Or just my random thoughts about the sci-fi and horror movies I’ve watched. After watching Chronicle, it made me think a lot about the genre as Chronicle smartly crosses both sci-fi and horror. It’s a first person documentary-style sci-fi horror film about three teenagers acquiring the unfathomable power of telekinesis after an encounter with something unearthly and alien.
It’s Joe Dante’s Explorers meets Brian De Palma’s The Fury.
The Quan Yin of Buddhism
My mom was a Buddhist, so I was raised as both a Buddhist and a Christian. I went to a protestant school since Grade 1 and I found biblical stories to be quite fascinating whereas the Buddhism that I grew up with was essentially idolatry. To this date, my mom will pray to Quanyin for things she wants without really thinking much about it.
When I was impressionable and young, I really wanted to become a Christian but my parents told me to wait until I was eighteen. When I hit college, I was constantly bombarded by Asian Christians and their dogma on campus and that really made me think twice about being Christian. To me, Judeo-Christianity is a way of thinking and the foundation of Western culture rather than dogma. And then I started meeting Buddhist friends who embraced Buddhism as a philosophy and way of living rather than the idolatry that I was raised with. A great example is Ms. Canyon Sam, my documentary subject, who passionately follows the teachings of the Dalai Lama.
“What people intentionally don’t speak Mandarin? Assholes… According to my knowledge, a lot of Hong Kong people don’t identify themselves as Chinese. They say, ‘We’re Hong Kong, and you’re China.’ These people are assholes. These people are so used to acting as dogs in a British colony. You guys are still dogs, not human. I know a lot of Hong Kong people are good people but yet a lot of Hong Kong people up till now are still dogs,” said Kong Qingdong, the foulmouthed professor from the University of Beijing on national television.
“Room for improvement” was one of these popular comments I got from teachers when I was going to school in Hong Kong. On some subjects, I worked my ass off and did better than half the class and I would still get the comment “room for improvement.” Personally, I never quite enjoy hearing a comment with the word “improvement” because it reminds me of how difficult and competitive it was going to school in Hong Kong.
What does “improvement” mean for you? And if there’s one thing you can improve this Year of the Dragon in your life, what would it be?
When I was visiting my family for Chinese New Year in Vancouver, I got to watch The Flowers of War by Zhang Yimou on a (most likely) pirated DVD that my father had. The screener I saw was incredibly dark and high contrast. It also was two seconds out-of-sync during the last hour of the movie. On top of that, the cover said the movie was 97 minutes but it turned out two be 2 and a half hours. I was actually dreading to watch the movie as I have heard mixed things about it. My friend at the Golden Globes said it was essentially a Chinese propaganda film. A Chinese friend laughed at how ridiculous one of the plot points was (I will eventually have to talk about it so SPOILER ALERT ahead).
I got inspired by my fellow Offender Jerome’s “Around the Horn” and decided to write about the music of the heart. Once upon a time, I fell in love with a bisexual guy in college who was also an advocate of non-monogamous relationships. He was always dating a guy or a girl when we were dating in college. He was my first boyfriend. Between my junior and senior year in college, I listened to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” like a broken record. I was surprised that cassette tape survived my rewind and play for two years. I was obsessed… or in love the very first time!?
Serial Killer Charles Ng
After I first met Koji Steven Sakai at a CAPE event in 2007, we started developing a couple of projects together along with my longtime collaborator and film school buddy Stanley Yung. And the very first one we started developing was a drama about a self-hating Asian American man. That feeling or complex that I wanted to confront and explore—self-hatred—is really in all of us, particularly in a North American society primarily driven by identity politics. Especially for a visible ethnic minority, how many of us are confronted with the feeling of discomfort, competitiveness or even hate when we see someone else of the same skin color in an all white environment?
I cannot remember more clearly what my mom said to me when she came home one day after dropping my little sister off to school in Montreal.
“I saw this Chinese lady at school and I asked her if she was Chinese,” said my mom. “And she said, ‘I’m CANADIAN!’”
Mao I before passing
In a cozy loft just south of Market Street shared by my friend M and his husband D, we were all having glasses of sake and beer around the table as the recent addition of the family, Mao II, jumped on the tabletop. M grabbed Mao II and gently combed his hair with his fingers. The black cat purred.
“Do you want to see Mao I?” asked D.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Mao I… is dead.”
“Show him,” said M.
D ran upstairs and returned unfolding a cat skin complete with its claws and head preserved. I almost fell off my chair.
This may sound like the most cliché holiday movie title but that was pretty much my year. My good friend J passed away the past April. It was really the first time that a good friend of my age died. Before J, the only person who was close to me passed away was my grandmother in 1993. Even to this day, which hasn’t been that long, I am still trying to make sense emotionally of the radical discontinuity of J’s death. The day before I spoke to him on the phone and the day after I could not talk to him forever.
On top of all that, the circumstances around his death were unusual. We kind of knew what happened but nothing was confirmed except to the police and his immediate family. A police investigation and arrests were also involved which further complicated the scenario.
The Thing 2011
The thing about The Thing is that I love both movies—the 2011 remake and the 1982 John Carpenter classic—but ironically neither of them did well at the box office. Because I’m a horror junkie I see things through different eyes than the average viewer. But the curious thing about The Thing is that even though the 1982 original was considered a cult classic but a box office disappointment, Universal went ahead and remade The Thing anyway in 2010 and it ended up in a similar financial fate.
What do you think?
It’s that time of the year again, and nobody has done Christmas better than Bob Clark. The late Canadian pop director has made two holiday classics, Black Christmas (1972) and A Christmas Story (1982), one a seminal Christmas horror picture and the other a Christmas comedy. How the heck did he do it? Bob succeeded in making two movies each on the opposite spectrum of genres on the same holiday. Scrooge or Santa Claus, you get to pick that holiday classic!
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(From You Are the Apple of My Eye)
My introduction to Taiwan cinema was in 1995 when I, still in film school, went to the Vancouver International Film Festival to present my “first” feature Flow, essentially a feature compilation of my student shorts made at UCLA. I met directors Yu-Hsun Chen and Chih-yen Yee and watched their respective first features Tropical Fish and The Lonely Hearts’ Club. I also saw Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men Good Women with my newly met friend Rose Kuo who couldn’t stop sobbing next to me. Taiwanese art house cinema was all the rage in the 90s and the average budget for a Taiwanese movie at that time was around USD$300K. Even up until now, the average budget for a Taiwanese movie is about USD$300K with the most recent exception of Doze Niu’s Monga and Giddens Ko’s You Are the Apple of My Eye, both box office smash hits in Taiwan.
