Reviewing movies seems pretty easy, doesn’t it? With the advent of the internet and now the rise of blogs galore, everyone — and I mean, everyone — can be a movie critic. But then again, even before all this technology enabled people to have a voice, every single of one of us had the potential to be film critics. I mean, when audiences were leaving screenings of James Whale’s Frankenstein in 1931, I’m sure folks were giving “reviews” to their friends and families that were equivalent to our own contemporary usage of such ever-descriptive critiques as “It sucked!” or “It rocked!” In that respect, reviewing movies is easy — you see a movie, you blurt out your reaction, and you’ve got a review…of sorts. But I think trying to do this job responsibly is actually a pretty hard task if you put any degree of thought into it.

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 DVD Cover to Slant, Vol. 1

Kozo published another review of mine the other day, so I thought I’d talk a bit about it here.

While coming home from OU Medical Center awhile back, I stopped in Norman to find a place to eat. Across the street from the Chinese place I’d chosen was Hastings, a video/music/book/video game/comic store that I tend to frequent anytime I come back to Oklahoma. While browsing the “foreign film” shelves of the DVD section, I stumbled upon Slant, Volume 1, a collection of short films that aren’t foreign at all, as they’ve been created by a handful of Asian American filmmakers. It’s striking that an Asian American film collection gets shelved in “foreign film” section, but that’s a discussion for another time.

I had never heard of this anthology before (although I did recognize Kip Fulbeck’s contribution, as he screened Lilo and Me during a visit to UC Santa Cruz awhile back), but being the budding Asian Americanist that I am, I snapped up a copy for the low, low price of $1.00. From the official website, I culled this description:

The Best of Slant Vol 1 features a collection of short films culled from seven years of Aurora Picture Show’s annual Slant: Bold Asian American Images festival. The Slant festival annually showcases the best in emerging Asian American cinema. Since its start in 2000, Slant has screened an eclectic mix of films that explore a wide range of topics and genres such as the smashing of stereotypes, off-beat comedies, family stories, explorations of culture and identity, and universal themes like love, loss, the human condition.

Slant curator Melissa Hung is the founding editor of Hyphen, a magazine about Asian American culture. She is a frequent speaker on the topic of Asian American media and independent media. She lives in Oakland, California and works for the San Francisco WritersCorps, a creative writing program for urban youth.

Films in the Compilation include:

1. How to do the Asian Squat by Daniel Hsia
2. Lilo and Me by Kip Fulbeck
3. Maritess vs the Superfriends by Dino Ignacio
4. A Little Bit Different by Lynn Okimura
5. Profiles in Science by Wes Kim
6. I Pie (A Love Store) by Nobu Adilman
7. How to Make Kimchi According to My Kun-Uma by Samuel Kiehoon Lee
8. Slip of the Tongue by Karen Lum

You can check out my full review for LoveHKFilm.com here. I thought the better contributions made up for those that were simply lacking or just too quirky for their own damn good. For those of you curious about the anthology and perhaps unable to get your hands on it, check out Dino Ignacio and Rex Navarette’s contribution, Maritess vs. The Superfriends, one of the clear-cut gems of this eclectic collection.

On the main site, Kozo has posted my review for The Chaser, a 2008 South Korean film, from first-time director Na Hong-Jin. This award-winning motion picture first came to my attention via Roger Ebert’s three-and-a-half-star review this past January, and after stumbling upon the Malaysian DVD during a summer visit to Hawai‘i, I just had to pick it up a copy and see the movie for myself.

The Chaser was a multiple award-winner at the 45th Daejong Awards, taking home prizes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Kim Yoon-Seok). If you’re a fan of gritty, pulse-pounding thrillers (and not too squeamish about gore), you’ll want to check this one out.

You can read my LoveHKFilm.com review here, and I’ve embedded the UK trailer for the film below. The whole “There’s a U.S. remake coming!” angle in the preview is kinda silly, if not downright annoying, but otherwise, I think it showcases the film’s premise fairly well.

Have you ever bumped into a celebrity in your daily life? For some of you folks, it might be a common occurrence; for others, it’s a rare treat. If we leave aside sports/sci-fi/comic conventions, public appearances, or other venues where I knew a certain famous person would attend, I’ve only seen a handful of “celebrities” in my life. I once saw Louis Koo and Daniel Wu at Changi International Airport in Singapore, although my brain didn’t process what I was seeing until it was much too late. Before that, I saw Diane Keaton shopping on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, CA; Lost’s Naveen Andrews browsing Kahala Mall on Oahu; the B-52’s Fred Shneider holding a man purse in Detroit; and G.W. Bailey (a.k.a. Captain Harris in the Police Academy films) at some random airport when I was a kid. There are no interesting stories attached to any of those sightings. Sorry.

However, besides the botched Koo and Wu encounter, I do have one more “sighting” that actually connects with Hong Kong cinema that I could share with you.

A very long time ago, I visited Hong Kong for the first time. During the requisite sightseeing tour of the island, I saw a great many things. I’ve documented some aspects of my trip before, but never something as pointless as this:

What’s the significance of the above pictured watercraft? According to my tour guide, this boat belongs to none other than…

(drumroll, please)

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To increase the daily content for this blog, I’ve decided to start digging back into the archive and occasionally spotlighting one of the 300+ reviews I’ve written for the site thus far. Some of the movies that will be featured in “Retro Review” will be golden oldies, others could be classified as unappreciated gems, and still others will likely rank as unadulterated crap.

This first installment of Retro Review will be spotlighting — what else? — the very first review I ever wrote for LoveHKFilm.com — the Tsui Hark-produced 1990 film, Swordsman. When Kozo was looking for new reviewers way back in 2002, I contacted him expressing interest, and this review was my “try-out” for the site. Apparently, I passed the audition. Whatever its merits, in this early review, you can read not only my unbridled enthusiasm for Hong Kong cinema, but my initial interest in packing in as much detail and trivia as humanly possible.

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When I started reading Haruki Murakami’s work, the going rate on eBay for Kodansha’s English translation of Pinball 1973 was well over $250 a copy. I couldn’t and still can’t afford to pay that much for a novel (and wouldn’t if I could), and until recently, the only version I had of Alfred Birnbaum’s translation was one that had been transcribed onto a Microsoft Word document. I figured until a US/UK publisher got the rights, I’d be stuck with my digital copy. Well, never fear — it looks like the English translation of Pinball 1973 finally came back into print in Japan because I just bought it for $15 from an eBay seller.

In any event, both Pinball 1973 and its predecessor, Hear the Wind Sing, provide interesting, if entirely non-compulsory backstory to the events of Murakami’s more internationally known work, Wild Sheep Chase — in fact, the three books form what Murakami calls, “The Trilogy of the Rat.” J’s Bar, the novel’s unnamed narrator, his business partner, and the aforementioned Rat all get introduced in these two early works. Both of these slender tomes provide an interesting primer to all things Murakami: references abound to author fetishes like elephants, ears, spaghetti, suicide by hanging in a forest, an old girlfriend named Naoko, and wells — the deep, dark bottomless kind. Read the rest of this entry »

“You keep looking at the sea and you start to miss being with people; you stay around people all the time and you just want to look at the sea. Funny about that.”

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I decided to start reading Haruki Murakami again. As a warm-up, I read Jay Rubin’s Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words before plunging once again into Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. I did something like this before with my previous blog when I heard that a film adaptation of Norwegian Wood was in the works, and now that Tran Anh Hung’s version has been filmed, perhaps that’s part of the impetus to reacquaint myself with the work of one of my favorite authors. My last attempt at a Murakami marathon didn’t get quite as far as I planned (I had, quite ambitiously, thought I would read all of Murakami’s books in the order they were published in Japan and then write about them), but I think I might give it another go.

Published as Kaze no Uta o Kike in 1979, Hear the Wind Sing wasn’t translated until 1987 by Alfred Birnbaum. And funnily enough, the English translations for this novel and his second book, Pinball 1973 — have never been made available by any American publisher. They are only published in Japan as part of the Kodansha English Library. To my knowledge, Murakami has never provided an actual answer as to why these works have not been published in the West, but each novel’s length as well as its narrative content may factor into the decision. However, thanks to ebay and Amazon, these books are not completely out of reach.

According to the author, the idea for the book originated when Murakami was watching a baseball game. He became possessed with the idea that he must write a novel, and so, while running the bar Peter Cat for his father-in-law, Murakami would write for an hour every night for the next three months. After submitting the finished manuscript to a literary magazine, he won the Gunzo Literary Prize right off the bat. Not a bad start, eh?

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