DANCE DANCE (Korea; 1999)

D: Moon Seong-wook

Korea's film industry was by the autumn of 1999 taking toddler steps toward the Great Renaissance, but domestic audiences still had to contend with the kind of bland, clichéd, low-calorie snack films that Chungmuro had been cranking out for years, movies which all but dared viewers to spend their entertainment money on flashier import fare. DANCE DANCE is just such a film, a warmly-photographed, "feel-good" underdog dance musical fronted by two attractive leads (Whang In-yeong, Yang Dong-kun) who unfortunately don't dance very well, or act very well. Whang's an almost-pro dancer uncertain of her desire to attend school overseas; Yang's a hunky med student who simply must dance after witnessing one of her solo workouts. Her motley crew of dance schoolmates want to make a name for themselves. And, uhh, that's about it. There's no tension here because there's virtually no spark between these two pretty people from different worlds, and neither of them does anything--alone or together--that helps or hinders the fortunes of the collective, except for Whang's brief run-in with a lecherous out-of-town concert promoter that costs them a gig, a subplot which lasts all of 25 seconds. By Korean standards, this is remarkably free of melodrama, which is not a good thing in any film about people with a burning passion.

There is plenty of dancing in the film—14 sequences by my count (training, rehearsals and performances), with at least six of those blended into maudlin montage sequences. Whang's a beautiful woman, a weak actress and a game, if ungraceful, dancer; in the larger group dance sequences, she's often positioned off to one side in the foreground, shot from the chest up, or stationed rather obviously in the back row, the better to disguise her shortcomings. The climactic, multi-group dance performance is primo stuff because the supporting players and extras get to strut their very real stuff, but it's capped with a spectacular and well-choreographed full-group hip-hop roof-raiser for which gruelling rehearsal is implied by its intricate and effortless nature but never seen throughout the film. At the same time, the sequence is gestational evidence of the Korean B-Boy movement that would erupt only a few years later. Worth seeing for this sequence alone, but otherwise, an utterly forgettable film from the year that Korean cinema issued its primal cinematic shout-out to the world.

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.