Bodyguards and Assassins

Last night I went to see 'Bodyguards and Assassins' at the Cornerhouse in Manchester, it was a one of screening hosted by the 'Chinese Film Forum' who try to promote Hong Kong movies here which would otherwise go unnoticed. The film is a a multi-award winning feature from 2009 which swept the board at the Hong Kong Film Awards including Best Film and Best Director.

The main premise of the film is centered around the factual event of Dr Sun Yat-Sen paying a visit to Hong Kong to discuss plans for a revolution against the corrupt Manchu reign in the early part of the 20th century, the Manchus try to prevent this from happening by attempting to assassinate Dr Sun whilst those loyal to the uprising try to protect him in his pursuit. The result is an incredible build up of suspense throughout the film leading up to the day of the doctor's arrival, followed by an explosive clash between the two opposing forces.

I remember thinking at the time that it reminded me of 'In the Line of Fire' in the way that the film plays out. Although Clint Eastwood did not appear in the movie i'm afraid to say.

Whilst it is a serious film with a history lesson at it's core, it is not without it's moments of comedy. One character, named 'The Green Giant', was very tall and me and my friend Jim were wondering if he was a basketball player....any doubts that I had about this were well and truely quashed when later on in the film he began to slam-dunk watermelons onto the bad guys heads. It was also good to see John Shum back on the screen in a more serious role, albeit with slightly less hair than during his Pom-Pom days.

Another surprise was seeing Simon Yam play another role that did not fit his usual typecast characters, it seems that as he gets older the desire to branch out is upon him. And this is also clearly reinforced by his win of the Best Actor award this year for a seperate movie in which he played a distressed shoe-maker. As ever Donnie Yen pulled off a great performance in both action and drama plus it took me a while to spot an ageing Leon Lai who donned a powerful iron fan, a weapon that i've always been fond of.
I doubt that Eric Tsang's voice will ever break though, playing the chief of police his high-pitched voice came across as more humerous than authoritive....which I suppose does suit him perfectly!

One of the best performances in the movie for me was the character played by the newcomer Li YuChun, who unfortunately missed out on the award for Best Supporting Actress, throughout the film I was totally convinced by the character's passion.

The music was one of the stars of the show I felt, as at certain points throughout the film I kept thinking to myself 'this is great'. It was also slightly different in it's approach than other films similar to this, and of course it picked up the Best Score award for this.
It goes without saying that the fight choreography was good, although not outstanding I felt, but when you consider that Stephen Tung won the Hong Kong film award for this and then look at the other nominees (Corey Yuen Kwai and Chin Kar-Lok) you know that it must've been good.


Overall I thought that this movie was great and it's suspense was the winning formula, I loved the way that they executed the elements of action, drama and comedy and equal parts whilst also putting across an important history lesson. I got some fight scenes, had a few laughs, and also learned something in the process.....a film deserving of it's outstanding achievement.

Shirt design update

So i'm a little frustrated with the design at the moment, initially due to colour issues but mainly now concerning the composition as it still seems so empty.

This is how I intend the design to look, but as you can see the black area which blends Sammo's suit into the canvas clashes with Jackie's pants. I did try gradients, one of which can be seen in the previous image that I posted....but I felt it wasn't working. Lola's hair is also an issue, temporarily cut it into strands to seperate it from the rest of the image.




So then I experimented with the thought of putting a slight border around the edge of everything inside so that there wouldn't be any clashing of colours, but I feel that the border takes the heart out of the collage so I think i'll ultimately be removing this.




And recently i've now been jotting down some ideas on seperate layers for filling the gaping voids, as you can see i've been thinking about including some of the additional characters and also some subtle imagery. But at this point i'm still thinking about how best to go about this.

Life-drawing

This evening I went to my first life-drawing class since before Christmas, it wasn't the usual teacher and seemed to be a group of university students getting some mentoring practice in. I haven't done any sketching for a while so I wasn't very impressed with my efforts, looking forward to going more regularly again though.

Change of plans

I've almost finished the 'Wheels on Meals' t-shirt design and i'm ready to do the final colouring, although today I haven't really worked on it as I got a message from Kitty asking if I could help out mixing some music. I've not done any mixing for about a year since the last time was when I put a DJ set together for the NanimeW (North-West anime group) night in Manchester on my birthday....so it was good to do a bit again.

Childhood impacts - Definative cartoons

I've always believed that the imagery, music and stories that you're subjected to in your early years are an major part of what goes into making up personality, and being a film fan since an early age i've always considered those things to be the original source that ignited my imagination and creativity.

I often like to think back and remember some of the things that I found exciting, inspiring or magical at the time and revisit them to see how I feel about them now. I might do a few posts relating to this on different themes, but my main reason for this post was that I have recently been reminiscing about the old Hanna/ Barbera and Warner Bros. cartoons that I used to watch as a kid and I wanted to narrow down some of my favourites.
Unfortunately they don't seem to show a great deal of the old classics thesedays which I think is a shame because the kids watching cartoons now will be missing out on some of the earliest and greatest animations.....then again, this may just be me being an old geezer.

Anyhoos, in the pursuit of trying to think which was my favourite cartoon I remembered numerous shorts of Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, the Donald Duck WWII propaganda cartoons and others. I also recall a favourite which featured a futuristic house with buttons everywhere to activate things....i'm sure Elmer Fudd or Sylvester was in it....

....But....

There are two cartoons in particular which have always remained with me, and I managed to find both on YouTube. I'm not surprised watching them again why I loved them so much, it makes perfect sense.

The first is a Popeye short called 'Big Bad Sinbad' from 1957, and as the title suggests it is themed around Sinbad the Sailor. I realise seeing it now why I liked it so much, i've always loved the old arabian Sinbad movies (,'Thief of Baghdad', etc.) and the cartoon captures the mood (in particular the music) perfectly.




The second is quite possibly my favourite cartoon of all time, it is a Tom & Jerry short from 1945 called 'Mouse in Manhattan' and in fact doesn't feature Tom hardly at all. Watching it again now I feel just as inspired and enchanted as I did all those years ago, and I realise that one of the reasons I love this cartoon so much is because i've always liked the look of New York in the 50s....the styles and sounds relating to films such as 'On the Town', 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying' and 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'.
Once scene in particular, the broken candlestick and the dancing with dolls, is one that will always stay with me.

It's my birthday! :D

Well, i'm another year older....and a little bit more...errr...wiser. Since my last birthday I have discovered things that I didn't before realise that I was good at and since September the time has just flown by with constant projects.

This was the card my big bro gave me. I don't think there's anything that hasn't photoshopped featured a cat....so bizarre! ....but funny.




I think that this is perhaps crossing a line slightly.....but it still light-hearted. Look at their faces....they're like, 'what's going on?'.

( skip to 2:30 )

New tee preview

About a year or two ago I started doing a few designs for shirts relating to some of my favourite movies, whenever I go websites that offer film-related shirts it's always the same movies.....'Ghostbuters', 'The Karate Kid', 'Batman', 'The Goonies', etc.....this isn't a bad thing because I love all of these movies. But you rarely see designs for the less widely known cult hits....and never any for Hong Kong cinema, which i'm a fan of. So I decided to make my own.

I did a few subtle designs referencing the films 'The Running Man' and 'Escape from New York' that only big fans of those movies would recognise, but since then it's been on the back-burner. Until now. I'm going to do some more better quality designs over the summer and today I just started the first one, it's going to be a collage of scenes from one of my all-time favourites 'Wheels on Meals'.....which i'm a huge fan of.

I'm liking the way it's looking so far, the aim is to have a parallel setting down the shirt so that everything fits together neatly. What d'you reckon?




....i'm toying with the idea of putting the main cast list on the side of the van in the red title colour, but i'll wait until i've finished everything else before deciding this.