Archives For Films

the-namesake-ashoke-hospital-it-is-nothing

For those fathers who always play down their worries and fears.

我想你,爸。

Super messy Yu Aoi post ahead~

With the release of Haru wo Seotte [trailer] this Saturday, the release of Mozu Season 2 next, followed by Wakamono-tachi and Rurouni Kenshin Kyoto Inferno, all promotions are meshing with one another.

First, Kenichi Matsuyama and Yu together in this CinemaCafe interview.

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BiBi’s got a brand new song titled Hello World, the theme for the new Mainland Chinese movie The Breakup Guru (分手大师), which opens…  on June 27th. The vibe of the song is very Train’s Hey Soul Sister-y and Jason Mraz-y chill whimsical folksy.

Fun fact: Jason Mraz’s Wordplay [MV] was my jam back in my Vancouverite days. Never liked him as much since then.

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I had been hoping Emily Blunt make up for not living up to my expectations of her amazingness [1], and I’m so happy to see her in Edge of Tomorrow. I just want to see a prequel where she gets to kick some more ass, though I’m not entirely sure what the movie would be about… maybe an actual movie where we don’t get much into the explanation of what is going on with the re-living.

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I needed a little more feelings.

I’m not gonna lie to you ‘coz it’s obvious. I’m dying to watch Haider because of Tabu, and because it’s Vishal Bhardwaj… and Shakespeare, and the trilogy finally completed. I’m also not entirely sold on Shahid Kapoor, but I haven’t seen much of his work and he was sorta okay in Jab We Met. Haven’t seen Kaminey yet.

But he does look extra super duper sexy with clipped hair and facial hair.

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As Zoolander would say, Really REALLY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD LOOKING.

Sridevi’s lovely crowd-pleasing English Vinglish is going to Japan [Trailer, if you don’t believe me], and for a moment there I thought they might actually super-dub it [1] but no~ Japan is getting it subbed after 3 Idiots got a nod for Best Foreign Film in the last edition of the Japanese Academy Awards. For promotions of the film, they want to use this image of her 1993 film Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja:

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OH~ GODDDDDDDD

And it’s serious too- like, they totally mean to promote EV with Sridevi in yellow-face without a hint of irony. I wonder what Japanese people would think other than “oh, these silly foreigners,” I don’t know who the audience for the film is in Japan, somehow I don’t picture Japanese housewives going to watch a non-Japanese non-Hollywood (ft. Depp or DiCaprio or Pitt or Cruise) flick with subtitles, but maybe I’m underestimating them.

For casual watchers of “this is Chinese/Japanese/Korean” arguments online or real life, Sridevi’s attire though wanting to be Japanese is obviously more Chinese-inspired, like Disney’s Mulan’s match-making attire wanting to be Chinese but obviously Japanese-inspired.

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On Friday (May 16th), my Yu Aoi fandom turned six. Nobody congratulated me because I didn’t post anything special… but here’s a picture of Yu-chan with whiskers! If I’m not mistaken, it should be a shot featured on the Jul’2010 issue of H Magazine.

Despite the slowdown, it looks like 2014 might be a bit more active than it has been :) at least, maybe since 2010. The biggest activities will, of course, be surrounding the release of Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno and Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends, which will open in August and September respectively.

A film cut of Zipang Punk hit theaters in March [1], and Haru wo Seotte [1] will be opening next month.

On the TV front, Yu will also be appearing in FujiTV’s remake of Wakamono-tachi (若者たち) that will begin airing in July with a really impressive cast that includes Satoshi Tsumabuki (back on TV since NHK’s Taiga), Eita, Hikari Mitsushima, and Ai Hashimoto.

Plus, she’s an addition to the (second) season of Mozu — though it seems to be following the WOW/TBS formula done for Double Face — titled Mozu Season 2 – Maboroshi no Tsubasa (MOZU Season 2 ~幻の翼) that will last five episodes that follows three detectives (Hidetoshi Nishijima, Teruyuki Kagawa, and Yoko Maki) on their quest to get a contract killer known as Mozu. The show will begin airing on June 22nd.

That’s all I got for you, people~

I’ve been binging on Madhuri Dixit clips once again because it’s her birthday! I’ve been watching her clips from Devdas multiple times just tonight- I think this is the first time I decided to search for the clips in the best resolution possible. This is the first time I catch the EROSNOW 1080 clips, so I just noticed how cleaned up the image is- like, this is the first time I’m seeing the Devdas print without the orange tint. LOL

So… if EROS has the cleaned up print in high resolution~~~ why the heck aren’t they’re releasing it on Bluray already? I’ve only seen the film once, but it looks odd without the weird coloring… like they cleaned it up and color corrected it wrong. xD Anyway, I’ve settled for a lot of Hindi DVDs already — the YRF DVDs are particularly decent — but I won’t settle for less from Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Being able to just stream the movie is not enough either!

Because look at her! She owns it, and you sorta wish SRK wasn’t overacting so much in it because he’s ruining my mood in here. And I’ve learned to love SRK, but come on!

With that song~ Maar Dala~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX1ro0AJk_I

How can I not add the pretty of that to my collection? PLEASE!

Don’t make me do questionable things for high resolution video!

So… I thought I was wrong [1], but now I’m not so sure.

One of my pet-peeves with Indian cinema (and Chinese… and Russian) is when some sort of dubbing is involved. The Russians, of course, are the worst offenders of that when they just slap some Russian over-dubbed without even caring if it’s a man talking over a female character. It’s not even like it’s properly dubbed, it’s just lazily slapped onto the original track without even lowering the audio.

Then the Chinese mess around with you because you got Hong Kong actors that don’t necessarily speak proper Mandarin working with Mainland actors who wouldn’t necessarily speak proper Cantonese (or at all). The result? You don’t exactly know which one is the original audio track. The way I go about it is to choose always Cantonese when film is set in Hong Kong, and go for Mandarin in most epics. Anything historical epic HK production pre-97 also gets the Cantonese favoritism. xD

India has suchhhhhh an array of languages that I’m not entirely familiar with that it would mean little to choose one language over the other, unless you’re bothered with lips syncing. Though Hindi now sounds familiar, I must admit. What bothers me is that I get accustomed to people’s voices. It seems people in India find certain voices more appealing than others, and could -in a whim- dubbed you over. One of the reasons I can’t stand Ghulam is because it bothers me that Rani’s dubbed voice doesn’t match my idea of Rani.

Tabu has done a bit of non-Hindi films, and though her acting can be epic- Telugu dubbing, man. I know and I like Tabu’s voice, and it freaks me out a little how different the dubbing voice can be. As a general dubbing rule, companies tend to go for voices that are similar to the original audio… or they go for someone with a similar flare. Not generally in Indian cinema.

All this talk is because I found a clip of Vidya Balan from Urumi, for which I complained that they probably dubbed their voices. However, in the clip, it sounds… almost like Vidya. For a very long moment I thought it was her, until I read the comments… now, I’m not sure. LOL

If it’s dubbed, it’s the best dubbed I’ve seen. It’s a Japanese super-dub!

If it’s Vidya’s voice, she apparently speaks perfect Malayalam for the movie.

You know how we love to put stars on pedestals? Often reserved and measured in interviews — except for the fact that Ang Lee told her she laughs like a school girl [1] — it was totally worth the buy of the Meenaxi DVD for the Making Of. Now we have these~

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My reaction when I saw that?

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