Archives For fandom

Oh, who am I kidding. What I love about the end of the year is all the Best Of lists, rankings and voting. Expect my annual Top50 Songs of 2014, My fave movies of the year, and My fave local 2014 releases. I might even have enough material for a 2014 Music Highlights.

We started voting early on the YAM Magazine lounge because we are all lobbying for our favorite films, and prepping our personal End of the Year lists. I’m the most serious of all because lists can only matter when you grab the biggest possible sample. Not watching Indian movies meant that I wasn’t watching roughly 30-35% of the worldwide output.

So this is my first year online voting for Indian movies! I actually kinda like how MANY categories there are for actors to get a nod. LOL They don’t always make sense (Superstar of Tomorrow, hahahahaha and the Male Thriller/Action is quite rubbish), but I’m generally happy when I get to vote for Tabu, Madhuri and Rani without much conflict. So~ YEAH!

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You can vote here.

For the International HIV/AIDS day, Ranveer Singh (ever the sexy) got together with MTV India and Durex to try to demystify sex in the country, where the topic is usually completely hush-hush or chup-chup. He’s straight-forward, candid, sexy, funny… and gets to awkward moments when he conjures the images of everyone’s parents creating us. Though, he does have a point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SFTkE-Zzuo

It’s been a while already – over six months, to be exact – my quiverations for Ranveer are still pretty consistent. Like, he seems completely changed, focus and serious funny in the latest Anupama Chopra interview he had where he even makes her laugh. Polka dotted suit and all. His last test will be sitting on a couch with Arjun Kapoor and NOT BE THIS EVER AGAIN.

I do enjoy where his personality brand is going.

Y se nos fue, Chespirito. RIP, Chavito.

chavo-del-8-chespirito

I swear, for a while now South Korea has been trying to clone Aoi Yu. [1] Thank gods, Yu-chan’s switched styles and has been sporting different hair, and has sorta moved on from her Mori Girl vibe.

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Yu Aoi has a brand new book release simply titled 8740 DIARY 2011-2014, which is (from whatI was able to get) a collection of text and photos gathered between those years from different directors, screenwriters and co-stars. I am pretty sure there were texts from Shunji Iwai, Yuki Tanada and photographer Yoko Takahashi among many others.

The book is fairly priced… and the yen is down, so I think I might get it. We’ll see. In the meantime, Yu’s been promoting it with this cute little video for MORE Magazine, as well as the customary press event.

You can get the book on HMV Japan, which is my usual choice for Japanese items, even though YesAsia also delivers (but I find it extra pricey for them).

Wait, what? Are you telling me Faye Wong smiles in pictures? [1]

Faye Wong graced the October cover (in three versions) of Elle China for the 26th Anniversary, with a photoshoot by Chen Man. She’s always glorious when shot by Chen Man.

faye-wong-elle-china-oct2014-chen-man

You can check more of the photos and a brief (Chinese) interview with Faye at the Polysh. I tried the Elle website, but it’s not happening for me.

She also has two new songs out this year [1][2].

Only ONE of them can make it to my list. I need translations of the songs for that. At the moment, Fleet of Time is winning… mainly because I liked translating the title with such nostalgia feelings. lol

— EDIT Nov 7 —

Better quality photos at Fashnberry.

After the Razia Sultan movie starring Hema Malini back in 1983, the story needs a modern international-money-backed re-vamp… and Tabu should play her, am I right or am I RIGHT?

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Tabu is practically aching to do heavy action on a film (she just wants an action film really… I would put her as Wonder Woman if I could), and though ideally you’d pick an Indian director (Ashutosh Gowariker and Santosh Sivan come close to grand-scale production without the Sanjay Leela Bhansali masala), I’d like to see a full-on international production maybe at the hands of John Woo (enormous scale and grand battles a la Red Cliff are of his fancy nowadays) or have Tabu back with Ang Lee, or go the Korean route with Kim Han-min (War of the Arrows), Kang Je-Gyu (Tae Guk Gi) or Kim Sung-su (The Warrior).

I know Tabu chooses projects at times with set comfort in mind, and I don’t know how the others are on set (you don’t want one that’s as extreme as Von Trier… or such an asshole as David O. Russell LOL), so Lee would be a safe bet. Or… we could go the American-Indian, British-Indian or Indo-Canadian way. Asif Kapadia is looking like a good choice.

Historical political action drama sounds good, avoiding to outright do a dancing sequence unless it’s a court sequence and it’s not Tabu doing it. LOL

Ever since she said she wants to do an action film, I’ve been trying to think of a project for her to do… even though she wouldn’t be my first choice of an action star. But if she wants to put in the work for it, who are we to deny her wishes, right?

… the phrase “korea’s Aoi Yu” or its actual 韓国の蒼井優, kankoku no aoi yuu. And, no- just no. If there has to be a Korean version of Yu-chan, it has to be this one only. xD Just saying. I mean, come on~

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Yu-chan’s all fresh-faced one and only xD

I do love her hair at that length. She was also sporting it in a recent appearance on Kuwazugirai [1], where she mustered once again that she’d be probably rubbish playing poker because she can’t even keep a straight face when eating a hard-boiled egg, which she is literally suffering to do. It’s quite hilarious.

If you bother to scan comments from Marit Larsen’s (or Marion’s) fandoms, you’d notice that she has a sizable following in South East Asia (Malaysia and Singapore pop up a lot), as well as Latin Americans (Mexico and Chile are the most frequent), and it just suddenly clicked to me why this might have happened. One of them is, of course, this clip of M2M singing the Mandarin version of their Shades of Purple single Pretty Boy. Then there’s the even rarer version of M2M’s Everything You Do [MV] in Spanish- aptly translated to Todo lo que Haces [MV].

My Mandarin is not perfect, but it sounds pretty okay… as does their Spanish. As the Japanese would say~~~ ah, natsukashii na.

Also~ I can’t wait for Marit’s new album.

In honor of the release of Haider today/tomorrow and me not being able to watch it until it hits the DVD/Bluray shelves… or EROSNOW (or someone else) decides to VOD it early or *cough*… I had been curating a YouTube playlist of all the music sequences -choreographed or not- (and item songs or special apperances) in Tabu’s filmography, which has resulted in a list of over 83 clips (est: 6 hours) from Tabu’s participation not only in Hindi films, but also Telugu, Tamil… and the random Malayalam clip that I was able to find.

The list has time to expand with rarer to find clips, I suppose, including (at least) one or two more clips for Idee Sanghati, as well as other regional movies that aren’t on YouTube. There are also clips that are included in their dubbed version (with the original title and the language they’re on), because the original audio isn’t available… as well as repeated clips in better resolutions than their “official” uploads.