#shaw brothers studios

[jackie-and-peace]

I put together some Lo Mang and Kuo Chui duo/not-duo clips🐸🦎ft. Chiang Sheng. Obviously there is limited content to use on youtube, so sad

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Super Inframan (1975)

[billlaotian]

[pagan-stitches]

Cheng Pei-pei (6 January 1946 – 17 July 2024)

[otakunoculture]

It's all Hi-Yah High Stakes Action with Unboxing Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 4!

On the fence in buying Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 4? Well, we got this #unboxingvideo of @Shout_Studios latest. #wuxia #martialarts #movies #hongkongcinema

Available to order through Amazon USA Over winter break, I received a lot of packages from the PR firms representing of various studios, and a few direct from the distributors themselves. As the past unboxing videos have revealed, there was a lot for me to go through! Over Boxing Day, I did the opposite and posted my unboxing video of Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 4 from Shout! Studios (formerly…

[germ-t-ripper]

Currently watching: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

[vintagegeekculture]

So, a friend of mine on Discord said something interesting, and I feel like you might have thoughts on it. So. What do you think of the idea of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as being "The Shaw Brothers for kids", a sort of gateway drug for "the kung fu genre"?

Not the Shaw Brothers, but Golden Harvest. Let me explain: 

I’m going to sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say this, but I believe the New Line Cinema “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (1990) movie was actually a money laundering scheme by the Chinese Mafia, specifically, the Sun Yee On Triad. 

Looking into the role of organized crime in martial arts cinema is a rabbit hole that goes very, very, very deep...and comes out somewhere very shocking at the end.

You mention the Shaw Brothers, but there was another Hong Kong Producer who was the only credible rival to the Shaw Brothers (and who eventually surpassed the Shaws) in martial arts movies: Golden Harvest’s Raymond Chow….a man who started off as the Shaw Brothers’ talent division, but who eventually founded his own rival studio to the Shaws (with rumored triad financial backing), and who made Bruce Lee, Angela Mao and Jackie Chan stars. Raymond Chow is widely, and extremely credibly, believed to be a middleman for the Hong Kong Triad, the Sun Yee On, who used Golden Harvest as a front facing money laundering scheme, as claimed by Frederic Dannen in "Hong Kong Babylon," and Yiu Kong Chiu in "The Triads as Business," books I recommend if you are at all interested in the topic of organized crime in the Hong Kong film industry.

Raymond Chow was also the producer and primary funder of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. I mean, what does it mean when your movie is entirely produced and funded by a guy well known for being a triad middleman and money launderer?

And all of this happened at New Line Cinema, a borderline independent film company…one known for having dodgy financials it’s entire existence, no less, which ultimately doomed it? One of the most extraordinary things about the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie is that it was, essentially, an independent film. New Line would later become a powerhouse as a studio and created Lord of the Rings, but at the time, it was a mainly low rent operation, rather like Cannon films, known for the success of the slasher series “Nightmare on Elm Street.” So yes, I do believe "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (1990) was a money laundering scheme by the Chinese Mafia.

The triads in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan take enormous interest in financing martial arts movies for the same reason that they take a tremendous interest in financing porn movies: they’re quick, cheap, dirty, and can be used as a mechanism for laundering money, and a way to claim money from illegal sources (say, heroin) comes from a clean and legal source that can be claimed on taxes, like say, a movie studio. In addition, Hong Kong’s strict rating system, the Category III (equivalent to a far stricter R-rating) meant that very violent movies were handled in ways that were outside the law in ways similar to pornography. And according to several Senate investigations in 1991 ("Hearings on Asian Organized Crime"), the triads were actively involved in money laundering as well outside of Hong Kong, including currency trading and real estate, and the idea they could back a studio is entirely possible.

Everyone working in Hong Kong cinema has a story of dealing with the triads, who are interwoven into the city. Anita Mui's manager was was shot dead by mafiosos. Jimmy Wang Yu, the first Kung Fu star, was a suspected member of the Bamboo Union triad, and once borrowed money from one triad to pay another....and may have used his reported connections with the Triads to get Jackie Chan out of his initial contract with Golden Harvest, a favor Jackie repaid. Golden Harvest studios were actually firebombed in 1984, an event suspected to be due to Triad activity. Raymond Chow’s fellow producer and good friend who discovered Steven Chow, film producer Charles Heung, is well known to be the son of Heung Chin, who founded the Sun Yee On Triad, the largest in Hong Kong with over 25,000 members. And you don’t have to take my word for it; a US Senate Committee in 1991 on Asian Organized Crime identified Cheung as a leader of the Sun Yee On along with his brothers. Because of his association with Charles Heung and the Sun Yee On, Steven Chow, director of Kung Fu Hustle, cannot enter Canada legally.

Jackie Chan asserted Raymond Chow’s triad connections in his autobiography, and also claimed that he only hired triad members and other people who were mobbed up at Golden Harvest. One example would be producer Ng See Yuen, who produced Once Upon a Time in China for Golden Harvest, and who Jet Li refused to work with ever again after his manager was assassinated by triad gunmen (Jet Li blamed Ng See Yuen for his manager's death).

There's also Lo Wei, a Shaw Brothers director and known “Red Pole” enforcer of the Sun Yee On Triad, who came over to Golden Harvest, where he directed Bruce Lee’s Chinese Connection and Big Boss, and also directed Jackie Chan’s earliest “period” historical movies for GH. Jackie Chan, in his autobiography, stated that the reason he initially left Hong Kong to go to the United States for an American career was because Lo Wei, his director on Laughing Hyena, put a hit out on him for refusing to make Laughing Hyena 2, and Jackie had to flee the city when Lo Wei sent gunmen to his house to abduct him. When arriving in the United States, he had to avoid some men with machine guns at the airport. To this day, whenever possible, Jackie Chan goes out in public armed for fear of gangsters. 

Even Jackie Chan though, never made the assertion that Raymond Chow and the Sun Yee On had Bruce Lee killed. This is important to mention because if you talk to any Chinese person, nearly all of them believe with unshakable, absolute certainty that the Chinese Mafia killed Bruce Lee, which is literally the plot of Game of Death (which, incidentally, Raymond Chow produced). Everyone around Bruce was mobbed up, because everyone in the Hong Kong film industry was mobbed up; in fact, it’s an open question how much it existed for its own sake. It’s notable Bruce Lee died at the home of Betty Lo Ting Pei, Golden Harvest actress, and his known mistress…who was married to a triad gangster. It’s also known that the first person that Betty Lo Ting Pei called when Bruce died was not medical services but Raymond Chow, something that to this day, she has not attempted to explain. 

It can be hard to imagine what the motive is for Raymond Chow and the triads to kill Bruce Lee. After all, wouldn’t Bruce Lee be more useful to Raymond Chow alive than dead? I never saw the angle, here. But then, you consider that in the last few months of his life, Bruce Lee started to set the stage for his transition to behind the scenes roles like producer, and was assembling a lot of stunt talent around him (a lot of productions down the pipeline intended to have Bruce Lee in producer roles, like Circle of Iron). The rumor among the stunt players, as recounted by Sammo Hung, was that Bruce was attempting to form his own stunt and film production company (as Chiba later did successfully in Japan) and that would involve organizing and peeling off half the talent in Hong Kong….in a deeply triad controlled industry, no less. There was also a story recounted by witnesses that Bruce Lee, a temperamental and explosively violent man, physically assaulted Raymond Chow in his office with punches and kicks when he heard Chow had two sets of books in their shared production company, as Bruce was always keen to keep the triads out of his films. Ten days later, Bruce Lee was dead. And for weeks before his death, Lee told his friends "Hong Kong is getting too hot, I have to get out."

And you know something? A Ninja Turtles movie from 1990 is probably the least of it. In 2020, a few documents were declassified by the Taiwanese government that showed that the members of the Bamboo Union Triad had 19 top governmental positions in Taiwan from 1955-1984 (the era when Taiwan was in a complete state of military rule), including the National Security Bureau and all branches of the armed forces. In other words, Taiwan during the military rule era wasn't just corrupted by the triads, the triads were the government.

I never cease to be amazed at the incuriousness of the journalistic professions. Governments don't declassify documents - especially something as damning as triad involvement in government - unless they have to. So why would the Tsai Ing-Wen government reveal this now in 2020, especially when anti-corruption is the driving force of Taiwanese politics, and anti-corruption sentiment pushed the KMT out of power since the 90s? Outsiders believe that the single biggest question in Taiwanese politics is their relationship with the mainland. Kinda...the status quo is more or less a settled question. It's actually anti-corruption and anti-triad infiltration, which is why the DPP are the ruling party now.

The answer, I suspect, is that the triads are no longer working with the Taiwanese government, but with the mainland government. In the 1980s, Wong Man Fong, editor of the Xinhua paper of Hong Kong, said in several interviews he was asked by the People's Republic of China to reach out to the triads to help make a deal: no government interference in their activities, if they pledge to keep order in the city after the handover in 1997. I strongly suspect the mainland now has a similar arrangement with the Bamboo Union, Green Gang, and the Si Hai Bang they did in Hong Kong, especially since so much money is going back and forth with the release of trade to the mainland. In other words, the triads in Taiwan are active agents of the PRC.

Backdoor deals between government and the mob aren't out of the question, just ask the CIA, who used Giancana Crime Family assassins sent to kill Castro as a key plank of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the role of the mafia in the Kennedy Assassination, or how control of opium was a key under-the-table reason for the invasion of Afghanistan.

What I suspect happened is, the Taipei government is turning on organized crime now after decades and decades of ludicrous and obvious corruption, because to the triads, the money to be made with the mainland and unification is far more lucrative. It's no coincidence that the largest pro-unification party in Taiwan is led by a triad gangster who spent time in jail for racketeering, Chang An Lo, nicknamed "the White Wolf." Like John Gotti, everyone knows he's a mobster and that's even part of the White Wolf's coolness and appeal (if you could vote for Tony "Scarface" Montana, boy, I bet a lot of guys would), but nobody can touch him. In fact, combined with how the "light world" financial institutions are intertwined along with the underworld, there's an argument to be made that the reason the PRC hasn't tried to take Taiwan is that for all intents and purposes, they already have it.

In other words, the triads have gone from using the Ninja Turtles to money launder to essentially setting global geopolitics.

[hpowellsmith]

my brother in law and i have made our ways through all of your available cog stories (you have become a household name); i wanted to ask if there are any choice of games or other interactive fiction you recommend? i saw you answered in 2020, but wanted to see if there's any more on your radar since then!

I have a bunch of links and recommendations over here including my top ChoiceScript games ever. And I am here to recommend lots more!

Please note that I have the time and energy to play very few games and a vanishingly small number of WIPs. This only a tiny snapshot of the amazing interactive fiction out there. Do check out IFDB, sub-Q, the IF Comp and Spring Thing archives, the Narrascope and AdventureX speakers and exhibitors, and the interactive fiction tag on itch.io.

More below because there are A LOT:

Here is a big bunch of ChoiceScript games that I had a great time with!

Choice of Broadsides by Adam Strong-Morse, Heather Albano, and Dan Fabulich

Choice of Romance by Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse (note that it is not romantic and is not a dating sim!)

A Crown of Sorcery and Steel by Joshua LaBelle

Blood Moon by @barbwritesstuff

Deathless: the City's Thirst by Max Gladstone

The Dragon and the Djinn by @atharfi

The Eagle's Heir by Jo Graham and Amy Griswold

Fine Felines by Felicity Banks

Hollywood Visionary by Aaron Reed

Nikola Tesla: War of the Currents by Dora Klindžić

An Odyssey: Shadows of War by Natalia Theodoridou

The Play's the Thing by Jo Graham and Amy Griswold

Rent-a-Vice by Natalia Theodoridou

Siege of Treboulain by Jed Herne

Stronghold by Jo Graham and Amy Griswold

Their Majesties' Pleasure by Leia Talon

Thieves Gambit: Curse of the Black Cat by Dana Duffield

Tower Behind the Moon by Kyle Marquis

Turncoat Chronicle by @zincalloygames

Weyrwood by Isabella Shaw

Visual novels:

Analogue: A Hate Story by Christine Love

Dream Daddy by Game Grumps (writers: Vernon Shaw and Leighton Gray)

EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER by Heather Flowers

Ladykiller in a Bind by Christine Love

Other IF-adjacent games with visuals that I have loved:

80 Days by inkle (writers: Jon Ingold and Meghna Jayanth)

Fallen London by Failbetter Games

Overboard! by inkle (writer: Jon Ingold)

Over the Alps by Stave Studios

Twines:

There are so many more that I've enjoyed but these were what popped into my head right now - this is one where it's essential to check out itch.io:

Anything by porpentine charity heartscape especially With Those We Love Alive and Vesp

16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds by Abigail Corfman

Cactus Blue Motel by Astrid Dalmady

Detritus by Maz Hamilton (published as Mary Hamilton)

Faith by @kithj

Invasion by Cat Manning

Human Errors by Katherine Morayati

If I Die, Consume Me by @fiddles-ifs

Mama Possum by Kevin Snow

Nine Months Out by @nellplays

Salvage by @atharfi

Tangaroa Deep by Astrid Dalmady

To Spring Open by Yoon Ha Lee and Peter Berman (as Two-Bit Chip)

Parser games:

The Boot-Scraper by Caleb Wilson

The Compass Rose by Yoon Ha Lee (note that I didn't finish this one because I am bad at puzzles)

Galatea by Emily Short

Gun Mute by C. E. J. Pacian (as above)

Laid Off From The Synesthesia Factory by Katherine Morayati

Lime Ergot by Caleb Wilson

Midnight. Swordfight. by Chandler Groover

Take by Katherine Morayati

Games made with other tools:

Cape by Bruno Dias (Raconteur)

Honeysuckle by Cat Manning (Texture)

Prospero by Bruno Dias (Raconteur)

I play such a vanishingly small number of WIPs that it's ridiculous but I did really enjoy what I played of these two and am looking forward to more:

Body Count (@bodycountgame) by @nellplays (Twine)

Chop Shop by Becky @losergames (Twine)

Fervency (@fervency-if ) by Niko Charos (ChoiceScript)

[flanaganfilm]

Hey there!

I’m a new writer-director finishing up film school and I keep getting into little spats with some of my instructors over my characters talking too much/for too long.

My stock response at this point has basically become “Well, it works just fine when Mike Flanagan does it.”

I don’t know if it’s because I come from a theatre background or what, but I really don’t like the seemingly common wisdom that characters talking—actors orating—is boring for audiences. That you have to have Something Happening all the time, and that characters “just” conversing or telling a story doesn’t count, as though “to speak” isn’t a verb.

Since you tend to have characters speak at length and it turns out riveting—I’m thinking specifically of the confetti speech from Hill House and Hassan’s speech about being a Muslim cop in NYC from Midnight Mass—I was hoping you could share some of your thoughts on balancing action with conversation, giving actors room to “just” talk, and keeping lengthy oration engaging.

Thanks!

I also come from a theater background. I wouldn't be too hard on your instructors - in fact, they sound like they're pretty in sync with a lot of executives in the industry.

I received similar feedback when I was a film student. My first few student features were very talky. We were studying the breakthrough work of Kevin Smith, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch. The indie movies that were selling at Sundance and hitting theaters were The Brothers McMullen and Chuck and Buck. Tarantino had hit the scene and his characters were dropping pages and pages and pages of thick, unhurried dialogue. Reservoir Dogs posters were hanging on every dorm room wall on campus, and that movie was essentially just a long conversation. We watched My Dinner With Andre in class. So yeah, most of our student films were emulating that.

I have always loved a monologue. Going back to Robert Shaw's hypnotic story in Jaws, to Harry Dean Stanton's jaw-dropping monologue in Paris, Texas. It's an art form. Giving actors room to speak, to find music in dialogue, to transport a viewer just with mere words... that's an incredible feat, I think. It's some of the oldest magic left.

That said, I've always tried to balance that out. It's a visual medium, after all, and whenever I've found myself leaning too hard on the words, I've tried to counterbalance that was a very ambitions visual sequence, a long unbroken camera maneuver, or something else that honors the difference between filmed entertainment and theatre.

One of the reasons I made Hush was to challenge myself to eliminate words from my arsenal and focus on visual storytelling.

I take a fair amount of flack for my monologues and dialogue, first from studio executives and then from a small percentage of viewers whose attention spans are being challenged. The most common note I get on any project is to take out talking. It can be disheartening, but I'm always trying to be fair about it, and to be sympathetic to the fact that a lot of movies and television have actively tried to shorten viewers' attention spans for decades now. Audiences are being trained for things to happen faster, louder, shorter. What good is your amazing 6-minute monologue if people changed the channel two episodes ago?

There are times when it is more important to me than others. I dug in hard on Midnight Mass, where the words and ideas in those soliloquies are a big part of the point of the show... but on The Midnight Club, I didn't push for it. I kept scenes relatively short, and there isn't a monologue to be found.

But my overarching feeling is that an artfully written and well performed monologue is a gift, and a dying art. It celebrates great acting, it requires great trust of the performer and of the viewer, and it has the power to transport us with one of the oldest magics human beings ever discovered - the spoken word.

Storytelling began that way: monologues around a campfire. Over the millennia, we've harnessed that campfire light, we've even learned to paint with it, to pull our dreams out of our minds and put them onto giant screens, so the whole world can dream together... but the real magic still starts with the words.

Which is my long-winded way of trying to encourage you to make your films the way you want to make them. Make the films you want to see. And if you love words... that's a great thing. Try to find a balance, never lose sight of the visual medium, and if you're going to drop a big chunk of words in there, try to earn it with something visually challenging as well.

Or, just tell your instructors you'll make it shorter, and then cut out ten frames of air. ;)

[nemainofthewater]

This is a series of polls looking at the best Jin Yong adaptation, separated by novel. The masterlist of Jin Yong Adaptation Polls can be found here.

[kungfuwushuworld]

Louis Fan Siu-wong

Fan is the son of Fan Mei-sheng, an actor contracted to the Shaw Brothers Studio. When he was 14, his father sent him to Xuzhou, China, to learn gymnastics and wushu.

After completing his studies, Fan returned to the Hong Kong film industry, and starred in Stanley Tong's Stone Age Warriors (1991). In 1992, at the age of 18, Fan portrayed the titular character in Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a Hong Kong film based on the manga Riki-Oh. He claims that the director and producers of the film met him at the Hong Kong Airport upon arrival and immediately offered him the role. Being a young, up-and-coming actor, he took the role without knowing what it was. He later said he was shocked to discover how bloody and violent the Riki-Oh manga was.

Fan was a contract artiste under the Hong Kong television station TVB throughout the 1990s, and he starred in several television dramas, including Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (1997) and Young Hero Fang Shiyu (1999). He left TVB in the 2000s, and appeared in several Taiwanese and mainland Chinese television series before focusing on films.

One of his most memorable film performances in the 2000s was as Jin Shanzhao, the tough Northern martial artist in the 2008 martial arts film Ip Man, which starred Donnie Yen as Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man. Fan's performance in Ip Man earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2009. He reprised his role as Jin Shanzhao in Ip Man 2, the 2010 sequel to Ip Man. He also portrayed a new character in The Legend Is Born – Ip Man (2010), another movie about Yip Man that is unrelated to Ip Man and Ip Man 2.

In 2018, Fan made his proper Hollywood movie debut in the film Attrition (2018) starring alongside Steven Seagal as an ally helping Seagal's character to take down a human trafficking cartel in Thailand.

[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.

[cutekoala1001]

I made Spotify playlists for a couple of Sing characters that didn’t get one! (Song lists are under the cut) ↓

And I made a new Buster playlist! Since he has TWO playlists from the first and second movie, I combined them into one and added some showtunes, some upbeat jazzy stuff, and a few songs that gives off Buster vibes ♡ (sorry it’s so long, he had a lot of music! Mostly oldies but goodies ♪)

♘ Eddie Noodleman ♘

✿ Miss Crawly ✿

⭐︎ Buster Moon ⭐︎

EDDIE:

8TEEN (Khalid)

Moonshadow (Cat Stevens)

Let’s Go Surfing (The Drums)

Ukulele and Chill (Cody G)

Sunflower (Post Malone, Swae Lee)

Ventura Highway (Paco Versailles)

Love Your Days (Cherokee)

Swept Away (Vanilla)

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (Wham!)

No Rain (Blind Melon)

California (from The O.C.)

Days Like These (Lakey Inspired)

Dream With You - Bosq Remix (Jeffrey Paradise)

Young Folks (Peter Bjorn and John)

Tropical Heartache (Poolside)

California Sunset (Poolside)

Weather (Ralph)

Inbetween Days (The Cure)

End of the Line (Traveling Wilburys)

Pink Sky (Bay Ledges)

Australia (The Shins)

Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard (Paul Simon)

Baroque Hoedown (Perrey and Kingsley)

MISS CRAWLY:

Lagoon (Havana Swim Club)

You Make Me Feel So Young (Frank Sinatra)

What A Little Moonlight Can Do (Billy Holiday, Teddy Wilson)

Chop Suey! (System Of A Down)

April Showers (Proleter)

Frenesi (Artie Shaw)

Come Fly With Me (Frank Sinatra)

When I’m Sixty Four (The Beatles)

Shooby Shooby Do Yah! (Mocean Worker, Steven Bernstein)

C’est Magnifique (Kay Starr)

Blinuet (Zoot Sims)

The Last Time I Saw Paris (Vaughn Monroe)

Them from New York, New York (Frank Sinatra)

Sweet Happy Life (Peggy Lee)

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (The Beatles)

きらきらキラー (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu)

BUSTER MOON:

Flirty Cha Cha (The Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra)

Safe And Sound (Capital Cities)

Don’t Rain On My Parade (Barbra Streisand)

There’s No Business Like Show Business (Harry Connick, Jr.)

Gimme Some Lovin’ (The Spencer David Group)

My Type (Saint Motel)

Walking On A Dream (Empire of the Sun)

The Showman (Little More Better) (U2)

Blinuet (Zoot Sims)

Come to Me (Koop, Yukimi Nagano)

Cake By The Ocean (DNCE)

Dream A Little Dream Of Me (Teddy Wilson)

Over and Over (Session Victim)

Soulful Strut (Horst Jankowski and his Studio Orchestra)

Dancing in the Moonlight (Toploader)

A Happy Song (Victory)

Call Me Maybe (Carly Rae Jepsen)

Lovely Day (Bill Withers)

End of the Line (Traveling Wilburys)

Seasons of Love (Rent the Musical)

Times Are Hard for Dreamers (Amelie the Musical)

Keep Your Head Up (Andy Grammer)

Hang On Little Tomato (Pink Martini)

Smile (Nat King Cole)

When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You) (Louis Armstrong)

My Song (Labi Siffre)

Wouldn’t It Be Nice (The Beach Boys)

Mr. Blue Sky (Electric Light Orchestra)

Faith (Stevie Wonder, Ariana Grande from Sing)

I Got You (I Feel Good) (James Brown & The Famous Flames)

The Wind (Cat Stevens)

Hallelujah (Tori Kelly from Sing)

I’m A Believer (The Monkees)

Faith (George Michael)

You’re All I’ve Got Tonight (The Cars)

Keep It Comin’ Love (KC & The Sunshine Band)

Happy (Pharrell Williams)

Sing (Ed Sheeran)

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell)

Sing a Song (Earth, Wind & Fire)

Your Song (Elton John)

Golden Slumbers (The Beatles)

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)

Listen to the Music (The Doobie Brothers)

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (The New Seekers)

Saturday (Twenty One Pilots)

Someone In The Crowd (La La Land soundtrack)

The Blue Room (Zoot Sims Quartet)

Turandot, SC 91, Act III: Nessun Dorma! (Giacomo Puccini)

Viva La Vida (Coldplay)

You, Me, Here, Now (Dam Swindle)

Dancin’ - Krono Remix (Aaron Smith, Luvli, Krono)

Feel the Heat (Ghosts of Venice)

Flashing Lights (Kanye West)

Beautiful People (feat. Khalid) - NOTD Remix (Ed Sheeran, Khalid, NOTD)

Get Down Tonight (KC & The Sunshine Band)

Got To Be Realm(Cheryl Lynn)

Sing a Happy Song (The O’Jays)

Do You Believe in Magic? (The Lovin’ Spoonful)

You Can’t Stop the Music (The Kinks)

Can’t Stop The Feeling! (Justin Timberlake)

Don’t Dream It’s Over (Crowded House)

Take A Chance On Me (ABBA)

The Moonbounce (Koop)

Uptown Funk (feat. Bruno Mars) (Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars)

Off White Limousine (Client Liaison)

Old 45’s (Chromeo)

Pick Up The Pieces (Average White Band)

He’s The Greatest Dancer (Sister Sledge)

You’re The Top (Jeri Southern)

Let’s Go Crazy (Prince)

Daydream Believer (The Monkees)

Don’t Stop Believin’ (Journey)

It’s Gonna Be Good (Next To Normal the musical)

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

Why does it feel like “Fast X” is being made with the intention of spiting the Rock? Hopefully it’s not, but based on what we know of the movie so far:

1) The Rock said he wanted Jason Momoa to play Luke Hobbs’ brother. There were scheduling issues that prevented that from happening, but Rock said he was hoping to bring Momoa in for the next Hobbs and Shaw movie. But now, that can’t happen since Jason was brought in to play the son of Hernan Reyes.

2) The plot of “Fast X” would make a lot more sense if it was centered around Luke Hobbs. Dom might’ve been the mastermind behind the operation, but Hobbs was the one who actually killed Reyes. And Hobbs did it while Reyes was begging for mercy, which makes his action even more cruel. It feels like the studio or Vin Diesel is deliberately trying to erase Hobbs from the narrative. (Side note: Also, it’s not like Dom being the mastermind would make him more guilty of Reyes’ death since Hobbs joined in to make sure the plan worked. And Hobbs did it with the intention of killing Reyes while Dom just wanted the money)

3) This point is admittedly more speculative. While Deckard Shaw doesn’t always have to be connected to Luke Hobbs, it is a bit strange to give Shaw an entire story in F10 without Hobbs, especially since they went on a whole life-changing journey together. Also, let’s not forget that Han Lue was close to Hobbs as well, so it’s weird that they haven’t had a reunion.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

behind the scenes shots ft. akd as the adjudicator, from this article about the cinematography

“In Hollywood, action filmmaking was kind of looked down upon until The Matrix, and then people realized that action could also be part of the story,” [director] Stahelski notes. “I come from a place of loving dance and theater and fine art — action can be all of those things — and one of my favorite painters is Caravaggio.” When he was looking for a cinematographer for John Wick: Chapter 2, Stahelski recalls, “I asked myself, ‘Who paints with light?’ The answer is Dan Laustsen.” In strictly cinematographic terms, Parabellum functions less like an action movie and more like a Hollywood studio musical. The film’s first battle is a close-quarters knife fight in an antique weapons shop, where the camera cuts from wide shot to wide shot, sustaining the action in long takes so that the audience can better appreciate the physical prowess of Reeves’ performance — an elaborate fighting style that combines Japanese judo and jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu, Russian sambo, Filipino kali, and Muay Thai, more for the benefit of show than for self-defense.  “Ninety-nine percent of high-level stunt work is dance — not pirouettes, but how you move your body,” asserts Stahelski, who continues to train stuntpeople with Leitch through their company 87eleven. “I love the aesthetic of motion. A lot of our shots [in Parabellum] are lifted straight from Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story. We’re mixing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with Hong Kong cinema from John Woo, Jackie Chan and the Shaw Brothers.” “We wanted to go wider than Hollywood action films normally do and really show off the choreography,” Laustsen agrees. “When the camera, lighting and actors are all moving together, it really is a dance.”

“After we made Chapter 2,” Laustsen notes, “we discussed how we could make 3 even more visually powerful. The main setting was still New York, but we wanted to bring out the city even more forcefully. We decided to shoot all at night, with rain as much as possible. Rain is fantastic because it gives a third dimension to the picture, but it is a challenge to do it, especially in a city like New York.”

The Master Anamorphics’ low-distortion design also prevents dramatic, streaking lens flares, and so the technicians at Arri Rental in Secaucus, N.J., fashioned a flare filter — comprising three strands of nylon fishing line stretched across an empty filter frame — for the XT’s and Mini’s Internal Filter Modules. When a front-of-lens filter produces a flare, Laustsen observes, it “just looks like the light is catching on a piece of flat glass in front of the lens. It’s more beautiful when the flare comes from the lens itself” — and that’s the effect that was replicated with the behind-the-lens nylon lines. “With the filters inside the camera,” the cinematographer adds, “it was also easier for first assistant Craig Pressgrove to do the lens changes.”

The exterior of the Continental was shot in lower Manhattan, but the hotel’s interiors were filmed in downtown Brooklyn, in the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower — which now serves as an event space —whose glass-and-wrought-iron front doors open to a 128'-long vaulted banking hall with limestone facing, marble floors, carved teller stations, and a 63'-high ceiling supported by Romanesque columns. For its role as the Continental’s lobby, the hall was furnished by Kavanaugh with two round settees crowned with statues of the Roman war gods Bellona and Mars, a fully-stocked bar, and a lounge on the mezzanine. 

Parabellum’s stages were located at Gold Coast Studios in Long Island, N.Y. The first of the production’s two notable stage-bound sets is the Continental’s terrace, for which the Rockefeller Center rooftop garden was used in Chapter 2. The schedule didn’t allow for much time to shoot Parabellum’s scene, which takes place at sunrise. “You cannot make the sun rise [for] a movie,” Laustsen notes wryly. “It’s one or two shots, and then you have daylight, and then you’re fighting to control the light.”  So, for more control, the scene was moved onstage, where the set was surrounded with a sectional 45'x350' bluescreen lit with SkyPanel S120s; a 120' black velour curtain was used to control blue spill coming from off-camera. Early-morning ambience was provided by 176 overhead SkyPanel S60s, and the light of the rising sun was simulated by a 20K tungsten Fresnel and a 24K Dino light with medium bulbs, both gelled with 1⁄2 CTS. The other key set built at Gold Coast was the “manager’s office,” a labyrinthine two-story glass-and-steel structure meant to represent the top floors of the Continental, with a 270-degree view of the adjacent skyscrapers. It’s in this space that Wick and Zero ultimately face off mano a mano. “The concept was to create a space where everything is exposed, a place where there are no secrets,” Kavanaugh explains.  To help him integrate the lighting into the design of the set itself, Laustsen worked with a virtual-reality computer model based on Kavanaugh’s design. “Chad, Kevin and I had discussions about color — cool lights inside, warm light outside,” says the cinematographer, who wanted what he describes as an “organic” light element for both spaces. The art department therefore added a 35'x14' LED wall to the set’s second floor and a 28'x12' LED billboard to the rooftop; the latter was positioned between the glass structure and a 40'x440' Rosco SoftDrop that was backlit by 150 SkyPanel S60s through Magic Cloth sourced from The Rag Place.  Almeida and his rigging crew installed more than a mile of LiteGear Chroma-Correct RGB-Daylite LED LiteRibbon into the glass and steel set, using aluminum profile and plastic diffusers provided by Kavanaugh’s art department. Cues were orchestrated from an ETC Ion Xe console operated by Kent Arneson; Laustsen took advantage of that control to increase the intensity of the light over time — until the very end of the fight, when the two combatants are photographed primarily in silhouette against the LED walls. 

Wick literally fights his way through the set — alternately smashing his opponents and being smashed through glass pedestals, walls and floors — until he comes face to face with his nemesis. “We filmed this sequence with a [Chapman/Leonard Hustler IV] dolly and a Libra head, a Steadicam, and a couple of crane shots [with a MovieBird 45 and Aerocrane jib],” Laustsen details. “We didn’t want to go handheld because of all the straight lines. It would be a much more powerful look for the film if the frame was always parallel to the set.” “When we did bring in lights for the close-ups, we used Arri SkyPanel S60s and Astera AX1 LED tubes that we could attach virtually anywhere using magnets and clips,” Almeida adds. “The Astera tubes worked out great because they’re easy to hide, and if you saw a reflection, it just looked like the lighting that was built-in already.”

[dustedmagazine]

Bardo Pond — Volume 9 (Fire Records)

As its title indicates, Volume 9 is the ninth in a series of releases, dating back to 2000, of outtakes, jams and Bardo Pond-related sonic ephemera. But while most of the earlier Volumes were originally made and distributed independently by the band (on CDr, in small batches), Volume 9 has been released by Bardo Pond’s current label Fire Records on vinyl and as a digital download. The new (sorta) record makes visible Fire’s ongoing reissue campaign of the Volumes, including a number on vinyl of various splashy shades. That enterprise may principally be a collector’s fixation, and one might wonder about the relative value of the music, beyond the layers of insider hipness, the fluorescent orange records and the many, many 15-minute-plus explorations of deep and dark psychic terrain.

The relatively higher profile of its release implies that something is different about Volume 9, and the record makes good on that gesture. To be sure, if one listens to some of the earlier Volumes, there’s a charm to their shaggy-dog quality; see Volume 3, which wanders elliptically from informal studio jams like “Sifaka” to intensely stoned improv meditations like “Lomand” — sounds, one imagines, of a typical weekend at Lemur House in the early Aughts. Volume 9, on the other hand,feels like a more sonically focused affair, and the record makes more sense as a record, rather than just a collection of moments, however winning or blissed out.

Tracks on the first side — the long-ish (by Bardo standards, anyway, for whom songs don’t get really long until you top 20 minutes) “Conjunctio” and “The Nine Doubts” — were both recorded with Philly percussionist Michael Zanghi, likely best known as the drummer in the Violators, Kurt Vile’s live and frequent backing band. On these recordings, Zanghi leans into Eastern textures and flavors. There are suggestions of tabla in “Conjunctio,” along with tambourine and other hand-held percussive instruments. The Gibbons brothers’ fuzzed and fucked-with guitars dominate, as ever, but Bardo listeners who dig it when Isobel Sollenberger picks up her flute (and if you don’t, what are you doing listening to the band in the first place?) will want to tune into her playing, which hangs at the edge of the mix, spectral and mournful.

While “Conjunctio” suggests a bare melody and spends the rest of its time floating in the general area of that suggestion, “War is Over” is far more grounded in harmonic statement and something approaching song form. Two versions of the song appear on Volume 9: a three-minute statement and a twenty-one minute exploration of the statement’s potential. Both are evocative, yearning, a little melancholy. But the long version is the real deal, and for listeners attracted to the band’s sludgy psychedelia, it’s a terrific experience. Few bands are able to combine deliberation and slow accumulation with ecstatic abandon like Bardo Pond, and “War is Over” works that dynamic masterfully. While the song does not achieve the transcendent chaos of some of the band’s most sublime performances (see their cover of “Maggot Brain,” for instance, but buckle up), its fealty to its basic melodic structure makes it special and beautiful in different ways.

Volume 9 might not be the best way in to Bardo Pond’s particular powers and pleasures for the novice, but for anyone already familiar with the band’s remarkable music, the record is more than just a number for the completist. You’ll play it. And it will fill you with the peculiar, sometimes magnificent, sometimes terrifying joy that only Bardo Pond can create.

Jonathan Shaw