Asian Beauty Appreciation

Dance Subaru is not an animated cartoon about dancing Japanese cars. It is a 2009 film about one girl’s climb into the world of ballet; a place where deception, lies, back-stabbing, and using people to get ahead are considered the norm.

Subaru Miyamoto is played by the beautiful and talented Meisa Kuroki. As is usually done in the movies – to achieve success one has to have previously suffered. Subaru and her twin brother Kazuma are introduced to ballet at an early age by their Mom who soon passes away because of a cancerous brain tumor. But not before ballet had taken hold in the children.

The kids loved ballet and shared a dream about becoming ballet dancers. They could be seen in the street practicing some classical dance movements from Swan Lake. However their conservative father discouraged them, But again, death intervenes. Kazuma dies at the age of 10 from a brain tumor, just like his Mother. Read more…

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.

Read more…

Just when I thought that Nonami Takizawa’s acting career was on hold….

or maybe I should amend that statement: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

But that was the tag-line for Jaws 2 released all the way back on June 16th, 1978, just in time for the summer beach season (kids off from school and all that). Apparently that scary great white shark dreamt up by Peter Benchley for his novel Jaws more than 35 years ago is still attracting movie makers.

Which brings us to Jaws in Japan, a 2009 film that apparently went straight to DVD. And that brings us back to Nonami Takizawa who gets the star billing in this movie. I can’t say if this film was a success or not but the film makers attempted a cross-over between gravure and gore.

What little I’ve been able to find out about this movie is that four girls journey to a southern Japanese island to re-live some memories from their college days. There’s some problems with the lodging at a local inn, and there’s some nefarious bad guys in the area. There’s also that monster swimming around in the sea waiting for some bikini-clad beauties to munch on. Read more…

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

Read more…

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?

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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.”

Read more…

Isabella (Yi sa bui lai) is a 2006 Hong Kong film written and directed by Ho-Cheung Pang. It takes place in Macau and stars the beautiful Isabella Leong and Chapman To. The film begins abruptly with Chen-Shing Ma (Chapman To) attempting to pick up Bik-Yan Cheung (Leong) in some dark corner of a bustling club. It quickly cycles through a series of images including Bik-Yan smoking a cigarette down an unknown hallway, a close-up of a defeated Chen-Shing hunkered against a slot machine, and an ant’s eye view between some unfamiliar buildings before the title card appears.

The shots feel disjointed but not only do they give an idea of what is to come but they showcase the talented eye of cinematographer Charlie Lam and his excellent framing. The music is also introduced here with artsy guitar strumming and piano playing. Now while the score won best film music at the Berlin International Film Festival, I feel that it grows repetitious later as it never changes in tempo. Read more…

The idea was a good one. Market a film by employing the lustful thoughts of teen-age boys; you know what I mean – raging hormones combined with a healthy obsession with boobs (the Japanese word for breasts is oppai).

This state of affairs is a rather common state in boys all over the world, and has been for about as long as there has been boys and girls.

Mix that with one of the prettiest and most popular actresses in all of Japan – Haruka Ayase, a former gravure idol.

Add in a rags to riches sports angle – you know what I mean here as well: a team of inept and incompetent players (could be any team sport – in this case it was volleyball) who will try to rise to the occasion.

Read more…

Full Time Killer is a Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, helmed Hong Kong action movie which was released back in 2001. Besides the two hitmen – Andy Lau as Lok and Takashi Sorimachi as “O”, the person with the most screen time in the movie is the beautiful Kelly Lin.

This is the story of the most successful assassin in Asia who is known simply as O who is Japanese and though he lives in Hong Kong he speaks only in Japanese. So don’t expect Sorimachi to speak any Cantonese. Read more…