filmhustler

The Best 4 of Lucio Fulci

Some of you would say, WTH  (who the hell) is Lucio Fulci? I was acquainted by Lucio Fulci's works as a teenager in the 80s. The late prolific Italian filmmaker directed a whopping 56 features and was best known for his horror films. I would say the first Fulci film that I saw was Zombie (1979), an obvious but effective rip-off of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was released in Hong Kong and UK as Zombies. And then Fulci's Zombie was subsequently released in Asia as Zombi 2. So when I was tricked into watching the "sequel" on VHS, I was like WTF (what the fuck)?

Nevertheless, Fulci's Zombie made a haunting impression in my young mind. It's a dark and disturbing zombie epic with sadistic and ridiculous gory sequences outdoing Dawn of the Dead. Fulci for the first time found an international horror hit. I mean who wouldn't take note of a director that came up with a death sequence with a splinter piercing an eyeball?

Without a doubt, Zombie ranks as one of Fulci's best films.

Yet the best film that he made is perhaps The Beyond (1981), which is as original as a Lucio Fulci film could possibly be. It's a haunting mix of supernatural elements and zombies that Fulci started with Zombie. In Zombie, the cause of the epidemic is voodoo in Haiti. In The Beyond, it's a house built over the gates of hell.

Somehow in The Beyond, all of Fulci's haphazard use of extreme close-ups, crazy zooming and truncated framing synthesized into a coherent style of storytelling. The end result is chilling horror film, a cross between a haunting supernatural film and a gory zombie flick. Bravo!

His third best film is arguably The House by the Cemetery (1984) which is a hybrid between a haunted house and a single zombie movie. The zombie is Dr. Freudstein who did genetic experiments that have caused him needing human flesh and organs. A young couple with a child move into the very house that Freudstein haunts in upstate New York.

There is something poignant about The House by the Cemetery with child endangerment that perhaps predisposed me to liking the film as a teenager.

Last of my best four of Fulci is City of the Living Dead (1980, also known as The Gates of Hell). How could you possibly forget a scene where a young woman sees the apparition of a priest who committed suicide and ends up vomiting her entire intestine?

By committing suicide over the gates of hell, the priest has opened them up and let the dead return as zombies. None of it quite makes sense. For me the movie is basically a bunch of people walking around a city of zombies and getting chomped up.

While I've truly become a fan of Fulci and watched at least another dozen of his films from Murderock to Manhattan Baby to New York Ripper to even Cat in the Brain that I bought a few nights ago, really in my opinion the four films that I've picked are the four you should watch first to get yourself hooked on Fulci's world of horror.

Let's Dance 2010 Away

I want to wish you all a Happy New Year by catching up with the dance movies of 2010. First up, Step Up 3D is an entertaining hip hop flick with dazzling choreography while lacking a heart in the story and characters department. The story follows a young NYU freshman meeting up with the handsome leader of a street crew after an unexpected and cheeky battle in Washington Square Park. The handsome leader so happens to own a large building which is a club and also houses random ragtag dancers who've come to New York from around the world. In order to save his property, the handsome dancer enlists the freshman to be part of the crew for a battle of their life with eye-popping numbers.

To be honest, none of the story and characters bear much reality to the contemporary global dance community or the historical roots of hip hop. Step Up 3D is more of a Hollywood hip hop fairy tale.

After Step Up 3D, I became curious and wanted to check out the unreleased UK counterpart Street Dance that generated some buzz and business abroad. When I received my DVD from Amazon.co.uk, I tore the wrapper open and popped it into my DVD player at once.

I have to say that Street Dance is a step down from Step Up 3D. I was introduced to the various characters of the crew in freeze frames in the first ten minutes but I barely knew anything about them at the end. The main character Isabella has to deal with her leader boyfriend leaving her and her crew to join a better crew. Isabella then becomes the leader and must battle her ex-boyfriend's crew in the grand finale. The embarrasingly trite twist of Street Dance is having Isabella teach a few snobby ballet students to "street dance" and battle as part of her crew in exchange for using the ballet studio to rehearse. Well, guess what their final battle piece is about—a fusion of ballet and hip hop. How much more cheesy could that be?

The fact is that professional dancers now train for all genres of dance from ballet to Jazz to hip hop. And hip hop draws from all genres of dance and sports from basketball to martial arts. That's what makes hip hop the now and future of dance.

By far, the year's best dance movie is The Black Swan which is entirely wrapped in the psychological framework and exploration of a dancer who must deal with issues of competition, family, passion and technique in preparing for the performance of her life. It also deals with the fear of failure that all artists face so dearly. What makes The Black Swan powerful is its rigorous and realistic portrayal of a dancer's psychology that is obviously lacking in both Step Up 3 and Street Dance.

I look forward to a hip hop dance movie that's both real and fun. For now, let's dance tonight away!

The Beauty of Monga

Monga is probably the most exciting, commercial and well-made movie out of Taiwan in the history of Taiwanese cinema as I know it. Arguably The Wedding Banquet was another Taiwanese movie that was both artistically and commercially successful. Cape No. 7 truly escaped me. I tried watching Cape No. 7 five times and every time I fell asleep at the 30-minute mark. Cape No. 7 proved there was little audience beyond the eclectic Taiwanese audience that braced its local box office gross to an amazing USD$14 million.

First off, I generally hate gangster flicks, especially Chinese gangster flicks. I would only grudgingly watch them once in a blue moon in hope of catching up with Asian pop culture. So when I first heard about Monga, I had very little interest. In fact, I was drinking in a Taipei karaoke room with directors Doze Niu and Teddy Chen one night during the Golden Horse Film Festival 2009 with little knowledge that Doze directed Monga. When I was back in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago, another friend recommended the film so I decided to buy the DVD to take a look.

During a an early jetlag night back in Los Angeles, I popped Monga into my player and was immediately impressed with the filmmaking from the first shot on. Through the eyes of our main protagonist, Monga tells the story of Monk—played by hearthrob Ethan Juan—whom we first meets as a teen who gets bullied in high school and dares to fight back in a hilariously choreographed sequence. Monk's craftiness catches the eyes of Dragon, the son of a mafia boss, who takes him under his wings and initiates him into his elite gang who guards the titular district of Taipei.

Set in the 80s, Monga is an exceptional epic on all technical fronts from art and costume to cinematograhy and action choreography. The homosocial (thanks to the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who coined this term) friendships and world between the five gangster youths are so finely and emotionally portrayed to a surprisingly poetic yet violent conclusion. And yet another thing I appreciate about Monga, setting it aside from its genre, is that the violence is necessary and creatively executed with good taste. The violence does not feel gratutious. It's the kind of cool violence that we go to the movies for. And that's why Monga is cinematic.

Technically, the film is close to flawless. The one extended fight sequence where the five uniformed school kids transform into full-fleged young gangsters kicking asses and getting their asses kicked is jawdropping in the synthesis of cinematography and action choreography. But what's most amazing about the film is that these kids are humanely and emotionally portrayed as young adults who are neither heroes nor antiheroes. They are violent and mean at the same time they are scared and vulnerable.

To give an example of Noze's attention to details, I am not spoiling the film for you because the scene is in the trailer. Monk gets to meet Dragon's father for the first time over a casual meal. As Monk is about to chopstick a piece of meat, he reaches over and catches a glimpse of a severed finger right at the spot below where Dragon's father is eating. Monk keeps quiet and the gang dines on.

Perhaps Taiwanse cinema has already passed the world by, but Monga is a gem and discovery. It was selected as the official Oscar entry for Taiwan in 2010.

Allen Ginsberg vs. Mark Zuckerberg

Or it's Howl vs. The Social Network. As a filmmaker, I cannot resist looking at these biopics side-by-side in terms of the treatment and dramatization of our cultural icons. It's also interesting that both movies were released roughly in the same time frame—about a week apart.

First off, I was really excited to see Howl because Ginsberg was such a colorful artist. With elements such as sexuality, drama, drugs, and the obscenity trial, how could you go wrong making a movie about such a fascinating character?

On the other hand, I was dragging my feet to The Social Network because I really didn't want to see a movie about a Harvard-turned-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur. It would be as exciting as going to watch a biopic on Thomas Edison or on Tom of Myspace. However, I was pleasantly surprised.

What's interesting about both movies was the attempt to portray intellectual life with moving images to varying degrees of success. How would one go about doing it? While Ginsberg was a more general intellectual of his times, Zuckerberg is a "particular" intellectual for our generation. According to Alvin Gouldner, the class of particular intellectuals has emerged at the height of technocracy and postmodern society whereby a figure like Noam Chomsky—a general intellect—has become an extinct phenonenon. That would be the 2 cents I got out of my "Intellectuals" graduate class at Yale comprised of 2 students—me and an undergraduate.

I really wanted to love Howl but I was surprised at the general dryness and lack of sensuality and drama in the approach of making the film. As we all know, it is incredibly difficult to interpret poetry. Literalism is the death of interpretation. As I was watching the animated sequences of Ginsberg poetry, I felt like watching an afterschool special.

It's also interesting to note that both movies were framed by a trial. Howl was framed by the obsenity trial of Ginsberg poetry in San Francisco, whereas The Social Network was framed by the intellectual property trial of Facebook. Dare I point out that both movies were kind of set in the bay area! I would have thought that the obscenity trial could have proved a more compelling and dramatic result, but ironically it was the intellectual property trial that excited me with Fincher smartly leveraging our emotions with money, friendship and betrayal. Good old-fashioned hollywood tactics worked.

I would say that Howl had all the potential to be The Social Network in terms of cast and budget with James Franco toplining as Allen Ginsberg. But...

In my canon, The Social Network is not as groundbreaking as Fight Club. I remember watching Fight Club with Peter Chan in 1999. Even though Peter admitted that it wasn't his genre of movies, he thought it was the perfectly entertaining deconstruction film. For me, Fight Club is the postmodern masterpiece that's fun, subversive and conceptually brilliant. Fincher's often cool and clinical style made Fight Club work. Heathers could have been Fight Club if only the school had blown up at the end.

The Social Network is entertaining and compelling. And at the same time, it is inspiring for me in the sense that the film has captured that spirit of a passionate intellectual who would stop at nothing to realize his idea, reminiscent of Coppola's portrayal of a passionate American entrepreneur in Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

Must Hello Kitty Die?

I was quite intrigued by the book Hello Kitty Must Die by Angela Choi when my aunt first turned me onto it with the pitch about a young Asian American Yale grad who appeared to be just another "Hello Kitty" caught in a serial killer intrigue. It sort of hauntingly reminded me of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student who was murdered by a Caucasian male lab technician last year.

Hello Kitty Must Die seemed to be right up my alley. So I bought it and started reading it. As I was reading the book, I was much more intrigued by how the book/writer/protagonist perpetuated the stereotypes of Asian/American men who were all unattractive, fobbish (Fresh Off the Boat) and/or boring. Of course, the protagonist must have an unrequited love for her only Caucasian love interest.

I'm rather disappointed that the book is less about serial killers and more about how much the protagonist dislikes Asian American men. To me, the most fascinating thing about the book is how a well-educated Asian American can perpetuate stereotypes and myths that are culturally problematic.

Such is what I'd call "Asian American Orientalism."

Edward Said extensively theorized Orientalism in his influential and landmark book Orientalism where, in a nutshell, Said critiques that Western scholars exotifies the East shaped by imperialist motives. He also says that the exotified "Orient" is constantly floating more and more east as the West gains more knowledge of their imaginary "Orient" throughout history. Essentially, the Orient is entirely an imaginary scapegoat that bears little reality to the actual site and people.

I was rather startled when I read on P. 2, "As no one wanted to marry me by the third date, my insistence of keeping my hymen intact put a huge damper on my dating life. Had my parents and I stayed in Hong Kong, it would have been less of a problem. Traditional Chinese people frown upon premarital sex."

Having grown up in Hong Kong where my mom and sisters now live and where I visit at least once a year, I'd say that Hong Kong is nothing short of "traditional Chinese." We have sex, gay or straight, way before marriage. So I immediately flipped to the author's biography and was quite shocked to find out that she was "born in Hong Kong." How could you claim to be born in place where you have so little knowledge about?

I mean, you could... but I would really question the motivation behind a sentence like "Born in Hong Kong, she is proficient in the art of profanity in both Cantonese and English" in your bio.

Now let's move on to P. 56 where she talks about "stilletos." Choi writes, "It's the modern version of Chinese footbinding. Bound feet captivated Chinese men for almost a thousand years despite the awful smell it produced... Then maybe my father wouldn't have to set me up on dates with Chinese boys like Freddie."

Footbinding is such a trite trope and truly has little relevance to modern Chinese. And it's interesting that Choi connects footbinding to modern Asian American men. Predictably, the rest of the book is about how the protagonist tries to avoid an arranged marriage shoved upon her by her Chinese (American) father. Are we in dynastic China?

Why Asian American Orientalism? Well, the motivation behind scapegoating or exotifying Asia (China and Chinese in this case) is to validate Asian Americanese. Simply put, the disenfranchised Asian American female protagonist of Hello Kitty Must Die needs to scapegoat Chinese men or anything Chinese in order to validate and comfort her own disenfranchisement.

The idea of Hello Kitty Must Die has exciting subversive potential, and it's sad (for me) that the book is bogged down in the protagonist's (fictional) hang-up on Asian American men that she would much rather fall in love with a Caucasian serial killer who has no sexual interest in her than to ever dream of having sex with an "Oriental" man.

Rewrite!

Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kristina Wong lit up a gloomy Monday afternoon on the stage of Los Angeles downtown's Redcat with her solo performance show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. An appreciative audience gathered at 3:30PM on a Monday afternoon and filled up the 250-seat house to the brim. Where were these people from? I wondered and could never figure it out.

Ashamed to say, it was my first time watching Ms. Wong perform even though I had known of her works for many years. And I really didn't have any expectations.

The approx. 80 min. comedic piece is ironically on the topic of Asian American women's depression and suicide. Indeed, Ms. Wong is known for her irreverence and comedy. Last time I bumped into Ms. Wong at a film festival, she said she would do a "double penetration scene" for me. Such is the spirit of Kristina Wong.

Coming back to her show, I thought she walked the tightrope with a perfect balance between exposing the highly depressing issues about Asian American women and illuminating such issues with her own unique brand of humor. Ms. Wong narrated the suicide of author Iris Chang who had reached a point of no return in her life after years of researching into and publishing her landmark book on the Nanjing Massacre.

From the beginning of the show, Ms. Wong engaged and interacted with the audience with an energy and creativity that is sorely missing from the typical solo performance pieces that I have seen. Not only did she tread so intelligently between opposing ideas such as fiction and autobiography, Ms. Wong entertained us while calling into questions about the politics of representation and performance.

The show climaxed with Ms. Wong pulling us into her "own" descent into madness which was poignant, hilarious and brilliant. Imagine a postmodern and feminist reinterpretation of Shakespeare's classic scene of the mad King Lear.

Bravo! Move over, Margaret, or get in bed with her!

I was told that they had just shot the performance piece and would be available in distribution in the near future, so keep a tap on it through her website: http://www.KristinaWong.com

My Nightmare on Elm Street

I must admit that I was a little guarded walking into the theater to watch the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street as I was a die-hard fan of the franchise. As a teenager, I had been reading about A Nightmare on Elm Street a year before I was able to get a hold of an imported VHS copy when I was visiting Tokyo on my 15th summer. When they finally released the movie in Hong Kong, I watched it in the theater again and was disappointed by the censored version where they made some random cuts to tone down the gore. Thank God I had the VHS that I bought from Japan and I could watch Wes Craven's original version again and again.

Walking out of the theater last night, I must admit that Samuel Bayer's A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) is actually the perfect remake. While the original Nightmare is a classic, it is uneven both tonally and in terms of effects due to its limited 1.8 million budget and technology. With a much blessed budget and technological advance, Bayer's remake perfected Wes Craven's original vision with respect and rigor.

As a fan of the original classic, I was surprisingly impressed by the discourse that Bayer's remake had created with the original. It was simply a pleasure to watch how Bayer tried to stay faithful to Craven's vision by playfully shifting and reinterpreting both the characters, plot points and effects sequences of the original Nightmare. For newcomers, you'll find a much more serious and rigorous horror film with nuanced characters and flawless fright sequences.

Bayer's Nightmare has also improved on the original in the story logic department. Despite my love for the original, Craven's version is plagued with some logic issues within the film. The remake is much more rigorous and consistent with the dream/reality dichotomy and story logic.

In the original Nightmare, the final scare shot was shoddily slipped in with high camp and cheekiness. Craven ran out of money and put in the obviously campy and fake last shot as a joke that ironically tested well with audiences. Bayer completed Craven's vision by making the last scare shot beautiful and perfect. It really touched me because, from simply the reinterpretation of the last shot, I felt that Bayer was faithful to Craven's vision, the franchise, and the genre with respect and rigor. It was also an homage to the effectively frightening final shot of the 80s' horror classic Phantasm.

Last but not least, the use of the Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do Is Dream is nothing short of brilliance.

Birdemic Shock and Terror

As I was browsing through my neighborhood video store, I found a copy of James Nguyen's Birdemic on the shelf. I had been hearing about this cult-classic-to-be and hence I must rent it. It didn't have Severin Films' packaging so I was assuming that it must be a self-distributed copy from Mr. Nguyen's company before the distribution deal was made.

I went home and popped it into my DVD player. And to be honest, I couldn't really make it through the first half hour to even see the CGI killer birds that appear in the trailer. In the version that I rented, the soundtrack was so badly mixed (or not mixed) that there was a change in ambiance on every other cut of the film. The actors were literally reading lines from the script. Surprisingly though, the music was actually competent.

Mr. Nguyen must have released a rough cut of his movie in this version. I should wait for the re-release to watch it. And hopefully, they will have fixed the soundtrack by then.

I'm sure that Tippi Hedren's cameo in Birdemic will make Hitchcock twitch in his grave.

Mr. Nguyen posted on his website that he will be producing a sequel titled Birdemic The Resurrection. Great, it looks like Birdemic is attacking my neighborhood next.