Superhero movies

I honestly think I'm maybe a little bit too much of an analytical machine to watch superhero movies anymore. The subtext just gets to me. Recently the last two movies I've seen in the theater were Iron Man and The Dark Knight. I really disliked Iron Man, mostly on the grounds of class antagonism, the protagonist is a rich, immature, selfish bastard who has had everything handed to him. He has one setback and then supposedly reforms.

I also objected to the whole setup on racial grounds, hell, he even had a noble savage helping him out who predictably sacrifices himself so that our hero can live. The day that ethnic characters no longer have to sacrifice themselves for the white protagonist is a day I'll die happy.

There's also the dubious message of stopping violence by um, blowing more shit up. If it was supposed to be an anti war movie, it really failed. Although like the time I watched the Transformers movie, it was interesting to see the presence of Iraq in the film. There's a paper waiting to be written there.

The Dark Knight is a much better movie. Although thematically, I think it also gets a little murky. The idea of the righteous vigilante as well as the incorruptible Batman get a little muddled. Batman definitely does bend the law, kidnaps and tortures people. Works outside the law and is only accountable to a higher authority, yet somehow he's assumed to have limits. Does he really? It seemed like the movie was attempting to have its cake and eat it too.

I'll admit it, I enjoyed the film, but these things really bothered me. However, the cast was remarkably ethnically balanced even if most of the main leads were white. At least the HK gangster spoke good English, although he also spoke in Mandarin. Which isn't very believeable in HK. But that's a minor quibble.

Journey From The Fall

I don't know what took me this long, but I just finished watching Journey From The Fall directed by Ham Tran a few hours ago. It's probably a bit premature to write about it, because I'm still in the process of unpacking what I think about it.

But it's pretty clear just from the opening shots that Ham Tran isn't just making your average movie. The storytelling seems to be a turn off for some people, since it skips and jumps through different points in time. Perhaps I'm just pretentious but this type of storytelling works well for me, it adds complexity to my response to the film, since often I know what's going to happen. It may make the film a bit more difficult to follow, but I kind of like having to piece things out for myself. And I think that Ham Tran also manages to craft a pretty convincing and effective narrative out of such a complex and challenging way of telling it.

The movie is pretty unrelenting, but none of the violence or plot developments seem unnecessary. Each character works according to their own type of logic but none of them seem forced or improbable. At the same time, Tran definitely tells the story by showing rather than telling. There's one particular scene that sticks in my mind, he never explicitly shows two characters being intimate, but simply the way that they interact in the scene speaks volumes about their relationship.

I've been on a run of horrible movies, the low low point being the totally awful Iron Man. So discovering Journey From The Fall, albeit belatedly, I heard about it on Angry Asian Man, was doubly a pleasure. Go find this movie and watch it.

Some film thoughts

You know how 2046 was a kind of mediocre mashup of every theme Wong Kar Wai had played with in his entire film career? A sort of self referential exercise in narcissism?

I just got done watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Retribution, which I, uh, found, on the internet. And although it's less self indulgent, simply because I don't think Kurosawa is as successful as Wong Kar Wai, so he gets less money, it's a similar sort of concept. Essentially it's a rehash of some of his old themes: the power of dreams, delivered no less by Jo Odagiri who starred in Bright Future, a meme of violence coming from some undisclosed source of discontent lodged in the past like in Cure, ghosts as figures of human loneliness, like in Pulse, an angry detective with tendencies towards police brutality played by Koji Yakusho, practically every movie Kurosawa has ever made. Interestingly, I felt that his dislike of women came out more strongly in this film. Women have always been disruptive or malevolent forces in his films before, but there's never been so much violence against women as there is in this film. It's pretty clear from this review that I have seen a lot of Kurosawa movies and I also didn't really like this one. I really wanted to, even when the film is less than successful, his films are generally pretty interesting and I'm glad I said this one.

That said, the ghosts were really silly. I'm a wimp and I wasn't even scared by them. Kurosawa can scare the shit out of you when he really wants too. A woman dressed in red being wheeled around on a dolly doesn't scare me at all.

I like seeing Kurosawa movies, because strangely when I'm feeling depressed, they make me less so. I'm not sure why watching Japanese horror movies that are really about the human condition make me less depressed. But I'll take what I can get.

Bright Future

I've mentioned this film before, but I feel I have a bit more to say about it now. I got the Japanese version for Christmas. Which has an extra 30 minutes in it. I think Bright Future has become one of my favorite existential Asian movies ever. So I was pretty excited to see them. I would say that the extra thirty minutes do not really elicit any breakthroughs or new interpretations of the movie. However, they do serve to highlight far more clearly the central theme of the movie which is stasis or motion. Waiting or moving forward.

I really like aimless youth movies. The movie focuses around two people, Nimura and Arita. Like many people in their twenties, they're in dead end jobs but feeling the pressure to either shape up and develop a "normal" life or continue on in their boring dead end jobs. On the surface, Arita, the more inscrutable calmer one, is able to conform more on the surface. While Nimura is younger and far angrier. This isn't really an ordinary drama though. Neither character is an everyman type of character. Nimura has dreams of the future, and Arita is raising a deadly jellyfish.

The jellyfish is extremely important to the story. Although perhaps its meaning is something that I haven't grasped, even after seeing this movie three times. It represents the future, I seem to remember a critic saying. And it embodies the ambiguities and deadliness of the future. Although whether it promises hope and new beginnings or death is left ambiguous up until the end.

Another theme is the conflict between the old and the young. The future that young people envision is portrayed as being fundamentally toxic to the previous generation.

Anyway, I don't think that my thoughts as I've set out here are all that profound or well thought out, but they've been rattling around for some time now, so I feel I should at least set them down.

A review of Pan's Labyrinth

About a year after it was relevant. And therefore with lots of spoilers. If you don't want to know the end, don't read it.

Oh how I wish I could go back in time and not watch this movie. I have often observed to friends and acquaintances, that there's nothing worse than a movie that wastes a good idea. Which is pretty much what Pan's Labyrinth was.

It wasn't a terrible movie, but it certainly didn't live up to the hype. First of all, the main character is set up early on as having pretty much spent all her time reading fairy tales. Yet when she is dropped into one, she does such unforgivably stupid things, I wanted to strangle her.

She has to go to some underground world to retrieve a key. She's warned not to eat anything. Yet despite multiple murals of this mysterious sleeping eyeless man mutilating and eating children, and a giant frickin heap of frickin childrens' shoes in the corner, she still eats two grapes, and gets two of her helper fairies killed in the process.

Then when the faun (understandably) gets angry, she says she didn't think "two grapes would make a difference." Anyone who has read any fairy tales has to know that two grapes make all the difference. Hell, just read a Greek myth or two.

The final straw was really when she goes back for her little brother. The faun gives her this magical chalk that will cause her to be able to draw a door to wherever she has to get to. So she enters her evil, facist, torturing stepfather's lair. Where he's keeping her baby brother. And as she's hiding from her stepdad, she somehow manages to leave the magic chalk ON THE TABLE. Which of course the evil stepdad sees, and hilarity ensues.

Really, she was doing such stupid things, I was actually glad when he shot her. I'm generally quite a grumpy person, but I generally do not root for facist soldiers over cute Spanish child actors. But this was really a relief because it meant she would shut up and stop doing stupid stuff.

So in short, Pan's Labyrinth=disappointment.

Tekkon Kinkreet

As most people who read this site are probably well aware, I am a big nerd, I am a sucker for anime, and I am also a big big sucker for things that look pretty. A couple days ago, I got a chance to watch Tekkon Kinkreet, a new Japanese anime movie that's been getting a lot of buzz. You can watch the opening credits, below if you like. Although the quality of the video's not that great, it at least demonstrates that it looks damn good.



As you can no doubt learn from google-ing the title, it's about two street urchin brothers, Kuro (Black) and Shiro (White) who live in a Blade Runner-esque metropolis called Treasure Town. (Which bears a really uncanny resemblance to Sonny Liew's Sanya ). If you've seen any anime in the last 10 years, you probably know that this concept is not unusual. But the setup is less important than the execution of the movie. And whether we identify with and care about the characters.

Which I did. The main characters are fairly well developed. How much you enjoy this movie is probably going to depend upon whether you like Kuro and Shiro. I liked them. Although Kuro is sort of set up as the darker, "evil" one, he has a pretty distinct moral code, and the film does have moments where you suspect that he is less than satisfied with his life. Shiro is occasionally frustrating, but a believable character. He tends to say prophetic things, but the filmmakers generally manage to steer clear of making him either too prophetic, or too irritating. What I felt that the film did best though, was not making either of the kids cute. They were likable and interesting, but the film also makes no bones about the fact that these two kids are very dangerous, and major players in the politics in the city. Also their relationship to each other, they have a deep almost symbiotic bond, is also believable.

Given the Black White pairing of the movie, it already clues you in that this is going to be a movie about duality. So we get several pairs or opposites in the film, besides the central characters of Black and White. A parallel set of street urchins, Dawn and Dusk, a yakuza Kimura, and his boss the Rat, two cops: a rookie and a veteran. Some of these pairs are more developed than others, but the theme of duality is certainly reinforced.

As the film opens, we are introduced to several potentially destabilizing factors to the city's status quo. A rival pair of street urchins, Dawn and Dusk, arrive to claim Kuro and Shiro's turf for their own after being pushed out of their own town. As well as the reappearance of the Rat, a notorious gangster, which threatens to upset the precarious status quo.

As the film progresses, a multiple sided power struggle ensues, which will determine the fate of the city. Or so it would seem. What is intriguingly subversive about the whole thing is that beneath this narrative of urban decay, nostalgia, and gentrification, is the insistence by certain members of the cast, that the city will develop and change regardless of the outcome. It's just a heartless creature like that. Many characters will refer to Treasure Town as "his town," a point of view that is consistently undermined. I suspect Tekkon Kinkreet supports the view that the city belongs to no one but itself.

These events pull Kuro and Shiro farther apart, and once separated from his only reason for living, Kuro begins to fall apart and succumb to his inner demons. Tekkon Kinkreet has interesting things to say about strength, physical and mental, as well as power. Who the truly dominant member of the pairing of Kuro and Shiro is less obvious than one would initially suppose.

At its heart, Tekkon Kinkreet is really about human relationships. The bonds between the characters are very believable, supported by the visuals and also by the voice actors. The voice acting was really superb, understated, but really very believable. I was pretty favorably impressed by Kazunari Ninomiya (that guy from the band Arashi) as Kuro. Everyone's been saying nice things about him since he was in that Clint Eastwood movie about Iwo Jima, but I'm generally prejudiced against boy band actors. I take it back now. Yusuke Iseya was also pretty damn good as the yakuza Kimura.

This movie probably isn't for everyone. It has one of those "what the hell" type of endings that's quite common in Japanese animated films. However, I felt for the most part, the film kept it in line with the logic of the film. Admittedly this logic is not the logic of every day life. Children jump from the tops of trains, leap hundreds of feet in the air, float down to the ground like leaves. However, while this is not strict realism, I did feel that the logic of the film in this regard was consistent. The buoyant way that Black and White are able to bend the laws of physics probably have a lot to do with their state of mind as children, as well as being exceptional individuals. It's Wonderland logic, but even Wonderland has its own rules, even if they're at odds with ours.

There are some loose ends that aren't tied up though. Or perhaps were parts of an initially larger plot that didn't get tied away properly. However, generally they didn't get in the way of my enjoyment or understanding of the movie.

All in all, I liked it. So go watch it.

A Kurosawa movie double feature (and I don't mean Akira)

Recently I saw a couple movies by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure and Bright Future. Clearly they made me think or I wouldn't be writing about them. As a brief, spoiler free, outline. Cure (1999) is about a rash of murders in Tokyo, all committed by different people, and apparently for no reason, but all cut a deep X into the chest and neck of their victims in the exact same manner. The story centers on the detective responsible for investigating the case, and a mysterious, yet sinister young man named Mamiya, who comes into contact with each murderer shortly before they commit this murder. Bright Future (2003) is a little bit harder to define, it centers on two young workers in a factory with dead end jobs, and their poisonous jellyfish, and the estranged father of one of them. I can't really get into more detail than that.

Kurosawa really has an eye for color and light. It's not that he films extraordinarily beautiful things, but that he makes ordinary things seem beautiful. It's hard to explain, but there it is. Furthermore, although Cure is a genre film, thriller/horror movie, the structure of both films are so aimless, and yet absorbing, that pretty much anything could happen at any moment. There's very little build up to important events, even murders, which makes it perhaps truer to life, but in some ways much more disturbing.

Both films also center around the interplay between two characters, in the case of Cure the detective and Mamiya and Nimura and Arita in Bright Future. In both cases, one of the characters is somewhat otherworldly, functioning by a different logic than the rest of the world. And estranged from society to a great degree. The depiction of conventional society is usually rather unsympathetic, and one gets the idea that the director himself is none too sympathetic with ordinary society. However malignant or inexplicable this character, he usually projects a great amount of self knowledge and self confidence. The other character, the detective or Nimura, is, by contrast, fundamentally not at peace with the world and faced with a dilemma that will significantly impact their life.

Both films are pretty challenging to watch, and their endings are somewhat ambiguous. Particularly Cure, by the end of it, I had no idea what the hell was going on. However, the director is very good at building a persuasive world. Which stays with you, even if the ending isn't particularly tangible or understandable.

Of the two, Bright Future resonated the most with me. Perhaps this is because its central character is a directionless 24 year old who doesn't know what to do with his life or something like that. Interestingly, my mother thought Cure starring a middle-aged detective was more accessible, perhaps it's a matter of perspective. Both films are also about events which have the potential to change the world, whether it be a meme of murder, or the adaptation of a deadly jellyfish from saltwater to freshwater. Whether they change the world for good or for worse is almost immaterial. The change is what is important.

Bad Movies

Note, most of this will be kind of incomprehensible if you have never seen Better Luck Tomorrow.

I think Virginia Woolf said something about the mediocre pieces of a great writer are often better able to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses than their great works. (Most of my books are still in storage so I can't look it up and quote it.) Great works are often too wonderful and complicated, filling us with emotions that aren't really easy to digest and analyze. The Host and Paprika are both movies that I really liked recently and I probably won't have anything intelligent to say about them until I see them 5 times at least.

However bad movies or mediocre movies are something else again. It's easier to judge where they work and where they fall short. For example, last night, I watched Fast and Furious 3, as I recently observed to someone, it's hard to think of a movie #3 that's actually good, The Matrix 3, Rush Hour 3 the same rule can be observed with Fast and Furious 3. Where it worked was that the movie looked pretty good. After seeing two of Justin Lin's movies, it was interesting to see some recurring themes. There's a certain humor about how he approaches high school, and the opening credits were essentially to me a big budget repeat of a similar scene in Better Luck Tomorrow. The soundtrack as usual was slightly different and kind of interesting. Justin Lin also seems to make really good use of the locations he's in. And he takes advantage of Tokyo quite a bit. Visually, and cinemotographically the film looks fantastic. The script has some rather unexpected philosphizing, and as usual, his movies look great. Most of the money was put into the look of the movie, which honestly in a movie like this is how it should be. Lin also likes to put sort of iconic older figures in his movie, so Sammo Hung appears, as does the guy who invented drifting. Their presence does add a certain depth and make the whole affair a bit more interesting.

The downside was the casting of the main character. Actually, in both films, the actor who played the lead was not an incredibly charismatic guy. However Perry Shen's a lot better at conveying a basic range of emotions than Lucas Black, who unfortunately seems to have his mouth hanging open most of the time, and only two expressions. That's not a bad thing necessarily, however he doesn't really have the charisma to make me believe that he's a chick magnet which he's supposed to be. When you're being outshone by Bow Wow playing your snappy black sidekick, you have problems. Another thing that people, notably Oliver Wang, have noted about Lin's work is that women are generally placemarkers or tokens, both as a presence and as tokens of status. The girl is less important than what possessing her means. Again, in a movie like Fast and Furious 3, that's to be expected. What's also interesting is the parallels between The Girl in Better Luck Tomorrow and The Girl in this movie. Both of them occupy a rather ambiguous place in terms of ethnicity. One's adopted, the other one is hapa, raised in Japan. The first time it was kind of interesting. However repeating it just seems kind of lazy. He doesn't want to go to the trouble of defining her character, so making her mysterious and tragic is a lazy way to not go into it much. So chalk another one up to that theory.

In closing, the movie wasn't really all that bad. It wasn't that great either. At least it didn't have Paul Walker.

American Born Chinese

by Gene Yang

So the first thing I bought since I've been back in America is American Born Chinese, the graphic novel by Gene Yang. Odds are you've probably heard of this, I mean it was nominated for a National Book Award.

The set-up is basically this, the story is made up of three strands, the first one is the story of the Monkey King, or rather, a sort of prequel to the Monkey King's doings in Journey to the West, how he came to be the hero he became to be, the second is the story of Jin Wang, a boy whose family moves him to an all-white school in a small town, and finally the story of a white teenager Danny, who has a cousin Chin-kee, who comes to town every year and wreaks havoc on his life by embodying every Chinese stereotype known to man. And somehow, Gene Yang manages to weave these stories into a coherent whole, with meaning and stuff. And eventually you see how these stories come together. Their relationship becomes a lot clearer in the rereading, but the comic is pretty light on words, so it makes for a fairly easy read.

There are a lot of things I liked about the book. The Monkey King is a famous trickster hero, but Yang puts an interesting spin on the story, making the Monkey King a stand in for the subaltern, and in particular, the Asian American subaltern, who, despite his accomplishments and achievements, never gets invited to the party because he's a monkey. And the Monkey King's desire to wreak havoc stems directly from a desire to prove himself as more than a monkey.

Jin Wang's story, which is a fairly typical one in Asian American literature, complete with racial self-hatred and a desire to be white, appealed less to me. And honestly, this story has already been done millions of times. However this narrative is complicated by Jin Wang's relationship to Taiwanese FOB, Wei-chen Sun, his friend and "brother." Wei-chen, although he also experiences the same racism as Jin is far more comfortable with his Asian identity, and serves as a foil for Jin's self-hatred.

The final story, involving Chin-kee, is potentially offensive. Chin-kee is intentionally an exaggeration of the Chinaman stereotype. This was actually the story I enjoyed the most, in part because it felt to me the freshest of the three. Like I said before, in the short annals of Asian American literature, the Monkey King has been done, and so has the whole "I'm the only Asian American in my town and I hate myself" thing. There's something gleeful and somewhat cathartic in the way that Chin-kee causes chaos at the school. Something in me thought that Gene Yang got the whole stereotype thing spot on, from the eating cat-heads and innards, peeing in someone's Coke, knowing the answer to every question in school, while consistently confusing the l's with r's every single time. Chin-kee is a remarkably well written well thought out embodiment of the spectre of the Chinaman/FOB. Yang also pokes some fun at current events having Chin-kee belting out "She Bangs" in the school library. Up until then, it was pretty unclear what the time period was, but the "She Bangs" part, coupled with Wei-chen's transformation into rice rocket driving, bling wearing gangsta FOB kept the ending fairly fresh for me.

Over all, it was a well-written well put together book. However, the story just didn't resonate for me personally. In some ways it illustrates the generation gap for me. I think I've mentioned this about 87 times before, but I really don't feel that the "I'm the only Asian American kid in my town and I hate myself"TM is the story of my generation of Asian Americans. I really don't. That just isn't the world I grew up in. I can sympathize, but in the end I just can't relate. Incidentally, I have theories that this type of story is the type that white critics and reviewers just eat up. That said, it is a very well crafted story, well drawn, well put together, well plotted the works. And I'm not sorry I shelled out 16 bucks to pay for the thing, not one bit.

Interestingly, Gene Yang is buddies with Derek Kirk Kim, whose story Same Difference, to me epitomizes the new stories of Asian America. Between these two, and the largely Asian American contributors to the Flight anthologies, whether or not Adrian Tomine gets around to completing his White on Rice trilogy, the comics scene is definitely looking up in Asian America.

A Tale of Two Sisters

I've often thought that horror movies, and movies about ghosts in particular, can be read as the protest of people at the bottom of the social scale. In most haunting movies, the people most likely to become aware of the ghost's presence are women and children. Who are generally on the bottom of the social ladder in terms of rationality and thus easier to ignore by people in authority. That or if this is a secret Indian burial ground type of movie, than this comes from "ignorant superstitions" which are usually ignored by the (let's face it) white protagonists until it is too late. (I could read this as an expression of anxiety about the possible consequences of colonialism, but I would be being slightly silly.)

Ghosts also seem to have something to tell us. Either to reveal a story which was obscured by time, or actively covered up by the wrong doer, or to get revenge. This ghost is often someone who was wronged in life, and whose only recourse for justice now is through supernatural means after death. There are plenty of counter-examples I'm sure, since the horror movie genre is so big, but you have to at least admit that in quite a few of these movies, women or children figure prominently as either the protagonists, or the mediums through which these ghosts communicate. Children, in particular, are seen as having a close relationship to ghosts.

Which in a long and rambling way brings me to my point, which is The Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean movie which was released in the States a couple years ago. I'd link to the trailer, but quite frankly the trailer contains a ton of spoilers, and makes it out to be another The Ring. Not that the Ring doesn't have a few things going for it. (And besides, the story of a single mother, attempting to unravel the curse surrounding an illegitimate child of a psychic, in order to save her child who has a curious, sympathetic connection to said ghost, does reinforce my point I think.)

As does A Tale of Two Sisters, or obviously I wouldn't be connecting the two. A Tale of Two Sisters seems to be about a lot of things. On one level it's about guilt, and the different reactions that people have in connection to it. On another level it's about the gendered nature of illness both physical and mental. It's also the story of an extremely messed up family. Since it's been out for a couple years, I'll probably reveal all key important plot points, so if you don't want me to spoil anything for you don't read any further. You've been warned.

The story is about how ostensibly two, sisters, come back from a stay at a mental institution. They are brought to their extremely beautiful if isolated house in the countryside, by their silent and dour father. Their high-strung step-mother, who Dour Father was stepping out with before their mother's death, also lives in the house.

It's also quite clear that this family is not ok from the get-go. The stepmother resents the presence of the two step-daughters. Su-mi, the older sister is often in direct conflict with her, while Su-yeon, the younger, more passive, sister suffers abuse at her hands. While the father apparently doesn't see anything.

The stepmother is also being given pills, by her husband, and Su-mi just got out of the mental hospital. So it's also an open question as to whether you can believe what they are telling you, or you can believe anything that they are seeing. An early scene where Su-mi sees doubled objects is an early indication that you shouldn't necessarily believe what she's seeing.

Meanwhile, the stepmother and both sister start seeing ghosts. And there's the question of how their mother died, and why the closet in Su-yeon's room seems to bother everyone so much. And there's a clear feeling that past events which occurred in the house are being repeated again, using other people, in particular, women as substitutes. However, is this actually the result of the supernatural, or just sublimated guilt?

A Tale of Two Sisters is particularly difficult to understand, because you never know the full story of about Su-yeon and their mother's death until the last scene of the movie. After seeing the scene, it's pretty clear why revenge of some sort seems warranted. However, you never knew what really happened up until that point it makes the movie far more difficult to understand the first time around.

A Tale of Two Sisters is a pretty good movie in my opinion, however, it does have some weaknesses, the first of which being that it has a lot of Sixth Sense-esque twists. Two or three, depending how you're counting.
1) Su-yeon is dead. Which initially is difficult to the viewer to accept, since the stepmother has been interacting with Su-yeon except that
2) Su-mi has been hallucinating and thinking that she is the stepmother part of the time.
and then possibly
3) the ghosts of Su-yeon and their mother have been haunting the house for real. (this last one is debatable)

What was interesting to me was how the reactions to guilt were clearly gendered. The men spent most of the movie pretending that the event never happened, erasing evidence that it ever occurred, and medicating women when they do something that transgresses the boundaries of sanity.

The women of the movie, however, seem forced to voice and perpetuate the deeds which went on in the house, even as they are being surpressed. Furthermore, the ghosts single out the women to be frightened. The ultimate comeuppance is visited on the evil stepmother rather than the father, who, at least to me seems more responsible.

A Tale of Two Sisters could also be read as a story about Su-mi's psyche. Considering that her personality is split between herself and her stepmother, it's pretty clear that the conflict between the two characters is emblematic of the conflict between guilt and self-hatred, as well as the burden of memory. Su-mi, unlike her father, and her real stepmother (who makes an appearance at the very end) seems compelled to remember, or at least try in some way to bring events out into the open. The film seems sympathetic towards this, although the final results of remembering, Su-mi returns to the mental hospital, are far from optimistic. She may or may not receive redemption in the end. It's really rather hard to say.

The film loses points for a couple of things. There's a childbirth theme, running through all the haunting scenes. At one point, Su-mi dreams about a woman with hair over her face who stands over her in bed, and a small arm comes out from between the woman's legs and grabs at her. And in the final scene of the ghosts appearance, a baby is crying. This part is never explained, at least by the English subtitles, but given the explanation of events in the movie this seems a tad inconsistent.

Also there's a subtext of incest running through the film that seemed unnecessary. The film is extremely complicated, it would be less challenging viewing if it was less so, however, I enjoy this kind of thing.

On the upside, despite the incredibly convoluted plot, the film is really truly beautifully filmed, and it just looks great from an aesthetic point of view. The acting is generally good, particularly from the actresses who played Su-mi and the stepmother. However, in terms of blood and gore, A Tale of Two Sisters is pretty low on that. It's definitely fairly creepy, but it's just not really all that bloody. Well, I liked it, anyway.

Anyone who has come to the end of this, I'll have to think of some sort of prize to give you. I swear that after this, we will return to our regularly scheduled program of short posts. If possible, short posts with some sort of humor. That may asking too much, I'm pretty grumpy these days.

CSI Season 2

Recently one of my coworkers lent me the second season of CSI. I've watched CSI before, when I was in college. Usually my two friends and I would end up wanting to throw things at the TV by the end of the hour.

I don't watch much TV and I never really have. However, I do think that CSI is interesting, for a number of reasons. It is/was a pretty popular show, and by watching it you can figure out how many people get their ideas about all kinds of things. For example, the BDSM episode, in which a sex worker is accidentally killed by a client, seem like they were sort of poorly researched, although I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I can speak to this, but the first thing I was thinking when I watched it was, isn't there usually a safe word of some kind?

Not to mention the dreaded Asian episode. Every show seems to feel the need to have one every couple seasons. This one involves Mark Dascasos wearing shoepolish makeup and spouting stereotypical "Buddhist" sayings. It amused me however, that despite the lines being written in broken English, that both Asian actors' pronounciation makes it pretty clear that both of them are native speakers of English, no matter how hard they try. If in fact they were trying hard.

Interestingly, most of the episodes also center around white women in danger. Most of the people who are killed or harmed on the show are young blonde women under the age of 35.

These things aside, it seems to me that CSI is really about the triumph of science and technology over base human nature. The mysteries of sex, violence, and other lower emotions can be analyzed and explained by test tubes and scans.

Golden Fire Pig would make a great band name

As a former classmate reminded me today, it is in fact, the year of the Golden Fire Pig. Apparently a time of great fertility. Asian countries with negative population growth rejoice!

In honor of the New Year, I have compiled a random list. I don't know why being sick compels me to write about music. You guys will just have to deal, or not read, it's really up to you.

Albums I'm Very Glad I Bought in The Year of the Dog
The Decemberists The Crane Wife
The Decemberists Picaresqueties
Lateef & The Chief Maroons: Ambush, I've started liking Quannum Records more and more. This album isn't particularly long, but damned if I can find a song that I don't like.
Blue Scholars- Blue Scholars, Remember when I said it might be love. It really is love. I listen to this every day and haven't gotten tired of it yet.
Ladytron- Witching Hour, this is definitely not particularly deep, but it really is fun.

Albums I Feel Guilty for Downloading Illegally
Blue Scholars- The Long March EP, so I went out and bought a bunch of Common Market to make up for it. They're pretty good too.
Magnetic North- Magnetic North In all fairness, I can't buy this in Taiwan. Asian American emo-rap, as Wendao Jinxin calls it.
Far East Movement- Folk Music, my opinion is that Jin should just get these guys to produce all his albums for him. Their verbal skills aren't as good as Jin's, but they can build a much better album than he can. That said, any "cred" they had vanished when I found out that one of the member's dad is my dentist. I would have bought this too, but I can't find it in Taiwan either.

Albums I Should Have Downloaded Illegally
Pretty Girls Make Graves- Elan Vital, there's one or two good songs on here, that's the best thing I can really say about it.
The Far East Movement mixtape, eh this was really just a warm up for Folk Music. Anything on here is done better on their CD.

Albums I'm Very Glad That I Downloaded Illegally
Sufjan Stevens, I do not like slow sad, lo-fi indie pop. I keep trying it in the hope that I might like it. I never do.
Jay Chou- Still Fantasy, not bad, but just indifferent. It was a big disappointment after November's Chopin.

The Banquet or Why do I keep watching these movies?!

It's got to be some sort of self flagellation on my part, why do I keep watching these movies?

Ok so here's my review of Feng Xiaogang's (馮小剛）'s The Banquet. So although the genre might annoy me I do have some genuine reasons for watching the movie. For starters, it's based off Hamlet. As a literature nerd, I have always liked Hamlet. Possibly because lots of people die. So seeing it adapted to ancient China sounded kind of interesting. I mean Akira Kurosawa adapted King Lear into Throne of Blood. Furthermore, it's then a film targeted at Western audiences, selling itself as a traditional Chinese story, which is in fact based on a Western play. How very meta.

Some of the plot devices work pretty well. For example, Gertrude's incestuous tension (some say) with her son makes a lot more sense if she's in fact his stepmom. And since she was first engaged to the Crown Prince, but was later married to the Emperor, it seems like a good indication by ancient Chinese standards of the moral weakening of the regime or the rotten state of Denmark etc. Furthermore, the part where Claudius sends Hamlet off to England is adapted to sending Prince Wuluan to the Qidan in the North as a royal hostage. Which was a nice detail, since Chinese history has many stories of hostages being sent north.

I guess for my taste, The Banquet followed Hamlet a little too closely. So I already knew what was going to happen. Also a lot of the relationships between the characters weren't really explained. Most importantly Prince Wuluan's (Hamlet's) relationship to his father. Like Hamlet he's bent on avenging his father's death, but Hamlet's father didn't marry Hamlet's girlfriend. Clearly this relationship was a little bit twisted to say the least, but the movie doesn't go there. However, knowing that this event took place makes his single mindedness a little unconvincing. Furthermore, Wuluan isn't really crazy enough. Hamlet's indecisiveness and erratic nature is excusable because he's acting insane or he is actually insane. Wuluan broods a lot, but he seems more or less mentally sound.

Zhou Xun, who I normally really like, plays Qingnu, the Ophelia character, but she doesn't really connect with the character, and honestly the character is so blindly loyal to her lover, that she comes off as annoying rather than tragic. Kudos go to the guy (who looked a lot like Shawn Yu) who played Qingnu's brother. He does exhibit the kind of obsessive (and seemingly slightly incestuous) love for his family members that Hamlet is really all about. But he's only onscreen for about 20 minutes.

Ge You, who I also normally like a lot, is underwhelming as the Emperor. He was incredibly creepy in Farewell My Concubine, he's not really all that creepy here. And at the end, seemingly acts on his feelings, and dies somewhat nobly. Which seems an odd way to go for a guy who poisoned his brother, married his sister-in-law, and tries to kill his nephew.

As for Zhang Ziyi's character, the Empress Wan'er, she wasn't out and out bad exactly. But the movie clearly intends her to be a devious monster. Instead, for a large part of the movie, she seems like a cold woman, who was caught up in royal intrigue, rather than the irredeemable monster that she's supposed to be by the end. Also her feelings are pretty obvious from the start, which makes their revelation at the end kind of underwhelming.

Aside from acting problems, there's total gratuitous martial arts stuff in here. I mean randomly characters will bust out with martial arts stunts, that seem both out of character, and also they disrupt the narrative. Also, this is the Chinese nerd talking but, there is NO WAY that every member of the royal family is an accomplished martial artist. And furthermore, I can buy that the dead Emperor was a skilled warrior, however, that he taught his young wife his skills, I do not buy for one second.

Finally, as usual in these movies, Zhang Ziyi takes off all her clothes multiple times.

checklist of CTHD clones
Zhang Ziyi: Check
Gratutitous martial arts scenes: CHECK
Philosophical/nihilistic ending:Check
Yuen Woo ping: Check
Use of bright color for symbolism: kind of but not really
Golden finger: No, although Ge You does have this large jade pendant that he uses in creepy ways

Hibernation

A cold front came in yesterday and now it's rather cold. I've been feeling really sluggish and I've been wanting to eat a lot. Therefore I assume I must be hibernating. In order to keep warm, I've closed all my windows and doors and so I feel like a hamster in a small box.

I've also watched all of Wang Kar-wai's movies in the last three days except for Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and As Tears Go By. For the record, that means I have watched Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels (1.66 times), Happy Together (2 times), In the Mood For Love, and 2046. Clearly it's been rather existential. A student of mine once said that 2046 is like a summary of all of Wang Kar-wai's movies, so you have to see them all to understand it. Now that I've seen almost all of them, except Ashes of Time, I think I agree with her. Although this doesn't really make me like the movie a whole lot more. It also didn't make me like Zhang Ziyi a lot more either.

I will say there were a good ten to fifteen minutes where she impressed me with her acting, and about 35 minutes where I sort of understood why people say she's hot. However I think one of the reasons the film suffered was because she had no chemistry with Tony Leung. In the Mood for Love is a compelling story because you can believe that the two characters are in love. However Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi's characters are supposed to be in love, but I never really felt it. Since their affair takes up a large part of the movie, this really hurts the movie's credibility.

That said, Faye Wong, Gong Li, and the Japanese guy (Takuya Kimura) are all very good. Tony Leung is ok. He was rather smug throughout the movie which made it difficult to connect with his character. I know he's supposed to be hiding fear and a broken heart, maybe he hides it a little too well for me. At least the heartless cad in Days of Being Wild had a reason of sorts for being heartless.

However, 2046's ending is rather interesting, since it states that love is all a matter of timing, sometimes two people are right for each other but the time's just not right, so nothing happens. After having seen most of Wang Kar-wai's movies this does seem to be a fitting conclusion for most of them. Many couples have missed connections in his films, Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung in Days of Being Wild, Leon Lai and Karen Mok, and Takeshi Kaneshiro and Charlie Young in Fallen Angels, Chang Chen and Tony Leung (possibly) in Happy Together, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung (famously) in In the Mood for Love, and Tony Leung and Gong Li, and Tony Leung and Faye Wong in 2046. Clearly I have watched a lot of Wong Kar-wai in a short amount of time.

Well, I have nothing more to say on the subject. Except my theory that perhaps the graphic sex scenes with Zhang Ziyi was Wang Kar-wai's way of apologizing for coercing Tony Leung into doing a sex scene with Leslie Cheung in Happy Together.

The Promise

I'm not sure if Chen Kaige's The Promise 無極 is out in the States. If you have a chance though, I kind of recommend it in sort of a car crash kind of way. Although Chen Kaige is probably the second most famous Sixth Generation Chinese film maker, (The most famous director being of course Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige's former cinematographer, but I digress.) I guess I've never really enjoyed his films all that much. I've seen quite a few of them, I even wrote my thesis on Farewell My Concubine 霸王別姬. The only one I enjoyed was The Emperor and the Assassin. I guess to me, Chen Kaige's movies tend to be sort of overly ponderous. And recently people have criticized him for making that art house type of movie starring Gong Li that was pioneered (with great success) by Zhang Yimou. At his best, Chen Kaige uses his films to discuss interesting ideas. The Cultural Revolution, in Farewell My Concubine, which had a great deal of personal impact to him. In The Emperor and the Assassin, the idea that power corrupts. As for Temptress Moon 風月 , I have no idea what that was about. It was also just kind of bad.

Ok, so with that paragraph of Chinese studies nerdiness aside. The Promise was a highly anticipated movie. Chen Kaige's great fantasy/martial arts(ish) epic. In roughly the same vein as Crouching Tiger and Hero. The cast is pretty good, although most of the actors are unknown to Western audiences. Cecilia Cheung and Nicolas Tze, Hong Kong superstars, Liu Ye, of Lan Yu fame.

Cecilia Cheung plays the most beautiful woman in the world, who as a starving orphan was made into the most beautiful woman in the world by a mysterious goddess, under the condition that she never know true love. Anyway, naturally, she has a lot of guys chasing after her. Such as an arrogant General, his slave who can run at superhuman speed, and the Duke, who wields a golden finger on a stick (DON'T ASK).

Cecilia Cheung falls in love with the slave, but he was wearing the General's armor at the time, so she think she loves the general. And the slave, Kunlun is too obedient of a guy to set her straight. Anyway, the general naturally loves her too. Meanwhile she's sometimes caught by the Duke who puts her in a giant bird cage and puts a bird costume on her. Meanwhile Kunlun is trying to find out about his past, and why he runs so fast that he can apparently run through time. Meanwhile, the Duke's assassin Guilang, who seems to know a lot about Kunlun's past, follows him around in a bird cloak that the Duke put on him. Hopefully, this plot outline makes some sense, I don't know that the movie made a whole lot of sense to me in particular.

To be fair there are some good things about the movie, so let's get them out of the way first. Cecilia Cheung does look like she could be the most beautiful woman in the world. Liu Ye is good in his secondary role, he's probably the only character that I cared about. Sometimes the movie does look quite fantastic.

However, the plot is so incoherent that it's difficult to connect with the characters. You never really know why people are doing what they're doing. Why is the Duke evil? All he seems to do is put bird costumes on people, does this make him evil? Why is he more evil than the General, who is seen sending some slaves to their death with very little remorse at all? Why is Kunlun so loyal to the General, who never really shows much concern for him. Stealing his girl, taking him as a slave etc. Why is the goddess wandering around manipulating events? What does she want? The movie never really answers these questions. Furthermore the ending is rather unsatisfying and seems to be one which we're supposed to think is "deep" or "philosophical," although it mostly comes across as pat.

Furthermore, for a movie that seems to rely on the visuals to carry part of the movie, it doesn't always look that good. The armor is clearly made of plastic. And the silly props, such as THE FINGER really make it hard to take the movie seriously. To top it all off the action scenes don't even look all that cool.

So to sum up, the plot and the sort of over the top visuals really kill the movie. The acting's mostly ok. But the plot makes it really difficult to care about the characters, and only Liu Ye actually made enough of a connection for me to care about him. I mean, it's kind of bad when the one person who resonates in a movie, is the tragic assassin. Chen Kaige just seems to waste a lot of opportunities, I mean if you're going to pay money for Nicholas Tse to appear in your movie, shouldn't you at least make him look cool? Instead, Chen Kaige saddles him with a golden finger and silver lipstick. And by the time he's whining about his child hood trauma, I've ceased to care whether any of the characters live or die.

checklist of CTHD clones
Zhang Ziyi: No
Gratutitous martial arts scenes: Check
Philosophical/nihilistic ending:Check
Yuen Woo ping: No
Use of bright color for symbolism: Check

The Prestige

Oh right, I actually went outside and did something last weekend. I saw the Prestige. It was ok. A good reminder of why I don't see American movies in the theatre. I was enjoying it until the end. Since it's a pretty plot driven movie, I won't mention many particulars of the plot. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are magicians (the stage kind, not the Harry Potter kind). Christian Bale's hair looks far too contemporary by half. I'm pretty sure they didn't have hair gel back then. One review I read of the movie described them as "magical bastards" which is kind of funny and fairly accurate. There are probably a good two sets of twins too many in this movie too.

I think after I finish up grad school apps, I'm going to see if I can track down and watch all these "Chinese blockbuster" movies from the first one Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, The Promise, The Banquet, and maybe by then The Curse of the Golden Flower will be out on DVD. Am I missing any? You know what kind of movie I'm talking about, Zhang Ziyi, Yuen Woo-ping choreography, Tan Dun music etc. This is turning into a regular old phenomenon, so I kind of want to see them all together and see if there are some commonalities, I mean besides all having Zhang Ziyi in them. (For the record, The Promise does not, in fact have Zhang Ziyi in it.)

Actually I already watched The Promise. Man, well I kind of have to keep working, but when I get around to writing about it... oh boy.

The King's Man

So recently, a couple of my classes were canceled, resulting in a loss of 4.5 hours and a gain of 1 hour. So resulting in a net loss of 3.5 hours. This means that I have more time, although slightly less money. Anyway, as a result of more time on my hands, I've actually done something not related to work or grad school, and therefore I finally have something interesting to write about. Well, I've also been following the elections rather obsessively but I can't really write anything interesting about that.

Last night, I took some time off of trying to write my personal statement to watch The King and the Clown although the Chinese title is given as 王的男人 or in English The King's Man, which seems a little bit more true to the story. While watching it, it didn't necessarily blow me away the way some other movies have. But after watching it, I did keep thinking about it in a way that impressed me. Although the cover kind of makes it look like The Promise, The Banquet, etc. type of period piece, it's actually seems less self-consciously artistic and more like just a movie. Visually, there are certainly some really nice parts, but it's clearly not as high budget as the movies I mentioned above. Anyway, apparently this movie was a surprise hit in Korea, which was originally why I wanted to check it out.

Ultimately, The King and the Clown will probably be compared to Farewell My Concubine, since it's essentially about a gay love triangle involving stage performers in Asia, and involves a female impersonator. However, I would say I enjoyed The King and the Clown a lot more than Farewell My Concubine, and that there are some key differences between the two. However, like Farewell My Concubine, it focuses on two performers, one very masculine, the other rather feminine, and the wealthy patron, in this case the Emperor of Korea, who comes between them. I would say that The King and the Clown is significantly less homophobic than Farewell My Concubine. (I have a lot of opinions about Farewell My Concubine, I wrote my thesis on it.) I guess I probably shouldn't say too much about the plot since it might get released in the States someday. So briefly, two street performers run away from their troupe and arrive in Seoul. They put on a skit mocking the Emperor and his consort and, through chance and various other circumstances, are installed in the palace by the Emperor. Their presence then precipitates a series of conflicts within the court.

What really made the movie for me was the characters. There's never a clear bad guy in the movie. Even the childish and tyrannical Emperor is portrayed in a fairly well balanced light. The acting is generally quite good. Both of the actors who play the performers in the movie are really good and carry the movie. I was particularly impressed by the guy that played the female impersonator. Generally "effeminate" characters aren't written very sympathetically, and are often portrayed as weak. The part seemed difficult, because most of the character's feelings and decisions occur inside, which makes the viewer wonder what's really going on in his head. However, I thought the writer and the actor do a good job of bringing his character across.

Another thing I thought was interesting, is that while this film has a fairly clear gay theme: the emperor falls in love with female impersonator, and the two performers also seem to be involved with each other. (Hence the love triangle.) Their relationship is never commented upon by any of the other characters, but I thought their portrayal seemed more like, these are two people who are in love, rather than THIS IS A GAY MOVIE, which seems sometimes to infect movies like this.

Also, the film had some interesting quirks. I don't think I've ever seen another movie that included references to Hamlet, Farewell My Concubine, and Fists of Fury all at the same time. (I could be imagining the last one though.) The Hamlet reference was actually pretty neat, because the Emperor and Hamlet actually have a lot of things in common, oedipal tendencies, living in the shadow of their dead father, madness, mood swings. That plus the theater connection makes the whole thing kind of cool. The reference to Farewell My Concubine was a lot more random, except as a nod to Farewell My Concubine, or perhaps an acknowledgment that the film will inevitably be compared to Farewell My Concubine. However, it was really more random than anything and kind of took away from the movie, as well as seeming a touch anachronistic, but I'm not really sure about that part. The reference to Bruce Lee seemed to come at the end, but I may just be imagining things.

Asian American film

So, there's this film out, Cavite that seems to be getting a lot of press right now. It's even on metacritic.com. While looking at some of the future releases, (because I have no life) I also saw that Michael Kang's film The Motel is getting released in a couple weeks I think. It was weird to see two Asian American films getting so much attention within such a short time.

I was thinking about the state of Asian American film. It's sort of a weighty topic and sort of a boring one perhaps, but what the hell, I'm going to talk about it anyway. A couple years ago, Better Luck Tomorrow made huge waves by being an Asian American film which was not about rebellious second generation children and their mothers, for being commercial successful and finally, and most surprisingly for being a good film. As luck would have it, around the same time Charlotte Sometimes another Asian American film also did really well. It occurred to me at the time that something was going on.

Since then I've seen a bunch of films come and go, usually trying to capitalize on Better Luck Tomorrow's grassroots success. (i.e. getting on a bunch of e-mail lists and telling Asians to go see the movie and to tell their friends to go see the movie, and we all know how much we looove the internet. Not to mention Friendster, xanga, and the facebook.) There have been a bunch of them that seem to have won distribution and gone on to be modest successes sometimes critical, sometimes commercial, sometimes both. The ones that come to mind are Robot Stories, Saving Face, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, ( I include the last one because, although it was written and directed by two white guys, it starred two Asian guys and used similar methods of trying to get people to go see the movie). I think for the first time in history, we actually have something that we can call Asian American cinema. Most of these films do the Asian American film circuit, and later break into the more mainstream circuit, like Sundance and other places.

I think after Better Luck Tomorrow there was a lot of pessimism about whether or not this trend of success would continue or whether it was just a fluke. After all, before Justin Lin there was Wayne Wang. And quite frankly by taking on Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, Justin Lin does seem to be going down the Wayne Wang sellout road. I have hope though. There do seem to be some projects out there that are getting some attention like Cavite, The Motel, The Grace Lee Project, The Namesake, Americanese, and Punching at the Sun. I'm curious to see what happens.

The point of this long ramble is that, I do think something has happened. It seems to be easier for Asian American filmmakers to break into the regular indie market and get people to watch their movies. Most of these directors are first timers so it will be interesting to see what happens to them. Whether they start making like Wayne Wang and making essentially whitewashed movies or they continue making Asian American films. Eric Byler is a more hopeful example of this. And even Justin Lin's films have never been as whitewashed as Wayne Wang's. Take for example Anywhere but here which takes place in what is apparently an alternate dimension where all people of color have left Los Angeles. At least Annapolis had Roger Fan in it, even if it reportedly sucked.

My people may not be good rappers. (Sorry Jin.) But they do seem to be capable of making good independent films and good comic books. And for the time being, that's good enough for me.

Leaving my (old) job and the DaVinci Code

So a couple things of "interest" happened in my otherwise pretty mundane life today. For reasons that I won't be particularly explicit about here, (this is the Internet for Christ sakes) I recently, i.e. about three months ago, broke my contract with the cram school I worked at and went to work for another. However, in order to sort of fulfill the letter if not the spirit of my contract, I still taught one class at my previous school. I.e. the girlfriend Ken and Jerry class. Mostly it was because it was a class that I enjoyed a lot. However, due to a lot of unpleasantness, if you really want to know this you can e-mail me, I can provide you with many details that probably aren't all that interesting to people who don't know me. Anyway that's all finished now very suddenly. I taught them today but my boss at my school talked to my boss at my old school, and now I'm not going back next week. I'm really going to miss some of the kids there, but at the same time, I hate the school so much that I'm also relieved that I won't be going back.

Today I also saw the Da Vinci Code. What struck me most about this highly anticipated movie was that it was a lot like a movie that came out a while ago, National Treasure. However unlike the movie National Treasure, the Da Vinci Code was supposed to have some sort of intellectual content that was controversial. Most of my problem is that I am a grumpy person. The grumpy negative person in me says, "Woo, so Jesus had a wife. Big fucking deal." This isn't really fair because for reasons that I can't remember I was once interested and even read some of the Apocrypha that they talk about as well as the Gnostic texts that they talk about in the movie, so the concept was not entirely new to me.

There were a couple things that I found very interesting about the movie though although I'm guessing they probably aren't really intentional. The movie's premise and possibly the book's premise, although I haven't read it, seems to be that the characters want to reveal the hidden female side of the church and the Christian faith. However, I would hardly characterize this film as one that empowers women. In fact, for a movie that is supposedly about revealing the hidden female truth, it is a pretty male-centric movie. Despite the fact that Mary Magdelene is supposedly the heir to the Christian faith, she relies on and is protected by a bunch of male knights. And it is the male knights that the film focuses on. All of the female characters in the film, which is actually a grand total of one really, are actually symbols for the truth, passively containing the truth or some secret blood which wait for the male researcher or knight or whatever to uncover it. Honestly, I thought the whole God-female thing was more interestingly and originally covered in Kevin Smith's Dogma.

This may also be controversial, but what are the odds that the last descendant, which in and of itself is kind of unlikely, of Jesus Christ would be French? And also not Jewish? It seemed like the movie was also sort of getting around the whole inconvenient part of Jesus. Jesus was a man sure, but he was also a Middle Eastern possibly Arabic Jewish man. And let's be honest with ourselves. If Jesus took a plane in American right now, he'd be "randomly searched" about 15 times on his way to the gate. Instead, Jesus's descendant in the movie is Amelie. Somehow to me this seems a little off.

Wang Leehom

Since Jay Chou has received so much attention from everyone, I feel like I should talk a little bit about someone else. Jay recently released a CD which was pretty much inescapable for about a month. It was recently dislodged from its number one chart position by S.H.E.'s new CD although it's still at number 2. However, on the heels of this release by the King of Pop, is a future release.

For some reason, that is possibly the product of a permanently caffeine addled brain, Wang Leehom and Jay Chou have always seemed opposed. Fans of one rarely like the other. Wang Leehom for some reason is a bit more respectable and more people seem to publicly profess a liking for him. At the same time, he appears to be both ridiculously good looking, besides writing most of his songs. Whereas Jay Chou, when he first appeared, was apparently referred to as "the ugly kid with the squinty eyes" to quote a friend of mine. He is still labeled by many people as ugly.

As for me, I guess I see Wang Leehom as a sort of master imitator. He went to grad school for music at Berkeley, so there's got to be more going on up there than your average pop star (or your average thug) but at the same time he seems to borrow to put in kindly, others might say copy, let's compromise and say mimic American hip hop artists. At the same time, he says that he's trying to raise interest and pride in Chinese culture through his music. Ironically, most Taiwanese people I've talked to think his music is quite Americanized and commercial. His music is definitely commercial, and he models in ads like there's no tomorrow. At the same time there's this professed intellectual, ethnic, and cultural agenda that he pushes, and at the same time he's probably the most unabashedly commerical artist I've seen here.

He's also an ABC, and there's definitely times when I hear him singing and he sounds like he just translated his lyrics into Chinese from English. Anyway, these are just a couple thoughts. Feel free to rip them to shreds if you like. I'm going to bed.