Asian Beauty Appreciation

The Flowers of War has been reported to be the most expensive film ever produced in China. I’ve seen the numbers and they are in the range of 100 Million US dollars.

Directed by Zhang Yimou, this epic film is about courage and sacrifice set against the ravages and horrors of war in 1937 in Nanjing, China. This film also marks the first time that a Western Actor has the lead role in a Chinese production.

The film has a limited opening playing only in a short list of select cities (just 21 theaters nationwide) beginning on Friday, January 20th, 2012.

Since it is not playing anywhere in Florida, I have to hope that it will achieve a wider distribution later on, or I’ll have to wait for the DVD to review it.

Christian Bale (an Oscar winner for The Fighter and he starred as Batman in The Dark Knight) has the lead role. He plays a traveling mortician, attending to the dead, not an adventurer, yet he’s kind of a wayfaring dissolute man who happened to find himself in Nanjing, and at the church, when the Japanese troops attacked the city in December of 1937.

By circumstances unknown to me, so I’ll call them luck and fate, he and a group of frightened Chinese Catholic schoolgirls and another group made up of a dozen beautiful courtesans, find themselves trapped inside a walled cathedral – which they hope will afford them safety from the marauding soldiers. Bale’s character, John Miller, will take up the role of the church’s priest, donning the clothing and vestments of a recently killed priest

That’s about all the set up I can provide not having seen the film. Zhang Yimou’s cinematic pedigree – Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Shanghai Triad (1995), The Road Home (2000), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) are amongst his best known films that have garnered interest, praise and adulation from western audiences.

He’s worked with Gong Li multiple times (at least 5 films), and with Zhang Ziyi at least three times. So he’s got the talent and the rep to attract China’s most beautiful and best known actresses.

The reviews have been mixed, but if you are attracted to Asian beauties, love going to the movies, and you live in or near LA, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington DC, Houston, Honolulu, Seattle, or Atlanta – then you will have an opportunity to see the film on the big screen as soon as Friday, Jan. 20th.

I will be happy to help you publish your review if you do happen to take in the film in the near future, wish to contribute a review, and you don’t already have author status on this blog. You can contact me on the Scanlover Forum via Private Message.

For interviews with Director Zhang Yimou and lead actress Ni-Ni, visit Sidewalks.

To view a calendar with The Flowers of War beauties as the models visit Beijing Shots.

The trailer for The Flowers of War is below:

First we will set the stage. We are in Beijing, China, the time is present day, and most of the action will take place in and around a top-tier ad agency. Andy Lau plays Zi Gang Sun, an ad executive who is on a seemingly terrific career path.

He’s not only an eligible bachelor, but he revels in it. He’s unofficially – the hottest guy in the office. He’s also a male chauvinist, and his skill is in selling products to men. Girls working there fawn all over him, that is when they’re not flirting with him, or creating scenarios where they can bump into him.

On his way to the office one day – he meets a beautiful woman in the elevator. He offers to buy her a coffee, and she says she only drinks water. You can see the attraction. His for her is written all over his face, and she’s intrigued too, only she’s not so outgoing about it that you can easily tell what she’s thinking. She is Li Yu-long and she’s played by Gong Li. Lau’s Mr. Sun doesn’t know it, but she’s just been hired by his firm to become the Executive Creative Director of the firm – a position that he thought he would be promoted into that day.

After his boss, the firm’s CEO’s broke the news to him that Li got the job instead of him, he heads back to his office, where his staff had a surprise party set up for him – a celebration on his promotion. That he didn’t get. He dismisses them. Sorry guys, not today. Maybe sometime in the future.

The next morning, there’s a big meeting scheduled in the conference room to introduce this Li. Sun makes a bet with one of his buddies, that this Li, whoever she is, will look like a man. Soon after Li walks in and sits down. Sun goes over to chat her up.  He still hasn’t a clue as to who she is. He only knows that she is the woman from the elevator from yesterday. ”Oh – you also work here?‘, he says, amping up the wattage of his smile.

When Li takes off her glasses, Sun says, “You look good without your glasses.”

She replies, “You also look good … without my glasses.”

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Let’s start with the title Overheard 2. Now wouldn’t this title alone lead you to believe that this film would, should, or could be a sequel to Overheard which I reviewed here. Then add in the following:

Same Three Lead Actors - Lau Ching Wan, Louis Koo, and Daniel Wu

Same Directors - Alan Mak and Felix Chong

Same Screenplay Authors – Alan Mak and Felix Chong

Same Producer - Derek Yee

Same Underlying Themes – Covert Electronic surveillance and Insider Trading

I’m not crazy, am I? Every indication would lead us to believe that Overheard 2 was a sequel to Overheard. Only it isn’t. Which brings us to the question: Is this shameless marketing?

In China, there is a state agency which we shall label SARFT. Yes, that is an acronym, and sorry, but no – I didn’t make up the acronym. This agency aka State Agency for Radio, Film, and Television are the folks that decide what is or isn’t acceptable content for the few billion Chinese people. They also oversee the Internet as it pertains to content and access within China.

Now I have already told you that I wasn’t able to access my blog while in Yangshuo in China earlier this month. Now you and I, and possibly a good number of the few billion Chinese people, will find a small barrier/speed bump created by SARFT for Overheard 2.

In Overheard, our three stars played Hong Kong cops who were conducting a covert surveillance to uncover financial shenanigans by corporate honchos in the form of stock manipulation and insider trading. Only these cops decided to follow up, with their own money, and get in on the insider info and make a bundle for themselves instead of submitting the incriminating sound bytes. But Big Brother SARFT had decreed that crime cannot go unpunished – hence our three eavesdroppers could not be brought back for a Round 2.

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Takeshi Kitano is back with another in his Yakuza ouvre of films. This film is from 2010 but is about to open in a limited release across the USA beginning December 2nd. In this one called Outrage, in which Kitano is the writer, director, and star, he has decided to skip anything at all that might be considered fun, family, or as familiar as going out in Tokyo for a bowl of Ramen noodles. Sorry – there was a scene that began in a restaurant that served noodles but that scene ended with someone’s fingers floating in the noodle bowl.

Kitano has decided that the whole Yakuza experience is nothing more than the human equivalent of the most deadly King of the Hill game you’ve ever seen. From the lowest members of a Yakuza family, who are the button men or soldiers (the drivers don’t count), to the very top of the mountain where the Chairman holds forth – we see nothing but a supreme battle for power. Loyalties are constantly shifting. Your sworn brother today is your executioner tomorrow. And someone else will take care of him on the next day.

We start with a summit of one family. There’s a long line of limos and black-suited chauffeurs. We hear that Murase family has been doing a bit of drug business and that the Chairman isn’t pleased. So he instructs the Ikemoto family to set up an office on the Murase turf and begin to annoy and bother them.

An Ikemoto guy runs up a huge tab in a Murase night club in one night (600,000 Yen). He then claims he doesn’t have the money on him. The Murase’s demand payment but then are embarrassed when they send a couple of low level guys out to collect and find out that the guy was with the Ikemotos. An apology is necessary as well as the money being returned. But this meeting gets out of control fast, and the Murase lieutenant gets beaten up, and loses enough face that he’s required to cut off his pinky.

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What do a stock broker, actually a bank rep who handles investments for clients, a homicide detective, and a low-level triad enforcer have in common? This is the question that famed Hong Kong film director Johnny To puts before us in his brand new film, Life Without Principle.

Johnny To has received world-wide acclaim  for his stylish and hard-hitting films in the cops and crooks genre but he doesn’t limit himself to just those. In fact, I’ve reviewed a couple of his more recent films - Vengeance which had a relatively low police presence, and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart which was basically a romance. Besides those, I have personally seen close to a dozen of his older films.  That was one of the plusses of living in Manhattan – my proximity to the NY Chinatown where I could easily buy Hong Kong films on DVD. This time I caught his new film, which opened about a month ago on the 20th of October, at a real movie house – the UA Cinema in Taikoo, Hong Kong.

Okay, okay – enough off topic chatter. Let’s get back to the film. The first of the three main characters that we meet is the cop. Richie Jen (below) plays Inspector Cheung. As we first lay eyes on him, he is working a case that he caught. He’s on-site of a fresh murder. One old timer, a pensioner, has murdered another. This event doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but the murderer and the Inspector will cross paths again.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Inspector Cheung’s wife, played by Myolie Wu, is hot to buy an apartment. He thinks they need to discuss it further. But she is vulnerable to the real estate broker’s sale pitch (and not so subtle pressure tactics) about how time is of the essence, and that other buyers are preparing offers. So Cheung and Mrs are looking at getting a hefty mortgage.

Lau Ching Wan (below) plays the triad guy known as Panther. He’s a guy in his 40′s and he’s well known in the triad world. He serves as a bagman, he sets up dinners, he’s a go-fer, and above everything else he believes in loyalty. Panther will run around trying to raise bail money when that’s needed for one of his associates.He’s very well known in the Hong Kong triad circles, and everyone in his triad is his ‘sworn brother’.

Today, he’s going to need a ton of money and he’ll need to get it fast because one of his triad buddies has been running an internet investment house, and the market is turning, and his client has threatened him with mayhem or worse.

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It has been said that there are only two kinds of men in the world: Those who cheat on their wives, and those who want to. At least this is what is said more than once in the 2011 Hong Kong romantic comedy Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. Co-directed by the illustrious duo of Johnny To and Wai Kai-Fai, the film proposes a possibility for us to consider; that there is a third kind of man. At least that is what the film’s female lead wants.

She is Zixin, played marvelously by Gao Yuanyuan. She’s a financial analyst. She’s been dumped by a guy, and nearly sleepwalked herself into a tragic accident with an automobile on a Hong Kong street. At the last second she is snatched out of harm’s way by a seedy, scruffy, wino drunk. He is Fang (Daniel Wu has the role). Turns out he is, or rather was, an award winning architect who burned out on success and now the only thing he looks forward to is his next drink.

She works in an office tower and across the way, in the next building, we find Cheung. Louis Koo has the part.  He is the CEO of an investment bank. He has just two rules (actually three but bear with me a minute). Rule Number One - we never lose money. Rule Number Two - we never forget rule number one. Anyway Cheung and Zixin began a window to window flirtation. Ultimately she agrees to a coffee date with him via post it notes and hand held signs.

But she has forgotten that she made a date a week ago with the down and not quite out architect who saved her life for that very evening.

Meanwhile, Cheung has noticed a very busty babe working two floors below Zixin. She notices Cheung’s window flirtations and thinks they are meant for her. So a second coffee date is arranged at the same place.

Louis Koo as Cheung

There’s some confusion – Cheung is called an asshole (via a handwritten placard) by a thoroughly pissed Zixin after Cheung doesn’t show for their date and she sees him with the bimbo who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Meanwhile Fang the architect has taken Zixin’s advice, and decided to get his act together as well as getting his groove back. He waits for her but she never shows.

There’s your set up and there’s your Act One. As Act Two begins we see the fall of Lehman Brothers on a big news screen playing on the side of a Hong Kong Building.

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When you hear about electronic skullduggery, as in wire-taps, hidden voice activated microphones for eavesdropping, sorry – make that surveillance, and surreptitious cameras planted in offices, you might think of, if you are of a certain age, the goings on in a Washington DC office/apartment complex called Watergate, or if you like Asian films, you might think of Overheard, the 2009 police thriller from Hong Kong.

Overheard aka Sit Yan Fung Wan, was co-directed by Alan Mak and Felix Chong,  with Chong also having written the screenplay. These are two-thirds, with Andrew Lau being the third, of the group that created the Infernal Affairs trilogy which later became the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

We start (literally the movie’s opening images) with a colony of rats, the four-footed kind, scurrying about doing their business in a garbage strewn back alley in the lees of a Hong Kong skyscraper. Within seconds, we are far above this mean street and its night crawling denizens. This places us now in a high floor in this office tower, and a group of agents who work for the Hong Kong Police Department’s Commercial Criminal Bureau (CCB) are scurrying about doing their business which is to plant eavesdropping equipment. The target firm is E & T, a firm whose stock has exhibited such erratic price swings, that the Hong Kong version of the SEC has decided to investigate it.

The cops – Johnny, played by Lau Ching-wan, Gene played by Louis Koo, and Max played by Daniel Wu, are very good at what they do. And to prove it, the film calls for the man whose office they are bugging to make an unexpected late night return to his office while these cops are still in it. The tension is remarkable, and the suspense is truly pulse-pounding.

Of course, there is a back-up plan, called Plan B, and they go undiscovered. With the bugs in place, they will come to learn that the E & T stock’s share price is going to be artificially manipulated in a day or so.

With this – Mak & Chong present us with a moral dilemma. They’re good cops but being a cop in Hong Kong means low pay, long hours, and lots of danger. And our three cops also have some private issues to deal with.

A suggestion is floated. Let’s delete this audio exchange, let’s not report it, and let’s grab a piece of this insider trading knowledge for ourselves. We’ll buy the shares in the morning, ride the price up and then we’ll sell it off later in the day for a big profit.

There’s your set up.

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Hanamizuki [Flowering Dogwood - and tag-lined: May your love bloom for 100 years] will mostly likely not last 100 months in your memory. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch and enjoy it for what it is – a sweet drama with appealing actors and actresses in situations that we all can identify with.

The star of the film is Yui Aragaki who is affectionately known as ‘Gakki‘ by her legion of fans. In this film she’s the central character. As the film opens it is in the early 1980′s and a small Japanese girl is reaching upward to the blossoms on the tree. Flash forward to 2005, and we find ourselves tracking a bus as it drives along the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada.

It is then, on this bus, that we meet Gakki as the now adult Sae Hirisawa. An English speaking young girl ask Sae some questions and we find out that she is headed for a lighthouse where she says, “… I am meant to be…”. The camera pans down and we see a framed photo in her hands.

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My Darling is a Foreigner stars Mao Inoue as a manga artist and Jonathan Sherr as her transplanted to Japan, American boyfriend. The film is the tale of a cross-cultural relationship and the ensuing problems. This film is actually based on a very popular manga (more than 3 million copies have been sold), Darling wa Gaikokujin, written by Saori Oguri. That story was based on Oguri’s own life with her husband Tony.

The story has some humor to it, but not nearly enough. The tale has all the expected speed bumps:

Her father is against it and about his hoped for approval – ‘Not in a million years’, he says.

Tony’s use of spoken Nihongo (Japanese) is excellent but that doesn’t mean he will use the right word all the time.

Saori’s English is a work in progress.

Each of them, Saori and Tony, will be the one that is different at a key social setting – Tony is mistaken for the Minister who performed the service at Saori’s sister’s wedding by Saori’s Mom. When Saori finally says, “This is my boyfriend”, her mother is shocked and immediately pulls Saori off to the side (right in full view of Tony).

At a party of Tony’s friends – Saori is the only Japanese – and she feels so isolated that she drinks herself into a stupor.

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There is a word (or words) in Chinese that means ‘old sames’. That word is laotong. As understood, it is used to describe a relationship between two women that would be similar to close and strong friends, would last longer than sisters, and be even more intimate than marriage, but yet would not involve sex. In short, a laotong would be an emotional match that would last a lifetime.

In 2005, Lisa See wrote a novel called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. This book would become a best seller. In the book, a character describes a laotong thusly: A laotong relationship is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. The book opens with the following sentence:

I am what they call in our village “one who has not yet died.”

The speaker of these words is an 80 year old widow. She’s outlived her husband, and her future is limited. So she spends much of her remaining time looking at her past, filtered by memories that are hers alone, or those memories shared with her laotong.

From those 14 words, the story of a specific laotong would be told. The novel is more than 250 pages long, and in 2011, this story will be released as a motion picture. The director is Wayne Wang, who also directed the film version of the Amy Tang novel – The Joy Luck Club.

The film stars Li Bingbing, Gianna Jun, Vivian Wu, and Hugh Jackman. Filming began in China in early 2010. The North American film rights have been acquired by Fox Searchlight Films, and the planned release date in the US is July 15th.

The storyline as described by Fox Searchlight films:

In 19th-century China, seven year old girls Snow Flower and Lily are matched as laotong – or “old sames” – bound together for eternity. Isolated by their families, they furtively communicate by taking turns writing in a secret language, nu shu, between the folds of a white silk fan. In a parallel story in present day Shanghai, the laotong’s descendants, Nina and Sophia, struggle to maintain the intimacy of their own childhood friendship in the face of demanding careers, complicated love lives, and a relentlessly evolving Shanghai. Drawing on the lessons of the past, the two modern women must understand the story of their ancestral connection, hidden from them in the folds of the antique white silk fan, or risk losing one another forever.

From the looks of the trailer, this film will be very special. I have every intention of seeing it and enjoying it.

“Our destinies are tied forever. We will be laotong – sisters for 10,000 years.”

Though this film was produced in China, it is an English language film. Originally Zhang Ziyi was to star in the lead role, but a scheduling conflict caused her to back out.