Asian Cinema

Director: Petchtai Wongkamlao. Review: Chris Sawin. A man known as Uncle Wang (Petchtai Wongkamlao) runs a movie store and lives with his niece Jakkalan (JeeJa Yanin) who he's raised on his own since she was a child. Jakkalan works as a bicycle delivery runner and is extremely independent, but things become a little complicated when she's hired to smuggle drugs for a local gangster and gets in between an ongoing war between two of the town's most ridiculous druglords. "This Girl is Badass" begins with JeeJa Yanin doing some pretty unbelievable maneuvers on a bicycle (stuff that is logically impossible) while combining it with some tactics that are a bit more grounded. Once you're past that and try to choke down the generic blend of rock music blaring in the background - that you'll have to tolerate over and over again for the next hour and forty minutes - things literally take a flying leap into the toilet. The humor is seriously so bathroom related and so childish that it seems like a fifth grader wrote the screenplay. There's a vagina joke less than 3 minutes in, you see midgets training at a gym for no reason where the trainer tells them to make sure they "take a dump after each meal," there's the drug boss with the high pitched voice, another midget who runs a food cart who's crazy with drug withdrawals, period jokes, pimples, facial foot massages, and side stories revolving around love for ugly people. More of the film is devoted to this stupid humor rather than the asskicking by a girl the title promised.

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I’ve said repeatedly here that the wild and unknown territory that is generic and bootleg figure collecting affords a lot more joy of discovery and amazing mutated finds than tracking down better known and licensed collectibles from the past. The stuff sold on blankets outside of southwest swap meets, tables in midwest flea markets and [...]

A more down-to-earth Douglas Adams is still a pretty way-out Douglas Adams, as we find when the wildly imaginative author applies his skewed sensibilities to the private detective genre in DIRK GENTLY.Based on Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" books, this one-season British TV series follows the adventures of the incorrigibly eccentric Gently (Stephen Mangan) as he applies his theories on the cosmic interconnectedness of all things in the universe to such relatively mundane pursuits as investigating possible marital infidelity or locating a little old lady's lost cat. With Dirk Gently on the case, however, things have a tendency to get weird, like when an attractive woman enlists him to track down her stalker--who, it turns out, is Dirk--or when a paranoid conspiracy nut who tells Dirk he's being watched by the Pentagon is, in fact, being watched by the Pentagon. Dead bodies crop up at every turn, with Dirk possessing an amazing talent for stumbling upon crime scenes and looking as guilty as possible in the eyes of his nemesis, Detective Inspector Gilks (Jason Watkins). After using hypnosis to persuade erstwhile college chum Richard MacDuff (Darren Boyd, who was an excellent John Cleese in the Monty Python biopic HOLY FLYING CIRCUS) to invest $20,000 in the "Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency" and act as his assistant, the two operate out of the most derelict-looking office in detective fiction while their hostile, unpaid secretary Janice ( Lisa Jackson) continues to show up for work only to harangue her employers.Gently's methods don't make a lot of sense at first until you start getting used to the seemingly nonsensical way he pieces ostensibly unrelated bits of information together to come up with solutions that can ultimately be rather astonishing--or at least seem so if you don't think them through too carefully. Stories straddle the line between everyday realism and comical farce so adeptly that there's never a jarring transition from one to the other--just when a scene appears to be getting uncomfortably sentimental or emotional, something rather delightfully irreverent punctures the mood.I like the constant hostility that exists between the two leads--Gently and MacDuff are like the anti-Holmes and Watson--and the fact that Gently resolutely refuses to display any positive traits designed to make us "like" him more. He's a likable character despite all the evidence we're given to the contrary, or perhaps because he's so craven, self-centered, vain, greedy, and overwhelmingly irresponsible, in addition to being refreshingly unconventional. Lack of sentimentality is a strong point with this series.Season one--and with the show's apparent cancellation, the only one--begins with a pilot episode that introduces us to the characters and shows how Dirk and MacDuff manage to become partners. This is the one where Dirk is hired to find the old lady's cat, but with Douglas Adams at the helm, the story comes to include such fanciful elements as time travel. How the two are interconnected gives the story a delightful twist. Next, Episode 1 is a frenetic mish-mash of (interconnected) loose ends such as the aforementioned Pentagon surveillance, mysterious computer programs, and whether or not astrology really controls our lives. (Dirk is skeptical.)In Episode 2, Dirk returns to St Cedd's Institute of Science and Technology, Cambridge, where he first learned his holistic methods but was later expelled for cheating. As a security consultant, he's in charge of guarding a lifelike robot named Elaine, who naturally disappears along with an artificial intelligence program that has just achieved sentience. My favorite of the series, Episode 2 veers into deliciously dark "X-Files" territory with some of Adams' trademark scintillating sci-fi elements and a surprisingly resonant emotional core as Dirk meets and falls in love with the mysterious Jane (Lydia Wilson, "Midsomer Murders: Master Class"), who is involved in it all

Photos courtesy of X-Plus. Ultraman Nexus and Jamila © Tsuburaya Productions. Gamera © 1966 Kadokawa Shoten. Spectreman © P-Production. Source: X-Plus Co., Ltd. Special Thanks to Sachiko Ikenouchi A SCIFI JAPAN EXCLUSIVE Earlier this month, SciFi Japan posted information and photos of the giant monster figures scheduled for release by X-Plus Co., Ltd. in late June 2013. X-Plus was still waiting on final approvals for several of the figures so SFJ ran photos of the unpainted prototypes. X-Plus has now provided photos of the fully painted figures. X-Plus' monster figures can be purchased directly from the company's official Shounen Ric website. Shounen Ric offers Limited Editions of the figures with exclusive features or bonus pieces not available from other retailers. The standard figures are also sold by stores and online retailers including amazon.com, amazon.co.jp and SFJ's sponsors Anime Jungle and Toy Freakz. Continued...

Kiyoshi Kashiwada (Yusuke Yamamoto) revives the curse of THE RING in SADAKO 3D. Photo courtesy of Kadokawa Pictures, Inc. © 2012 "Sadako 3D" Partners From the Writer of The Ring Comes the Latest Terrifying Installment to the Haunting Franchise Source: Well Go USA, MPRM Communications Official Movie Site: sadako3d.jp (Japan) Special Thanks to Leif Helland A SCIFI JAPAN EXCLUSIVE Win the 3D/2D Blu-ray edition of SADAKO 3D from Well Go USA. Image courtesy of Well Go USA. © 2012 "Sadako 3D" Partners Well Go USA Entertainment is offering SciFi Japan readers a chance to win the Blu-ray edition of SADAKO 3D (????, 2012), the latest installment in the frightening RING franchise. Director Tsutomu Hanabusa (HIGH SCHOOL REVIEW) brings back the long haired girl in the white nightgown and her reign of terror has extended from television screens to all forms of technology: PC screens, mobile phones, jumbotrons and more. Sadako waits, a vicious spirit, hungry for blood and souls. What began as a haunted videotape, passed from hand to cursed hand all those years ago in THE RING, has only gotten easier to find. Sadako waits. And it’s not just on tape anymore. At a local high school, there is a rumor about an online video of someone committing suicide. If it were only a prank, or the work of a deranged artist in town, the students wouldn’t be killing themselves after watching it, would they? The police would have a theory about the quickly-growing body count? And what about the woman in white with long hair? Sadako is always hungry. And she’s no longer alone. SADAKO 3D debuts on Blu-ray (srp $29.98), DVD (srp $24.98) and Digital June 4th from Well Go USA Entertainment, but here is your chance to win the Blu-ray edition for free! Continued...

A new trailer has been released for Hiroyuki Nakao’s upcoming science fiction/historical drama film Time Scoop Hunter. Time Scoop Hunter is a TV drama which has aired on NHK since 2009. The program uses the theme of time travel to present fictionalized documentaries on lesser-know historical figures. In this film version, “space-time journalist” Yuichi Sawajima (Jun Kaname) is sent back through time to unravel the mystery of Azuchi Castle, which was built by famous shogun Oda Nobunaga and...

Jukkalan Petchtai Wongkamlao - 2011 Magnolia Home Entertainment Region 1 DVD One of the more fun films I saw in Thailand was Bodyguard 2, written, directed and starring Petchtai Wongkamlao, better known as Mum Jokmok by his Thai fans. I'm not sure how well Mum's new film is going to play for most North American viewers, but I had a good time here. Hollywood could probably learn something here, with some imaginative action scenes, truly tasteless and simultaneously hilarious jokes, and kickboxing midgets, all in one modestly budgeted movie! And who needs special effects when you have a crew of gifted stuntmen and women riding bicycles, leaping about, and taking and receiving body blows. And then there's Jeeja. Don't bother telling me about the Hollywood actress of the day who took a few months to train for an action role. Jeeja Yanin trained for years before her debut in Chocolate. Mum crafted the film especially for her, so Jeeja has the opportunity to have a leading role. The original Thai title is the name of Jeeja's character. If you've seen Jeeja previously, you know what she's capable of as a martial artist. Here she does stunts with a bicycle including using it as a weapon against a gang of bad guys. There is some kind of story here, with Jeeja as a bicycle courier, doing deliveries for two rival gangs. She lives with her "uncle", played by Mum, and has a crush on the handsome musician next door. All of this is besides the point, which is to allow a series of goofy situations with even goofier characters. There's one gangster who sings his own theme song upon entering a room, the sartorially challenged owner of the bicycle courier service, and a would-be suitor who, as one joker would put it, has a face for radio; Almost nothing is sacred here with the exception of Mum's character, a video store owner, pointing out that everything in his store is legal. And if you think the boast of the guy who proclaims that he'll be selling DVDs of movies released in theaters earlier in the day is some kind of exaggeration, I can tell you about seeing DVDs of Hollywood movies even before they hit U.S. theaters. Some of the humor here is aimed at cliches about life in Thailand. That suitor gets the worst of Mum's verbal barbs, being called "Dog phlegm", among other niceties. There are even a couple inquiries as to whether he's the placenta and the actual baby is somewhere else. Yes, Mum's sense of humor is unfiltered, and some of us like it that way. One of the funnier sight gags involves a hood pulling a knife out of his leg, flinging it away, only to have it ricochet against a warehouse pillar and plunge into his arm. Yeah, it's rude and crude, but also truly entertaining.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} ‘I want to be a director’, the title, speaks the spirit of Colin Huang’s earnest attempt at making a straight-talking, street-level humour short film. While the film was not nominated for any awards at the 4thSingapore Short Film Awards, it succeeds in entertaining the child in us that want to see some mindless action on the screen. The film opens with a class in session in the classroom and the teacher gives a final warning to a boy who seems to be daydreaming. His daydream then becomes the film’s story – one about a dream to be a filmmaker and the kind of kick-ass films he wants to make – slasher-gore, zombies, gangsters, explosions etc, The film lifts itself beyond fan-boyism through its cute and clever touches that gives the word ‘skit’ a good name. It is a collection of skits no doubt, but the actors in it are natural comic talents, wide in their dramatic range and yet never trying too hard. Polished, this film is not, but it serves as a bright reminder that sometimes, the key to entertaining others is to entertain oneself first.Review by Jeremy SingWatch the film here:Everyone's favourite: bloopers

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Ric Aw’s recent short film ‘Villain’, like his previous short films never fails to stylize the Singapore landscape, offering a quiet ‘art-house’ version of Singapore that does not look too different from the uncluttered style prevalent in many of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s films. It is at once, both distancing yet disarming. ‘Villian’ tells the story of an errant father who loathes the daily grind of a working class life and wants an easier, though unscrupulous, way out of it. And it starts with a bang – literally on his leg, a pre-meditated plan to be injured and be compensated for it. He has a daughter who also gives in to the same ‘stealing’ instincts as him and loots items from a supermarket like a seasoned thief.With the help of a mostly stationary and composed shooting style and objective camera framing of the characters, coupled with long moments of nothing but ambient sound, we are presented with an almost clinical study of the two characters in this film, and through them, a study of poverty and marginalization. What results is an understated yet thoughtful film where we, the audience complete the thoughts. The characters don’t say too much (like in Ric’s previous films) but the message is well-delivered through crisp and succinct storytelling and editing. Interesting to note that all other characters other than the two leads are unflinchingly one-dimensional.Despite the arms-length treatment of marginalization, the films succeeds in presenting dilemmas and conflicts in both of them. The girl struggles with her current daily stealing routines as she yearns to go back to a normal schooling life. Her father professes to be irresponsible but yet his desire to provide for his daughter is discernible. Which makes the ending both perplexing and heartbreaking at the same time – his abandonment of his daughter en-route to escaping. Guess that’s when the surrealism kicks in – the idea that one can actually escape to somewhere in Singapore. Mmmm…..One more comments: this film needs a better and more fluent Mandarin narrator.This film was nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Fiction at the 4th Singapore Short Film Awards.Review by Jeremy Sing