So Star Wars: The Last Jedi is not a hit in China, opening second and only earning half the box office takings of The Ex-Files: The Return of the Exes, a low-budget comedy about manchild exes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM9zOfOkErsVideo can't be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Ex-Files 3: Return of the Exes Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips […]
Apparently, there's some minor hubbub this week about new Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski admitting he wrote Marvel Comics under a Japanese pseudonym, Akira Yoshida, thirteen years ago. The story is all over social media and entertainment news sites. I've been asked to write a reaction piece, perhaps because I'm East Asian. Not Japanese, so you'll just […]
Every year at the New York Asian Film Festival, there's a surprise movie that's not revealed until the time of the screening. It was fitting that the movie chosen this year was the 1992 Hong Kong Category III thriller Naked Killer, and a rare 35MM print, no less. And the surprise screening isssssssss… Naked Killer! […]
I usually like screwball comedies. They're the subgenre of romantic comedy where the characters are all nuts or eccentric and the situations are absurd and farcical, which serves as the perfect allegory for falling in love. From the 1930s to the early 1960s, Hollywood made a lot of them brilliantly. But very few are made […]
Mad World is not a fun movie, but it's an important one. It's a heartbreaking drama about a former investment banker suffering from bipolar disorder, who moves in with his estranged truck driver father so they can pick up the pieces of their lives together. It hits a whole catalogue of hot-button issues, including the […]
Guanxi, the Chinese vampire genre specific to Hong Kong culture, was hugely popular in the '70s and '80s. Its pinnacle was the Mr. Vampire movies, which featured more slapstick than horror as the slightly hapless heroes used both ingenuity and traditional Taoist artefacts to stop the hopping undead. But after the handover to China in […]
First of all, Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight has got to be one of the worst titles in the English language. Hong Kong movies have a tendency to be weirdly arbitrary in how they pick their English titles. The direct translation of the Chinese title for this movie is "Let's Fight Zombies Tonight", which is a […]
Tsui Hark's latest movie, a collaboration with comedy writer-director Stephen Chow, is the manic, crazy, deconstructionist take on the Journey to the West saga: Journey to the West 2: The Demons Strike Back. Nearly every Chinese person knows this story, as do the Japanese, who adapted it into the popular TV series Saiyuki — which was in […]
Tsui Hark is one of the world's greatest action directors, and it's nice to see him getting a resurgence with a string of hits on the Chinese Mainland since 2010's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, which put him back on the map, and then with Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and Young […]
It wouldn't be a New York Asian Film Festival without at least one Takeshi Miike movie. People don't write about him that often anymore. He might have become taken for granted after he was first discovered in the late 1990s with horror movies, subversively deconstructionist gangster movies, and odd, almost experimental and indescribable movies too […]
A Double Life, from director Zenko Kishi, is one of those Japanese existential movies that border on exploitation, but wants to chew on much meatier matters than that. Tama (Mugi Kadowaki), a shy philosophy student who has hit a block with her doctoral thesis, decides to pick a single random person and follow them to […]
After watching two violent crime thrillers, I needed a change of pace. So I decided to watch a black-and-white Korean indie movie: A Quiet Dream. A Quiet Dream is apparently unusual even by Korean movie standards; a plotless, character-based shaggy dog story about Ye-ri (Han Ye-ri), a Korean-Chinese woman who runs a low-rent bar and is […]
Yang Shupeng is considered a maverick director in China, a former fireman-turned-self-taught-filmmaker who has made three accomplished period movies before this. Now he tackles not only his first present-day film, but also the noir thriller genre with Blood of Youth. Blood of Youth follows a computer hacker who weaves a tangled web that draws in a violent […]
Bad Genius is the opening movie for this year's New York Asian Film Festival. It's a high school heist thriller from Thailand that's as slick as anything from Hollywood. As I write, the tickets are already sold out, the movie having come across the ocean with a lot of buzz preceding it. It was a […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, Finished my second novel, so now I can go back to writing about pop culture. I've been having a perfectly good time watching FX's LEGION, the show based on a character from the X-Men, specifically one created by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz during their run on The New Mutants back in […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, Carmilla is the little webseries that could. Where many other webseries have crashed and burned, it has managed to garner a massive cult following amongst teen girls and 20somethings with its emphasis on geek humour and reconfiguring of J. Sheridan Lefanu's original 19th Century novella. Where the original novella was a typical […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, Director Mamoru Oshii is widely considered a visionary when he hit the international scene with the anime movie adaptation of Masamune Shiro's Ghost in the Shell. His films are known for combining politics, philosophy, cyberpunk Science fiction, technothriller with exquisite art direction and special effects. I doubt the Hollywood live action version […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, The nice people at Udon Entertainment have sent over review PDFs of the official English translation of the Persona 4 manga series, which gives me an opportunity to talk about games and their translations into other medium, which I'd been thinking about for a while. Japan has a different relationship with adaptations […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, I finally read Patience, the latest graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. This is one of my favourite graphic novels of the year. I wasn't sent an advance reader's copy. I borrowed it and it sat on my desk while I was busy with deadlines, and finally read it this weekend. I'm amazed […]
Adi Tantimedh writes, I'd been looking forward to a movie of J.G. Ballard's High Rise for a long time. It had been passed from one filmmaker to another for decades, ever since it was first published in the 1970s. Finally, it's been made by Ben Wheatley, the first director to adapt Ballard who's actually British […]
