Painted Skin (Wa Pei) is a fantasy tale based off the classical Chinese novel of Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) and is directed by Gordan Chan. It starts out with general Wang Sheng (Kun Chen) and his army invading and inevitably demolishing a bandit outpost in the middle of the desert. The action choreography is too pretty and perfect as only the bandits take a beating, leaving the army unscathed. The battle includes decent wire work as the general and his legion jump up walls and on top of buildings.
As general Wang Sheng fights his way through, he comes upon a graceful and stunning beauty (Xun Zhou) amid the dirty bandits. She lies barely covered by an animal pelt next to a murdered man and as the general makes his appearance, she is noticeably intrigued by him. He carries her to safety and as his army make their way back, a lone lizard looks on almost as an omen as the titles come up.
At the army’s return to their city, Wang Sheng’s wife Chen Peirong (Wei Zhao) appears and is instantly and understandably wary of the young looking Xiaowei’s proximity to her husband. This early sense of danger leads her to future revelations regarding the newly rescued damsel.
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Water Boys began as a Japanese movie back in 2001. It was the story of some geeky male students who joined a synchro team. That’s a short way of saying synchronized swimming. It proved so popular in Japan that it was packaged and delivered as a TV series which ran for two seasons in 2003 and 2004. Finally, a TV Summer Special was aired in 2005. It was broadcast over two nights each with each segment running about 90 minutes.
Admittedly, synchronized swimming is still in the Summer Olympics but aside from that you don’t hear much about it these days. It is sort of like ballet and swimming combined. Meaning that I could have a look at it with girls doing the swimming, but watching guys do this – I think not.
At least not for me. But I can see how Japanese girls might like watching a wholesome story that showed off a lot of guys in brief racing swimsuits.
So why I am doing an article about this? Well, I learned that buxom gravure idol Nonami Takizawa had a speaking role in this TV Special with appearances on both nights.
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Ai No Uta (aka Love Song) begins with a despondent woman telling us how she was an unwanted child. We are told that her mother did as much as she could to prove that theory again and again – including making her 7 year old daughter hide in a closet while she entertained male guests.
She is shunned by other children at school, is given stale bread to take to school for lunch, and her birthday or Christmas were ignored by her Mom. At one point, while still as a child, she had attempted to run away. She tried to live in a cardboard box nearby. When she was driven back home by severe rainstorms, and hunger, her mother greeted her with an indifferent, “Oh you’re back? Didn’t you run away?”
We learn just about all of this in voice-overs and flashbacks in the first 7 minutes or so of this TV series. This child, named Yoko Matsuda, and played as an adult by TV actress Miho Kanno, grew up to be a woman who lacked both friends and family. She was totally lacking in any kind of happiness at all. So we are not surprised when she, after giving up all hope, decides to take her life by jumping off a bridge in Tokyo. She climbs up on the railing and jumps off. All that remains are her shoes. Roll intro.
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Ordinary Miracle is a story about two people who meet by chance on a train platform. They’re total strangers and unrelated to each other in any way other than both are coming or going either from or to their work while passing through this one station.
The event that caused them to meet was anything but romantic. On their own, they each consider or think that a third person, a man standing by himself at the far end of the train platform, may be going to take his own life by leaping in front of an oncoming train.
Independently they watch him, and as the train approaches, this man edges toward the side of the platform of the oncoming train. They spring into action and barely pull this man back to safety from a sure death by punching him and wrestling him down to the platform’s surface.. Read more…
Hana Haruna – Koi Yuu Ryokou Abaren Bou Oppai
E-Net Frontier
Catalog # ENFD-5188 – Region 2 Disc – 16:9 Aspect
Running Time: 92 Minutes
The Skinny: The google machine translation of the title comes out: Transportation Tits Rowdy Koi. So I’ve really no idea. However it’s not really important to know the title in order to watch the video or even to order the video. Release date was 12/18 and I had this one in my hands in Florida on 12/19.
This is Hana’s 6th gravure DVD release this year. It is her first release from E-Net Frontier. She’s now been in DVDs released by I-One, Takeshobo, Saibunkan, and Air Control which means all of the major gravure producers have had her on screen. Read more…
Company: Pathfinder Entertainment
Horror
Running Time: 76 Minutes (1 hr. 16 mins.)
Region 1
Not Rated
My rating: ** out of *****
Check the review of this product. There is no spoilers.
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Director: Jingle Ma
Cast: Louis Koo, Cherrie Ying, Tats Lau
Synopsis: He’s great looking. She’s gorgeous. They meet in Beijing, China, and it looks like love will blossom. Or will it? This isn’t boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Instead this is boy meets girl, then boy can’t remember girl.
Tagline:
Classification: Romantic Comedy
Release date: April 10, 2003
Running time: 97 minutes
Language: Cantonese or Mandarin with English and Chinese subtitles
Studio website:
Links: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379975
Categories: Comedy, Romance
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Karmic Mahjong (2006) stars Francis Ng and Cherrie Ying (she was the reason I rented the film) as the attractive leads in this comedy (maybe) / thriller (maybe not) set in Chengdu, China.
Ng plays a loser mechanic, Wu Yu-chuan, who has disappointed his wife sexually, who runs afoul of a gang of thieves who have a car smuggling racket, and is being given some bad advice by a blind fortune teller.
Ying plays a good looking woman, Jia Jia, who sold her son to a gangster, but tells people he was kidnapped, and now is desperate to get him back. She too consults the fortune teller.
Can these two people who have seemingly run out of luck and are both beset by the ‘villians’ in their lives, find a way to leave all their bad luck behind them by teaming up?
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I first saw “Ju-On” in 2003. I was at my sister’s for Christmas, and she rented it for some after-dinner entertainment. She could not have made a better or worse choice for a holiday movie!
It is not for kids or even faint-hearted adults. It is jarring, intense, dismal, taut to the breaking point, and one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. This film breaks the mold and sets a new standard for horror.
It has gore, but not splattered all over the screen. It has pretty girls, but no sex, It has ghosts but not the soft eerie kind that go bump in the night. No, this movie’s ghost’s intent is not to scare, but to destroy, and destroy it does; consuming everything in it’s path, this ghost does not boo!, it groans.
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Back when your grandparents were dating – let’s make that era sometime in the 1950’s, a film star was known the world over for simply standing on a grating on a Manhattan street and having a wind draft from below lift up her skirt.
That would be the legendary Marilyn Monroe and the film was called The Seven Year Itch. Monroe’s career was already in high gear by that time (1955), and an iconic picture like what was used in the film’s poster (next image below), only added to her allure. Sadly, she died in her sleep in 1962, having made, in fact, only six more films after this one.
This film was a male fantasy of course. Tom Ewell played the male lead whose wife goes out of town for a period of time, and then, a dreamy, single, sexy blond bombshell moves into the apartment upstairs. Fantasies ran rampant through his head after chatting with her, when she said to him, “When it’s hot like this, you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox.”
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