This is a collection of animated shorts (mostly from CalArts students). These things are always a mixed bag, most are good, some are pretty boring. The one I enjoyed the most was Golden Age, itself a series of shorts. The film presents the "E! True Hollywood Stories" version of newsreels about fictional cartoon characters (as opposed to real cartoon characters?) and their personal turmoils off-screen. It's pretty witty and has a good sense of animation styles through the ages as well as the darker side of Hollywood history. One great moment comes during a segment that lampoons wartime shorts like Donald Duck's Der Fuehrer's Face and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (don't try looking for that last one on your Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Warner like to keep it under wraps). In it the villains are racist caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Only for Hirohito they use Chinese stereotypes instead of Japanese ones, priceless.
This is an incredibly brutal Chinese gangster film about a Cambodian hitman and the Hong Kong cop trying to track him down. It's a real competition to see which of these men is more ruthless in the pursuit of his goals and, although I'm not all that familiar with the situation, after seeing this film I could believe that all of China's human rights violations are perpetrated by the police in Hong Kong. This is a strange movie and when you think everything has been resolved, it just keeps going only to find more complications. This is also one of a few movies I've seen that has double subtitles (Chinese and English) and it's funny to think that China is such a large country with so many dialects that they have to subtitle their own movies so that the non-Cantonese speakers can understand what's going on.
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