Quick take: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Writer-director Andrew Dominik deserves praise just for attempting to transfer Ron Hansen's sprawling historical novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, onto film. The book captures the essence not only of James, Ford, and several of their cohorts, but of the entire West of the late 19th century. Astonishingly detailed and dripping with Americana, it could have made several movies. But Dominik bravely follows the main narrative, from the meeting of James and Ford to each of their ends, quite closely within a single 160-minute film. The result is minimalist, focusing closely on a few characters in clean, empty landscapes. It's realistic in a different way, focusing on the sparse population of the West rather than the crowded gathering places within it. The film hews closer than the book to the public perceptions at the time of James as a Western hero and Ford as a pathetic young hanger-on. But Casey Affleck gives such a vivid performance as Ford that he may have single-handedly perpetuated this image for years to come.

Review: The Home Song Stories

The Home Song Stories, Tony Ayres's impressively mounted feature about his own early childhood, feels like an utterly true film. That's the root of both its strengths and its weaknesses, but at its best, this intelligent and heartfelt portrayal of family relations and cultural hybridity is a rare treat.

Joan Chen plays Rose, a former nightclub dancer who marries a sailor and moves to his home in Australia with her daughter and son (Ayres) in tow. The sailor is good-hearted but soon is shipped out, and it turns out Rose can't handle being alone. In time we learn this isn't the first time she's flown off the handle, and it certainly isn't the last in this film, which traces her emotional instability over several years and its effect on her children.

What's most extraordinary about The Home Song Stories, besides Chen's vivid performance, is the way it defies expectations and stereotypes. It's full of the inconvenient juxtapositions of real life: a devoted husband whose job forces him away from his wife most of the time, a flashy compulsive gambler (Rose's lover) who's both well and horribly suited for stepfatherhood, a brother and sister who bicker with and rely on each other.

Perhaps most exceptional is the film's treatment of racial and social relations. Between Chinese and white Australians, there's love, tolerance, ordinary friendship, and open hostility. Ayres even renders in fine strokes the complex relationships among different types of Chinese characters. One scene brings together in a hospital room Rose's Australian-accented daughter, a working-class cook from Hong Kong, and an immigrant Singaporean nurse. (Ayres's gentle honesty about the nuances of Chinese-Australian life is reminiscent of works by the artist William Yang, with whom Ayres worked on the documentary Sadness. Yang's Blood Links is a family slide show blown up to global proportions.)

Yet the movie's evasion of cinematic expectations sometimes bogs it down. The drifting life of an unstable mother's family is almost by definition episodic, and Ayres tries to impose narrative order on it only in very broad strokes. Before long, we feel young Tony's craving for stability acutely.

It was brave of Ayres to essentially tell the whole story through the eyes of a shy boy who barely speaks, but Joel Lok does a great job with that role, as do Irene Chen as his more confident older sister and Steven Vidler (who graciously spoke at the SFIAAFF screening) as Bill, the sailor. The look of the film beautifully evokes a distinctive time and place, Australia in the 1970s, with innovative angles and selective-focus effects. The Home Song Stories never really adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but every one of those parts is brilliantly observed.

Review: A Brighter Summer Day

At last week's gloriously sold-out screening of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day at SFIAAFF, The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office handed out pamphlets advertising travel to Taiwan. I can't thank them enough for sponsoring an incredibly rare presentation of this four-hour masterpiece, and I heartily recommend travel to Taiwan. But it was an odd place for that promotion, since the film essentially paints Taiwan as hell on Earth.

ABSD takes place in Taipei in 1959, ten years after the Communists took over China and the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. It centers on the family of a Shanghai intellectual, Mr. Zhang, specifically on him and his teen-aged son, Si'r (megastar Chang Chen, in his first feature role). In this new and supposedly temporary home, the old order collapses. Both father and son are drawn into turf battles -- between the Communists and Nationalists and between local street gangs, respectively.

The twin stories are to blame for ABSD's daunting running time, but they need each other. Like few other films, it creates a sweeping vision of a complicated time and place, one we can feel as well as see, even if we don't understand the complicated gang rivalries. (I've seen it three times, and I still don't.) The city is still in the shadow of World War II and the Chinese civil war. Tanks roll down the streets. Weapons are hidden in homes left over from the Japanese occupation. Most demoralizing for Mr. Zhang, the military calls the shots. It's no coincidence the film takes place largely at night, and often by flashlight.

But ABSD is more than a vision of a debased and dislocated society. It's also about a love affair between that society and its key military ally, the United States. Visions of Fifties America abound, from sock hops to gunslinger fantasies and gang fights reminiscent of West Side Story. The title comes from a slight mistranslation of the Elvis song "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" by Si'r's sister, slaving over a phonograph and a dictionary. The juxtaposition of soothing American music and the complexities and deprivations of the family's life in that sequence is exquisite.

It takes Yang's innovative eye, and powerful performances across the board, to bring all this to life. Wang Qizan nearly steals the show as Cat, a diminutive gangster and budding musician. Zhang Guozhu (Chang Chen's real father) embodies weariness and disappointment as Mr. Zhang. But Chang as Si'r, and Lisa Yang as his girlfriend, Ming, are the two engimas at the heart of this volatile story. Fittingly, in Yang's wide, unpredictable shots, action emerges by surprise rather than being presented as set pieces. There is sweetness throughout ABSD, in romances, bits of humor, and Mr. Zhang's devotion to his son, but the lulling nostalgia never lasts very long. The gun is not a toy, and it's loaded.

Review: Option 3

Few filmmakers mount a full-scale musical as their first feature, so maybe it's fitting that Colma: The Musical director Richard Wong made a highly personal, small-cast, sparsely scripted art film as his sophomore effort. Yet Wong and Colma collaborator H.P. Mendoza didn't step back in any other way with this latest project. Option 3 is consistently well shot and edited, even taking on more challenges than most mainstream films do.

The movie is a meditation on lost love, but in the form of an urban thriller. Thus it goes light on the Emily Dickinson poems (though it includes some snippets, marking perhaps the first time the lonely poet has been paired with Thai martial arts) and is far less self-indulgent than most breakup movies.

As the film races through styles, including a bit of rock musical, the story is relatively easy to follow yet not really to understand: A young man's girlfriend is kidnapped and he has to retrieve something of hers -- it's never clear what -- and deliver it if he ever wants to see her again. Naturally, things don't turn out quite as planned. The film can be frustrating as it moves between action and flashbacks, and Option 3 isn't satisfying in conventional film terms. Wong even said, introducing its premiere at SFIAAFF on Sunday, that it's not a movie at all.

The pleasure in this film comes from the beauty or thrill of particular sequences, such as a closeup of two pairs of lips in silhouette or an escape down several flights of stairs in one shot. For a shoestring-budget project from two relative newcomers, it's remarkably polished. And in an age when an arty chase film can win Best Picture without even delivering a final showdown, who's to say what counts as a movie?

Review: Happiness

One character in the South Korean film Happiness always calls the main character "Cirrhosis." The protagonist's real name is Young-su, but this recurring joke reinforces one of the many questions the film raises: whether each of us is his own disease, the thing that will kill him.

Young-su (Hwang Jeong-Min) is living a fast life and dying a slow death in Seoul, where he's involved in the nightclub business. After staggering through a club clutching his stomach one night, he cashes out and tells everyone he's going "abroad." But where he really goes is a clinic in the country, far from his city friends and influences. There he gradually weans himself from alcohol and cigarettes with the help of the other patients, especially Eun-hoo (Lim Su-Jeong), a young woman who's been there for eight years with a terminal lung disease. Young-su and Eun-hoo fall in love and move out of the clinic to a small house of their own, where they continue to live a simple agrarian life. But there's trouble down the road.

Impending death is a classic trope of melodrama, but in Happiness, it engenders much more than simple sadness. The city's pulsating club scene and the clinic's corny positive-thinking exercises and calisthenics are like alternate conceptions of life itself, of accepting or fighting mortality. Director Hur Jin-ho's condemnation of urban life (he co-wrote the film with three partners) is as harsh as F.W. Murnau's in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. He draws brilliant contrasts between the textures of the two worlds through framing, sound, and pace. But as in that film, it's the people that stand out most, with Hwang and Lim perfectly embodying the dramatic transformations in the main characters.

Happiness is reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life, in which people meet after death in something like a movie studio and help each other recreate the best moments of their lives. Both films suggest that, contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre's grim interpretation of hell, heaven is other people.

Review: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

My SFIAAFF experience kicked off this afternoon with Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the sequel to the 2004 stoner comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The sold-out showing in the massive House 1 of the Sundance Kabuki was quite a party, especially with co-star John Cho appearing afterwards for Q&A. He apologized for missing the festival so many times, explaining that he had schedule conflicts, and sported a bandaged right wrist from an injury on the Star Trek set.

Heading off to Amsterdam in search of the hot girl from Harold's building, as well as all that legal herb, our friends end up indefinitely detained after an in-flight misunderstanding. After the titular (hehe, titular!) escape, they have to find a way to a rich friend's ranch in Texas. Yes, the Bush references flow freely, and they grow more explicit and funnier as the movie goes along.

Guantanamo Bay is not only more politically and racially alert than the hilarious White Castle, it's also funnier, better paced, better shot, and less crude. Mind you, this is no drawing-room comedy, but there's less gross-out humor. Cho (who, unbelievably, is 35) and Kal Penn are better than ever. Let yourself go, don't expect The Godfather, and you won't stop laughing.

Review: The King

There is definitely a good movie somewhere in the idea of a Texas minister's half-Mexican bastard child coming back to visit after getting out of the Navy. Knowing this, one could only dream that Gael Garcia Bernal would play the son and William Hurt the father. Yet having seen just such a film, even with the added attraction of Paul Dano, I just want my 105 minutes back and the memory purged from my mind.

I'd like to know whether a worse film has ever been made with three great actors near the peak of their careers. Despite its cast, and a fairly good indie look, the film's flaws are so distracting they needle at the mind even as we gaze upon a shirtless Bernal. This particular accomplishment, at least, is one that will stand out for decades to come.

Hurt is really quite good as Pastor David Sandow, who preaches at a big fundamentalist church in Corpus Christi, Texas, alongside teen-aged son Paul (Dano), who plays Christian rock. Sandow also has a fragile wife (Laura Harring) and a straight-laced daughter, Malerie (Pell James). Director James Marsh, a documentarian, shows Corpus Christi (apparently really Austin) with a refreshing realism of hard light and banal modern architecture. The entry of Elvis (Bernal), who quickly takes a liking to Malerie, introduces the requisite twist.

But a violent incident soon sucks all the air out of the story. Bernal is one of the greatest actors in the world, but here I find he falls short. Rather than silently brooding, he came off as simply impassive. Lacking a sense of his love for Malerie, underlying motivations, or level of rage, we are reduced to simply waiting for something else to happen. Marsh and co-writer Milo Addica could have turned The King into a drama of emotional confessions and confrontations, but they inexplicably chose not to. Instead, as the events grow more bizarre, the emotional responses grow more subdued. This may sound like an interesting effect, but trust me, it's not.

Short takes

Elvis: The (CBS?) two-part TV movie. I had read that Jonathan Rhys Meyers was amazing in the lead role. He was, but only sporadically. Same with Randy Quaid, whose Colonel Tom Parker weirdly echoes Joe Aguirre, the abrasive rancher he played in Brokeback Mountain the same year. He deserves credit for trying to merge Dutch and Southern accents, but it ends up more of a switching back and forth. Meyers lipsyncs to the original records rather than singing, which is distracting but ultimately proves the point of the film: Elvis was one of a kind.

The Last of the Mohicans: Again looking for a strong lead performance, we rented this after reading that Daniel Day-Lewis prepared for this by carrying a real flintlock rifle around with him for weeks. This clearly paid off, as his gun-handling is excellent. He also built a canoe. I wish he'd helped out with the screenplay instead, or perhaps done a different movie altogether. The period details are probably more accurate than in the 1936 Randolph Scott version, but the James Fenimore Cooper story is still romantic hokum from beginning to end.

I Am Legend: This far outpaced that other survival movie at the box office, but it's pretty clear that we're venturing Into The Implausible when Will Smith starts careening around New York in a red Mustang years after a plague emptied out the city. Who's maintaining the streets? Certainly not the zombies (going by some fancy other name) who dominate the second half of the film. I Am Legend is like Sunshine, giving up a strong premise for cheap horror-movie tropes, but it surrenders earlier and is never that mind-blowing to start with.