a blog about a lot of things

  A Land Imagined Despite my general appreciation for the cinema of Asia, Singaporean films are not my area of expertise. In fact, I think I haven’t seen any at all (at least that I can recall as explicitly Singaporean, though some Indian crime films have had scenes set there when the gangsters are in exile and possibly Crazy Rich Asians ) before I watched “A Land Imagined”. This was a film I was inclined to like and have heavy bias towards because it fit into many categories I appreciate. A film about immigration embedded into a noir mystery, set in a city I have a lot of appreciation for, it was always likely I’d enjoy the film. In the end, my bias didn’t matter because A Land Imagined turned out to be one of the better films I’ve seen this year. It’s a film that starts out with a conventional enough narrative of a detective, world weary and aged, looking for a missing person and having to go to the seedier parts of the city to get information. The story could ha...

Project Gutenberg The thing about Hong Kong crime movies that are filled with action is that I have a hard time being objective about them. Like many people who are in their thirties now (and even older), I grew up watching a steady diet of Hong Kong cinema. For much of my childhood I was convinced Hong Kong was one of the most dangerous places in the world (mostly the fault of Johnnie To and John Woo’s films). I have never tired of the Hong Kong gangster film, much as I have never tired of the Western. And the fairly recent resurgence of quality crime movies coming out of Hong Kong has been something I didn’t even realized I missed until the revival and so I’m even inclined to let a few bad movies slide. However, Project Gutenberg isn’t one of the movies that needs to get a bye since it’s a thoroughly enjoyable two hour ride into the world of counterfeit money creation. With a cast frontline of Chow Yun Fat and Aaron Kwok, the film already comes with classic actors of ...