Sympathy for Mr. Vampire

So I'm flicking through Netflix's streaming catalogue, and see a vampire movie by the director of Oldboy. I bet that'll be really visceral and extreme! Wow, I could not have been more wrong. Thirst turns out to be inspired less by Rice or Stoker than by the Coen Brothers and Zola (Emile, not Arnim or gorgon-).

Apparently I sold Chan-Wook Park's range short; Oldboy had moments of black humor, but there's a definite Raising Arizona or Big Lebowski quality to the proceedings here. Perhaps I should have remembered he directed a romantic comedy set in an insane asylum.

I don't think I would have enjoyed Thirst as much if I hadn't gone in cold, so I won't go into much detail, but it's definitely worth checking out.

Where Martial Arts And Hip-Hop Collide

I saw Volcano High a couple years ago (what the hell is up with Wikipedia calling this a film noir?), but I decided to rewatch it in the MTV dub version, on the theory that everything is better with Tracy Morgan. It is both better and worse than I expected.

It goes without saying that the entire soundtrack has been replaced, but the dub cast is surprisingly faithful and restrained... even Tracy Morgan! I was expecting a lot more moments like when the evil female substitute teacher calls this character Bacon-head. The worst I can say about it is that it commits the classic dub error of being terrified of silence. Since the main character doesn't actually talk that much, this means there's pretty much a constant flow of his internal narration, like a wire-fu version of The Wonder Years.

On the other hand, the actual film footage has been kind of butchered. We lose about forty minutes overall, and some of the surviving scenes get shuffled around, most notably moving the lead character's traumatic flashback to the very beginning and cutting out about half of it, including my favorite joke in the movie. They also omit the whole kung-fu cliche plot about the secret scrolls, but let's be fair, the plot is not exactly the reason to watch this.

On the whole, I have to give MTV and Fox some respect for putting both versions of the movie on the DVD, so I can laugh ruefully at the iffy Americanization without actually feeling screwed over. If only all companies were so generous.

Eastern Standard, issue 3