Globality's film blog

The Olympics: Instant narrative!

2008-08-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know anything about Olympics TV coverage outside the U.S. (Never got a TV in Hong Kong. D'oh!) And I know the American coverage is shamelessly U.S.-centric. But it is also an amazing work of media craft. Think about it: How many people care about any of these sports or know who these athletes are in years that aren't divisible by four? And yet by the second week of the Games, how many will stay home to watch a medal race or rush online to check out gymnastics results? The producers, writers, videographers and crew get us absorbed in this stuff from a dead stop. Granted, the "print" (online) media help, but this doesn't happen by itself.

Then again, maybe it's really about something else.

Review: The Exiles

2008-08-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

The Exiles, a 1961 feature about young American Indians living in downtown Los Angeles, throws us into the underworld of America's seemingly orderly postwar existence. Made by recent USC film grad Kent MacKenzie on a tiny budget, it's rough around the edges technically and lacks a conventional story arc. But like a great documentary, The Exiles draws its life from the small glimpses of the world in which it takes place.

The Indians, who left reservations to find a better (or just different) life in the city, mostly waste their days with little money and no goals. They live on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, a residential area that soon afterward went under the wrecking ball to make way for office towers. The Exiles explores nearly 24 hours in their lives and is based on stories that real Indians in the area told the filmmakers. They mostly play themselves, in the real settings of their lives, with what seems to be some documentary footage added in.

It's depressing to watch these young people throw away their lives, but as with Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep (Burnett helped to restore and release The Exiles), the realistic vision of a little-known world is fascinating. This is a side of Los Angeles, just minutes from Hollywood's backlots, that has rarely been seen on film. And though MacKenzie doesn't achieve quite the sheer beauty of Burnett's work, there are some gorgeous shots, and the velvety blacks of his night shots are wonderful. The film is like a motion version of gritty street photography by the likes of Weegee and William Klein (though with a slightly different tone from their New York scenes), evoking the harsh midcentury American city.

The world in which the Indians live is like that of John Rechy's novel, City of Night: The mixed underbelly of a society obsessed with homogeneity. I don't know whether there were enough Indians in 196o Los Angeles to fill most of the seats in a string of bars, but even though they do in this film, the scenes aren't homogeneous. There are glimpses of the sorts of polyglot night settings found in Rechy's work and that of the Beats.

One sequence in particular stunned me: In a downtown bar packed mostly with Indians late at night, a tough-looking young white man and a petite Asian man talk, dance, and put their arms around each other. It's a strange combination of fight and flirtation, like magnets attracting and repelling each other. They seemed a bit edgy about being watched by the rest of the bar (and the camera?) but also relishing it as already rejected street queers will. I don't know what the circumstances of the filming were, but they seem so natural that it's hard to believe they're actors. In addition, the pairing is so unlikely -- if the filmmakers had just wanted to show that homosexuals mixed with Indians, why not two white men? -- that it seems as if the crew might have simply found them there at the bar.

Could that bar have been a distant ancestor of the clubs I knew in L.A. in the 1980s? I mean this in the sense that one bar will close and its denizens will move on to another, and younger members will join the crowd, to be joined later by another generation, but always overlapping. In 1960, would that have been me in that rough-and-tumble mixed bar?

Yet I think the way I saw that scene went beyond my literal affinity to those dancing men. Few people today would see The Exiles from the perspective of that era's insiders, the white suburbanites watching Perry Como at night. Yes, we're outsiders as we watch it, not being people of that era, and with the distance of time we recognize the cultural blinders inherent in the omniscient narration about Native Americans at the beginning of The Exiles. But following the late Sixties, we're all seeking a place in the margins, or we're nostalgic about a time of life when we were nearer the edge implied by the sharp line between neon and velvety night sky. Rechy and Bukowski won the battle of images. We may not be a society of outsiders, but perhaps more remarkably, we share a culture of self-aware exile.

Review: Wall-E

2008-08-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

I was keeping my thoughts to myself about Wall-E, which we saw weeks ago, but a friend told me today how much he and his son enjoyed it, and I found I had more to say than I thought.

Wall-E is better than Monsters Inc. Which is to say it's the best film Pixar's ever made, and just to let you know, in my opinion nothing else from Pixar even came close to Monsters Inc. The adventures of Sulley and Boo were strange, clever, touching, and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful. Wall-E is simultaneously massive and intimate, clanky and graceful, wildly imagined and comfortingly familiar.

(OK, at this point, if you don't know what the movie's about and you still want to see it, just go. There's no big "surprise" in it, but I went in nearly blind and I wish I'd gone in a little more blind.)

So, when I rave, I'm talking here mostly about the first part of the movie, because this is a film that takes place in two distinct settings, where the tone of the story and the whole design of the universe are very different. For the most part, one has humans and the other doesn't, because the humans have forced themselves off Earth by essentially littering it to death. (A clever and simple way to bring an environmental message home to the young audience.) They all (?) live on one big spaceship that's like a huge cruise ship, fully automated to the point where they literally don't have to lift a finger.

Who's left behind to clean up the mess? Wall-E, a rusty little trash compactor with legs, arms, eyes, ears, and maybe ... a heart? Of course he has a heart! But this movie isn't a simple Disney anthropomorphic romance. Wall-E is is deeply lonely, even though he has a tiny sidekick (a cockroach) and a home overflowing with pieces of junk that catch his eye as he compacts all day long. It's a grim landscape, all the more so because we know it's New York City.

The girl who suddenly shakes up Wall-E's life is a true femme fatale, a far more advanced robot on a no-nonsense mission. As in Monsters Inc., which paired a middle-aged man with a young girl in an unlikely platonic friendship, Pixar throws us a curve with this robot romance. It's like a chaste crush between ten-year-olds, with all the awkwardness and wonder that implies. Conveyed with virtually no dialog, the romance is as elemental as can be. This is the real heart of the film, which, given its unique context, could have used a tagline from Elvis Costello: "Who's making lover's lane safe again for lovers?"

The film's glow dims a little as the action moves out to where the humans are. The story gets less original, the animation less expressive, the messages less subtle. But Wall-E's journey to the spaceship shows off the sheer scale of this film, a movie that literally has the universe as its stage. The power of Wall-E is in its visuals. Thirteen years after Toy Story, Pixar's animators have achieved the confidence and finesse to render an abandoned New York that's more evocative than the settings of most live-action films. (It helped that they turned to master cinematographer Roger Deakins as a consultant on angles and lighting. And the vintage music and Thomas Newman's score make it all shimmer more brightly.) Wall-E's world is like the Sunday afternoon of all history, quiet and hazy and sadly languid. It's exquisitely imaginative and crushingly banal at the same time.

So although Wall-E eventually retreats from this initial darkness, the wordless emotions of its first half hour linger long after the cheery Disney ending. It's animation that truly takes us beyond our own perspective rather than just having other creatures act out a typical journey or success story.

The user-generated content conundrum

2008-07-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

My friend Charles and I have been corresponding lately about whether something like YouTube can ever make money. What kicked it off was a report by TDG that said user-generated content would make up almost half of all video streams on the Internet between now and 2013, but deliver only 4 percent of the online video ad revenue. That may sound pretty dire, but Charles, who knows something about this, confirmed that advertisers are still skittish about having their ads placed with these kinds of videos. They're too unpredictable in terms of taste and subject matter.

Now there's this blog post by someone from WatchMojo, who makes the novel suggestion that Google just eliminate all that unprofitable user-generated content, or UGC, from YouTube.

It's become fashionable to dismiss user-generated content as "crap." At least this commentator acknowledges that user-generated content is why YouTube exists in the first place. If I want to watch "high-quality" content, I'll go to TV, or newspaper sites, or Yahoo News. But guess what? TV's not that good! Sure, it conforms to commercial standards of image and audio quality, but the "content" of the content, as it were, is often devoid of ideas. Certainly of new ideas. That's why we needed YouTube in the first place.

The problem with talking about UGC is that it's impossible to generalize. The only thing one UGC clip has in common with another is that it it's not commercially produced. Even apart from the problem of advertising on unpredictable UGC videos, it's difficult for "experts" to praise this content as a general class. In fact, the overall language of the mainstream media defies attempts to praise even individual user-generated works, because the mainstream media doesn't officially value the qualities that are frequently most valuable in UGC: utter inanity, inside jokes about the UGC universe, a subtle sense of intimacy.

And, of course, a lot of what we hear about online content in the mainstream media (I mean, consumers as well as reporters like me who are in the "pitch stream," as it were) is driven by business considerations. And the fact is, 99.99 percent of user-creators have no economic interest in getting the word out about the value of their content, let alone the means to get the word out in mainstream media channels. Now, folks like MojoVideo are in an awkward position here. In a way, they have the potential to be ad-friendly, but they have a huge mountain to climb if they want to compete with the established studios and networks in perception and brand awareness. At the same time, their content has neither the spontaneity nor the street cred of video that comes from the average Joe. Yet the Internet must have room for something other than mainstream TV and movies, and the peculiar charms of amateur video.

IAST: The Exiles

2008-07-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

I am SO there. This looks like a good article about the movie; I just stopped reading. SF: Castro Theatre, Aug. 1-7.

Quick take: Weerasethakul shorts

2008-07-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

Thai director Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul seems to be on a one-man crusade to free our minds. He constantly challenges assumptions about cinematic tone, setting, storytelling and more. That practice was on glorious display in Mysterious Objects, the program of shorts presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Sunday.

Surprising audiences is an art filmmaker's job. But Weerasethakul does it in such gentle, lighthearted ways that there's never a sense he's throwing something out there and leaving it up to us to figure it out. There are hard things to figure out in some of his films, but his work is always accessible at some level. Most important, there's an underlying sense of play that lightens the whole experience. Some of these shorts would be perfect tools for teaching students to think outside the box.

The Anthem (2006) is most stunning in this respect. Like the feature Tropical Malady, it consists of two parts, in this case a conversation followed by ... an indoor sporting event? The idea of the short, apparently, is some imaginary alternative to playing the national anthem before movies, which is traditionally done in Thailand. Weerasethakul creates a strange combination of many elements with such flair and energy that we're easily taken along for the ride.

Another highlight was Ghost of Asia (2004), a co-production by Weerasethakul and Christelle Lheureux as a tribute to the creative spirits of people lost in the 2004 Asian tsunami. Children "direct" an actor/ghost in frantic beach activities. It's not what you'd expect a post-mortem tribute to look like. My Mother's Garden (2007) is a dreamy combination of animation and eye-popping organically inspired jewelry. Worldly Desires (2005) is a meditation on filmmaking (specifically, the making of Tropical Malady) and wilderness. It was the longest work in the program and also the most challenging. Is the jungle the world's most elaborate backlot, or are humans a species that hunts images instead of prey?

It was a rare chance to check out little-known work by someone I think is on the leading edge of film. If not for Michael Guillen of The Evening Class, I wouldn't have known it was happening. Sunday's was actually the second of two sets, but according to Guillen and others who attended both, it was the better of the two.

Quick take: Were the World Mine

2008-06-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

A lot of movies start out with appealing gimmicks but then wear out their welcomes, failing to make good on what looked so promising or come up with anything else. Were the World Mine, a low-budget independent musical homegrown in Chicago, works the opposite way. Its flaws, namely uneven acting and a screenplay that's sometimes too obvious, are glaring as the movie gets started. But after the story of a prep-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream starts to pick up steam, those shortcomings mostly fade into the background. The fusing of the play and film, along with world-class songs by Chicago-based newcomer Jessica Fogle, lifts Were the World Mine on a magic carpet. The key actors, including Archie-like lead Tanner Cohen, Christian Stolte as the gruff rugby coach, and especially Wendy Robie as the ultimate drama teacher, are excellent. The production values are impressive for such an independent film, showing what a difference a few touches like good sound mixing can make. Unabashedly gay yet capturing Shakespeare's universal themes, Were the World Mine is funny, often moving, and ultimately uplifting.

Review: La Leon

2008-06-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

Even if there were nothing else to recommend La Leon, an eerie drama by Argentine director Santiago Otheguy, it might be worth seeing just for its gorgeous monochromatic tone. It's nominally a "black and white" movie, but in fact there isn't a spot of black in it. Everything, from the rippling water to the lush vegetation and the weathered main characters, is a sort of bronze or gunmetal. It's fascinating to look at throughout the 85-minute running time and a great example of the creative possibilities presented by digital video.

But there's so much more. The cinematography is beautiful, contrasting off-kilter close-ups with languid shots of boats going up and down a river. A distinct plot keeps the movie on course even as it drifts between vague moods of gloom and doom. The main actors are excellent.

Quiet Alfaro (Jorge Roman) lives on a stretch of river that time seems to have forgotten, quietly helping elderly Iribarren (Jose Munoz) harvest reeds. He's wiry and middle-aged, with deep lines in his face and a look of resignation. The opposite pole of the movie is the bellicose, barrel-chested El Turu (Daniel Valenzuela), who pilots La Leon, a riverboat seemingly from another age. As the modern world encroaches on the island where they've lived all their lives, the changes draw them toward each other and their fates.

La Leon is like a combination of Tropical Malady, The Last Picture Show, and Touch of Evil. Though it never crosses the line into the supernatural, there's enough social isolation, shadowy motivation, and colonial detritus to draw the viewer in like a bottomless swamp. Some elements of the story will be familiar to fans of queer cinema, but, at least for a South American film novice, the lion's share of this movie is exquisitely strange.

Quick take: Before I Forget

2008-06-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

The old song says "When the end comes I know / I'll be just a gigolo / Life goes on without me." David Lee Roth (after Louis Prima) sang it in less than five minutes, with room left over for "I Ain't Got Nobody." In Before I Forget, writer/director/star Jacques Nolot takes a full 108 to get the same points across. But stories about The End should drive slowly and inexorably to their conclusions, and it's weirdly intriguing to watch Nolot's character, Pierre Pruez, talking... talking... talking... about his life and regrets. At 58, he's a writer and former gay gigolo living in Paris, now hiring his own young partners. He sees his analyst three times a week and hangs out with his aging friends, also ex-gigolos. And it turns out that the bonds with their old "clients" are still there, though just hanging on. They worry out loud about wills, priceless art, blood relatives coming out of the woodwork. But the beauty of this very particular film about a very particular man is that it's also universal. In the end, all the riches of the world can't really be ours, and all we have is our memories and what we've become.

Review: The Visitor

2008-06-14T20:39:00.001-07:00

For me, Tom McCarthy's The Station Agent was almost like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape all over again. While the earlier movie opened my eyes (and I wasn't alone) to how fresh and different an American independent film could be, McCarthy's film 14 years later revealed a sweet sensibility that seemed to have been missing in the independent movement Soderbergh had inspired. Let's face it, Sex, Lies was kind of a creepy movie at times, and however much quirky character-driven comedy/dramas such as Heavy and Ghost World may have been suffused with humanity, the genre tends to be more than a little dark. The Station Agent threw all that out the window, creating almost a fantasy world of human relationships that, while refreshingly realistic on one level, was also a bit like a train set. And who doesn't love a train set?

McCarthy's new film, The Visitor, is something like The Station Agent in reverse. Instead of leaving the city for a rural town where he doesn't seem to belong, the main character in the new film, Walter Vale, heads into New York City from the tidy Connecticut town where he teaches college economics. But like Finbar McBride in The Station Agent, Vale needs a change and finds it unexpectedly in his new surroundings.

The story is set in motion when Vale discovers someone has rented out the apartment he owns in Greenwich Village to a struggling immigrant couple. This isn't the first movie in which a WASPy middle-aged character has been caught up in the drama and joy of a world more "colorful" than his own, but the inevitable has seldom felt so emotionally honest and believable. As in The Station Agent, writer-director McCarthy builds up his characters slowly but surely and makes us cringe occasionally as they struggle to accommodate one another. What's refreshing about both films is that the stories don't really rely on great, reverberating confrontations. That leaves room for a lot more small observations of the sort that get drowned out in too many current films.

Like the diminutive Finbar in the earlier film, Vale isn't a typical lead character. So longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, who comes off like one of the less dynamic middle managers you might find at an office supplies company, is well suited to the role. He's a good foil for the energetic Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), the beautiful Zainab (Danai Gurira) and other indelible characters.

As befits a movie that sends a suburban recluse into the urban maelstrom, The Visitor is much more engaged with the outside world than was The Station Agent. That's both a strength and a weakness, as it gives a little more heft to McCarthy's storytelling but sometimes feels forced. Still, the focus here is on individual relationships, and there are no cardboard characters. The Visitor may not have quite the magic of McCarthy's earlier film, but he's given us another small gem with much the same sweet tone -- something the eclectic Soderbergh, for all his impressive achievements since Sex, Lies, has never done.

Coming Up: Take Out

2008-05-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

My friend Charles Jang's movie, Take Out, is finally coming to theaters. It was a highlight of SFIAAFF 2004 and is well overdue. Shot on location on digital video, Take Out is a fast-moving, electric experience, and though it's all about one day on a repetitious job -- Chinese food delivery -- it never lags. There's danger around every corner for delivery man Ming Ding (Jang), a recent immigrant from China, whose refuge is the camaraderie of his struggling coworkers. The performances are excellent and the direction by newcomers Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou carries on New York's tradition of "street style" filmmaking.

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008

2008-05-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

I was saddened tonight to read of the death of Sydney Pollack. He was a good director and a really fine actor and always seemed like a decent guy. His movies, such as Tootsie and Out of Africa, were middlebrow without being lazy or cynical. The last Pollack film I saw, the DVD of the complicated thriller The Interpreter, came with a "deleted scene" that would have given away too much of the story at that point in the movie. It seemed to be there for people who'd watched the whole movie and hadn't been able to figure out what happened. I thought that was a very kind thing to do.

Quick take: The Flight of the Red Balloon

2008-05-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

It would have been nice to see Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon again before seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 2007 tribute, but it didn't work out. Things have changed in Paris, and the world, since the original. Yet despite being very modern in terms of dealing with divorce, globalization, video, cellphones, and so on, The Flight of the Red Balloon has a reassuringly grounded quality. It essentially revolves entirely around home and family life, and though there is trauma in this family, the story isn't built around disruption. There's no plot at all, in a conventional sense, and the action is very naturalistic, as if we'd just stumbled upon this family and the neighbors and visitors surrounding it. There are some impressively long takes in which happy, sad, and ambiguous action plays out among a handful of characters in a small space with no break in our experience. In that sense, it's like an Ozu film transplanted to Paris and the postmodern age, much as Cafe Lumiere revisited Ozu's Tokyo Story in the title city. Domestic (and some professional) life plays out at a sane, realistic pace, with looming dangers no greater than those in any average life. The action, like the home of Suzanne (wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche), her son Simon (Simon Iteanu), and his nanny Song (Fang Song), seems lived-in. The balloon itself has a relatively small role, though once again what's remarkable about it is that it seems to have a mind of its own. I think one of the points of this film is that each human, too -- even the director -- has a mind of his or her own and all of us live in our own worlds. But even without deep analysis, I found this initially sluggish film quite enjoyable as an experience.

Quick take: Once

2008-05-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

Is there anything else like it? An unconventional love story with songs, integral to the plot, that proceed from beginning to end before our eyes and ears. Partly with montage, but often in real time, with the camera on the musicians as they play, live. Real musicians, that is. A feature-length film that probably has more minutes of music than of dialog. Oh, and the music is great, the story stays focused on music, and the emotions feel real (they sort of are, apparently) even though the acting isn't always stellar. Only 86 minutes, but it feels ... longer? shorter? ... well, different in length. If there's anything else like this, let me know.

Review: Flower in the Pocket

2008-05-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

It's good to see a truly independent film once in a while. In the U.S., the term has come to encompass a whole industry of movies that just didn't happen to be made by the brand-name part of a studio. There's nothing wrong with them as films, but they usually lack the feeling of freedom and improvisation that comes from a work that was hard to get made.

Flower in the Pocket, a charming comedy by Malaysian director Liew Seng Tat, is suffused with those qualities from beginning to end. Of the limited information about it on IMDB, we're lucky enough to get an estimate of its budget, about $47,000, and it shows. But the artistry rises up out of it rather than being thrown in as another effect.

The film spends most of its time with two grade-school brothers in Kuala Lumpur who do poorly in class, wander the streets after school, and come home to an empty house. Their father works late every night and doesn't return until after they're asleep.

On the surface, the setup of kids fending for themselves is reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Nobody Knows. It's a nerve-wracking scenario, and plenty does go wrong. But the boys are so cute and funny, and their relationship so realistically tender, that the movie is strangely adorable and frightening at the same time. And there's a sense of whimsy and play, for the filmmaker as well as the characters, that suggests everything will be all right in the end -- probably.

Tat weaves a complex world for the boys, full of surprises, drawing on the mixed cultures of Malaysia as well as sheer inspiration. A mischievous Malay friend of the boys has a doting, guiding mother, and at one point we glimpse the challenging home life of one of their teachers. There's a fascinating mix of languages, and play with languages. The comedy is often quietly surreal in the vein of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Even cinematographer Albert Hue's framing is odd and fresh. In a few shots, characters enter the frame from totally unexpected angles.

Gradually, the film's focus shifts to the boys' father, who's single for no given reason and has shut himself off from the world. In this aspect, Flower is like The World of Apu, the final chapter in Satyajit Ray's classic Apu Trilogy, in which Apu struggles to find his place in the world as a man and a father. Both are naturalistic, and there's some of the same kind of gently symbolic dialog, though in this case with a humorous flavor. Apu is formal, shot on black-and white film, and a guaranteed tearjerker. Flower in the Pocket, shot on digital video, cares no less about its characters but digs into the reality of everyday life in a way that suits the present day, with a postmodern wink.

Quick take: Star Trek trailer

2008-04-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

Well, as pleasant a surprise as Cloverfield was, it also marked the first time I've seen a trailer upstage the DVD it came on. This trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie brilliantly subverts our associations with science fiction, and certainly with the Star Trek franchise. Instead of the future, it harkens back to the past. Instead of aspiration, it evokes work. Most ingeniously, it conjures not some far-removed galactic era but the historical Space Age and even the Industrial Age. (I know this movie is about the beginning of the Enterprise, but was it supposed to take off in the 20th Century?)

Obviously, space-travel movies take place in the dark. But this is subtlely different. If I'm not mistaken, it's not just space, or darkness, it's night. A very dark night, in fact. Maybe like our own time? Searching for goals and reasons? This is fascinating stuff.

Quick take: Cloverfield

2008-04-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

It could have been entitled, No Insufferable Yuppie Left Behind, but Cloverfield is not bad. By pretending to be footage shot by an amateur caught in a horrific alien attack on New York, it delivers all the thrills of a good space-monster flick while avoiding the cliches: phony cross-section of citizens reacting, preposterous scientific explanations, predictable power struggles over the appropriate response. Cloverfield asks, 'Wouldn't it be scary (but really cool!) if creepy aliens attacked New York?' and leaves it at that. It is scary and it is cool. And hey, digital video has made possible the truly first-person narrative movie.

Review: My Blueberry Nights

2008-04-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of Wong Kar-Wai's signature visual style on display in My Blueberry Nights, the Hong Kong auteur's first American film. The film stock is grainy, the colors are saturated, the slo-mo is abundant and jerky. Even working with cinematographer Darius Khondji for the first time, instead of with classic partner Christopher Doyle, Wong brings us to a familiar and wonderful place.

This highly abstract look fit hand in glove with Wong's classic films. It lends itself to contemplation, whether of the impenetrable details of Ashes of Time or the subtle emotional resonances of what previously was his most conventional film, In the Mood for Love. The problem is that, in Blueberry, there's not that much to contemplate. The story is quite linear, the conflicts relatively simple, the emotions understandable. And the occasional explanatory voiceovers would have been superfluous even if the story were just half as clear as it is.

So the washes of candy-colored grit that pass by our eyes quickly become little more than visual entertainment. Even with that, one wishes for more of Wong's mysterious arrangement of shots. A surprising amount of the film is taken up with conventional shot/reverse shot dialog scenes.

In Blueberry, co-written with author Lawrence Block, Wong is back to telling stories about lost love and the difficulties of hanging on or letting go. There are several such tales in this movie, and clear echoes of one of his classic pining-and-searching films, Chungking Express. There's a late-night restaurant, a relationship blooming across the counter, and even a lovelorn cop. But none of this feels as fresh as in the earlier film, despite the new setting and mostly excellent performances.

About the latter, it should be enough to say that in her first acting role, singer Norah Jones looks the part of a young New Yorker getting over what is probably her first love affair. She brings a fresh face and a certain innocence to the film, as Faye Wong did in Chungking Express, but her acting is out of step. She can't match the great work of Jude Law, David Strathairn, and especially Natalie Portman, and this becomes a distraction.

But clearly, Blueberry is required viewing for Wong fans. It's his first vision of America, which he seems to have approached hesitantly: He can render New York much like his beloved Hong Kong, but overall he relies a lot on indoor and night scenes. In a scene that's gorgeous and smart but also telling, a classic Pontiac and an old block of Memphis appear softly through window blinds. But there's a hint at openness and light as Jones's character works her way into the West.

Maybe Wong will return to the U.S., and maybe not. But if he does, note that John Woo (admittedly a very different kind of artist) arrived from Hong Kong in 1993 and didn't make a significant film until four years and four projects later, with Face/Off. So if there are more American Wong movies, someday we may have trouble letting go of him.

Ang Lee's next

2008-04-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

It turns out Ang Lee's making another "gay movie." I'm thrilled to hear this, because Lee's movies about gay men are never simply "gay movies." He's interested in characters shaped by multiple pressures and influences.

This is what made his breakthrough feature, The Wedding Banquet, so exceptional. Though its plot and humor was largely driven by gay-related family pressures and immigration limbo, its gay characters weren't flamboyant stereotypes and their world felt real, not like a gay-ghetto bubble or a hell of social ostracism. Wai-Tung Gao, the gay immigrant who marries a woman in a scheme to please their parents and the government, seemed simultaneously authentically gay, fully male, fundamentally Chinese, and pragmatically American. The movie's other characters, including the non-gay ones, were drawn with similar sympathy and complexity.

There are other examples throughout Lee's career of these multiply influenced characters, but to fast-forward to his second overtly gay story, Brokeback Mountain, again the protagonists are multifaceted. It's not just that Ennis and Jack aren't stereotypical gays, either effeminate or self-consciously masculine, but that they are fully shaped by all their circumstances, including location, upbringing, historical era, and sexual orientation.

So I can't wait to see what Lee does with Taking Woodstock, the story of the (gay) town official in Bethel, New York, who approved the permit for the 1969 event. Not reading the book first on this one.

Danny Federici, 1950-2008

2008-04-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

Danny Federici, keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, played the first note of "Backstreets." That's him on the accordion on "Fourth of July, Asbury Park." And on the swirling storm of organ on "Born to Run."

Federici died today in New York, from melanoma. One of the greatest rock bands of all time, in its original form, is gone forever. Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, Steve Van Zandt, Max Weinberg, Roy Bittan, and Gary Tallent have lost a friend. My sense of loss is nothing in comparison, but I feel there's a part of my youth that will never be complete again. This is the band roster I've been able to rattle off -- like THAT -- for almost 30 years.

A lot of superlatives and imagery about Greatness get thrown around when it comes to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, but what matters is that every time I saw them, they gave it their all. Four-hour shows, night after night. A week, sold out, at the L.A. Coliseum in 1985. I've never seen anyone work harder. The fourth and last time, in 1999, I remember noticing how amazingly tight they sounded as they rolled into "Thunder Road."

Bruce and the band will go on, with someone else's help, but it'll never be quite the same again.

FNL renewed!!

2008-04-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

This came out of the blue: "Friday Night Lights", the best show on TV, has been renewed for a third season! It has to do with some kind of deal between DirecTV and NBC. I'm very excited. It's a full 13-week season. Who knows what direction it will take?

This is from the LA Times article:

"The 13-episode season will air first on DirecTV in the fall and then run on NBC in midseason, probably in its current Friday night time slot, said David Nevis, president of Imagine Television, which produces the show. NBC is expected to officially announce the deal in a presentation to advertisers in New York this afternoon."

"Nevins declined to say how much money DirecTV is forking over for the rights but characterized it as "a lot of money, significantly more than if we just did second runs on a cable network." Nevins remarked that he wished a deal like it had been possible three years ago when Fox was forced to cancel "Arrested Development," another show with a small but loyal audience."

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

2008-03-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-20T22:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

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?