Reviews: SFIAAFF 2009
I kept it low-key this year at SFIAAFF, but saw eight programs, stayed well the whole time, and didn't take any time off work. Though '09 lacked the roundhouse punches of some earlier years, every program was rewarding in some way.
Tokyo Sonata
Like Bright Future, the one other Kiyoshi Kurosawa film I've seen, Tokyo Sonata felt futuristic. It's hard to say exactly why. It might be his very slight exaggerations of real-life phenomena, which suggest the way things might be if things got just a little more the way they are. He's clearly addressing a growing (downward) trend in the Japanese economy when he shows his salaryman protagonist getting laid off and joining other men in suits hanging around in the park. The general grimness of his family's buttoned-up life is searing for the first two-thirds of the film or so. (The lead actor has an amazing face that's like something out of a German Expressionist film.) The story then takes an unexpected turn that, while rewarding for a while, later weighs down the movie. But there are enough indelible images in Tokyo Sonata to make it a rewarding experience for anyone worried about where life may take them these days.
The Love of Siam
It's wonderful to see a film, from any country, that has at its heart a love story between two young men that's realistic and not primarily sexual. Whenever Tong and Mew are together, The Love of Siam crackles with drama and sweet electricity. The problem is, those scenes seem to add up to less than 45 minutes of a 158-minute film. This epic is overstuffed with the struggles of a fledgling pop band and a drawn-out story about a missing girl that only feels believable in one or two scenes. Though these narratives are interrelated, The Love of Siam is really three movies, one of which is a lot better than the other two.
Children of Invention
Tze Chun's hotly anticipated followup to his short Windowbreaker has a lot going for it: a rare suburban realism, stunning HD videography, and strong performances. It's a technically impressive film perfectly timed to our current financial nightmare. Why, then, was it slightly disappointing? I think it was a lack of mystery. A single mother in the Boston area gets into hot water over her involvement in a Ponzi scheme, and her children suffer the consequences. The grim premise pays off with some suspenseful and heartbreaking scenes. But once we're introduced to the characters, most of the insights offered by Children of Invention are unsurprising. A subplot about the boy's plan to make money selling inventions is cute but nver goes deep enough. The densely packed Windowbreaker felt as if it had raised 11 tantalizing questions in 11 minutes. Maybe it's fitting that a movie about a single mother trying to put her family's life back together maintains a laser focus on its central crisis, but Children of Invention might have been better if it had wondered and wandered a little more.
Family Portraits
The eight shorts in this program about family relations ranged from utterly simple (on the surface) to supersaturated and grim/fantastical. It was the two extremes that most interested me. What would it be like if your family tried to recreate a vacation photo taken 35 years ago? And what if yours were an Asian immigrant family, in which the parents had come to America long ago with high hopes for themselves and their children and ended up with a multiracial family, in today's vastly different Asian America? Those are just a couple of the questions raised by Julia Kim Smith's Grand Teton (view it here), one of the simplest films I've ever seen: four minutes, one angle, five or six people, some music. On the other hand, Wanda & Miles tells us about the troubled relationship between a young woman and her mother through reminiscences, animation, and a strange little dollhouse.
Fruit Fly
The premiere of H.P. Mendoza's Fruit Fly recalled the first screening of Colma: The Musical at SFIAAFF 2006. In a packed house -- the much larger Castro Theatre, this time -- the atmosphere was festive and the reception enthusiastic. In place of balloons, there was the director's LED T-shirt, its multicolored graphic equalizer visible throughout the house. Fruit Fly is a lighter film than Colma, gently poking fun at various aspects of (largely) gay life in San Francisco or any big city. Viewers looking for another classic dramatic arc will be disappointed, but Fruit Fly is a very entertaining 94 minutes. The Drosophila of the title is Bethesda, a straight young woman attracted to gay men. On a quest to find her birth mother, she moves to San Francisco and is surrounded by a cast of artistic and romantic searchers. As in Colma, the songs are catchy, the dialog is clever, and lead actress L.A. Renigen is wonderful. Rich Wong's cinematography is even better this time out, and there's the added attraction of Mark Del Lima's pulsating animation.
Lust, Caution
I wouldn't have gone out -- let alone crossed the bay -- to see Ang Lee's darkest movie again if not for the prospect of seeing the man himself for the first time. Yet I got so much more out of the movie this time that I'm almost embarrassed I didn't return earlier. This is a very complex film. Both the second viewing and Lee's fascinating insights confirmed that. What brings the young female spy and the sadistic middle-aged collaborator together is more than lust and cunning. Last time, I called this a black hole of a film. This time I saw a flower blooming in the middle of it -- a giant carrion flower, the kind that smells like rotting flesh.
High Noon
Festival Assistant Director Vicci Ho said that in Hong Kong, this "is likely to become the film that defines a generation." The story, with hoary elements like the drug spiral and the friend in a coma, hews more closely to a previous generation. But visually, director Heiward Mak and her team seem to invent a revolutionary new style every minute or so. Shots are defocused, overexposed, saturated, handheld, animated, spinning ... and all stunningly well composed.
Treeless Mountain
As with Children of Invention, I was sold on this one by the director's previous work, in this case So Yong Kim's cabin-fever masterpiece In Between Days. Also like Children of Invention, Kim's latest revolves around two adorable children forced to fend for themselves. But whereas I thought Tze Chun's film could have been just a little more compelling, I felt like Treeless Mountain ran into a wall about a third of the way through. It basically has a binary structure, throwing the kids into an urban setting first and then, much later, a very different rural one. But what could have been a powerfully simple 60-minute film instead is stretched to nearly 90, and it sags in the middle. A grueling existence can make for a great film, as In Between Days demonstrated, if it has something like that film's molten sexual tension. And Treeless Mountain has its charms, such as Kim's familiar ultra-close-ups, but without a powerful driving force, they trickle in a bit at a time.
Tokyo Sonata
Like Bright Future, the one other Kiyoshi Kurosawa film I've seen, Tokyo Sonata felt futuristic. It's hard to say exactly why. It might be his very slight exaggerations of real-life phenomena, which suggest the way things might be if things got just a little more the way they are. He's clearly addressing a growing (downward) trend in the Japanese economy when he shows his salaryman protagonist getting laid off and joining other men in suits hanging around in the park. The general grimness of his family's buttoned-up life is searing for the first two-thirds of the film or so. (The lead actor has an amazing face that's like something out of a German Expressionist film.) The story then takes an unexpected turn that, while rewarding for a while, later weighs down the movie. But there are enough indelible images in Tokyo Sonata to make it a rewarding experience for anyone worried about where life may take them these days.
The Love of Siam
It's wonderful to see a film, from any country, that has at its heart a love story between two young men that's realistic and not primarily sexual. Whenever Tong and Mew are together, The Love of Siam crackles with drama and sweet electricity. The problem is, those scenes seem to add up to less than 45 minutes of a 158-minute film. This epic is overstuffed with the struggles of a fledgling pop band and a drawn-out story about a missing girl that only feels believable in one or two scenes. Though these narratives are interrelated, The Love of Siam is really three movies, one of which is a lot better than the other two.
Children of Invention
Tze Chun's hotly anticipated followup to his short Windowbreaker has a lot going for it: a rare suburban realism, stunning HD videography, and strong performances. It's a technically impressive film perfectly timed to our current financial nightmare. Why, then, was it slightly disappointing? I think it was a lack of mystery. A single mother in the Boston area gets into hot water over her involvement in a Ponzi scheme, and her children suffer the consequences. The grim premise pays off with some suspenseful and heartbreaking scenes. But once we're introduced to the characters, most of the insights offered by Children of Invention are unsurprising. A subplot about the boy's plan to make money selling inventions is cute but nver goes deep enough. The densely packed Windowbreaker felt as if it had raised 11 tantalizing questions in 11 minutes. Maybe it's fitting that a movie about a single mother trying to put her family's life back together maintains a laser focus on its central crisis, but Children of Invention might have been better if it had wondered and wandered a little more.
Family Portraits
The eight shorts in this program about family relations ranged from utterly simple (on the surface) to supersaturated and grim/fantastical. It was the two extremes that most interested me. What would it be like if your family tried to recreate a vacation photo taken 35 years ago? And what if yours were an Asian immigrant family, in which the parents had come to America long ago with high hopes for themselves and their children and ended up with a multiracial family, in today's vastly different Asian America? Those are just a couple of the questions raised by Julia Kim Smith's Grand Teton (view it here), one of the simplest films I've ever seen: four minutes, one angle, five or six people, some music. On the other hand, Wanda & Miles tells us about the troubled relationship between a young woman and her mother through reminiscences, animation, and a strange little dollhouse.
Fruit Fly
The premiere of H.P. Mendoza's Fruit Fly recalled the first screening of Colma: The Musical at SFIAAFF 2006. In a packed house -- the much larger Castro Theatre, this time -- the atmosphere was festive and the reception enthusiastic. In place of balloons, there was the director's LED T-shirt, its multicolored graphic equalizer visible throughout the house. Fruit Fly is a lighter film than Colma, gently poking fun at various aspects of (largely) gay life in San Francisco or any big city. Viewers looking for another classic dramatic arc will be disappointed, but Fruit Fly is a very entertaining 94 minutes. The Drosophila of the title is Bethesda, a straight young woman attracted to gay men. On a quest to find her birth mother, she moves to San Francisco and is surrounded by a cast of artistic and romantic searchers. As in Colma, the songs are catchy, the dialog is clever, and lead actress L.A. Renigen is wonderful. Rich Wong's cinematography is even better this time out, and there's the added attraction of Mark Del Lima's pulsating animation.
Lust, Caution
I wouldn't have gone out -- let alone crossed the bay -- to see Ang Lee's darkest movie again if not for the prospect of seeing the man himself for the first time. Yet I got so much more out of the movie this time that I'm almost embarrassed I didn't return earlier. This is a very complex film. Both the second viewing and Lee's fascinating insights confirmed that. What brings the young female spy and the sadistic middle-aged collaborator together is more than lust and cunning. Last time, I called this a black hole of a film. This time I saw a flower blooming in the middle of it -- a giant carrion flower, the kind that smells like rotting flesh.
High Noon
Festival Assistant Director Vicci Ho said that in Hong Kong, this "is likely to become the film that defines a generation." The story, with hoary elements like the drug spiral and the friend in a coma, hews more closely to a previous generation. But visually, director Heiward Mak and her team seem to invent a revolutionary new style every minute or so. Shots are defocused, overexposed, saturated, handheld, animated, spinning ... and all stunningly well composed.
Treeless Mountain
As with Children of Invention, I was sold on this one by the director's previous work, in this case So Yong Kim's cabin-fever masterpiece In Between Days. Also like Children of Invention, Kim's latest revolves around two adorable children forced to fend for themselves. But whereas I thought Tze Chun's film could have been just a little more compelling, I felt like Treeless Mountain ran into a wall about a third of the way through. It basically has a binary structure, throwing the kids into an urban setting first and then, much later, a very different rural one. But what could have been a powerfully simple 60-minute film instead is stretched to nearly 90, and it sags in the middle. A grueling existence can make for a great film, as In Between Days demonstrated, if it has something like that film's molten sexual tension. And Treeless Mountain has its charms, such as Kim's familiar ultra-close-ups, but without a powerful driving force, they trickle in a bit at a time.
Labels: sfiaaff 2009
posted by Steve at
7:58 PM
1 Comments:
Great reviews. DOn't miss my latest "Reconsidering Johnny Mnemonic"
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