How To Be Emo: Panthers Edition

"Friday Night Lights" is getting squeasy. All these intense relationship scenes and ultra close-ups. It's like "In Between Days: The Series." Do I like that? Uh, sure. Maybe tonight just isn't the night for it.

Quick take: Junebug

Since I saw Junebug a few weeks ago, I've found myself recommending it to several people but having a hard time putting into words what I loved about the film.

At its heart, it's a movie about the meeting of two cultures. Newlyweds from Chicago travel to North Carolina to talk to an outsider artist about selling his work. They stay with the husband's family in the home where he grew up. Junebug stands out by being brutally realistic about both country folk and educated urbanites without ridiculing either group. During the visit, the husband's brother and sister-in-law (Amy Adams, infectious in a breakout role) are expecting a baby. But to me, the movie is about the Chicago couple and the different ways each of them straddles the urban and rural worlds. The writing is exceptional. So is the cinematography, which takes weird and original angles on simple settings such as a breakfast nook. The look is perfect for a movie that doesn't try too hard to be unique but isn't quite like anything else.

SFIAAFF Preview: The Love of Siam

The Love of Siam
Saturday, March 14
2:15 p.m.
Castro Theatre
158 minutes

When I know I'm going to see a movie -- or will see it if I possibly can -- I stop reading about it. I want as many surprises as possible. And when expat and ex-Festival staffer Chris Schulz wrote several hundred words about The Love of Siam in his wonderful blog about living in Krungthep (Bangkok), I knew I wanted to see it. But Chris is a thoughtful person, and thoughtfully, he left all his spoilers until the end.

Chris tells us Love of Siam is a movie about the reality of being gay and young, as opposed to young and gay. And apparently it was a breakthrough film for the Thai film industry and generated a huge following and a lot of controversy.

Even at "just" 158 minutes (not the 200-minute director's cut Chris saw), this movie sounds like it has the kind of "bigness" that makes it memorable long after the house lights come up. I'm really looking forward to it.

Quick take: Slumdog Millionaire

Yes, we finally saw it. The best thing about Slumdog Millionaire is its sheer old-fashioned entertainment value. It's practically a catalog of the oldest elements of the art form: Kisses, chases, street urchins, and damsels in distress. Yet all those tropes mesh seamlessly with outstanding modern (digital) cinematography and editing. What seems stale and predictable in a movie like Changeling feels both familiar and suspenseful in Slumdog. Partly, that's due to the fact it takes place in a world unknown to most Westerners. And its Bollywood sense of melodrama goes to the edge but never over it. But most of all, Slumdog Millionaire lets us root for a character we fully believe in.

SFIAAFF preview: Tokyo Sonata

The San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival opens March 12. The program came out last week, and it's an amazing one. There are several screenings I'm really excited about, and I'm going to set the stage for them one by one. I'll go in chronological order.

Tokyo Sonata
Friday, March 13
6:45 p.m.
Sundance Kabuki
119 minutes

I tend to follow directors. One whose work I've enjoyed and who has built up quite a reputation is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Most of his works tend toward horror and the supernatural, but not in a typical J-horror way.

I've only seen one film by this Kurosawa (no relation to Akira). Bright Future screened at SFIAAFF in 2004. Here's what I wrote about it then:

"Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future shows what's extraordinary about Japanese film these days. There's a murderer, a killer jellyfish loose in Tokyo's waterways, and a white-shirted teenage gang like you've never seen, all against a backdrop of urban blight. But Kurosawa isn't interested in lamenting the ruin of society or even in us liking his movie, at least not in the obvious way you'd see in most American movies. Like Akihiko Shiota, director of 2001's Harmful Insect, Kurosawa seems to be creating all this from so far above, sometimes literally, that he can make his characters do anything. Yet Bright Future doesn't talk down to the audience or characters. To me, it's a perfect statement of a punk aesthetic. Kurosawa's bright future (and as he told SFIAAFF associate director Taro Goto, he doesn't mean the title to be ironic), lies in youth smashing the conformity and nostalgia of a stagnant society."

This year, there's a whole retrospective of Kurosawa's work. He'll be appearing at the two screenings of a new film, Tokyo Sonata. It's not a horror film but a drama about the dissolution of a Japanese salaryman's family. Our friend Taro, now in Japan working on movies, wrote the teaser for Tokyo Sonata in the festival guide. He said the film references Ozu and Naruse, which makes me even more interested in seeing it. For more about Tokyo Sonata and Kurosawa, see Michael Guillen's interview with the director on his blog, The Evening Class.

Still photography news

GREAT EXCITEMENT!

- The Thrilling News -

A New Era Has Begun.

Flickr profile "sdlawsonphoto"
- is the talk of the City -

You know, when you think about it, 19th century headline writers were just Twittering 100-odd years before there was a place to Twit. We need more headlines these days, and shorter ones. See, the ones I just wrote convey both the essential news and the way people feel about that news. It's true. Well, I feel that way about it, and I'm practically the only person who knows about the news yet.

Over time, all news gets less exciting. That's just to be expected.

I started using Flickr casually a few months ago and just carried over one of my Yahoo Mail accounts. Now I'm getting a little more serious about it. Eventually, everything on my old profile will be posted here.

This is what FNL is all about

The show last night (still available for viewing thanks to the magic of the Internet) was a nearly perfect Friday Night Lights. So many plot developments, and none of them strained credulity. No time wasted on stupid crime subplots. Lots of screen time for all the best actors on the show.* More good local color: rodeo, country club, diner, honky-tonk. The scene where Coach Taylor is driving his former star running back to a college tryout was stunningly realistic, with natural light and this amazing road noise unlike anything you hear on conventional shows.

* Connie Britton, Kyle Chandler, Gaius Charles, Jesse Plemons, Adrianne Palicki, and Zach Gilford. OK, yes, I just named all those people off the top of my head. Is that scary? However, I couldn't name Louanne Stephens, who plays Grandma Saracen.

Sometimes smaller is better

The Castro Theatre has gone to monthly calendars from the former seasonal schedule. Or at least they just distributed a printed February calendar, which has to be one of the easiest ever, since they're showing Milk for something like half the month. Hey, more power (and money) to them. I hope they keep up the monthly calendars, because they're much easier to use. There's no way I can remember something I was going to see three months in advance, and trying to read that whole calendar was a guessing game as to whether I could see anything.