October 2025 – Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
2 posts published by mark during October 2025| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
2 posts published by mark during October 2025| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
While Exhuma is marketed as a straightforward horror film, its true genius lies in its structure as a piece of supernatural “competency porn.” This is a film about experts doing their job with breathtaking skill, only the job happens to be calming the dead and confronting ancient curses. The narrative begins with a wealthy Korean-American … Continue reading "The Dark History Buried in Exhuma"| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s was a creative cauldron, bubbling with relentless commercially driven energy and an “anything goes” mentality.. Unlike Hollywood’s often more rigid g…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
1 post published by mark during September 2025| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Ghost Month has started in Taiwan, so it’s a good time to consider the Taiwanese film Marry My Dead Body.The film’s premise is audacious: a macho, homophobic police officer, Wu Ming-han accidentall…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
2 posts published by mark during August 2025| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Akiria Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful opens not with an image of beauty, but with a brutal command: “Attack and Destroy the Enemy!” This command is followed by the totalitarian declaration that this is “An Information Bureau Movie for the People,” before the familiar Toho Studios logo even appears on screen. This is the disorienting introduction … Continue reading "Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful (1944): A Study in Propaganda"| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
To fully understand the genesis of Hong Kong genre cinema in the 80s and the early 90s, you must first witness a man battling a reanimated corpse with a wooden bench. That scene, in all its boister…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
When Pearl Harbor shattered America’s isolationist fantasies, General George Marshall faced a peculiar dilemma: how to transform farm boys and factory workers into global warriors who underst…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
What if I told you there’s a film written by James Cameron, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, that critics praised but audiences ignored-leaving it to vanish into the shadows of cinema history? That fil…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Imagine a man running on the edge of a rushing locomotive, staring up at a torrent of water about to crash over him-knowing he’s about to risk his life, not for glory, but for a laugh. This was Bus…| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Akira Kurosawa: a name synonymous with cinematic mastery. His debut, Sanshiro Sugata, often heralded as the first glimpse of towering genius. But strip away the reverence, look past the auteurist mythology… What are we really left with? Released during the height of World War II, Sanshiro Sugata charts the familiar arc of a young, impetuous … Continue reading "Kurosawa’s Debut: Genius or Just Practice? Revisiting Sanshiro Sugata (1943)"| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
Tsui Hark stands as one of Hong Kong cinema’s most formidable auteurs, his finest works deserving placement alongside the masterpieces of John Woo or Wong Kar Wei, yet with a filmography that is far more varied. His latest offering, “Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants,” has reached American screens after amassing an impressive $83 … Continue reading "The Visionary Returns: Tsui Hark’s ‘Legends of the Condor Heroes’ "| Optimistic Indie Roleplaying
