Review: 101 Dalmatians (1996)

It's minor Disney.

Review: I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Kuala Lumpur mirrors Taipei in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Taiwan filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang's first feature set in his native Malaysia. That's just the beginning of the echoes and parallels in this typically sad and twisted movie.

Lee Kang-Sheng is back as Xiao-Kang, the Taipei native who's grown up in Tsai's films since 1992's Rebels of the Neon God. But he also plays a catatonic young man in the care of his sister and a live-in nurse. At one point the two Lees are effectively eye to eye, in one of several mirrored scenes within a movie full of fascinating perspectives.

Hsiao-Kang, traveling in the city alone, gets drawn into a street scam that doesn't end well and is rescued by South Asian migrant laborers. The sliver of a story, as usual, is just a frame for Tsai's fixations: sickness and healing, unhealthy lust and pantomimed love, and environmental disaster.

Though little else is new, the setting is, and Asian film's poet of standing water portrays Kuala Lumpur as another version of Taipei that's even more sticky and stifling. It's a perfect Tsai location: a city of the globalized present, mixing old, new, and abandoned buildings and Malay, Chinese, and South Asian residents. Old Mandarin and Cantonese pop mixes with Bollywood tunes and local folk music, though there are no musical performance numbers this time.

Everyone in the film lives on the margin or the edge of the margin. The city looms outside small attic windows, and it's through windows and doors that the most interesting shots peer. Credited here as co-cinematographer with frequent partner Liao Pen-jung, Tsai proves himself again as a master of composition and color.

Yet Sleep falls short of Tsai's masterpieces, The River and Goodbye, Dragon Inn. At his best, Tsai delivers universal humanist messages through quiet poetry. But like his other lesser films, Sleep takes place in a closed, self-referential Tsai world. Beneath the sheen of realism is a stylized performance that pays meager dividends to a general audience. Like that other queer master of Southeast Asian film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai loves to play with cinematic conventions. But whereas Weerasethakul constantly invites the audience in to his lighthearted games, Tsai often seems to keep the fun to himself and his loyal fans. As Sleep drifts into the home stretch, it's like listening to Jimi Hendrix on the last day of Woodstock. "You can leave when you want to," Hendrix told the audience. "We're just jammin.'"

Mysteries of Justin

Couple of things about Justin.tv:

It's about time. That is to say, the medium is the message of Justin.tv, and the fact that it's a real-time medium is a big part of what makes it interesting. For example, one day Justin and his friends had a barbecue in the park and invited anyone to come join them. (As usual, the execution was kind of lame; there was only enough food for about eight people.) I was watching off and on. It was mid-morning and I wasn't really hungry, but when the burgers were done, I felt like going up to the park. Why? Just because of the natural anticipation that comes with a barbecue. It's a time thing. I knew that some actual burgers were really done right that instant, two miles from where I was, on a beautiful day.

Justin.tv also turns the media inside out. You can see (very nearly) everything Justin does and hear what he says. Just watching him makes you an insider. It's the opposite of the mainstream media, which edits everything down to create a particular image. So it was interesting to see a comment on a friend's blog.

"the nightline reporter said his apt STINKS!!!!!," kimsamsoonLA wrote. So while we get the real dirt about mainstream celebrities from small, independent media, kimsamsoonLA got the dirt on Justin's tiny online show from ABC.

But anyway, I've gotten bored with the whole thing. Next!

The Supremes Sing Medieval Television History

If it's live TV filmed off the screen, does it even matter that it's lipsynched? There's so much broadcasting history on display on the Supremes DVD Reflections: The Definitive Performances, 1964-1969, the music is almost incidental. Why do ultra-tame afterschool dance shows like "Shivaree" somehow look so dynamic and unpredictable? What looks like Rotoscope gives way to early black-and-white video, then eye-popping color. Unfortunately, the liner notes are skimpy when it comes to technical issues.

You can also watch the clips with bare, a capella vocal tracks from the studio ... if you like stuff that's really eerie.

Mini-review: The Nativity Story

The Nativity Story never carries its own weight in bringing the Biblical story of Jesus' birth to the screen. With a few minor exceptions, the cast and filmmakers relied on what's already been said to make the story matter to us.

Plenty has been said in lots of media over the centuries, of course. That's why The Nativity Story needed to take advantage of modern film to do something other than make the characters move and talk in a well-shot, realistic setting with good background mattes. But there's not one performance at the heart of the story to drive us forward through the drama. It lacks the Yul Brynners and Anne Baxters that made old Technicolor Bible epics like The Ten Commandments pop despite their Hollywood soundstage looks.

The Nativity Story's subplot about the Three Wise Men works better than most of the film, with an emotionally charged performance by Nadim Sawalha as Melchior and a little bit of humor. The first time we heard a funny line, we had to listen to it several times, both because everyone mumbles in various accents throughout the movie (we needed the subtitles anyway, so they should have just performed it in the original languages) and because the rest of the movie is so humorless and, well, reverent.

Alfonso Cuaron's sci-fi tour de force Children of Men was last year's real nativity story, capturing the feeling of hope arriving through birth amid chaos and oppression. The Nativity Story gets the details right but never comes screaming to life as Cuaron's film does.

The first, the last, the everything

For Bay Area people, just a reminder that Syndromes and a Century, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's latest love story, is showing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend. Apparently this is its exclusive Bay Area theatrical run. It'd be easy to indignantly say this movie should have had a "real" release in a commercial theater, since it's better than most of the stuff in commercial release, but I won't. I think it belongs in a museum and more people should go to museums.

Johnny Ray Huston wrote a very smart review for the Bay Guardian, along with an interview with Joe.

What does Justin mean?

Yesterday we went to Fisherman's Wharf -- to buy a book, of all things -- and on the way back we saw the apartment building where Justin lives. I instantly knew it, and it felt like I was looking at some sort of landmark. That startled me a little.

Mark my words, people will be studying Justin.tv for years. What makes Justin a celebrity and his home a landmark? He's good-looking, but no more so than many other 23-year-olds. We never actually see Justin anyway unless he's facing a mirror or sleeping. He doesn't have to "work" per se, but that's not uncommon in San Francisco, and what he does instead is hang out with boring venture-capital types and sit in his apartment looking at his computer. The apartment is as rigorously nondescript as a college dorm, less interesting visually than most viewers' homes. A lot of the time Justin's view is just like mine: A notebook computer screen.

What makes him matter is that we get to see what he sees, and know what he's doing, almost every second of the day. And because we know so much, we want to know more: What kind of person is he, really? Why is he doing this? What's it like to expose your whole life to the world all the time?

I don't even watch Justin much. A minute here, a minute there. Honestly, the "content" is incredibly boring. What matters is that so many people are watching. We get to share this and stay cooped up in our little worlds, looking at our computers.

I know this all sounds trite. I'm barely scratching the surface. That's why people will be studying this for years to come. It's more than a gimmick.

And this would be because ... ?

Happy Feet is just lighthearted entertainment until you start to ask yourself why it exists. Why would anyone remake a moving French documentary about penguins as an animated comedy (complete with similar narration) about singing and dancing? Because they could, I guess. It just ends up feeling sort of odd. Quite entertaining, though, and sometimes quite clever. Way too scary for little kids, though.

Time-remap us, please

Why do televised concerts by older artists always have so many cutaways to the audience? I realize someone like Elton John can't exactly jump around the stage, but I'd rather watch six angles of him sitting at the piano than shots of people my age "rocking out" past their bedtimes. And don't you dare point a camera at me in the middle of a concert! ;-)