Hehehehe hahahaha
I would like to announce that i have submitted the final of my essays… 
YES YES YES yessire!

Time for this for some R&R

So anways…i decided to call my dearest friend back home…(she is a big history buff, and has prob seen most of the movies made on Hitler, or German War and the Third Reich…
Goodness knows how the topic came to this…but she suddenly asked me, “Hey how come there are no movies on Mao Zedong?” (she thinks China’s history is absolutely fascinating not to mention their rich culture)

My first response mmm maybe the china people are too conservative so…

She said “yea considering that they are so loyal to Mao and how revered he is… they probably refuse to divuldge any incrimidating matters that will affect his reputation…”

 Yea so that prompted my search for movies on Mao…

This came up: http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/robert-de-niro-making-mao-zedong-film/

I wonder…

Its 532 am …sleepless in seattle, sleepless in melbourne…
Okay no seriously…

Channel 7 – has been showing NBC Today and..

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21487444/ - stuff they were showing, clips and all
how to have a green day, eco friendliness, saving of electricity, etc

Which jolted by memory to the movie/documentary Planète blanche, La

also known as The White Planet, i watched awhile back during semester and forgot to blog about…

Official site: http://www.thewhiteplanet.com.au/

check out the trailer:

Directors, movies made that help create awareness, on whatever issue/subject/problem..KUDOS!

haha yes its a strange title…BUT… i have been watching QAF on sbs (friday nights, now into season 2) and my darling friend back home has manage to purchase

the entire season 1-5 for me (guess what i will be doing when i fly back)? haha

Ok well, see, Gale Harold (who plays Brian Kinney) and Randy Harrison (who plays Justin Taylor) on the show have been doing broadway numbers since QAF and yea i know you are thinking WHAT?

I just have this tendency to link one thing to another (even if they seem to be of no link) but yea…broadway musicals bring me back to my point about music (previous entry)

Movies- musical movies- (Priscilla Queen of the Desert)

is a great movie, now on broadway as well…

Lights, Color, Sound ahhhh fascinating stuff!

Anyway my POINT was, COMPOSERS that i mentioned in the previous entry (music) as creative genius, there are two i would like to bring up.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, were an American songwriting duo consisting of Richard Rodgers (1902 – 1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 – 1960). They are most famous for creating a string of immensely popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, during what is considered the golden age of the medium.

Featured as TIME, top 100
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/hammerstein.html

and this webpage is worth browsing: http://www.broadwaymusicalhome.com/rogershammerstein.htm

YUP! haha

now first of all i am flat out dead tired from essays, so on sunday, stoning on the couch and flipping channels on the tele, ABC was showing a short documentary of

Martin Scorsese: Emotion Through music. He was talking to an off interviewer about his musical influences.

Which got me thinking about the music or lack of music of the various films we have watched… of course most notably the strongest impression of soundtrack/score would have to be “Notre Musique” but i realize the effects of Ten and Blissfully Yours, was the realism…the actual sounds that should you have been in the taxi or in the forest, actually added to the “real-ness” of it… not to say that the other sounds/music of the movies did not help make the movie better…

I was just wondering how important music is to a movie, browsing through Sight and Sound: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/filmmusic/scoring.php and there was a quote from him…
Martin Scorsese
(Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York)
“Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together. It’s been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that’s true. Take a filmmaker like Kubrick. He really understood the rhythmic impact of two images coming together. He also had an extraordinary feel for the pace or tempo, a musical term, of a given scene.”

“And he knew that when you add a piece of music to a scene, and if it’s just the right piece of music, hitting at just the right instant – like the refrain of Handel’s Sarabande, the main theme from Barry Lyndon (1975), over the little boy’s funeral procession, or ‘Surfin’ Bird’ by the Trashmen fading up over the panning shot of the soldiers in the second half of Full Metal Jacket (1987), or the use of the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ in 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968)– you’ve given that scene an extra dimension, a sense of mystery, of life beyond the frame, that it would not have had otherwise. Of course, that’s very hard to do. It requires a lot of concentration.”

Take for example, if any movie soundtrack that i watch resonates in my head at this age of 22, i have to say was Free Willy, (1993). I was like…12 when i watched it… i think in 1997? What the hell did i know about movies and music at that time…

Anyway my point being, sure the story was touching but what really stuck in my head was the soundtrack, at that time, if i am not mistaken, my cousin actually made a tape (yes cassette tape) side A and B of the musical soundtrack for me. The emotions that were evoked were i guess at much part of the storyline but the music really enhanced and brought the feelings to the brim?

Continue…Martin Scorsese
(Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York)
“Because it’s very easy for the music to become a kind of security blanket, for the filmmakers and then for the audience. It’s bad enough when it’s used for nostalgic purposes, or when it’s used to place a scene in time, but there’s nothing worse than when music is used to tell the audience what they should be feeling. Unfortunately, it happens all the time.”

MMM i tend to disagree with him on this bit i mean viewing a movie, though touch is not really involved, the eyes and ears are so important and i think its great that the music manages to tell the audience what they should be feeling, because i mean whether or not you feel it is up to you, aint it?! >.<

I think the composers and musicians who create scores specifically for a movie, not just taking it off someone else are creative genuises!

MMM…
http://www.spencersundell.com/blog/2006/04/10/the_pre-history_of_sound_cinema_part_1/ 

Talks about how “the history of sound cinema begins far earlier than 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Indeed, efforts to synchronize recorded sound and film are very nearly as old as motion pictures themselves.”

Can you imagine if sound in film was never invented?!

Black white silent movies, yea sure they are classic and different and all but… still… it would have been a great loss…

http://lavender.fortunecity.com/hawkslane/575/sound-in-films.htm
explains that:

“What was happening to the sound during the so­called silent period? Music came in. By acquiring a house of its own, the moving picture rose from the status of the pedlar to a more bourgeois standard, to which the greater refinements of a musical accompaniment were appropriate. 

At the beginning music was used for two very different purposes at once: 
(a) to drown the noise of the projectors; 
(b) to give emotional atmosphere. 

As cinema developed commercially, the music became more elaborate and played a larger and larger part in the show as a whole. Cinema owners vied with each other to attract the public. The piano became a trio. The trio became a salon orchestra. The salon orchestra became a symphony orchestra. 

Not only the composition of the orchestra but also the technique of musical accompaniment enjoyed, or suffered, continuous development. The system of leitmotifs was introduced. Certain themes were associated with certain characters, and played whenever they appeared on the screen. A cinema musician’s desk contained a thick bundle of music of every possible kind­his music for the big picture.”

http://lavender.fortunecity.com/hawkslane/575/theory-of-film.htm
I have to agree…
“The sounds of our day­to­day life­we hitherto perceived merely as a confused noise, as a formless mass of din, rather as an unmusical person may listen to a symphony; at best he may be able to distinguish the leading melody, the rest will fuse into a chaotic clamor. The sound film will teach us to analyze even chaotic noise with our ear and read the score of life’s symphony. “

and yea not forgetting SILENCE (is golden) haha
“Silence, too, is an acoustic effect, but only where sounds can be heard. The presentation of silence is one of the most specific dramatic effects of the sound film. No other art can reproduce silence, neither painting nor sculpture, ‘neither literature nor the silent film could do so.”

(ever had those moments where you just sit and listen to the silence?)
-bliss-

that being said, its 9pm and i finally hear my microwave oven go
“BEEEEEEEeeeeeP” haha
Dinner time!

Randomness:

A friend once asked me, if you had to lose your 5 senses,
Sight Sound Touch Taste Smell rank them in order of the one you would be most willing to do without to the last being the last that you would most rather never ever lose…

Hmmm…

YANGON (AFP) – About 100 monks marched Wednesday in central Myanmar for the first time since the junta’s bloody crackdown on anti-government protests last month, witnesses said.

The monks marched around the town of Pakokku for about 30 minutes chanting Buddhist prayers, town residents said, adding that they did not shout any political slogans.

“These monks were marching for the first time after the crackdown,” said one woman in Pakokku.

“It is really strange.”

The march followed a mass pro-government demonstration staged by about 100,000 people in the same town in the morning. Participants denounced the earlier protests against Myanmar’s military rulers.

Pakokku, located about 500 kilometres (310 miles) north of the commercial capital Yangon, was the scene of an unprecedented standoff between authorities and monks, who took about 20 security officials hostage on September 6 after troops violently broke up an anti-junta protest.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071031/ts_afp/myanmarpoliticsmonks

Actions speak louder then words?
Peace?
Uncommunicated message?

The Tudors: Epic storytelling

I wanna watch!!!

(yes im a sucker for british history… england and london…hahaha)

and it starrs Jonathan Rhys Myers =)

Oh yea…i was thinking of this…Imaginary Prisons

Vik Muniz
Brazilian 1961–, worked in United States 1983–
Prisons XIV, the gothic arch, after Piranesi
from the Prisons, after Piranesi series (detail) 2002
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
© Vik Muniz

after the lecture on Blissfully yours… applicable to a lot of World Screen aesthetics and life and people in general… (more in next post…)

not sure how many people manage to catch it while it was on in NGV
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/imaginaryprisons/

but yea…some other links…

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Piranesi_Muniz_Images.html
(a few pictures)

review by The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/imaginary-prisons-gb-piranesi-and-vik-muniz/2007/05/02/1177788197572.html

source of picture: http://www.animwatch.com/Spotlight-MyLittleWorld.php

I am suppose to working on reading and researching BUT…
i was randomly surfing on stuff like anime…which lead me to the above picture and eventually to this website… http://animwatch.animationblogspot.com/

(Randomness…at this very moment…i must say WSAP has def jolt me awake to

everything i see on tv/movies…)

But yea… i was with my cousin at http://www.northmelbourne.mymoviesnow.com.au/
at 334 Queensberry Street because on tuesday she borrowed heaps of dvds (for $1 each, plus she was on leave) and we were standing around talking about how we both did not watch Transformers and TMT (the latest movies) and how we missed the good old days when cartoons were hand drawn and not like some Power rangers sort of thing…or computer generated or some 3D stuff… (sign of aging when you get all nostalgic?) >.<

That said and done, we did last watch Rataouille and found it amazingly life like…MMM… I guess with the progress and i mean rapid changes to technology…change are inevitable…Have not had much time to do my comic reading and cartoon/anime watching… haha (things to do during summer break…when i am back home =p)

I do not know if anyone noticed but in Seven Swords, it was a multi national cast (will tear it apart in next entry) in the mean time these few films are worth a watch and like the heading of the post, they consist of actors/actresses from those countries…some of them have sword play, martial arts, emprical dynastys and so on…

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) by Lee Ang is China-Hong Kong-Taiwan-United States co-production. Chinese actors, including Chow Yun-Fat (Hong Kong), Michelle Yeoh (Malaysian), Zhang Ziyi(China) and Chang Chen (Taiwan). REALLY a surprise international success, that became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. Winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and three other Academy Awards, and was nominated for a total of ten Academy Awards including Best Picture. I GUESS..it WOULD be a good place to start for novices in terms of getting a insight into martial arts and swordplay…

Hero (2002) by Zhang Yimou. A group of assassins: Flying Snow (飛雪) (Maggie Cheung), Broken Sword (殘劍) (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), and Sky (長空) (Donnie Yen), have sworn to kill the King of Qin (秦王) (Chen Daoming), and Nameless (無名) (Jet Li) comes to the royal capital to claim the reward offered for their defeat. The movie tells the story of his conversation with the King of Qin, and the flashbacks depicted the journey he took to earn the honor of sitting before the emperor. Zhang Ziyi stars as Broken Sword’s servant Moon (如月). I found the aesthetic backgrounds and use of computer animation for this particular film to be amazing…

Hmmm i think this may be useful at this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_China

Warriors of Heaven and Earth is a 2004 action/adventure film from China, and is directed by He Ping. The film is in Mandarin, with some Japanese. It was made in 2003, but was only released internationally the following year.

The film’s score and soundtrack are composed by A. R. Rahman, which features 16 tracks including the theme song in 3 languages, Chinese (Mandarin), English and Hindi. The film features the theme song Mirage (Warriors In Peace), sung by Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai.

It is basically a classic battle between good and evil, set in the Gobi Dessert. I must say China actress Zhao Wei who capulated to fame thanks to the role  of Xiao Yan Zi (Little Swallow) in My Fair Princess did give a fairly commendable performance…

House of Flying Daggers (Chinese: 十面埋伏; pinyin: shí miàn mái fú), is a 2004 action/romance movie directed by Zhang Yimou.

The film is set in the once great Tang Dynasty which is now on the decline. Numerous rebel groups have formed, the largest of which is the House of Flying Daggers, based in Feng Tian county. The Flying Daggers steal from the rich and give to the poor, gaining the support of the locals. Slight similarities to Robin Hood…but somehow not as good as Hero (same director)…

Now…the KOREAN connection

The Myth (Chinese: 神话; pinyin: Shenhua) is a 2005 Chinese film directed by Stanley Tong starring Jackie Chan,Tony Leung Ka Fai, KOREAN actress Kim Hee-sun and Mallika Sherawat. I found this film to be a bit too messy… you have to watch to understand what i mean…But it is in a way a bit fantasy like a lot like the other movie

The Promise (Simplified Chinese: 无极; Traditional Chinese: 無極; pinyin: Wújí; literally “Limitless”) which is suppose to be an epic fantasy movie directed by Chen Kaige and starring  KOREAN actor Jang Dong-gun, Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, rumoured lovers Cecilia Cheung and Nicholas Tse who were always top hongkong entertainment headlines because of their family background, bad behaviour, relationships and so fourth, always in the gossip column and constantly being chased after paparrazi (they recently had a kid).

I truly doubt it was by coincidence that Korean Actors and Actresses were cast in the movies, because the “Korean Wave” was and to a certain extend still hitting Asia fast and furious:)

MMM and last but not least

The Banquet (Chinese: 夜宴; pinyin: Yè Yàn; literally “The Night Banquet”) is a 2006 Chinese wuxia-drama film, directed by Feng Xiaogang and starring Zhang Ziyi. With themes that deals with revenge and fate, the story is loosely adapted from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is set in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, in 10th-century China. It has LOADS of dialogue and you really have to pay close attention to it… slightly draggy at times but pretty great plot!

http://www.kungfucinema.com/news/2007/100701.html

Tsui Hark planning HK’s ‘biggest action film’

News | Upcoming | by Mark Pollard | 2007.10.07

SEVEN SWORDS may have not been the big comeback that director Tsui Hark had hoped for but he’s not giving up the fight yet. Chinese news media reports that he is planning an ambitious martial arts action movie with Donnie Yen and Simon Yam as possible candidates to lead an ensemble cast.

Tentatively called 13 REGIMENTS, Tsui’s latest project is being impressively billed as the biggest action film in the history of the Hong Kong film industry. The film will feature a variety of martial arts styles including kung fu, kendo, judo, freeform sparring, and wrestling.

The story will center around 13 individuals, each with unique abilities, who travel around the world recovering scattered Chinese relics and returning them to a national museum in China.

Yam, a non-martial artist, is expected to play the brains of the team while Yen is the fighting lead. Possible co-stars include Nicholas Tse (as a sniper), Gordon Lam (ELECTION 2), Michael Miu (JIANG HU), Alex Fong, Zhang Jie, Wei Chen, and Sun Hong-lei (as the lead villain).

Because audiences are reportedly tired of seeing the same few Hong Kong actors onscreen all the time, Tsui is planning to introduce new talents from mainland China.

Production on 13 REGIMENTS is scheduled to begin at the end of the year.

Source: Wu-Jing.org