You are currently browsing all entries tagged with 'hong kong'

Lonely Tears

  • April 4, 2012 8:21 pm

My grandmother and me at 3 months old.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’d love to see you but I want you to finish your first quarter of school. I know it’s very important,” said my grandmother on her hospital bed over the telephone seventy two thousand miles away.

Just a month away from finishing my first quarter at film school. I was really hoping that she would make it till the end of the month. But she didn’t. Those were the last words I exchanged with my grandmother who bought me my first video camcorder and supported me unconditionally throughout her life.  Read more...

Film Festival Dispatch: Sights, Sounds & Tastes of Hong Kong

  • April 2, 2012 8:52 am

Working for film festivals does take a toll sometimes, but then again, I get to travel to cool places. In March alone, I headed out to SXSW in Austin, SFIAAFF in the Bay Area, Saigon and Hong Kong for the annual Filmart and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF). Run by friend and mentor, Roger Garcia, the HKIFF and Filmart (the film market arm of the organization) has been on a roll with strong film programming, celebrity-studded events, capped with the Asian Film Awards, honoring the best in Asian cinema.  Read more...

Blood of an Artist

  • February 29, 2012 9:17 pm

“My aunt is really into Cantonese opera,” I told my friend Tin who’s making a short film called “Memory of Butterfly” about Chinese opera. “I can probably have her help you out with the music. She sings and produces Cantonese opera in Vancouver.”

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Hong Kong: Funky Time Lapse

  • February 26, 2012 3:27 pm

YouTube Preview ImageShot on the 5D Mark ii, this very cool time lapse video that goes through the streets of Hong Kong set to the cool funkytastic opening theme to ENTER THE DRAGON. Very, very cool! Happy Sunday, everyone!

The Foul-mouthed Professor

  • February 7, 2012 8:44 pm

“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.

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THE HKVD Experiment

  • February 3, 2012 12:10 pm

Pop question for the day: what would the HKVD Experiment look like today in 2012?

What is the HKVD Experiment you ask? No, it’s not some kind of new venereal disease imported from Asia. What I’m referring to is the Hong Kong Van Damme Experiment. Back in the nineties, when the leading men in movies all sported physiques mirroring action figures, one of the more interesting things to come out of Hollywood for action fans were a series of movies each starring Jean Claude Van Damme and directed by an internationally-renown director from Hong Kong.

It all started with HARD TARGET, by the cinematic master of the heroic bloodshed genre, John Woo. It was then followed by DOUBLE TEAM (Tsui Hark) and MAXIMUM RISK (Ringo Lam). The directors of those two movies obviously liked working with the Muscles from Brussels enough to go for a second round, and thus were born the movies KNOCK OFF and REPLICANT (one of the gems of the JCVD oeuvre, in my humble opinion). It was an interesting experiment for an action movie nut like myself, in that you were afforded the opportunity to see different directors and their unique stylistic tendencies given similar material with the same actor (on a larger scale, kind of like what the ALIEN series has been able to do in its various incarnations with four different auteurs).  Read more...

Dinner with Roger and Lydia

  • November 30, 2011 12:05 am

I first heard of Roger Garcia, a pioneer champion of Asian American films, when I was an intern at Visual Communications in 1988. Finally, in the last decade or so, I’ve started meeting him at various film festivals all over the world. Roger and his wife Lydia Tanji began stationing in Hong Kong after his appointment last year as the executive director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the largest festival player in the region. Returning to Hong Kong, I touched base with Roger who warmly invited me to dinner at a tucked away Izakaya in Wanchai, the neighborhood where I grew up as a kid. It was also my first time hanging out with Lydia though we met briefly at the Hawaii International Film Festival a couple years back.

Having stayed in Hong Kong for a few days, I was mostly catching up with friends and family and was desperately seeking some kind of inspiration for a story or a blog with little luck. On top of that, my Macbook was acting up and I had to go to the most dreaded Genius Bar that usually came up with little solution other than replacing the entire computer. Meeting Roger and Lydia definitely changed my luck as I was immediately inspired talking to them about the state of Asian American filmmaking over sake, beer and tasty skewers of meat and vegetables.  Read more...

Beauty of Asia

  • November 23, 2011 9:39 pm

My filmmaker friend Ringo and I just came back from a screening of Luc Besson’s latest opus The Lady with Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis and we got into a heated debate about the movie and essentially the beauty of cinema and representing Asia. I was quite excited about the screening as I love Luc Besson, Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis… but sitting through the 127 minutes movie about the story of pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her professor husband Michael Aris proved slightly underwhelming.

“But you gotta give it credit that it’s an Asian movie trying to be an Oscar contender,” said Ringo. “I like the movie because it’s really trying to tell an untold Asian story to the global audience.”  Read more...

1,001 Reasons I Love Movies: (#25) Bruce Lee Goes to Hell & Meets Popeye, Dracula, Clint Eastwood, James Bond, the Exorcist & More!

  • November 7, 2011 12:01 am

The good folks at io9 recently wrote about a film that has to rank up there as one of the all-time classics that I had completely forgotten about…the 1977 Hong Kong martial arts-comedy The Dragon Lives Again (a.k.a. Deadly Hands of Kung Fu).

One of the many Bruce Lee-inspired exploitation (or “Bruceploitation”) flicks released after the Asian American icon’s death, this is not only arguably the best of that genre, but one of the most bizarrely brilliant cinematic creations ever. Just read the Wikipedia synopsis:

After his untimely death, Bruce Lee (Bruce Leung Siu-lung) wakes up to find himself in the “Underworld”. He meets the King of the Underworld and questions his power. The King demonstrates his displeasure by shaking a pole that can cause an earthquake through the Underworld, which gives Bruce pause.

Bruce goes to a restaurant, where he meets Kwai Chang Caine from the TV show Kung Fu and cartoon sailor Popeye. He also meets Dracula, James Bond, Zatoichi, and Clint Eastwood, with whom he does not become friends. These pop culture characters, along with The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Emmanuelle, are planning a coup to take over the Underworld. Among their schemes, the characters send Emmanuelle to have energetic sex with the womanizing King in the hopes that he will have a heart attack.  Read more...

First Halloween

  • October 26, 2011 12:05 am

I started trick-or-treating at 6 when no one was celebrating Halloween in Hong Kong. No one in Hong Kong really quite knew what Halloween was at that time. I accidentally stumbled upon some make-up kits and greeting cards with a smiling Jack-o’lantern that year in an American store and I asked my mom about Halloween. My mom explained the whole American tradition of trick-or-treating to me and I thought it was a brilliant idea. On my first Halloween night, I put on a pair of fangs, glued some cotton to my face as decaying flesh and put on two bug eyes with plastic tape… I was trying to be a vampire of some sort.

I knocked on the doors of different neighbors in my apartment building on different floors and very few answered. Even if they did, they were totally puzzled at “Trick or treat.” My mom told me to hit up this kid whom I used to play with when I was two, and so I did. His mom opened the door and I said, “Trick or treat.”  Read more...

Yup, Japan and Hong Kong are Apparently the Same to One of America’s Most Respected Film Critics

  • June 3, 2011 2:10 pm

Regular YOMYOMF readers know how much I love the films of director Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver). So when I heard about respected film critic/historian Richard Schickel’s new book Conversations With Scorsese, of course I had to pick it up.

The work is a book-length Q & A between the author and filmmaker that covers the whole span of Scorsese’s life and career and is a fascinating read. But then I got to the chapter on Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed and right there on page 260 at the start of the interview, Schickel asks a question that I found troubling:

RICHARD SCHICKEL: The Departed was based on a pair of Japanese crime movies that were quite well received critically. And, of course, it eventually brought you your long-delayed Oscar. I gather you hesitated about making it first.

So what was I troubled by? Well, the two “crime movies” that The Departed was based on—2002’s Infernal Affairs and 2003’s Infernal Affairs II (both directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak) are Hong Kong films not Japanese.  Read more...

First 3-D Porno Cuming…er, Coming to Hong Kong & Taiwan

  • April 8, 2011 12:01 am

That’s right—it’s the moment humankind has been working toward since we crawled out of the swampy waters millions of years ago and evolved into the amazing life forms we are today…the first 3-D porn flick.

It’s been in the works for two whole years, but starting next week, the lucky people in Taiwan and Hong Kong will finally get to see Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy in all its 3-D splendor and glory…holes and all. There’s supposedly such anticipation for it that thousands of tickets have already been sold and many mainland Chinese (where the uncensored version of the film will not be available–at least for the first five minutes until someone bootlegs it) are already planning trips just to be a part of this historic experience. Here’s the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szz9tsthY8E&feature=player_embedded  Read more...