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For full festival info, please visit http://www.subwaycinema.com
Subway Cinema presents...
New York Asian Film Festival
ASIAN FILMS ARE GO!!! 2003
May 15-May 26, 2003
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue @ Second Street (Manhattan)
New York's BEST contemporary Asian film festival erupts yet again with 22 of the latest and greatest from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Thailand and Taiwan for 12 days of UNRELENTING ENTERTAINMENT. Whereas most festivals show sleepy arthouse snoozers, ASIAN FILMS ARE GO!!! brings on the blockbusters, the newsmakers, the trend-setters, and the banned, scandalous releases from thousands of miles away!
22 movies from 6 countries
12 days of non-stop motion picture madness
2 International premieres
5 North American premieres
2 US premieres
7 New York premieres
WHY PAY $10 FOR A MOVIE THAT SUCKS...
WHEN YOU COULD PAY $8 FOR A MOVIE THAT ROCKS!
INDIA!
Company (2002)
Shouldering its way to the front of the crowd and demanding to be taken on its own terms, COMPANY is an epic saga about the rise and fall of a criminal cartel and the men and women who ran it. With Francis Ford Coppola's panoramic sweep and Martin Scorsese's delicate touch with actors, director Ram Gopal Varma delivers the greatest and grandest crime story to hit the screens since GOODFELLAS. Cold as the flicker of a cobra's tongue, Malik (dead-eyed, Ajay Devgan) recruits slum-thug, Chandu (Vivek Oberoi), to beef up his side in an internal war. The two come out on top and build an international business on a mountain of dead bodies. Hailed as the best Bollywood film of 2002, this is crime as a capitalist enterprise: if they won't buy what you're selling, put a gun to their head; if they won't sell what you're buying, pull the trigger and pry it from their fingers.
KOREA!
Break Out (2002)
One of life's little losers is stranded with no money for a bus home and nothing to his name but a hard head and a disposable lighter. A fading gangster swipes the lighter in a public bathroom and horns are locked: one man wants his lighter back, the other won't admit he stole something so cheap. Everyone winds up on a runaway train, surrounded by a SWAT team, and headed for disaster. BREAK OUT is about that one inch of our souls that no job can own, and no one can tamper with. Social comedy as a weapon of mass humiliation, it's all about our dignity, and how undignified we look when we fight for it. Written by Park Jeong-Wu (ATTACK THE GAS STATION)
Double Agent (2003)
Han Suk-Kyu (SHIRI; CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST) returns to the screen after a three-year absence to give the performance of his career as a North Korean defector who becomes a South Korean spy. Or is he a North Korean spy pretending to be a South Korean spy? Or a North Korean spy pretending to be a South Korean spy pretending to be... A stomach-churning look at the 1980’s anti-communist madness that turned patriots into torturers, DOUBLE AGENT is for everyone who loves spy movies but hates one-liners. Here, espionage isn't a rah-rah thrill ride, but a carnivorous hall of mirrors where people walk in, and husks walk out.
My Beautiful Days (2002)
MY BEAUTIFUL DAYS is all about those years between leaving college and starting life when nothing seems to be happening but time keeps slipping away. This is a quietly powerful call to stop worrying about the water temperature and get in the pool. Sink or swim, it's your life and you better start living it!
Over the Rainbow (2002)
Local weatherman, Lee Jung-Jae, has a car accident and wakes up with some minor holes in his memory, like who he was in love with before he got flattened by a truck. Lots of people want to help him, and you just know that his quest for his forgotten dream girl will end happily, but isn't that the world we'd all like to live in? OVER THE RAINBOW throws caution to the wind and spews shameless love confetti all over the audience. As fun as being tackled by a gang of cute animals, this is the most effortless romantic comedy of the year.
The Phone (2002)
And you thought your cell phone plan was bad? Korea's highest-grossing horror movie is a consumerist nightmare. These young urban professionals find that their stylish clothes and chic haircuts are rotten from the inside out and no match for a moldering schoolgirl having the ultimate bad hair day. Eun Seo-Woo plays the young freak and she deserves a special Oscar for her out-of-control performance: French kissing daddy, trying to break her own neck, and hissing like a cat with its tail on fire. As the counter marks off time until “The Endâ€, all the stylish ephemera of modern Korean filmmaking does a time lapse dissolve into an Edgar Allan Poe story with unlimited minutes and no roaming charges.
Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002)
In a world where Mickey Mouse has more legal rights than an Iraqi child, director Jang Sun-Woo has driven this car bomb loaded with semiotic explosives and philosophical dynamite deep into the heart of the multiplex. Director Jang isn't here to praise the movies; but to bury them. As rich and tricky as James Joyce's Ulysses, RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL won't please anyone who just wants a movie. If all you're looking to do is make it a Blockbuster night, try THE CORE. Ju (Kim Hyung-Sung, MY BEAUTIFUL DAYS) is a frustrated delivery boy. At an arcade he meets Im Eun-Gyung, a girl who's out of his league and who knows it. He flirts, she shuts him down, and he goes home. Movie one, ending one. But like Joyce, Jang know that you can pack a lifetime into a single day, and both men use the ephemera of entertainment as tools for a shamanic ritual where we learn that we're not striving for enlightenment, but becoming enlightened with every second we live, with every restart we punch, with every level of fiction we build: God is in our Gameboys. What happens next is that Ju either dreams about rescuing Im Eun-Gyung, and his dream is saturated with the video game conventions he's absorbed all his life... or else he wakes up and gains entry to RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, a fully-immersive, world-sized game whose arrival is heralded by Chuang Tzu's famous butterfly, and whose perverted end can only come when you make the titular Match Girl fall in love with you right before she freezes to death. It's an ugly thing to watch: a human actress turned into a bit-mapped puppet for a gang of thugs, hoods, mobsters and lone wolf gun babes to fight over. But fight over her they do, in bullet ballets, wire-fu fist fests, motorcycle chases, helicopter battles inside narrow, concrete hallways. Fighting with weapons doled out by a fishcake seller who runs an armory out of his food stand: guided missiles, atom bombs, submachine guns, and the ultimate Taoist weapon, the Mackerel. Watch carefully where characters fall asleep, or get high. Keep your eyes out for the butterfly that heralds yet another trip down the rabbit hole. Like Dante's hell, the only way out is in. So sit back, relax, open your minds, and prepare to put your mouth over the nozzle of a motion picture firehose.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Park Chan-Wook, the director of Korea's 2000 smash hit, JOINT SECURITY AREA, returns with that film's stars, Song Kang-Ho and Shin Ha-Kyun. Deaf-mute factory worker, Ryu, is hunting for a donor kidney for his sister. But when the organ slated for her turns out to be the wrong blood type he begins a long walk down a dark tunnel and the light at the end is an oncoming train. Director Park has hung the world up by its heels and let all the forgiveness run out through a slit in its neck. What happens when there's no more sorry? When there's no more starting over? A nearly-silent, almost unbearable dissection of what we can do to each other out of love, this is the movie Film Comment calls “a remarkable masterpiece†and Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool news picks as the best of 2002.
Too Young To Die (2002)
It sounds like the perfect Hollywood love story. Park Chi-Gyu and Lee Soon-Ye meet cute, they flirt, start dating, move in together, bicker, go to karaoke, and have sex (lots and lots of sex), just like new couples everywhere. But add in the fact that our lovers are in their mid-70's and you've suddenly got a movie no studio exec would touch with a ten foot pole. A digital video molotov cocktail, TOO YOUNG TOO DIE stars Park and Lee who play themselves in this movie based on the ups and downs of their real life relationship. An older couple who fell in love late in life, these two are not the gimpy seniors we're used to seeing onscreen. These two fight, flirt, and #### with an earthy vigor that's inspiring for anyone who's scared of getting old. Not so much a traditional movie as a celebration of love, TOO YOUNG TO DIE is a flipped bird to a world that thinks people over 65 should crawl off in a corner and die, this flick is a slice of life that's vigorously, uncompromisingly alive. ATTENTION SENIORS: Bring a date and get in free. WARNING: This movie graphically depicts explicit healthy, sex between consenting adults. If you would rather see a woman's nipple get sliced off, we recommend ICHI THE KILLER.
JAPAN!
Bounce Ko Gals (1997)
Japanese filmmakers understand the teenage wasteland the way most of us haven't since we were 16, and director Masato Harada wears his heart on his sleeve in this flick about kogyaru: schoolgirl hookers who sell their soiled underwear and bodies for spending money. “It made me so depressed that men of my age had become that rotten,†says Harada. Existing in a strange state of grace, this movie is the best film about friendship ever made, but it never puts on rose colored glasses. "I left a notebook in a cinema where viewers could write their opinions about the film" said Harada. "One kogyaru wrote that I had said everything that she wanted to say but couldn't. Then she left her telephone number."
Ichi the Killer (2001)
- It's based on a comic book that is completely banned in parts of Japan
- Thirteen minutes were censored for its Hong Kong release
- British censors recommended more cuts than in any other film in almost a decade
- The Toronto Film Festival handed out barf bags when they screened it
We've all heard of Takashi Miike's notorious ICHI THE KILLER: now come and see it uncut before it starts a week-long run at the Anthology Film Archives.
This movie will make you storm out of the theater in disgust only to return minutes later for more, More, MORE!
MORE Yakuza bondage torture sessions!
MORE human tongues cut out before your very eyes!
MORE corrupt cops dressed as teddy bears!
ICHI THE KILLER: you won't be able to tear your eyes off the screen...so let Ichi do it for you.
WARNING: ICHI THE KILLER contains graphic scenes of self-mutilation, nipple removal, tongue amputation, rape, and men hung from the ceiling by giant hooks. If you'd like to see a movie about a loving relationship between consenting adults we recommend TOO YOUNG TO DIE.
Out (2002)
If you ever suspected that women were better than men this movie puts that theory in the lab and proves it. Four middle-aged women are leaky boats on a sea of troubles, and there's nothing life can do between now and the time they die that'll surprise them. They're clock-punchers at the local box lunch factory and their home lives are just as drab: downsized husbands, sullen children, senile in-laws, mountains of debt and maxed-out credit cards. And then the hugely pregnant Yayoi kills her husband and suddenly there's a dead body that has to be dealt with. Well, packing up a dead body shouldn't be much harder than packing up a box lunch, right? Graceful and mature, hilarious and suspenseful, OUT is a movie driven by its story. You can feel the whole audience lean forward, wondering what happens next, drawing closer to the movie screen as if it's a campfire on a dark and starry night. It's like DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD, only good - and with corpse disposal.
Ping Pong (2002)
Long-time Ping Pong tournament pals - loudmouth Peco and dour Smile - have come to a crossroads. Smile is the better player, but he consistently loses to Peco out of a misguided sense of friendship. Nice of him, but it's led Peco to believe he's the unbeatable king of the world. When the joyless technician, Dragon, crushes Peco; and China, a Mainland player who couldn't make it in the PRC, mops up the court with Smile, it's time for both players to either put up or shut up. PING PONG is a hurricane of emotionally complex performances, wild visuals, and narrative brio. Fading players sprout wilting butterfly wings, micron-level close-ups dissect the impact of the ball on the surface of the paddles, and surreal flocks of seagulls streak through anonymous community gymnasiums. PING PONG is the greatest eXtreme sports movie ever made - and the sport is table tennis? Sho nuff!
Versus (2000)
Prisoner KSG-301 escapes from the slammer with one bracelet of a handcuff clamped around his right wrist, the other end clamped around some poor sap's severed arm. A yakuza gang is supposed to get him to safety, but they insist on hanging out and waiting for the boss, passing time by tormenting a random female hostage. They're getting on KSG-301's nerves, so there's a short sharp eruption of violence and the yakuza guys wind up in the dirt with sucking chest wounds. Movie over? Not quite. See, this is a magic forest, and the recently deceased yakuza come back to life, and KSG-301 and the female hostage make a run for it with a growing army of kung fu kicking zombies on their tails. Proving just how far a determined director with a shameless cast and some cool ideas for new ways to kill zombies can go, VERSUS has nothing on its mind but pure cinematic anarchy. Irredeemable, inexcusable, indefensible - but fun!
HONG KONG!
Just One Look (2002)
If JUST ONE LOOK was an American movie here's what would be different. It would have been hailed in the US as a gently bittersweet film about growing up. Its rapturous worship of old Chinese movies would have earned it comparisons to CINEMA PARADISO. The star performances of Canto-pop idols, The Twins, would have been lauded as stunning proof that the bubblegum duo could act. Anthony Wong's performance as a two-bit gangster would have been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Award, and he would have won. JUST ONE LOOK would have toured independent theaters and run forever. But it's Chinese, so none of this happened. Don't miss out on an understated, undiscovered classic. Two screenings only - and it'll never come this way again.
Runaway Pistol (2002)
Some people think "Hong Kong movie" means "heroic action movie". RUNAWAY PISTOL is a bullet in the face to that idea. Directed by Fruit Chan's cinematographer, Lam Wah-chuen, this is a convention-defying, synapse-frying, anti-gun, anti-humanity, anti-everything flick that follows a hapless handgun from one back-against-the-wall owner to another across Hong Kong's blasted cityscape. Fully armed with vengeful dogs, nude weatherwomen, foot fetishists, and a dejected pistol that just can't stop bemoaning its fate, this is one of the bleakest and bravest independent movies of the year.
So Close (2002)
The plot is very similar to Flaubert's Madame Bovary in that it revolves around a computer program that can hack all the security cameras on earth. Rather than sell it and become millionaires, Shu Qi (THE TRANSPORTER) and Vicky Zhao (SHAOLIN SOCCER) use it to become career assassins - follow your dreams! But after years of busting caps Shu Qi has become a hurting-on-the-inside kind of hottie, who begins to feel sorry for the thousands of people she's snuffed. Loser. Little sis, on the other hand, just wants to wear revealing outfits and open cans of whup ass on veritable armies of henchmen. Enter luscious Karen Mok, a cop who has run into the glass ceiling so hard she's got a concussion. She unwinds by pursuing Vicky and Shu and maybe, just maybe, falling for Vicky in the process. Cop/criminal romances are, historically, really bad ideas we at Subway are extremely grateful that Karen and Vicky are ignoring precedent on our behalf. Lesbians who like their women armed, Asian, and able to run up walls and kick people on the tops of their heads, will also appreciate the effort. With perfect hair, perfect clothes, and perfect roundhouse kicks, SO CLOSE is like a fashion shoot that can beat your ass.
A TRIBUTE TO LESLIE CHEUNG
As a tribute to Leslie's life and talent, Subway Cinema is proud to present two a 2-film tribute to Leslie. This tribute will begin with BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR, and end with either PHANTOM LOVER or ASHES OF TIME. Stay tuned to http://www.subwaycinema.com for updates.
TAIWAN!
Double Vision (2002)
Like a clinically depressed RUSH HOUR, this flick pairs an American cop with a Chinese cop and sets them loose in Taiwan. YAWN! Fish out of water! Don't ever touch a black man's radio! But no... this time it's different. The director is Chen Kuo-fu, one of Taiwan's great art film auteurs. And David Morse's Great White American Specialist mostly flounders around, stuck in the miasmal hell-swamp of Taiwan's scorching summer and in the relentless pull of partner Tony's depression. Sleeping in his office, Tony hasn't been home since he exposed a colleague's corruption, earning department-wide hatred. Now he's pickled in self-loathing, trying to pluck up the courage to kill himself. And the serial killings? They don't even seem to be the work of a human being. A grim literalization of the five Taoist hells, DOUBLE VISION is putts science and religion at each others' throats and then films the carnage.
THAILAND!
Killer Tattoo (2001)
An 80's-style action movie dripping with double cheese and cranked up to maximum volume, this flick is a greasy, guilty treat. Four of Thailand's most popular comedians star as crazed n' cranky hitmen who get so tangled up in their own plotlines that the entire movie explodes around them into a surreal, amphetamine-tweaked fiesta. This picture swept the Thai film awards (winning Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Comic Actor, Most Promising Actress and Best Fight Scene Choreography) in 2001. It's an anything-goes 24-hours-a-day midnight movie that runs faster than an athlete on ephedra and explodes in your gut like a sugar bomb.
For full festival info, please visit http://www.subwaycinema.com
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