In advance of the film, I got a quick brain dump on the main protagonists so had a moderately good idea of what to expect from the characters.

The film started well with an MGM-esque gay wedding with Liza Minelli belting out Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies‘ but then went downhill. At first it was just minor actors had cod Oirrish accents and then production item things started to bug me like the fact Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie had an apartment that felt as personal as a hotel room. This all meant that the suspension of disbelief necessary to follow the plot was shattered.

The Middle Eastern plot line played to many American stereotypes of the region that felt more Carry On Up The Khyber than a modern drama should. This film does for Abu Dhabi what Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat did for Kazakhstan. Arab societal conservatism is mocked and violated by Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall).

I was really surprised that for a show which had a decade or so to develop the characters, everything felt so two-dimensional.  The whole film felt like the cynical abuse of presumably had been a powerful franchise.

Firstly, The Independent reported that Confucius was replacing screenings of Avatar at many Chinese cinemas, though the one I went to in Shenzhen was running the two side-by-side.

Distribution aside, Confucius serves up a quality-biopic of the famous philosopher which is grand in both its vision and in its cinematography. Its soundtrack features a well-known Chinese singer who was tempted back into recording for the film and a great cast to support Mr Fat’s efforts. It moves him away from being an action star to a character actor and will hopefully open a different set of doors for him in Hollywood in the future.

If you like Chinese epics like Red Cliff or the House of Flying Daggers then this is a good film for you to watch. I don’t think that it will excite western audiences like Avatar did, but that is less to do with the quality of the film and more to do with the audience’s cultural receptivity to it.  It will be interesting to see how the domestic audience here in China receives it.

There is a recursive nature to this film’s relationship with Bladerunner. Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner played at being Asian with its Japanese soundtrack and synthesis of a Kowloon night market.

It is interesting to see how the Koreans reinvented these concepts for Natural City. One thing I really like is the way they merge the old and the new in the film, giving an amazingly rich experience for a film that couldn’t have been made on a Hollywood budget.

Ginta quickly gets a travelling companion, a magical talking cup and ball game / weapon called Babbo. Unfortunately Babbo, is also coveted by the powers that be and a lot of the adventures that Ginta has is to do with this continual tug-of-war over the possession of Babbo.

If you like your anime rich and adult orientated like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, this isn’t for you. If you like the high production quality of Studio Ghibli, you may find MÄR too bold, brash and crudely executed. However MÄR, does compare very well to the likes Dragonball Z or Bleach (but without the gore factor). Happy anime couch surfing.

Milk tells the story of Harvey Milk, which is also the story of the gay community in San Francisco to be treated the same as everyone else. Penn sympathetically portrays Milk as a dreamer with a mission to secure public office. The film is a beautifully shot period piece.

Milk was eventually killed alongside San Francisco mayor George Moscone (the famous Moscone convention centre was named after the mayor) by conservative political rival Dan White.

This is not a joke but the premise of Triangle. The name mirrors the three central characters and the three film directors who created this film. All of these directors names on their own is enough to carry a heavyweight Hong Kong film, I was afraid that it may be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen but my fears were unfounded.

Instead you get a complex drama that interplays the relationships and trials of three friends, local gangsters, corrupt police officers (which is ironic given that Hong Kong has one of the cleanest police forces in the world after a painful clean-up under Governor MacLehose and Commissioner Sutcliffe’s ICAC), a robbery, adultery and a spaghetti western-esque shootout with a dollop of comic timing.

To say any more would give the game away, just watch it.

Watching it over again, a few things struck me:

• The Matrix owes it a huge stylistic debt in terms of the real-world style, character motion and even the green character title sequence at the introduction film credits
• The film was quite prescient is its perception of technology. The idea that our ideas and memories would be super-connected to each other is already happening with social software and services from Facebook to Flickr and Delicious. The three-dimensional visualisation of data isn’t that far from systems being demonstrated at the moment, if you think about Jeff Han’s touchscreen work at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Perceptive Pixel, the Apple iPhone and Microsoft’s Surface project
• The films cultural references see Asia Pacific (lots of visual references to Hong Kong) as being foremost in future technology. This may seem far-fetched at first, given the world’s largest and most successful software companies are American (Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems); but when you look at the level of engagement by Joe Public in Asian markets for social and mobile software services and cultural attitudes to new technology in general the geographic status quo is unlikely to be maintained over the longer term

The media owner Mr TV has a secret plan to subjugate the citizens forever. Its up to a little girl and her family to stop his evil man from robbing the city of its words with the help of a radio transmitter and the blind boy next door. Stylistically La Antena borrows extensively from the golden age of cinema, I noticed visual cues from Metropolis, Things to Come and Nosferatu.

The film has a lush indie Hollywood film like Sin City, but was in fact made on a preverbial shoe string in Argentina.  It is the most entertaining world cinema film I have seen since Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (admittedly La Antena doesn’t have actors with the presence of Maggie Cheung, Gong Li or Tony Leung).

The story is about the tensions the characters have to make in setting the world back to a more balanced state that would be advantageous to the human race or continue trying to live in balance with nature

Whilst the film was presented in the usual high production values and style of STUDIO GHIBLI, however it is out of their fantastical comfort zone and it shows. The suspension of disbelief is broken when a volcano moves on massive tracks that looks like the old tracked platforms NASA used to move the Apollo rockets around.