Smash Cut

French documentary filmmaker Yves Montmayeur likes his Asian cinema, judging from his previous works which include 2007’s The Angry Young Men of Korean Cinema and the 2005 profile of the great animator Hayao Miyazaki and his production company, Studio Ghibli, entitled Ghibli et le mystère Miyazaki.

Now he’s back with Yakuza Eiga, which promises to be “a history of yakuza cinema.” I’m a big fan of those tattooed, garishly-clothed, finger-chopping gangsters myself, so I hope I get a chance to check this one out (with English subtitles). There appear to be some interesting interviewees in the film, including ’70s-era Hollywood titans William Friedkin and Paul Schrader and Japan’s mega-talented Takeshi Kitano, who allegedly didn’t want any clips from his movies, such as the lyrical yakuza potboiler Sonatine, to be used in the doc because he thought their inclusion would suggest some actual gangster ties!

Visit the official Yakuza Eiga website and take a look at some of the film’s interview segments while you’re there.

If you’ve ever looked up info online about something or someone, chances are you were directed to the encyclopedia website Wikipedia. But aside from its seemingly endless bits and bytes of info about a gazillion topics in multiple languages, how much do you know about the site? Who created it? How does it work? What might its ramifications be, on a cultural or academic level?

A new documentary hopes to address all those topics and shed new light on the site. Called Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, it features a gamut of talking-head types (like linguist/intellectual Noam Chomsky, mega-bucks mogul Richard Branson and rapper KRS One) all chiming in on the phenomenon that is Wikipedia, as well as an in-depth look at the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales.

As someone who’s Wiki’ed quite a bit — by referring to its entries, not authoring any — I’m admittedly pretty fascinated by the website, and am looking forward to this film, which is co-directed by Scott Glosserman, the filmmaker behind 2006’s horror-themed faux-doc Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

Watch the Truth in Numbers trailer over here.

Well, Hideo Nakata will show you the way! Or at least offer some advice about how to deal with getting royally screwed but continue to find work. That’s what I imagine this film is all about.

Nakata’s name may ring a bell with some of you, and that’s because he’s the Japanese writer/director responsible for the original 1998 J-Horror trendsetter, Ring (a.k.a. Ringu). Yup, he’s somewhat to blame for spawning every shambling, long-haired, vengeful spirit that’s plagued genre cinema for almost a decade.

Anyway, Nakata did some time in Hollywood when he made The Ring Two, the U.S. sequel to the American remake of the original film (the 1998 one that Nakata helmed in Japan). Follow?

The experience must’ve left Nakata pissed, I guess, or feeling that people should get some kind of advice about dealing with the Tinseltown studio system, so he made a documentary called Foreign Filmmakers’ Guide To Hollywood to do just that. Judging from the credits, there are some pretty interesting interview subjects in the piece, like big-time producer Walter F. Parkes and prolific composer Hans Zimmer.

This doc could be nothing more than a rant, but color me curious. If you’re Japanese-fluent, you can visit the film’s official website (I think) here to stay informed about the Guide’s status.

I know, the title sounds like some kind of long-lost Godzilla sequel, but it is, in fact, the name of a documentary film that’s currently in the works.

Director Jessica Oreck, who’s past efforts include contributions to the excellent PBS show Nature, is nearing completion of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. It’s an exploration of sorts into the fascinating relationship that Japanese culture shares with the insect world. The doc promises to be something different from the usual “life-and-death-plus-mating-habits-of-an-animal” style of fauna profile, and seems to delve into something deeper and richer.

You can visit the preliminary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo official website to keep abreast of the documentary’s status and, I assume, of completion information and possible festival playdates when such details become available. You can also explore the site to watch the beautiful-looking (and sounding) trailer for the film.

It’s a documentary called Chelsea on the Rocks and it focuses on the many denizens, past and present, of New York’s infamous Hotel Chelsea.

Go here for the details. Outspoken director Abel Ferrara himself (that’s him on the right in the above photo, obviously) will intro the movie, and he’s always a total riot in person, so if you’re a fan, you should make a point of getting out to Cinema Nolita on Oct. 12, Sunday, at 10:30pm!

The official Chelsea on the Rocks website is here.

Hell, maybe it’s the longest biopic about anyone ever. Starting on Sunday, China Central Television — the state-controlled broadcasting network of the P.R.C. — is set to air a 50-part series (yeah, count ‘em: 50 episodes!) about the life of the late martial arts legend. We’ve already had movies like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story in the States, but what makes this epic a big deal is that “The Legend of Bruce Lee” is, according to its producer, the first-ever TV or movie production in China about the superstar. Kind of amazing, isn’t it?

Hong Kong-actor Danny Chan, whom some of you may know as the main baddie from the Stephen Chow chop-socky comedy classic Kung Fu Hustle, has the unenviable task of playing Bruce Lee in the biography. Those are large shoes to fill, but Chan is a pretty startling dead ringer for Lee, so I think he can probably pull it off.

“The Legend of Bruce Lee” was shot in China, Italy, Macau, Thailand and the U.S., over a period of nine months, and cost around 50-million yuan to make (that’s roughly U.S. $7.3 million, a hefty sum by Chinese TV production standards). The exhaustively-researched series promises to trace a lot of aspects of Lee’s life right down to the most minute details, including his fear of cockroaches! When it debuts on Sunday, it’ll air every night with two episodes playing consecutively for two hours. That’s a whole lotta Lee.

Keeping in step with the gargantuan length of the series, there’s an equally epic seven-and-a-half minute long trailer for “The Legend of Bruce Lee” here. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss a guest appearance by high-kicking fan favorite Mark Dacascos.

In 1972, award-winning master filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the controversial 1960 arthouse sensation L’Avventura, was invited by the Chinese government to visit its motherland for eight weeks and shoot a documentary about the country. The resulting 207-minute-long magnum opus, called Chung Kuo - Cina (a.k.a. China) enraged Communist authorities, who claimed that the movie did nothing except highlight suffering and propagate “anti-Chinese” sentiment by showing showing “barren farmlands, lonely elderlies, tired animals, and broken houses.” A curious reaction, considering that the late Antonioni (he passed away in 2007) was one of the most fervently anti-capitalist filmmakers out there, not only because of his visually/spatially driven narrative techniques (the “story” or notions of “characterization” were often revealed through visual framing or landscapes rather than traditional dialogue or action), but also in terms of his work’s content (as exemplified, for example, in the explosive (literally and figuratively) ending of his 1970 freak-out Zabriskie Point).

Anyway, as a result of the political controversy, Chung Kuo - Cina was banned in China until 2004, and it didn’t enjoy much play in the West either (the doc’s three-hour-plus running time didn’t help, obviously). It basically ended up as lengthy programming on Italian television. But if you live in or near New York, on Saturday, Oct. 11, at 3:00pm (yes, one show-time only), the Asia Society will be screening (in digibeta format, with English subtitles) the film in its entirety, as part of its series entitled “Under Mao’s Red Sun: China’s Cultural Revolution on Film.” Antonioni’s an amazing visual talent, so any opportunity to see one of his movies should be taken advantage of, especially for a rarity like this documentary.

You can look over the whole “Under Mao’s Red Sun” series schedule here, buy tickets online here, or get directions to the Asia Society here.

An unsubtitled five-minute clip from Chung Kuo - Cina can be seen here.

…if you live in the U.S. or Canada, anyway.

In a statement on the official website for his new doc Slacker Uprising, Michael Moore writes that “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans.”

The reason for making this doc available in such a novel manner (Moore claims this is the “first time ever that a major feature-length film is debuting as a free download on the internet” in a legal manner, but I figure there has to be an exception to that blowhard statement) is that the filmmaker/provocateur thinks its essential to motivate everyone — especially the disenfranchised/disaffected “youth market” — into voting this year. As with all of his work, Slacker Uprising follows Moore around as the focus of our attention, but this time the setting is after the 2004 release of Fahrenheit 9/11, as he travels for 42 days across America, visiting 62 cities in a (failed) attempt to remove George W. Bush from office. His goal for the tour was to help turn out a record number of young voters and others who had never voted before, and he claims to have succeeded.

Will Moore’s muckraking tactics work for this year’s presidential race? Only you can decide that for yourself, I guess.

You can watch the trailer here, or go ahead and download the entire documentary here after you sign up with your e-mail account.

Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, those are scribe Alan Moore’s very own words describing his feelings about Zack Snyder’s forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen, the groundbreaking, decades-spanning superhero epic that originally appeared in comics form courtesy of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons in 1986.

Moore has famously loathed Hollywood for quite a period of time and has never seen a single cinematic version of any of his work (which includes the Victorian era fantasy The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Johnny Depp-starring Jack the Ripper exposé From Hell). The much-ballyhooed, long-awaited Watchmen film is already smarting from the studio-related legal wrangling that’s been going on and which threatens its scheduled March 2009 release date, and I imagine that Moore’s remarks, which appear in the L.A. Times blog, won’t help in any way.

Still, don’t let Moore’s Tinseltown-directed vitriol make you think that he hates movies in general. One pic that he does encourage you to see, and which features him in it, is The Mindscape of Alan Moore, an experimental documentary that probes into the life and mystical/magical beliefs of the author. You can see the trailer for it here.

The full interview with Moore can be read on the L.A. Times blog.

Any chop-socky fan has probably witnessed untold amounts of on-screen adventures featuring the legendary martial arts masters known as Shaolin monks. Nevertheless, although kung fu classics like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (a.k.a. Master Killer) or Chang Cheh’s Shaolin Temple had techniques and details that were grounded in reality and history, there was never any doubt that these cinematic interpretations of the school and art were driven by fiction storytelling.

A new documentary called The Real Shaolin purports to lift the veil from the secretive school (although this idea of representing reality should be regarded with a grain of salt, considering the varying degrees of “truthfulness” that documentaries may have ). It follows two Chinese and two Western would-be pupils as they travel to the Shaolin Temple in China with the hopes of becoming students and perfecting their art. The four were inspired (as were most of the people there, I’d wager) by the kung fu mythologies presented in the 1982 Jet Li-starrer Shaolin Temple (which shouldn’t be confused with the aforementioned Chang Cheh pic with the same name), and their experiences at the monastery engender harsh realities that will test their celluloid-fueled fantasies.

The Real Shaolin is coming off of a successful set of engagements at the recent 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. The film’s website is here, and it will keep you updated about future screenings and distribution possibilities. Also, you can check out the doc’s trailer, and the blog by filmmaker Alexander S. Lee. The preview really whets my appetite for this movie, especially seeing the amazing physical feats that the little kid (one of the two Chinese students) pulls off.

And lest you believe that these robe-clad, sandal-wearing zen masters have been left behind by the information superhighway, check out the Shaolin Monastery’s official website.