Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

The Only thing I could get myself to do this Sunday morning, with slight hangovers, was to write about some movies. I have already written about some Chinese and some Japanese movies, so I might as well complete the Asian circle with some Korean movies, in this “3 of a kind” category. You can roughly say that the Japanese are good at bizarre/horror movies, The Chinese at action movies and the Koreans at romantic comedies. For the diversity of it I have once again chosen some very different movies for this one.

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I just realized that not everybody is familiar with the Japanese movie icon, Takeshi Kitano, which is big a mistake. I myself am a big fan of his movies, about which I have a hard time coming up with one single word they have in common. His movies are just too different, although they are usually very dramatic in some way. I think he would be an obvious theme for my second 3 of a kind posts. Not only does this guy make movies. You might have heard about Takeshi’s Castle, and he is generally very exposed in the japanese media. While I was in Japan in 2004 i was able to watch him several times in tv shows. (Wearing a dressing gown for some reason).
By looking at the pictures below you might notice that there is no Battle Royale, which you might think is utterly insane. But off course you have already watched that movie, and if not, then try by all your powers to wriggle your toes so the doctors will try harder to wake you up from your coma. By the way, these movies are only movies that mr. Takeshi himself directed, which he didn’t do with Battle Royale, even though I suspect a lot of influence from him. I am mainly thinking about the scene in the end where Takeshi is shot several times, and everybody thinks he is done. But then his phone calls and he just have to get up at get it like nothing have happened.

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I now start off my new category “3 of a kind”. Posts in this category will contain three short reviews of movies which is similar in some way. The similarity can be of different kind and can be about the nationality, genre, plot or whatever. I think i owe to say that i am normally very uncritical about movies, and enjoy most genres no matter the budget, plot or kind of digital sound (although this one is important!). I love hollywood blockbusters, and i am certainly not to posh to say that a large budget (mostly on CGI) and nice effects can save a movie from an awful plot, and still make it cool. So you should take this into consideration if you should happen to get influenced by my recommendations. I start this off with three Chinese movies which is relatively new, and worth noticing. They are all action movies and epical/historical in some way, and none of them is starring the Chinese actor Andy Lau, who normally appears in every movie produced in China.

I watch a lot of asian movies partly due to interest, and partly because of my Chinese girlfriend. She is the main reason why i fell over these three movies. An obvious Chinese “3 of a kind” would be Crouching tiger hidden dragon, Hero and House of flying daggers which all are great movies, but you have surely already watched those… Instead i chose the following:

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