#Wang Chiang

[coolgenie]

Kiseki: Dear to Me

Second Day in Tokyo 🌸

[nihillist-blog]

The Sadness (2021)

[orangemocharaktajino]

For the fan meeting in Japan, the Kiseki cast was asked to pick new partners and it got very chaotic

Everybody else picked one person but Huang Chun Chih decided to go for the polycule and be the meat in an Aaron Lai and Hank Wang sandwich

[stuff-diary]

American Born Chinese

TV Shows/Dramas watched in 2023

American Born Chinese (2023, USA)

Creator: Kelvin Yu (based on the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang)

Mini-review:

I loved this so much! Sure, it has its flaws, but its strengths far outweigh them. The show feels refreshing and almost groundbreaking thanks to the way it takes inspiration from Journey to the West and Chinese culture. With these elements, the show gets to tell a fantastic story about coming of age and finding your identity. It also tackles the topic of representation head-on, with a beautiful monologue by Ke Huy Quan in one of the last episodes. I can't think of many TV shows that talk so frankly about this, and American Born Chinese deserves big kudos for that.

But the main reason why this show is a hit is its cast. For starters, we have legends like Michelle Yeoh, the aforementioned Ke Huy Quan and Daniel Wu. Obviously, they are as great as anyone would expect from them. But the young cast also delivers: Ben Wang's comedic timing is perfect, and Jimmy Liu pretty much steals the show with an incredibly charming and adorable performance. On top of all this, the action scenes are fantastic, with amazing choreographies and very stylish and cinematic direction. Also, I thought this was supposed to be a limited series, but I guess it's not? I'm not complaining, cause I really enjoyed it, but I hope it's doesn't end up being cancelled.

P.S. Why the f**k is Disney+ not promoting the hell out of this? They have Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu from Everything Everywhere All At Once, plus Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed the Shang-Chi movie, and they are doing nothing to promote it. It's seriously baffling.

[chernobog13]

Jimmy Wang Yu as Fang Kang, The One-Armed Swordsman (1967).

This film was a huge hit for the Shaw Brothers studio and director Chang Cheh, and launched Wang into superstardom. He returned as Fang Kong in the sequel, Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969). This soon lead to Wang playing various one-armed swordsmen and one-armed boxers in films for several years.

[silveremulsion]

The Five Venoms (1978)

[dweemeister]

Best Documentary Short Film Nominees for the 96th Academy Awards (2024, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up goes with my thanks to the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California for providing all three Oscar-nominated short film packages. 

If you are an American or Canadian resident interested in supporting the short film filmmakers in theaters (and you should, as very few of those who work in short films are as affluent as your big-name directors and actors), check your local participating theaters here.

Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Documentary Short Film at this year’s Oscars. The write-ups for the Live Action and Animated Short categories are coming soon. Non-American films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

Năi Nai & Wài Pó (2023)

Rarely do both sides of one’s family ever meet. You might expect them to mingle at weddings and funerals. But cohabitation? Such is the case with Taiwanese American director Sean Wang’s two grandmothers in Năi Nai & Wài Pó (paternal and maternal grandmother, respectively), available worldwide on Disney+ and Hulu. Wishing to live closer to family, Wang moved in with his grandmothers Yi Yan Fuei (Năi Nai) and Chang Li Hua (Wài Pó) in their California household during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. His grandmothers rarely leave the house, even for groceries, and keep their heavy curtains drawn at all hours. As thin beams of sunlight barely stream through the interior’s earthy colors, both grandmothers continue to read the newspaper, sing traditional Chinese music, do their own cooking (I assume someone drops off groceries for them), tease each other about farting in bed, and reflect on their families and their pasts. They know that there are fewer tomorrows remaining, but that will not stop them from living joyously and with love for their grandson, who, though off-screen, they converse with throughout the shoot.

Qualifying for the Academy Awards by wining Best Documentary Short at SXSW in 2023 (in addition to the equivalent prize at AFI Fest), Năi Nai & Wài Pó freely admits that its subjects are playing up their act for their grandson. Observational cinema this is not. But in their sense of exaggerated play there exists a twofold acknowledgement. First, as Năi Nai states, “the days we spend feeling pain and the days we spend feeling joy are the same days spent. So, I’m going to choose joy.” And perhaps most meaningfully to Wang, their playing for the camera is one of many ways they express their love for their grandson. It is an elevated home video, a loving portrait, and a reminder to cherish those who loved us into being.

My rating: 7.5/10

The Barber of Little Rock (2023)

People Trust in Little Rock, Arkansas is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). In other words, it is a non-profit – partially funded by the American federal government – to address issues in creating economic growth and opportunities in some of the most underserved communities in the nation through loans, emergency financial assistance, and housing subsidies. People Trust and its President, Arlo Washington, are the subjects of The Barber of Little Rock (available for free online through The New Yorker), directed by John Hoffman (2021’s Fauci) and Christine Turner (2021’s Lynching Postcards: 'Token of A Great Day'). The film, Oscar-qualified by winning the Grand Prize for Documentary Short at Indy Shorts International Film Festival (Indiana), requires a wealth of context to the issues that it raises, but does not always provide enough – especially how municipal, state, and regional history impacts racism in banking, and vice versa.

Arlo Washington is a fascinating, wonderfully-intentioned person, but the movie spends too much time with him directly stating the piece’s thesis about financial equality and generational poverty to the camera. Most compelling of all were some of the individual appointments at People Trust of regular people simply looking for financial relief or a loan to kickstart a business or make their rent payments. So too Washington's barbering training school – especially a scene when two students are asked to look intently at the other’s faces, to understand the other’s struggles simply through quiet observation. Arlo Washington figures in many of these scenes as well, and those scenes reveal as much, if not more, about the lives of People Trust’s clients than any of his brief lectures can accomplish. Hoffman and Turner clearly had deeply cinematic material to work with that could empower their messaging, and it is a shame they are unable to fully utilize it.

My rating: 7/10

Island in Between (2023, Taiwan)

Ten kilometers away from the Chinese city of Xiamen lies Kinmen, a group of islands under control of Taiwan (the island of Taiwan is 187 kilometers away). Directed and narrated by S. Leo Chiang and distributed by The New York Times, Island in Between is Chiang’s meditation on not only Kinmen’s precarious geography and its political status, but his own identity of being American, Chinese, and Taiwanese – three separate identities that interconnect, but are forever distinct. Like many viewers, I was unaware of Kinmen’s existence before viewing Island in Between. This film is most valuable in introducing audiences to a place in some ways frozen in the mid-twentieth century, not so much capturing the spirit of the place and understanding its history.

During visits to mainland China in the late 2000s, Chiang, Taiwanese-born and American-raised, was struck by how vibrant the mainland was – something unrecognizable from “the communist wasteland [he] learned about in school.” In the years since, the crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased political tensions between China and Taiwan have complicated his feelings towards the mainland. As a Vietnamese American, I easily saw parallels between how the younger diaspora views our so-called “motherland”, what we are taught, and how older generations perceive their original home. Even among generations, there are divisions in how we feel about the motherland. But Chiang has the additional complication of being caught between three nations important to his being. If anything, his mentions about his parents and their views feels far too cursory, as they are the ones most responsible for shaping his views about American/Chinese/Taiwanese tensions. One hopes this film is not a harbinger of things to come, as beached tanks rust on the placid Kinmen shore.

My rating: 7/10

The ABCs of Book Banning (2023)

As of the publication of this omnibus write-up, bans and challenges to books in libraries and schools have spiked since 2021. These book challenges, often taken up by parents and certain religious organizations, have disproportionately targeted books by and/or about LGBTQ+ and non-white (especially black) people. Stepping into the debate is MTV Documentary Films’ The ABCs of Book Banning (available on Paramount+), directed by Sheila Nevins, Trish Adlesic, and Nazenet Habtezgh. Unfortunately, the film advocates against book challenges in the most stultifyingly artless way. Early on, a title card reveals that the filmmakers will ask about book banning and restrictions from a group that we have heard little from: children. An honorable approach, but the interview snippets found in The ABCs of Book Banning are repetitive and seem rehearsed – children, aghast at the notion that a selected book is a target, offer reasons why book banning is a terrible idea. Nothing Americans have not heard before. Breaking up their interviews are images of book covers, followed by a brief quotation from said book, and an amateurish “BANNED” or “CHALLENGED” banner in red over the book. Sometimes, cheap animation depicting that book’s passage appears; the placement of these animated sequences has no rhyme or reason.

Damningly, this is a film in search of a structure. A handful of authors whose books have been banned from libraries or schools show up to introduce themselves over what appears to be an interview over Zoom. They say a few sentences about why book banning is terrible and we never hear from them again in the film – a complete waste. I suspect these authors recorded longer interviews, but there is almost nothing that remains of those interviews in the final product. This is a film for those who agree with its premise, have no cinematic taste, and are tediously self-satisfied in how they express their political views.

My rating: 4/10

The Last Repair Shop (2023)

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the last major city school district in the United States to offer free musical instrument repair to its students. From the Los Angeles Times and Searchlight Pictures comes Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’ The Last Repair Shop (also available on Disney+ and Hulu), which takes us to LAUSD’s repair shop. Just short of the 40-minute limit for short films, The Last Repair Shop curiously tells the viewer preciously little about the shop itself (what are the challenges it is facing, and why is the last of its kind?). Proudfoot and Bowers – both previously nominated in this category for A Concerto Is a Conversation (2021; also available online thanks to The New York Times) – adopt much of the same style as their previous nominee. Both films share talking heads in shallow focus and snappy editing. These aspects sometimes made A Concerto Is a Conversation incohesive, but they work immensely better for The Last Repair Shop. It also helps that The Last Repair Shop, which slowly reveals itself to also be a portrait of a rarely-seen side to L.A., has a clear structure that the viewer can discern early on.

What carries The Last Repair Shop are the life-affirming conversations we have with the four principal interview subjects, all of whom work in a different department at the shop – Dana Atkinson (strings), Paty Moreno (brass), Duane Michaels (woodwinds), and Steve Bagmanyan (pianos; also the shop supervisor, and who inspired the film as he tuned pianos at Bowers’ high school). Whether they play an instrument or not, all four recognize music’s ability to better understand ourselves and others, and as “one of the best things that humans do.” The addition of student voices to the film – especially when one realizes that the repair shop employees almost never hear back from the children whose instruments they repair – strengthens a connection, however distant, through music. The Last Repair Shop’s final minutes provide it that final cinematic touch you might have anticipated, an affirmation of why those who speak the language of music hold it so dear.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

From previous years: 88th Academy Awards (2016) 89th (2017) 90th (2018) 91st (2019) 92nd (2020) 93rd (2021) 94th (2022) 95th (2023)

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[fyeahcindie]

This duo release a winner every time out!   珂拉琪 Collage  =D

Music / Lyrics / Arrangement / Electric Gtr: 王家權 Hunter Wang Vocal / Cover Art: Natsuko Lariyod (夏子) Chorus: 珂拉琪 Collage Guest Players: Bass: 程杰 Jay Cheng Drums: 江尚謙 Shang-chien Chiang (佛跳牆 Buddha Jump) Lyrics and full credits at YT.

Links: StreetVoice,  Natsuko Lariyod (夏子) (that IG has all the art for their releases),  Hunter IG,  YouTube,  ナツコ/ Natsuko YouTube,  Hunter YouTube,  Spotify

[amatsuki]

I’m fairly certain (based on a quick perusal of news articles and Chinese Wikipedia) that elephant Grandpa Lin Wang did not have the rank of general but I want to believe

[thenerdsofcolor]

'American Born Chinese' Teaser Announces Full List of Guest Stars

The cast of Disney’s live-action adaptation of American Born Chinese was already stacked with the likes of Academy® Award-Nominees and Golden Globe winners Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once) joining Ben Wang (“Chang Can Dunk”), and two-time International Emmy® Award nominee Yeo Yann Yann (“Wet Season”), Chin Han (“Mortal Kombat”), Daniel Wu (“Reminiscence”), former…

[divinum-pacis]

A participant dressed as Ba Jia Jiang (eight generals), Chinese guardians of the gods, is purified by firecrackers during a temple festival marking the birthday of traditional Taoist deity "Qingshan Wang" or "Ling''an Zunwang" in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

[stuff-diary]

Dìdi

Movies watched in 2024

Dìdi (2024, USA)

Director & Writer: Sean Wang

Mini-review:

This is one of those special films that feels achingly true to life, with a realistic, incisive portrayal of the awkwardness and cringiness that comes with being a 13-year-old boy. Sean Wang's vision is deeply personal, but at the same time it manages to be a surprisingly universal experience. It certainly helps that the production design is so detailed, perfectly capturing the essence of the late 2000s. Izaac Wang does a great job with a pretty difficult role, which allows you to empathize with his character despite his behavior. And Joan Chen's performance is beautiful and nuanced too, basically the beating heart of the movie. Anyway, Dìdi certainly lives up to that "For anyone who's ever been a teenager" tagline.

[dekaydk]

This is kinda adorbs

We gang gang 😎🙌

The whole gang arrived in Tokyo 🙌

[brokehorrorfan]

The Sadness will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on July 30 via Shudder in conjunction with Vinegar Syndrome. The 2021 Taiwanese horror film is also known as Kū Bēi.

Writer-director Rob Jabbaz makes his feature debut. Berant Zhu, Regina Lei, Ying-Ru Chen, Tzu-Chiang Wang, and Emerson Tsai star.

Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by director Rob Jabbaz and composers Tzechar (new)

Audio commentary by film critic Simon Abrams (new)

Audio commentary with director Rob Jabbaz and medical advisor Shu

The Production featurette (new)

SFX featurette

Dictor featurette

Art Director featurette

BusinessMan featurette

Video essay by Samm Deighan (new)

Clearwater - 2020 short film by Rob Jabbaz

Fiendish Funnies - 2013 short film by Rob Jabbaz

Theatrical trailers

Booklet with new writing by film critic Brandon Streussnig, storyboards, and a gore guide

After a year of combating a pandemic with relatively benign symptoms, a frustrated nation finally lets its guard down. This is when the virus spontaneously mutates, giving rise to a mind-altering plague. The streets erupt into violence and depravity, as those infected are driven to enact the most cruel and ghastly things they can think of. Murder, torture, rape and mutilation are only the beginning. A young couple is pushed to the limits of sanity as they try to reunite amid the chaos. The age of civility and order is no more. There is only "The Sadness."

Pre-order The Sadness.

[silveremulsion]

Invincible Shaolin (1978)

[outofthemouthsof]

Thanks to this fun post by @absolutebl I went down memory lane and made my list of ships I’m most attached to (pretty much in order of favorites):

Pond Phuwin

First Khaotung

Billy Babe

Sailub Pon

Daou Offroad

Pooh Pavel

Tay New

Great Inn

Boss Noeul

Zee Nunew

Boun Prem

Fort Peat

Thor Fluke

Jimmy Sea

Then I geeked out some more with my list of pairs I WISH were branded ships!

Park Seo-ham & Park Jae-chan

Higuchi Kouhei & Mashiko Atsuki

Kai Hsu & Taro Lin

Nat Chen & Louis Chiang

Bright Nonkul

Wu Ping Chen & Huang Li Feng

Chalarm x Neptune x Seagames

Li Le & Wang Yun Kai

Then I thought about actors I think could chemistry with just about anyone! And yeah I put several from favorite ships because I’d definitely follow them if it ended.

Zee

Seng

Perth (Tanapon)

Bible

Neo

Billy

Tay

Ohm (Pawat)

Nut

First (Piyangkul)

Jimmy

Great

Frank

Jes

Boss

Finally, this is my short list of actors I wish were leads in more BLs. (Okay Atomu and Euro haven’t actually been a romantic lead in a BL but I’d REALLY love them to!)

Kim Jiwoong

Kang Yoo Seok

Mizuishi Atomu

Euro Thanaset

If you enjoyed and want to make your own list(s) please tag me!