Quick take: Of Time and the City

Last year I heard Terence Davies narrating Distant Voices, Still Lives at PFA. It was an autobiographical film to start with, and he took it the extra step and just talked over it, explaining the references and telling additional anecdotes. His latest film, Of Time and the City, is just like that. He's dispensed with the art of using "fictional" characters, and actors, and sets, and just about anything new. He just talks over old found footage and borrowed music.

Terence Davies is an old codger. He's also a genius, and Of Time and the City is a deeply moving film. It's about Liverpool in the mid-20th century, as well as aging, generations, urban planning, England, life, death, and countless other things. Somehow it made me pine for my own youth and remember things I'd forgotten for years (well, they were things about England). A deep and gorgeous movie.

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.

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.

Review: Revolutionary Road

With his latest film, Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes atones for much of the sin in his previous tale of suburban ennui, American Beauty. The 1999 Best Picture winner drew a cartoon version of American suburbia and then condemned it in a story that was simultaneously farfetched and intellectually lazy.

Working from evidently better source material in the form of a novel by WWII-generation American writer Richard Yates (adapted by Justin Haythe), Mendes has created a film that pierces the myths of postwar life so well in its first half that the dramatic tropes that dominate its second half are easier to take.

Revolutionary Road is the story of a young couple raising two children in a suburb of New York in 1955 who decide to drop everything and seek adventure overseas. They want to live life to the fullest and find their true vocations before it's too late. But there are surprises along the way, and one thing gradually turns into another.

The film kicks off in much the same world as the great TV series "Mad Men", but naturally, it delivers a more concentrated dose of the period. At its best, Revolutionary Road feels less self-aware than "Mad Men," though on the other hand, it's impossible to deliver in two hours the depth of a character like Don Draper.

As in American Beauty, Mendes (a former stage director) gives us a lot of monologues, set pieces and theatrical devices. But Revolutionary Road has a more sophisticated take on the staid universe that inspires rebellion in both films. The interplay of the dreams, glamour and reality of the Fifties, along with our nostalgia for the time, is exquisite. Roger Deakins's cinematography is excellent and the cast is generally impressive, especially leads Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. At its height, Revolutionary Road rises far above mere period drama.

Quick take: The Savages

Sometimes I wonder why movies like The Savages get made. The widest it was ever released in the U.S. was 201 theaters at a time. It only made $10.6 million in box office worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Here are some possible reasons why: It's frequently funny, but not enough to be marketed as a comedy. It's a drama where people grapple with relationships, but it's not a relationship drama. It's about aging and death but isn't a poignant weeper featuring a "brave" career-capping performance by a legendary actor.

Yet those are also all reasons I loved this movie. It has an honesty and a realism about adult life today that's rare in the movies. The settings and character types, on the surface, are exaggerated and contrasted to maximum effect. This is most true in the first part of the film, in which two East Coast intellectuals go to a stunningly shot Sun City, Arizona, to get their father's affairs in order. But as the film progresses, the details of the characters' lives add up to much more than caricature or cliche. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are excellent, of course, but the cast is fine all around.

The Savages is a "small movie" and may not leave you with a single impression that lasts a long time, because it isn't a Big Message movie. Its truth is that life isn't made up of Big Messages that are revealed in Big Moments. That reminder is reason enough for movies like this.

Quick take: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

I like the premise of The Chronicles of Narnia, with four kids in World War II Britain finding their way into a magical world. The first movie based on C.S. Lewis's books, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, spent a lot of time exploring that premise. The second film, Prince Caspian, bogs down in one big battle after another. We jump into Narnia through a complicated time-warp twist that deserves more explanation. Instead, there's a series of pitched battles and hand-to-hand struggles that are pretty much like those in any generic good-vs.-evil movie. According to an IMDB commenter, the seemingly 45-minute raid against the bad guys' castle was blown up from almost nothing in the book just to make Prince Caspian more of an action movie. Despite the chaste romance that grows between the eldest girl and the handsome young prince (not even very interesting itself), the first film's nice balance between chick-flick fantasy and guy-flick heroism is gone.

Quick take: The Lady Vanishes

Befitting its name, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is light as a feather. Though it's more comedy than suspense, its mystery keeps the story compelling while the script and performances provide comic relief. The film starts in a fictional Northern European country as a mixed group of tourists are waylaid at a small mountain inn and then scramble to get on a train that will take the British passengers toward home. Then the eponymous lady disappears, and no one is quite who we thought they were.

Of course, we've seen that kind of premise a million times, and this is a 70-year-old movie made on a tiny set with projected scenery outside the windows. The ancient sound is as good as it could be, given this is a Criterion Collection DVD, but it's still impossible to hear all the lines. Yet there's enough to think and laugh about in four out of five lines that the fifth would just be icing on the cake. The barely veiled references to European politics in the lead-up to World War II, which are explained further in the DVD extras, are fascinating.

This isn't just a droll little English film. It's laugh-out-loud funny. And Hitchcock makes it all look easy.

Review: Milk

"How many gay supervisors do we have now?" my partner asked after we saw Milk on Friday night.

I thought about it for a moment and gave up. "I don't know."

Mind you, we're gay men living in San Francisco, and though we don't watch local politics intently, we do read the papers. But as it turns out, a new gay supervisor just got elected, and we didn't even know it.

The fact that an elected official's sexual orientation could have escaped our notice is testimony to the courage and vision of Harvey Milk, who ran for San Francisco supervisor twice and Assembly once before being elected supervisor in 1977. Gus Van Sant's new film honors Milk's legacy by telling his story in a way that captures the magnitude and the impact of his achievements -- not just on the city and country, but on Milk himself.

Stylistically, Milk is a mainstream film, with just enough distinctive touches thrown in to signal that we're watching a work by an independent, idiosyncratic artist. Van Sant, another gay man who has succeeded within the system while never giving up his point of view, clearly feels strongly about his subject. The performances are excellent across the board, especially from Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as murderer Dan White. The way they inhabit their characters is chilling. My only criticism is that Danny Elfman's music is sometimes intrusive and emotionally leading.

But the real hero behind the project is Dustin Lance Black, who was inspired to write the dramatic screenplay after seeing the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Black shopped the script around until he found someone to film it. He's a meticulous writer, tracing Milk's life from a closeted existence as an insurance man in New York City through to his assassination in 1978 without overemphasizing any one aspect of it. Though the film shows its subject overwhelmingly in a positive light, it does present Milk as a three-dimensional person, a man and not a saint, with sometimes conflicting desires and impulses. Milk makes the sometimes complicated politics of San Francisco easy to understand, quickly laying out key issues and then circling back to refresh our memory. I can't vouch for all the historical details myself, but in some ways, this drama tells a more complete story more succintly than the documentary itself did.

Black was also downright prescient about the environment in which the film would be received. In its treatment of Anita Bryant's crusade against local gay-rights ordinances, culminating in a 1977 California initiative to fire gay teachers, Milk displays eerie parallels to the debate taking place in the aftermath of the anti-gay-marriage Prop. 8. Harvey Milk clashed with the gay "establishment" over the anti-Prop. 6 campaign, saying it wasn't enough to just talk about civil rights without mentioning actual gay people. Now debate rages over the very same issue. The film presents Milk as a politician with a different approach from current "leaders" of the gay community, one that is uncompromising about presenting gay faces and perspectives but also about forming effective coalitions with other groups.

Fortunately, Milk is also shaping up as a mainstream success. It was the No. 1o grossing movie in the country this past weekend despite showing on only 36 screens. The audience last night at the Castro Theatre, right in the heart of the neighborhood where the story takes place, must have been far from typical, though it was mixed. But in 20 years, always showing up 45 minutes before a major screening there, I have never had so many people in front of me in line for any movie. (There was enthusiastic applause not just after the film, but for individual scenes.) By the time its run has ended, Milk will have told many people more than they have ever known about the gay movement, and indeed, about real gay people.

Yet on a personal note, I have to say that seeing this movie at the Castro, a few blocks from home, was a filmgoing experience like none other. It was filmed mostly on location in the neighborhood, and in fact the set for Milk's photography shop was built in the storefront where his real shop once was. Knowing that, it was haunting to watch the many scenes that took place there. An older friend who lived here in Milk's era -- and later lost most of his friends to AIDS -- told me he found the movie depressing because he would rather be living in that time. But as someone who was far away and too young to understand what was happening at the time, watching the movie brought that world alive for me and returned its ghosts to their places in my midst. For this neighborhood, and for the gay community as a whole, Milk is a powerful and impassioned origin story.

Quick take: Gattaca

In response to my recent post about non-action, non-thriller sci-fi movies, someone kindly lent me a DVD of Gattaca. More about the DVD itself in a later post. But as for the movie, first of all, it's an excellent film. Writer-director Andrew Nicoll found a good balance between mythic, futuristic, sociological, and suspense elements. The cast, which amazingly brings together Gore Vidal and Ernest Borgnine (!) along with stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law, is superb.

You'll notice I mentioned "suspense elements." Gattaca has plenty of suspense. I'd even call it a thriller, of a sort. There's definitely a conspiracy. But the story is so original that it won't fit into any pigeonhole. It defies the conventions of a typical thriller: It pits one determined man against a sophisticated bureaucracy, but in a very original way. And the plot doesn't come close to answering all the questions the screenplay raises, leaving a delicious sense of mystery.

But along with being the rare sci-fi movie that's not a (typical) action or suspense film, Gattaca is also a (less rare) gay movie with no overtly gay characters. The film opens with the first of many of what I'll call, to avoid giving too much away, male shower scenes. (They're not what you think, and yes, this is a movie that passed the "What the hell?" test right out of the gate.) Then there's the situation of having two young, smartly dressed, impeccably coiffed men living together in a starkly modern luxury loft. One of them being Jude Law. And there's more, but it's all behind a sort of curtain. Gayness is never "there" in the story, either spoken or unspoken, but it doesn't have to be. After the closing scene, featuring one of the oddest and most inspired wardrobe choices ever, I just laughed out loud. Gattaca is the sci-fi film as a modern Hays Code movie.

Review: Changeling

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I never love a movie unless at some point, preferably in the early going, I think to myself, "What the hell is going on here?" Something has to really get me off kilter -- it can be a character, a performance, a shot, a setting, a plot development, whatever -- or the movie will quickly fade from my memory no matter how well it's made. I've been this way for at least 20 years. It's not that high a standard, really. Several movies a year meet it for me.

Clint Eastwood has met the bar, as a director, at least a couple of times. The vague sense of doom in Unforgiven, and the way in which Million Dollar Baby seemed to be taking place in the 1940s even though it was set in the present day, both got me intrigued. But it's been a while. For some reason, Eastwood's two Iwo Jima films won me over in concept but offered no real surprises on screen. His latest movie, Changeling, has the same strength and weakness.

Changeling takes place in late-1920s Los Angeles, which sounded good to a Western history buff. I trusted Eastwood (rightly) not to do this as a lot of flapper nonsense. And it's the story of a struggling single mother who finds her son missing and then gets him back, except that he doesn't look like the same boy. It sounded sad, mysterious, and spooky. I was sold.

I suppose if I'd gone in knowing absolutely nothing about the story I might have gotten one interesting slap in the face when the "wrong" boy showed up. But unfortunately, despite the utter strangeness of the story -- it gets weirder, and it's based on a real case -- it never passed the "whaaaat?" test. The facts of Changeling are almost hard to believe, but the way they're laid out for us is never really surprising.

In fact, the film eventually descends into the kinds of business we've seen too often on screen, and it's only Eastwood's classy film craft that keeps the film from descending into laughable cliche. There are good guys and bad guys, villains and innocent victims, and saviors who show up at the last minute. For all the earnest efforts here to tell a story about the place of women and the arbitrary power of authority in an less enlightened era, Changeling is a deeply old-fashioned movie.

That's not to say it's a bad film. The dialog is believable and not overcooked. The settings and behavior mostly feel right for the period. Angelina Jolie gives a credible performance as the anguished mother, only briefly coming across as a Movie Star With A Cause. John Malkovich is simultaneously caring and narcissistic as a crusading radio preacher.

But although Changeling isn't a Lazy Hollywood movie, despite some easy catharsis and a few too-perfect coincidences, it's never more than a Hollywood story. Unlike the characters in the movie, I saw it all coming a mile away.

Review: An Autumn Afternoon

When I pointed out the new Criterion edition of Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon at our local video store last night, my friend asked me what it was about. I hadn't seen it in about 15 years, but with a late-period Ozu film, you have an excellent chance of being right if you simply say, "It's about a father and his daughter, who's getting old enough to get married."

Made in 1962, this was Ozu's last film, and it's even more about his favorite subject than his other late works, if that's possible. The plot, concerning Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a modestly successful executive, and daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita), winds gently through the movie's 112 minutes. But An Autumn Afternoon is mostly just a meditation on the theme of aging and family relations. Old age and youth, and despair and hope, bounce off each other in a series of connected encounters. Hirayama's newlywed son argues with his wife about money, a middle-aged friend brags about his young wife, and a younger middle-aged man who served under Hirayama's command in the Navy reminisces with him. Hirayama encounters one of his own elders, too, a former middle-school teacher who's down on his luck. A small reunion in his honor leaves everyone, in subtle ways, closer to the grave.

All this builds up to something, but not through the clockwork of a typical plot. In Ozu's world, tradition is the force that overshadows everything, but each event feels driven by characters rather than by a march toward some predetermined destination. An Autumn Afternoon is even less plot-driven than most Ozu films, giving us a series of mirrored events that simply reflect on its themes. Though it seems to drift along, it's compelling because of the growing sense of approaching separation, sleep, physical decline, and death.

All this plays out against the backdrop of a thriving Japanese city in the delectable light of long fall afternoons. The "pillow shots" that Ozu used as buffers between scenes reached as high an artistic level here as they ever did. The images of smokestacks, office towers, and modern apartment buildings portray the churning prosperity of postwar life. The cheery soundtrack, which plays even throughout many dialog scenes -- Ozu always asked his usual composer, Kojun Saito, to write in the style of "home music," a kind of generic background music popular with Japanese families, according to biographer Donald Richie -- contributes to this feeling. Yet the screenplay, and even a few pillow shots of barrels of industrial waste, undercuts that optimism in interesting ways.

All those images are in full splendor on the Criterion disc, a clean and vibrant transfer. Ozu was an adventurous and inventive filmmaker, embracing first sound and later color, though the latter only for his last few films. As in Good Morning, his use of color is extravagant, with many bright red and yellow set props and even a hot-pink apron in one scene.

No single film can sum up Ozu's work, but this release of An Autumn Afternoon -- and I'm not even considering the commentary -- is a good introduction to his late period.

Quick take: Stop-Loss

Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce's drama about soldiers being re-deployed to Iraq after multiple tours of duty, is about a very worthy and serious subject. The problem is, it never really moves beyond being about that. I wanted to care about the characters and their individual predicaments, but too often I was distracted by obvious issue-y speeches. On the positive side, I admire Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard for managing to criticize the war without either idealizing or condemning the troops. That must not have been easy. And I liked the rare inclusion of a young, attractive woman as a friend of the male protagonist, with no sexual tension. The performances also are generally strong. But most of the time, Stop-Loss felt like an exceptionally sophisticated TV movie-of-the-week.

Review: The Exiles

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

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.

Quick take: Weerasethakul shorts

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

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

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

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

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.

Quick take: The Flight of the Red Balloon

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

"Distant Voices, Still Lives" at PFA

For some reason, I expected Pacific Film Archive's "shot-by-shot discussion" of Distant Voices, Still Lives to be movie first, then analysis. When I got there, I noticed a little table in the center of the screening room with a light, a glass, and a pitcher of water. Why lead a discussion from the middle of the audience? Well, because director Terence Davies was to show us the film, on DVD, wielding a remote, pausing and talking over it and allowing viewers to ask questions.

Had I known this, I would have rented the movie myself ahead of time, because I'd never seen it. But it's hard to imagine a more perfect host for this sort of thing than Davies. He was witty, erudite, and unfailingly polite, and clearly enjoyed himself.

The film was also well suited to the format, since there's very little story to follow. And because it's very closely based on Davies' own childhood, he was able to reminisce about the true characters and put each scene in context.

Like Davies's The Long Day Closes, DVSL is about growing up poor in 1950s England, specifically Liverpool. (Unfortunately, I missed its Friday night screening at PFA because I was sick.) I prefer Long Day because it's more cohesive: really, all about a young boy who's close to his mother and loves to go to the movies. DVSL looks at the rest of the family, including a tyrannical father, with glimpses of their lives roughly before (the Distant Voices half of the film) and after (Still Lives) his death. So while both are very personal films, this one is more a vision of family and community life in that setting than a personal reminiscence.

But it's a remarkably honest and understanding film in regard to the painful and distorted ways people who love each other can be to one another. Davies never judges anyone, and neither does he paint a silver lining around his father's cruelty after his death. And like Long Day, it's elegant and contemplative without ever becoming, well, distant. The combination of formal compositions and intimate, realistic action is reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Also like Hou, as well as Ozu, Davies likes scenes of characters singing right in the context of the story. In Hou and Ozu films and in Long Day, there are songs that startle us by continuing to full length, free from the cuts we expect after a few lines or a verse. In DVSL, some songs do get cut, but there are far more of them. The film is seemingly one-quarter singing. But it's lovely stuff. After the screening I asked Davies why he uses so much of this, and first of all he said it was true to life, that people did spend a lot of time singing to each other. Then he noted that, without knowing it, those people were usually expressing their deepest feelings in the songs they sang.

Gnarnia!

I waited three years to write that headline. (Back then it would have been more original ...) We finally saw Narnia (full name: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe), and it was indeed gnarly. Like a blend of The Wizard of Oz, Pan's Labyrinth, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it tells the story of four brothers and sisters who stumble upon a hidden world and get involved in a battle to save Good from Evil. Oh, and they go there from WWII blitz-era Britain.

It lacks the rustic gloom and weird resonances of Pan's Labyrinth, but there is some welcome complexity to its characters. They kids act their ages and squabble like real siblings. The creatures in Narnia feel like real beings rather than just coming to life for our amusement. And Tilda Swinton, whom I've tried to avoid ever since her insufferable performance in Orlando, was wonderfully over the top as the White Witch. As for the special effects, it's hard to separate them from the makeup, costumes, and art direction. It really looks like a single, coherent world, with the help of a story that (usually) holds our interest. Cowabunga!

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: There Will Be Blood

Studio City-born director Paul Thomas Anderson has never made a movie that wasn't about California, and in his first few features he showed us views of the state that were familiar, albeit with his own creative twists. The Seventies glow of Boogie Nights and the suburban desolation of Punch-Drunk Love, for example, were unmistakably rooted in Los Angeles.

With his latest and most mature film, There Will Be Blood, Anderson goes a short distance north and about a century back to deliver a vision of California that's no less true but not nearly as well known. Inspired by Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil! (the story apparently deviates widely from the book) Blood follows an independent oilman as he battles the industry's barons and his own demons.

This is California between the 1890s and the 1920s, before it underwent the softening effects of mass migration and postwar suburbanization. There's nature and open space everywhere, but greed and a crude form of civilization are running rampant over it. Freewheeling capitalism and fundamentalist religion were in fact prominent in California before modern corporatism and, later, New Left politics and New Age spirituality became hallmarks of the state. Anderson conveys the raw texture of that time and place with a vigorous directorial style, and Jonny Greenwood's angular score forms a perfect harmony to that vision.

But the heart of the film is Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman, Daniel Plainview. He appears in nearly every scene of the film, from his early days drilling wells with a few employees to his wealth and success at the end. As in Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis plays a cruel, towering figure who would force his will on the world. But Scorsese let himself be consumed by the violence and mythology of his story, whereas Anderson does a better job of letting Day-Lewis's nuanced acting shine through.

Day-Lewis plays Plainview as simultaneously larger than life and needy, both masterful and insecure. The accent he uses is vaguely English, like that of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. It's distracting on a character in California who supposedly grew up in Michigan, but like many things in Blood -- and famously, in California -- it's just made up. Like Kane, Plainview is a man essentially out of place everywhere who stakes his claim over as big a world as he can create. But as much as Orson Welles deserves credit for creating Kane, Day-Lewis's performance in this California tycoon story is miles ahead of the radio pioneer's stage-acting.

Day-Lewis doesn't carry the film entirely by himself. Paul Dano's performance as an evangelist practically splits the character at its seams, and Kevin J. O'Connor is wonderfully understated as a mysterious visitor who comes into Plainview's life. The surprise of the film, however, is Dillon Freasier as Plainview's son. Even as a character in his early teens, sitting solemnly at his father's side, he exudes a mysterious intelligence.

Be forewarned that this is an almost all-male movie, and an occasionally violent one. But it's not a macho film or in love with its protagonist. Blood is a compelling study of a fascinating man, and not one conducted at a safe distance. Day-Lewis and Anderson throw us right into the muck, and by the end, we recognize it.

Year in review

Movie reviewing is definitely a sideline for me, more a way to write about something I love than a concerted effort to inform the world. Real critics see everything that matters (and bravely sit through a lot that doesn't), but I just watch what I want to see. So I won't pretend to give a Top Ten you can compare with those of other critics.

Instead, here are six movies that stood out for me. Don't take that small number to mean it was a weak year. On the contrary, it's been the best film year in a long time, though my moviegoing experience of this calendar year was profoundly enriched by Children of Men, a 2006 film I didn't get around to until 2007. With There Will Be Blood yet to open in San Francisco, maybe 2008 will have a strong kickoff as well.

Syndromes and a Century
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest masterpiece (a 2006 film, but released in the U.S. this year) is simple, playful and seductive, so you may not realize it's also boldly inventive. It's an art film so smart you don't have to think about it.

In Between Days
Made up almost entirely of extreme closeups of faces, So Yong Kim's film about Korean teen-agers seeking warmth in a Toronto winter evokes the blurry lines between festering and growing and between being uncomfortably close and comfortably intimate.

The Bourne Identity
Great action filmmaking that slams into the era of Abu Ghraib at full speed.

Into the Wild
Never mind the debates about whether the lead character, real-life adventurer Chris McCandless, should have tried to live in the Alaska wilderness. This is a great movie about youth and age, and it bursts with energy and light.

Lust, Caution
Like Into the Wild's polar opposite, Ang Lee's latest and most mature film yet is a black hole. Tang Wei is wonderful as a young actress on a mission, but the seething Tony Leung Chiu-Wai absorbs all hope.

No Country for Old Men
This contemporary Western has mystery, humor, and white-knuckle suspense, and on top of all that, wisdom.

Review: The Namesake

There's a touching love story in The Namesake, Mira Nair's film of the Jhumpa Lahiri novel, between a self-conscious young Indian engineer living in New York and the wife he brings over from the home country. Their self-sacrificing love amid humble beginnings recalls Satyajit Ray's masterpiece The World of Apu. But everything that makes The Namesake a pleasure, including that plotline, strong lead performances and Nair's eye for telling details, often gets lost in an overall story that comes off as contrived.

That couple name their first child Gogol, after the Russian writer, for reasons that become clear only later. He grows up in an affluent suburb of New York in the 1980s and goes on to Yale and the company of tony Manhattan intellectuals, but all the while he's so ridiculed for this name that he's torn between using it and a more traditional Indian name, Nikil. The idea of such a name causing its holder that much suffering outside of, say, a small town in Arkansas is the sort of thing that might be amusing in a fanciful novel. I've never read Lahiri's book. But in this film, of which humor is not a strong point, the conflict that drives the main story seems so unlikely that it becomes a distraction. And it's not the only piece of Gogol's story that feels forced.

These unlikely (or underdeveloped) plot developments and a sometimes clunky script contrast with the film's sophisticated perspective on migration. Though the trailer strongly suggests it, The Namesake never sends its young protagonist to India in a successful search for his roots. His family's identity is unique, rooted in both America and India as well as in their own shared experiences. And there are subtle touches -- shots of a scarf tangled in a phone cord, of the father smoking alone outdoors, seen through a window -- that make that portrayal richer. The acting is fine as well, especially by Gogol (Kal Penn) and his father and mother (Irfan Khan and Tabu). The Namesake often feels as if it would have been better if its makers had had the courage of their convictions.

Review: No Country for Old Men

It's almost impossible to write about No Country for Old Men without giving spoilers, so if you do plan to see it, wait until afterward to read my review. In fact, the big surprise in this movie is so big that I'm not even going to take the risk that you'll look farther down on this page accidentally and see it. So until around the bottom of this page (or well below it, if you're reading this on an Asus eeePC), I'm just going to write about the subject of spoilers.

I'm sensitive about spoilers because of a couple of childhood traumas. Or maybe just dramas. Dramas, to me. One time on my dad's birthday, I deliberately blurted out what his gift was right before he opened it. Don't ask me why. No one excessively browbeat me over this, but it only took about two seconds to realize how stupid that was.

That wasn't the main one, though. The incident that really made me obsessive about spoilers involved The Sting, one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater. (Incidentally, and just to further insulate you from the spoilers farther down in this review, I used to work at a newspaper with an older guy who was really into being an old-time newspaper guy. We were all talking about our three favorite movies one day, and he said his favorite movies were "The Sting, The Sting, and The Sting." At least he has closure on that.) There's a big surprise in The Sting, but it was never a big surprise to me. That's because my friend told me about it in advance. No idea why. In retrospect, he could be kind of a jerk sometimes.

It wasn't that I didn't enjoy The Sting. I even saw it again and bought the soundtrack album. But it just irked me that part of what I'd paid for when I bought my ticket the first time was lost to me forever. So when I know I'm going to see a movie, I don't really want to know anything about what happens in it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I torture myself by looking down at the part of the review that gives stuff away. But that's just because I'm slightly nuts.

By now we're probably down below what appeared on your screen when you first came to my site, so I'll start writing about No Country for Old Men.

With SPOILERS.

No Country starts out about a guy (Josh Brolin) in the West Texas desert in 1980 who finds a bunch of bodies, one half-alive guy, and a bag of money from a drug deal gone bad. There's also a guy (Javier Bardem) who seems like just a psycho killer but ends up trying to track down the lucky guy with the money to kill him and get the money back. Meanwhile, the local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to figure out what's going on and protect the lucky guy as he gets increasingly unlucky. But the sheriff's kind of an old guy, and he never really gets too far with the case. Then the lucky guy gets killed by someone else entirely, the psycho killer knocks off some more people and walks away alive from a car crash, and the sheriff retires. The sheriff tells his wife about a couple of dreams he had, and that's it. Silence. Fade to black. Titles.

If you've seen the movie, can I just say, "Was that the best ending ever, or what?" If you're not going to see it, let me just say, "It has the best ending of any movie, ever." And by ending I mean the very ending, not the conclusion of the story. It's better than the ending of Boogie Nights. Or The Godfather, Part II. Or Mahjong, for the 18 other people who've seen that. Even better, in a sense, than the ending of Yu Tu Mama, Tambien. Yes, I know that's a bold statement.

Because this ending makes the movie. The last dream the sheriff tells about is a beautiful allegory about death, and knowing his father is waiting for him on the other side. (Jones tells it so well, I won't even try.) So this whole modern Western that seems to be about solving crimes and catching bad guys and restoring justice and so on ends up just being about death. In fact, Death itself, in the form of the "psycho killer." It undermines all our expectations about suspense, catharsis, and the Western hero. He'll just die when his time is up, and even if it's with guns a-blazing, death itself is a peaceful thing, and there's something larger than the cares of this world. That's a direct contradiction of the motif of life-or-death struggle that forms the backbone of traditional Westerns, and action movies as a whole.

For me, this ending redeemed a movie I'd admired, but hadn't loved. And there's no way you could ever predict it. Unless your friend told you ahead of time, that is.

Review: Into the Wild

Have you ever been on a day hike somewhere and some 23-year-old kid comes along who's been out there for five days and is moving twice as fast as you, so you step aside and let him go by? He'll always thank you but he'll never slow down. Isn't he annoying? Well, what if you knew he had had $24,000 but gave it all away to charity and just ran off and bummed rides and meals off of people, plus doing odd jobs for a little while until he felt like quitting? Wouldn't that be even more annoying? But you have to admit, it would be kind of inspiring, too. By the way, if you are that kid, I know you don't mean to be annoying or understand how you're inspiring, but just be aware that you are.

That's what Into the Wild is about. It's exactly like that. The acting is as real as a five-day beard and the look of the film is like a 23-year-old's road trip: All over the map, but gorgeous and memorable the whole way. There are only two kinds of people who should see this movie: young and old.

Review: Lust, Caution

Director Ang Lee, one of the world's most agile filmmakers, for years had a desire to win over the audience that softened the edges of excellent films such as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, and even The Ice Storm. But in 2005's Brokeback Mountain, he stuck with a chilly tale of doomed love to the end, making what in some ways was his richest movie yet.

With Lust, Caution, an erotic thriller set in 1940s Shanghai, Lee has gone farther still, creating a black hole of a film that swallows all glimmers of light. Contrary to his earlier instincts, that absolute darkness is enough to draw us in throughout Lust's roughly two and a half hours.

As imperial Japan overruns much of China, student Wang Jiazhi (newcomer Wei Tang) does her part against the occupiers by pretending to be a businessman's wife and then seducing Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) a key Chinese collaborator. But as complex as this role is for her, their relationship becomes even more complicated.

With a screenplay by Hui-Ling Wang and longtime Lee collaborator James Schamus, based on a story by Eileen Chang, Lee builds what feels like the world of a novel. The tale unfolds slowly and in subtle ways, though with a clarity that's been a hallmark of Lee and Schamus's work. This is by far their most complex and mature work. But what drives the film most are Tang and Leung's performances.

The round-faced Tang looks like a classic Chinese beauty but brings remarkable strength, along with vulnerability, to her role. Leung, who's created some of cinema's most glum male characters, seems to have wound all their disappointments into a very tight ball in the character of Mr. Yee. His malevolence is visceral and believable, never more than in the explicit sex scenes that earned Lust its NC-17 rating. They are too painful and fascinating to watch to be erotic.

As in Brokeback, Lee maintains a perfectly consistent tone throughout the film, this time one of brooding and impending doom. For Lust, he seems to have tapped into the elegant yet hard-edged imagery of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, with long takes of social interaction along with some bloody, realistic violence.

Lust, Caution is a movie of hard truths, using both the brutal conditions and the strange opportunities in wartime Shanghai to expose the voids in some human hearts while making us question what fills others. Though firmly centered in a Chinese world, it's a very relevant film for our American age of murky and questionable crusades.

Review: The Kingdom

With targets as big as terrorism, American dependence on Arab oil producers, and the clash between Western and Islamic culture, it's so easy to go overboard that Peter Berg's The Kingdom triumphs by being a nuanced, if somewhat predictable, thriller.

The story involves a team of FBI agents going to Riyadh to investigate a major terrorist attack against a U.S. expatriate compound. Naturally, they're gung-ho types who take matters into their own hands while higher-ups play politics, but they're more smart than wise-ass, and their interaction with the local authorities is complex and interesting. Amid action would probably embroil all of world politics, the movie wisely stays focused on the FBI team and its ally in the Saudi army, Colonel Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom). Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper, in particular, make them worth our attention for 110 minutes. Jennifer Garner is also strong, and Jason Bateman, in one of The Kingdom's smart touches, is not as far from "Arrested Development"'s Michael Bluth as you might expect.

Visuals are a highlight of any project by Peter Berg, who brought the high-school football drama "Friday Night Lights" to TV as one of the best-looking series ever. (FNL fans will recognize Kyle Chandler as a distraught FBI agent and Minka Kelly in a more fleeting role.) All the touches that have made the fictional Dillon, Texas, look so good are here: handheld camera, shallow focus, extreme closeups, dialog shots in profile, face shots dominated by out-of-focus objects, characters shot through doorways and other frames, and near-silhouettes against blown-out sunlight. Naturally, the action sequences in The Kingdom are tailor-made for those edgy effects, but what makes Berg's work stand out is that he uses them in quiet in-between sequences too, creating a documentary feel.

The Kingdom isn't a profound film, but beyond a bit of exposition early on, it's more subtle than the average Hollywood production. Much of this is thanks to Foxx, who expertly balances the rage and intelligence in his character. Like Berg's signature camera angles, The Kingdom attacks its subject matter with a masterful series of glancing blows.

Quick take: The Host

Any of those people who said only America really knows how to make special-effects action blockbusters need to see the South Korean monster flick The Host. Uh, OK, I just did. And I'm amending my superpatriotic spiel by saying America's still the king of incredibly large-scale special-effects action blockbusters. Because The Host is not only thrilling, suspenseful, and pretty darn realistic-looking, but also extremely well-written and funny from top to bottom and all around. Not like, they had to put in some jokes and they were actually funny and nicely distributed throughout the movie, but like, top-notch slapstick and character comedy. Add in a quest to keep a family together, some touching observations about the human condition, and some pointed political satire, and you have far more than a monster movie. Update: And, as Tony points out, there's an American element to The Host, too. The visual effects were outsourced to the U.S., done by a company in San Francisco. So it brings together the best from both sides.

Reviews: 3:10 to Yuma

Westerns will never die as an American art form because of what they say about the classic American themes of forging into the unexplored, building civil society out of chaos and grappling with wildness both external and internal. But it turns out that last weekend's opening of James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma was the first wide release of a "traditionally gunslinging Western" since 2003, according to Box Office Mojo. So it's both heartening and dismaying to see Mangold remake Delmer Daves's fine 1957 film.

The original is a deeply psychological work based on an Elmore Leonard story and steeped in the social order and film style of its era. Shot in stark blacks and whites, it raises the question of an average farming man's responsibility in serving justice and maintaining order. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) grudgingly agrees to deliver captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) onto a train as his fellow criminals look out for their boss. Along with the social pressure to help out in a region with few lawmen, there's a countervailing theme of class conflict as the struggling Evans is pursuing Wade for a promised $200 from a stagecoach tycoon.

But that's essentially all that's going on in Daves's Yuma, a film that takes dead aim at its subject matter. It's a talky movie that keeps moving thanks to well drawn-out suspense. A large chunk of its 92-minute running time is taken up by a battle of wills between the two men in a small hotel room. For almost the whole film, there are just a handful of shots fired.

As a movie of its time, the 1957 Yuma has its flaws. The screenplay is a bit stilted at times, its characters look suspiciously well scrubbed, and it doesn't reflect the ethnic diversity of the late 19th century Arizona territory. But after all, at its heart it's a stylized picture. Its abundant energy radiates from Ford's subtle, complicated performance. His Wade is not far from being a pillar of frontier society but has a chilling streak of pure self-interest just beneath the surface. The way the story plays out between him and Evans says something about how men may really have survived in the bleak world of the Old West.

The remake by Mangold, an excellent director of actors who made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the 1995 indie gem Heavy, gives us more things to look at but less to think about. Mangold opens with Evans (Christian Bale) being woken in the night by debt-collectors burning his barn, and the action rarely lets up from that point. The new film, 25 minutes longer, is as crowded and noisy as the original was empty and silent.

It's a good artistic strategy to adopt a different tone and style in a remake, but after abandoning the single-minded focus of the 1957 film, Mangold fails to deliver anything nearly as eloquent. What we get is repeated catharsis rather than growing suspense, and in place of Daves's abiding Hollywood hope there's a grimness that feels no less artificial.

Mangold's Yuma isn't a truly dark Western like The Wild Bunch or Unforgiven. Its characters may be desperate and its towns and camps lawless and dirty, but it just builds up to more death, not an overriding sense of doom. There are more references to the Bible in this version, in one example of more accurate historical detail, but it's nothing more than a detail. Characters torture and kill either gratuitously, justifiably, or both, but mostly in the service of spectacle. Self-interest and revenge dominate, while the quest for justice and order fades into the background. It's Grand Theft Stagecoach, with the doggedly sane Evans cast in with an unlikely number of sadistic weirdos.

Despite a screenplay that gives him less to work with than his predecessor had in the role of Evans, Bale gives a stronger performance. It's excellent naturalistic acting, where Heflin's was a workmanlike Hollywood turn. But Russell Crowe is no match for Glenn Ford. His brash, snickering performance is entertaining but lacks the subtle menace beneath Ford's soft-spoken charm.

Mangold and company do inject some physical realism left out 50 years ago. Faces are dirty and sunburned, towns are half filled with tents, and bits of dialog give an historical context that was missing in the earlier film. But their attempts to go beyond the white-male-centric storytelling of the original leave a bitter taste: We get a silent Mexican sharpshooter, Indians who kill for pleasure, startled Chinese railroad workers who just try to get out of the fighters' way, and one black man killed in a shootout. (The portrayal of the Chinese is also historically inaccurate. There would have been no children and scarcely any women in their railroad camp. And a foreman there says the Chinese are lazy and he'd rather have "negroes" on his crew. After the Chinese had started working on the railroads, bosses and foremen no longer thought they were lazy, and white males in the late 19th Century West overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of African-American labor.)

Maybe every generation gets the Westerns it deserves. The 1957 Yuma captured the mood of a post-World War II, Cold War nation that policed the world. After Zapruder, Vietnam, and Taxi Driver, that approach could only play as anachronism. But if it takes a bloodbath to evoke our own time, we would be better served by one that had more to say.

Review: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveras

Filipino-American author Han Ong once wrote that at first hearing, the Tagalog language would seem to require more the services of an ornithologist than of an interpreter. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveras, an independent film from the Philippines recently released on DVD, has excellent subtitles but may have you looking up the number of that tropical bird-watcher you used to know. It's small, soft, colorful, and delicate on the surface but fiercely strong underneath, and it frequently takes sudden cinematic flight.

Like Maximo himself, a 12-year-old boy on the streets of Manila who seemingly couldn't survive as a prancing transvestite but somehow does, Blossoming triumphs despite its tricky premise of a romance between Maximo and a no-nonsense beat cop, Victor. Much to its credit, the film neither judges their relationship nor overlooks its problems. Both Maximo's family and Victor's precinct mates know something's going on, and they're doubly ostracized because Maximo's father and brothers are small-time criminals at odds with the new precinct captain. The movie makes obvious allusions to Romeo and Juliet and plays on the sort of melodramas that Maximo and his friends act out in an early interlude, but at its core it's a subtle and sophisticated film.

Shooting digital video in a real Manila barrio and using a lot of what looks like documentary footage, director Auraeus Solito has created a work that looks as if it rose up from the gritty streets by itself. Some of the night scenes are awash in digital noise from the attempt to shoot in very low light, but that usually accentuates the naturalistic visual style. The two lead performances are excellent, though no one else is spectacular. Blossoming's very flaws make it more vibrant, while its treatment of the potentially overwrought subject matter ultimately is subdued and mature. "Gay movies" with larger budgets and bigger names would benefit from its intelligence and emotional truth.

Quick take: The Good Shepherd

Last year's Matt Damon spy movie, The Good Shepherd, has one big thing in common with the one currently in theaters, The Bourne Ultimatum. They're both about the personal costs of doing the dirty work for one's country. But where Bourne tallies up that cost in graphic detail, Shepherd accounts for it one word of dialog at a time. Make no mistake, this is a well-acted and mostly well-crafted film. It's also smart, parsing the ideals and grim necessities of mid-20th century American foreign affairs without the naivete of typical Hollywood movies. Shepherd is worth two hours and 48 minutes of your time if the Bourne movies and Breach left you wanting even more. But as you hit Play, keep in mind that it's not a thriller, it's an informer.

Review: The Bourne Ultimatum

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't the end of history; the Bourne trilogy is. The series of films based on Robert Ludlum's spy novels has defied the fundamental rule of sequels by soaring ever higher with each installment. The Bourne Ultimatum isn't just better than its fine predecessors, it's one of the best films of the decade.

Director Paul Greengrass, who also made the documentary-like 9/11 drama United 93, uses the spy-thriller form to explore our greatest anxieties about international affairs: arbitrary use of power, the ultimate effect of torture, means vs. ends in the war on terror. Like America in the fourth year of the Iraq war, Jason Bourne can't remember how he got into this. As he gets closer to the answer, The Bourne Ultimatum becomes just as much about the system that created him, and the movie goes all the way back to the 1960s and an historic political thriller to shed light on these issues.

At its foundation, Ultimatum is a masterpiece of muscular action cinema. Nearly every shot is handheld, the film stock is often grainy, cuts come at breakneck speed and the zooms are mind-blowing. Greengrass brings so much twitching energy to the film that this technique looks urgent, not like an affectation or a retro effect. The stylistic high points of Ultimatum are a long hand-to-hand fight with no dialog or music and an epic pursuit through the streets of Manhattan. Calling this breathtaking sequence of clips a car chase is like calling Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" a portrait painting.

Every character is all business in this joyless world. Matt Damon exudes exhaustion in his third and best outing as Bourne. David Strathairn is consummately unlikeable, but so grim that he never descends into villainhood. Joan Allen seems a little flat at first but soon recaptures the crackling energy of her performance in The Bourne Supremacy.

The movie's larger agenda is embedded throughout, but its most intriguing appearance is in an extended section in the middle that's set in Tangiers. In numerous ways, it's a clear reference to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers, which illustrated the outcome of heavy-handed tactics by French colonial forces trying to hold on to Algeria. The age of Abu Ghraib has seen its reflection in Algiers, and Ultimatum gives the mirror an extra turn by making an American its victimized hero.

This isn't a scolding liberal tract or even a lament, exactly. Even while making obvious statements about the current war and corruption, it does so in the language of dramatic characters and globe-trotting suspense, not ideology. For genre reasons, Ultimatum lacks the ambivalence of Pontecorvo's film, but it knows not to simply finger one suspect in today's state of affairs and leave it at that. As a result, it's a film of its time but also much more. Greengrass and company have created the work that may lay this period on the line for generations to come.

Quick takes: Sunshine, Zodiac

Sunshine: It boldly reaches for the gravity and spectacle of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and although the plot finally stumbles, Sunshine is worth seeing for its ambition alone. Fifty years from now, the sun is dying prematurely and a small crew is piloting a bomb into its center to rejuvenate it. They seem to half expect doom from the minute we meet them, holed up in a tiny craft protected from the burning rays by a huge shield that makes thundering noises as its tiles shift around. This is a space story for the age of global warming and shuttle accidents, more interested in survival than in aspirations. Danny Boyle's breathless direction, set to a great soundtrack, is the best special effect here. A strong ensemble cast and editing jolts by Chris Gill add to the experience. It's too bad writer Alex Garland gave up on the psychological drama among the crew and went for an easy, implausible ending. The first two-thirds of Sunshine is blistering hot.

Zodiac: David Fincher's story of the long hunt for the Zodiac, a 1970s serial killer, sweats the kinds of details that Sunshine avoids. The murders themselves, and even the murderer, are just the triggers that set the story in motion. Over nearly three hours, Zodiac tracks a reporter, a detective and a cartoonist as they track the mysterious killer who sent cryptic messages to local newspapers. When the killings stop and the protagonists keep sifting through clues year after year, it becomes clear they're after something more than justice. They get older and so does Northern California, which has rarely been captured with such perfect pitch. Starting in a leafy suburb in the summer of 1969 and ending decades later, Zodiac carries a strong undercurrent of innocence lost.

Review: Transformers

I will now irritate countless art-film fans by following up my single paragraph on Pan's Labyrinth with a full review of Transformers. Weeks later, even.

No, Transformers is not better than Pan's Labyrinth.

America did not invent the automobile or, depending on who you ask, the motion picture, but it introduced both to the mass market. While the age of American passenger cars that mean anything is long gone, the crowd-pleasing blockbuster is still defined overwhelmingly by work that takes place between the Golden State Freeway and the public-access-required beaches of Southern California's coast.

A case in point is Transformers, a film that astounds as much with its overly self-confident duration (144 minutes) and its obvious staggering cost as with its consistent humor and impeccable action craft. If you have to ask how much Transformers cost, your country's film industry can't afford it, and if you object that it's largely a product placement within a product placement, you don't get it. Transformers is a romp: a funny, preposterous, violent, and proudly idiotic film.

The atomically pure formula story throws suburban teenager Sam Witwicky (the Kevjumba-like Shia LaBeouf) into the middle of a battle between two factions of giant robots from an alien planet. One side likes humans and the other doesn't.

What triggers all this is Sam's purchase of his first car, the canonical bitchin' Camaro, a yellow 1970s example that along with the funk of a thousand bong hits harbors a strange emblem in the middle of the steering wheel. That's our clue that it's something a little, a little more, in the immortal words of David Lee Roth.

The first part of Transformers is suffused with teen-angst imagery that owes a lot to the era of that Camaro, which promptly gets geeky Sam very close to the hottest chick in school. On a hillside overlooking LA at sunset, even.

Then the CGI begins, and what amazing CGI it is. The transformers are all cars to start with, some of them rusty and dented cars, and those worn car parts stay on the robots after their transformations. They're fast and remarkably seamless transformations, too. Plus, these CGI creatures appear in full color in broad daylight, unlike the slate-gray renderings we're used to seeing in CGI. The robot characters belong on Saturday-morning TV -- which is where they originated, after all -- but the filmmakers know it. Transformers doesn't take itself seriously. And it's refreshing to see a sci-fi actioner that has nothing to do with human social problems. This is just between the aliens.

Combine a cartoon plot and male fascination with military might, however, and some lines are bound to be crossed. The film starts with the U.S. military fighting off the evil robots when they first land, which happens to be in the Middle East. Transformers not only glorifies violence and largely disregards its impact on the native population, it also has little time for the victims of battle among the military's own ranks. Taking it that one step beyond the typical dumb bravado of American war movies, in a time of war no less, is unconscionable.

That's an unfortunate blemish on a movie that for the most part is a pleasure to watch, thanks in part to its cast, including the likable LaBeouf, Rachael Taylor and Anthony Anderson as dueling computer geeks, and the stern Michael O'Neill, who gets to flesh out his recurring role as an all-business Secret Service officer on "The West Wing."

It's pure American blockbuster fare that with cliches and shorthands avoids the talk and emoting that bogged down Spider-Man 3 and Superman Returns. But there are interesting touches, too: For part of the film, the robots are battling over an antique pair of glasses, creating a clever juxtaposition of fragility and heft. And there are numerous nods to Asian action traditions, including Godzilla-like city-smashing and a Chow-Yun Fat gunplay move. Early in the movie, Sam says the robots must have come from Japan, a comment simultaneously on the monster-movie tradition, the robots' samurai-like appearance and America's insecurity about its industrial prowess as Toyota overtakes GM as the world's biggest automaker. Yet in an age of national anxiety, at its best Transformers reminds us what America still does best.

Quick takes

Since returning from our cross-country trip, I've been busy with a church video project and a number of other things. But I haven't been neglecting movies, just putting off writing about them. Before I forget all about the recent ones, here are some quick impressions:

Pan's Labyrinth: Much more than a typical fairy tale. The fantasy characters are deliciously flawed and complicated, and the movie doesn't just hint at the grim realities our dreamer needs to escape, it shows them in gruesome detail. The parallels between dream and real life are brilliant.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Maybe some earlier film I don't know about had a big influence on George Roy Hill, but this 1969 megahit looks like the very blueprint of early Seventies style. Backlighting and halo effects, anyone? Ankle-length Victorian dresses? Robert Redford's wavy locks? I could almost taste the gorp. But the movie's aged about as well as peanuts, raisins, corn nuts, and M&M's in a Kelty backpack on a hot day. The idea of Western outlaws as charming free-love nonconformists on a lark is the epitome of Baby Boomer narcissism. Butch and Sundance's sudden moment of remorse over killing a bunch of innocent Bolivians is such an obvious Vietnam reference that it just makes this macrame trifle unravel that much faster. Gimme shelter.

Ocean's 12: Now here's a movie that knows it's meringue. It's the glitzy European heist flick as all glitz and no heist. The popcorn pandering reaches delirious heights at the movie's self-referential climax. But director Steven Soderbergh's visuals are anything but dumb, with endlessly inventive angles including a twist on the jumbo-jet-landing shot that's so bizarre I can't even reconstruct it in my mind.

Review: Mahoga...

A big gripe of Asian-American media activists like my friend Angry Asian Man is that almost every Asian character in an American movie or TV show is there for an "Asian reason." They can never just Be There. Anthony Perkins had the same problem. Last night we were watching the DVD of the 1975 Diana Ross vehicle Mahogany and saw him playing a fashion photographer. That's great, I thought: Not a bad-looking guy, definitely has some acting chops, breaking out of that Psycho thing. But then his character got more and more creepy, and finally he pulled a From Russia With Love-style gun on Billy Dee Williams. So it turned out he was there for an "Anthony Perkins reason" after all. So disappointing. Anyway, I can't tell you what he did with the gun because at that point we just went to bed. As Seventies as Mahogany is -- and I love the Seventies -- and as great as Ross looks in David Watkin's gorgeous cinematography, we couldn't take any more of the ridiculous plot. I think they just made it up as they went along. Run, don't walk, to see Lady Sings the Blues instead.

Review: Olympia (Part One)

Leni Riefenstahl's International Olympic Committee documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games, Olympia, stands out in several respects. The games were used as a showcase for a murderous regime, the filmmaker was associated with that regime to a degree, and the film's blurring of fact and thematic montage is distinctive. But it's also a timeless lesson in documentary filmmaking.

Part One of the film, which I saw last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is first of all a marvel of concision. It covers several track and field events in less than two hours, minus a long thematic introduction. And though there is a dated, by-Jove British narration in the English-language cut of the movie, the story comes through mostly in the extraordinary shooting and editing. We see the facial expressions of the athletes and audience, frequently in close-up. The action sequences show the athletes from preparation to follow-through, sometimes focusing in on a stance or a movement, showing rather than telling how the sport is played. Most amazing is the variety and quality of the footage. As each competitor performs and as races go through several heats, there's a different angle seemingly every time. One heat of a sprint is shot from behind and above so we can see both the start and the finish in a single shot. The next heat starts with a wide-angle shot from the ground, just on the inside of the track. This variety, along with judicious use of slow motion at various speeds, gives a heightened sense of drama to an already dramatic event. Even making allowances for out-of-sequence edits of action and audience reaction, and what must have been a large crew with small handheld cameras, the craft is amazing.

And that's saying nothing of the movie's sheer beauty. I stopped following the competition after a while just to take in the images. The incredibly long cross-dissolves of Greek ruins and statuary at the beginning are gorgeous, and the closing sequence of the Olympic flag superimposed on the stadium is breathtaking. There's something about the way she shoots the stadium from a distance, centers it, and isolates it that simultaneously exalts the event and makes it seem part of something even larger. As creepy as that sounds, I wasn't even thinking about meanings at that point. (The shots of Hitler are surprisingly candid but straightforward, making one's skin crawl even more.)

But it's the pole-vaulting that's most amazing. It starts in daylight and ends at night, and the coal blackness behind makes the brightly lit action more dramatic. The scene starts to look very intimate as the background disappears. Athletes waiting their turn watch together on the grass nearby. One image sticks in my mind: Two male athletes sitting on the field, sharing a blanket to keep warm as their eyes follow a vaulter going over. It's delightfully and chastely homoerotic. (Homoerotic images of women far outnumber those of men, here. Intentionally or not, Olympia must be a lesbian landmark of some kind.) The shot of the waiting pole vaulters is just a cutaway, but I see reflections of its style all over the fashion photography of the last 30 years. In addition to making Nazi propaganda in Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl may have invented Abercrombie. But Olympia, Part One is a great film and, I believe, one that uplifts humanity.

Review: Spider-Man 3

Spider-Man 3 is the perfect blockbuster for the YouTube era. Its highlights are brief, light set pieces that could almost stand alone. Then we're back to the main story, too serious for a comic book and lumbering on toward a too-late ending. The special effects are excellent, but more so than the earlier installments, Spider-Man 3 lacks the effect it needs to captivate us: a strong performance by Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. His boyish quality served him well in 2002's Spider-Man, but his character has outgrown him. Maguire has no chemistry with Kirsten Dunst, who plays girlfriend Mary Jane. The filmmakers shove easily made points down our throats and Parker learns the usual hoary Lessons. What works are lighter scenes, such as Mary Jane and James Franco's Harry Osborn cooking to the oldies and publisher J. Jonah Jameson (the hilarious J.K. Simmons) struggling with stress management. They almost make this well-meaning movie well.

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.

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.