Days of Being LJ

I watched The Godfather trilogy with my posse over the weekend and words still can’t describe how much I love those films. I guess it’s another one of those bi-decade re-obsessions I have. But every time I watch an old film or TV show I get this incredible sense of mortality when I start realising holy shit:

Pacino and De Niro are both hitting 70, Sean Connery is 80 and even fricking Macgyver is 60.

Soon, these people (who I’ve grown up with through the medium of cinema) are going to start carking it, and then…I’m gonna cark it too.

It’s a weird way of looking at things really. I get these major mortality pangs, as I like to call them, about once every year, usually towards the end of the year when I realise the impending doom of my birthday in January and I come to the realisation that I’m another year closer to death.

Speaking of great actors I was looking up Pacino’s filmography and in a span of 5 years in the early 1970s he made:

• The Godfather
  
• Serpico
  
• The Godfather part II
  
• Dog Day Afternoon

And he didn’t win an Oscar for any of them. I mean those films pretty much defined his career and he would probably never reach that pinnacle again but to think people like Gwyneth Paltrow have an Oscar for a role in Shakespeare In Love (even though I like that film, it’s still drivel), the lack of the award for the role of Michael Corleone just defines bafflement.

When one talks about Pacino, you immediately have to insert De Niro (crude imagery: one is the bun and the other the frankfurter in a classic NYC hotdog). As Brando defined post-war method acting on screen and thus changing the nature of cinema forever, Pacino and De Niro were both his natural successors. Coming out of the method schools of the East coast they both inspired generations of wannabe actors, mobsters and Italians with raspy voices and squinty frowns.

Pacino took rise in the early 70s but the latter half of the decade and much of the 80s where squarely in De Niro’s pocket. Perhaps his solid relationship with Scorsese guaranteed him a slew of well developed roles whilst Pacino retreated back to treading the boards after his screen career slipped into a long cold coma (Scarface the one exception).

Although they consistently shared sentences, it was not until Heat in 1995, did they share some screentime, and even then their one major scene together was shot with on separate days with stand-ins. Therefore Righteous Kill (billed as the first collaborative film) was to be a wet dream for all fanboys and girls.

Alas it was a shit film. And really what could be expected? Pacino’s last good film was Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone’s ensemble homage to pro-football, and De Niro? Probably Frankenheimer’s Ronin in 1998. Of course people would disagree, heaps of people LOVED Meet the Parents, and obviously Pacino’s Roy Cohn was deservedly lauded (even though it veered a little on the shouty scenery gnawing Pacino).

The only good thing to come as a result of Righteous Kill

But as these great actors get older and come closer and closer to shuffling off this mortal coil, we think, shit when will we ever get actors like these two ever again? Actors who DEFINED cinema.

Like every wannabe director I’ve had lucid dreams where I’ve cast both in a movie. Of course in reality if I was ever in the same room as Pacino and De Niro, I’d wet my pants and cry in the corner. However in my imagination, as brilliant as it is, I see, 5 years from now, my smooth awesome confident self directing these two 75 year old geezers in a romantic comedy.

Just think about it…you know you’d want to pay 18 bucks to see it.

LJK film al pacino, filmmaking, godfather, life, mortality, robert de niro

So I’m at the start of another weekend and I feel so happy that I won’t have to go to work until Monday. I have no idea how I’m going to deal with the next 40 years of my life but I’m hoping that somewhere along the line I can subsist by only selling photos, poetry, advice or whatnot and languish at home with my pretend cats emulating the best of Judi Dench in Notes On a Scandal.

I had dinner tonight with Lam and his Voice Actor whom was participating in Lam’s Media Arts Project this semester. I stuck around to help a bit afterwards and since I had my trusty camera, took a few production stills. It made me realise how much I did miss the production side of things, the tangibility of the equipment, the fiddling of knobs and buttons…Problem solving on the run. I really like the awesomeness of production technology and overall I miss collaborating with different people, actors, crew etc. However I’m sure that if I was working on a freelance project, I’d be bitching about it forever so perhaps I’m just happy being miserable?

Anyhoo, because my mobile ran out of battery earlier in the day it meant I couldn’t contact anyone in the city to hang out with so I just decided to head home on a lonely Friday night, since Lam was bound to spend ages recording his script. Got to Wynyard and missed my bus by 5min, the next being another 25min wait, so I hopped on a 273 instead and decided to walk from Crows Nest back home and perhaps take some piccies along the way. Google Maps tells me that it was 3km exactly. So I legged it and tried some long exposures at the freeway overpass on Miller Street and at the Tower Bridge at Northbridge. I felt a tad of a ditz with my tripod and camera on a freeway overpass on a Friday night but I think it turned out for the best really.

Some favourites from tonight:

Torrents of Light (Freeway Overpass)

Bridge of Light

I think some of the reasons why I’ve taken up this period of photography with such aplomb are:

1. I haven’t properly photographed using an SLR since 2002.
2. Sometimes I enjoy looking at the world through a camera lens. I’ve done it consistently for the past 10 years of my life. There’s no sense in stopping now.

LJK life, photography filmmaking, judi dench, long exposure, photography

Okay so the title of this post suggests that Shinjuku Incident (Jackie Chan’s latest Non-Kungfu offering) was a bad film. It’s not, it was actually quite enjoyable. A few unintentional laughs yes, (but when do people like Alan and I ever not laugh at unintentional moments?) but some good tension and action set pieces too.  Chan takes a few acting risks which is nice but overall he is slightly miscast as Steel Head. Derek Yee like most HK directors needs to restrain his actors badly, and what often starts as a nice scene descends into scenery chewing with bad moustaches.

Shinjuku Incident also embodies elements what has often become the scourge of HK cinema in the past 5 years or so:

1. Way too many actors from across the regions, HK actors, Mainland actors, Taiwanese actors and of course Japanese, cause the film is set in Japan.
2. Because of 1, you get HK actors trying to speak mandarin whilst lapsing into Cantonese or trying to sound Dong Bei but with an unconvincing Dong Bei mandarin accent, Taiwanese speaking hakka and mandarin, Japanese speaking Japanese AND Chinese and Mainlanders speaking standard mandarin (no that they’re actually capable of doing anything other). Like WTF people, have some consistency. The thing is that if it was a Hollywood film and Brad Pitt was meant to be a British character but instead spoke in an American accent they’d be uproar, but in Chinese films it happens all the fucking time. Like someone introduce the notion of a “Dialect Coach” into Chinese Cinema…PLEASE

• • But wait, you say…What about something like Hero or Lust Caution where you have HK actors speaking mandarin with an accent? That’s okay I say because those characters where never explicitly said to be from a certain place in China. For Ancient China we don’t even know what the accents were so it shouldn’t even be a problem to the viewer. In Lust Caution, Tony Leung’s Character was from the South, so he had a southern mandarin accent which worked. But in Shinjuku Incident, Jackie Chan and Daniel Wu were both meant to be from Dong Bei…but had southern mandarin accents.
  • But hey if you don’t even understand Chinese you wouldn’t care, so maybe I’m just being picky.

1. Total inconsistency with tone, Shinjuku Incident is part country bumpkin migrant rags to riches, part black society, part TV Soap, part weird surrealist punk rock anti-drug story.

Derek Yee is a director with some good solid and interesting films under his belt, but overall I can’t help but feel that The Shinjuku Incident was another failed attempt at pleasing the Pan-Asian market. Yet because of it’s subject matter, it didn’t get a release in the lucrative Mainland market and thus had to settle for whatever profits it can take from HK (It headlined the HKIFF) and peripheral markets like this weird deal made in Australia where it was exclusively shown at Hoyts cinemas.

What I think has been the fundamental downfall of the HK film industry is not only due to the rise of the Mainland China but more the lack of development of it’s own talent. In the golden age of HK Cinema the directors, actors and other crew came up through the studio system from the 1960s-70s with the likes of the Shaw Brothers Studio. They were essentially trained as collaborative filmmakers not as money men. Time and time again we see the same directors making the better films now, John Woo, Derek Yee etc.

Later on actors came though the TVB training system which has now become weaker and weaker because whilst previously young men and women who tried out for the TVB school did so not for the fame or money but because they didn’t have any other avenues (Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung etc etc). But now acting is seen as lucrative, HK people go into it for the wrong reasons and hence you keep getting more and more mediocre graduates.

So now you’ve got a lack of young developed talent both in front and behind the cameras in HK who have to compete with the greater numbers of more talented people over the border on the mainland. So we have actors and directors in their late 40s-50s who are still taking the top billing and getting the best projects…why? because no one younger can come close.

It’s a serious dilemma, and HK Cinema is not going to improve until it decides to start nurturing the younger talent like it did in the past. So in 10 years time I hope I’m still not stuck watching Jackie Chan, Tony Leung and Andy Lau in roles which should be played by guys in their 30s.

So has HK Cinema lost it’s mojo? Yes, and tt has since probably 2005 and probably even much earlier (although I think 2004-2005 was the last year for solid films like Breaking News, 2046, Jiang Hu, Love Battlefield etc) And it probably won’t regain its mojo in the near future. I’m thinking there’s at least another 10-15 year wait until there’s a possibility of a resurgence. It’s sad, but the damage has been done.

—

We have a similar issues in Australia with both Film and TV. I was looking at the BBC blogs over the past few days and stumbled over these:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunity/college_of_comedy.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunity/writers_academy1.shtml

The BBC has a Writer’s Academy and a College of Comedy…to do what? To nurture new talent. And this is why they’re able to continue to output new and interesting programs because they always have a fresh crop of youngsters waiting in the wings. But not only do these programs benefit BBC itself but it also benefits the entire UK TV and film industry.

*sigh*

LJK film accents, bbc, dialects, filmmaking, hong kong cinema, jackie chan, writing