Oscar thoughts

Well, my pick for Best Picture (There Will Be Blood) didn't win, but I was happy to see a serious, well-crafted, even deep film win. The awards ended up pretty well spread out, which was fitting in a strong year for films. Into The Wild was shut out, but that was pretty well preordained when it got so little love in the nominations. Silver lining: Hearing a producer of No Country thanking his partner and calling him "honey."

Good to see (and hear): The winning song from Once, and Marketa Iglova being allowed back on stage to give her speech.

Personification of class: Art director Robert F. Boyle, accepting an honorary Oscar at age 98 with a very sweet speech.

Disappointment: Edward Yang being left out of the tribute sequence.

Best concession prize: The Bourne Ultimatum sweeping the awards it was nominated for (Editing, Sound, and Sound Editing) even though it deserved better nominations.

Favorite part of the show: The shots of Paul Dano, who will probably look psycho to me for the rest of my life.

If Cate Blanchett Can Play Bob Dylan, Then Surely: Tilda Swinton can play David Bowie.

"Distant Voices, Still Lives" at PFA

For some reason, I expected Pacific Film Archive's "shot-by-shot discussion" of Distant Voices, Still Lives to be movie first, then analysis. When I got there, I noticed a little table in the center of the screening room with a light, a glass, and a pitcher of water. Why lead a discussion from the middle of the audience? Well, because director Terence Davies was to show us the film, on DVD, wielding a remote, pausing and talking over it and allowing viewers to ask questions.

Had I known this, I would have rented the movie myself ahead of time, because I'd never seen it. But it's hard to imagine a more perfect host for this sort of thing than Davies. He was witty, erudite, and unfailingly polite, and clearly enjoyed himself.

The film was also well suited to the format, since there's very little story to follow. And because it's very closely based on Davies' own childhood, he was able to reminisce about the true characters and put each scene in context.

Like Davies's The Long Day Closes, DVSL is about growing up poor in 1950s England, specifically Liverpool. (Unfortunately, I missed its Friday night screening at PFA because I was sick.) I prefer Long Day because it's more cohesive: really, all about a young boy who's close to his mother and loves to go to the movies. DVSL looks at the rest of the family, including a tyrannical father, with glimpses of their lives roughly before (the Distant Voices half of the film) and after (Still Lives) his death. So while both are very personal films, this one is more a vision of family and community life in that setting than a personal reminiscence.

But it's a remarkably honest and understanding film in regard to the painful and distorted ways people who love each other can be to one another. Davies never judges anyone, and neither does he paint a silver lining around his father's cruelty after his death. And like Long Day, it's elegant and contemplative without ever becoming, well, distant. The combination of formal compositions and intimate, realistic action is reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Also like Hou, as well as Ozu, Davies likes scenes of characters singing right in the context of the story. In Hou and Ozu films and in Long Day, there are songs that startle us by continuing to full length, free from the cuts we expect after a few lines or a verse. In DVSL, some songs do get cut, but there are far more of them. The film is seemingly one-quarter singing. But it's lovely stuff. After the screening I asked Davies why he uses so much of this, and first of all he said it was true to life, that people did spend a lot of time singing to each other. Then he noted that, without knowing it, those people were usually expressing their deepest feelings in the songs they sang.

SFIAAFF 2008 rocks!

I've been following this festival for more than a decade, and I've never seen a more promising lineup. To begin with, a range from classic SFIAAFF fare like a Wayne Wang cross-generational Asian-American family drama (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) to irreverent mass-appeal comedy (the SF premiere of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay) is a dream come true. But there are so many other highlights in between.

- Mike (The Motel) Kang's West 32nd -- Grace Park in person!
- history and documentaries strong as ever, with the 1936 Whispering Sidewalks, as well as Long Story Short, about a midcentury nightclub act, and works about Anna May Wong, fortune cookies, kamikaze pilots, break dancers around the world, and more.
- multi-award-winning The Home Song Stories, Australia's Oscar submission for Best Foreign-Language Film
- a whole Wayne Wang retrospective, including another new feature, The Princess of Nebraska
- Music programs, including one featuring Goh Nakamura ... with a band
- Colma: The Musical director Rich Wong's new movie, Option 3
- Colma itself -- as a singalong!
- Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon

I'm not going to see all of these, but there's certainly something for everyone. If you'll be anywhere nearby, check it out!

A Brighter Summer Day in SF!!

Earlier tonight. San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival (deep breath) kickoff party. Packed house. Blaring old-school dance music. Finally sit down to look at the program, hot off the presses. Hm, that's nice ... that's nice ... The Home Song Stories on closing night, wonderful. Wait, what's this? A Brighter Summer Day. (More blaring dance music.) That's one of the big Taiwan New Cinema movies, isn't it?

Omigod. It's A Brighter Summer Day! The sweeping epic of Cold War Taiwan! Of which there are only one or two prints left in the world! The movie that obliterated a three-day weekend because I couldn't stop thinking about it, after watching it on VCD on a laptop.

Wait...wait: Look at the time ... 240 minutes! It's the real deal, kids!

Wednesday, March 19, Landmark Clay Theater, 2261 Fillmore, S.F. Be there or be not into great films.

(More on the rest of the spectacular festival lineup tomorrow.)

Here's what I wrote about ABSD after that first viewing. (Warning: Thematic spoilers.)

"Like Yi Yi, it's a long movie with a big subject that comes across in a number of different, connected stories. Both are well-balanced -- filled with well-balanced, well-composed shots and good pacing. Although I liked Yi Yi and thought Yang had a lot of success with a very ambitious concept, A Brighter Summer Day is in some ways even more ambitious. It's far more successful. He explores seemingly every aspect of Fifties life in Taiwan and underneath it all shows the current of violence. It's a metaphor for the threatened conflict with the mainland, and beyond that, for the whole undercurrent of violence in the Cold War. The story of the main character's growing up slips so delicately between innocence and danger. Then there is the creeping influence of American culture, the music, Westerns, romanticism, and what looks to an American like a West Side Story gang culture. Then there is the adults' attachment to the mainland past, and the sister's growth and academic progress. The way Yang fits in all these elements harmoniously and builds tension and brings it down, all over the course of four hours, is stunning."

FNL: Final (?) thoughts

The second-season finale of "Friday Night Lights," which aired two nights ago, will go down as the final episode of the series unless something unexpected happens at NBC before next season's schedule gets locked down. Ratings for the best show on television weren't stellar last year, and there's little indication they've picked up.

I'll keep holding out hope that somehow the network will see potential or an artistic halo in FNL, but the show's demise (if it comes about) will be one of the least surprising ones in my memory. It's not like "Arrested Development," a show so user-friendly you could start watching at any point in an episode and it didn't matter. To appreciate FNL, you have to at least be willing to get engaged in some stories about Texans, high school, and small-town life.

The closer wasn't the strongest episode ever, but I liked Tim's radio show and the silly confrontation between Coach Taylor and Moe (series creator Peter Berg). The whole thing with Street's one-night-stand waitress getting pregnant was a little over the top, but it was cute to end the episode with him telling her to just have hope. That goes for the fans, too.

I'm voting for Obama

Obscure film blogs can't really make political "endorsements," but there comes a time when you have to use whatever tools you've got to support a cause you believe in.

I'm voting for Barack Obama, and I hope you will, too, because we need a president who can lead and inspire the whole country. Obama does that better than anyone in the field -- better than any politician I can remember, in fact. He and Clinton are close in terms of policy, and there are issues on which I don't agree with either one of them. Our problems won't all suddenly be solved if Obama is elected. But in a president, powerful rhetoric can make a difference.

We need to end the false dichotomy of "red" versus "blue" in America. Our children should not grow up in a country where a feud that started before they were born dominates political discourse throughout their formative years. We need a leader who can inspire the other 299 million of us to work to heal our divisions.

This part of Obama's South Carolina victory speech gets to the heart of it:

"And what we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. A politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won’t cross over. The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don’t vote. The assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate; whites can’t support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can’t come together. But we are here tonight to say that this is not the America we believe in."

And since this is a video blog, of course, here's the speech on video:

What FNL is all about

Tonight's episode, "Leave No One Behind," was the best of the season, hands down. Great relationship developments, no ridiculous crime or violence stories, lots of opportunities for the cast to show off their phenomenal talents. Plemons, Palicki, Britton, Chandler, Charles, Gilford ... and a breakout performance by Aimee Teegarden. It looks like the season is nearing its end with the writer's strike continuing. Let's hope the great cast and crew go on to continued success.