The reason I wanted to check out Ovid.tv was to watch the documentary about a small town in Southwest China, called Ghost Town. There was a showing of it several years ago that I missed and I was su
Out of curiosity, I bid on issue No. 75 of Cinema 63 that was up for auction on eBay in France. The magazine arrived promptly, fairly reeking of mildew and with pages cracking off the spine, but de
There is something fascinating, unfathomable, and mystifying about the Caucasus Mountains, and the peoples there, scattered among the modern nations of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and spilling acro
Repost of Dark Knight Review (originally published July 2008) If you haven’t yet seen the film, Dark Knight, please do that first before reading this post, because you will definitely spoil the “tens
Went to see the new Tsui Hark film “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame“ [狄仁杰之通天帝国] at one of the downtown shopping centers in Taipei and loved it! Apparently, the only showing in America so far has been at the Toronto Film Festival in September where it was reviewed as a return to fun for Hark. I certainly thought it was fun myself, harking back to the crazy wuxia themes that played so well in Chinese Ghost Story [倩女幽魂] __and Green Snake [青蛇]. For those of us who also loved the series of novels fashioned on Judge Dee by Van Gulik, this movie seems to distort the character into a much-larger than life action hero. Nonetheless, the cinematic style and lavish attention to sets create a fantasy epic very much worth seeing. The underworld scenery and throwaway characters reminded me of the similar backdrops used in Hellboy II and Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End Singapore sets, suggesting that Tsui Hark has made a close study of those design ideas and paid homage to them.