Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

Last summer came the first part of the awaited movie Red Cliff, which was just one of several movies that year based on stories from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A 700 year old classical novel, describing the fall of the Han dynasty and the start and end of the three kingdoms and the beginning of the Jin Dynasty. The book is pretty complex, and features extensive name dropping, and I must admit that i didn’t finish Vol. 1 of this massive novel. Among other things I was continuously annoyed by the Wade Giles romanization of the names.

Red Cliff is a two-part movie and is one of the few movies from the Chinese mainland, that are released outside China. The movie is expected to gain substantial popularity outside China as well when it is released sometimes in 2009, but I am not so sure. I love the movie, and it is one of the best movies of 2008 (part 1, that is), but I’m am not sure i speak for the majority of westerners.
The movie is directed by John Woo, and that alone could bring a crowd to the movie theater. But the Recent Chinese movies that have gained popularity in the west is epic almost art like dramas. Crouching tiger was a hit, followed by Hero and the latest House of the Flying Dagger. Those movies were all an extreme beautiful mix of location, choreography and underlying music. The story in itself was not essential. With Red Cliff it is different. It has an action driven plot, and are very different from the traditional dramas so popular outside China. It lack the deep emotion appealing storyline which has been a trusted ingredient in Chinese movies from Zhang Yimou’s movies from the 80′ies and 90′ies to Ang Lees recent mainland movies. Last, it’s CGI is not on par with western expectations, which tends to be a big point of critique in the west. I could imagine this was why, the otherwise great movie The Promise failed to deliver (that, and the funny hats).

I look forward to see how the movie will do here though, when it is released somewhere in 2009.

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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“MAAAYN BOAT”, which is my totally wrongful translation of the movie title “Otoko-tachi no Yamoto”, is a new Japanese WWII movie about the battleship Yamato. A more rightful translation of the movie title would be “Yamato’s men”. Yamato was the biggest Japanese battleship, and was the Gundam of the 40’ies. I am really looking forward to watch this movie, because it seems like there has been put a lot of effort into this one, first of all of building that immense construction (out of plywood though). But also because I generally like Japanese movies off course :)! I don’t expect it to be 2 hour intense action, because Japanese movies are seldom like that. But I do expect some kind of MECHA MONSTER PUNISHMENT…And I also look forward to compare it to Pearl Harbor, which was not the most popular Allies Vs. Japan movie ever made.

A funny sidenote is the text “baffering” on the movie website, which indicates a small waiting time. A Class One example of engrish. Another quite hilarious thing is the English parts of the title song. It is so typical Japanese to drop an English line or two in the middle of a song. You’ve gotta love that.

The model of the boat can be seen in Onomichi – Hiroshima, if you incidentally should be nearby. It looks like it is a visit worth. I am sure that some Japanese scientists are working on a mobile suit Yamoto somewhere. Or maybe even a totally autonom flying-mecha-killer-ship, made by combining the terrifying panzer and size of the Yamato, with the advanced AI of an Aibo…and maybe some laser.

Some weeks ago I stubled across a cool application at binarybonsai.com to manage media collections, called MediaMan. Apparently I have to use the knock off windows version, but it seems just ok for me. But I must admit that the apple version has cooler dark wood background.

The application can import the media, buy scanning the barcode (or maybe the number on it), using a webcam. It didn’t work with mine though, maybe because it was of a low quality with bad resolution. It uses Amazon web service to fetch information, like images and general movie info. It couldn’t find all of my obscure Asian titles though, and I had to manually ad them myself. I started by using the EAN product code (barcode) but it could pretty much only find the titles are bought from Amazon self. It didn’t have information of DVD’s bought on CDON or yesasia or in stores here in Denmark. But fortunately it is possible, to search by keyword, and ad the title that are most similar to your copy.

This little application makes me hope that the global data synchronization project will speed up, and that we will soon have an object name server (ONS) like we today have the DNS. That way we could be able to look up the information that the barcode actually contains. Of course Amazon doesn’t have all the information, and by asking an ONS first, it could be possible to be directed to a place which knows about the product, and retrieve the information from there. Even better, when someday hopefully the EPC gets integrated in our products, we can look up the exact transaction date of the unique DVD. And we can use a centralized placed RFID reader in the room, to automatically detect new DVD’s and add them to the digital library…

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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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