"Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled."
Before I got married, I taught myself a card trick to perform after hours at my wedding. I've always loved magic tricks, and I thought what better excuse to perform one for my friends and family. I would often begin the trick by telling people that I have a bad poker…
"The screen is only a surface. If an image, by itself, clearly illustrates something, if it contains an interpretation, it won't transform when in contact with other images. The other images will be powerless over her, and it will be powerless over the other images. No action or reaction. It's definitive and useless in the system of cinema."
Histoire(s) du Cinéma is hard to describe. The best I've come up with is to call it cinematic scrapbooking: it's a beautiful…
"It's your turn to experience what it feels like to get shot by a friend."
Full Contact feel first and foremost like a distillation of the testosterone-fueled 80's actioner: everything is big and loud and sexy and violent, often all at the same time. The film opens on a robbery orchestrated by flamboyantly gay villain Simon Yam (who almost feels like an inspiration for Willem Dafoe's character in The Boondock Saints but criminal instead of cop) in which Bonnie Fu…
Deconstructing cultural mythologies and destroying nationalist ideologies
It's no mystery what's going on here: according to legend, every ten years the greatest swordsman from China fights the greatest swordsman from Japan in a Duel to the Death for the glory and honor of their respective nations. The conflict is very explicitly China vs. Japan, from its broad strokes down to its details. Martial arts are always a loaded signifier for national identity, but here we not only have Japanese ninjas…
"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."
There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…
In a selfish attempt to cope with his separation anxiety, a sociopathic student abuses his relationship with his mentally unstable best friend in order to throw his future away on a single day of raucous debauchery.
