Journey to the spring

Orlando didn't feel like the East Coast. The air and the water were soft and there was that lush Southern greenery, but everything else was new and generic. I knew the recent history of the place, that Orange County was largely open land in the Sixties when Disney picked it for its new, larger version of Disneyland. The county that we see now grew up around that project and Disney still dominates local politics, or so I have read. Nearby, Disney helped create Celebration, a master-planned community designed to evoke an old-fashioned small town just as Disney's Main Street USA does.

So initially I looked at Orlando as a place with no heritage, a tabula rasa upon which all this artificial junk had been built: Theme parks, upside-down buildings, kitschy restaurants. Only later did I think of the other Orange County. As I wrote in this essay, California's Orange County wasn't really a blank slate when Disneyland and suburban sprawl overran it after World War II. Yet, like this place with the uprooted upside-down classical building, it must have seemed so to Walt Disney and others who built places like Old World Village.

They put the "small world" of particleboard world harmony in these places because of the myth that there was nothing there to start with. In the case of Orange County, California, the fake globality of Disneyland and its cousins could only exist because its builders didn't know how other countries and cultures were actually woven into the place's history and present day. Believing Orange County wasn't already a kind of small world, and that it essentially had no history, was a requirement. After all, there can't be a Swiss mountain, a tropical lagoon and an old English town in Wyoming, for example, because they don't belong there. Everyone knows that's the West. (Buffalo Bill and Nate Salsbury told us so.) People mentally emptied both Orange Counties and then filled them up, because culture abhors a vacuum.

All this is by way of recommending Journey from the Fall, an epic drama about a family's escape from Vietnam and resettlement in Orange County, California. Arriving there in the Seventies and Eighties, they landed in an established universe where they didn't yet belong, but they found a way to recreate their world in a small way. Today, the Vietnamese of Orange County have a thriving community, mainstream success, and a measure of political power. But everyone needs a myth, a story that's more than facts and dates. Journey from the Fall goes a long way toward creating one.

Remote this week

I'll be out of town for the next few days. In a place in Florida that, as far as I can tell, has "movie studios" that are primarily there so tourists can visit them. Think about that one a little while. I hope I'll find the time to write, but if you see nothing new here this week, you'll know why.

Review: Syndromes and a Century

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is flirting with us. How else to explain the lush landscapes, languid pace, and gentle camerawork of his films? Or the endless come-ons among his characters, from sexual to platonic and a fascinating array of combinations in between? He's like a Buddhist Barry White, always quietly encouraging us to get it on -- "it" being what, exactly? Some vague higher level of human togetherness?

After spending half of his last masterpiece, Tropical Malady, blurring the line between military recruitment and homosexual seduction (the second half imagined a more primordial seduction), Weerasethakul turns to the subject of healing in Syndromes and a Century. A Thai movie made in 2006 with such a title invites interpretations involving SARS, but the characters in this multifaceted work suffer from a wide variety of other syndromes, both physical and spiritual. For most of the film, they're all either seeking or providing some kind of salve, so relentlessly that sometimes two characters are at odds, both trying to help the other.

The story, which like Malady is split down the middle, begins at a clinic in the Thai countryside. The plot might be best described as a series of vignettes among related characters, with a love story loosely threaded through, but Weerasethakul doesn't operate on the level of dramatic progression. Like a good pickup artist, he plays with mood and setting. Again he experiments with form, constantly and always impeccably. A dialog scene is shot as a landscape. Incongruous lines drop abruptly into conversations. A change of scenery subtly alters the movie's texture. Sometimes inviting, sometimes menacing, often funny, the imagery and dialogue in Syndromes is more varied than in Malady, and this is a much more accessible work. It's an art film that inspires contemplation but doesn't require an intellectual eye. Weerasethakul is creating a cinema that surprises and delights at the level of the viewing experience itself, acknowledging our expectations and playing with them without having to remind us he's doing so. All we have to do is give in to it.

Review: Shanghai Kiss

Ken Leung, probably best known as the karaoke equipment salesman in the Edward Norton comedy Keeping the Faith, is a great dramatic actor too, as evidenced by his powerful performance as Quill in X-Men: The Last Stand. So when I found out he would play the lead in Shanghai Kiss, I didn't even check to see whether it was a comedy or a drama before buying a ticket. As unbelievable as it seems, this is Leung's first lead role.

Shanghai Kiss is that rare thing, a fresh romantic comedy. That's thanks in part to Shanghai-born David Ren's sharp screenplay and up-to-date take on China, but most of all to Leung, who's like a freshly opened bottle of champagne in every scene. The New York native delivers Ren's consistently funny lines like he was born to play Liam Liu, the hard-luck Asian-American actor trying to become a star in L.A. I was surprised to learn during the Q&A after last night's premiere at SFIAAFF that he had to audition for the role. The whole production plays like a Leung vehicle.

If you're at all familiar with returning-to-roots stories, there's nothing especially new about Liam's story, but in the hands of Ren and Leung it becomes a heartfelt story about a character we've just met. An interesting complication is Liam's ambiguous relationship with 16-year-old Adelaide in L.A., well-played by Hayden Panettiere of NBC's "Heroes." What is original for an American movie is the way Shanghai is portrayed, especially when Liam first arrives to handle the sale of a home his grandmother left to him. There's no Chinese-y music, no bicycle traffic jams, no wizened old faces or Mao jackets. In time, China's poverty plays a key role in the film, but Liam's first glimpse of Shanghai is of a dynamic, modern city, a land of promise, with a pulsating rock soundtrack.

It's a bit inaccurate to call Shanghai Kiss a film, though. It was shot on high-definition digital video, which for the most part looks wonderful. The lighting looks natural for the most part, the colors are dazzling -- at times a bit unnaturally so, like a modern-day classic Technicolor -- and the sharpness is eye-popping. This is the best digital video I've seen on the big screen. The new medium will take some getting used to, but it's a legitimate alternative to film.

More than that, I hope this marks the Leung's arrival as a big-screen force. Shanghai Kiss is heading for theatrical distribution in selected markets, and I think it has the goods to go wider. Either way, you can't deny that the star is a natural.

Review: In Between Days

As a sometime diaspora-studies geek, I expected a lot of insights and reflections on that subject from In Between Days, which centers on a Korean girl living in Toronto who misses her estranged father in South Korea. It delivers very little on that score but so much else that writer/director So Yong Kim and co-writer/producer Bradley Rust Gray can be forgiven many times over.

This is a movie about a boy and a girl. We know this because a good three-quarters of the screen time consists of their faces in extreme closeup, or just the two of them side by side. Forget multiethnic Toronto, celebrated as one of North America's most vibrant cities: We barely see it in this movie. Aimie and Tran (he's also Korean) ride the subway, sit in coffeehouses, hang out at claustrophobic teenage parties and ponder their ambiguous relationship, almost always in darkness. The city appears as a dimly lit skyline as we hear Aimie voicing the letters she's writing home to her father, but this is a film of warm faces in a cold landscape.

To be sure, their situation as immigrants does play a role in the story. Though Aimie claims in a letter to have friends of all colors, she doesn't appear to be close to anyone but Tran. Together they speak Korean almost exclusively, and everyone they spend time with is Asian. This amplifies the sense of isolation and claustrophobia in this very close film.

Jiseon Kim as Aimie and Taegu Andy Kang as Tran, both new to the screen, give perfect understated performances. Decades earlier and a world away, Elizabeth Taylor warned that the slightest expression goes a long way when your face is projected on a screen two stories tall, and these young actors have clearly learned that lesson.

In Between Days takes a while to gather steam, but once we understand its visual world, the movie's dim midwinter lighting and deliberate pacing make it that much more powerful. And despite its unconventional style, the movie has a classical movie arc built around increasing sexual tension. In Between Days is a perfect evocation of two themes in adolescence and life itself: the blurry line between festering and growing, and between being uncomfortably close and comfortably intimate.

A few shorts

Yesterday I caught a shorts program at SFIAAFF called "The World, Complicated." It was my first shorts program in a long time, because there are always so many features to see.

Whether you'd like to see a feature-length version is certainly not the only measure of a short film, but two of the standouts in this program met that mark for me. The Last Chip, an Australian film by Heng Tang, joins three elderly Chinese-Australian women on a casino run. It's visually stunning and well-crafted overall, though I felt it went a little overboard dramatically at one point. I wanted to know more about the backstory of these characters, all of whom were brilliantly played.

Windowbreaker, directed by Tze Chun, is set in a changing Boston suburb torn by sometimes unspoken conflict among Caucasian, Chinese, and Vietnamese residents. The video, credited to "The Complications," hints at the complexity of the situation and raises questions that almost beg to be explored at feature length. Thankfully, student filmmaker Chun displays the delicate touch that could make such a movie work.

The other entry that stood out was Going Home, an intimate first-person documentary about another traumatic parting in a Vietnamese refugee family that has been separated many times before. Director Hung Nguyen's camera drinks it all in, in takes that are extraordinarily long and well-shot for interviews with untrained subjects. This one is fascinating and a pleasure to watch all by itself, the perfect length at 20 minutes.

Review: Undoing

After finishing his landmark Asian-American feature Yellow in 1998, Chris Chan Lee left Los Angeles for TV and film work in Asia. His return to the city resulted in Undoing, a movie about returning from overseas and one that's in love with LA's film noir heritage. Once again, Lee examines guilt and betrayal, as well as the intersection of the straight-laced and the criminal Koreatown.

Coming home from Korea, to which he fled after a tragedy involving a close friend, Sam (Sung Kang) wants to get back together with girlriend Vera (Kelly Hu) and undo what he did to hurt her and others. Once he's done a couple of deals, he'll leave town with her and start anew. Naturally, there are complications, and Lee's writing and Kang's superb performance keep us guessing whether Sam really knows what he's doing. The supporting cast is excellent, too, especially Tom Bower as Don, an older white man who seems like a substitute father to Sam.

Undoing mercifully steers clear of the settings we're so used to seeing in films that take place in Los Angeles. There are palm trees off in the haze, but this is strip-mall-and-bungalow L.A., simultaneously older and newer than the shiny Westside locales of more conventional films. Lee and cinematographer John DeFazio bring Koreatown, a drab section of midtown made colorful by bright Korean retail signs, into the universe of noir L.A.

Unfortunately, until the final act, Undoing is too busy visually, and too busy being noir, to get us fully involved in the story. The filters, grainy textures, dim lighting, and rapid-fire still shots are relentless. Much of it looks wonderful, but added together it becomes distracting. However, once the characters' real motivations become clear and the film starts closing in on its not-quite-Hollywood ending, the power of the story and of Kang's performance stand out in sharp relief.

Opening night

Opening night of SFIAAFF yesterday started out more like a summer day, what with the gorgeous, sunny weather and daylight saving time. Survivor winner Yul Kwon did a fine job as MC through many introductory speeches for the 25th annual event. (I wouldn't even know who the guy was if it weren't for Angry Asian Man.) The opening film, Finishing the Game, got an enthusiastic response. The cast and crew in attendance filled up the width of the Castro Theatre's sizable stage, to the point where co-writer Josh Diamond and some other folks were outside the spotlight.
The gala afterward was, as usual, held at the Asian Art Museum and packed. There were stars galore and I had a great time. Caught up with HP Mendoza, whose Colma: The Musical is heading into theaters this summer, and with a couple of critic friends, Tony of YNOT and David Lamble of the Bay Area Reporter and ClaudesPlace.com Both liked the film, though Tony pointed out that some of the humor depended on familiarity with trashy Seventies TV shows.
Finally, I met Ken Leung, who was a remarkably casual and unobtrusive presence for being such a powerful actor. I just had to shake his hand, and he and Shanghai Kiss co-director David Ren were very gracious. The movie plays tomorrow night.

Sodagreen

Now, isn't that lovely?*

*Technically, this entry needs to be about a video or film (and this is an intriguing one), but I sure love the soundtrack ... ; - )

Sodagreen is from Taiwan.

Review: Finishing the Game

Justin Lin's Seventies mockumentary about fake Bruce Lee movies, Finishing the Game, is deceptively simple on the surface. Like other comic films about the earth-tone decade, it often plays as a good-natured spoof of that period's relatively innocent pop culture in the wake of the Big Ideas of the Sixties. But in this case, the story is about casting Lee's final film, Game of Death, after his death in 1973, a subject that inspired Lin and co-writer Josh Diamond to make some more serious statements about racism.

The subject is familiar to anyone who's followed conversations about Asian-Americans in the media, or looked for them there: It's hard for Asians to get any film or TV role in America that isn't there for an "Asian reason," and most of those have involved martial arts or food delivery. But Lin and company make us laugh about it pretty steadily throughout Finishing the Game's 88 minutes.

And we're not just laughing at society or Hollywood. There's a wide variety of humor packed into this brief film: character comedy, relationship comedy, sex comedy, workplace comedy, and old-fashioned slapstick. Last night, Finishing the Game even made an audience at an Asian-American film festival laugh at a Vietnamese refugee's heartfelt story about his family being divided by the war. At other times, Lin delivers his own poignant messages through pure spoof, such as casting Dustin Nguyen of 21 Jump Street as an out-of-luck actor who once gained fame on a short-lived cop show. It's layered filmmaking that keeps you thinking.

Meanwhile, the excellent performances serve the real-world cause of demonstrating the skills of Asian-American actors including Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Leonardo Nam, and Brian Tee. It's a movie about auditions that is itself an audition at another level, and at times imagines an Asian-American movie stardom that is almost unknown in the real world.

The story in Finishing the Game ends abruptly before completing a conventional story arc. Though that may be another "meta" maneuver by the filmmakers, it's disappointing that the movie feels, well, unfinished. But by the time it ends, this "small" film has already delivered more laughs and ideas than most conventional productions ever do.

Festival Eve

SFIAAFF starts tomorrow! This SFGate article talks about the history of the Center for Asian-American Media, which hosts the festival.

Given CAAM's roots in documentary film and especially in public television, it's funny that I feel I should point out some documentary stuff this year that might be overshadowed by the many Asian-American and Asian narrative features. Veteran documentarian Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese, the story of Chinese-Americans who helped shape classic Hollywood films, should be a real eye-opener. Then there are historic films themselves, including the 1929 Pavement Butterfly. Meanwhile, And Thereafter II is the sequel to a documentary from the 2005 festival about a Korean war bride's unhappy life in the U.S. Now, the first movie was so jaw-droppingly grim that I will have to sit this one out, but the images in that movie have really stuck with me.

So as strange as it sounds, when you go to the little festival that started out trying to tell the world about the Asian-American experience, try to look beyond the big, flashy comedies and dramas.

Review: Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven was the first art film I ever saw, unless you count 2001: A Space Odyssey as an art film, which I do now but didn't when I was nine years old. I saw Days of Heaven in its first run, at a matinee with my parents at the Village Westwood. I remember seeing the scene with the raw cabbage on the cutting board and being mesmerized by the lighting and color. This is how you become the kind of person who watches four-minute shots of empty movie theaters with a straight face.

I remembered the movie on Oscar night when it made up, oh, a third of Michael Mann's "Bunch of Movies that Were Made in America" montage, and my partner found it at the library. Here's the review I wrote, which will also be preserved for posterity here.

It's good to see Terrence Malick in what is for him a flurry of activity, having released The Thin Red Line in 1998 and The New World in 2005, and coming in with Tree of Life next year. In the 20 years between Days of Heaven and Line he grew considerably as a director, but not enough to make up for the three or four films he might have made at a more conventional director's pace.

Days of Heaven is one of the most beautiful films ever made, no doubt thanks to having both Nestor Almendros (who won the Oscar) and documentary legend Haskell Wexler behind the camera. But even more impressive is how well it's grounded in a particular time and place. Malick started with a vaguely soap-opera tale of of a love triangle and turned it into a much larger story about young industrial America. Golden-hued shots of old-fashioned farm work are undercut by the harsh realities of labor exploitation. The deafening noise of a Chicago steel mill is echoed in the hiss and clang of steam-powered farm machinery. Migrants escaping poor countries and urban sweatshops ride the rails to the country at harvest time, desperate for work.

The story centers on Bill and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams), an unmarried couple who leave Chicago and pretend to be brother and sister. Along with Bill's teen-aged sister Linda (Linda Manz), they end up at a big Texas spread owned by The Farmer (Sam Shepard). His attraction to Abby leads to a tense arrangement that keeps the characters together on the farm for months before falling apart. But this is film more of images than of words. The cast, especially Gere, was well chosen to exchange smoldering stares more than lines of dialogue.

In that sense, Days of Heaven is of a piece with Malick's other work. His focus was already on nature: frogs, wild turkeys, tall grass rippling in the wind. Malick's fascinated with historical Edens and falls from grace, and like The New World, Days of Heaven takes place in a less spoiled America. But in his later films, Malick broke away more completely from convention. The environmental shots in Heaven are gorgeous but not as daring at those in Line and The New World. There's narration here, too, but it's solely in Linda's voice and is grounded in the story. Twenty years later, Malick shifted the balance, making stories into mere frames for the idyllic settings and philosphical musings at the heart of his films. But if this earlier work lacks the total mastery of image, pace, and tone Malick would achieve in Line and The New World (the latter of which notably suffered from similar story and acting flaws), its pleasures still overshadow its shortcomings.

Why FNL rocks

At Salon, Heather Havrilesky articulates exactly what I've been thinking about "Friday Night Lights": Bright Lights, Big Pity.

Burns shocker!

When I looked at the paper on Saturday I was surprised to see this article:

"Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and members of his crew were banned from a Pacific Heights hotel and billed for thousands of dollars in damage on Friday after a raucous night that left two rooms "unrecognizable," according to the hotel's manager.

Burns and his entourage were in San Francisco for a preview screening of scenes from "The War," a PBS documentary in the making, at the Castro Theatre on Thursday night. After partying with fans and local luminaries until almost midnight, they went back to their rooms at the Hotel Majestic on Sutter Street. There, the hotel alleges, they lit kerosene lamps, pulled an historic photograph of the hotel off the wall and mounted it on acid-free archival board, and rearranged antique furniture to match the original design of the 1902 hotel.

A room service waiter alerted the night manager after he found the debauchery in full swing at about 1:30 a.m. while delivering an order of tea and scones -- the crew's sixth that night.

"They had that photo on a table and a guy with a camera was filming it every way you could think of. He zoomed in, zoomed out, panned left and right ... I left when he started panning and zooming at the same time. I'm a family man," he said.

Neighboring guests complained of being kept awake or fitfully dreaming of America's rich heritage by jaunty yet wistful airs played on a dulcimer, a violin, and a mandolin. The night manager finally confronted Burns and his guests when the thick-maned director walked down the hallway wearing glued-on muttonchops and made up to look like railroad magnate Milton Schmidt, who built the hotel as a private residence. With a camera crew following him, Burns launched into an historically accurate tirade against William Jennings Bryan.

Burns and his friends were told to return to their rooms and go to sleep, which they did. But after they checked out on Friday morning, the hotel staff was in for a rude surprise upon entering the rooms.

"There were these porcelain water basins all over the place. We have private bathrooms in every room, you know," said housekeeping employee Ashley Contreras. "Don't these people know how to use a sink?"

Reached by wireless on Friday, Burns declined to comment, saying Adam Arkin was the only actor who could bring the right voice to the role and was currently unavailable.

Automatic Ken Burns Effect

Last night on the way home from work I saw a huge line at the Castro Theatre. Not exactly your typical Castro crowd, either. It turns out they were there for a preview of Ken Burns's new PBS miniseries on WWII, "The War." Why pay $15 to watch TV clips? Mr. Bowl Cut himself was there!