Unfortunately, Disney fired Wong and a bunch of other animators in 1941 after a contentious strike (one that Wong didn’t even participate in), and his name only appears in the credits of Bambi as a background artist.

Without getting too specific: Academic background, a number of years in China, the fact that watching movies is one of the few things keeping my already-unimpressive Mandarin skills from atrophying altogether, and ongoing gigs as a reviewer for a magazine in China and a programmer for an Asian-American film festival.…

Yoko's Plastic Ono Band album is way better than John's.

In all seriousness, the title + Japanese cast + Japanese title on the concept art lead me to think this is inspired by Tashirojima and Aoshima (a.k.a. the "cat islands"), but with the cats swapped out for dogs. In which case this movie is gonna be totally dogwashed.

I hear that ScarJo's gonna play an Akita, and Tilda Swinton will shave her head again to play a Chinese crested.

Sure it seems sad, but how do we know these puppies wouldn't have grown up to become Dog Hitlers?

For various personal and professional reasons, most of my viewing falls within a pretty narrow band. I've only seen one of the twenty films above, though there's a few more I plan to check out when they open here. So I have no illusions that this is at all a "representative" list of the year's best films, but then how…

Catan has been down to $31 for a couple of months now. I know because I ordered it in mid-October when it first hit that price and had to reconfirm the order a half-dozen times because Amazon kept messing up the restock date.

It's the "adult accompaniment" rating used in Ontario (and maybe some other provinces) at the time, instead of the separate 14A and 18A. The AA was equivalent to a 14A.

Speed was rated R. It's a pretty soft R, so that doesn't invalidate the point, but still. And The Fugitive was the highest-grossing action(-ish) film of '93, but #2 was Cliffhanger, which is far from the cynical depths of something like Cobra but still feels like a holdover in some ways. (Like Hard Target from the…

I googled it for shits and giggles and it turns out the novelization addressed this all the way back when the movie originally came out, explaining that the T-1000 has a "molecular brain." It also explained that each molecule can communicate with the others up to a range of 14 kilometers, which seems like useful…

It was actually Hard Boiled, though if you believe the IMDb trivia page it didn't come from T2. The idea goes back at least as far as Kubrick's The Killing, so it's not like Cameron had a claim on it anyway.

The computer has to sense organic matter so that the machines don't just ship a whole army of robots into the past blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.

In the published screenplay they just say it was "deemed an unnecessary and expensive piece of action." It also had the T-1000 emerging from the flames and morphing from its silver form back to the cop, which they felt was too much like the aftermath of the motorcycle chase.

Nice observations about the T-1000's uncanniness. I remember people at the time nitpicking it with stuff like "where does it keep its CPU," which I guess is why they eventually retconned it as a bunch of nanomachines, but the contrast between the T-800 (a pretty conventional android) and this inexplicable thing is…

If you're talking about the Dekalog, it got a theatrical re-release using that poster (notice the Janus Films logo at the bottom—that's Criterion's theatrical-distribution sister company). Criterion then used the same art for the video release.

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Kerrigan's Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)—an experimental narrative about an actress starring in a Grace Slick biopic—was completed and publicly exhibited at Cannes 2010, but dropped off the face of the earth after that. Reviewers generally agreed it would struggle to get distribution, but it didn't even get…

Tsui Hark shot a 3D thriller in 2010 called Catching Monkey, starring Charlie Yeung and Yu Nan. It's never seen the light of day and nobody has a definitive explanation, though speculation is that Tsui just wasn't happy with the way it turned out—he made it in part to get some experience with 3D before doing Flying…

Loved the movie where he hunted and killed Bin Laden.