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If Only… April Story

January 7, 2010 — 4 Comments

by Acerk.

In my opinion, Yu’s had a pretty decent 10-year career. She’s been a supporting character more than I would prefer, but who cares, she’s still young and has a long way to go. Here are 5 movies that I wish she could have been in. I believe each film selected would have helped her career in one way or another.

5. April Story

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Independent Film has a new post by Heidi Van Lier talking about her hopes for Indies this year, which I found interesting… considering last night’s People’s Choice gave Favorite Indie Film to Inglourious Basterds. If you do a quick google, it turns out that Inglourious Basterds cost about $70M USD to make. That’s indie in America for you.

Small studios to actually give out, en masse, small amounts of funding to indie filmmakers to make films under $500,000, and not just talk about doing it. Hell, even $250,000. (Do you know the fab film I could make with $250,000?)

I’m all for more distribution of indie films and foreign.

I’m still trying to find someone to pick up my idea.

The video is pretty disappointingly average,
but the song is quite good. =)

If Only… Yu Aoi Edition

January 6, 2010 — 2 Comments

During the holidays, I messaged Acerk about him collaborating on a series of posts about films that he would have liked Yu Aoi to be in. If Only is fairly simple.

You pick your subject, in our case Yu Aoi, and choose films that we would have loved to see her in. There’s just a few rules to the game, the subject needs to positively be right for the role. For example, as much as I could love Cate Blanchett on Elizabeth… Yu Aoi can NOT play her. LOL

Of course, there are work-arounds to your logic…

Like for example a 1999 film with a 20-something year old character. You could argue that Yu would be just a teen back then, but she could star in it now. Or a 2001 film about a girl in her late-teens… Yu was in her late teens.

Of course, the Elizabeth role would need to be a pretty awesome logic xD

Anyway, Acerk agreed, and this is his queue that he should send me something. I had my picks last week, but I lost them — soo… I had to try to remember them, but they turned out a little bit different. Hopefully better than my first picks. Definitely interesting choices.

If you (not Acerk, coz he’s already doing a set) are interested on making your OWN If Only assumptions, leave a comment stating it. Everyone is welcomed! Especially Yu Aoi fans.

What do you think about the idea?

These are our If Only picks~

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Yu Aoi 2010 Calendar

January 5, 2010 — 5 Comments

I wasn’t gonna post these — like I said, not a calendar person — , but ran into some okay scans,
so now I’m looking for all of them. If you have them, resolution of 560px wide or more
leave a link on the comments!

I can totally see Dutch Milk Maid… or Hansel & Gretel. Ja?

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Turns out that Faye Wong had been working on the main theme for the Chow Yun-Fat Confucius film. The song, titled You Lan Cao (幽兰操), was finished on December 31st, and will be released on January 6th for the release of the film.

It is based on the works of the Tang Dynasty poet Han Yu (韩愈, 768-824). The director, Hu Mei, is reported to have described Faye’s rendition as ethereal, as “Communication of the earth and the sky’s beauty.”

The new song uses only 64 Chinese characters and is adapted from ancient poet Han Yu’s eulogy on orchids that resonated with the iconic philosopher Confucius.

via Aiya They Didn’t.

So, The Hurt Locker keeps on winning people. Best Picture and Best Director seem to be in the bag. Are we looking at the first female director to EVER win an Academy Award? That’s kinda nice… but actually kind of shocking it’s taken this long for a woman to be seriously considered.

And a few surprises too!

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Yu Aoi is featured on CMs for U-Can (ユーキャン) a company dealing with distance learning courses and communication, among other stuff. One of the promotional materials is an almost-12-minute short film titled Sute Neko OL, or Stray Cat Office Lady, in which Yu plays Mayumi Yamamoto (?) an office lady who finds a stray cat…

some captures after the break~

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The Decade in Pop

January 2, 2010 — Leave a comment

Pitchfork has a really interesting article on how Pop music has changed these past 10 years, with a surprising take on the what was BackStreet Boys, Britney Spears, TLC, Christina Aguilera and Hanson. You know, since most people try to deny they listen to them at some point in their lives.

Here’s one measure of how well they succeeded. Breaking through behind the Backstreet Boys on 1999’s pop roster were a crew of former Mouseketeers: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and ‘N Sync’s Justin Timberlake. Even the commentators who loved their records didn’t give them a hope of longer-term success. But 10 years on, Spears is midway through the year’s highest-grossing tour, Aguilera is lining up M.I.A. and Santigold to work with, and Timberlake can pick his hip-hop collaborators as he wishes. (Not to mention snaring a Pitchfork Single of the Year.) It’s fair to say the class of ’99 exceeded every expectation.

My only issue is the focus on the American market. Sure, BackStreet Boys, Britney, Aguilera and everyone were popular worldwide, across cultures. Since the market’s shift to online music, it hasn’t been really the case… so the 2nd half of the article feels dull, just like the ‘worldwide pop music’ market. How about an exciting comment about Pop music in Asia? I keep saying Asia is actually saving “pop acts” alone by taking it to different levels.

You can read the article here.

Also~ Pitchfork has its Decade lists…
From its 200 albums, we only concur on five choices. They also repeat artists… 2, maybe 3 albums per artists, while I chose 100 albums by 100 artists including soundtracks. Oh yeah, I also have albums in Chinese and Japanese and Korean, and French. They don’t.

I’m kinda mad at their lack of variety.
It’s as if music in English is the only one that matters…
Check all their Decade lists here.

If you wanna check mine.
Best Albums of 2000-2009
Best Songs of 2000-2009
part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5