Subway Cinema News

Day Two of the New York Asian Film Festival. Status report: sold out shows of DAINIPPONJIN, L: CHANGE THE WORLD and TOKYO GORE POLICE. The L screening featured teenaged girls walking out at the end in tears, audience members begging us to buy posters and lots of perfect 10 scores on the Audience Award ballots.

Feel the power of L.

Day two also saw the debut of our limited edition special character postcards promoting the festival. Collect them all!

And for your viewing pleasure, the magic marker movie portraits of the day, preserved for all eternity here on the internubs.

Last night was Day 1 of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival and it was the kind of film fiesta that people will be regurgitating onto the heads of their children and their grand-children for generations to come. See these happy merry-makers in their enormous reclining lounge chairs before the sold-out screening of THEN SUMMER CAME? They make the “V” for victory right before director Ryo Iwamatsu takes the stage after he spent all day at Yankee stadium hanging out with Matsui who was recovering from a lightly injured knee.

The audience lurks in the dark, like wolves.

See their faces and TREMBLE WITH FEAR!

The audience suddenly stops lurking in the dark, as we start taking pictures with a better camera!

Director Iwamatsu takes the stage.

Also, at the IFC Center, some secret usher or manager has started doing magic marker sketches for every movie on the dry erase board they use to direct ticket-holders to the right theater. Ephemeral art, preserved forever on our blog for the space children of our future loins to enjoy.

Joe Odagiri: magic marker man.

Chanbara Beauty is a thing of deviant beauty.

Reviews of this year’s line-up are coming fast and furious, like a veritable blizzard of ink and paper. So what do the critics think you should see?

ADRIFT IN TOKYO (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“…aimless, but consciously, introspectively, and out-of-left-field hilariously so…[director] Miki’s bizarre vision is sweet, not saccharine, and too modest to boast its cunning.” - the Village Voice

ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET 2 (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“This sequel to the retro 2005 sleeper hit is another sweet-natured, cozy nostalgia trip that plays like a love letter to Tokyo - think IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE only with chopsticks and Godzilla references.” - New York Magazine

(we’re also screening the first ALWAYS movie, winner of 12 Japanese Academy Awards - more info, tickets and showtimes here)

THE BUTCHER (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“…one of the most disturbing pieces of unrelieved horror I’ve had the pleasure of enduring.” - Firefox News

DAINIPPONJIN (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“I hurt myself laughing at this amazingly inventive mockumentary, and because it’s so good, I refuse to give away much more than an insistent recommendation.” - the Village Voice

“…one of the most thoughtful and funny superhero films for adults because it’s not serious…ultra-human and really funny.” - the New York Press

MAD DETECTIVE (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“Johnnie To outdoes himself with this dark police procedural blessed with a clever, densely plotted script by co-director Wai Ka-fai…” - Time Out New York

“Wai and To’s MAD DETECTIVE continues to push the limits of their viewers’ sanity with more brilliant images and ideas…an unhinged blast.” - the New York Press

“Displaying virtuosity at every turn, MAD DETECTIVE is the kind of film that doesn’t just invite multiple viewings, but practically demands them.” - Firefox News

THE REBEL (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“…the rousing set pieces and a rollercoaster pace keep the formula successful…replete with gun fights, torture, opium smoking, eye-gouging (off screen, thankfully), nail biting chase scenes and astonishingly acrobatic martial arts thrashings.” - the Brooklyn Rail

SAD VACATION (more info, tickets and showtimes)
“This very well could be the film of the festival.” - Time Out New York

2008 is a year of many changes for the New York Asian Film Festival. We’ve got more films, more screenings, a bigger catalog, screening passes for the first time, gift bags, an intern, and we’re also devoting a section of our program to a focus on one of the newest and most exciting production and distribution companies in Japan, an upstart called Stylejam.

Formed three years ago, Stylejam has, in that short time, turned out some of the most interesting—and most difficult to pigeonhole—films in Japan. We’re presenting five of their films at the fest this year, all of them standing head-and-shoulders above comparable productions from other studios, and worthy of accolades and audience attention: the observational comedy about nothing more than a simple stroll through Tokyo, ADRIFT IN TOKYO; the genre-defying coming-of-age chick flick, DOG IN A SIDECAR; the truly unclassifiable nonsense comedy about coming to terms with adulthood, FINE TOTALLY FINE; director Shinji Aoyama’s long-in-gestation follow-up to his first film, SAD VACATION; and finally, the World Premiere of director Ryo Iwamatsu’s serio-comedy about a father and son who are both trying to avoid deep connections with women, THEN SUMMER CAME, which is being presented on June 20th as our Opening Night Film. (Director Iwamatsu will be joining us for the Opening Night screening on Friday night, and will perform a Q&A with the audience after the screening.)

Additional events connected with the Focus are our opening night party, co-sponsored by Stylejam and attended by Iwamatsu-san, and a special presentation that brings a truly Japanese television phenomenon to American audiences for the first time.

RETRO GAME MASTER is the newly-christened, English-subtitled version of a long-running Japanese TV show called GAME CENTER CX. The show follows popular comedian Shinya Arino, playing a fictitious corporate employee called “the Kacho,” as he attempts to defeat classic, old-school, 8-bit Nintendo (and other) games, all in one sitting. Condensed into half-hour episodes, these marathon challenges regularly run into the double-digit hours, with Arino calling on assistants and going through cheat guides in order to accomplish his task.

Stylejam has released several DVD box sets of the show in Japan, and all have become best-sellers. They’re now poised to unleash the phenomenon on the US, and are hoping for an IRON CHEF-level of audience appreciation. In support of this, we’ll be screening two episodes of the series—one featuring the obscure Japanese game MYSTERY OF ATLANTIS, the other with old-school favorite GHOSTS AND GOBLINS—several times throughout our festival, for FREE! Even better, this is the first time ever that any episodes of the show will be presented with English subtitles.

The free screenings are being held at IFC Center, and you just need to check in at the box office and say “hi!” in order to see them.

RETRO GAME MASTER: MYSTERY OF ATLANTIS (free screening at IFC Center):
Saturday, 6/21 at 11:00 am
Wednesday, 6/25 at 11:30 am
Saturday, 6/28 at 12:00 noon

RETRO GAME MASTER: GHOSTS AND GOBLINS (free screening at IFC Center):
Sunday, 6/22 at 11:00 am
Sunday, 6/29 at 12:00 noon
Wednesday, 7/2 at 11:30 am

And for you old-school gamers out there, there’s more coverage of the event already up at 1Up.com.

In a bit of news that has been mostly ignored by the media, Korea’s acclaimed action director and stuntman, Ji Jung-Hyeon, died while shooting THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD. How do we know this? Because he’s a big presence in upcoming NYAFF movie, ACTION BOYS, and that film’s stuntmen pay tribute to his career in their documentary, which is the only place you’re going to see this talked about.

Ji Jung-Hyeon was the assistant action director and a key stunt player on numerous Korean films, choreographing the famous “hammer fight” in Park Chan-Wook’s OLDBOY and working as the assistant action director on MONGOL. He died near the set of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD when the car in which he was riding was hit by a lumber truck. Further details are not available, and people are not talking about it much in order not to bring bad luck onto the film. He was working as the assistant action director on THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD at the time of his passing. His credits include:

MUSA (aka, The Warriors, 2000), Stuntman
LAST WITNESS (2001), Stuntman
FAMILY (2002), Action Director
PUBLIC ENEMY (2002), Stuntman
OLD BOY (2003), Stuntman
RED SHOES (2005), Wire Action stuntman
BRAVO, MY LIFE (2005), suspicious guy
A BITTERSWEET LIFE (2005), gangster
THE CITY OF VIOLENCE (2006), construction worker
THE RESTLESS (2006), assistant to action director
MONGOL (2007), assistant to action director
THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD (2008), Assistant to action director

There’s a video interview with him about his career here (in Korean only) and if you’re interested, you can see him as a major presence in ACTION BOYS, with more info on the documentary here.

We just confirmed who’s going to be at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival and here’s the list of guests and when they’ll be at screenings.

THEN SUMMER CAME (Friday, June 20 @ 8pm) - director Ryo Iwamatsu will be introducing the screening of this new Joe Odagiri/Yoshio Harada father/son film and he’ll be conducting a Q&A afterwards. Tickets for this one are almost sold out, so get yours now! (Tickets here)

MISE EN SCENE SHORT FILM PROGRAMS ONE AND TWO (Friday, June 27 @ 3:45pm; Saturday, June 28 @ 3pm) - short film director Park Jae-Young will introduce both screenings and conduct a Q&A afterwards. His film, OUR PUPPY, OUR FAMILY is one of the best Korean movies of 2007 and it’ll be playing the second short film program. (Program One Tickets and Program Two Tickets)

M (Tuesday, July 1 @ 7pm) - director Lee Myung-Se (NOWHERE TO HIDE, DUELIST) will be introducing his dreamy love story, M, and conducting a Q&A afterwards. If you’ve ever attended a Q&A with him you’ll know that he’s going to leave you with your head spinning. Favorite moment: during the New Directors/New Films screening of NOWHERE TO HIDE he was asked to explain the movie and instead told a surreal story about fishing, leaving the audience highly entertained but leaving the programmers a bit flummoxed. (Tickets here)

ACTION BOYS (Thursday, July 3 @ 9pm) - the director, producer and one of the stuntmen from this brutal documentary about the stunt industry appear onstage to do some stunts, intro the film and conduct a Q&A afterwards. Very outspoken, if you ever had a question about the underbelly of the Korean film industry then these are the guys who’ll tell you about it. They were thrown off the set of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD injured on CITY OF VIOLENCE, terrified on THE HOST and they have experienced pretty much every trauma and humiliation known to filmmaking. This is one that you absolutely shouldn’t miss. (Tickets here)

For years the constant refrain from the NYAFF audience has been, “We want to buy a festival pass.” Unable to deal with the pressure, this year we finally cracked: festival passes are now available for one and all. We understand that movies are expensive, so we want to help you get into our shows for less money.

There are two ways to get discounted shows at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

1) The Subway Matinee Six Pack
For only $49 you can buy a six pack of tickets at the box office. You give them $49 and they will hand you a ticket that you can trade in for SIX TICKETS to any matinee shows (shows that start 5pm or earlier, from Monday through Friday). You have to trade in all six tickets at one time, and you can use them for six different shows, or bring 5 friends and use them for the same show. What this means is that you’re paying around $8 per ticket instead of $11.50.

2) The Subway Matinee Screening Pass
For only $99 you can go to the box office and get a magic ticket that lets you into all 27 weekday matinee shows. All of them. That’s something like $310 worth of tickets for only $99. All you do is flash your pass and we let you in. We’ll even give you a special pouch so you don’t lose your pass (because if you lose it, you’re screwed). Plus, flash your pass and you’ll get one free popcorn at every screening, and you’ll get a free Subway Cinema NYAFF t-shirt. Even better, your name is not on the pass, so if you’re not coming to the matinees one day then loan your pass to a friend and let them attend the movie in your place.

You can buy the six-pack and the pass at the IFC box office, or you can buy them online. Because online ticketing is wonky, it’s a little weird to get the pass and the six pack online, but just follow the link below and it’ll take you to a page where you can buy them (each ticketing page for every single movie has the Six Pack and Pass options on it. Weird, right?).

Click here to go to the page where you can buy a Six Pack or a Matinee Pass.

This is our way of saying, “Thanks!” for your support.

For easy reference, here’s a list of movies that have a matinee screening:

ACTION BOYS

ARCH ANGELS

THE BODYGUARD

THE BODYGUARD 2

CHANBARA BEAUTY

DOG IN A SIDECAR

HAPPINESS

LIKE A DRAGON

LOVE ON SUNDAY

LOVE ON SUNDAY 2: LAST WORDS

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NIGHT IN THE WORLD

MSFF SHORTS: PROGRAM ONE

THE REBEL

SASORI

THE SHADOW SPIRIT

SHADOWS IN THE PALACE

SHAMO

TAMAMI: THE BABY’S CURSE

THIS WORLD OF OURS

TOKYO GORE POLICE

(If you’re still confused, here’s out complete guide to buying tickets. Or post a comment expressing your befuddlement. We will help you!)

THIS WORLD OF OURS is a film about teenagers spinning out of control in Tokyo, and here’s the first shot of the film:

Pretty exploitative, right? Pretty tasteless? Insensitive? Immature?

I thought the same thing as I started watching the movie, and then, over the course of the next 92 minutes, director Ryo Nakajima convinced me that he’d earned the shot. THIS WORLD OF OURS isn’t a teen angst film that revolves around who’s going to the prom with whom, or who’s in love with someone who can never understand them, or who’s flunking out of AP Algebra. It’s a movie that acknowledges that the stakes are higher for teen angst these days. Teen angst caused the Columbine Massacre. It causes suicides, it causes murder, it causes rape and self-mutilation. It’s not funny anymore.

Nakajima traces a line from 9/11 to teenagers cutting themselves, and the line goes: why can’t I change the world?

Who hasn’t felt this way? We wake up, day after day, trapped in the same old world with the same bills to pay. The big things seem beyond us, but the small things aren’t worth living for. Nakajima points out that when teenagers go off the rails it happens at the moment when they realize they’re not special, that they’re going to have to fit into the world around them, that they aren’t going to be rock stars or great leaders or movie stars, but just ordinary people. And faced with a future like that, with years stretching ahead of them like a prison sentence, where nothing ever changes, they go crazy. Usually temporarily, but sometimes permanently.

THIS WORLD OF OURS is about the making of a teenage terrorist, and it asks us to have some sympathy for the devil. What drove the people who piloted those planes into the World Trade Center, what drove the kids at Columbine to start shooting, was nothing more than a desire to change the world. Politics? Religion? Whatever. It’s the movie star instinct, teen angst writ large. It’s that desperate desire to be remembered, to make a difference, to show the world that we’re people too, not just a faceless demographic. Some people are talented and they can write a book or star in a movie, and that satisfies their drive to be somebody. Other people don’t have that drive, they just want a “normal” life. But for a huge number of people, trapped in this world of ours, who feel the urge and who don’t have the patience or the talent or the luck to make something different out of their lives, what are their options? A job at 7-11? Working at Goldman Sachs filing contract briefs for all eternity? If the thought of a family and a white picket fence makes them feel sick, then what?

Nakajima was 24 years old when he made THIS WORLD OF OURS, and from the age of 19 he’d been a hikikomori. One of Japan’s shut-ins, hikikomori hole themselves up in their bedrooms or in their apartments, like Brian Wilson, hiding from a world that overwhelms them. What drove Nakajima out of his front door was a desperate desire to connect with people. He wanted to tell them what he was thinking and how it felt to be him. And so THIS WORLD OF OURS is his message in a bottle. It’s an S-O-S from a kid who’s fed up with the world, and who’s taking a chance that other people will either understand where he’s coming from, or they’ll remember what it was like to be young and feel restlessness twisting in your gut like a snake. It’s a postcard from the teenaged wasteland and on one side is the World Trade Center, burning eternally, and on the other are three Japanese kids who are screaming with rage and frustration and he wants to make sure that we never forget that people can’t be reduced to their religion or their politics or their demographics. No matter what they do, they’re still people and if we’re honest with ourselves there’s nothing they can do that we can’t understand.

And that’s what makes THIS WORLD OF OURS one of the rawest, scariest, most upsetting and most heartbreaking movies we’re showing this year.

Critics have been whinnying on about post-9/11 art and finding movies that deal with the it. So far we’ve had to settle for an Adam Sandler movie and a Nic Cage/Oliver Stone film. Finally, here’s a movie that faces 9/11 head-on and uses it to say something new. If you know your directors, then think of this as a Shunji Iwai movie about 9/11. If you don’t know who that is, then just realize that this is something you’ve never seen before: a movie about terrorism that’ll break your heart and shatter your faith in this world we’ve built.

(Showtimes and ticket information for THIS WORLD OF OURS)

(quick note: that’s not literally the exact same shot of the World Trade Center burning that starts THIS WORLD OF OURS. The shot Nakajima uses is much worse, to my mind, since it’s taken from much closer, but fortunately I couldn’t find it anywhere.)

Earlier this spring, we sent out our first press release devoted to the New York Asian Film Festival, and in it we were bragging about an event we were calling, LADY WHIRLWIND: AN EVENING WITH ANGELA MAO. But between then and now, the whole thing went “poof” for a variety of reasons. We believe in transparency, so here’s what happened.

If you read this blog, you probably know who Angela Mao Ying is. Born in Taiwan in 1950, Angela attended Chinese Opera school from a young age and trained for 14 years alongside several other future actors and actresses (like 80’s HK comedy stalwart Charlie Chin and frequent movie villain James Tien). Signed to a contract with Golden Harvest in 1969, she made truckloads of classic kung fu films there, including LADY WHIRLWIND (aka DEEP THRUST), HAPKIDO, WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES and THE TOURNAMENT. Trained in the Korean martial art of hapkido, she (along with frequent co-star and choreographer Sammo Hung) championed the discipline in several of her films. Angela departed Golden Harvest in the late 70’s and made several films in Taiwan, like SCORCHING SUN, FIERCE WIND, WILD FIRE, before retiring from the industry altogether in 1980 to concentrate on her family. Soon afterward, she moved to New York City, where she and her husband own a construction company and several restaurants in Queens.

Last November, Tokyo Filmex, a one-week film festival held in the Yurakucho district, hosted a small tribute to Angela that included a screening of a restored version of HAPKIDO, presented by King Records, who’d acquired the Golden Harvest library of Angela’s films for Japan and were preparing them for special edition DVD releases. King Records brought Angela to Tokyo to conduct some video interviews for the DVDs and they held a special press conference with her prior to the HAPKIDO screening, and I attended (coincidentally, I was joined by NY Post columnist Vincent Musetto, who’s a member of our first-ever competition jury this year). Afterward, I spoke with people from Filmex and they allowed me to go backstage (with Vincent) to meet Angela and her son, George King. I introduced myself and told them that I was a programmer for the NY Asian Film Festival, and that we’d love to host a tribute to her at our 7th edition the following June. Angela seemed interested, and her son gave me his contact information in NY, and that was that.

Flash-forward to February or March of this year, and I contacted Angela’s son about her appearance at the festival. He agreed in general, and said we should work out specifics over the next couple of months. That was enough confirmation for us to move onto the task of deciding which film(s) to show and sourcing prints, a task we knew wouldn’t be easy considering how poorly most Hong Kong films from that era have been archived. Little did we know at the time that this would prove to be the end of the Angela Mao tribute!

We first tried going through Dragon Dynasty, our main sponsorship partner, who own the U.S. home video rights to HAPKIDO. They were very interested in supporting the event, and interviewing Angela for their upcoming DVD, but didn’t have a usable master yet, or a 35mm film print. So we next approached Fortune Star Entertainment, who own the library of Angela’s Golden Harvest films in Hong Kong. King Records had licensed these films for Japanese release, and were supportive of our efforts, but Fortune Star turned out to be a dead end. Not only did they not have any usable 35mm projection prints, they wanted to charge an outrageous amount of money for the poor-quality prints they did own. Considering that this would be a specialty event during our festival, attended by at most 200 people, the massive screening fee that FS insisted on was far, far outside our budget. Even when we appealed to them that Angela herself lived in New York and had agreed to attend the screenings, they remained unmoved.

So our next step was the private print collector network. But it turned out that most of the films in private hands wouldn’t really be appropriate to show as headline events - they were fun, but lesser, films from her body of work, or titles in which she’s only a supporting character - or were in storage or had gone missing. We were also appealing to several Chinese and Taiwanese cultural agencies to help us maybe scrape together the money to bring over the prints from Fortune Star but they all seemed about as interested in helping stage a tribute to one of the great female movie stars of the 70’s and early 80’s as they did in eating dirty socks.

In the end, all these obstacles proved too much for us and we decided, with a great deal of depressed resignation, to cancel the event. The fact that Angela’s son’s phone number had gone dead was kind of a consolation, as it spared us the embarrassment of having to tell them that nobody else seemed interested in contributing to this tribute to one of the icons of martial arts cinema besides us. We’ve got hopes we can pull this off next year, but the first thing we have to do is find masters or prints of her best films, and unfortunately that seems to be nearly impossible. It’s frustrating that in a world where we can go online and watch a video of a cat dancing to Mexican music on Youtube, we can’t find a screenable print of LADY WHIRLWIND.

This year NYAFF is showing two sets of action packed Thai films that are the yin and yang of their film industry, but what the two KING NARESUAN and the two BODYGUARD films have in common was their enormous popularity at the box office. I had the chance to catch all four of these films in a theater in Thailand and half the fun was just being surrounded by Thais hollering, cheering and having fun.

Thai audiences love patriotic films and KING NARESUAN gave them nationalism in spades. (Speaking of patriotism, here’s a helpful tip if you ever see a film in Thailand – stand up for the National Anthem or you will likely find yourself spending some time in a Thai jail with a guy called Nong who is covered in demonic tattoos.) Along with bone breaking stunts, Thai audiences also love their action comedy splattered with insults, word play, funny faces and overall bad taste. Now, you won’t find any of that in KING NARESUAN, but the BODYGUARD films are stuffed with it like a mid-west family after Thanksgiving dinner. Political correctness hasn’t found a home in Thailand yet where they still believe in equal opportunity insults.

KING NARESUAN is a gigantic earth-shattering celluloid spectacle like Hollywood used to make in the 1950’s and 60’s when audiences thrilled to films like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, BEN HUR and SPARTACUS. Hollywood doesn’t make those kinds of movies any more or at least not without gobs of CGI effects because doing so would cost more than our national debt, but they still make them in Thailand. Of course it helps when making a film the size of KING NARESUAN if the director is related to the King and is considered the greatest Thai director of all time. Director Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol gets what he wants to make a film. He needs the entire Thai army to show up as extras, he gets them; he needs hoards of elephants for enormous battle scenes, he gets them; he needs ornate temples as settings, he gets them. It’s good to be a Prince in Thailand.

The two NARESUAN films are the biggest box office hits ever in Thailand for three main reasons: they relate the story of Thailand’s greatest hero and the founder of their country, it was basically almost mandated that everyone see them, but they became hits mainly because they are amazingly good and filled with political intrigue, nation building and plain old fashioned blood-and-guts heroism. The final forty minutes of the second film may be one of the most exciting set pieces I have ever seen. Chances are this will be your only opportunity to ever see these films – the DVDs in Thailand have no subs and, at least so far, no US distributor has gone after them because they think US audiences have the attention spans of a fruit flies.

The BODYGUARD films are polar opposites of the NARESUAN films. They are weird, crazy and action packed like a long lost Hong Kong film from the 1980’s. Both films star Mum Jokmok who is best known to Western audiences as Tony Jaa’s wisecracking sidekick in ONG BAK and TOM YUM GOONG, but back in Thailand he’s the most popular comedian around using his dim deadpan expression and famous square head to deadly comic effect. You see him everywhere – on billboards, on TV with his own variety show, on commercials selling anything he can and in lots of films. He acts in them, directs them, writes them and sometimes produces them. Thais like Tony Jaa but they love Mum Jokmok. In the first BODYGUARD film he plays a bodyguard (surprise surprise!) who loses his client in a huge shootout and then has to regain his pride and honor. But in between this there are enough insults and physical comedy to make the Marx Brothers blush. In the second film he oddly enough plays the father of the character in the first movie! Here he’s a secret agent who has to stop a dangerous conspiracy at work and who’s henpecked at home by his wife who thinks he’s an unemployed bum. And in case you’re a Tony Jaa fan, he makes an action cameo in each film for his good friend Mum Jokmok. You won’t come out of these films feeling like you are a better person, but hopefully you will have a dumb grin spread across your face and, to be honest, that’s better for you than being a better person. - BN

(Buy tickets, get more info, and see the trailer for KING NARESUAN 1 & 2)

(Buy tickets, get more info, and see the trailers for BODYGUARD 1 & 2)

(A NOTE ON THESE FOUR MOVIES: two movies from Thailand and their sequels! How does one pick which to watch? Here’s my take: THE BODYGUARD 1 is like an old school Stephen Chow movie, full of action and absurdist humor, but rough around the edges. THE BODYGUARD 2 is much more polished, with a much bigger budget. While the humor is toned down some, the stunts and action are amped up - think late 80’s Chow Yun-fat action-comedy from Hong Kong like TIGER ON BEAT, only slicker. For me, I prefer BODYGUARD 1, but that’s cause low budgets don’t trouble me none, and I think Mum Jokmok’s nude chase through Bangkok can’t be topped. As for KING NARESUAN 1 and 2, they’re like THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS and THE TWO TOWERS, respectively, if you don’t mind a LORD OF THE RINGS reference. Like FELLOWSHIP, KING NARESUAN 1 puts the focus on character development and drama, with some stand-out action setpieces sprinkled throughout. KING NARESUAN 2 is like THE TWO TOWERS in that the whole movie builds to a final battle sequence that lasts for close to an hour and is a Helm’s Deep-sized blow-out of epic proportions. Personally, I’m dying to watch them back-to-back on Sunday, June 29. - GH)