Just wanted to write myself an artist profile on www.alivenotdead.com. An online community targeted at networking artists in the creative field.

Oh, and btw, I'm in Hong Kong now. No more New York for a while.

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Unlike many directors, Bernard did not grow up with a Super 8mm in the basement and filming cheesy C-grade horror flicks at the backyard with his younger brothers. Instead, he grew up holding inanimate objects and pretend to be in fantasy worlds in the living room as his parents thought he had Attention Deficit.

But once during the running of the Original Star Wars trilogy on TV in celebration of the 20th Anniversary, this young Chinese boy realized that he wanted to make movies.

It was not until high school that he got a taste of what acting would be in drama class. And it was not until he chose videography as his Drama major that he wrote and filmed his first short. Shooting in miniDV and editing on two SuperVHS decks... linear editing! The film was about a homeless man and the tragic loss of his best friend.

Time went by and Bernard lay his dreams of becoming a filmmaker to pursue a more stable career in computing. Though, once he finished his Computer Science degree and told himself he didn't want to see numbers and parameters for a job, he opted to enroll at the Sydney College of the Arts with their Masters of Film and Digital Image course. After graduation, he worked at several Sydney production companies as editor or technical analyst.

Still lacking the taste of film creativeness, it was not until a chance encounter with Hong Kong director, Ronny Yu, that he was pushed once again into the dreams he so thought of walking since that night in his parent's room, seeing Luke Skywalker with his trusty saber.

He enrolled himself into the New York Film Academy to spruce up his writing. Currently, he's traveling the world, writing and by the end of 2008, he will have several self written and directed short films to showcase his talents.

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Damn, I wrote quite a bit...

A bit late of a review for the most costly produced 2008 Summer blockbuster, but at least it didn’t disappoint. So let’s get the most important question, is it good? Yes. Yes it does. It’s not on the realistic level of Batman Begins so I would put it in between Spiderman and Fantastic Four. I placed it there because although the film deals with realistic issues of war and terrorism, it also has a lot of gags and jokes in the film. (I especially thought the visual metaphor of fisting to be very very cheeky)

The film would most closely resemble Spiderman 1. As the film starts off pretty quickly with our hero, Tony Stark, in a situation that grants his power. In this case, he is mortally injured and must create a device which sustains his life… evolving into the Ironman suit.




Audience is then taken on a journey of Stark learning his abilities and using it for good. In the end, using it to defeat an adversary. Though, I am yet to see a superhero film with an actual hard villian to defeat. When are we going to see a Sephiroth?



The casting was well chosen with Robert Downey Jr. fitting the part of a wise cracking jerk billionaire turned physical philanthropist truthfully. The whole film was essentially on his shoulders. I felt that the other actors didn’t do too bad, but Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard’s characters needed much more development. I felt that they only had dialogue to give RDJ something to work with.



Terrence Howard actually looked like he was going to be in tears in every scene of his. Maybe he was sick? Oh, and wait for extra footage after the entire credits, “That’s so gangsta!” was the response of this dude that commented throughout the whole film. And for Jeff Bridges? Well, as I said, I’m yet to see a villain that is deep. Maybe The Prince of Clowns will fulfill that missing narrative in The Dark Knight.

I was a bit confused with two locations in the film. For someone that has no idea how the Airforce works, I did not know where the air traffic monitoring scene was set in. Also, a scene where Pepper Pott had to access computer files, it wasn’t clear who’s office she went to. That scene was meant to be suspenseful, but after seeing the screensaver of a hot rod, I was thinking how is it scary to go to Tony Stark’s office?



The action in the film was top notch. Ironman dodging F22 Raptors and fighting militias were cool, but not as on the seat action as Superman Returns were (saving a falling plane is just crazy.. just Super). The CGI in Ironman was flawless. I guess that’s the advantage of modeling inorganic objects.




Overall, the film was a good watch and I would say is just under Batman Begins and Spiderman. It would’ve surpassed those films if the writers chose to put Tony Stark in harder situations and have more to lose than just his family’s honor. But I guess Ironman is just too smart to get into sticky situations. As Christopher Nolan, director of Batman Begins said, “The turning point for Bruce is when he realises that he’s not immortal, that even as Batman, he will still fail. So we made him fall off a building in flames.”


4/5      

When I watched the first Harold and Kumar, I thought the film was hilarious. Two Asian dudes that goes on a crazy adventure just to get themselves some burgers. Memorable scenes were, Freakshow, Bobby Lee as the student, EEXXXTRRREEEEMMME, the Black guy in jail scenes and beating the Bag of Weed wife.



Unlike the first film, I don't think there were such memorable or funny scenes. But does that make the sequel bad? No. Why? Because this time, we have a plot! The quest is not just one linear goal now. The first film had Harold believing in himself and not doing other people's work, whereas Kumar had accepted that he is good at medicine. This second time around, their emotional goal is to grow up and find love.



Having hilarious flashbacks, EMO HAROLD, the writers "plant the seeds" for what happens later on in the film. And it works effectively. It gives the film a full circle appeal and much more touching than the first film. Neil Patrick Harris cameos in this film again, but I don't think his scenes were that funny. Not as funny as how he humps Harold's driver's seat in the first film.



Again, this film really is just a series of gags and racial commentary from start to finish and this time with more boobage. The love story is the icing on the cake which made me enjoy this film more than the first. Not all the scenes were good though, I didn't really find the George Bush scene that funny, but I guess it was written as a device to get keep the story going.

So the writers and directors, Hurwitz and Schlossberg, have definitely matured form the first film. At least in their writing, mimicking the Apatow group, ie, 40 yr old virgin, Superbad and Knocked Up, has given the characters more depth instead of just randomness.



This film, I would say, has grown from Family Guy to South Park quality. Harold and Kumar are will probably be memorable characters in film history. Wether or not they will make a third movie remains to be seen. The ending closes up nicely, but seeing that they made over $14Mill in their first weekend might say otherwise...

3.5/5

Also known as Forbidden Kingdom



Jet Li and Jackie Chan's first collaboration is hopefully not their last as this film which follows the classic narrative tale of a child or pre adult's journey into a mystical fantasy world. Filled with people trying to hunt him down for the item in which he possess.

Michael Angarano surprisingly brings a truthful character out of Jason who loves watching Hong Kong action films. It is these classic Hong Kong films from 70s to present, which the general international market has not really been exposed to that the movie borrows a lot from. Such as Jackie's Drunken Master (Wong Fei Hung) as well as Ronny Yu's, Bride with the White Hair.

Crystal Liu, who plays an orphaned girl that kicks as, Legolas style, joins the entourage in their quest to revive the Monkey King. It is this plot which I find very much similar to Tolkein's Lord of the Rings as they need to go to the enemy's lair in order to complete the task. But unlike LotR, this film does not have epic battle sequences with our heroes battling hordes of the opposing force.



Instead, the fighting is mostly 1on1, choreographed by Yueng Woo Ping. Which looked fantastic as usual. But I would've really loved to see the fellowship trapped in some mine, and needing to fight a plethora of Jade soldiers... Though, the comedy of Jackie and Jet saves the lack of epic battles.

Li Bing Bing played a bounty hunter with White hair that looked a bit purplish... Her English, I must say, was really good compared to all the other Chinese actors. Maybe they should've focused on her character more, to explain why she has such good English skills. Maybe she's a planetary bounty hunter that travels the globe?

Most Chinese watchers would cringe at the authenticity of the film's language. As all the main characters speak English in the film, that's set in ancient China. Though, about 30% of the film is in Mandarin. I would've prefered the film to have more Mandarin, as I'd be glad to read subtitles. Especially since Jet, Jackie and even Crystal has major speeches in their heavily accented English. There were actually a few lines that Crystal spoke which I had either no idea, or it sounded like swearing.


Journey to the.... 5 Element Mountain

Directed by Rob Minkoff, this film was made for children. As his resume includes one of my all time favourite, The Lion King. But scripted by John Fusco, who is writing the remake of The Seven Samurai, seems to need to hone his craft more. As I pointed out earlier, the film is basically made up of parts from classic Wu Xia films. And maybe due to that, his dialogue writing is a bit out of place. Why some characters speak in third person just puzzles me.

Overall, this is another kids movie, similar to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but set in ancient China with the Monkey King as the backing story. I loved some of the twists in it, but there weren't enough. And with Zhang Yi Mou's epic films, the Forbidden Kingdom just falls short in visual spectacular.


Crystal Liu, Jackie Chan and Li Bing Bing

Most likely I felt that the film was rushed through the writing and filming process. It seems as if Yuen Woo Ping, who is the Executive Producer of the film, finally talked Jet and Jackie to be in a movie together. Once they knew when the two big stars were free, they quickly attempted to write an original film by taking parts of older films. Some people may say the production value is high, with nice costumes, but it's incomparable with all the recent Chinese martial art films at all.

I would've rather they made a strictly Chinese film based on a classic story. Or a crossover of a previous Jackie film and Jet film.... Supercop VS Black Mask anyone? Just joking... but not the classic story part. Actually, what could've worked was if this film was split into two parts. I just felt I wanted more from it....




I'm sad to say, but I am only giving this film an average score.. well, maybe I'll be a bit lenient.

3/5

Argh, my website, www.silverkottage.com.au has reached it's max bandwidth, so can't blog there..... but xanga might be better for this type of post, since it will be time stamped (hopefully) on the xanga server, which I can't fiddle with.

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On the Lot...



Last night was the first time I actually sat through an entire episode of American Idol. Watching that show, it reminded me of why On the Lot wasn't as popular. Actually, I never really enjoyed watching On the Lot, but I would watch it because, well, if you didn't know, I'm an aspiring Director.



But the reason I didn't enjoy On the Lot that much was because of the format of the competition. From what I remember, that show was a weekly series, instead of a daily one like Idol. Though, that doesn't really matter.

The actual competition required each contestant to write and direct a 2 minute short film with a professional crew and working actors. Some of the actors I saw on On the Lot, I see in ads on TV now. Some of the shorts were good, but to me, 2 minutes is not long enough to be a short film. And it's too long to be a tv commercial. Instead, I feel that it's more like a skit.

All the directors had to do was think of an event and put characters in it then place a comedic or dramatic twist in the end. 2 minutes is not enough to have character development, so the audience wouldn't really feel for the characters on screen. Instead, most of the popular shorts of the show were the comedic ones.

I remember that most of the show's competition theme were comedy. Which I feel was silly. Not everyone has comedic lives to draw from. I enjoyed how they also had Action and Horror as the themes. Horror though, would be hard for most people to show within 2 minutes... and the Horror shorts that actually were crowd favourites were more Horror Comedy.



In the end, I found out that the winner was Will Bigham the guy that made shorts which were mostly light hearted comedy sketches. I have no doubt that he'd be able to Direct a $1 Mill picture from Dreamworks, but if he has to write it himself? I'm not too sure about that....

Anyways, the point of this post is really what I think the next season, or if there's another TV show on a Film making competition should be.

The show should be short and long film format. Short films should be mini challenges during the weeks, whereas the long film would be shown further on in the competition.

2 minutes is not long enough to show a Director's true skill. Instead, they should opt for the main film for the competition to be at least 10-15 minutes long.

Not all Directors can write. Mainly, the job of a Director in pre production is to choose the right script, and change it according to their style. Hence, the competition should include aspiring and professional writers whom the competing Directors can choose scripts from. The Directors can choose to work with the writer weekly, or they can rotate partners.

The weekly challenges should be testing the Director's creative and technical skill. Such as one week, each Director must include a certain item in the 2 minute short. Or they can choose to recreate a scene from their favourite movies (subject to budget). Or they have to film the same script their own way. Or combine the previous 2 options, like they get to choose from a pool of classic scenes from the competition to recreate.



How cool would it be to see another Director's rendition of the I am your father scene?

Voting for the contestants would be weekly. Similar to Dancing with the Stars (not that I really watch that), the voting system would be the average between audience votes and judges vote. Contestants are ranked weekly, but they will not get kicked off the show. They can redeem themselves by stepping up their game the next week with the short challenges. The short challenges only account for 50% of the final score.

The other 50% will be from the votes of their long film near the end of the competition. So during the whole competition, they are refining their art, and use it for their main film.

While they are working on the small challenges, the show will also be a documentary. Following each Director and their crew on the film making process.



That's all I've thought of so far... Maybe I should copyright this idea? I guess posting it online, this post would be timestamped, hence, proof that I wrote it on this day and time. I should try and get in contact with an actual producer, or Dreamworks to sell this idea... actually, I don't even care if I get money for it, I just want to see a better competition.

Nothing is original in this world, so I won't be surprised if what I have written might have already been thought of. I'm going to google up and see if there is already a competition like this, if so, I'm surprised it isn't popular. Otherwise, maybe I can push for a competition like this. I think I can be a producer.... though, my goal is to be a Director.

Reading through what I have wrote, this really is just the same format I was taught at film school. But unlike going to University, the individual with the highest score gets a film deal.