Then, Oct. 2, four red river hog piglets were born. And on Oct. 7, the zoo announced that Asian elephants Rex and Asha are having a baby — 18-year-old Asha is seven months pregnant with her second calf. Asha’s first calf, Malee, born in 2011, was the first elephant born at the OKC zoo. Zoo […]
asian
Posted inArts & Culture
Flying Fists of Kung Fu / Kickin’ It Shaolin Style
After about the third or fourth film I watched — either 5 Pattern Dragon Claws or 18 Fatal Strikes, I can’t be sure — I noticed how similar the movies were to another. I wasn’t exactly surprised, having digesting so many of these cheap chopsocky efforts over the years, but never in such close proximity. Basically, each […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Guillotines
Not necessarily. The guillotines of The Guillotines are of the shimmering CGI kind, and so obvious as to be cartoons. Still, this Hong Kong pic is at its best when the guillotines spin on their scooped launchers like rabid dogs waiting to be unleashed, then zoom around the place looking for a head to latch […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Tower
Set on Christmas Eve (thereby also making it akin to Die Hard), the film takes place at Tower Sky, a twin-towered luxury apartment building of some 1,700 units and 108 floors. The towers connect via a shivers-inducing “sky bridge” with see-through floor. If that makes your stomach do flip-flops, perhaps it can be settled with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
23:59
In the opening scene of writer/director Gilbert Chan’s film, we also learn that if someone dies at that time, one minute until midnight, his or her soul will not rest in peace. Tan (newcomer Tedd Chan) tells his fellow recruits this while regaling them with ghost stories on the floor of their barracks. They’re in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sadako 3D
This time, that creepy, crawling girl with the stringy black hair known as Sadako (Ai Hashimoto) comes not through TV sets, but computer and smartphone screens. The cursed VHS tape is now a cursed video clip of a live suicide, and anyone who views it immediately kills himself or herself. Well, anyone except pretty, young […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Nightfall
But 2012 may prove to be a banner year for him, based upon the smash-hit ensemble The Thieves and now the crime thriller Nightfall. In the latter, he portrays police inspector George Lam, who hasn’t quite been the same since his wife committed suicide five years ago, so his work — however gruesome — provides a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Dragon
The reason? Science! As a friend put it, Dragon plays like CSI: Kung Fu. I’d add a dash of Rashomon. Set in 1917, it opens with kindly papermaker/family man (Donnie Yen, Ip Man) reluctantly thwarting the robbery of a general store, leaving the two criminals dead. But how, wonders the investigating detective (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Red […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Great Magician
A co-production of China and Hong Kong, the film centers around Chang Hsien (Tony Leung, Infernal Affairs, Red Cliff and roughly half of Wong Kar Wai’s output), a stranger who swoops into a little village in the early 1900s and wows its residents with his amazing tricks. But don’t call him a trickster — he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Thieves
So don’t complain that you have to read subtitles; literacy is good for you. Depicting the theft of a national treasure from a seemingly impenetrable art vault, a 10-minute prologue puts viewers right in the mood for its jaunty, addicting vibe — one that marries the globetrotting derring-do of the Mission: Impossible franchise with the […]