am i afraid of a few young girls

[reverancepavane]

It appears John Woo has sensibly given up on Hollywood (I don't know whether it was prejudice against them or just that their views on what made a good movie where so alien to the American movie executives), and returned to Hong Kong. The result of his return is Red Cliff, the first part of which is now available on DVD. Here is a teaser:

Watch on YouTube

I don't know if any Adelaide cinema would even contemplate showing it, unfortunately. Especially as it is only the first half of a two part epic movie (which explains why it ends so abruptly). You can see some of the trailers for Red Cliff 2 here. I miss HK cinema. They know how to entertain people.

Comments

[shadow-5tails.livejournal.com]

Ooh, very nice. Reminds me of The Emperor and the Assassin at first glance, with a dash of Hero thrown in for good measure.

Does Adelaide do film festivals at all, or little defiant independent cinemas? If not, I'm sure it'll get a showing in Melbourne... *grin*

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

It's good. And heroic rather than pseudo-historical. The subject title was uttered by a bad guy, and you just know that after saying that he is going to get his butt soundly kicked. As for film festivals, we do get the standard Palace foreign film "festivals" that circle the country, although I don't think there is a Chinese one on the circuit as yet. And we do have a pair of eyeballs Adelaide Film Festival (although I'm afraid most other film festivals around the world will have little to fear from it). About a decade ago one of the Chinese video shops used to show a Chinese movie every Saturday at noon at our local government arthouse cinema [1], which I religiously attended, regardless of the film (they were all invariably entertaining, something that Hollywood had long forgotten). Another (competing) store would hire out a major cinema to show the occaisional film on a Saturday night. Between them, we got lots of Chinese films. All gone now. For that matter, so are most of the cinemas in the CBD, making getting a group together for movies these days quite problematical. Maybe I should visit Melbourne if it shows? And visit Chez CheesBane while I'm at it. <grin> [1] This cinema was essentially closed in order that it wouldn't compete with the privately-owned commercial "arthouse" cinemas. Which was a pity, as I spent much of my life there. I think my record was 9 films in one week there. We even named our local film group after it: Caffeine and Mercury. Because we like to see caffeine and then go and drink some mercury. No ... wait...