New Pants: New Pants (1998)

A few years ago I stumbled upon a CD by a Chinese post-punk band named New Pants. I bought it on a whim and absolutely loved its blend of Ramones-esque fast punk and breezy electronica. I've enjoyed what I've heard of the band ever since, but recently I managed to track down a copy of their original 1998 self-titled album. It is a chance to hear the band in their early stages.

It's a slightly strange experience, since it almost sounds as if the tracks were laid onto the album in the chronological order in which they were written. It certainly ends with a fairly similar sound to the one with which I'm familiar, but it begins somewhere quite different. In truth it begins with them sounding like a straight-up Ramones tribute act.

An Artist: Yang Yongliang

An Artist is a series of posts profiling contemporary artists whose work I find interesting. I am a big fan of contemporary art, particularly from North Asia. I am by no means an expert in the field, but on a personal level these are the artists whose work I have liked the most in recent years.

I first encountered Yang Yongliang's digital art works in an exhibit of contemporary Chinese art in Singapore. They grabbed my attention immediately, and have been stuck in my memory ever since. They're just enormously effective and captivating. I think they have a near-hypnotic effect.

Yang originally trained in traditional Chinese ink painting before formally studying visual communication in Shanghai. After a few years of experimentation in ink painting, short film-making and photography, he started working on his so-called 'phantom landscapes' in 2006. In his works he draws intricate Chinese landscapes in the popular 'shanshui' style of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 CE). Into them, however, he inserted modern buildings and technology, and tightly clustered fictional cities. Then he animates them.

P.K.14: City Weather Sailing (2008)

P.K.14 is a Nanjing-formed and Beijing-based post-punk rock band. Formed back in 1997, they have become a well-respected fixture in China's independent rock scene. Internationally their sound gets compared to the like of the Pixies and Sonic Youth, although based on this album I find the comparisons under-value P.K.14's own distinctive sound.

City Weather Sailing is the band's fourth studio album, released in 2008. I found the CD in a charity shop here in Melbourne, and purchased it purely on the basis of its intriguing and artful cover. It has wound up being one of the most unexpectedly great albums I have heard this year.

There is a general kind of indie Britpop feel to the album, which is dominated by rolling guitars that give it a sort of Manchester sound - to me, at any rate. I am hardly a musical authority, and just describe these things as I see them. I am very keen to track down the band's other work - not to mention their members' side projects - to see how they all compare.

Railroad Tigers (2016)

In December 1941 a group of Chinese railroad workers, led by the station porter Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) engage in carefully staged raids of Japanese train shipments to disrupt Japan's military efforts to occupy China and invade other Asian nations to the south. When an injured soldier tells the group of a failed mission to blow up a strategically vital bridge, they take it upon themselves to complete the mission on the Chinese army's behalf.

Railroad Tigers is a hugely enjoyable slice of populist action-comedy, headlined by Jackie Chan in one of his most entertaining films in years. While the film has problems - in fact it has quite a few of them - none of them manage to fully obstruct what is ultimately a hell of a lot of fun. This is his third collaboration with director Ding Sheng, following Little Big Soldier in 2010 and Police Story 2013. To my mind this is the strongest of the three. It has plenty of action, a strong line in slapstick comedy, and makes the best use of its ageing star that I can remember.

Five Films: Donnie Yen

One of the most common responses I have seen to Disney's new film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, apart from the ones that would involve spoiling the movie to explain, is a general shock and joy at the performance of Donnie Yen as blind Force-sensitive warrior Chirrut Imwe. For many viewers in the English-speaking world Yen is a surprising new action star: talented, athletic, handsome and funny. For viewers in the Chinese-speaking world he has been a major action star for a quarter of a century, ranked up alongside male contemporaries like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat. It has taken Yen longer to make a successful break into Hollywood - a mid-90s attempt failed when he accepted a role in the fairly ropey sequel Highlander: Endgame - but now that he is here I would not be surprised to see American studios begin lining up to offer him some high-profile roles.

Thankfully for the new fans who have first seen Yen do his action thing in Rogue One, there is now a massive back catalogue of awesome often-times over-the-top action films to check out. I have picked five that I think will likely give the new viewer a solid showcase of what Yen can do. I have been a huge fan of his work for years, and it's great to see him make such a huge impact this year.

Where Are You Going (2016)

Always push your viewing habits. I am not demanding that you do so constantly, but always make sure you push a little on your comfort zones. If you only ever watch science fiction, go watch a straight drama. If you only watch Hollywood, go watch an independent film. If you watch a lot of films from Europe, watch one from Africa. I think it's a valuable exercise for any regular moviegoer to occasionally explore new territory, and I certainly try to do so from time to time. It cannot all be Johnnie To action thrillers and 1970s BBC science fiction episodes.

Where Are You Going is a new arthouse film by Chinese filmmaker Zhengfan Yang. Yang live in Hong Kong for five years, and it was clearly an experience that resonated with him because he returned there to showcase it in his new work. The film is a series of taxi rides through the city, each announced with a bilingual title card. Some of the journeys take place in silence. Some of them contain awkward, hesitant conversations between the taxi driver and his passenger. Some feature lengthy, in-depth conversations about life in Hong Kong and how the city is changing. The camera never moves, and it is not even pointed at the actors. Instead it's fixed straight ahead from the roof of the taxi: it makes Hong Kong itself as much of a character as the people inside the taxi.

Kaili Blues (2016)

The following synopsis is going to severely under-sell Kaili Blues, but here goes: Chen (Yongzhong Chen) is a reformed ex-con living in China's Guizhou province. He operates a small medical clinic with an elderly colleague, although of late he has become concerned about how his disreputable brother is treating his nephew Weiwei (Feiyang Luo). When he learns his brother has sent Weiwei away, and has even discussed selling the boy, he heads off to recover Weiwei and bring him home. He also finds himself roped in to returning a cassette tape of pop music that was given to his colleague by a lover many years earlier.

'Arthouse' is a term that gets thrown around in film criticism in a manner that often suggests that the critic has simply run out of better words to use. It can indicate all manner of things to all manner of writers. For some it will mean experimental narratives, editing or photography. For others it will signify a lack of narrative at all. For yet more writers it is simply a shorthand for directorial pretence. The word has been thrown at Kaili Blues an awful lot, in this case because the first time around the film really is remarkably impenetrable, and it is only once out on the other side that its immense merits become clear.

Please Vote For Me (2007)

Three rivals stand for election. Politics are being discussed in corridors and washrooms. Dirty tricks are being planned, and campaign strategies sorted out. The competition is fierce and brutal. In a formal debate, one candidate hammers another so fiercely that she bursts into tears and runs from the room. Over-sensitive? Not particularly: all three candidates are eight years old.

Please Vote for Me is a riveting documentary that charts the election of a class monitor in a Chinese primary school. The students have been encouraged to engage in an election campaign as a lesson in modern democracy. Three candidates have been chosen – Luo Lei, Xu Xiaofei and Cheng Cheng – and there varying efforts to win the respect and admiration of their classmates forms the core of this unique gem of a film. It forms part of a series of political documentaries originally broadcast for the BBC's Why Democracy project. This particular film's funding comes from South Africa and Denmark, although its director Weijun Chen is Chinese.

2,000 minutes

Let's say you had 2,000 minutes that you wanted to spend watching movies. That breaks down to 33 hours and 20 minutes, so you could stock up on meals and snacks and run from 8.00am to 12.40am over a weekend. What would you watch with those 2,000 minutes? I am a pretty keen fan of Asian cinema, so let's say you wanted to see some great and entertaining Asian films. You could keep things simple, I suppose, and watch the first 21 Godzilla films in a row. On the other hand you could get an in-depth understanding of a particular director, like Akira Kurosawa: 2,000 minutes would get you from his debut feature Sanshiro Sugata all the way to The Lower Depths (his 17th).

I think a little variety would be better. Under the cut are my picks, pretty much made by browsing along my DVD collection until I hit 2,000 minutes of viewing time. These are not the best Asian films ever made, and they don't really follow any kind of pattern or logic beyond them being films that have really entertained me and that I would enthusiastically recommend to others. 20 movies in all: 12 from Japan, six from Hong Kong and China, and two from South Korea. Watch them over a weekend, or watch them occasionally over the course of a year. Either way, these are 20 Asian films I would wholeheartedly recommend.

Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991)

He Ping, the Chinese director best known for his international arthouse hit Red Firecracker Green Firecracker, is also the director of an intriguing trilogy of 'Chinese westerns'. In these films He developed a combination of wuxia-style stories of heroic feudal warriors fighting evil in China's distant past with an aesthetic borrowed liberally from Sergio Leone and other Italian westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a curiously successful blend. I had previously reviewed Sun Valley (1996), the second film of the three, and many years ago I had the opportunity to see the third - Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003) - on the big screen. Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991) is the first of He's thematic trilogy, and it is a starkly told and effective sword-wielding western.

A teenager named Hao Ge (Gao Wei) travels across the western desert region of China to a small walled village known as Double Flag Town. He is there on the dying command of his father, a noted swordsman, to track down a crippled restaurant owner (Jiang Chang) and marry the man's daughter Hao Mei (Zhang Manna). When Hao Mei is almost raped, Hao Ge murders the assailant. When the assailant's brother arrives in town - a notorious and violent swordsman known as One Blow (Sun Haiying) - Hao Ge must stand against him or see the entire village slaughtered.

Monster Hunt (2015)

In the distant past, monsters walk the Earth but have been banished to faraway mountain regions separate from humanity. A runaway monster queen escapes to human territory and bestows her infant child upon an inept village mayor (Jing Boran). He soon teams up with an aspiring monster hunter (Bai Baihe) to protect the baby from both the monsters that have undertaken a coup of their kingdom, as well as the monster hunters who wish to eliminate the monsters once and for all.

Monster Hunt was a massive hit in China last year, where it broke box office records to become the highest-grossing Chinese language film of all time (a record since broken by Stephen Chow's 2016 film Mermaid). Monster Hunt combines computer-generated effects, wuxia action, scatalogical humour and even a few musical numbers, in a sort of 'everything-in-the-pot' approach to popular filmmaking. The result is a sort of amiable yet uneven mess, one too scrappy to really rate as a genre classic but far too goofy and loveable to criticise too harshly.

Shower (1999)

Daming (Pu Cunxin) is an up-and-coming executive living in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. When he gets the mistaken impression that his elderly father (Zhu Xu) is dying, he rushes home to Beijing and the family's public bathhouse. While there he comes to appreciate the family business that he abandoned, and forms a fresh bond with his father and his brother.

Shower is a Chinese comedy-drama directed by Zhang Yang. It plays with very well-worn story elements of family and duty, and the prodigal sun returning home and unexpectedly coming to embrace the small town life that he had so aggressively rejected. It is likely that most viewers will have seen similar stories played out screen several times before.

That said, there is nothing wrong with a film following a well-established road so long as it brings something else along for the ride. Shower brings a number of particularly strong performances and a gentle sense of realism that proves very emotionally effective.

Eight Asian films coming in 2016

2016 is upon us, and that means a whole new year's worth of feature films coming out. I figured I would have a look ahead and see what is coming and what I am most interested in seeing over the next 12 months. It seemed as good a place as any to begin with Asian cinema. I don't know the release dates for a lot of these films - unlike Hollywood, countries like Hong Kong, China and Japan tend not to set their release dates in stone. At present, however, all of the films mentioned below are supposed to be in cinemas by the end of the year.

Here are the eight films coming out of Hong Kong, China and Japan that have me most excited.

Election 3

Directed by Johnnie To. Starring Andy Lau, Louis Koo, Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Anthony Wong, Nick Cheung, Sammi Cheng, You Yong, Sun Honglei and Gordon Lam.

A veritable who's-who of Johnnie To performers reunite for the long-awaited third instalment of his Election trilogy. This is, in effect, the Godfather of Hong Kong movie franchises, boasting outstanding scripts and performances. While time will tell if this third film will match the quality of the first two (released back in 2005 and 2006), past experience of To's immense talents seems to make it pretty likely that it will.

The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom (2014)

Baifa Monu Zhuan, variously translated as Biography of the White-Haired Succuba or Romance of the White-Haired Maiden, is a serialised Chinese novel by Liang Yusheng. It was enormously popular when originally published in 1957. Within two years it had already been adapted into a Hong Kong wuxia film, Story of White-Haired Demon Girl. A television adaptation appeared in 1978, another film in 1980, and another TV serial in 1986. In 1993 the novel received its most famous and still most widely acclaimed adaptation, Ronny Yu's phenomenally successful The Bride with White Hair. His film stripped out the majority of the novel's plot - the political machinations, the civil war, the rival clans of nobles and bandits - to concentrate primarily on its central tragic love story. He also cast Hong Kong film legends Brigitte Lin and Leslie Cheung, which never hurts.

Last year the novel got yet another adaptation - its 10th including film and television - in the form of Jacob Cheung's lavish CGI-filled epic The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom. The film stars Huang Xiaoming as the dashing warrior Zhuo Yihang and Fan Bingbing as the bandit queen Lian Nishang, destined to become the white-haired witch of the title.

Sun Valley (1996)

The Avenger (Zhang Fengyi) is a wandering swordsman suffering from a deep post-traumatic malaise. He arrives in a rural valley in western China to wait for someone. While waiting he struggles to retain his composure while encountering an old warrior-turned-monk (Ku Feng) and a kindly woman (Yang Kuei-Mei) who runs the local inn and bathhouse.

Sun Valley, from Chinese director He Ping, is a remarkably sedate film. It formed the second part of a trilogy of 'Chinese westerns', films that deliberately riffed on the tropes of the American western genre and re-worked them into a Chinese context. I have not seen the first film in this trilogy, Swordsmen in Double Flag Town (1991), but I have seen the third: He's masterful 2004 action film Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2004), which I liked very much. Sun Valley is a much quieter, less accomplished work. It feels rich with potential, but the potential is - for much of the film's running time at any rate - unrealised.

Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons (2013)

Most people seem to have encountered Journey to the West in one form or another. Most Australians my age will have first encountered Wu Cheng'en's legendary Chinese novel via its Japanese TV adaptation Monkey, which the ABC broadcast on a seemingly endless look during the early 1980s. More recent audiences might have seen it adapted by Hollywood in The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), or the admittedly very loose adaptation in the popular anime Dragon Ball. The story basically follows a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage from China to India, accompanied by three supernatural creatures: a water monster, a pig monster, and the boistrous Monkey King.

Stephew Chow's 2013 film Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons is another rather loose take on Wu's novel. It seems to make two major changes: firstly, it presents itself essentially as a prequel, set prior to Xuanzang (aka Tripitaka, for English viewers) embarking on his pilgrimage; secondly, it presents his three companions Sandy, Pigsy and Monkey not as fallen immortals from heaven but as terrifying and monstrous demons in need of hunting down and taming.

Wind Blast (2010)

A debt-ridden boxer (Xia Yu) shoots a man dead in Hong Kong before fleeing to mainland China. A year later, a team of police officers have almost succeeded in tracking him down along the borders of the Gobi Desert - only to discover that a pair of assassins (Francis Ng and Yu Nan) are also on his trail.

Wind Blast is a 2010 Chinese action film written and directed by Gao Qunshu. It's not simply an action film: it's essentially a Chinese-language modern-day western, with lawmakers and criminals circling each other's trails on horseback while wearing cowboy hats. It's shot like a western, climaxes with a one-on-one showdown in the middle of an isolated town, and has a deliberate guitar-dominated musical score that brings to mind John Woo's 1996 action film Broken Arrow.

That's not to say it's not also a very Chinese-style film. The characters all seem to spend a remarkable amount of time talking about fate, destiny and honour, in that way that the protagonists of Chinese action films often seem to do. There's more than one slightly surreal moment, the most memorable of which is a climactic horse stampede. It's not simply that some horses are stampeding, it's that they do it through a town, and that they're remarkably tiny horses.

Princess Iron Fan (1941)

Princess Iron Fan is a Chinese animated film, produced and released in 1941. That makes it the oldest animated feature in the history of Chinese cinema. It was the 12th animated feature film produced anywhere in the world, animated by a team of 237 artists in war-time Shanghai under near-impossible working conditions.

The film was directed by the Wan brothers, Guchan and Laiming, who had been creating animated shorts in China since 1926. Seeing Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939 inspired the Wans to create their own animated film with a specifically Chinese flavour. To this end they selected a brief section of Journey to the West and adapted it to the screen. The monk Xuanzang (or Tripitaka) is forced to pause his journey when the path ahead is blocked by magical fires. To remove the flames he requires a magical fan owned by the Princess Iron Fan, and to this end he dispatches the Monkey King to ask to borrow it for a short while. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Sky of Love (2003)

Xiao Jia (Gigi Leung) is a Chinese university student living in 1981 Shanghai. Through a panicked moment of embarrassment she comes into possession of a broken CB radio unit. When she takes it home, however, it appears to work, and she begins a series of conversations with fellow student Jia Hui (Ken Chu). When an attempt to meet up in person fails, both discover the impossible truth: she is in 1981, and he in 2003, and they are somehow communicating through time.

Sky of Love is an unashamedly emotional Chinese melodrama, replete with all of the standards of that genre. So watching this film will provide impossibly pretty young protagonists, simplistic but heartfelt motivations, corny humour, and more than one sad montage of tearful youths standing in the rain backed by a mournful pop ballad. Criticising these aspects of the film are effectively pointless: if you don't like them, or can't tolerate their presence, then you're never going to like any film of this nationality and genre. It is, as they say, what it is.

Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)

A police officer in a northern Chinese city is the sole survivor of a horrifying shoot-out that leaves both criminals and his fellow officers dead. Five years later, he is an alcoholic security guard. A former colleague drags him back into the fold when his last police case, long thought closed, suddenly swings open with a fresh string of murders.

Black Coal, Thin Ice, directed by Diao Yinan, takes a well-worn film noir narrative: the beaten-down detective falls for the femme fatale who may have murdered several men. It then re-tells that narrative in a bluntly realistic fashion. The characters act like real, three-dimensional people. The violence, when it occurs, is confronting in its matter-of-fact bluntness. The surroundings, a Chinese coal mining town, give it all a highly distinctive edge. It might be an overly familiar story, but it's a striking execution of it.