Brian Hu

Picking up where John Caldwell left off in his discussion of post-network permutations of style and narrative in 1995's Televisuality, Erin Hill and Brian Hu discuss HBO's forging of a unique brand of quality through its original series beginning in the 90's. HBO not only increasingly chose for its original programs the filmic look first pioneered by network shows like Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, but, through strategies such as widescreen formatting, the production of prestige properties, and the appropriation of authors and genres strongly associated with film, the cable network also aimed increasingly at obtaining for its programming the high culture status that had previously been reserved for only the greatest and most critically acclaimed works of cinematic art. The channel's success in thus defining itself as something above and beyond television (not TV but HBO), in turn, had an effect on network and basic cable narrative and aesthetics from which it had...

Print and online reviewers of DVD players tend to evaluate new products given a set of predefined criteria: video quality (playback appearance, high-definition up-conversion), audio quality (compatibility with major audio formats), and connectivity (digital and analog ...

Like any DVD anniversary edition, this list promises to sell the same product to the same consumers, with a few updates to re-whet the public's appetite. Mediascape took a look at the AFI's ballot of 400 eligible films, and instead of writing the usual criticism against canonization, bad taste, or corporatization, decided to "review" the AFI's new list with a top 100 of its own. Of the 400 films on the ballot sent to AFI voters, only 4 were directed by women. (Five if you include Shrek, which was co-directed by a woman.) Does that mean that women are inferior directors? Hardly. Does that mean that women have been kept out of the director's chair? Yes and no. What our list aims to demonstrate is that, while women have certainly faced sexism in Hollywood, both in and outside of the mainstream American film industry (which the AFI list represents almost exclusively), women directors have made extraordinary achievements in filmmaking. But 100 films? That's ...

... capital's media corporations. Resulting from a history of cross-media symbiosis, the intersemioticity of Hong Kong popular culture creates a network of meanings surrounding singer-actors and their popular songs. This article ...

... 21 Implicit in these statements is the fact that there's a disjuncture between the Korean pop cultural imagination of Harvard as ... YA Entertainment has distributed some of the biggest titles in Korean TV dramas: Dae Jang Geum (Jewel in the Palace), Sandglass, My Lovely Sam ...

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two major Mandarin-dialect studios of the Hong Kong film industry, Shaw Brothers and Motion Picture & General Investment Limited, looked to brand themselves as cosmopolitan to both its regionally scattered Chinese audiences and to its potential Euro-American co-producers. To achieve this, the studios used the figure of the cosmopolitan female star and the musical genre, which provides a showcase for the actress's ability to sing, dance and strut in the musical and fashion styles of the world. This article looks specifically at actress Linda Lin Dai, who both studios, through their films and fan magazines, built up as an exceptional student of all things cosmopolitan and a well-travelled, universally beloved superstar in time and in step with the world of global tourism, haute couture culture and the international stage.

In the decade after Bruce Lee's death in 1973, film-makers from around the world produced numerous films starring imitation Bruce Lees with names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee. This article suggests that any understanding of the discourse of Bruce Lee as a star is incomplete without consideration of the ways in which the ‘Bruceploitation’ industry appropriated the star image of Bruce Lee and repackaged it for a transnational audience in the waning years of ‘kung fu fever’. By analysing the films’ narratives and marketing, the article argues that these films are not mere ‘clones’ of the ‘real’ thing, but rather imitations with a self-conscious difference. These films present ‘conjectural Bruce Lees’ that expand the familiar Bruce Lee image in order to maintain fan interest. As a result, ‘Bruce Lee’ as a discourse became increasingly flexible and sticky, hybridizing across cultures and genres. This view of ‘Bruce Lee’ beyond Bruce Lee asks that scholars approach stars not simply as discrete actors, but also as disembodied star-functions that transform across time and space.

As a Hollywood production helmed by Japanese director Hideo Nakata, The Ring Two upsets categories like ‘remake’ and ‘sequel.’ Running below the sinuous narrative and generic entanglements of adaptation, translation, and sequelization is a pattern of shifting authorship. By analyzing the discourse of authorship in industrial texts such as trade journals, newspaper articles, press kits, and DVD featurettes, this article argues that the logic of shifting authorship reflects Hollywood’s flexible accumulation of international content and labor. The fetish of ‘the original,’ discussed and reinterpreted continuously in each subsequent installment of the Ringu/Ring franchise, becomes the basis for self-mythologizing and justification for Hollywood’s new international division of cultural labor. Under these circumstances, Nakata’s auteur status serves as (multi)cultural capital, while his labor serves to ventriloquize Hollywood horror conventions and the style of director Gore Verbinski, whose presence continues to haunt the franchise as it is further passed along.