Giant Robot Store and GR2 News

  One day… we’ll attend this festival. This is the premier Fantastic Film Festival in North America. July 14-August 7. It’s takes place in Montreal and this is the 15th year! As usual, anything out of control, interesting, and weird will be here. Oh, it should be Asian. New film by Takashi Miike – Ninja Kids, Sion Sono – Cold Fish, Jet Li – Ocean Heaven, and more. Seriously what’s missing? At times, the films are super over the top ridiculous. B or C movie if it were made here with American bad actors, but then again, sometimes they’re not. (Twitch film – FantAsia 2011)   Check out the Ocean Heaven trailer… you expect to see Jet Li start throwing punches. [youtube]EJemRXBaO80[/youtube]   Miike’s Ninja Kids looks ridiculous [youtube]HVjoh-jG36o[/youtube]
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Takashi Miike to Direct Film Based on Nintendo DS game – Phoenix Wright Miike’s next film following his 13 Assassins and Ninja Kids… This man keeps busy, and it’s striking that anyone will make a film based on a DS game. That’s how strong DS is in Japan. “In a typical “Ace Attorney” game, you’d hunt for clues in various locations and talk to persons of interest who might info on a case. Then, like a “Law & Order” episode, the action shifts to a courtroom where you put witnesses on the stand and whip out evidence that shatters their alibis.” (IFC - Miike Phoenix Wright) After the Quake: Sake Returns! Takahiro Hirai says, “I thought the fermentation had gone too far and we’d have to discard everything. I had almost lost hope,” he says. “But it turned out to be full of life, with an excellent strong, thick flavor, although very different from our usual style.” It turns out that although the many sake houses damaged from the quake are re-finding their stride. The rice used isn’t from the quake zone, but are from Western Japan. Perhaps there’s a few relaxing times ahead. (Time – Sake is back) China slows down Rail Expansion The story might not be that exciting, sans this one passage: “A corruption scandal ousted China’s speed-loving railway minister Liu Zhijun, amid reports he kept multiple mistresses nationwide, and concerns over safety and cost persuaded his replacement to lower top operating speeds from 217 to 186 mph.” Guess what he wanted the high speed railways for? (USA Today – Bootie Train) 40 Ways The Chinese Economy Is Beating The Living Daylights Out Of The US There’s probably more than 40, but this scroll through list is a good quick way to catch up on how strong China is at the moment. “Since 2005, the U.S. has spent $1.1 trillion in Chinese products and services, but China has only spent $272 billion on American goods and services” (Business Insider – 40 Ways China Leads) Old School Asian American Actor – James Hong “You know the face. but you may not know that actor James Hong, who voices Panda’s papa, grew up in Minneapolis “They couldn’t find a role for me in high school because they said they didn’t know what to do with a yellow face. And even at the U of M, they’d say, ‘What would we do with a Chinese man in our plays?’ ” James Hong is one of those actors who has contributed to the growth of Asian Americans in Hollywood, but in the end, he gets just a pat on the back, if even that. (Twincities – James Hong)
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From Japan, a Poncho Toilet for Disasters (to Prevent Disasters) “This is basically burnable garbage.” When you gotta to, you gotta go, And in order to go, you need two things: A place to go, and bit of privacy. On the serious side, you have a country like Japan, where crowded living conditions often make attaining privacy difficult. And we have a hard time imagining how the survivors of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami have adapted to having even less privacy than usual in crowded shelters and refugee centers. On the lighter side, we can see a huge advantage to having a toilet in a baggie at one’s, uh, disposal. Check out the video at the link, and just try to convince yourself that this is a crappy idea. (SFGate – Poncho Toilet) Mumbai Artist Puts Himself in “Jail”—Wait, What? “My act is a poetic take on the practice of arresting and punishing people for sedition.” Jail is perhaps too strong a word. But the point performance artist Tushar Joag is trying to make by sealing himself in a five-foot by three-foot cell is that India’s sedition laws are too harsh and too freely utilized. But it’s a good thing he has confined himself in a space with a bathroom, because all he’s doing from now until he releases himself on May 30th is writing the words “I will not lose faith in the Indian Judiciary and Democracy” in a stack of blank school notebooks. (Hindustan Times – Tushar Joag, and CNNGo – Indian Artist) Amazing Flight Path Time Exposures from San Francisco International “The lights seem almost alien in nature. The shots string ribbons of fiber optics across the skyline, almost fooling the viewer.” With enough time and patience, an artist can take even the most mundane and run-of-the-mill occurrences and show us something normally unseen and extraordinary. The photos you’ll see at the links below make it clear that the nearly two years photographer Terence Chang spent making these images, from July, 2008 to April, 2010, was time very well spent. Until viewing these photos, it never occurred to us that the normally annoying event of a jet airliner flying overhead contained such sublime, concealed beauty. (YPOC –Terence Chang. Full Gallery on Flickr) Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai “As a complete slice of entertainment, “Hara-Kiri” isn’t quite at the elevated level of “Thirteen Assassins”, and plays more like the talky but absorbing first half of that film.” Following our NewsBot piece yesterday about the impending American release of a pornographic 3D film from Hong Kong, today we bring you news of yet another film genre into which 3D technology is making inroads. Frankly, it seems a bit incongruous for a highly-respected director of Samurai genre films like Miike Takashi to get on the 3D bandwagon. But according to this review, the use of 3D in “Hara-Kiri” is restrained and understated, and does not detract from the overall lushness and quality of the film. In fact, the only...
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