Unknown Chinese: Keye Luke

Although we're only tending to notice Chinese people showing up in our media now, there have been some that blazed the trail a long time ago. Keye Luke was one of those people and you've seen him in dozens of things and never noticed that it was the same chap. And he's an interesting fellow indeed.

Keye Luke (陸錫麟) was born in Guangzhou in the Cantonese-speaking part of China and thus has his name pronounced Luk Sek Lam. When he was still quite young, his family moved to Seattle. His father ran an art shop and Luke started off by working as an artist himself.

You'll have seen Grauman's Chinese Theater used as the venue of choice for many film premières (all the Star Wars films for a start) and it's the place with all the hand prints in the cement. It might seem these days that Grauman's is a horrendous mish-mash of Chinese styles, but actually many of the murals and decorations were created by Keye Luke.

Luke also designed many of the press packs for films (including the original King Kong here) and it was this work that got him into acting. RKO signed him as a contract actor.

One of Luke's first roles was as "Number One Son" in the Charlie Chan films. Although the lead was taken by white actor Warner Oland in 'yellowface' makeup, Keye Luke became famous as Lee Chan. Many actors at the time struggled to establish themselves outside of such a role, but Luke appeared in a series of films for RKO, usually in action roles.

Although many people associate the role of Kato in the Green Hornet with Bruce Lee and think that he pioneered the part as a Chinese man, Keye Luke came before him and established Kato as an action character.

Keye Luke appeared in dozens of films and helped lend credibility to many Hollywood films that were ostensibly set in China. He continued to play Number One Son in the Charlie Chan films, even when the lead was changed to Roland Winters. Hilariously, thanks to his youthful oriental looks, Luke was actually several years older than Winters, who was playing his screen father.

Luke became a veteran Hollywood actor, regarded as a "safe pair of hands" often used to support upcoming actors in a variety of films. Here he is with Peter Lorre in Mad Love, Lorre's first film.

Yeah, that's Keye Luke in the original Star Trek series. In later years he was due to play the part of Noonien Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but illness sadly prevented him from doing so and the part ended up being performed by Brent Spiner (Data).

Hanna Barbera made a cartoon version of the Charlie Chan stories and Keye Luke went full circle and provided the voice for Charlie Chan.

In the TV series Kung Fu, although the lead was taken by David Carradine, the part of the enigmatic Master Po was taken by Luke.

In another interesting part, Luke played Lord Sun Ming in the TV version of Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders. Detective/Judge Dee (aka Di Renjie) was an all-too-real official of the Tang dynasty who became known to the Western world through a series of novels written by Robert van Gulik.

One of my favourite parts that Luke played was that of Mister Wing in the Gremlins films. Despite being 80 years old at the time, Luke didn't look old enough and had to wear heavy make-up to make him resemble his true age. I've never had this confirmed, but I always presumed that the character was named after Luke's relative Wing Luke who was one of the very first Asians to hold public office in America, becoming Assistant Attorney General in Washington.

In one Scooby Doo episode, Keye Luke memorably played every part other than the gang in an admittedly Chinese- themed episode. And yeah, he would have gotten away with it too...

One of Luke's final roles was playing Zoltar the trans-gender/hermaphrodite alien bad guy in Battle of the Planets. Dubbed and edited from the extremely violent and profanity-laden Japanese original (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), Battle of the Planets was a surprise success in the West and Zoltar a favourite character.

Keye Luke died in 1991. His body of work was incredibly varied and included many iconic characters, but he is virtually unknown to Chinese audiences, which is a bit of a shame. Hopefully in years to come, he'll be recognised in the East as the pioneer that he was.

The odd truth about quicksand

It doesn't really exist. Well that was an easy blog post.

Oh, you want more? Okay well quicksand does exist, but it's not quite how it's normally portrayed. There are two types: wet and dry.

Wet quicksand is the type we've sort of heard of. It's made of particles of sand or mud suspended in water. Normally when sand becomes wet, water seeps into the gaps between grains, but with quicksand the water flows around the grains encasing them in a layer of water. It happens because of a nearby water source pushing water up through the sand and causing each grain to be suspended in water.

In the films, as soon as you step into quicksand it sucks you in and you're dragged under to die. In real life, quicksand isn't very deep and it won't suck you under. As it's mainly water, you can float in it without any problem. But as soon as you step onto quicksand, it will just part beneath you and you'll sink down quickly. It won't suck you down per se, but there is suction all around you which makes it more difficult to extract yourself, especially if you're wearing shoes. The flat surface that is the sole of your shoe will cause a vacuum to attempt to form under it when you lift it and then you're fighting against the suction of that vacuum.

It's rarely more than chest-deep so you won't necessarily die from the quicksand itself, but it can be rather hard to get out and that's what really kills you. There are regular reports of lone hikers getting stuck in a patch and not being able to get out. Then exposure to the elements, dehydration, etc will kill them.


In the video, note that guy is smart enough to remove his shoes before stepping into it. He'd have a lot harder of a time getting out if he didn't. Now the quicksand in the video is relatively easy to spot because of the wet surface, but often the surface will be covered with leaves or even a dried layer of sand so it can be very hard to spot.

That's wet quicksand and that's the kind we've sort-of heard of. But there's another kind which has long been a rumour, but has only recently been confirmed to exist: dry quicksand.

Dry quicksand is really scary. Instead of water flowing through it, it has had air. The airflow moving through the sand causes it to become more loosely packed. Ordinarily sand has a packing fraction of around 60% - that's the ratio of sand to air in the mixture. Because of sand's rounded shape, it can't be packed tightly. Consider a ball-pit at a kids playground; that's how sand is packed. In dry quicksand, the airflow through the sand has flowed around each grain separating it from the others. As the sand has fallen back, the packing fraction has been reduced making for a much looser sand mixture. In a recent experiment published in Nature, Dutch scientist Detlef Lohse and his mates built a box with a perforated base, filled it with fine-grain sand  and passed air through it. When the air was turned off, the packing fraction of the sand had been reduced to 40%.

Now reducing the packing fraction from 60 to 40% doesn't seem like a big difference, but look what happened when they dropped a ping pong ball onto the sand.

It sank down to a depth equal to five times its diameter before the sand underneath became compacted enough to support its weight. So if you were unlucky enough to find some of this stuff and step onto it, within a second or so, you'd be 10 metres down trying to discover a new method of breathing.

There had long been rumours of desert caravans vanishing into dry quicksand, but it was generally assumed to be bullshit. It wasn't until Dr Lohse's experiments that the existence of dry quicksand was confirmed.

During the Apollo lunar missions, there was a very real fear of something like dry quicksand. Previous lunar probes had confirmed a rocky, dusty surface on the Moon and there was concern about the packing fraction of the lunar dust. The Apollo sites were particularly chosen for being hard and rocky to reduce the risk of the Lunar Lander just vanishing below the surface into a pit of dust. The bottoms of the Lander legs were fitted with dish-like pads to help prevent this. Even though the Lander made it down okay, nobody knew for sure if it would be okay for the astronauts to step onto it. There was a chance the Neil Armstrong might have stepped off the Lander and disappeared into the dust.

Oh, Princess Bride, is there nothing you can't teach us?

Of course, NASA and  Dr Lohse could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they'd just watched The Princess Bride. Look, there's the Lightning Sand (called Snow Sand in the book), the second trial of the Fire Swamp. That reminds me: I really must write an article about Cary Elwes and his odd connection with the Lord Lucan mystery.

Getting back to quicksand... It ain't like in the movies, but it's real enough. Wet quicksand can be dangerous, but dry quicksand is downright terrifying. I read a statistic somewhere that 3% of all movies made in the 1950s and 1960s featured quicksand as a plot element, but it's now sadly missing from modern films as too much of a cliché. Well, apart from The Princess Bride and the Chinese film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (which is on my list of films I need to watch).

Films I've watched: Samurai Commando Mission 1549

Do I have to say anything at all?

A bit like with Snakes on a Plane, the title alone pretty much guaranteed I'd watch this, but once I saw the poster I knew I had to own it. Can you guess what the plot is?

There's some unit of the Japanese Defence Force (what they're forced to call their army since they were the runners-up in WWII) that's out doing some military stuff and then some experimental equipment causes them to go back in time to samurai days. There's two warring samurai clans and the modern soldiers are caught right in the middle of them. And then they resolve their problems through the art of violence. Yay!

You don't get great odds betting on the guys with the swords

This is actually a remake of an old 1979 Sonny Chiba film called GI Samurai or Time Slip(well, in the West anyway). Actually I think technically it's a sequel, but that doesn't matter. Okay, so the original is pretty much the same story but with less sophisticated effects, but it has a certain lazy charm that entertains. There are lots of fun mistakes too like the time travel process stopping wristwatches, but leaving tanks fully functional. It's also got a surprisingly high score on iMDb.



Samurai frigging love machine guns - but check out the unenthusiastic voiceover

Spot the difference
Samurai Commando Mission 1549 isn't exactly a film that will challenge your intellect, but it's fantastically silly fun and there's nothing wrong with that. And seeing as it's in foreign, that makes it all the more culturally valid.

And what is this thing you hu-mans call love? Oh, wait.. wrong film

I'm actually massively disappointed that they didn't get Sonny Chiba to do this film. He'd have been great as the samurai warlord. But I guess you can't have everything. The acting is better than you'd expect from a film like this, especially in the second half of the film when emotions start to run high. The fight scenes are visually engaging despite somehow being unspectacular. Yeah, it's a solid enough film and way better than it has any right to be.

I told you; once them samurai get their hands on a machine gun...

I tell you what. I'll read the map and you frigging well fly this thing

You don't have to be drunk to enjoy Samurai Commando Mission 1549, but I do recommend that you've at least taken some of those drugs that are so popular with the kids these days. The acting isn't bad, the plot isn't terrible, but it is a bit lacking, especially when you compare it to the original. If you haven't seen the Sonny Chiba version, then you'll probably enjoy this just fine. If you have seen it, then you might be unhappy with this one as it's somehow just not as good. All the elements are there and there's nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn't surpass itself in the way that the 1979 flick did.

MJE rating system
Aliens	0
Time Travel	X
Car chases	0
Twin guns	X
Lesbian Nazi vampires	0
Lasers	0
Explosions	X
Spaceships	0
Robots	0
Lights behind fans	X
Total	4

Back in the day, my friends and I came up with a system to rate bad films that were worth watching. Anything that scores more than 3 out of 10 pretty much guarantees a fun film. Some of the items on the list seem unlikely, but you just have to start looking for backlit fans to realise how prevalent they are in the less cultural end of film-making. So 4 out of 10 for Samurai Commando Mission 1549 makes it very much worth watching.

12 Chinese films I'm looking forward to in 2012 (part two)

Right, I'm back again. Here's the second (and final) part of my list of the most interesting looking Chinese films of 2012


7. I Not Naughty

Right, keep this one quiet: it's from Singapore and thus not exactly Chinese. If my wife finds out I'm watching Singaporean films, I'll be subject to a lengthy lecture about the inferiority of the Singaporeans. So let's just keep this between me and you, okay?

This is a followup to the enormously successful I Not Stupid and I Not Stupid Too. Jack Neo (again with the names) made a simple little film about thick kids at a Singaporean school. Now you'd think that would make for one of those standard Hollywood films about a class of kids at a failing school having their lives turned around by an unconventional teacher, but you'd be wrong.

After watching the amazing Iranian film Children of Heaven, Neo wanted to make a film that evoked a similar spirit. In Singapore, academic achievement is all-important and their educational system separates children into 'streams' according to academic ability. In a society not famous for allowing criticism of the government, Neo's resulting film satirising the education system created quite a stir and became one of the highest grossing films in Singaporean history. So great an impact did it have that it led to much public debate about the stigmatisation of academically-poor kids and even actual reform of the education system. Now you'd think that would make for a heavy and emotional film, but it's actually quite light-hearted in its approach and quite enjoyable to watch. That's not to say it's without some deeply distressing scenes and it can be quite uncomfortable to watch in places. It's a genuine make-you-laugh, make-you-cry, change-your-life film.

After an equally-successful sequel and a TV drama series, 2012 will see another sequel. Nothing is really known about it at the moment, but it's likely to be every bit as good and thought-provoking as the original.



8. Game of Assassins

Now this is a bit of a return to the old school. Beijing-based American stunt man Ian Powers and director Seven Miao (uh... yeah) are collaborating on a film very much in the style of so many Shaw Brothers classics.

The film features veteran actor Chen Kuan-tai as General Tu Jia who trains a trio of young fighters to seek revenge on the villainous King of Wei (Leung Kar-yen), only for one of them to be tempted from his mission by wealth and power.


There's no trailer for this one yet. So in the meantime here's Ian Power's impressive 2010 showreel





9. Flying Swords of Dragon Gate

Jet Li. Do I need to say anything more? Directed by Tsui Hark. It's a remake of a remake of a classic Taiwanese film. Yeah, that's definitely enough. Sure-fire swords and flying brilliance.



10. Qian Xuesen

Ah, now this one's a bit odd. I don't know the name of the film or anything about it other than it's based on the life story of Qian Xuesen.

You probably haven't heard of Qian Xuesen (or Hsue-Shen Tsien as the yankees tended to call him), but he's one of the most important people in the history of space flight. Back in the 1940s, he attended MIT and later Caltech, studying under von Karman (regarded as the foremost aerodynamic theoretician) and went on to become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was the lead developer of America's first real rocket, the multi-stage Private A.

Americans being the paranoid dicks that they are, when Qian Xuesen applied for full citizenship in 1949, they decided he was a communist and rescinded his security clearance and stuck him in prison. Charming. Five years later, the Americans swapped him for some pilots the Chinese had captured during the Korean War and Qian headed home to start China's space programme instead.

I love space stuff and have right since I was a kid. Every school project where I had a choice of subject matter was about space. I love reading Starblazer comics partly because the back page always featured a satellite or spacecraft. Yep, I love space, but I hate NASA. They've managed to take a fascinating and exciting subject and make it dull as fuck. Oh yay, yet another Space Shuttle launch. Where's it going? Oh, the International Space Station. What's the ISS for? So the Space Shuttle's got somewhere to go. And what's the Space Shuttle for? To service the ISS. Ah...

Remember Starblazers? Then we ain't friends any more

Apart from the odd Mars probe, NASA have failed to do anything exciting since I was a young child. They complain about the public not being interested in what they're doing, but there's only so many communications satellite launches and weather probes you can watch before it becomes boring as hell.

I like China for a number of reasons, but one thing I'm so very pleased about is the Chinese space programme. Oh yes, they know how to do it right. I want to see people going to places and doing shit, not some glorified minivan that failed its own design brief going to low earth orbit (yet again) to tinker about with a fucking weather satellite. So when China went from chucking up unmanned flights to putting a guy in orbit in just a few years, I got interested again. China is working on its own space station and already has the first bit up there (bet you didn't know that) and has the thing scheduled to be completed just as the white elephant that is the ISS is retired. For extra fun, China's sending probes to the Moon shortly afterwards and plans to have an observatory on the lunar surface just after that. That's more like it! Heck, China's even got plans to send probes to Mars with a manned mission to follow up on that. Now that's proper space exploration. Fuck NASA.

Fei Tian aka Wentian I Wentian II

One of my favourite films of 2011 was Fei Tian. It wasn't terribly good as a film, with a story about Chinese taikonauts (astronauts) training to go into space, but the level of realism was fantastic. The Chinese space programme is considerably assisted by the Russians and their new-found desperation for cash and Fei Tian had unprecedented access to various Russian and Chinese space facilities which made for an amazing bit of space porn. Oh, it almost had me in tears at times.

So I'm very much looking forward to a film about the life of Qian Xuesen - the unsung hero of the American space programme and the father of Chinese rocketry. He was one of the first people who made space flight possible and one of the last to make it exciting.



11. The Warring States

Before China was unified by the first emperor Qin Shi Huang, there was what's called the Warring States Period. China was split into seven kingdoms, each led by a warlord intent on a bit of border expansion. It was a period of almost constant war and a lot of really cool military innovation took place during this time.

So director Chen Jin has decided to concentrate on the rivalry between two generals: Pang Juan and Sun Bin. Theirs is an interesting tale with Pang conspiring to imprison Sun in order to force him to reveal his military strategies and tactics. He succeeded, but Sun feigned insanity, to the point of living in a pigsty and eating pigshit (no, really) before escaping and uniting with a rival kingdom to fight Pang.

I should say that this film is very much made for a Chinese audience who are all familiar with the history and legends of the period. If you don't know the background, it's probably going to be a bit confusing. But if you enjoy massive battles, billions of arrows, espionage, zinjas (what the Chinese call ninjas), torture and some insanely clever military tactics, you'll at least be able to sit back and enjoy the excellent visuals.



War porn. It's a thing



12. The Great Magician

Starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka-fai), The Great Magician is set during a turbulent period in Chinese history (the 1920s). Despite looking like a heavy period drama, it's actually a comedy about political intrigue and shifting alliances.



In the middle of it all is Tony Leung's character, returning to Beijing to reclaim his former love. It's bad timing as she's been taken as wife number seven by local warlord, General Lei who has coincidentally imprisoned Tony's former mentor. So with a cunning mix of tricks, both magic and martial, Tony Leung sets out to rescue everyone without getting himself (and everyone else) killed. Yeah, now I know that doesn't sound like a comedy and I know the trailer doesn't make it look like one either, but trust me on this. There's some daft bits in it like General Lei ordering his soldiers to drive a tank backwards down a street because the back end looks prettier. There's lots of fun little moments as the General bickers and fights with rival warlords (one of them played by Tsui Hark) and the General getting bullied by his six other wives. Yeah, there's a serious story in the midst of it all, but director Derek Yee retains the humour of Zhang Haifan's original book. Oh and Jackie Chan's in there in a blink-and-you'll-miss-him appearance



And there we go. Those are the 12 (well, the other six) Chinese films I'm most looking forward to in 2012. Those and Jackie Chan's Chinese Zodiac film that I don't know anything about yet.

12 Chinese films I'm looking forward to in 2012 (part one)

Okay, so I've already done the Hollywood rundown, now here's what I'm looking forward to from the crazy world of Chinese cinema. Oh and I haven't bothered to mention Jackie Chan's new Chinese Zodiac film as it's a given that I'll want to see that, plus it's not out until 12/12/12 and nothing's really known about it.



1. The Monkey King

Donnie Yen? Check. Monkey? Check. Well, I'm good to go

Remember the Monkey TV series? No? Then you're a callow child and I despise you. Take a 16th century Chinese legend, make it into a Japanese TV series, dub it into English, add Andrew Sachs, Miriam Margolyes and Burt Kwouk and you've got nine out of the ten ingredients of awesome (the last one being flying on clouds).

Do you realise that Monkey (Journey to the West) is actually one of the four great novels of Chinese literature? Or that it's (kind of) a true story? And that's it's basically the equivalent of the Bible (but way better)? Yep, by watching Monkey, you're actually taking part in a sophisticatedly religious literature cultural experience. Hell yes.

And now it's 2012 and China is making a film version (for the billionth time), but this time with Donnie fucking Yen. Oh yeah. I love Donnie Yen. I love that he's 48 years old and yet still gets film parts playing 20 year olds (eg Dragon Tiger Gate). I love that hos parents were worried about him getting into too many fights (in Boston of all places) and reckoned that sending him to Beijing to learn wushu martial arts was somehow a solution to this. I particularly love that Donnie Yen's mum is way harder than he is - every film he's in, when the bad guy comes at him, I'm always thinking "Yeah, but his mum can kick your arse".


Donnie Yen's mum. 70 years old and she's got more swords than an... uh... appropriate metaphor

So where was I? Oh yes... Monkey + Donnie Yen = I'm definitely watching this. Chow Yun-fat's in it as well, but I'm already sold long before we get to him.





2. The Viral Factor

Ah, Dante Lam - now here's a director who just ticks all the boxes. Hong Kong? Guns? Explosions? Check, check, check. Cop and his Triad brother facing off against each other with two pistols each? Probably - I think it's against Hong Kong law not to.

Dante (how do they choose their English names?) Lam seems to have played Call of Duty and shoved in as many modern guns as possible. There's a story involving uh, well I don't know exactly. There's something about a virus and uh.. well then there's an awful lot of shooting. Right, I'm in. Jay Chou (whom I hate) and Nicholas Tse are the weapon transportation devices - theoretically, they're actors, but we all know the real stars are the guns. Oh and there's the always excellent machine gun babe, Bai Bing playing the character of "Ice" (um, yeah...)


Bai Bing - even her name is a killing word
If this was an American film it would be dismissed as childish, overblown rubbish, but with the addition of everyone talking in Foreign, it becomes an art-house cultural event and you an intellectual film connoisseur for vegging out in front of it with a pile of alcohol.






3. Ultra Reinforcement

Last spring, a story suddenly appeared across a lot of newspapers about the Chinese government and time travel. Depending on the quality of the newspaper involved the story ranged from their government banning time travel to them banning it in films (warning: Daily Mail article). All this was bollocks of course. What the government was doing was issuing new guidance requiring film makers to not include elements such as time travel to films involving Chinese history or literature.

It had become a bit fashionable (not to mention lazy) to slap in elements such as time travel into historical epics. Imagine doing a serious biographical pic about Henry VIII and halfway through having some aliens from the future drop in to help him laser the French. Yeah, okay so that would be pretty cool, but it was getting so that almost every film was like that and the government was getting a bit tired of seeing Chinese culture getting adulterated so out went the edict and everything changed. This might seem a bit heavy handed, but consider that the other month they decided there were too many entertainment shows (of the X Factor type) and cut them by 80%. Just think about it: all the Simon Cowells gone overnight - now just how important is democracy to you?

Anyway, the result of this government tinkering with the subject matter of films has led to a bunch of original fantasy films coming out. They may take historical legends as inspiration, but they're able to go much further into insanity by ditching any semblance of reality.

So Ultra Reinforcement is the latest of this new breed of films. Not content with throwing random words at a poster in order to choose a name, the producers have taken a similar approach to the film. Take young hot actress Jing Tian (whose name hilariously also refers to the system of land distribution in 8th century China), chuck in a Taiwanese pop singer (to ensure cross-border appeal) Wallace Huo and add a veteran actor to tie it all together and make it work. Then it's just a case of fish out of water comedy by bringing characters from the distant past to modern day China and it's laughs all the way.

So you see, even middling fantasy rubbish like this can actually be a deeply educational experience. Just watching some young hottie pretending she knows how to wave around a sword can give insight into the politics of China and the immutable forces effecting Chinese cultural heritage.

Although the main reason I'll be watching this is because of veteran actor Lam Suet. How do they choose those names? Lam Suet appeared in a lot of Stephen Chow films (Kung Fu Hustle for example) and is just a delightful character actor who can turn a good film into a great one. Hopefully here, he'll be able to turn second rate shit into acceptable sub-par comedy. Hoorah!



I couldn't find a trailer and this is what YouTube suggested when I searched for "ultra reinforcement"





4. Legendary Amazons

Western history is pretty interesting and all, but it can be a bit dry. For reasons I can't fathom, Chinese history always seems to involve people just murdering shitloads of other people using spectacular weapons and awesome martial arts. History classes in Chinese schools must be cool as fuck.

Yeah, so this film is another true historical tale. I'll save you reading the eight volumes of the novel or sitting through the numerous operas about the Yang clan: big Chinese family, very loyal to the Northern Song dynasty, lots of fighting, menfolk mostly get killed or captured, chicks dig out their prettiest armour and most outlandish weapons and go batshit crazy kicking the crap out of... uh, well I never quite understood who the bad guys were when I was reading the books, but that's just not important.


AhProduced by Jackie Chan and with some excellent older cast members from the golden age of kung fu movies when the girls really could do all the moves themselves. The film stars Cecilia Cheung who seems to have been rehabilitated now after the amazing Edison Chen photo scandal (long story short: there are some very explicit pictures of her on the internet). Massive continuous battles, some really unusual weapons (that did actually exist), kick ass armour and quite a lot of blood and you've got a fantasy epic that's actually historically accurate (well, sort of).



5. Kung Fu Hustle 2


There's not even a poster for Kung Fu Hustle 2 yet, so here's the final ten minute fight from Dragons Forever
with Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, the brilliant Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah as the cigar-chomping bad guy
Stephen Chow. Yuen Wah.  More of the same. Yipee!






6. (The Flying) Guillotines

The 1970s were a crazy time for Chinese films. Kung fu was what was most popular, thanks to people like Bruce Lee. Chinese Opera had always been more about sword fights though and so there was a series of films that tried to combine the kung fu film style with weaponry.

After a number of films of mind-blowing craziness, things came to a new high (or low, depending on your critical stance) with The Master of the Flying Guillotine. There's this guy, he's sort of blind (but he's got really massive eyebrows, so they might just be getting in the way) and he's got a mate with extendible arms and there's this bloke with one arm (Jimmy Wang Yu who seemed to always play characters with one arm), but Old Blindy has got this sort of hat on a string, but it's got teeth and it eats heads. Yeah!


The original 1970s Guillotine movie

And so you can probably guess that this new Guillotines is a bit of a remake. Yeah, it probably is. Not very much is know about it other than it's out this year, but I really can't see how it can fail to be anything other than mental.



Crikey. I was going to make this list about the twelve Chinese films I'm most looking forward to, but this article's already pretty long. I think I'll just stop here and carry on tomorrow with the other six.

Stuck for a film to watch? Try "Foolproof"

I have trouble watching a lot of films. After seeing a trailer or a plot summary, I generally don't need to see the bloody film to know exactly what'll happen. And it's not like I've got precognitive powers; a lot of us have the same problem.

Accordingly, I watch a lot of foreign films. It's not because I'm intellectual or snobbish (although I resolutely am), but simply because I won't know a damn thing about them and subsequently have no expectations or preconceptions. Every now and then though I do like to watch something in English though.

A while back, my friends and I wanted to watch a film to round off an evening together and we were a bit stuck. Luckily I remembered I had "Foolproof" lying around.

Oh, Ryan Reynolds. He's so dreamy

Go into Foolproof with no expectations and you'll enjoy it. It's a perfectly-formed little film that didn't have a big budget and doesn't really have any big stars, unless you count Ryan Reynolds. Oh and David Suchet (Poirot) is in it as an excellently menacing bad guy.

It's a low-key comedy about heists. There aren't any laugh-out-loud moments, but there are some nice little quips and jokes that will please you and it's all kept serious enough that you're drawn in. Now it may be a heist movie, but that's not going to put a girlfriend off. There's enough in it for one of the members of the weird gender to maintain an interest. Heck, it's even light-hearted enough that you can watch it with kids.

King's knight to king's pawn breakfast cereal fire escape. Huh?

And that's really all I'm going to tell you about it. It's a great little film and you'll wonder why you've never heard of it. It gets a 6.5 rating on iMDb which is pretty respectable. And with it being an overlooked film from 2003, it's cheap to get hold of and has enough major actors in it to ensure you'll be able to find it with little difficulty. Amazon are doing shrink-wrapped copies for £2.99
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Foolproof-DVD-David-Suchet/dp/B0002W13UM/

My little grey cells say that I'm gonna cut you up if you don't do the blag, you muppet. D'accord?

Oh, now I'm a bit of a computer nerd and films with inaccurate computery shit do piss me off considerably. This doesn't have any of that. It's fine. All the technology is plausible, simple and works in the way that it pretty much should. Phew.

I was going to make a hilarious Angry Birds joke, but, y'know, meh...

There are quite a few twists and turns and you're a better man than me (gunga din) if you manage to figure it all out. But there isn't anything so complex that the girlfriend is going to be interrupting you every five minutes to ask what's going on. Ryan Reynolds is pretty enough to keep the ladies entertained, but he's manly and funny enough for the guys to like him too. Heck, this is pretty much the film that made me like Ryan Reynolds. Oh and the chick's good looking enough for you to want to look at, but not enough that you'll get into trouble for doing so. Just sayin'...

Y'know I've just managed to convince myself to watch it again. End of review.

Here's a trailer. Don't watch it. Just get the film.