ben sin - my official artist profile -alivenotdead.com

HUGO STIGLITZ GUITAR RIFF

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blWtj2kvxBg

These guys are great.

We need more of these cats in HK, yeah?

I'm watching the Star Canto movie channel and they just unveiled their October lineup. A few thoughts:

1: I absolutely loathe this new made-for-TV series of PTU movies based on the characters from Johnnie To's PTU.

PTU is Hong Kong's first and to this day, only, film noir. It's a fucking amazing moody movie set in the dark streets of Tsim Sha Tsui. Simon Yam was absolutely bad ass in the movie (the scene where he makes the triad rub his tattoo until he bleeds is a classic scene in HK cinema) and Lam Suet is ice cool.

It pains me that the cast have all reprise their role in these lower quality straight to DVD movies.

2: There's this movie called Pandora's booth and it stars Fiona Sit and this other dude. It's a love story of the two and they travel in time via a phone booth.

A ripoff of Time Traveler's Wife? But importantly, the time traveling phone booth is stolen from BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE.

Weak sauce.

3: Ocean Flame.

I hated, hated, hated this movie. This is the worse film of 2008. It's offensively bad.

This is the plot: this chick falls for a guy, and they have this Radio Raheem relationship--the guy beats her and the girl tells him she hates his guts. This goes for 90 minutes, with pretentious slowmo shots and nonsensical dialogue. Then the girl kills herself and the film just ends. Serious. There are these 7 minute scenes of them two just standing around like they're in a Wong Kar Wai movie, only they're not cool like Tony Leung; they suck.

And the film features this phenomenon that's been super popular with HK films lately--two characters will carry a conversation in which one speaks Mandarin while the other speaks Cantonese. It's stupid. I'd rather watch the 80s HK films with the dubbed sound and everyone, even Gweilos, speak perfect Canto.

Ocean Flame is the worse movie of 2008. I literally stormed out of the screening the second the film ended.

So yes, these films are the new lineup of the Now TV HK movie channel. Why do I pay for this crap?

over 14 years ago 0 likes 3 comments 0 shares

Marie Jost

It sounds like the soundtrack on Ocean Flame is just making obvious what's been happening on movie and television sets in Hong Kong for a few years now: in any given scene half of the actors are typically speaking Cantonese, and the other half are speaking Mandarin, to each other. It is all "worked out" in the looping. What the viewer sees, whatever the audio track, is half of the actors dubbed into another language. It really drives me crazy. I guess that is better than everybody speaking Mandarin in a HK production, with very bad Cantonese dubbing added later.

over 14 years ago

ben sin

no, the mando/canto conversations in recent films are not due to dubbing but rather HK trying to embrace/please the big bros up north. The best example is Overheard, out of the blue there's this Mandarin speaking captain who heads the HK police force, and everyone listens to him speak in Mandarin and replies in Cantonese, and they converse like this for th whole movie. Coincidentally, Overheard is one of the first movies made by the IA team to be approved for the mainland and made huge bucks up there.

over 14 years ago

Marie Jost

I think you are actually saying the same thing I am. I'm saying this is how films are made in Hong Kong right now; in any given scene half of the actors are really speaking Mandarin. Now they are just using the original sound recordings and letting everyone speak back and forth in a conversation in their native language and everyone is acting like they understand one another (which they are, because everyone has memorized the script).:-) The powers that be are just preparing everyone for the day 20 or 30 years from now when you will no longer hear Cantonese in any form of public media--radio, television, movies and whatever has come along in the meantime. The day will come when Cantonese will be relegated to a "poor man's" dialect that will only be spoken at home. It will be exactly like the Mainland, and probably long before 2046, so that the educational system will prepare at least an entire generation of students before 2046 arrives. When Mandarin replaces Cantonese in the public spaces of Hong Kong, that will be the day when Hong Kong as a separate identity ceases to exist. I already have Mandarin speakers (from the PRC AND Taiwan) telling me I shouldn't bother learning to speak Cantonese, that everyone already speaks Mandarin in Hong Kong. You see, the propaganda machine is already working very hard. I wish people in Hong Kong would write articles about the erosion of Cantonese in Hong Kong, and how it is being "helped along" by official and unofficial policies. I'm sure there is quite a story there. Your heritage is under attack, and no one in Hong Kong seems concerned. That makes ME, as an outsider, extremely nervous. Once the language is gone, Hong Kong becomes just one more big city in China and fast becoming indistinguishable from all the other megalopolises. Is that what people in Hong Kong, the ones who really identify as Hong Kongers want?

over 14 years ago

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Languages Spoken: english, cantonese
Location (City, Country): Hong Kong
Gender: male
Member Since: January 25, 2008