Asian Cinema

A 30-second trailer for Nigerian-born tarento Bobby Ologun’s Moon Dream has been uploaded to the Movie Collection channel on YouTube. In addition to directing and starring in the film, Ologun also wrote the screenplay, which is based on his own experiences as a young foreigner coming to Japan for the first time. When he arrives, he meets other foreigners struggling to make it in Tokyo as well as various Japanese people, leading to relationships that transcend racial and cultural differences....

This is old, the beginning of the month of May 2013 old. It won’t be in Khun Chai Puttipat, we have to wait a few more weeks for this scene of James Jirayu giving Bella Ranee Campen a kiss in the last installment of the Gentlemen series in  ’Khun Chai Ronnapee’ with James Ma and Mint Chalida. It’s the last scene of the series where James Ma marries Mint Chalida with all his brothers and sister-in-laws present. At this point, Krong Kaew and Khun Chai Puttipat are happily married. She is wearing pink as one of the bridesmaid for her youngest brother-in-law’s wedding. In one scene, she gets a kiss from her husband. A real kiss between two people who unconditionally love each other. It’s well documented Bella and are close friends on set. They are playful together, she is seen in this clip bending his hands and then massaging him. The kiss that took several takes and it was a real kiss. Bella massaging James

Modestep is a four-piece bass orientated band from London who are quickly rising to the top of every music lovers’ playlist. Armed with over a half a million fans total on social media, and selling out concerts worldwide, we are very honored to have one of the members of this iconic band. Enter Nick Tsang, since turning professional in 2004, Nick has already toured extensively throughout the UK and internationally, plus amassing a wealth of session, touring, recording, and songwriting credits. We sit down and talk about his overwhelming success, playing at Coachella, Asian films, and more! Read below for the full Q&A… Would it be accurate to say there aren’t too many Asian musicians in the dubstep scene? How did you find yourself in the place you’re in now? Did you have aspirations growing up as a child? Nick: I can’t speak world wide because I am sure there are Dubstep musicians in the far east, but I have to say I haven’t met many Asian Musicians in the Dubstep scene in UK and US. The only guys I know of are xKore and one of the members of the band Subsource. My last band was the Ting Tings, and when that finished a friend called me and asked if I was interested to meet a band that he was working with called Modestep. I went to meet the guys and we clicked from the start. The day after we met they asked me to join the band and three days later I was was performing my first show with them at Download festival. To be honest I never knew what I wanted to be growing up, but I knew I loved music. I was a bit of a failure academically so I thought I might as well pursue my passion. So here I am still with my six strings. Bit of a joke really! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bparw9Jo3dk What have you learned so far during your North American tour. Did you guys have any expectations from performing in the U.S. for the first time? Nick: I’ve learnt that there is a huge difference in the Dub step scene in UK and the States. In UK, the people who come to dubstep shows generally are ghetto boys with new era caps and their hoods up. Its a very grimey and dark scene. In US its a rave thing. Everyone turns up in UV glow paint, glow sticks, juggling toys and bright pick tutus. Because of the big delay with the release of our album, I thought that the US would have forgotten about us. So it was pretty crazy to have sell out shows on our first ever US tour. You most recently hit Coachella. What was that experience like? Nick: Coachella was mind-blowing. We have been on the road for about two and a half months performing nearly everyday. Because of the routine of it, we felt like we had conquered the stage nerves. Coachella knocked the nerves right back into us! As soon as we saw the crowd that we were about to step in front of, we all shat our pants! The whole energy of the crowd, and the stage production got us all amped up more than any other of the US shows we had done. Hopefully our nervous energy translated into a good performance on stage. There are lots of styles and sounds in your music like dubstep, rock, and other various musical elements. Since joining the band what unique attributes have you contributed to the sound of Modestep? Nick: I guess I introduced guitars and help bring the rock element to the Modestep sound. oh and the asian factor obviously. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qpUChC6iU4 And how did that carry over into your new album ‘Evolution Theory’? What was the creative process like on that LP? Nick: In the songs written before I joined such as Up, Bite the hand and Feel Good, there were little or no guitars on the recordings. Within the two day I met the boys, I was straight into laying guitars for ‘To the Stars’ and since then, we have recorded guitars for every track. The most guitar dominated track is ‘Freedom’, where you can probably hear my Rage Against the Machine influence creeping in. For the creative process of the LP, all the band m

Godzilla 2000 is a 1999 Japanese kaiju film directed by Takao Okawara and written by Hiroshi Kashiwabara. It was the twenty-third film released in the Godzilla series and only one to feature Orga a kind of weird thing I don’t know how to describe. I don’t really like this one, it doesn’t do anything other movies haven’t done better and it doesn’t add anything new to the series. Remember the neatness of the 80’s series how they all flowed into one story? Well this film is the first official movie in the millennium series whose continuity is all over the place. The millennium series unlike the Hesei series ignores continuity established by any previous Godzilla films except for the first one. But a few of them share continuity with a few other Toho features. It’s a mess. Godzilla 2000 is the last in the Godzilla series to make a North American theatrical run until the upcoming one in 2014. Godzilla is a force of destruction to Japan (what else is new right?). The Godzilla Prediction Network studies the mutant dinosaur and predicts his landfalls. Meanwhile, the scientists of Crisis Control Intelligence find a sixty million year old UFO deep in the Japan Trench. As CCI attempts to raise the UFO to study it, it takes off into the sky on its own. Godzilla arrives and battles the Japan Self Defense Forces in just about the only worthwhile scene, but the UFO appears, searching for genetic information that only Godzilla possesses. It fights Godzilla to a standstill, driving the monster underwater, and then lands to replenish its solar power. Yawn. The founder of the GPN discovers the secret to Godzilla’s regenerative properties but so has the UFO. Which has begun to drain all the files about Godzilla from Tokyo’s master computers. The rest of the film is an incredibly drawn out scene where Orga appears monsters lamely fight and the two scientists groups argue. The story is extraordinarily boring. I am not sure how the 1998 film gets so much hate but this one is relatively unknown. It’s slowly paced, drawn out, confusing, and all around not fun to watch. This was the first Toho flick to use an abundance of CGI and it looks so out of place. There is a scene where Godzilla swims underwater and it looks like it was thrown together in 5 minutes with Photoshop. Orga’s space ship looks like a giant brown nut and when it flies its very laughable. Orga himself looks ok as does Godzilla when they are both not CGI of course. But none of the sets feel real there is never any sense of dread except for a scene near the beginning that has the GPN being chased through a tunnel. None of the characters are memorable, I don’t even know if they gave many of them names. There are a lot of random slap stick scenes that pad the run time with nonsense. Did I mention there is nothing interesting happening in this movie? So on top of not being invested the audience is just left bored. I remember seeing this movie in theaters and being left really confused because I genuinely thought I was walking into a sequel to the movie I had enjoyed a few years earlier although to be fair the first time I saw it was the last day of my summer vacation at the time so it has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t think this one is worth your investment despite it having one of the last original monsters.

Cover art for Pokémon Adventures: Black & White and Pokémon Adventures: Diamond and Pearl/Platinum. Images courtesy of VIZ Media. © 2013 Pokémon. © 2011 Pokémon. © 1995-2011 Nintendo/Creatures Inc./GAME FREAK inc. POCKET MONSTER SPECIAL © 1997 Hidenori KUSAKA, Satoshi YAMAMOTO/SHOGAKUKAN VIZ Kids Launches Popular Series in the Important British and Irish Markets Source: VIZ Media, MediaLab press releases Official Site: VIZ.com/Pokemon Special Thanks to Jane Lui and Erik Jansen VIZ Media, LLC brings the fun and adventure of the popular Pokémon manga franchise to the United Kingdom and Ireland for the first time. Simon & Schuster U.K. is the official distributor of VIZ Media titles in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Several Pokémon manga series are scheduled for release under the company’s VIZ Kids imprint and kicks off with the U.K. debut of Pokémon Adventures: Black & White, now available. The series is rated ‘A’ for All Ages and will carry an RRP of £3.99. VIZ Media plans to follow this title with the debut of Pokémon Adventures: Diamond and Pearl/Platinum on June 6th and will launch the Pokémon Adventures: Heartgold and Soulsilver series later this Autumn. Continued...

Omnibus horror movies are still all the rage in Asian it seems and Tales From The Dark part 1 is the latest offer to fuel the fanboy flames. Based on the best-selling horror novel written by Hong Kong author Lilian Lee it comprises of six segments adapted from stories. Good so far but its even better when you see who’s directing. The six segments will be directed by Fruit Chan, Lee Chi Ngai, Lawrence Lau, Teddy Robin, Gordon Chan and actor Simon Yam in his directorial debut. Part 1 opens in July and Part 2 will be hot on its heals in August. Part 1 synopsis: One chilly night, Chu meets an uncommon client, a pretty 20-ish girl who pays her to curse 4 villains without knowing their names. Mysteriously, with each cursing ceremony performed delivers a gruesome death of a victim. When it comes to the last victim, or villain, it also unfolds a chilling, intolerable secret. Dark Side poster Dark Side teaser trailer

Today it was revealed that the second film of the trilogy based on the late Osamu Tezuka's award-winning 8-volume Buddha manga will be released in February 2014. In addition, an official website has been launched which features a 9-minute English-subtitled promotional video produced for the Cannes Film Market. The first installment, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, was released in 2010 and covered the early part of Siddhartha's life as a young prince as he questioned the very class discrimination that...

Welcome back Gentle-Minions!!! This week we bring you more Kickstarter goodness with selections from Brian (BTSJunki) Kelley with The corruption of Chris Miller (1973) directed by Juan Antonio Bardem and a selection from Tom Chance with Ghosts...of the Civil Dead (1988) directed by John Hillcoat!!! Emails to midnitecinema@gmail.com Voicemails to 206-666-5207 Adios!!!

As other, non-4DK related matters have been making demands on my time of late, I've reached out to some friends in the blogosfear to contribute guest posts. The first comes from my esteemed friend, colleague and boss over at Teleport City, Keith Allison.Of the three science fiction films produced by East German studio DEFA that found their way to the United States, Eolomea is often considered the least of the three. It lacks the 1950s pulp appeal of The Silent Star and the eye-popping disco style of In the Dust of the Stars. Compared to those two brightly colored space adventures, Eolomea is a more somber affair set in a lived-in solar system where the wonder and daring of space travel has been replaced by workaday drudgery and blue-collar boredom. The space stations are less wonders of futurist architecture and more akin to a grubby bachelor pad. The cosmonauts of Eolomea are not bold venturers into the great beyond; they are mostly irritated guys who just want to do their time and get home, like a crew stationed at some remote Antarctic outpost.Eolomea begins with one of those multi-cultural “general assembly meeting” that are usually convened to discuss what to do about the Mysterians. Scientists and associated bureaucrats on Earth are panicked when they start losing contact with their far-flung network of space stations. Unable to figure out what might be causing this (some sort of plague is suspected), they take the emergency measure of freezing all space flights. This order sits poorly with cosmonaut Dan Lagny (Ivan Andonov), stationed on a remote outpost with only one other ennui-wracked crewmember for company. Lagny is sick of space stations and endless voids, and his return to Earth is delayed by this new order. Luckily, space -- like the Soviet Union -- is pretty big, and most of the people on the outskirts of the colonized cosmos simply ignore orders from Earth.Thus is Dan able to escape the confines of their little station and return home, where he can don space-age (1970s) leisure-wear and yell at the sky. His retirement is derailed when he meets scientist Maria Scholl (Cox Habbema), in charge of investigating the communications blackouts and uncovering the mystery behind the single cryptic message anyone has received from the space stations: the single world “Eolomea,” which seems to have no meaning. Despite his grouchiness, Dan is pressed into service once more. The investigation eventually uncovers something sinister to do with another prominent scientist and leads Dan, Maria, and their small crew to the littered and wrecked halls of one of the seemingly abandoned space stations -- seemingly.The dramatic change in tone that sets Eolomea apart from other DEFA sci-fi films is thanks largely to it being one of the first Eastern Bloc science fiction films released in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That film effectively ushered in a new era, one less concerned with rocket models and monsters and more concerned with human drama played against the vastness of space. The first Communist response to 2001 was 1970’s Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer, a German production that places one foot in the pre-2001 world of space pulp and the other in awkward attempts at post-2001 intellectualism. That film is largely forgotten, falling as it does in the twin shadows of both 2001 and the Soviet response, Solaris, a stark and complex film that is as well-regarded and almost as well-known as 2001. Also existing in that shadow is Eolomea, based on a book by Bulgarian writer Angel Vagenshtain, released the same year as Solaris and promptly forgotten until recently.Although its disjointed timeline and contemplations on the emptiness of space make Eolomea a more complexly structured film than Silent Star and In the Dust of the Stars, it’s still relatively accessible compared to Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The central mystery proves more solvable than the mind-bending freak-outs that comprise the ends of either of those movies

It’s like I am a drug addict and the series ‘Khun Chai Puttipat’ is my crack–I can’t get enough of it and most likely I will suffer from withdraw symptoms when the lakorn ends this Friday May 24, 2013. It has been a long time since I have been MAJORLY obsess with a show, since the Korean series ‘Coffee Prince’–that was difficult since I had to reply on subtitles. With this, I can get all the spoilers I want, watch it live, it’s pretty satisfying getting a quick fix as much as I want. This lakorn transcends beyond James Jirayu, people seem to think the star of the series carries the show–to a certain extent it does but there has to be a good story executed well to make people cling emotionally to it. I think Khun Chai Puttipat is one of those rare gems for lakorns, it does have its flaws but I can overlook them because of the story and the chemistry of the cast. There is no weak characters–they embody what they are playing from the villains you hate to the good guy characters you love. It’s well-acted. I applaud the producers who chose their actors and actresses well. It’s Sunday May 19, 2013 and I have watched all the episodes of Khun Chai Puttipat that aired this weekend from episode 7-9, I think episode 7 was the weakness and it only went uphill from there. It got better and better. I just didn’t want it to end. Because each prime time lakorn is almost 2hrs long, when you are doing summaries, you want it to end. It’s NOT done but I am releasing it. I just didn’t realize how much important dialogue is in this episode. As they are dancing, Bai Bua’s people are plotting to kidnap Krong Kaew to give to Khun Pinit.  After the dance, they parted ways. Khun Chai Puttipat is disturb when he doesn’t see her in the ballroom, someone had asked Krong Kaew to see the host of the event but she is nowhere to be seen and the host is seen talking to other guests. Krong Kaew is lured outside and drugged with a chloroform cloth and placed in a car by Khun Pinit’s people. Ing On and her son Glai-Lerk intercepts Krong Kaew by attacking Khun Pinit’s people. Glai-Lerk attempts to assault Krong Kaew with his mom standing outside the car–what is wrong with this guy. Mom, he was like let me try it first that old guy won’t know about it. And you’re like ew. Luckily, Krong Kaew wakes up and pushed him back. Soon after Khun Chai Puttipat and his two younger brothers Ronnapee and Rachanon came to save her and beat up Glai-Lerk. Khun Chai Puttipat found one of her shoes when they were searching for her. Fighting for her well-being, Krong Kaew attacks Khun Chai Pat without knowing it. He carries her to his car. ‘It’s me, look at me, Kaew! Those people were trying to kidnap for Khun Pinit.’ She looks up and sees him and his two younger brothers. ‘You came to help me.’ Khun Chai Pat:’Right now, you are safe.’ The brothers advised Khun Chai Pat to take Krong Kaew into hiding, Khun Pinit is becoming more ruthless, he won’t stop until he has Krong Kaew, they must flee. Khun Chai Pat:’Will you go with me?’ He puts one of her shoes on for her:’I found this and I knew you were in danger.’ The brothers watched their hermit older brother with a smile, like fangirls. Aw. Khun Chai Pat:’We must quickly leave here.’ She lets out one tear drop and the brothers are like awwing in the background with smiles. Off they went off in his car. Krong Kaew:’I have cause you trouble again.’ Khun Chai Pat with a smile:’Who says that, you are helping me instead. Since I become a doctor I have never taken off not even a day. No one could ever remove me from the operation room until you Kaew.’ Kaew changes the subject:’The road is really dark.’ Khun Chai Pat:’Are you afraid?’ Kaew:’I am scared.’ Khun Chai