27 February, 2006

themovies

a couple of weeks ago Jill and i took a little trip down to Chinatown in LA, hoping to find some things for our wedding, along with a few items of Chinese food we had missed since being back in the States. though we were largely unsuccessful in our stated aims, we did stumble across an unexpected treasure at the sweet Neo Happyland store:


Takumi (Jay Chou) in the 藤原とうふ店 (Fujiwara Tofu Shop) car, the Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno.

頭文字D, or Initial D, as it's known in English, is the first feature film of Jay Chou (周杰倫), or thejayfather. some of you may remember that Jay, "the king of Chinese hip-hop", served as the inspiration for the title of this very weblog.

though there may be a little too much vomiting (projectile even) in the film, Jill and i agreed that Jay acquitted himself well in the role of Takumi, the drift racing prodigy son of a local tofu man in Gunma Province, Japan. Tofuman was himself a great racer back in the day, and Takumi learns the skills of drifting almost without being aware of it, while making early morning tofu deliveries around Mt Akina in the AE86. based on a series of anime cartoons of the same name, the movie came out just as we were leaving Taiwan, so we missed it there and were glad to see it now; we were also happy to see it with subtitles and to see that Jay was considerably better at acting than he had been in some of his music videos.

on the flip-side, however, the movie Jill gave me for Valentine's Day was just as bad on DVD as it had been in the theatre.


Transporter 2: Transport More

i really enjoyed the first Transporter movie, but somehow this one wasn't up to scratch, being, inter alia, even less plausible than the original. still, it was good of Jill to sacrifice like that--she even offered to watch it with me--and now my DVD library is two movies stronger. well, bigger anyway.

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