Review: Sundance Cinemas Kabuki

On New Year's Day, we saw Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. I loved the music and the movie was well-made and (mostly) fun to watch, though at the end it felt a bit "so what?"

More interesting was where we saw it: the new Sundance Kabuki theater. The Redford gang bought the AMC Kabuki last year after AMC was forced to unload it for competitive reasons.

What used to be a slightly worn and outdated place is now the best-looking multiplex in town and dedicated to independent cinema. But I have mixed feelings about the changes. Though the old Kabuki was undistinguished on the surface, it was where I had some of my most memorable movie experiences. It was a phenomenal place for a film festival, and there were some great ones, with SFIAAFF and SFIFF both based at the AMC Kabuki for years.

Under Sundance, the Kabuki is like no other theater in San Francisco. First, there's assigned seating. Also, the ticket prices are amazingly complex, with the movie itself broken out from the "amenities charge," and both of these varying for different times of day and days of the week. Fortunately, it's the kind of theater that will attract viewers with smart phones that have calculators. Because the other thing about the Sundance Kabuki is that it's a distinctly adult space. The decor says it when you first walk in, with its earth tones and its remarkable two-story screen of weathered, recycled wood planks. The food at the concession stands is a bit more grown up, too. And going upstairs, there is a bar on the second floor and a restaurant on the third floor where you can take food and drinks into a special screening room. The film purist in me sees a distraction there, but it's unlikely anyone will be forced to see a movie on that screen.

The second-floor bar replaces a small, open coffee counter that had just a few stools and standing tables. The mood of the space is completely changed, with low tables and chic couches and leather cubes to sit on. The recycled-wood screen closes off the front of the bar area, making it a dark and cozy place. It's also much larger than the previous venue, spreading far into what used to be the wide lobby area where festivalgoers lined up.

Fortunately, Sundance found a way to squeeze everything in without eliminating the main screening rooms. But most of them have been converted to stadium seating. This is, technically, an improvement in terms of being able to see a movie and read subtitles over the heads of the people in front of you. The old Kabuki's seating was not very steeply raked. But I don't think stadium seating is as good for post-show Q&As. The old screening rooms, with two wide aisles and no barriers all the way to the stage, plus an area at the top where people sometimes caught a few more minutes of a discussion as they headed out, were perfect for this. And with the house lights on, they were as brightly lit as lecture halls. The new screening rooms have more comfortable seats but darker colors and much dimmer lights. They're the sort of rooms that are well suited to a date but not as much to a festival experience.

The assigned seating, likewise, has its advantages but doesn't seem like the best thing at a festival. (I don't know whether the festivals will actually use it.) The good thing about assigned seats is that you only have to stand in line once, to buy your ticket. I enjoyed this in Hong Kong, where it's possible to enjoy a leisurely meal between buying tickets and going into the theater, because you don't have to worry about getting a good seat.

Clearly, Sundance had this in mind when they set up the Kabuki. Ticketholders who don't have to rush for a good seat are more likely to linger in the lobby area and buy a drink or a snack. This might even make it easier for festivalgoers to mingle between shows, because they don't have to be in line. But frankly, many devoted festival fans are on tight budgets. In fact, in many ways, the lifeblood of a festival like SFIAAFF is young people who don't have a lot of money, aren't big drinkers and may not even be of drinking age. A bar may sell non-alcoholic drinks, but it's still a bar, and the one at the new Kabuki reads to me as mature.

I realize that the theater owners who are kind enough to host festivals still have to make their profit, which generally doesn't come from ticket sales, so this is a difficult subject. And I don't want to overstate the natural camaraderie of festivalgoers who meet randomly in line. But there is often a feeling of excitement to getting in a long line in a crowded lobby and watching the line get even longer behind me. And with the Kabuki's new layout, there just doesn't seem to be enough room for people to line up for seats even if a festival wanted to go with open seating.

Still, I shouldn't jump to conclusions. The Kabuki was first built as one large performing-arts theater, and when it was broken up into a multiplex there must have been protests from people who had fond memories of the original space. The new Kabuki is still in a great location for dining and other activities. Naturally, some things will be not as good, some things will be better, and life will go on.

Review: Syndromes and a Century

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is flirting with us. How else to explain the lush landscapes, languid pace, and gentle camerawork of his films? Or the endless come-ons among his characters, from sexual to platonic and a fascinating array of combinations in between? He's like a Buddhist Barry White, always quietly encouraging us to get it on -- "it" being what, exactly? Some vague higher level of human togetherness?

After spending half of his last masterpiece, Tropical Malady, blurring the line between military recruitment and homosexual seduction (the second half imagined a more primordial seduction), Weerasethakul turns to the subject of healing in Syndromes and a Century. A Thai movie made in 2006 with such a title invites interpretations involving SARS, but the characters in this multifaceted work suffer from a wide variety of other syndromes, both physical and spiritual. For most of the film, they're all either seeking or providing some kind of salve, so relentlessly that sometimes two characters are at odds, both trying to help the other.

The story, which like Malady is split down the middle, begins at a clinic in the Thai countryside. The plot might be best described as a series of vignettes among related characters, with a love story loosely threaded through, but Weerasethakul doesn't operate on the level of dramatic progression. Like a good pickup artist, he plays with mood and setting. Again he experiments with form, constantly and always impeccably. A dialog scene is shot as a landscape. Incongruous lines drop abruptly into conversations. A change of scenery subtly alters the movie's texture. Sometimes inviting, sometimes menacing, often funny, the imagery and dialogue in Syndromes is more varied than in Malady, and this is a much more accessible work. It's an art film that inspires contemplation but doesn't require an intellectual eye. Weerasethakul is creating a cinema that surprises and delights at the level of the viewing experience itself, acknowledging our expectations and playing with them without having to remind us he's doing so. All we have to do is give in to it.

Review: Shanghai Kiss

Ken Leung, probably best known as the karaoke equipment salesman in the Edward Norton comedy Keeping the Faith, is a great dramatic actor too, as evidenced by his powerful performance as Quill in X-Men: The Last Stand. So when I found out he would play the lead in Shanghai Kiss, I didn't even check to see whether it was a comedy or a drama before buying a ticket. As unbelievable as it seems, this is Leung's first lead role.

Shanghai Kiss is that rare thing, a fresh romantic comedy. That's thanks in part to Shanghai-born David Ren's sharp screenplay and up-to-date take on China, but most of all to Leung, who's like a freshly opened bottle of champagne in every scene. The New York native delivers Ren's consistently funny lines like he was born to play Liam Liu, the hard-luck Asian-American actor trying to become a star in L.A. I was surprised to learn during the Q&A after last night's premiere at SFIAAFF that he had to audition for the role. The whole production plays like a Leung vehicle.

If you're at all familiar with returning-to-roots stories, there's nothing especially new about Liam's story, but in the hands of Ren and Leung it becomes a heartfelt story about a character we've just met. An interesting complication is Liam's ambiguous relationship with 16-year-old Adelaide in L.A., well-played by Hayden Panettiere of NBC's "Heroes." What is original for an American movie is the way Shanghai is portrayed, especially when Liam first arrives to handle the sale of a home his grandmother left to him. There's no Chinese-y music, no bicycle traffic jams, no wizened old faces or Mao jackets. In time, China's poverty plays a key role in the film, but Liam's first glimpse of Shanghai is of a dynamic, modern city, a land of promise, with a pulsating rock soundtrack.

It's a bit inaccurate to call Shanghai Kiss a film, though. It was shot on high-definition digital video, which for the most part looks wonderful. The lighting looks natural for the most part, the colors are dazzling -- at times a bit unnaturally so, like a modern-day classic Technicolor -- and the sharpness is eye-popping. This is the best digital video I've seen on the big screen. The new medium will take some getting used to, but it's a legitimate alternative to film.

More than that, I hope this marks the Leung's arrival as a big-screen force. Shanghai Kiss is heading for theatrical distribution in selected markets, and I think it has the goods to go wider. Either way, you can't deny that the star is a natural.

Review: In Between Days

As a sometime diaspora-studies geek, I expected a lot of insights and reflections on that subject from In Between Days, which centers on a Korean girl living in Toronto who misses her estranged father in South Korea. It delivers very little on that score but so much else that writer/director So Yong Kim and co-writer/producer Bradley Rust Gray can be forgiven many times over.

This is a movie about a boy and a girl. We know this because a good three-quarters of the screen time consists of their faces in extreme closeup, or just the two of them side by side. Forget multiethnic Toronto, celebrated as one of North America's most vibrant cities: We barely see it in this movie. Aimie and Tran (he's also Korean) ride the subway, sit in coffeehouses, hang out at claustrophobic teenage parties and ponder their ambiguous relationship, almost always in darkness. The city appears as a dimly lit skyline as we hear Aimie voicing the letters she's writing home to her father, but this is a film of warm faces in a cold landscape.

To be sure, their situation as immigrants does play a role in the story. Though Aimie claims in a letter to have friends of all colors, she doesn't appear to be close to anyone but Tran. Together they speak Korean almost exclusively, and everyone they spend time with is Asian. This amplifies the sense of isolation and claustrophobia in this very close film.

Jiseon Kim as Aimie and Taegu Andy Kang as Tran, both new to the screen, give perfect understated performances. Decades earlier and a world away, Elizabeth Taylor warned that the slightest expression goes a long way when your face is projected on a screen two stories tall, and these young actors have clearly learned that lesson.

In Between Days takes a while to gather steam, but once we understand its visual world, the movie's dim midwinter lighting and deliberate pacing make it that much more powerful. And despite its unconventional style, the movie has a classical movie arc built around increasing sexual tension. In Between Days is a perfect evocation of two themes in adolescence and life itself: the blurry line between festering and growing, and between being uncomfortably close and comfortably intimate.

A few shorts

Yesterday I caught a shorts program at SFIAAFF called "The World, Complicated." It was my first shorts program in a long time, because there are always so many features to see.

Whether you'd like to see a feature-length version is certainly not the only measure of a short film, but two of the standouts in this program met that mark for me. The Last Chip, an Australian film by Heng Tang, joins three elderly Chinese-Australian women on a casino run. It's visually stunning and well-crafted overall, though I felt it went a little overboard dramatically at one point. I wanted to know more about the backstory of these characters, all of whom were brilliantly played.

Windowbreaker, directed by Tze Chun, is set in a changing Boston suburb torn by sometimes unspoken conflict among Caucasian, Chinese, and Vietnamese residents. The video, credited to "The Complications," hints at the complexity of the situation and raises questions that almost beg to be explored at feature length. Thankfully, student filmmaker Chun displays the delicate touch that could make such a movie work.

The other entry that stood out was Going Home, an intimate first-person documentary about another traumatic parting in a Vietnamese refugee family that has been separated many times before. Director Hung Nguyen's camera drinks it all in, in takes that are extraordinarily long and well-shot for interviews with untrained subjects. This one is fascinating and a pleasure to watch all by itself, the perfect length at 20 minutes.

Review: Undoing

After finishing his landmark Asian-American feature Yellow in 1998, Chris Chan Lee left Los Angeles for TV and film work in Asia. His return to the city resulted in Undoing, a movie about returning from overseas and one that's in love with LA's film noir heritage. Once again, Lee examines guilt and betrayal, as well as the intersection of the straight-laced and the criminal Koreatown.

Coming home from Korea, to which he fled after a tragedy involving a close friend, Sam (Sung Kang) wants to get back together with girlriend Vera (Kelly Hu) and undo what he did to hurt her and others. Once he's done a couple of deals, he'll leave town with her and start anew. Naturally, there are complications, and Lee's writing and Kang's superb performance keep us guessing whether Sam really knows what he's doing. The supporting cast is excellent, too, especially Tom Bower as Don, an older white man who seems like a substitute father to Sam.

Undoing mercifully steers clear of the settings we're so used to seeing in films that take place in Los Angeles. There are palm trees off in the haze, but this is strip-mall-and-bungalow L.A., simultaneously older and newer than the shiny Westside locales of more conventional films. Lee and cinematographer John DeFazio bring Koreatown, a drab section of midtown made colorful by bright Korean retail signs, into the universe of noir L.A.

Unfortunately, until the final act, Undoing is too busy visually, and too busy being noir, to get us fully involved in the story. The filters, grainy textures, dim lighting, and rapid-fire still shots are relentless. Much of it looks wonderful, but added together it becomes distracting. However, once the characters' real motivations become clear and the film starts closing in on its not-quite-Hollywood ending, the power of the story and of Kang's performance stand out in sharp relief.

Review: Finishing the Game

Justin Lin's Seventies mockumentary about fake Bruce Lee movies, Finishing the Game, is deceptively simple on the surface. Like other comic films about the earth-tone decade, it often plays as a good-natured spoof of that period's relatively innocent pop culture in the wake of the Big Ideas of the Sixties. But in this case, the story is about casting Lee's final film, Game of Death, after his death in 1973, a subject that inspired Lin and co-writer Josh Diamond to make some more serious statements about racism.

The subject is familiar to anyone who's followed conversations about Asian-Americans in the media, or looked for them there: It's hard for Asians to get any film or TV role in America that isn't there for an "Asian reason," and most of those have involved martial arts or food delivery. But Lin and company make us laugh about it pretty steadily throughout Finishing the Game's 88 minutes.

And we're not just laughing at society or Hollywood. There's a wide variety of humor packed into this brief film: character comedy, relationship comedy, sex comedy, workplace comedy, and old-fashioned slapstick. Last night, Finishing the Game even made an audience at an Asian-American film festival laugh at a Vietnamese refugee's heartfelt story about his family being divided by the war. At other times, Lin delivers his own poignant messages through pure spoof, such as casting Dustin Nguyen of 21 Jump Street as an out-of-luck actor who once gained fame on a short-lived cop show. It's layered filmmaking that keeps you thinking.

Meanwhile, the excellent performances serve the real-world cause of demonstrating the skills of Asian-American actors including Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Leonardo Nam, and Brian Tee. It's a movie about auditions that is itself an audition at another level, and at times imagines an Asian-American movie stardom that is almost unknown in the real world.

The story in Finishing the Game ends abruptly before completing a conventional story arc. Though that may be another "meta" maneuver by the filmmakers, it's disappointing that the movie feels, well, unfinished. But by the time it ends, this "small" film has already delivered more laughs and ideas than most conventional productions ever do.

Festival Eve

SFIAAFF starts tomorrow! This SFGate article talks about the history of the Center for Asian-American Media, which hosts the festival.

Given CAAM's roots in documentary film and especially in public television, it's funny that I feel I should point out some documentary stuff this year that might be overshadowed by the many Asian-American and Asian narrative features. Veteran documentarian Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese, the story of Chinese-Americans who helped shape classic Hollywood films, should be a real eye-opener. Then there are historic films themselves, including the 1929 Pavement Butterfly. Meanwhile, And Thereafter II is the sequel to a documentary from the 2005 festival about a Korean war bride's unhappy life in the U.S. Now, the first movie was so jaw-droppingly grim that I will have to sit this one out, but the images in that movie have really stuck with me.

So as strange as it sounds, when you go to the little festival that started out trying to tell the world about the Asian-American experience, try to look beyond the big, flashy comedies and dramas.