I have blogged about popular music from the US and Russia. This time, I would like your indulgence in some films, TV shows and music from the East.

• Japan: This blog post was supposed to be about music only but then I saw this movie.
  • Crazy Family: This movie from 80s starts off quite innocously but then the horror starts unexpectedly and does not stop until the end. It just became worse and worse like the movie Dead Alive! The story is about a family that moves from a cramped quarters in the city to a spacious suburban house. The abundance of space makes each family member possessive about their exclusive space. Everyone becomes detached from the others and become selfish. The head of the family then boards up the house and sets it on fire. Things go from bad to worse after that. The director more than manages to drive home his message. I wish he was less successful.
  • Johnny Sokko and his giant robot: This TV serial was shown on DoorDarshan in 80s. All the kids watched it when it was broadcast. It was created by the man who introduced Japanese monster madeness.
  • Kyou Kare Ore Wa: This was manga cartoon created in the 80s. It is about two high-school rebel kids who get into trouble with roughs from other schools. Lots of fighting, humour and action. Nothing boring like the other manga stuff that gets shown on Cartoon Network. There is some off-colour swearing but the stories are all good-natured fun. Only 10 episodes were made.
  • Ninja Hattori: This popular TV cartoon was original broadcast as a TV serial in Japan in the 1960s. The ninja was played by a kid but with a wooden mask. The ninja dog was quite big – bigger than ninja. For some reason, the ninja and his dog move from Iga village and moves in with the family of a schoolkid in the city. When the TV serial was made into a cartoon, the dog became much smaller. The kid’s elder sister was gone. A rival ninja kid and his ninja cat was added. One of the Ambani companies did the dubbing in English using Indian voice artists and released it all over the world. I am currently going through the Japanese TV version. Without subtitles, the episodes are not as funny. However, it shows how developed Japan was in the 60s. (The serial was filmed in black-n-white.) I even saw one train that looked like their iconic maglev vehicles.
• Hong Kong: I saw several compilations of Tik Tok videos. I do not use social media apps so these videos were quite a revelation for me. I picked up a few wonderful-sounding Chinese/Vietnamese songs.
  • Yi Jin Mei: A famous Taiwanese TV personality name Fe Yu-ching sang this song in the 80s. It got revived by a conehead in Hong Kong recently. The song has become on Tik Tok and other platforms. I have provided English pronunciation of the song, which are very different from the romanized transliteration of Mandarin Chinese.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekl-yqfr9tc&rel=0
  • Unknown song: I am unable track down this song.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFXVqiJsu8&rel=0
  • Happy Ghost 2: Raymond Wong is a prolific producer, director and actor. In this movie, he acts as an arts and games teacher in a girls school. There is a mean girls club called Club ___ in his class who torment him. The teacher’s attempts at disciplining them fail. He has some magical powers thanks to a ghost who got reincarnated as him. It belongs to a Ming dynasty scholar who committed suicide. The ghost helps in outwitting the girls and helps him lead the girls to victory in sports events. The girls nevertheless continue their pranks and get him almost fired. This movie has a lot of great Cantonese songs.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqtj8vp_zY&rel=0
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31HcaQBxUFk&rel=0
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGGNDdBIdnA&rel=0
  • Mr. Vampire I & Mr. Vampire 2: This Sammo Hung comedy horrow movie started the genre of hopping vampire in HK cinema. The vampire hunter in many of these movies was Lam Chi Shing who unfortunately died at the young age of 44. You may have already seen in many Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan movies. The second movie has Yuen Biao.
  • We will eat you: Under Mao, farms were collectivized and unqualified were put in charge. The result was a famine that lasted several years. Chinese people in mainland started eating all kinds of animals, bugs and even humans. People who were condemned by the Chinese Communist Party were killed, cooked and eaten. Cannibalism was widespread in rural and urban China. The movie was very horrifying and I did not follow the subtitles. It is actually very funny but I was too chicken and fast-forwarded the movie to the fight scenes of which there are many. They are absolutely terrifying and fast.
  • Gift From Heaven: Three girls doing late shift for a giant retail corporation find a shopping bag with millions of dollars. They take it home but decide not to spend the money until they can be sure it is not mob money or company money. They want to be certain that it is safe to spend it. The money was a payoff for a man blackmailing the manager of the corporation. He is a relative of the owner. The owner asks the police to conduct a confidential investigation. The girls are now too scared to anything. The movie is funny and extremely thrilling. I do not care for character development in films but it in this movie it is very realistic.
  • Troublesome night: The first movie was an anthology of loosely related ghost stories. It became a big hit and several sequels were released. I saw the first two of them. The second movie has a bereaving girl committing suicide and her ghost asking song requests of the song “I am beside you”. This is a really haunting song. Anyone will like it and want to hear it all the time. After a lot of guesswork, I tracked it down to a 70s movie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7alVGlhalA&rel=0
• Australia: I have decided to include Australia because that country does not deserve to be treated as part of a separate continent. It has been chickenized after it elected some wimpy politicians. They have given up their guns, accepted the climate BS and adopted the carbon tax. They are now happy to be an appendage of Communist China.
  
  I have seen a total of three Australian movies before this. Interesting but not remarkable. This movie was quite different.
  
  • Australiens. Is there a science fiction movie where all the characters are so likeable? I particularly like the lead girl who talks about ‘other-wordly cognitive powers’ in almost every dialogue and the newsreader who calmly reports the attack. The movie is about aliens who decide attack Australia and nowhere else. This prompts envy in Washington DC who refuse to help country and dare the aliens to attack the States. The movie has low-budget but spectacular graphics. The aliens quickly body-snatch humans so the believability quotient is high. The attack vehicles are sharply designed. The plot changes quickly and dialogues are fun. An alien bodysnatches one of the characters and he looks green, moves laterally and speaks suspiciously but nobody suspects him. Every other person is interogated and asked to prove their human-ness. There is a fun song about Tasmania, which the aliens surprisingly leave out of their attack.

 

 

 

• Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey: They ruled the 1930s with their comedy and musical act. In many of their movies, they played poor drifters or runaways eager for a break. The quiet and younger Wheeler played the straight guy while the sauve and pretend-sophisticated Woolsey took upon slightly crooked roles. Many of their movies had the adorable Dorothy Lee. The best movies I saw are:
  • Half Shot at Sunrise
  • Hook, Line and Sinker: This is my favorite of theirs because it combines comedy and the use of a machine gun (as seen in the movie DJango).
  • Cracked Nuts

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1AB7cDVb3s&rel=0

• Bud Abbot & Lou Costello: They were famous in the 1940s. They were vaudeville actors who moved to radio and then film and television. The fat Costello is the straight gullible guy while Bud Abbot is the scheming type. Costello is not very bright and does not understand words with more than three syllables. This creates several comedic situations in which Bud says something and Costello understands either the literal meaning or the something it sounds like. The most famous of such routines is “Who is on first”. Who or Hu is a player but Costello think he is asking a question. Then, Bud says Watt’s second and Costello thinks “What is second”. Some of their movies that I saw were:
  • Pardon My Sarong
  • Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
  • Abbot and Costello Meet Invisible Man
  • Abbott and Costello Go to Mars
  • Jack and the beanstalk
• Bing Crosby and Bob Hope: Their “Road to” pictures are famous to this day. Road to Bali, Road to Hong Kong and Road to Singapore are among them. Beautiful actress Dorothy Lamour appeared in many of these movies.
• Bud Spencer & Terrence Hill: These Italian actors were famous in the 1980s and made
  

  Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill

  several films set in the US and dubbed in English to the target the larger audience worldwide. Bud Spencer is the tall fat guy and his punches seemed to pack quite a lot of power and that was one of the reasons why people all over the world turned up at cinemas to watch his films. In one movie a tough takes a thick steel road and bends it with his bare hands. Bud Spencer picks up the bent bar and straightens it with his bare hands. Top that! When not being Chuck Norris, Bud Spencer is the most nicest guy except when he has to deal with the crooked blue-eyed Terrence Hill. Because of this, he becomes a hero to all kids who get to watch his films.  Bud Spencer has a website – https://en.budspencerofficial.com/ It is written in the same friendly and jovial character that he played in the movie.

  • Who finds a friend, finds a treasure
  • Double trouble
  • Miami cops

In the grand old days when Doordarshan was the sole broadcaster, only two films were available per week – Hindi on Saturday and Tamil on Sunday. Monday morning talk invariably revolved around those two movies as everyone would have seen over the weekend. When cable TV and private TV channels started becoming popular, Doordarshan started allowing private TV groups to make their own deal with Hollywood movie libraries and advertisers. For its part, Doordarshan sometimes broadcast movies from the Soviet Union.

Cinema from the Soviet Union was not as good as Hollywood but it was good enough. The movies had a weird Marxist twist, particularly at the ending. There is a Soviet film version of the English novel Treasure Island. In the end, they do not get the treasure and return back empty-handed. Soviet cinema even had Hollywood-style Western movies. They seemed to have all the thrills of a Hollywood make but the ending was an impromptu propaganda session on Communist anti-capitalist values. This did not really matter because in the 80s and 90s, we (us kids in school) were all supporters of the Soviet Union, which was a great friend and benefactor of India.

Recently, my Internet connection improved. For the first time in my life, YouTube is playing without any lags with speeds approaching 1000 Kbps. Strangely, BSNL is providing high speeds even when I am over monthly fair-use data limit. This was drastically different from a few months ago when it really went bonkers*. Dish TV had disabled recording on my recorder set-top box. I don’t watch TV programs live like ordinary people. I watch only recorded programs. So, and I switched to watching online videos.

Mosfilm, the Soviet movie production outfit, has turned over several of its famous movies online. Here are a few of them that that I saw recently, in descending funniness order.

• Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures: A movie in 3 parts. (First and last part are safe for kids. Fast-forward for 3 minutes after 00.37). Extremely funny movie. My favorite line from the movie is the policeman saying “Dear citizens, alcoholics, hooligans and parasites..” alkogoliki, khuligany, tuneyadtsy
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG9Wjgd2w7k
• Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia: The movie is about a group of Italians who go to Moscow in search of a treasure buried by a dead grandma who escaped the Bolshevik revolution. I think this movie was shown on Doordarshan. I had multiple deja vus hitting me, particularly during the scene with the passenger aircraft landing on a highway. This movie has one of the best car chase scenes ever recorded in movie history. There is a scene with gratuitous 30-second nudity (obscured by a curtain) for few seconds at 01.09m which is not safe for kids. The background music is based on some famous compositions I suppose. You also get to see some famous landmarks in 1970s Moscow.
• Kidnapping, Caucasian style: The Shurik adventure continues in this movie. He helps a gang kidnap a girl thinking it is part of a local Caucasian tradition. Before he realizes his mistake, he is in the nuthouse… The most memorable part is the song by Aida Vedishcheva at (00:27m).
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBm1h3LOD7QA little like Indian movies, many of these Russian movies feature song sequences. Here is another song of hers “Help me” set to the tune of the song Sway. The tune seems to be very popular in Russia. I heard in many of these movies.
  

  Sway from the movie Dark City by Anita Kelsey
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrRkVNVboFs

• Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future: Ivan The Terrible is brought to the present thanks to a scientific mishap. The guy who played Shurik, Aleksandr Demyanenko, is the scientist.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a50qT9bW2QoThis song became an delightful ear worm.
  

  Here is another song. Russian women are B-U-T-fool!
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDWPKqXDNq8

• Irony of fate: This 3-hour movie is supposed to be very famous and is routinely broadcast on New Year. [In order to whip up nationalistic fervour and fight the Nazis, Stalin once allied with the Church. The Commie dictator moved the birth of the Messiah to New Year Day so that Christmas celebrations could be allowed under the guise of a secular holiday.] The movie is about a guy who gets drunk in a sauna and mistakenly put on a plane going to a different city. Thanks to the uniformity of Soviet town planning, his address in Moscow has counterparts all over Russia. And, the taxi takes him to the same address in St. Petersberg and mayhem ensues.Part – 2
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmGPeowN-0
• Rusalochka (The Little Mermaid): This is a Russian-Bulgarian adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson story. It is set in the 13th century. The little mermaid sees a prince on a ship from a distance and falls in love with him. Other mermaids mesmerize the sailors into crashing their ship on to the rocks. The mermaid saves the prince from drowning and brings him to shore. A local princess notices the unconscious prince and rescues him. The mermaid wants to marry the prince and swims towards palace where the princess lives. One of the fishermen spots her and they all throw rocks at her. She hides for safety in the canal within the palace. A traveling handyman befriends her. He enlists the help of a local witch who demands her hair and sweet voice for transforming her tail into legs. The witch takes the mermaid’s hair but does not take her voice. The traveling handyman contacts the prince who is recovering at the palace and tells him about the mermaid. By then, the mermaid is about to be burned at the stake by the people who had caught her. The prince saves the mermaid and the princess takes the mermaid in her care. The prince fights off a local challenger in a joust to marry the princess. But, the challenger stabs the prince in the back when he was not looking. Everyone abandons the prince now that he is dead. The mermaid begs the witch to revive the prince. The witch does so but warns her that if the prince does not marry the mermaid, she will die. The prince comes back alive but does not marry the mermaid. He marries the princess and the mermaid is destined to die on the same day. The traveling handyman challenges the prince to a fight and is killed. His sacrifice spares the mermaid from death and her soul becomes eternal.

  Because the original is a tragic story, most adaptations have veered away from the original. This one does too but not in a crass commercial way. The movie is beautifully filmed, production design is top-notch and the background score is fittingly haunting. Viktoriya Novikova is very beautiful as the mermaid and is perfectly cast.

• Purple Ball and Teens In Universe: These are two science fiction movies. It is almost impossible to determine how the special effects were created. It does not look like computer graphics. It does not look like props. It looks almost real…
• Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair: A charming fairy tale for children.

* – At that time, the Internet connection was extremely flaky, even flakier than it regularly used to be. It seemed like some monkeys were playing with the wires.. However, I turned the misfortune into something valuable. I wrote a software called NetCheck in both PC and Android versions. It provides visual or audio notification when the Net connection fails. It is now an indispensable application on my computers and phones/tablets. Interestingly, even with higher speeds, the Net connection continues to be flaky, particularly when I blogging or publishing. If I am passively downloading stuff or reading the news, the connection stays up.
* You can download the subtitles for Youtube videos from a site DownSub.com. Just replace youtube with downsub in the URL address.