Films for Friday 4

'Outlaw Brothers' Lovely 80's Hong Kong action film where everyone fights in Pringle style golf sweaters, smashing each other over the head with their giant mobile phones. Yukari Oshima is the bad ass style police woman tracking smugglers with the help of a car thief. At the end she gets to beat up loads of villainous white guys in some excellent fight scenes.
'Tiger on the Beat' starts out as a very comedy-style police drama but gets really vicious after half way. It's got Chow Yun Fat in it being cool and ends with a great chainsaw martial art battle to the death, need I say any more...
'Chinese Untouchables' is a very depressing film. It's more or less a remake of 'The Untouchables' but try and imagine that where the Al Capone character wins and rides off scot free into the sunset while all the good characters lie on the floor dying in a pool of blood. 'You can never win' he laughs as he walks happily off. I sometimes think I would like to see a film where the baddies win, but in the end they are just very grim when you watch one.

Films for Friday 3

This weeks movie is 'Opera' by Italian director Dario Argento. As I have only seen it in Italian I am a bit hazy on the plot details, but thats not really the point of these 'Gialli' horror fillms anyhow is it. The best bit of the film is the very start. The heroine is tied up and needles are taped to her eyelids so if she blinks they will stab her (its a kind of crazy injury-to-eye motif thing to a silly degree), then her boyfriend comes in and gets stabbed in the throat, going through his tongue in sudden severe close up, and the crazy rock music starts up. Its by one of the Goblins, who are an awesome Italian band who worked with Argento for the soundtracks for nearly all his films. The best of their music is in Suspiria where the whole film seems like an excuse for the great music. I had their 'best of..' album once, I wounder where it has gone, I must go find it. The rest of the film is pretty good, crows fly around, people get done in. This film is from my Video Nasty collecting phase when I was younger. (Never did me any harm...)

Films for Friday 2

This weeks film for Friday is 'Shaolin Soccer'. This is easily my favourite football based film of all time (second is 'Escape to Victory').

My friend Erik sent me this from Shanghai and I was very pleased with it. First have a look at the case. The dodgy makers have been lazy on the back of the DVD and stuck on the credits for the movie Patton with George C Scott, and below that the plot synopsis of the film 'Monkeybone'. That's cool already.

It's a very funny and top quality film, I've only ever seen it in Chinese, but I think that's better as English subtitles would take away from the madness of it all, and I've avoided the dubbed version that came out a few years later with added British football jokes, bah. The clash of good and evil between the two football teams in their final game is astounding, and it has a classic ending. Highly recommended.

New Feature - Films for Friday!

I'm bored today so I thought I would start a new and exciting feature on my blog - Films for Friday! Where I will pointlessly talk about some films for a bit. Hurrah.

First up is Takeshi Miike's classic 'The Happiness of the Katakuris'. I really like this random horror musical! It's not very horrifying but it is a lot of fun. My favourite scenes are when the actors are talking away like normal and then suddenly the walls behind them fall away and they are in a big musical number, all dancing and singing badly. There's something about that I really enjoy, don't we all sometimes feel like we are in some kind of stupid musical. It's really very funny. Also it has dancing zombies in it for a bit, but not for very long, don't be fooled.

'The East is Red'. If you are only going to watch one Maoist Chinese Opera performance this year, make it 'The East is Red'. It's really very flash! At one stage a tank rolls onto the stage, and at the end you can see Mao himself in the audience clapping away happily. The dancing and acrobatics is second to none and it has a great rendition of 'The Internationale' as a happy musical number. Maybe this should be Andrew Lloyd Webber's follow up to 'We Will Rock You'?

'Phantom of the Toilet' sounds like it would be a great film! Sadly the knocked off copy of it I bought in Hong Kong is blank. Maybe it's better to never see it and not spoil the dream...