PAUL'S ON TOUR

Paul Bae is on tour!(Paul plays Sam in the motion picture "Yumi in Love")

The A-List Comedy Tour comes to Vancouver next weekend (Nov. 2 to 4). Held for five shows over three days at the new Funny Bone comedy club at Edgewater Casino (at Plaza of Nations), this tour features the top Asian comics in Canada including Paul (Korean), Jeffery Yu (Chinese), Ron Josol (Filipino), Sugar Sammy (East Indian), and Gilsin Lubin (black--we ran out of Asians). Veering away from everything you expect from stereotypical racial humour, this show opened to critical acclaim in Toronto two weeks ago and is the first tour of its kind in Canada.

Please spread the word even if you can't make it. Also, if you go to the following site and use the code word "asianinvasion" (one word) when you purchase your tickets, you get a discount of $10, no matter your colour.

BE THERE!

FILMS VIEWED and their ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

A SCANNER DARKLY: "A surprisingly irrelevant (and a jumbled mess of plots and stock characters) film considering the subject matter, but good-looking, good Winona, and Good Robert Downey Jr."

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: "No matter how many times I see the "floating" camera style, the overlapping chatty dialogue, or the ridiculously large cast of characters, when he does it right there's nobody better.

BLOGGER IS MESSED RIGHT UP

JUST MADE KELLY A NEW WEBSITE

kellyhaigh.com

She's good.

NEW MURAKAMI NOVEL "After Dark" Coming July 2007. Yes.



The midnight hour approaches in almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realize they've been acquainted through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese requests her help.

Meanwhile, Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is "too perfect, too pure" to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporfic state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth - a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television's plug has been pulled. Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With "After Dark" we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?

ANOTHER YUMI POSTER POSSIBILITY

JULIE MOCK UP

PHILIP ROTH (quotes from Guardian Interview)

I ask him [Roth] if he is religious. "I'm exactly the opposite of religious," he says. "I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. Are you religious yourself?" he asks.

"No," I say, "but I'm sure that life would be easier if I was."

"You know, passion doesn't change with age, but you change - you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent. The sexual passion is always deep, but it becomes deeper."

"If you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two."

Some list of the highly subjective 1001 books you must read before you die

I've read slightly less than 100 (including a few sitting on the shelf).

Wow. I've got a lot of reading to catch up on.

It's tougher when you're trying to write one!

YUMI IS COMING ALONG.



NICE QUOTE

"It's like you want to be Radiohead and then you think, 'Shit, I've accidentally turned into Coldplay.'"
– Novelist Mark Haddon

YUMI UPDATE

-Doing ADR tomorrow in my basement for Yumi. Looking forward to getting the film off to the sound professionals!
-Very excited about the cut as it is. Once the audio is taken care of, it feels like a movie. Whew.

OTHER FILM STUFF
-A few exciting projects on the go, the TV pilot, the new film CINEMANOVEL and the new film JULIE. Lots of stuff going on!
-Need to incorporate over the next week or so.
-My novel...I need to keep working out bits...my fiction teacher is also one of my favourite writers, so I need to keep on top of this stuff. Writing a novel is a heady enterprise, but it's great to get "inside" the characters.

FILMS

The Departed "pretty good, VERY entertaining, a plot riddled with holes from start to finish, doesn't stick with you, but this remake of Infernal Affairs (which I've yet to see) is flash and fun, much better than expected for me.

Stone Reader "a doc about a fan of literature that rediscovers a novel and champions it back into print (Stones of Summer). Aside from the narrators love of literature, his presence wears on you, eventually he became way too much. Still, when you love books as much as I do, you're prepared to forgive almost anything.


np TALKING HEADS

Missing Torri and Sedgie.

Heaven's Just a Funky Moose

Every year I have to post a link to this thing. It's crazy. It's serious.

NEW PROJECT

In the same spirit of YUMI IN LOVE, I've decided to immediately launch into the next project. CINEMANOVEL

CINEMANOVEL

I'm going to begin the hunt for CAST, CREW, and PRODUCERS!

This time a PRODUCER is a MUST.

If anyone knows anyone interested in producing or executive producing a feature film with an amazing script and an outstanding cast, please email. Not just Producers and Executive producers, we'll take Co-producers, Associate Producers, anyone with stuff or money or food or energy...

Teambuilding 2.0

CinemaNovel

More info coming very soon.

PLEASE email with HEADSHOTS and RESUMES and TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

It's back on.

YUMI IN LOVE

Just finished watching the film. The scene I put "back in" really makes a difference. I've chosen another scene to cut. Feels like it's just sitting there (it used to be 3 pages, then 2, then 1, then we shot it, now I'm cutting it). You really do have to take out a few favourites if you want to serve the whole...I thought those people (the "kill your babies" people) were fucking idiots (some of them still are), but you can glean the occasional bit of useful info.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING. Good film. Funny. Silly SNL (not the good years) type moments in there, but overall a very impressive comedy. The kind of film you used to be almost certain to see in the theatre. If you're like me and you remember going to the theatre and rarely leaving disappointed. Lately it's almost inevitable that you leave the theatre disappointed. Sentimental "on the nose" crap, or dick and fart jokes. Not much in between that isn't subtitled or written and directed by Wes, or P.T., or Woody, or someone you already love (Baumbach, etc...).

Where are we headed?

Who knows...I just have to get a film "out there." YUMI IN LOVE Coming Soon...

PICTURED: Adam becoming Thomas



YUMI UPDATE

I put a scene back into the film, or rather, I put a scene into the film that I cut before I began editing.

I think it's an important scene, and it lets us settle with Thomas's character for a bit. The film is clocking in at around 94 minutes, and with some temp soundtrack music, should be almost ready for some post sound magic.

I can't believe the amount of days spent, just sitting in front of the computer, trying to make a "temp" version of the film that's watchable. With 20% ADR required, it's difficult to maintain flow...we're missing the dialogue for at least two, maybe three, entire scenes.

Still, one day closer...