantomas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre.

The other day I made it to two films in the James Whale retro at Film Forum - Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Both classics obviously though you have to watch them with the realization that they are over 70 years old. People were clearly much more mellow back then and much more easily frightened. I was thinking how much fun it would be to take my time machine into the past and sneak into a theater and show the audience something like Saw (which I confess I have been too weak-kneed to watch). Their heads would explode. I hadn't seen either film in donkey's years and so to some extent it was like seeing them anew (my fading memory being a plus in this regard!) and what struck me was almost how prescient Whale seems to be about the coming age. The early 1930's was the dawning of the terror of Fascism and both films had dark murmurings within though likely they were not intentional. Frankenstein (1931) takes place in a lovely quaint German village with the Baron's son trying to create a new race of man that goes horribly wrong. The old Baron represents the passing age of good manners and a paternalistic attitude towards the common people while the son is all about science, progress and obsession. Then later the village town people go from schuhplatting (no, not having sex - that is a German folk dance) to an angry hunting mob that was within a few years to turn its anger in real life on the Jewish population in the infamous Kristallnacht (1938) and all the horrors that followed. In The Invisible Man (1933 - the year the Nazis came to power), the character played by Claude Rains is a cheap suit echo of a mad ranting Hitler in his dreams to conquer the world - and is done in only by the snow as Hitler was on the snows of Russia. Ok - that may be a stretch but it was kind of eerie. The Whale retro continues all week long.

Hallelujah! Yesterday I finished the final episode of Alias. I loved the first three seasons of that show and a while back I went through the DVD' s like butter popcorn but with conspiracy piled atop conspiracy it began to weigh itself down with so much absurdiity in the forth and fifth seasons that it took me a long while to get through them. The final fifth season cranks up the nuttiness full throttle with Sydney (played by Jennifer Garner) pregnant and as big as a two story cottage bungalow hanging on to crains and saving the world. When one of her evil female nemesises is dunked into a Hawaiian Punch brew of Sydney's DNA and comes out not only looking like Sydney but speaking like her I groaned at how corny the series had become but still continued to the end.

Last night I had dinner with a friend and he mentioned in passing that an acquaintance of ours had died a few months back. I was sad to hear it as it felt like one more New York institution was gone. A weird institution mind you as this was the famous Roberta, an elderly occasionally cranky woman who was known to all the true movie fans in the city. Her life was going to the movies every day and she would put together a schedule of films for that day, their starting times and her route to get there as fast as possible. On some days she told me once she would see five films if the timing was right - otherwise only three to four. She would show up at nearly every one of our films at the New York Asian Film Festival and almost always wheedle her way in free. She truly loved the magic of movies and kept as a remembrance every untorn ticket stub she ever got. You had to pray for the unknowing usher who would tear her ticket up and face her wrath. Roberta was one of the subjects of a documentary about film obsessed people called Cinemaniacs, but the one time I brought it up with her she began sputtering like a broken faucet "They made me look crazy in that film!". Well, ya Roberta, but lovable crazy. She was one of a kind. I hope there are movie theaters in heaven with comfortable seats and free popcorn for her.

Here are some selections from the soundtrack to the truly classic film, Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China. Looking at the pictures that were included on the insert made me feel like I need to visit the film again soon - it is just a great movie - Tsui at his best and of course Jet Li as well. The main theme song is famous and always brings back instant images of Wong Fei Hung training his students on the beach. There are two versions of the song (written by the legendary James Wong) that is based on a Chinese folk song from the Ming Dynasty (according to Wikipedia) - the first here in Cantonese is from George Lam and the second is in Mandarin from Jackie Chan. The rest are instrumentals that I tried joining together with some software but I was unsuccessful. I thought it would be easier than having to click on each individual song, but such is life.