Tag: fandom

  • Sing My Song: Because You are Mavis Fan~

    So I’m late to the party (as always), and just started watching this year’s season of Sing my Song (中国好歌曲), which has been airing for a couple of weeks. It’s honestly my favorite of these many music contests because it’s new songs. I never ever stay through the actual contest, but… I do enjoy their blind auditions for the surprises!

    Episode one, so far, has given me that awkward moment when Laurence Larson 罗艺恒 sings better Mandarin than me… nobody turns for blues singer 黄晓宁 Huang Hsiao Ning which makes David Tao cry (and reminds me of my dad, hence also making me teary), and gives us the meta moment of the night (and probably of the season) when Liu Wei 刘维 sings Because You Are Mavis Fan (因为你是范晓萱), using many Mavis music and lyrics cues, to make Mavis herself cry.

    I’m a Mavis fan and I love I Want Us to Be Together to bits, so of course I loved it.

    The song is available for download over at QQ (apparently, officially), but you gotta download their APP, sign up for an account (maybe pay to get the 320kbps version)… and for sign up, it’s asking for a mobile number to send a verification code, and I don’t use a phone, so I can’t sign up [Hipster First World Problems]~~~ so I only got myself a 128kbps from somewhere murky on the net LOL. If you happen to get the 320kbps one, do share it with me pretty please.

    And it’s not like EVERYTHING is available on iTunes. On time.

  • The Fitoor of Begun Hazrat

    *dies*

    It really kills me that this movie is opening a few days after my birthday, and I can’t watch it. WHY DO YOU GUYS DO THIS TO ME?

    Sidenote: The Fitoor promotions have brought some interesting interview bits with Tabu- like she wants to be part of Golmaal 4 (I haven’t seen Golmaal, but that’s a Rohit Shetty movie, so… xD), she’s fishing for a comedy, she likes David Dhawan’s type of comedies (which are so 90s comedy style type of not my thing), and wants to do a movie with Govinda… who, if I recall correctly, actually doesn’t like many of the 90s comedy movies he did xD

    Comedy is such a particular genre, so difficult to please people.

    My type of comedy, I’ve found out, is in the realm of Roxana Avalos, Rosalind Russell, and Sandra Ng. I laugh quite a bit with Hong Kong/Chinese comedies.

  • Ram-Leela on Ice!

    Ice-skaters Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov did a rendition of Nagada Sang Dhol [clip] in their ice-skating routine (which, apparently, won them a gold medal) that made me want to watch Devdas on Ice~~~ or specifically Dola Re Dola on Ice because I’m like that!

    [Original YT link seems to have been removed, the upload available at Volosozhar and Trankov’s performance channel isn’t as good quality as I remember]//240730

    As you know~ Russia is big on the ice-skating events, even more so than the Koreans (who had the reality Kim Yu-na’s Kiss & Cry[1]), the Japanese who broadcast ice-skating competitions quite regularly throughout the year, and the Americans (the other day I caught a broadcast of Musselman’s Apple Sauce Family Skating Tribute on ESPN).

    I never thought I’d see this fandom crossover. xD

  • In case you didn’t know Fitoor is coming~

    Though Fitoor might get trapped by remaking Alfonso Cuaron’s version of Great Expectations… I’m still looking forward to Tabu as Begum. I’m also looking forward to see Haminasto (aka. also romanized as Haminastu) [YouTube] because it’s my favorite track in the whole soundtrack, even though I’ve been butchering some of the other songs out loud late at night. xD I like the song so much that I ended up looking for Zeb Bangash, found Pakistani duo Zeb and Haniya, discovered Coke Studio [1][2][3][4][5 non-Zeb related], and downloaded the compilations on iTunes [S2][S6].

    It messed up my language library because there’s so much Punjabi, Urdu and Pashtu, and Turkish… I don’t know which is which xD

    ANWYAY~ OCD frustrations aside~

    Fitoor promotions are at full throttle~ and it includes the release of this micro clips of dialog, which I don’t understand at all… but Tabu’s just saying “Firdaus, Firdaus, Firdaus” gives me the chills.

    More: Duur, Qubool.

  • My 2015 Letterboxd Year in Review

    I know… Letterboxd is trying to get me to pay~~~

    Though I’m still kinda mad that they reset my movie-view count a few couple of hours before midnight, I do kinda appreciate their stats~

    letterboxd-2015-review

    Being the obsessive compulsive person that I am, I was kinda disappointed that I didn’t reach my 1000hrs of movie-watching, but was also glad because it turns out I’ve spent like 11% of my year watching movies. That’s like more than a whole month during a year. I’m so glad I’ve taken up exercise while watching movies xD

    According to this, my bias Zhao Wei was my Most Watched Actor –though I’m missing actual numbers, I think I saw 8 films with her (including cameos) — and about 6 Anurag Kashyap movies (without the ones he’s produced). That doesn’t match the 23 movies I watched of Tabu in 2014 (LOL), and the 13 movies prior to that.

    But overall, these skin-deep newsletter shows a good reflection of my movie-watching~ a little bit Chinese, a little bit Indian, a little bit European, a little bit of animation, and some Taiwanese melancholic rom-com.

  • Missed 2016 Yu Aoi Greeting~

    Oh, hey! I somehow missed this on my YouTube timeline- Yu Aoi’s 2016 New Year greeting xD

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytkL0LaH_BM

    I’ve lost most my Japanese powers in the past two years of no Japanese movies, music and television. LOL I can only make out the greeting xD I feel deflated because -crossing fingers- I may be heading to Japan for the holidays in a couple of months and scares the crap out of me because no one speaks Japanese in this trip~~~

    My dream is that I’ll meet Yu-chan and tell her how big a fan I am/was. xD Must also remember to stock up on movies (hopefully with subs) and/or Shiina Ringo concert DVDs and discography.

  • Khamatova on Gazeta.ru for The Puppet Syndrome Promotion

    sindrom-petrushki-2015-khamatova

    And all of a sudden~ Elena Khazanova’s The Puppet Syndrome (Синдром Петрушки) was released. A couple of months ago when the trailer was released, I didn’t even have a solid release date, but alas~

    They’ve also just released the trailer for Aleksandr Proshkin’s Garden of Eden (Райские Кущи), but while they’re promoting The Puppet Syndrome, Khamatova gave an interview for Gazeta.ru about the film, women on Russian film, as well as being a film actress… and talked briefly about playing a teenage boy in Aleksei German Jr.’s Under Electric Clouds.

    Apparently, they really did build a Chulpan Khamatova real-life-sized doll, full-body plaster cast, straws in her nostrils and the whole thing.

    I can’t wait to watch that~~~

    On Pixar’s Inside Out Russian movie pitch~ “Let’s make this big beautiful expensive animated film… about emotions in the mind of a little girl!- This is ridiculous.” Even in the European/Hollywood environment, it seems like a crazy idea.

    Interesting bits about that line alone~ the Russian title of Inside Out, Головоломки (Holovolomky) — means “game puzzle.” and an animated film is called a мультфильм (mul’tfil’m).

    And if she had been given the chance to play Furiosa (or Milla Jovovich’s role in Resident Evil), she bluntly said no. LOL

    You can read the whole interview on the Gazeta.ru website.

  • Brown Eyed Girls Got Away with Warm Hole~

    Yup~ no typo there.

    They do have indeedy a song called Warm Hole (웜홀, womhol), which everyone’s trying to pretend it’s Wormhole. Considering the song, I wonder how that was gonna fly on a ‘live’ performance, but they did.

    The only minus? Lipsync. I’m sure they can come up with a way that JeA doesn’t have to do a choreography and just focus on the vocals, no? Music Core performance of Hot Shot, anyone? She was even great with the Sixth Sense bit. Nothing tops that Music Core performance. Legendary.

  • Tabu for Filmfare Nov’15 by Vivek Bhatia

    It was Tabu’s birthday yesterday, so happy birthday!

    The web was flooded with wishing-well graphics and trivia posts of some of the same-old same-old trivia bits. The best one was Jitesh Pillai [1][2] who shared some photos of the new issue of Filmfare Magazine– Tabu has a couple of pages in a shoot by Vivek Bhatia [Facebook], there doesn’t seem to be an interview, just a photoshoot of four shots with short texts.

    — May 8th, 2016 edit —

    I don’t know why I was under the impression that Vivek Bhatia was in charge of the photoshoot. Correction: these photos were by Abhay Singh.

    tabu-filmfare-2015-vivek-bhatia-003

    She gets up with the morning’s prayer on her lips… and the night’s pleasure in her eyes.

    Is that suggestive or is that suggestive?

    And the cherry on top? The Filmfare issue also includes a short 10-trivia article on Vidya Balan with photos by Rohan Shrestha [used here][and here]. However, it doesn’t seem to be connected to this mysterious photoshoot that I loved so much. My favorite bit about that?

    If there are no subtitles in an English film, then I don’t enjoy watching it. The actors speak so softly that I can’t understand the dialogue. I hate to miss even a single word.

    There’s so many mumblers, nowadays. I do watch everything with subtitles— English, Spanish, French, Portuguese… in that order, and if there’s none available in those, I’ll try to wing it in Chinese.

     

  • Friendly BEG Reminder~

    …that Brown Eyed Girls’ comeback is just around the corner~

    New album comes out in like- one day, Nov. 5th.

    And this one sounds like a winner track.

    Looks like brand new management, brand new image.