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Free tickets to the Korean Film Festival (closed)
(Update: … and I’m all out. Thanks to those who wrote in!)
Heads up, readers in Sydney and Melbourne!
I’ve got three double passes to give away to any screening you like (except for the opening and closing night galas) at this year’s Korean Film Festival in Australia (KOFFIA 2011), courtesy of the festival organisers. Feast your eyes on their program full of recent Korean cinema, choose what you’d like to see, then come back and use our … (read more)
Once a Gangster (2010)
Anyone with an interest in contemporary Hong Kong cinema has seen a film with Felix Chong’s screenwriter-fingerprints all over it, from this year’s Donnie Yen action spectacular (well, one of them!) The Lost Bladesman to the much-lauded Infernal Affairs trilogy. Usually, he works alongside Alan Mak, with whom he shares most of his writing credits, and often it seems that director Andrew Lau’s involved as well.
Not so for Once a Gangster, Chong’s first film as solo director. Years … (read more)
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KOFFIA 2011: The Lineup
It seems it’s festival season in Australia right now, and after MIFF the next one we’re excited about is the Korean Film Festival in Australia (KOFFIA), which has just unwrapped their lineup for this year. Eugene and I went along to their media launch, and we’re impressed: for their second year, they’ve come back with a larger list of screenings and expanded into Melbourne as well!
Their program announcement has all the details, but here’s a short … (read more)
MIFF 2011 rolls onwards
I do hope Melbourne readers are getting stuck into MIFF this year — there’s a lot on show, and they’ve filled out their schedule with a bunch more Asian films since I wrote up our little summary of their First Glance list. You can see the full program at the MIFF site, but there are a few films of interest that I thought I’d make particular mention of.
Firstly, for those who want a chance to catch some bona fide … (read more)
Upcoming Asian film festival in Melbourne
I’ve been contacted by Neil Foley of Monster Pictures, a Melbourne-based distributor who are organising an all-Asian genre film festival, pencilled in for mid-November this year at the Cinema Nova in Carlton.
Things are still being bootstrapped, but among the titles playing will be Na Hong-Jin’s The Yellow Sea, Sion Sono’s new film Guilty of Romance, and a picture or two from Sushi Typhoon (think Alien vs Ninja, Mutant Girls Squad).
Neil’s looking for volunteers … (read more)
One Thousand Reviews!
I’m delighted to announce that as of Eugene’s review of Wu Xia the other day, Heroic Cinema now has precisely 1,000 reviews up on the site.
It’s been a long time since we started — even I, a Johnny-come-lately compared to some of the team, can remember when we used to review films on videotape and couldn’t wait for SBS to program something fun… say, all of Jackie Chan’s HK movies on successive Friday nights. Nowadays, we get Australian DVDs … (read more)
Posted in Roundups
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Wu Xia (2011)
Wu Xia is billed as a martial arts murder mystery, and one needs to wonder whether there are many more genre mash-ups still left to be made (of course making that thought is sufficient for some unknown combination to come forth). That, of course, is the central premise of Wu Xia: that Jinxi’s (Donnie Yen) intervention in a robbery draws the attention of magistrate Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) who is convinced that Jinxi’s good deed was only possible through the … (read more)
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‘Wu Xia’ comes to Australian cinemas
Continuing with their series of Chinese cinema releases in Australia, China Lion are bringing us Peter Chan Ho-sun’s new film Wu Xia this week. It’s nice to see they’ve resisted the urge to re-title it — it’s apparently going to be titled Dragon for its release in the USA.
Fans of Chinese cinema will be familiar with the name: wuxia describes a whole genre of film and literature, in which heroic swordsmen (and women) compete for mastery of the martial … (read more)
Posted in Australian News
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