ViFF continues today at UC Irvine with a couple sets of shorts and a special spotlight session on Dustin Nguyen who, several years ago, starred in the action TV series “21 Jump Street” as Officer Harry Truman Ioki – a cop who goes under cover as a high school student and who recently became the hottest Viet actor with his role in The Rebel, known in Vietnamese as Dòng Máu Anh Hùng.
Shown tonight will be Little Fish (pictured right) where Dustin will be in various states of undress and kissing Cate Blanchett.
The special session on Dustin Nguyen starts at 6pm with a reception hosted by Wells Fargo (you know, that bank whose profit report buoyed the stock market last week), followed by the screening.
Also shown today will be two sets of shorts running parallel at 12 noon and a third set at 3pm. All events today will be at UC Irvine, HIB 100.
In the third set of shorts is a special sneak preview of director Leo Chiang’s documentary A Village Called Versailles, a powerful story of the Vietnamese community in Louisiana uniting and standing up against the government’s plan to place a landfill right next to their neighborhood, post-Katrina.
The showing of A Village Called Versailles will be followed by a panel discussion on the rebuilding of the community after Katrina.
Appearing on the panel, among others, will be Derrick H. Nguyen, better known by his Vietnamese name Nguyễn Hoàng Dũng. As a member of the White House Initiative on Asian-Pacific Americans during the Bush administration, Nguyen was intimately involved with efforts to help reconstruction of the areas devastated by the hurricane.
I watched “Nu Hon Than Chet” (Hot Kiss) last night at the Bowers Museum.
The film was surprisingly good and highly entertaining ! it has all the elements of a good commercial movie : Pretty woman, Handsome man, Love, Death, Evils, Angels … and the story has a ligh-hearted happy ending. No wonder it broke all the cashiers’ record in Vietnam.
“Nu Hon Than Chet” was also the first Vietnamese movie that used many hi-tech digital special effects, a great new achievement for VNMese movie industry. The digital special effects improved the VNmese filmakers’ capabilites immensely, even with small budgets, now they can do many things that in the past only big Hollywood studios were capable of.
Nụ Hôn Thần Chết?
Oops. Probably you don’t understand Vietnamese deeply. Language used in that movie is strained and not realistic. The movie is pathetic. Most people in VN watch it because it’s a “new” thing, not because it’s good.