This short animation conjures up a futuristic society in which robots are banned. Stores deny service to robots and humans demonstrate against them on the streets. But the robots find ways to survive on the fringes of society, including one pesky little robot that’s adept at shoplifting. The 2011 work is a collaboration by two students from San Jose State University in California — Kimberly Knoll, an American, and YungHan Chang, originally from Taiwan.
SHANGHAI PEARL
We’re nearing the home stretch in our countdown of the most talented and luscious babes of burlesque. Only four more dancers remain before we’ll be moving on and introducing a new series.
Today’s babe, Shanghai Pearl, bills herself as “The Tantalizing Temptress from Taipei” and also as “The Princess of Pulchritude.” Now a performer and instructor based out of Seattle, Shanghai Pearl is celebrated for her wild costumes and bawdy humor, as well as her sultry strip-teases. In a display of versatility, she designs all of her own costumes. Check out the mermaid suit in this compilation, although there’s nothing fishy about the rest of her opulent gear.
We looked, but couldn’t find her full mermaid act online. But the performance she gave at the 2010 New Orleans Burlesque Festival is killer. She always seems to be enjoying herself enormously on stage.
The full title of Celeste Lai’s whimsical animated short is The Man Who Once Owned An Eternal Garden. It’s about a man who loves his garden dearly, but he’s not blessed with a green thumb, and doesn’t really have a sense of the changing seasons. This leads to some spotty horticultural results.
Lai uses a playful mix of different media and animation styles to give a rich texture to her work. A native of Taiwan, she’s now based in New York, working as an independent animator, and frequently illustrates lectures for the TedEd series. Visit her website at http://www.celestelai.com/
Dixieland jazz bands wail at New Orleans funerals. Green activists are now clamoring to be buried in bio-degradable cardboard coffins. In Taiwan, another unusual funeral rite has become popular — strippers dancing for the dead, and consoling the living, by performing on movable Electric Flower Cars that join funeral processions en route to the graveyard.
This practice originated in rural districts of Taiwan, but has spurred more debate since appearing in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. Marc L. Moscowitz has now documented the phenomenon in a film called Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan. He interviews academics, journalists, government officials and the strippers themselves to try to make sense of what’s at stake. Here is an excerpt.
A Touch of Zen, one of the most spectacular Chinese martial arts actioners of all time, is today’s Trillion Dollar Movie. The 1971 epic from writer-director King Hu served as a major inspiration for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Key scenes and story elements also have been heavily paraphrased in both Star Wars and The Matrix.
It’s long — running more than three hours, divided into two parts — but sit back and enjoy the ride, as this film is guaranteed to sweep you up in the action given its lyrical beauty, heroic cast of Ming Dynasty characters and breathtaking fight scenes. It’s also a genre-bending pleasure, starting off as a ghost story then morphing into a romantic comedy, a political thriller and a Buddhist parable, before finally evolving into a no-holds-barred martial arts extravaganza.
Much of the plot centers around Miss Yang, who bears a striking similarity to Princess Leia. Miss Yang lives in an abandoned, possibly haunted fortress, where she has gone into hiding to escape a brutal regime that tortured and killed her father. Ku, an impoverished scholar from a nearby village, takes a shine to this damsel in distress and emerges as her most steadfast defender. Together, joined by a small band of Shaolin monks, they will challenge the corrupt Eunuch Wei and his many evil minions.
King Hu, who perfected his craftsmanship working with the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, shot A Touch of Zen in Taiwan. He won a technical grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival recognizing his gorgeous landscapes as well as the special effects and editing behind the stunning swordplay. Hu continued making movies another 22 years, including Raining in the Mountains and Legends of the Mountains, both loosely based on the same source material as A Touch of Zen, namely, Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Some of his later works are worth seeking out, especially those with action choreography by Sammo Hung. Still, none quite compares with this milestone production.
Closed captioning available in English and Spanish. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
