Category / Academic

by Eternality Tan

Zombie Manifestations in the Digital Age

(First written in 2012, updated in 2015, never before published)

Introduction
Although the horror genre was littered with countless B-movies with incredulous titles in the early days such as The Giant Claw (1957), The Alligator People (1959), and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), it had slowly gained some sort of industry and critical acceptance over the decades with films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978), and The Shining (1980), among many others, now considered canonical works of the genre.

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by Eternality Tan

Waltz with Bashir: An Inquiry into Reality

(Written in 2009, and first published 25 Dec 2009)

The Film
First premiered at Cannes in May 2008, Waltz with Bashir subsequently won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and earned an Oscar nomination in a similar category.

Directed and written by Ari Folman, an Israeli who is not exactly prolific in his work, Waltz with Bashir is only his third film in 12 years after Clara Hakedosha (1996) and Made In Israel (2001).

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by Eternality Tan

“Hero”: Placing Asian Cinema Within National and International Boundaries

(Written in 2013, and first published on 1 Jan 2014)

Zhang Yimou remains to be the most famous of mainland Chinese filmmakers working today, yet his greatest works were made during the early phase of his career in the early 1990s with critically-acclaimed sociopolitical films such as Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and To Live (1994).

In 2002, two years after the international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Zhang released Hero, his first-ever martial arts film starring some of the biggest names in Chinese cinema, including Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi.

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