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This year's New York Asian Film Festival will run in NYC from June 16 - July 1 and I hope no one minds me plugging it a little here.
The fest was started by myself and four friends about 7 years and the goal is to bring the best, funnest, most exciting new Asian movies to NYC. This year we've got manga-based and superhero movies coming out our ears:
KRRISH - the new Bollywood song n'dance spectacular is a superhero saga with musical numbers, a star with three thumbs (really), and action choreography by Ching Siu-tung, the mastermind who did the action in HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS and more.
CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL - the manga/anime comedy from Japan gets the live action treatment. It's a send-up of juvenile delinquent movies with Freddie Mercury, a gorilla, and a band of delinquents vs. an armada of blond-wigged Space Monkeys armed with Super Science.
THE GREAT YOKAI WAR - Takashi Miike forges an epic kids movie that, to my mind, kicks the ass of LORD OF THE RINGS. It's got a lower budget, but a lot more imagination. It's an epic battle between the funky demons of Japanese folklore and a mechanized army of garbage, that's animated by its hatred for the humans who threw it away, but the movie also manages to become a moving anti-war statement and a heart-breaking account of growing up and leaving childhood behind.
BEETLE, THE HORN KING and OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID - two wrestling movies from Japan. BEETLE is about a super group of masked wrestlers fighting alien bugs with no manners. ZOMBIE is about a pro wrestler who must save his wife from the Mermaid Bacteria (which turns her into a mermaid) by wrestling the undead. And Amazons.
SHINOBI - it's a ninja movie from Japan, but forget what you expect. This special effects filled ROMEO AND JULIET pop opera is like The X-Men versus the Justice League in a movie written by Gardner Fox and Stan Lee and directed by Tim Burton who has been told to be more like Michael Bay. It is truly the ninjapocalypse.
You can find a listing of the films here and you can find links there to buy advance tickets.
Just to bore you one final bit, but this is a festival put on by fans and we do it out of love. We don't care about prestige, fame or fortune. Corporate sponsors avoid us like the plague because of how we conduct our screenings (which are raucous parties with giveaways, prizes, nude introductions to films, and occasionally wrestling matches) and so every year we put the entire cost of the festival on credit cards, cross our fingers, and hope to make back our costs on ticket sales. Every year audiences show up in mad packs and we manage to break even.
If you like movies, please come. We promise you'll have fun. And if you don't, you can box my ears. |
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