Okay, it’s not Asian cinema-related, but a fellow named Abe Goldfarb—who goes by the burlesque handle of Bastard Keith—is inaugurating a new series called The Bastard Keith Movie Club, wherein he will host a live commentary during a favorite “bad” movie, accompanied by burlesque dancers and lots of drinking. This is the kind of stuff we’re also into, and since Abe will be helping us with the New York Asian Film Festival 2011 (expect to see him on our stage at Lincoln Center introducing some movies), we wanted to help him out.

The first movie-skewering at the Bastard Keith Movie Club will take place on Wednesday, May 4th at 8:00 pm at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo. The victim for the inaugural effort will be the notorious 1980 Cannon-produced musical travesty, THE APPLE. Directed by Israeli movie mogul Menahem Golan and starring Catherine Mary Stewart and a host of B-level stars who’ve since removed the film from their resumes, THE APPLE is the epitome of ill-conceived big-screen musicals: a futuristic disco science-fiction fantasy set in the far future of….1994! It’s also hilariously entertaining, and an appropriate choice for the first Movie Club entry.

Join us with Bastard Keith at the show and watch for a ticket giveaway via our Subway Cinema Newsletter very soon. Tickets for the show are available now, only $10 each! Less than a regular movie, and you get some naked ladies to go with it.

Comments (0) Apr 24 2011

The 10th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival is now in full swing, and Subway Cinema is happy to be co-presenting two films in their lineup.

First up is Tsui Hark’s amazing, retro-style wu xia extravaganza DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME, starring Andy Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai. Its final screening will be this Thursday the 28th, at 9:30 pm, at the Clearview Cinemas Chelsea. Rush tickets are still available.

We’re also co-presenting Jiang Wen’s comic Western LET THE BULLETS FLY, starring Chow Yun-fat in a grand return to form, and perennial Chinese box office megastar Ge You (IF YOU ARE THE ONE). BULLETS screens three more times: Monday at 9:00 pm, Wednesday at 8:30 pm, and Friday the 29th at 3:00 pm, all shows at the Loews Village 7. Tickets are still available for all shows.

If you’re signed up for our Subway Cinema News weekly email, you already know that we gave away a ton of free tickets to the above shows. If you didn’t know, you can get in on the next giveaway by clicking here. See you at the movies.

Comments (0) Apr 24 2011

HELLDRIVER: Director’s Cut!

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Thursday, April 28th @ 7:30pm
Japan Society

Special Benefit Screening….50% of all proceeds go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund

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Featuring the first-ever US appearance by Eihi Shiina (star of AUDITION, TOKYO GORE POLICE and HELLDRIVER)!!!

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Eihi Shiina in all her glory!

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And special guest, director Yoshihiro Nishimura (TOKYO GORE POLICE, HELLDRIVER)!

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A screening of the director’s cut of Nishimura’s gory, hilarious, action-stuffed, blood-spurting, gut-crunching zombie car crash flick, HELLDRIVER!!!!

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Buy your tickets here!!!

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Not only will Eihi Shiina be making her first US appearance (and she and Nishimura will be signing autographs after the show) but there will be a free party after the screening with food and drink and a live performance by metal band VAURA (hear them!) (see them!) (feel them!)

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We’ll also be announcing titles for this summer’s New York Asian Film Festival (July 1 – 14 @ Lincoln Center and Japan Society)!

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Finally, Nishimura is bringing a bunch of stuff for sale and the proceeds will go 100% to the Earthquake Relief Fund. He’ll have $10 tenegui (logo hankies) from his new production company and he’ll be bringing a bunch of special make-up and effects memorabilia from his films that will go to the highest bidder. CASH ONLY for these items, so come prepared.

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Where will you be on 4/28? Doing your part to help Japan by watching zombie movies and meeting Eihi Shiina? Or sitting at home watching TV?

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“Where will you be? Will I have to come looking for you?”

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Comments (0) Apr 13 2011

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Korean Movie Night

from May 10, 2011 – June 21, 2011

courtesy of the Korean Cultural Service

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Every other Tuesday @ 7pm
Tribeca Cinemas
(54 Varick Street, on the corner of Canal Street, one block from the A, C, E and 1 train Canal Street stops)

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Price? Free.

All seating is first-come, first served. Doors open at 6:30pm.

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Series 3: The Hidden Gems of Indie Cinema

Korea exports lots of blockbusters overseas but, just like in America, its best, funniest, strangest and most fascinating films are produced independently. In this series we’ve picked the best new indie films from Korea that have won awards and blown away audiences around the world and we’re bringing them to New York City just for you.

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Tuesday, May 10 @ 7pm
RE-ENCOUNTER (North American Premiere, 2009)
A film festival favorite featuring two powerful lead performances from Yoo Da-In and Yoo Yun-Suk, RE-ENCOUNTER won a fistful of awards around the world and became a major indie word-of-mouth success when it was released theatrically in Korea. Hyehwa is a veternarian’s assistant living a quiet life when suddenly her high school sweetheart reappears one day and tells her that the child they thought died when he got her pregnant at 18 is still alive. Lyrical and intimate, it’s a movie that sees two people tear themselves up in quiet desperation. (read a review)

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Tuesday, May 24 @ 7pm
MISSING PERSON (North American Premiere, 2008)
Winner of “Best Film” at the Jeonju Film Festival and the “Artistic Achievement Award” at Greece’s Thessaloniki Film Festival, MISSING PERSON will mess you up. A real estate agent takes out the frustrations of his job and life by regularly tormenting a mentally ill kid in his basement. As violence trickles down from the upper levels of society to the lower, the entire city begins to simmer and boil over with fear, hate and mistrust in this shocking dissection of modern society, leavened with pitch black comedy. (read a review)

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Tuesday, June 7 @ 7pm
VEGETARIAN (New York Premiere, 2010)
Like a Korean version of Todd Haynes’s SAFE, this movie starts when a perfectly normal woman develops a meat phobia that shatters her ordinary life. Unable to stand the sight or smell of meat, soon she can’t even stand to be in the same room as her husband if he’s eaten meat that day. Turning darker, from a tale of a phobia to a story of erotic obsession, VEGETARIAN was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and it stars a posse of Korean indie scene veterans. (read a review)

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Tuesday, June 21 @ 7pm
CAFE NOIR (New York Premiere, 2008)
The Hollywood Reporter calls it “enthralling” while other trade papers have violently rejected it like a bad cheeseburger, but either way there’s nothing else out there like film critic Jung Sung-Il’s epic CAFE NOIR. A sprawling, multi-character feature in the vein of a postmodern Robert Altman movie, the film tells the tale of a rejected young lover and his married mistress, juggling visual styles, points-of-view and references to everything from Korean monster movie THE HOST to Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Truly unique. (read a review)

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Comments (0) Apr 13 2011

Let’s hear it for BAM which is hosting one of the best film series of the Spring season:

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Cruel Cinema: New Tamil Film

(April 14 – 17, 2011)

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Featuring four Tamil movies, it’s a really eye-opening retro and you have to see at least one of these films. We’ve always wanted to book some of these films for the NYAFF but getting subtitled prints has been a problem so kudos to BAM for wrangling this. Tamil movies are from Southern India and the Tamil film industry may have lower budgets than Bollywood but its technicians and directors are considered some of the best. Lots of big cinematographers go from the Tamil industry to Bollywood and its directors (such as Mani Ratnam) are considered to have an eye for grittier, more “real” and often more hyperkinetic filmmaking than you’ll find in Bollywood. Also, several of its actors are considered to be amongst the finest in India. Not just Rajinikanth (who’s more an icon than an actor) but also Kamal Hassan, who’s like Al Pacino if he achieved godhood.

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If you’re going to see one movie in this line-up, go see I AM GOD (aka NAAN KADAVUL). I’ve watched it, and it is stark, raving crazy. It’s the story of a dad who loses his son, and then goes to look for him years later only to find he’s an Aghori. These are holy men who…well, let Wikipedia handle it:

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The Aghoris…indulge in extreme ritual worship practices known to some extent as Tamasic (rituals involving some or all of the following: meat eating, alcohol drinking, consumption of beverages and foods with opiates, hallucinogens and cannabis products as key ingredients, cannibalism, residing in cremation grounds, and Tantric sexual rituals).

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Our hero smokes some holy ganga.

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The bad guys in the movie? A guild of beggars made up of children and adults with birth defects who dress up like gods and beg near temples. They rounded up hundreds of actual adults with birth defects and gave them a musical number in a jaw-dropping scene that feels like something Fellini might have shot. The movie won lots of awards when it came out and took three years to make and it is pretty much a mind-blower.

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God is on his way to kick butt.

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Retro website and details

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Tickets and showtimes for I AM GOD

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And the trailer pretty much rules.

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Comments (1) Apr 04 2011

The Great Yokai War (2005)

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One show only: Sunday, March 20 @ 2pm (buy tickets)

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ALL TICKETS ONLY $5!!!

(More info)

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“The army of bizarre creatures is wicked awesome. It’s like a Miyazaki tableaux reimagined by Sid & Marty Krofft.”
- Noel Murray, The Onion AV Club

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Takashi Miike has made dating movies about torture, shown a man slicing out his own tongue, covered his cast in showers of breast milk, and treated chihuahuas very, very badly. The last thing anyone expected from him was a kids’ movie, but with THE GREAT YOKAI WAR he gives us a LORD OF THE RINGS-sized epic kiddie flick that blows the competition out of the water and puts him on the front ranks of Japanese directors.  This is, to my mind, one of the best movies Miike ever made, and one of the best fantasy films of all time, full of the dark little corners and tough emotions that so many bland kiddie flicks scrub away. For the uninitiated, the yokai of the title are Japan’s funk-a-licious demons from mythology and folklore – there are water yokai, umbrella yokai, snow yokai, and a million other flavors of yokai, promising a movie that looks like a Hieronymus Bosch painting on acid.
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The flick kicks off in true family film fashion with a nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, a slinky female demoness (played by Chiaki Kuriyama of KILL BILL VOL. 1 and BATTLE ROYALE) in a short skirt wielding a whip, and then the birth of a goo-covered, flayed, screeching cow fetus who prophesizes the apocalypse. It’s a miracle kids in Japan can sleep at all.

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The story is about a young boy who has to go on a quest to the top of Goblin Mountain in order to retrieve a magic sword and end the war between the sterile, mechanical forces of technology and the lovable, creepy, long-necked, giant-nosed, hairy-faced, wall-sized, hopping, flying, gerning, pogo-ing yokai who are on the verge of extinction. It’s also a battle between old school special effects (the yokai are all rubber monsters and charming practical, onscreen effects and make-up jobs) and the new wave of digital CGI (the bad guys are all slick, soulless computer-generated monsters). Delivering massive battles, non-stop special effects and a story that’s as tight as a drum, Miike turns in a top quality popcorn muncher. But he also delivers the kind of truth that Peter Jackson shied away from at the end of  THE LORD OF THE RINGS: every quest has an ending and no childhood lasts forever. Amidst the burning fusion of ridiculous ideas at the heart of this movie take a moment and be very still and quiet. That sound you hear is a child’s heart breaking.

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Read the fun, baffled, thoroughly entertained review in the New York Times.

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Read another glowing review.

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Comments (1) Mar 18 2011

We’ve been seeing a lot of these prints for the first time as they come in, and I just wanted to say that the CITY OF LOST SOULS print is great looking. AUDITION had a little wear on it, but CITY just looks incredible. One more show left on Saturday, March 19 @ 6:15pm (buy tickets).

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Comments (2) Mar 18 2011

CITY OF LOST SOULS

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Thursday, March 17 @ 2:15pm (buy tickets)

Saturday, March 19 @ 6:15pm (buy tickets)

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Too much is never enough in CITY OF LOST SOULS, an underrated Miike classic from 2000 which sees Miike leave behind logic, reason, good taste and common sense to put together the ultimate action movie and zap it full of high voltage so that it lurches off the table with a roar of “Looove!!!” A movie so loud, so proud, and so gonzo over-the-top that just watching it could get you pregnant with a tiny muscular action baby that’ll bust out of you with twin machine guns blazing during a high speed car chase.

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Things kick off when Mario (Brazilian soccer player, model and four-movie Miike actor, Teah) busts his gal (Hong Kong’s Michelle Reis, best known as the sexually frustrated agent for a contract killer in Wong Kar-wai’s FALLEN ANGELS) out of a prison bus while it’s coasting through the desert, then the two of them jump out of the rescue copter and land in downtown Tokyo. From there it’s a no-holds-barred assault on the Russian mob (guzzling vodka, of course), the Chinese triads (playing ping pong) and the Japanese yakuza (killing people) which involves some of the most bizarre scenes Miike’s ever put on film.

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It’s as if someone dared Miike to make the ultimate action movie and so he took two action figure leads and threw them into a celluloid blender crammed with every action cliche ever conceived, and then he added a bottle of tequila. There’re capoeira death squads, midgets brushing their teeth with cocaine, lethal ping pong matches and a now-legendary riff on THE MATRIX featuring some awesomely funky CGI chickens. Slathered on top of this tequila-soaked fun cake is a sugary frosting of multi-culti madness. Seeming to take place in a dream Tokyo that’s part-Brazil and part-Los Angeles, CITY OF LOST SOULS is full of South American accents and brimming with actors from Brazil, Hong Kong, Russia, China and Japan.

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It’s not only a love story between its two leads, but a love story between Miike and the action movie genre, and it’s a love that runs passionate and hot. While the kids on screen demonstrate that it’s ultimately youth and beauty that save the day from the old and boring bad guys, it’s Miike who proves that it takes a middle-aged man with serious chops to create a valentine this huge and explodey for action movies. CITY OF LOST SOULS is a movie where everyone is from everywhere and bullets are just another way of saying, “I love you.”

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Tickets and showtimes

The Midnight Eye review

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Comments (0) Mar 16 2011

To celebrate the upcoming major! massive! Takashi Miike retrospective we’re co-presenting with the Film Society of Lincoln Center (check the schedule and buy your tickets here!) we’re putting up lots of Miike info on the blog all week to give you something to do while you’re on the internets.

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TIME Magazine’s Richard Corliss has long been a Miike supporter and he includes AUDITION in his “Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time” list. (read its entry here)

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AUDITION: the most evil date night
movie ever made.

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The number one chronicler of all things Miike is Tom Mes from Midnight Eye who wrote the book Agitator: the Cinema of Takashi Miike. His interview with Miike on Midnight Eye is terrific and there’s added coverage of Miike’s trip to the Venice Film Festival to present SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO. The most serious and in-depth reviews of Miike’s movies online are at Midnight Eye including one for his teen pop vehicle, ANDROMEDIA, and reviews for movies that are going to be in the retrospective this weekend like AUDITION, CITY OF LOST SOULS (called a “tour de force” and “a turbo-charged piece of blood-drenched gangster lunacy”), as well as IZO (“Miike is generally not too concerned with serving his audience a snug, comfortable viewing experience…”) and FUDOH: THE NEW GENERATION (“It’s the kind of film that has ‘guilty pleasure’ written all over it.”).

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A shot from CITY OF LOST SOUL’s jaw-dropping,
MATRIX-inspired, CGI cockfight.

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Nick Rucka has been a longtime friend and supporter of Subway Cinema, even though he lives in Los Angeles which is a cursed city full of mutants and perverts. He’s also a contributor to Midnight Eye and his review of DEAD OR ALIVE: FINAL (part three of the series, part one is screening tonight at Japan Society) is one of the few passionate defenses of that film you’ll find out there. He’s also written a review of SCARS OF THE SUN, a Miike-directed 2006 riff on DEATH WISH, that we have desperately tried to get both for the New York Asian Film Festival and for this weekend’s Miike retrospective and we’ve come up short each time. It’s worth seeing but almost impossible to find, and so Nick’s review will have to do until a complicated ownership situation is sorted out.

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SCARS OF THE SUN poster.

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Jason Gray lives and works in Japan, doing subtitling and a bunch of other jobs in the movie business including the occasional acting gig and writing screenplays. He’s been covering the Japanese film business for years both for Screen and on his own blog. His Miike coverage includes a long review of Miike’s English-language Western, SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO as well as a summary of his thoughts on Miike’s maligned but fascinating ZEBRAMAN 2. It’s fun to dig back through his blog and see his entry from 2002 on ICHI THE KILLER advertising back before ICHI became part of the pop cultural canon. And don’t miss his very short post on Miike’s GRAVEYARD OF HONOR remake because it links to Tom Mes’s review and it gives us a chance to give that neglected Miike masterpiece a shout out!

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GRAVEYARD OF HONOR – we’re not
showing it, unfortunately.

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More Miike tomorrow! And don’t forget to buy your tickets now for this week’s Miike-a-thon!

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Comments (0) Mar 15 2011

Argh! We just learned that after 48 hours of arranging and re-arranging travel plans, Takashi Miike has had to cancel his plans to come to New York City for the biggest North American Miike Retrospective ever.

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Takashi Miike, sad.

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This is a huge bummer for all of us, but given the massive tragedy that has struck Japan it’s understandable. Miike really wanted to come and we were all working to make this happen, but travel is erratic right now and, more importantly, no one in Japan wants to be away from home and family when anything could happen.

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He sent a brief note expressing his regrets:

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“Japan was violently rocked, swallowed by the ocean as the lives of many disappeared amid the rubble. I had wanted to be here with you all. I had wanted to thank you all for coming from the bottom of my  heart. But that wish was not granted. It is unfortunate and I am very  sorry. Please accept my regrets. But, from this adversity — on our lives — we  will all rise up without fail. As a start, I would be grateful if you could enjoy Japan from my films.

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Sincerely,
Miike Takashi”

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We’re trying to see if we can arrange some remote Q&A’s or something for the screenings and they’re still going to be an absolute blast, but without Miike, unfortunately.

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A lot of people still get killed by badass samurai
in 13 ASSASSINS, thought.

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Comments (1) Mar 14 2011