My top 10 favorite scenes from Asian film…

February 4, 2010

10. Asano takes a foot to the grill in Survive Style 5+

In the first of 5 overlapping, intersecting, funny and warped stories about how people deal with what is dealt to them (ie. how they survive), Tadanobu Asano plays a man who has just killed and buried his wife. Upon returning home, he encounters her calmly sitting at the table in her bright green dress. Without saying a word, she whips up an enormous feast for him and sits quietly watching while he slowly polishes it all off. Just as he sits back to light up an after dinner smoke (perhaps thinking that he’s dodged a bullet), he looks up to see her looming over him poised for attack – which she does with a huge flying kick to his head.

9. The Samurai’s story in Rashomon. Told through the medium…

Rashomon is a crime mystery film by Akira Kurosawa. The movie centers around four perspectives of one story. A woman is raped and her Samurai husband is killed by a bandit. The movie is basically everyone’s version of what happened. You never really know who is telling the truth, that is left up for you to decide. The dead Samurai’s story is presented through a spiritual medium (Noriko Honma, who plays this role so perfect). This scene sticks out to me because the it is foretelling of future Japanese cinema. The scene is creepy in contrast to a otherwise darkly comedic movie.  The samurai claims that Tajōmaru, after raping his wife, asked her to travel with him. She accepted and asked Tajōmaru to kill her husband so that she would not feel the guilt of belonging to two men. Tajōmaru, shocked by this request, grabbed her, and gave the samurai a choice of letting the woman go or killing her. (“For these words alone,” the dead samurai recounted, “I was ready to pardon his crime.”) The woman fled, and Tajōmaru, after attempting to recapture her, gave up and set the samurai free. The samurai then killed himself with his own dagger; later, somebody removed the dagger from his chest.

8. Muay Thai Vs. Capoeira battle in Chocolate

Jeeja Yanin is cute but she will beat your ass. Chocolate is her break out movie and made her an international superstar. In Chocolate Zen (Jeeja Yanin) plays a young autistic girl born to two gang members in the Thai drug trade. After her mother gives birth to her she learns that she has cancer. The mother decides to leave the game a raise her kid in a safer environment. The cancer treatment becomes too expensive Zen’s mother begins to treat herself at home. While this is happening Zen  is developing her Muay Thai skills by imitating Tony Ja movies and watching the kids at the Muay Thai academy next door.

In this scene Zen’s mother has been kidnapped by the Yakuza boss and his transvestite thugs (yes i said tranny thugs, have you ever seen a Thai movie?) send out his martial artist hitmen to take out Zen. There is one challanger who has tourette’s syndrome and does some sick capoeria. The best part is after watching his movement she immediately picks up his fighting style…

7.  Grenade Massacre Scene in Merde from Tokyo

7. Merde (a French term translating as “shit”) is the name given to an unkempt, gibberish-spewing subterranean creature of the Tokyo sewers, played by Denis Lavant, who rises from the underground lair where he dwells to attack unsuspecting locals in increasingly brazen and terrifying ways: he steals cash and cigarettes from passersby, frightens old women and salaciously licks schoolgirls, resulting in a televised media frenzy that creates mounting hysteria among the Tokyo populace.

In this scene Merde discovers a stash of WW2 grenades that he decides to hurl at unsuspected people in the busy streets of Tokyo. This act leads to one of the funniest terrorism trials I have ever seen.

6. Yoko tricks Kazari which results in Kazari’s death in ZOO

Twin sisters Yoko and Kazari have a “loving” mother but she only cares for one of her daughters. The mother enjoys beating Yoko and treating her like a worthless animal. Not a single soul seems to care about Yoko until she returns a lost dog to an old woman names Ms. Suzuki. Suzuki treat Yoko well and restores some of her confidence and encourages her to come live with her. After the mother discovers the key to Ms. Suzuki’s house, she hides it in her room. Kazari who is moms little Angel goes into her mothers room to get a cd and spills coffee all over her mothers laptop. Kazari tries to convince Yoko to take the rap for it and Yoko agrees but she has a trick up her sleeve—-What an awesome scene

5. The Dead Shine All NIght Long song from Suicide Club

Suicide Club is a brilliant warning about society when it becomes obsessed with pop culture idolization. Sion Sono presents social commentary in the most gruesome and grotesque manner. A string of suicides among youth in Tokyo begins to be investigated by Detectives. Through investigation you learn that the suicides are fad created by a J-Pop girl group who through their music convince life isn’t worth living resulting in “Suicide Clubs”.  Naturally with any fad in mainstream culture you are going to have copy cats. In this scene you have a group of imposter groups who claim to be originators of the suicide club… It shows hows sometimes people who try to copy a dangerous idea can sometimes be more dangerous…Plus its just an awesome song

4. Zombie Song in The Happiness Of The Katakuris

a 2001 film directed by , with screenplay Takashi Miike by Kikumi Yamagishi. It is loosely based on the South Korean film The Quiet Family. The film is a surreal horror-comedy in the farce tradition, which includes claymation sequences, musical and dance numbers, a karaoke-style sing-along scene, dream sequences and Hitchcockian symbolism. The Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures (grandfather, father and mother, children and granddaughter, who narrates the film) who use the father’s pay to buy a guest house in the country. Somehow, each of their guests ends up dead— by suicide, accident or murder— and once they have made the decision to save their business by burying the bodies and concealing the deaths, they find themselves sucked into a nightmare of lies and fear (not helped by the arrival of the daughter’s con-man boyfriend, an escaped murderer with police in hot pursuit, and an erupting volcano).

3. Gunning down hospital staff from I’m A Cyborg But Thats OK

The film takes place mostly in a mental institution filled with an anarchic menagerie of patients. Young-goon, a young woman working in a factory constructing radios and who believes herself to be a cyborg, is institutionalized after cutting her wrist and connecting it with a power cord to a wall outlet in an attempt to “recharge” herself, an act that is interpreted as a suicide attempt. Her delusion is characterized by refusing to eat, (she instead licks batteries and attempts to administer electric shocks to herself,) conversing almost solely with machines and electrical appliances and obsessively listening to her transistor radio at night for instruction on how to become a better cyborg. Her apathetic mother is interviewed by the institute’s head doctor, to determine the roots of Young-goon’s psychosis; despite claiming ignorance of her daughter’s delusion (it is later learnt she knew but was too busy to make her seek help), she reveals that Young-goon’s mentally-ill grandmother had previously been institutionalized for delusions of being a mouse, a trauma that sparks Young-goon’s own lapses from reality. As a result, she fantasizes frequently of finding her grandmother and seeking revenge on the “men in white” who took her away. In this scene Young-goon has just received ECT and thinks she has been recharged and decided to take revenge on the white coats…

2. Audition Torture Scene

There isnt a lot to say about this except if you havent seen this movie…then see it. It is one of the best horror films ever…not just asian film…period! This is one of the most notorious scenes from asian film post 2000. Also I want to add that Eihi Shiina is one of the most beautiful actresses ever and should be remembered for her role in this film.

1. Oh De Su vs. gang fight scene from Oldboy

After being imprisoned in a hotel room for 15 years then being suspiciously released. Oh De Su has been training. Can 15 years of imaginary training work? Hell Yeah. This scene is great not only because 1 guy takes out a bunch of thugs. Its the way it was filmed it wasnt fancy martial arts it truly looked like a man who was self trained and was sick with revenge.

From Wikipedia: The corridor fight scene took seventeen takes in three days to perfect, and was one continuous take – there was no editing of any sort except for the knife that was stabbed in Oh Dae-su’s back, which was computer-generated imagery. Though the scene has often been compared visually to side scrolling beat ‘em up video games, director Park Chan-wook has stated that the similarity was unintentional.