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Books

Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

On the History of Film Style pdf online

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Film Art: An Introduction

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

The Way Hollywood Tells It pdf online

Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Figures Traced In Light

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

Video

Hou Hsiao-hsien: A new video lecture!

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

How Motion Pictures Became the Movies

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Essays

Rex Stout: Logomachizing

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His “Monument to a Scientific Error”

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

Mad Detective: Doubling Down

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema

(Re)Discovering Charles Dekeukeleire

Doing Film History

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Anatomy of the Action Picture

Hearing Voices

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

Film and the Historical Return

Studying Cinema

Articles

Book Reports

Observations on film art

Speaking of Asian film….

Wednesday | October 11, 2006   open printable version open printable version

Did you know that South Korea represents the fifth largest theatrical box office in the world? (More than Germany.) Or that Korean films and TV shows are sweeping Asia, with middle-aged ladies in Japan and the PRC swooning over SK pop stars? Or that Hong Kong star Andy Lau Tak-wah (Infernal Affairs, As Tears Go By, Running Out of Time) has been in 130-plus movies?

Variety for October 9-15 has a nice supplement pegged to the Puchan Film Festival detailing what’s on there. Kristin and I went once, and we had a great time (despite my coming down with pneumonia). It’s fall’s most important Asian film festival, with Hong Kong playing a parallel role in the spring. Online you can go to VARIETY or SCREEN INTERNATIONAL.
This year’s outing gives the award for Asian Filmmaker of the Year to Andy. He is of course a major pop idol–singer, TV star, film star, and model for fashion, shoes, watches, cameras, and God knows what else. After twenty-five years in the business, he still has charisma; I’ve seen a stadium full of teenage girls burst into a frenzy, screaming, “Tak-wah!”

Andy’s used his clout to benefit local and regional cinema. His production company Focus has supported a lot of recent work, notably Crazy Stone, and his First Cuts program underwrote such films as Patrick Tam’s After This Our Exile and Ou Yuhang’s Rain Dogs. (On the last, see my Vancouver blogs). And Andy is only 45 (though he looks about 30, dammit).

DB

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