NYAFF Audience Award
Sure we had a fancy jury that give out awards this year, but the prize that the New York Asian Film Festival has been giving out for seven years is the Audience Award that is picked by, you guessed it, our audience. Past winners include, THE TASTE OF TEA, MY SASSY GIRL, PING PONG and ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET.
It took a while to tally them up, but we finally have the results of this year’s voting. The winner of the New York Asian Film Festival 2008 Audience Award is…FINE, TOTALLY FINE!
However, because the voting is only half scientific (we use magic for the other half) we also want to recognize the achievements of the five top-ranked movies out of the 43 we showed. They are:
1) FINE, TOTALLY FINE
2) ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2
3) KING NARESUAN 2
4) PUBLIC ENEMY RETURNS
5) SPARROW
Congrats to all the winners!
“What do you mean I won?”
July 16th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Ok, for Audience Award Winner this is acceptable … I mean “Fine Totally Fine” ha ha.
“Adrift In Tokyo” was similar in tone and also a better movie. But FTF did have a better trailer (in which they gave away most of their best sight gags) … So?
At any rate, FTF is a fine movie, and the lead actor is hilarious to watch. For a stretch I was concerned that “M” might win it (good grief).
(Why yes, as a matter of fact you * do * care about my opinion)
July 17th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I do applaud the addition of the Jury Award / even if I won’t necessarily agree with their decisions. I wasn’t able to see Saaa-ad, Va-cation (I can’t get that whinnying title song from the trailer out of my head), but I will definitely keep an eye out for it since the Jury has spoken <—- tell this to your sponsors, distributors, etc. for future leverage in getting more quality flicks to future festivals
I was also unable to see Maaa-ad, De-tective (no song that I recall, just fun), but I will definitely make an effort after the anecdotal feedback in these comments.
Sukiyaki Western Django: Ai-yi-yi! This one falls into that category of his movies where he apparently came up with two or three quality novelty scenes and then connected these with so-so filler. In a sense, Like A Dragon was kind of like this, but was much better: more and better quality scenes, cogent story (it’s relative), fascinating characters. The musically thumping scene where the baseball-bat-wielding nemesis swaggers down the block to start a rumble easily puts the movie over the top of SWD on its own, and there were many more cinematically transcendent (it’s relative) moments. Like A Dragon: watch it, friends
That said, SWD came with beer and a t-shirt and the title screen was pretty rad. Aooooo-wooooo!
July 18th, 2008 at 4:09 am
Geez no love for SUKIYAKI from you guys! How much of that was not being able to understand the actors? I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and tell me they would have liked it a lot more if they could have actually understood the dialogue. I saw it at Pusan where it had English subs and I liked it a lot though it definitely meanders a bit too much at times. But more importantly, how is the Sukiyaki T-shirt hold up?
M was one of the more divided films - a number of people took a real dislike to it but a whole bunch of people voted 10 on it and some told me they thought it was a masterpiece. But Lee Myung-se’s films often tend to divide audiences - DUELIST which we showed in 2006 has loads of rabid fans in Korea who saw it dozens of times but it got reamed in the press and flopped badly at the box office. Perhaps my favorite Korean film is his NOWHERE TO HIDE made back in the early years of this decade - again very much style driven but incredibly visually interesting and creative. The Korean Fest in August is showing this film as part of their retro on Ahn Sung-Ki and I highly recommend it - though you may well hate it!