Last Fantasia movie (plus some recs)
Jul. 22nd, 2008 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaShould probably have gone for the Midnight Meat Train adaptation but it'll live without me, methinks. XD
The Moss [trailer]: Ced had the impression this was much longer than the 90 minutes it was. The brutality can certainly be gruelling - no clean gunshot deaths in this one, all digging implements to the skull - but for some reason it didn't leave the unpleasant aftertaste these things usually do. Maybe it's the dark fairytale aspect (the trailer makes it look more like a conventional mob thriller and less like the quasi-Carteresque Beauty and the Beast riff it actually is), or the fact that it's beautifully shot and edited, and the actors have faces that hold the gaze.
I have to say, though, and not just about this movie - the recurring "Indian illegals who are psychotic machine-gun wielding rapists" trope is seriously wigging me out. I've been watching, on average, a few HK triad movies every year at Fantasia since the late 90's, and the genre's reflected a shifting palette of anxieties: the handovers of Hong Kong and Macau, the rise of competitive Southeast Asian economies, the influx of cheap and/or illegal labour from the mainland... It's a dark and un-PC glass, but assuming it is still a glass, the zeitgeist right now is a massive upswell of xenophobia (always unfortunately latent in Chinese culture). And frankly I haven't the slightest clue what's going on in reality.
***
petronia muxtape will be revamped pretty soon, as they've upped the file size limit to 24MB - finally, an end to discrimination against fans of 15-minute techno cuts! \o/
Other recs from my favorites list:
soulfonicsource: for people who like to listen to minimal at work, with a bit of melodic indie woven seamlessly in. Soothing and gorgeous.
narie: has gone pink. (Possibly I have never actually heard "Stars Are Blind" before? I didn't know it was ska. Er... >_> Speaking of which, eventually I'll figure out which Pizzicato Five song Lily Allen is pakuri-ing there.)
ricforsale: the other other Brit indie + jpop fan on muxtape.
The Moss [trailer]: Ced had the impression this was much longer than the 90 minutes it was. The brutality can certainly be gruelling - no clean gunshot deaths in this one, all digging implements to the skull - but for some reason it didn't leave the unpleasant aftertaste these things usually do. Maybe it's the dark fairytale aspect (the trailer makes it look more like a conventional mob thriller and less like the quasi-Carteresque Beauty and the Beast riff it actually is), or the fact that it's beautifully shot and edited, and the actors have faces that hold the gaze.
I have to say, though, and not just about this movie - the recurring "Indian illegals who are psychotic machine-gun wielding rapists" trope is seriously wigging me out. I've been watching, on average, a few HK triad movies every year at Fantasia since the late 90's, and the genre's reflected a shifting palette of anxieties: the handovers of Hong Kong and Macau, the rise of competitive Southeast Asian economies, the influx of cheap and/or illegal labour from the mainland... It's a dark and un-PC glass, but assuming it is still a glass, the zeitgeist right now is a massive upswell of xenophobia (always unfortunately latent in Chinese culture). And frankly I haven't the slightest clue what's going on in reality.
***
petronia muxtape will be revamped pretty soon, as they've upped the file size limit to 24MB - finally, an end to discrimination against fans of 15-minute techno cuts! \o/
Other recs from my favorites list:
soulfonicsource: for people who like to listen to minimal at work, with a bit of melodic indie woven seamlessly in. Soothing and gorgeous.
narie: has gone pink. (Possibly I have never actually heard "Stars Are Blind" before? I didn't know it was ska. Er... >_> Speaking of which, eventually I'll figure out which Pizzicato Five song Lily Allen is pakuri-ing there.)
ricforsale: the other other Brit indie + jpop fan on muxtape.
