NYAFF 2009!!!

It's back!!

New York Asian Film Festival
June 19 - July 5
IFC Center and Japan Society

If you live in New York City, you know that at any given day there're at least 10 events going on, but the one I look the most forward to every summer is the New York Asian Film Festival. Despite NYC being an international metropolis, it is still hard to catch the latest asian films. NYAFF is the time when I go on asian film beige. Again this year there's an amazing line up with films for everyone. Here's just a few:

Let's start with a few films I'm personally excited about: OLD FISH, where members of Harbin’s bomb squad take on a mad bomber who’s leaving homemade explosives all over the city. What's different about this movie (which Onyx will appreciate) is it's acted mostly by actual cops and bomb squad officers. Then there's romantic comedy from China IF YOU ARE THE ONE, which is the second-highest grossing movie EVER released in China. The original film name is actually "Do Not Disturb If Not Sincere", about a man determined to end his bachelorhood and posts an advertisement, and a heart-broken stewardess who ended an affair with a married man. More than one review says this film goes back to the golden age of romantic films.

For those manga followers, 2008 NYAFF brought Death Note 1 and 2. This year, they have 20 CENTURY BOYS and 20 CENTURY BOYS: CHAPTER TWO- THE LAST HOPE. This award winning manga series is about an ordinary man who realizes that someone is drawing from a book he and his friends created as kids about the end of the world, and making it come true. Will they be able to stop the conspiracy in time? What excites me the most is that rather than trying to stuff the series into one 2 hr film, it's a three part series, and according to wiki, the movie is a faithful adaptation to the manga. I have not read 20 Century Boys, but I'm a big fan of Naoki Urasawa's other series Monster, which you can find them in any major bookstore. There is also ANTIQUE (TRAILER), based off the wildly popular (and I'm not joking about this) shojo manga series Antique Bakery about gorgeous gay men who make even more gorgeous cakes.



On the more serious front is CHILDREN OF THE DARK (TRAILER), a Japense drama that's set (and now banned) in Thailand about child trafficking, both for sex and for their spare organs. Also CLIMBER'S HIGH (TRAILER), about a group of newspapermen covering the real-life tragedy of a 1985 plane crash in the mountains of central Japan.

For martial art addicts, you will not be disappointed: there's Hong Kong historic action complete with battle scenes AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS (TRAILER); there's sexy ridiculous action with a hot girl who is actually a samurai who is actually a cyborg, SAMURAI PRINCESS; there's based off of Bruce Lee's master IP MAN action; there's award winning brutal bloody action BREATHLESS (TRAILER); there's 70's Korea's anti-communist hysteria satire spy comedy action DACHIMAWA LEE; retrospective screening of iconic old school (1978) action flick FIVE DEADLY VENOMS; and just pure comedy action whose plot can be explained with its title: BE A MAN! SAMURAI SCHOOL (TRAILER)

Then there are the beautiful, sensitive dramas: ALL AROUND US, which follows 8 years of marriage of a courtroom sketch artist. Actress Tae Kimura won “Best Actress” for her performance as the wife at the Japanese Academy Awards. CAPE NO. 7 (TRAILER), the highest grossing movie ever released in Taiwan, is a crowd pleasing film about in a tiny seaside town and its civic booster mayor who vows to form a local band to be the opening act for a pop star's concert. How does this have anything to do with 7 love letters that were lost in the war? I have no clue and am excited to find out. Then there's the brutal VACATION, which builds to a powerful punch in the guts as a guard volunteers to holds down the legs of a condemned prisoner when he’s hung in order to get extra vacation time. ROUGH CUT (TRAILER), a high concept action film about a spoiled actor known for playing gangsters who stars in his latest movie with a real life gangster.

I'm personally a sucker for surreal films, so I'm pretty psyched about DREAM, where two people find that their dreams are connected. To make matters worse, one of them is a sleepwalker that acts upon what the other dreams. Also THE CLONE RETURNS HOME (TRAILER), which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival about an astronaut's wife who recieves a clone of her husband when he dies in an accident in orbit. But life can be hard when you’re the clone of a dead man, and soon this photocopied human is lost in the labyrinth of his own artificial memories.

And what would an Asian Film Fes be without its above and beyond over the top ridiculous movies? Samurai zombies! Need I say more? Samurai zombies chasing a happy family on vacation and some mentally unbalanced guys with guns! That's YOROI SAMURAI ZOMBIE (TRAILER). Also the return of hideous space chicken, Guilala, who attacks the G8 Summit and the world leaders must fight back! MONSTER X STRIKES BACK: ATTACK THE G8 SUMMIT (TRAILER). From Malaysia is WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES, a “lost” black-and-white thriller from the 60’s with secret communist cults, werewolves, were-tigers, ghosts, private eyes, midgets and eerie secrets,

Check out Subway Cinema for more films and events (including Tokyo Gore Night and Pink Power)! http://subwaycinemanews.com/archives/317

The films are playing June 19 - July 2 at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue, at West 4th Street) and July 1 - 5 at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues).

swordplay and acid trip

Thanks to the NYAFF, I’ve been bingeing on Asian films, and am again reminded how Director Lee Myung-Se is greatly underappreciated.

One reason is because you can’t really find his films in the states. To be honest, I’ve only seen two of his films, but he blew me away. The first film I saw was Duelist. I went to see it almost exactly a year ago with MWS. The premise seemed interesting. Korean historical martial arts detective vs. assassin film. I can dig that. 111 mins later, MWS and I walked out the theater in a complete daze.

After a long discussion, MWS and I figured this is what happened: 3 days into Duelist’s shoot, aliens planning on destroying earth by screwing with people’s minds steal every single copy of the script. The cast and crew had to choose between continue to film, or be publicly beheaded with swords made by the tears of their children and shame of their ancestors. So everyone went into improv over-drive. Occasionally, someone would shout, “Wait! I...I think I remember a scene from the script!” and they’d shoot that. And so a movie filled with “wait, what??” scenes was born.

And yet the first thing I said coming out of the movie was “I got to own that fucking thing”. It is by far the most beautiful martial art movie I’ve seen, easily topping Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, Hero, etc. Of the protagonists, one comes off a bit nuts and the other autistic. But when they fight, they are beautiful together. It’s as if a veil has been lifted, and they can fully express themselves clearly. They’re completely in love with each other, and they want to kill one another. At one point, a character describe seeing a battle: “Don’t know whether I was possessed by the moonlight or the snow.... a man and a woman were fighting like crazy with some sharp swords. But they also looked like they were dancing. It was like they were making love under the moonlight as well.” When a writer writes lines like that, he can only pray that that scene look kinda sorta that good. But the fight in Duelist looked exactly like that. So rarely is a movie simultaneously serious, cheesy, beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and incredibly sexy. It made so little sense, but you can’t look away.

M, despite not having its script taken by extraterrestrials, is a psychedelic movie that a NYAFF rep described as an acid trip. It’s about 3 characters: A novelist battling writer’s block finds himself haunted by nightmares, unable to recall parts of his days and feeling someone is following him. A girl follows her favorite novelist around with both a sweet first-crush shyness and a creepy stalkerish undertone, but soon she finds herself being chased by a shadow in the dark herself. A rich businessman’s daughter finds her boyfriend drifting away from her, but is what’s come between them another woman, his mysterious new novel, madness, or a ghost?

While Duelist has great color and light/shadow play, in M there is all that and smoke and glass and mirrors, ghosts and insanity, dripping water and phones that don’t stop ringing. So rarely does a director take so much care in every shot. Each scene drifts into one other. Not only can you not tell if you’re looking at a dream or memory or reality, sometimes you don’t even know whose is it. The next moment has equal chance being sweet or creepy, and it kept my attention the whole film.

(This is a music video, but I find it depicts the movie better than the trailers I've found.)

There are a lot of criticism against both movies, and I can see exactly why. But even with those flaws, I am personally extremely impressed by Lee Myung-Se’s craftsmanship, and wish that more people can see his movies.