YELLOW: AMERICAN DREAM, CHINESE AMBITION (USA; to be released)

D: Troy Antonio
W: Tony Murphy



This comes via the film's producer-writer Tony Murphy, who's also a member of the Hong Kong Movie Database.

Sez he:

What you see doesn't fully convey what we really want to do which is create a Chinese Sopranos meets The Wire as a one hour dramatic cable series. Here's a bit about a few of the characters.

We have a female Prada wearing "snakehead" who was a former prostitute that took over the very business which enslaved her. She constantly berates her poor husband because of his low sperm count. There's the Liu Brothers, loyal, Lexapro poppin hitmen who love videogames and argue about the merits of hip hop and pop culture and combat their depression by killing. We have the weed-smokin' underage girl loving Ming the Credit Card King, the 2nd in command because of his ability to generate revenue via credit card fraud, counterfeiting, hacking, etc. yet covets Genghis' position as the dragonhead; however he's more Pineapple Express than gangster. And finally, Genghis who must fight to hold his unruly bunch of gangsters together, come to terms with having a gay brother, and appease the uncles while maintaining a semblance of peace as he plots to become the next Uncle 7 of Chinatown.

The gangsters are the nexus into the world of Chinatown and how the rest of its inhabitants live and struggle to assimilate into American culture. This is just a little taste of some of the characters but not everyone will be bad. I don't want to give it all away just yet.

35mm. Nice. Looks solid. But that name's gotta change. It says too much, with too many words; kills the mystery before anyone parks their ass in a theatre seat. I'm thinking "Yellow" would be perfect on it's own. Any poster for this film is bound to have Asian faces on it, so an automatic connection would be made, meaning at least a couple of different things to different people (a perfect hook!), with a likewise automatic allusion to the film's "race" issues.

Or maybe something like this:

YELLOW

The American Dream

Just with better fonts than Blogger allows, of course.

CATCH THE HEAT (USA; 1987)

D: Joel Silberg
W: Stirling Silliphant
(aka: Feel The Heat)



This pedestrian actioner from the director of 1984's BREAKIN' and 1985's RAPPIN' has four aces up its sleeve (well, two down it's shirt, actually): Oscar-winning screenwriter/executive producer Stirling Silliphant (long past his prime); his alleged** wife, leading lady Tiana Alexandra, and her fantastic breasts, which debuted to the world in a very impressive wet t-shirt sequence, and later in a brief shower scene. The movie also stars Rod Steiger, but he doesn't count as an ace up the sleeve because it really feels like he did this as a favour to the prolific screenwriter who helped him score an Oscar for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.

Produced in association with a rather haughty sounding outfit called M'amsel Tea Entertainment that one presumes was fronted by the Vietnamese-American actress herself, CATCH THE HEAT casts the overeager-to-be-a-star Alexander as Checkers, a hot shot U.S. cop recruited by tough guy partner David Dukes (very wrong for this kind of role) to infiltrate Rod Steiger's Buenos Aires drug operation via his nightclub by posing as an import dancer from Hong Kong.

Steiger's master plan for flooding the U.S. with drugs involves ripping off and killing his Malaysian suppliers, then encouraging his dancers to undergo boob jobs, whereupon their bazooms are stuffed with bags of heroin before the gals are shipped back to the U.S. for unstuffing. (!) Yeah, that's a speedy plan! Alexander's "clever" disguise consists almost entirely of a high-slit cheongsam, a few Suzy Wong wigs, and one of the phoniest Chinese "accents" ever. In fact, Alexander doesn't so much effect an accent as an "oriental" cadence that would fool no one because every word she speaks utilizing this facade sounds like fluent English in its own right, with only the rhythm of the sentences making it all sound "foreign". But she's beautiful, "feisty", and she fills out unitards and Danskins quite nicely while delivering high kicks to the faces of Steiger's goons.

Production values rival an average TV cop show of the day: flat compositions, hasty framing, harsh lighting, but with a couple of larger explosions than you might see on the tube.

Weirdest gag in the movie: when henchman Ike (John Hancock) discovers the undercover Alexander's real name, Checkers Goldberg, and calls her "that fuckin' Chinese Jew, half heeb, half chink" which makes no sense as it implies that the character is of mixed heritage, which by all accounts she's not, or that she adopted the religion, which still wouldn't make her half-Jewish. I'm guessing Silliphant thought it sounded funny, but didn't think about it beyond that.

**I say "alleged wife" because IMDB's entry for Tiana Alexandra lists her year of birth as 1961 and claims she was married to Stirling Silliphant until his death but give no year for their marriage. The Silliphant entry, however lists the year of his marriage to one Tiana Du Long as 1974. If these two are the same woman, which seems highly likely, that means either a) he married her when she was 13 or b) she lied about her age somewhere along the line. Wish the IMDB could be straight about this.

WHISPERS AND MOANS (Hong Kong; 2007)

D: Herman Yau Lai-to.
W: Herman Yau Lai-to, Yang Yee-shan.

Ten days in the lives of a cross-section of Mongkok sex workers, led by weary "mamasans" Candice Yu and Athena Chu, in an industry on the wane, as they contend with the nightly rituals of club life—petty rivalries, pathologically abusive customers, gangsters, drug abuse—and the the daily rituals of survival: dysfunctional relationships, deadbeat sugardaddies, syphillis, AIDS and (the worst threat of all) mainland Chinese girls who'll offer steep discounts and fresher faces just to keep sending money back home.

Director Herman Yau reteams with liberal feminist social anthropologist and author Yang Yee-shan (his co-writer on this and the excellent FROM THE QUEEN TO THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE), working from her 2006 bestseller of the same name (previously published in 2002; and yes, it sits on my shelf!), a collection of mostly hard-luck stories mined during a year spent shadowing the denizens of Hong Kong's sex trade and learning, for the most part, that a lack of common sense is often the working girl's (or guy's) most vicious enemy. That theme is successfully carried over to the film, but unfortunately, so is the author, in the form of alter-ego Yan Ng, a pie-eyed social worker whose increasingly didactic refrains about unionization as the key to basic human rights and protection for prostitutes is met with a fairly predictable volley of sad-sack stories (both past and present) from the workers themselves, even though Yau's softballing of their often difficult, directionless lives ultimately supports the social worker's contention.

The slice-of-life concept would make this an appealing ensemble piece for nearly any performer, although some of those here are a little too green to put across the devastating emotional complexities required by the script. Signature moment is probably a lengthy, late-film diatribe belted out by a hard-working, righteous mainland hooker (newcomer Misia Chan) when she's informed that her sterling reputation may have just been jeopardized when jealous co-worker Chu released a syphillis-infected cloud of urine on her in a hotel swimming pool.

The biggest career leap, such as it is, is handled by Patrick Tang, as a popular gigolo who smoothly services housewives and mistresses, verbally vents his frustrations on his female colleagues, and saves for a sex change operation for his transsexual lover (Don Li). Tang, Li, and most of their young castmates do alright (if not exactly stellar) by the sexual frankness of the words they're fed, but there's a conservatism in the sexual imagery (which is almost always depicted under the covers, behind closed doors, or from the shoulders up) that actually undermines the filmmakers' drive to depict the unpleasant realities of the trade. Where 80's and 90's Hong Kong films about gigolos and whores often used nudity and sex for sheer exploitation value, to not see it used for political value in an issues-driven film such as this is somewhat of a copout, no doubt to keep the cast from having to dig too deep. Yau and his team compensate by composing an authentic milieu of night clubs, karaoke rooms, micro-brothels and a medical clinic in which the cast can function in an almost improvisatory way, one that echoes Michael Radford's DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA (2000) to such a degree that there's little doubt Yau used it as an inspiration.