February 21 – 29, 2008

Welcome to Subway Cinema News, your guide to Asian entertainment in NYC and beyond.

We’re running a little behind as we switch servers and revamp the Subway Cinema website and design a whole new Subway Cinema News. A new Subway Cinema News? That’s right, and if you squint at it just right and it’s sort of dark and you’re very far away it might even look professional by the time we’re done with it.

COMING SOON
March 6 – April 17 sees GAMBLERS, GANGSTERS AND OTHER ANTIHEROES: THE JAPANESE YAKUZA FILM screen at the Asia Society. It’s a very strange line-up, from rarities to common place films, some that have never screened in NYC before and some that get screened a lot. We’d send you to a webpage for more info, but they don’t have one place where all the films are written up. Whoops.

March 7th the amazing, the inimitable, the unforgettable FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT appears at the ImaginAsian and it’ll run in repertory with its director’s previous movie, A TASTE OF TEA. You will never experience joy in a theater the way you will during A TASTE OF TEA and FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT. Weird, surreal, hopeful, disjointed, bizarre...treat yourself to something different.

March 12 sees Film Forum present BLIND MOUNTAIN, Li Yang’s moving Chinese film that’s his follow-up to the harrowing BLIND SHAFT which was about coal miners running an insurance scam in China’s super-unsafe mines. This time out it’s the critically acclaimed story of a young girl who gets caught up in human trafficking in rural China. Expect to be so shocked and upset your fingernails fall off.

NOW SHOWING
Cinema Village
SUMMER PALACE (China, 2007, 140 minutes)
Daily @ 1:20pm, 6:20pm
Lou Ye’s lush flick about a young woman moving to the big city and falling in love is set against the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 earned the acclaimed director a five year ban from filmmaking. Was it worth it? See the film and decide for yourself. Lou’s previous films include the Zhang Ziyi spy film, PURPLE BUTTERFLY and the elliptical VERTIGO-esque SUZHOU RIVER.
read reviews:
http://www.mrqe.com/lookup?summer+palace

STILL LIFE (China, 2007, 108 mintues)
Daily @ 4:05pm, 9:05ppm
Jia Zhangke is not a director you can easily warm to. Chilly, distant, slow and methodical his movies often feel more like abstractions than movies and more like thesis statements than stories. But STILL LIFE has won over even the most diehard Jia Zhangke haters. Taking place in a city that’s being demolished for scrap after it was abandoned for the massive Three Gorges dam-building project, a woman arrives looking for her husband who left her. Beautiful and surreal with a slight touch of sci-fi, it’s impossible to describe this movie. Just give yourself over to it and you’ll most likely come out happy. Plus, the critics lurve it!
read reviews:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/still_life/

The ImaginAsian
JODHA AKBAR (India, 2008, 215 minutes)
Daily @ 2pm, 10:45pm
Starring two of Bollywood’s brightest stars – Hrithik Roshan, the triple-thumbed, dancing stud with washboard abs and Aishwarya Rai the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” - and directed by Oscar-nomiated Ashutosh Gowarikar (LAGAAAN) this is a lush, huge, ginormous period film that has been getting raves all over India. It opens this weekend and reportedly blow you away.
read the first look review:
http://www.indicine.com/movies/bollywood/review-jodha-akbar-movie-review/

WHITE BADGE (Korea, 1992, 122 minutes)
Thursday, February 28 @ 6:30pm
This classic Korean movie tells the story of two Korean soldiers who fought in Vietnam long after the events are over. Needless to say, they’re both pretty screwed up. This was the first Korean film to talk about Vietnam, and the soldiers are depicted more as mercenaries than Korean patriots assisting their buddies, the Americans. With a massive budget, the war scenes are terrific and its politics are so searing that Korean war veterans demanded the movie be cut.
read more:
http://www.koreafilm.org/feature/100_91.asp

more info:
http://koreanculture.org/bbs/view.php?id=event&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc&no=161

Japan Society
NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960’s Nikkatsu Action Cinema
This retrospective screens a film a month from the Nikkatsu vaults and it’s not to be missed. The movies have had subtitles made by Subway Cinema’s very own Marc Walkow who will painstakingly run them BY HAND during the screening (we whipped him until he got the timing perfect). This is the genius period of Nikkatsu when they were turning out stylish, jet set, visually jaw-dropping films from directors like Suzuki Seijun (PRINCESS RACCOON) and you really shouldn’t miss this opportunity to see these flicks.

GANGSTER VIP (Japan, 1968, 93 minutes)
Friday, Feb. 22 @ 7:30pm
Tetsuya Watari from Suzuki Seijun’s eye-popping TOKYO DRIFTER stars in this downbeat, “mature” Nikkatsu Action flick. Watari plays a yakuza who comes out of prison where he’s been doing time for stabbing a guy and rather than embrace his old gang buddies he’s sick of his life of crime. His old buddies are miffed and, this being a yakuza flick, they eschew heart-to-heart conversations over steaming mugs of herbal tea and decide to settle their differences by punching each other in the face, instead. Also, long, wicked looking knives.
read details:
http://www.japansociety.org/event_detail?eid=2bcfdff3

watch the abbreviated trailer (ie, 30 seconds of it):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYnDyDQIV4A

Landmark Sunshine
LUST, CAUTION (Taiwan, 2007)
Daily @ 11:15am, 2:30pm, 5:40pm, 9:00pm
Ang Lee’s dirty movie is moody, repressed and features lots of scenes of Tony Leung naked. It’s also about 500 hours long. Still: Tony Leung naked.
read reviews:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lust_caution/

Walter Reade
FILM COMMENT SELECTS
February 15 – 28 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
Film Comment Selects is the punky little brother to the New York Film Festival and, frankly, the movies are a lot more fun. Tons of Euro-horror and other good stuff this year but the two Asian films are:

FLASH POINT (Hong Kong, 2007, 88 minutes)
Sunday, February 17 @ 9pm
Tuesday, February 19 @ 1:30pm
Friday, February 22 @ 4pm
Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen team up after their SHA PO LANG to bring you the trashiest and flashiest Hong Kong movie of the year. The ridiculous plot with all its angst and undercover cops is paper thin and super-lame, but the action is, well, the action is some of the most unique and most intense stuff ever put onscreen. There’s one or two brief flickers near the beginning and then, starting at about the one hour mark, things get fast and furious. You really shouldn’t miss seeing the final half hour throwdown on the big screen.

read a review:
http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/tiff-report-flash-point-review/

DARK MATTER (USA, 2007, 90 minutes)
Wednesday, February 27 @ 8:15pm
Thursday, February 28 @ 1pm
Aidan Quinn, Meryl Streep and Liu Ye star in this flick by opera director Chen Shi-zheng that was abandoned in distribution limbo after the University of Virginia shootings. Why? Because it tells the highly stylized tale of a Chinese PhD candidate at the University of Iowa who slowly comes unhinged and runs amock. It played Sundance and has split audiences: some folks think it’s overly-sylized and mannered while others find it intelligent and upsetting. See it yourself and then you, too, can have an opinion.
read a review:
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=review&id=2471&reviewid=VE1117932601&cs=1