15) You're not studying hard enough unless you get a nosebleed.
16) If you have a nosebleed, you most definitely have cancer. And you have no money to pay for the surgery that will save your life. And your liver is missing. We're not sure where it went, but it's making your cancer progress faster.
21) You go to America you come back miraculously successful. You go to England you come back amazingly fashionable. You stay in Korea the only thing that changes is your hairstyle.
22) And if you come back with no apparent reason then it's because you have cancer.
PAINTED SKIN is coming, and people are excited, mystified and perplexed. Or at least, I am. An aggressively stylized horror/action film, it feels like a return to A CHINESE GHOST STORY days, mixed with a bit of THE DEMON'S BABY and some 300. The stills that have been released look like this:
Which is pretty groovy. The cast includes Donnie Yen, Vicki Zhao Wei and Zhou Xun and it's directed by Gordon Chan who's one of those Hong Kong directors who turned out some decent action flicks in the early 90's, then some worse action/horror flicks (ARMAGEDDON) in the mid-90's and then vanished for a while, to all intents and purposes.
The trailer for PAINTED SKIN recently came out, and it looked surprisingly square and old school - but trailers are never the best indicators of what a movie's going to be like. Now, a new Hong Kong poster has been released for the movie, courtesy of Intercontinental Film Distribution (which releases Dreamworks/Paramount and Disney films in Hong Kong). Donnie Yen is conspicuous by his absence here, although given the fact that FLASHPOINT and AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS didn't do so great in HK it's no surprise that Intercontinental probably figured that Zhou Xun and Vicki Zhao Wei were more marketable commodities.
I don't even know how I feel about this, but in a world where people work out by pole dancing like a stripper, ROCK N ROLL DIET is bound to be the next big craze. This low brow comedy starring Koichi Sato and Tomorowo Taguchi is being produced by BioTide Films, the company responsible for low budget pokes in the eye like DOUBLE D AVENGER and SURVIVAL BEACH (although they are also responsible for Iraq War agitprop doc, LITTLE BIRDS - which I double dare any American to watch - and the underrated and ambitious WOMAN TRANSFORMATION). The plot is, well the plot is easy to grasp once you watch the trailer. Weight loss through rock n'roll! It's like the movie Guitar Wolf will make when they finally sell out.
It's the year for Korean remakes. THE CHASER was sold for a Hollywood remake, as was legal/kidnap drama SEVEN DAYS starring LOST actress Kim Yun-Jin. The much-delayed MY SASSY GIRL remake starring Elisa Cuthbert just went straight-to-video (and it's about as interesting as watching paint dry), THE HOST is getting a Chinese remake from Ning Hao (CRAZY STONE), ADDICTED became POSSESSION (and sunk without a trace, despite starring Sarah Michelle Gellar) and now the remake of K-horror film, INTO THE MIRROR has become MIRRORS, starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Alexandre Aja (HILLS HAVE EYES, HAUTE TENSION).
The film opened at number four over the weekend, with around $11 million in box office gross. Even worse, critics don't love it or hate it - they could care less about it:
"Ponderously paranormal film, which Fox withheld from critics for good reason, suggests a violent variant of the studio's megahit NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM." - Variety
"...MIRRORS, a slab of shoddy, hollow rubbish that can't be bothered to concoct imaginative frights or even tenuous bonds between its supernatural terror and its characters' human drama." - Slant Magazine
All these bad reviews make
the original actors sad.
So THE LAKE HOUSE (remake of Korea's IL MARE) did okay box office, but POSSESSION, MY SASSY GIRL and MIRRORS have all splatted at the box office like an under-cooked flapjack. Is this because people are staying away from remakes? Or are these just bad movies? I tend to think it's the latter.
Gillian Chung, the half of the TWINS whose career exploded earlier this year when she wound up being prominently featured in Edison Chen's sex photos doing things that a squeaky clean pop idol shouldn't be caught on camera doing, is returning to the public eye with a new TV series, SPIRIT OF THE SWORD. Joining her in the limelight will be Nic Tse, whose wife Cecilia Cheung was also featured prominently in Edison's photography project. High ratings and public complaints are bound to ensue.
Gillian has just told Nic that Edison is
indeed all that, plus bag of chips.
Mark your calendars for the premiere of the show on August 25.
This is old news, but whenever an actor really goes for the gusto at the speed of maximum ridiculosity, Kaiju Shakedown will be there to congratulate them. And, in this case, a DeNiro goes to Korea's Su-Ae (or Soo-Ae) who previously appeared in the excellent A FAMILY. She recently starred in SUNNY, the July 24 release from director Lee Jun-Ik who's best known for the Korean mega-hit KING AND CLOWN. SUNNY, a movie about a woman chasing her missing husband through war-torn 1971 Vietnam is bound to earn a DeNiro based on its premise alone, and enough people were intrigued to give it a respectable opening and decent business, although it did nothing even close to KING AND CLOWN numbers. But now I want to see this movie myself to witness DeNiro-worthy method acting from Su-Ae. I Love Korean Movie describes it best:
"Su-Ae admitted in an interview with Yonhap News that had actually gotten drunk and blacked out for a scene. It was for a scene in her new film SUNNY, which takes place at a nightclub in a U.S. army base, where she drinks heavily and passes out in the bathroom. She revealed that she really drank more than half a bottle of whisky at the director’s criticism that she didn’t look real enough. As a result of drinking so much alcohol, she became really drunk, adding reality to the scene where she throws up in the toilet and blacks out. Su-Ae had won admiration from the director and the rest of the filming crew for her commitment to the film."
So let me get this straight: the director tells her she stinks while shooting a scene, so she downs half a bottle of booze, then yaks in the toilet and passes out while the camera's running. When she wakes up the crew (not including the director) congratulate her for her commitment. Yes, yes. Su-Ae, a DeNiro for you.
Everyone who watched the Hong Kong hits INFERNAL AFFAIRS 1, 2 and 3, INITIAL D and the lesser CONFESSION OF PAIN instantly recognized the name of the director, Andrew Lau, one of Hong Kong's biggest hitmakers and a longtime cinematographer on movies like CHUNGKING EXPRESS. But Lau shared directing credits on those movies with Alan Mak, which gets an eternal shrug of, "Who?" from most viewers.
A young guy who only graduated from performing arts school in 1990, Mak worked on all those movies with Lau as well as directing several odd movies of his own including NUDE FEAR (his directorial debut) and A WAR NAMED DESIRE (a decent action flick starring Francis Ng). He also directed MOONLIGHT IN TOKYO, a movie which stars Leon Lai as a mentally retarded gigolo living in Tokyo and loving the ladies at the instigation of Chapman To who plays his pimp.
Now, Alan Mak and INFERNAL AFFAIRS writer Felix Chong have teamed up to co-direct the first movie in three years from Sammi Cheng, the pop idol who burned out on movies after starring in Stanley Kwan's EVERLASTING REGRET back in 2005, an experience which led to - according to most reports - something of a nervous breakdown for the actress/singer. This time out she stars in Mak and Chong's LADY COP AND PAPA CROOK in which Eason Chan plays a triad kingpin whose son is kidnapped during a gang war. Sammi is the cop assigned to find his kid and he works with her and the police on the one hand, while deploying his men all over China to rescue his kidnapped son from his rivals by any means necessary.
Action director Ching Siu-tung can lay claim to the fact that he choreographed the action on Uwe Boll's IN THE NAME OF THE KING. While Boll's latest stinker only grossed about $4.7 million at the US box office, ads (in Home Video Magazine) for his upcoming film, SEED, claim that it grossed $35.5 million on home video. True or not true - who knows? But it looks like SEED will be released direct-to-video which is, apparently, where the real money for Boll's artistic endeavors lies.
(Thanks to the sharp-eyed reader who sent in the info on Dr. Boll)
This summer marks what might be the last chance for once-acclaimed-now-reviled Bollywood director, Ram Gopal Varma, to rescue his career and, true to form, he's turned out three movies for the summer months giving audiences three chances to judge his work. First up, there was SARKAR RAJ a sequel to SARKAR, his remake of THE GODFATHER starring father-son duo, Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan. SARKAR RAJ threw in daughter-in-law, Aishwarya Rai, for good measure and it did pretty good business. Artistically, it was nothing new and had all the failings and strengths of the original SARKAR which was never his best movie. However, it wasn't a flat-out disaster like KI AAG, his SHOLAY remake, or SHIVA, his remake of his own first film.
A few weeks ago he released CONTRACT, an underworld thriller about the intersection of terrorism and gangsterism that he promised would complete the trilogy he started with SATYA and continued with COMPANY. However, the reviews were generally in this vein:
"RGV is amongst the finest storytellers India has produced, no two opinions on that. But howsoever efficient the chef may be, if the meat isn't fresh, no amount of garnishing can make it taste sumptuous. In this case, it's the story [oft-repeated] and screenplay [gripping at few places only, otherwise uninspiring] that throw a spanner."
"Sadly, the film lacks the chutzpah of SATYA and COMPANY and ends up as a pale shadow of Ramu's finest works."
The film had further problems when the press jumped on the similarities between the terrorist blasts in the film (released July 18) and the Ahmedabad blasts (July 28) which killed approximately 46 people. Both the film and the real life incident saw low intensity bombings send scores of people to the hospital, followed by much more lethal bombs being detonated at local hospitals.
No one is saying that one incident inspired the other (the timing is too close) but real life imitating the movies definitely turned off audiences and CONTRACT bombed at the box office. Since this flop, rumors have circulated that the Bachchan family is unlikely to associate their name with RGV's upcoming films, and an unnamed source (speaking in the Times of India) said that any announced or planned projects between the Bachchans and Ram Gopal Varma were on hold indefinitely. RGV dismissed this rumor out of hand via text message, and Amitabh Bachchan dismissed it as well, stating that they had "20 more" movies in the works. They might want to rethink that because RGV's summer of comeback is set on serious limp right now.
The much-anticipated Thai film CHOCOLATE has already hit screens in Thailand and did great business before being sold to multiple overseas territories. The story of a young, autistic girl who learns martial arts by watching Bruce Lee movies on TV and then goes on a path of righteous butt-kicking to save her mother, it's directed by ONG BAK and TOM YUM GOONG director Prachya Pinkaew. It will finally be hitting North American screens at the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto Film Festival and at Austin's Fantastic Fest. Oddly enough, while it was rumored that the Weinstein Company had picked up CHOCOLATE for North American distribution, they aren't handling any of these festival screenings and seem to be completely uninvolved with the film at this point.
The Toronto dates are great news for the film's distributor, Sahamongkol, who saw their ONG BAK screen at Toronto's Midnight Madness a few years ago which sparked a bidding war in the lobby during the screening. Hopefully, CHOCOLATE will get the same reaction.
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