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Musings from the Edge of Forever

Note: This blog expresses only the opinions of the blog owner,
and does not represent the opinion of any organization or blog
that is associated with RONIN ON EMPTY.

Technical Issues

I’ve taken measures to weed out the numerous spam comments that I’ve been inundated with in the last few months and I’m back in a position where I check my comments regularly, so please feel free to post your thoughts in the New Year. And sorry to those who may have had their comments deleted in the last month or. It wasn’t personal; it was accidental!

The Not-So Magic Gourd

Magic Gourd

Based on the print advertising for the movie which featured a computer-animated gourd and a frog, I expected John Chu and Frankie Chung’s 2007 film, The Magic Gourd, to be an all-CGI affair. It is not. It’s basically Who Framed Roger Rabbit with CGI — at least in the sense that real-live human beings interact with animated characters or, in this case, computer generated ones.

Based on a popular children’s novel by Tianyi, the movie centers on Wang Bo (Zhu Qilong), a lazy daydreamer who’s apparently the worst student in school. As luck would have it, he encounters the titular Magic Gourd (”Hulu” to his pals & voiced by Chen Peisi), a walking, talking Aladdin’s lamp with no limitation on the number of wishes he can grant. Wang Bo makes his wish, but gets a lot more than he bargained for in the process.

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Choice Pull-Quotes

DisciplesDVD

While browsing that same Wal-Mart in which I saw the Indonesian flick Merantau sitting on the shelf, I noticed that Disciples of the 36th Chamber had been released on US DVD. Unlike their DVD releases of Return to the 36th Chamber and Return of the One Armed Swordsman, which quoted my reviews by name and as “LoveHKFilm.com,” Dragon Dynasty chose not to utlilize my review for their back cover art and website link.

That’s probably because I hated it. I mean, can you imagine picking up a DVD and seeing these quotes?

“Extremely disappointing third entry in the 36th Chamber of Shaolin trilogy”

“Hsiao Hou […] plays quite possibly the most annoying Fong Sai-Yuk in the history of Hong Kong cinema”

Disciples of the 36th Chamber is a lackluster sequel, and that’s putting it mildly.”

I don’t think that would help sell more copies.

As a side note, I remember contemplating buying a copy of Ong Bak in Singapore, and the one I picked up — purportedly a Mainland Chinese DVD, I think — had pull quotes from a BAD review of Iron Man on the back cover! It said something disparaging about Jon Favreau. Poor guy.

It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green

Green Snake

Maggie Cheung has never been as mischievous nor as sensuous as she is playing the title role in Tsui Hark’s 1993 film, Green Snake. Adapted from Lilian Lee’s novel, Green Snake retells the story of Madam White Snake from the perspective of her younger sibling, Qingqing (Maggie Cheung). The main storyline involves two snake spirits — Qingqing and her older sister, Madame White Snake herself, Bai Suzhen (Joey Wong) — who assume human forms to experience the pleasures of the human world. Along the way, Bai Suzhen falls for a scholar (Wu Xing-Guo), and their inter-species love affair sparks the ire of repressed Buddhist monk (Zhao Wen-Zhou). Of course, a showdown proves inevitable.

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The State of HK Film Geek Culture

Comedian Patton Oswalt recently set the Twitter-verse aflutter with a piece he wrote for Wired magazine entitled “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die.” With its title reference to a bit of dialogue from Blade Runner, Oswalt’s article laments the death of nerd culture as he once knew it, calling for its necessary death in its current form as a way to “save” it for future generations. Or something. He kind of goes off the rails in the last few paragraphs in an attempt to make some kind of big poetic flourish. Even so, I think Oswalt’s larger point still stands — things ain’t how they used to be. Anyway, you can take a look at the article here and see where you fall on this issue.

While Oswalt is speaking to a larger geek culture that enjoys Star Wars, Marvel Comics, Lord of the Rings, and various other iconographic cultural texts of geekdom, that have gone on to become real cultural forces in the twenty-first century, I want to focus on something far less ubiquitous — Hong Kong and, to a larger extent, all of Asian cinema — or to be more precise, the people who enjoy it. I think of the things Oswalt mentions about geek culture still applies to HK/Asian cinephiles, even if our numbers have dwindled rapidly since the early 2000s. Could it be that we’re on the brink of extinction?

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Gwailo Corner

Inception Top

On occasion, I’ve wanted to write about subjects that don’t quite fit into the Hong Kong (and more generally Asian)-centered focus championed by the main site, LoveHKFilm.com, so to rectify this issue, I’ve created “Gwailo Corner.” Now, don’t worry; only about 1 in 10 posts will carry the “Gwailo Corner” moniker, as I’ll be primarily interested in Asian-related cinema, comic books, video games, toys, and the like, as I’ve always been.

Even so, the truth of the matter is that I just want to create a venue on this site to talk about the next Inception or Avatar — big pop cultural phenomena that I’ve got an opinion on and would guess even Hong Kong cinema fans might be interested in discussing. After all, in real life, most people don’t limit their movie interests to a single nation, genre, and/or language. In that respect, “Gwailo Corner” is space for these kinds of discussions — about subtext, politics, and interpretation.

Now, I know the name isn’t perfect. After all, the Cantonese term Gwailo (鬼佬) has often been translated into English as “foreign devil” and has come to mean “white person” in common parlance — sometimes disparagingly, sometimes not. However you personally take “gwailo” to mean, I haven’t chosen it as a way to insult our white readers (I am, after all, half of white person myself), and I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of the posts marked “Gwailo Corner” are somehow for “whites only.” Instead, I just thought it would be a funny, self-deprecatory title for the occasional column that doesn’t focus on stuff coming out of the Asian continent. That’s all.

The Best Hong Kong Films of 2010 (I wish!)

Ekin Ponders Sanjuro Pondering

This would be so much funnier if I still called myself “Sanjuro.”

I have to level with you: the title of this post is purposely misleading, as I have not seen anywhere near enough Hong Kong films this year to be even remotely qualified to assemble a proper “Best of” list for 2010. I’d love to do it; it’s just not possible. To tell the truth, you can count the number of 2010-released Hong Kong films I’ve seen on one hand  — Crossing Hennessey, Fire of Conscience, Ip Man 2, Little Big Soldier, and True Legend.

So, that makes only makes five movies I’ve seen total; well, I suppose if you were getting creative, you could say I’ve seen six — that is, if you count Jet Li’s performance in Sylvester Stallone’s incredibly disappointing action extravaganza, The Expendables.  If a) Jet’s totally out-of-sync performance with the rest of the cast didn’t make me think he was just there to cash a paycheck and b) his one-on-one fight with Dolph Lundgren hadn’t been so terribly, terribly choreographed, I might be persuaded to think that it somehow “counts” as a Hong Kong film. Either way, it doesn’t.

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