It's a cultural ban so stringent that there's a Orientalist promise of the title, doesn't get to kiss her, either-and Jet teams up with a white prostitute (Bridget Fonda) and, belying the sly (black)-mitigating, I would have thought, the taboo against Asian men inĪmerican cinema having any kind of sexuality that isn't ridiculous (see: Long Dukĭong) or that involves a white lady. But then he doesn't die,Īnd he also doesn't get to kiss the girl, who isn't white but Aaliyah Must Die, this particular yellow Romeo must die. Through Hollywood, among them the fairly simple question of why, in Romeo Screenplay by John O'Brien and Channing Gibsonīy Walter Chaw There are a lot of interesting things about Jet Li's sad run Starring Jet Li, DMX, Anthony Anderson, Gabrielle Union ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D Screenplay by Eric Bernt and John Jarrell Starring Jet Li, Aaliyah, Isaiah Washington, Delroy Lindo By the end of the film, we don't believe that anymore.Ĭontinue reading "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011)" » Kobayashi goes into flashback, unexpectedly, telling the story of the young samurai we, at first, are complicit in mocking. ![]() It's a kind of torture, and everyone watches. Seeking to make an example of Chijiiwa and the effrontery he represents to the Bushido code, the Iyi clan decides to force the issue-even after it's revealed that Chijiiwa has, somewhere along the way, pawned his iron for a bamboo stick with a hilt. Tsugumo is one such samurai, but before he's granted the privilege of dragging a sword across his belly, House of Iyi counsellor Saito insists on telling him of a previous penitent, Chijiiwa, who claimed he wanted to kill himself but only really wanted a handout. It's set in 1630, at the end of feudal Japan, when collapsing fiefdoms mean throngs of ronin overflowing into the countryside and, occasionally, asking for the right to commit ritual suicide in an "honourable" courtyard. It lands somewhere between Ozu's pillow flicks and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and, of course, as Kobayashi is the auteur behind the Human Condition trilogy, that martial austerity, that antiestablishment mien, is to be expected, if impossible to ever truly gird oneself against. Screenplay by Kikumi Yamagashi, based on the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchiīy Walter Chaw Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece Harakiri is the height of austere-almost Noh-Japanese filmmaking. Starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Eita, Hikari Mitsushima, Naoto Takenaka You know what, though? It doesn't mean what it says.Ĭontinue reading "Sundance '20: Be Water" » If he, with his heavy accent and ferociously Chinese demeanour, could refuse to assimilate and yet rise, maybe this country meant what it said. That he could become something so huge in my imagination was to me extraordinary. Slight, wiry, he looked like me when I was little. He was someone I lionized when I was a kid. It occurred to me not to review it at all. The pressure for me to write favourably about this film is crippling and depressing. He was a point of pride for Asian-Americans and became a peculiar rallying point for African-Americans, too. He reminds of James Dean in that respect, captured in amber as this eternally young punk icon for the disenfranchised, the alienated, the frustrated. ![]() If it didn't work, it wouldn't keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.Ĭontinue reading "Mortal Kombat (2021)" »īy Walter Chaw Bao Nguyen's Bruce Lee documentary Be Water is a moving hagiography of a legend immortalized by his sudden death at the beginning of his career. What's left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground-a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. Time has scattered us Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. ![]() Anderson's 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. Screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callahamīy Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. ![]() Starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |