Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

WTF? They’re going to remake My Sassy Girl as an American offering? How could this possibly get better than the original, I don’t know. Check out the movie poster:

The film, starring Elisha Cuthbert of The Girl Next Door and TV show 24 fame, is scheduled to come out sometime in 2008, and is subtitled “The girl your mother warned you about.”

In spite of it being up for download online, I decided to cave in and buy My Girl on Amazon:

It has a 4.5/5 rating on Amazon, which bodes well, and my girlfriend swears to heaven it’s the best drama she has ever seen. I was able to get one at a used price of $40, which is also good! It was produced in 2005 / 2006, so it’s fairly new, and assorted ratings around the net put it 90% or higher. Here’s a plot summary from IMDB:

The story concerns a young hotel magnate whose grandfather lingers near death, depressed of having never met his granddaughter, having dismissed her mother from his life years earlier. The manager, unable to locate his long lost sister, instead hires a young con artist who has tried to scam him to act as his sister for the benefit of his grandfather. Romantic and comic entanglements ensue between the two as their plan takes hold all to well. But what will happen when the grandfather makes a miraculous recovery and the two are forced to act as brother and sister, perhaps forever?

It’s worth pointing out that in Korea a girlfriend will call her boyfriend “older brother,” so typical American feelings might not get the joke!

This too cute movie clip was bumming around Youtube. It’s from the movie Chik yeung tin si or So Close in English, starring Karen Mok, Shu Qi, and Zhao Wei.

IBDM gives the movie 6.7 (which isn’t bad) and the video has 133,006 views on YouTube. You can buy So Close on Amazon for $21 if you wanna watch it too.

Any movie with Jason Statham and Jet Li facing off as adversaries must be worth watching. War, a movie about “FBI agent Jack Crawford (Jason Statham) who becomes obsessed with revenge after his partner Tom Wynne (Terry Chen) and family are killed apparently by the infamous and elusive assassin Rogue (Jet Li). His world unravels into a vortex of guilt and betrayal.”

It also stars Steph Song who has a change of adding a bit of romance to an otherwise formulaic (BUT OMG JET LI) action movie.

The strangest, most fascinating, complicated part of the recent movie Babel was Rinko Kikuchi’s scenes, where she portrayed a mentally distraught deaf-mute obsessed with finding someone in the world to love her. However, since her part involved occasional nudity, they cut a good five minutes from Alejandro González Iñárritu’s movie:

This reporter observed that apart from cutting out all of the scenes where Rinko Kikuchi’s character is naked, the film also cut a scene at the beginning showing a Morrocan kid masturbating, and one in which Gael García Bernal tears the head off a chicken. After watching the film, this reporter felt that the excised content basically had no effect on a normal viewing experience.

Of course, the reporter is simply reporting on national interests in China, and being Chinese of course is happy to have a Japanese woman’s body dropped from the movie.

If you’ve seen the movie I’m sure you will agree that the scenes where she throws herself towards an older man, tortured by her life without sound or speech to find some other intimate sensation, tangled in the investigators of her mother’s murder are the most passionately moving.