Brian Zhang Larsen's Blog » Movies

Will Red Cliff become a hit in the West?

Brian Zhang Larsen — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:32:38 +0000

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.

3 Korean Movies

Brian Zhang Larsen — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 11:57:12 +0000

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.

Bichunmoo (2000) is a very long, but very cool movie which takes place in the 14 century Korea. Sullie is the Daughter of a mongol General who wants her to get married to some important nobleman. Her previous love affair jin-ha, is then of course killed by her father, to ease the transformation to married life for her. The only problem is that jin-ha don’t die. He get his hands on the secrets to the most powerful martial art, the bichun arts of Korea. He also get a very cool black rice hat by the way, but that is not explained further in the movie, because it is mainly just a prop. Its very cool though, even though I realize that cool and rice hat is two words that are mentally hard to fit together. With this hat and these secrets he is prepared to take revenge and get his girl back. A lot of serious kick-ass is involved.

My sassy girl (2001) is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Everyone I know that have seen the movies agrees with me (not many though). Please watch this one. If you have any prejudgment of Asian humor or comedies, watch this one before you rant or whatever. I think a lot of lame Japanese TV shows have given Asian comedy a bad reputation, but My Sassy girl is not like that at all (even though the visual representation above might indicate otherwise). When the movie came out it stormed most of Asia, and still now it has its effect. The phrase from the movie “Do you wanna die?” became very popular among girls all over the continent and still is to some extend. Well the movie is a romantic comedy, so actually classic Korean. Although I think the genre first seriously went popular after this one. A guy (Kyung-woo) is so unfortunate to meet a very rude and noisy drunk girl in the train one night, and helps clean of her puke of an old mans head… with his sweater. He takes the almost unconscious girl to a hotel, and stay there to watch out for her. It quickly appears that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and he gets wrapped around the finger of this strange manipulative girl. She has massive mood swings and forces Kyung-woo to do various humiliating things. He also lands in jail a couple of times. The movie is based on true events, blogged by the unfortunate soul Kim Ho-sik. Now the movie also gets a US remake, which should be out next year. I really don’t see the meaning in this, because I have trouble imagining how this movie could be made any better. Just watch it if you haven’t already. It is really great. It is also the only movie not directed by a guy with the name Kim.

Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring (2003) is a very quiet low pace movies, which also reflects in the beautiful scenery and the changing seasons effect on it. The movie almost only takes place in and around a floating temple, in a lake. In this temple lives an old monk with his apprentice, and they help to give spiritual advice to visitors. It is a challenge to convert the movie to words. Every line and every scene is executed in a minimalistic way, to sort out meaningless chit chat and info, and bring only the essential touching bits of information that makes your brain settle at ease. Some ignorant people may find this movie boring, however evolutionary progressive people will enjoy this movie and reflect on the important things in life afterwards. Watch this movie alone, to make sure you don’t have any of the first categories of persons near you at the time.

Real life Mecha

Brian Zhang Larsen — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:57:07 +0000

“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.

Digital Media Library

Brian Zhang Larsen — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:19:41 +0000

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…

I am a bit disapointed with the way, the box sets doesn’t stand out compared to the other dvd’s. This disturbs my mental perception of my collection a whole lot. But that is probably just me

On Beat Takeshi

Brian Zhang Larsen — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:14:04 +0000

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.

Zatoichi is a remake of an old series of movies featuring Zatoichi, the blind swordsman. Off course he took the role as Zatoichi himself, which he does very well. A thing about Beat Takeshi, which he is also called, is that he very often acts in his own movies. It is about a blind guy who enters a village, and meets badguys and….do nothing!! But only for a while. Then he ofcourse kicks ass, which he is fairly good at even thouh he is blind. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any other Zatoichi movies, but I guess this one is the weirdest. There are episodes where normal everyday situations, generate rhythmic sounds, which is totally out of context. In the “hmm, that was kind of weird” kind of way. For instance some farmers use their tools in the field in a way that it generates a rhythmic beat, which is never mentioned or referred to again. Another cool thing is Kitanos normal dislike of traditional swordfights. They are too often trying to hit the sword of the opponent more that the opponent himself. In this movie he has tried to do it differently, and the swordfights turn out cool and bloody. Although there could be more.

Kikujiro no Natsu is a whole other kind of movie. Takeshi plays a lowlife hustler kind of guy (Kikujiro), who is taking a young boy to see his grandma. I don’t really remember if they are related or not, but I guess that is not really important. The movie is not very action packed, nor is there bloody fighting scenes. But it is still a good movie, filled with very funny an entertaining elements. Kikujiro is such a “to the bone” loser, so he is surely not the ideal traveling companion for a young boy. And in the early beginning of the movie it Kikujiro has success in loosing all the boys money on the cycle racing tracks, and it sorts of takes of from there. The movie itself is kind of low pace, with steady humorous features.

The last Movie in this Post is Dolls. Surely the strangest movie I have seen from Takeshi Kitano. It is actually three small intervened stories, and yes, that idea have been seen before. This movie is very tragically and emotionally though, and is mainly about love and insanity. And this movie shows just how close these to mind states are to each other. I wont write about the actual content of the movie because nobody reads this far anyways. And I wouldn’t recommend this one, unless you are really into Takeshis movies. But it the movies really generates a mood, and the play with colors are nice, as you might see from the cover. And by the way, the strangest thing about this movie is that he does’nt appear in it himself…