Hong Kong 97 takes place, appropriately enough, in Hong Kong right before the transfer of power from Britain to China. Reginald Cameron, an assassin affiliated with a large corporation with interests in the colony, guns down key members of the Chinese envoy which will take charge of Hong Kong the next day. Suddenly, he becomes a target for every two-bit mercenary in the city. With the help of his company mentor, a clueless friend , and his ex-girlfriend, Cameron must unravel the motives behind his sudden target status and escape Hong Kong alive.
Month: October 2019
Popular jazz drummer and actor Frankie Sakai stars in this comic version of the “industrial competition” genre: two tourism companies compete for foreign clients in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highlighting the coming internationalization of Japan, the film dramatizes the felt tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures of the “economic animal” lifestyle, and the energy of high economic growth. The closest Japanese cinema ever came to the full-blown Broadway style musical, with singing and dancing on the streets of Tokyo, music by avant-garde composer and jazzman Toshiro Mayuzumi, lyrics by renowned poet Shuntaro Tanikawa.
In this musical, a popular singer runs away from stardom to find some much needed R&R on a Mexican ranch. His manager is terribly upset and sends a pretty young woman to lure him back. However, the gal constantly natters away at the exhausted entertainer.
Two men, who have been fighting on the enemy sides in WWII, meet in the jazz club twenty years after. Mladen, who was a partisan at the time, recognizes a familiar face of a man whom he was supposed to shot, but missed on purpose.
Theresa is a successful teacher of deaf children during the day but after a short unhappy affair starts to spend her nights cruising bars. Her craving first for sex but later also for drugs leads into increasingly demeaning and dangerous situations at odds with her daytime commitment to her children.
After a sojourn in Mexico, undergrad Gnossos Pappadopoulis comes back to his college where, at the close of the 1950s, he partakes in the staples of the burgeoning counterculture movement: drugs, casual sex and radical politics. After Gnossos thumbs his nose at everything from the campus fraternities to the ideas espoused by his professors, he decides to leave school and head for Cuba with a friend. There, he once again struggles with the excesses of his hippie lifestyle.
Red and his cohorts kill three prospectors and file on their claim. One of the three was Joe Henderson’s brother and Joe goes after the killers. After Lem finds gold he is injured and loses his memory. Red finds him and thinking his sister knows where his claim is, kidnaps her. But Red was seen following her and this leads Joe to their hideout and the showdown.
Nine-year-old Vanyo often plays with wooden swords and cardboard knight’s armour. He gradually confronts the life of grown-ups. The boy is confused – why do his parents say one thing and do another? Vanyo feels increasingly lonely and, in his thoughts, he talks to the only person he trusts – his uncle Georgi. It is only with him that the boy feels happy. Together, they go to the printer’s, to rehearsals at the theatre, and they watch movies. Uncle Georgi never interrupts Vanyo’s words and questions; he treats him seriously. How is this tiny knight going to enter life without an internal armour against rudeness and egoism?