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In sorting through Asian movies, one needs an appetite and some kind of sense of what is good to watch, because there are a lot of good movies.
On Netflix, Gorgeous and 2046 are both really good movies, both from South China. Gorgeous is a Jackie Chan movie from 1999, and presents a love puzzle that involves a young woman who flies between Taiwan and Hong Kong, hanging out with Jackie is his industrial residential complex. Jackie is soooo good at presenting the kind of Asian one wants to talk to; on his late night talk show appearances in the US, he is so very easy to talk to, and communicates complete self respect, to boot, definitely emulatable. Gorgeous presents fighting in an easy-to-understand format and trends toward political sanguinity and cheerfulness vis a vis cross strait relations. It's like "boba tea", if one has ever gone to Chinatown to try one of these. And, the movie presents a recurring theme in Asian cinema, that of a principal love story that connects strongly to another love story, in this case that of a mysterious man in a purple corduroy jacket from the girl's hometown. One gets the sense that Asian cinemathiques are 100% positive about these loves, and also somewhat unsure about what is the future.
2046 is a lot like Solaris, of which I saw the original a long time a go in DC; George Clooney remade the movie some time later. Solaris was a Polish movie set aboard a space station, and is the type of movie that deals with ennui. Or boredom. 2046 starts with what seemed to me to be a back and fill operation as pertains to "right now" Asia, presenting 60s and 70s people who are the counterparts to today's people, kind of like Willie Loco Alexander and old J Geils are the people one could spend time with if one is into Gang Green, Dropkicks and Mighty Mighty Bosstones - you know, one doesn't have to be uncomfortable to know the past.
2046 goes on with a very cool science fiction hotel/casino environment and a very plastic world-wide train system. The movie is made with Chinese, Japanese, Thai and French money and is technically is in the high-tech French film category, without the heaviness and cultural load that one would suspect a French film of. It is a 2004 movie.
Attack the Gas Station is a movie I have owned for a long time, part of the Korean post-90s cinema development, the dominant force in Asian culture. Gas Station's plot is like, a bunch of Rush fans take over a gas station that is run by an ascot-wearing owner who doesn't manage well. The movie seems to be about new Koreans being very involved in the world outside, taking a positive outlook towards living as a country in the world, as opposed to really looking inward too much. I learned something interesting from this movie; the unscrupulous Chinese restaurant people whom the boys call for food using the money in the station till demonstrate a very uneducated way of existence insofar as they speak very superiorily, spookily and gutterally in the presence of Koreans; I take it that if down through the centuries, a jerk from China tried to walk into Korea, Korean culture is designed so that ill intent is displayed by the intruder's inability to behave properly. One assumes that if one takes politics seriously, this wouldn't happen. It's like a sieve.
Daisy is very great, part of the mainline romantic comedy set of movies that are the center of the new Korean cinema. It is set in Haarlem, Netherlands, and is another example of an action movie that is completely supported by a love story, so much so that the action can attain a level of realistic current-events style unrealism, that wouldn't be possible in the first place if the love story weren't the important thing to begin with.
My Sassy Girl is not to be overlooked because of the title, it is the center of the new Korean cinema, made in the late 90s. It is serious; over and over again I have found the most serious movies, like My Sassy Girl, She's On Duty, Oh Happy Day and Windstruck, with seemingly cheaply happy adwork, and I'm not being a film snob when I say this (you know, the "Jerry Lewis is a genius" kind of approach). These movies are nice. As My Sassy Girl, or My Yupki Girl, as it is also known, is a centerpiece of the new Korean cinema, I the reviewer find it difficult to sell, like it is ridiculous to strain oneself to do so. Physics teachers don't worry about moving Newton's Laws of Motion; chemistry teachers don't worry about selling the conservation of matter; math teachers don't worry about dv/dt, modern English lit teachers don't worry about DeLillo and Vonnegut.
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One theme I have noticed representing itself in new movies is the dual nature of male and female existence, as though William Kennedy's Ironweed and Downtown Julie Brown's Clueless were two parts of the same world.
1 Windstruck
2 She's On Duty
3 Attack the Gas Station!
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