The Wily Filipino

A Musical Exercise: 5 from the '50s.

Arranged by year of release, here are my five favorite songs from the '50s. (See also the rationale behind all of this.)

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1. Nat King Cole, "Red Sails in the Sunset"
1955

There are two distinct periods to Nat King Cole's long body of work: first, the pianist leading his swinging jazz trio; second, the "Unforgettable" crooner bringing his music to a bigger (and whiter) audience. My dad loved the latter Cole, his uncomplicated, unruffled songs now overlaid with strings and the most syrupy backing choral arrangements this side of, I don't know, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (Listen to his renditions of "Ramblin' Rose" and "The Yellow Rose of Texas", for instance; they're irredeemably terrible.)

This was unfortunate, and I did not, in fact, find out that Cole actually played piano until the early '90s! It was, however, the Nat King Cole I grew up with: the Cole of "Smile" and "L-O-V-E" (though the fantastic "A Blossom Fell" is from this era too); the Cole played over and over on the stereo and later, once technology permitted, on long road trips; the Cole whose enunciation was held up by my father as a paragon of good singing, "unlike the music you listen to -- is he even saying anything?" he'd address me. (I might have been particularly obsessed with New Order's mumbly "Ceremony" at that point.)

And so "Red Sails in the Sunset" is from the wrong Cole period, but it's lovely nonetheless, and included here for all the right reasons: my dad sang me to sleep with this song, and I sing my daughter to sleep with it as well.

Amazon link for the compilation Unforgettable.

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2. Frank Sinatra, "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning"
from the 1955 album In the Wee Small Hours

The song is cinematically, melodramatically, solitary from the get-go: the ironic lullaby-like notes in the beginning, with the strings gently nudging the weary Sinatra into an effortless recitation of his loss. The languidness of the song's arrangement, and the odd, redundant juxtaposition of "wee" and "small" (but what the first few words do is shape the singer's mouth not into a caress, but into a kind of tired, slackjawed mourning, i.e., no plosives or fricatives), are in perfect consonance with the resigned melancholy of the lyrics. But the almost somnolent haze of the song belies what's most important: he is wide awake, he does not want to go to sleep, and he is waiting for a call which he knows will never arrive. And he is all alone.

Amazon link.

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3. Billie Holiday, "I Thought About You"
from the 1956 album Lady Sings The Blues

For me it's all about that purring lilt in her voice at the end of the line when she sings "The one going back to you." Sometimes, though, what does it for me is the couplet that goes

And every stop that we made
oh, I thought about you

The "we" of course refers to her and the train's passengers, but I like thinking she's with someone else.

Amazon link.

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4. Link Wray, "Rumble"
1958

I mean, listen to it! It even sounds filthy and dangerous and about to stab you with a dirty knife.

Amazon link for the compilation Rumble! The Best of Link Wray.

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5. The Teddy Bears, "To Know Him Is To Love Him"
1958

Phil Spector was all of seventeen years old when he wrote this simple, straightforward philosophical equation of "to know" and "to love" (he also arranged it, and sang in the background), and it's already a fully-formed marvel of adolescent longing from afar. (Though it's really a tribute -- like Bread's "Everything I Own" -- to Spector's late father.)

But we don't find out about the "from afar" part until we hear the second stanza, and we move from the present tense to the future conditional, and the bridge, when Annette Kleinbard finally lets loose, only accentuates the despair: "Why can't he see me?" This three-part structure is mirrored as well in that fantastic opening line, progressing from "know know know" to "love love love" and finally to -- what else, in 1958? -- "and I do and I do and I do."

Amazon link for Phil Spector's box set Back to Mono.

A Musical Exercise.

I wish I understood music better. That lack of vocabulary or technical background feels like it renders senseless my faux-critic writing for this blog: I can't tell a middle fifth from a particular piano chord, but I know when a guitar solo kicks ass. But I can't tell you exactly what makes the music good. It's easier on my part to chart the emotional trajectories of the music, to map out the avenues of sentiment, to write, if paradoxically, about the ineffable. I suppose it's an oblique testimony to what's best about popular music: its ability to better articulate words that can't be said. (Which is why pop music is also responsible for the phenomenon of the crappy mixtape.)

But maybe the inarticulable reveals itself in other perhaps less welcome ways as well. There are parts of my waking and walking life where half-remembered lines, fragments of lyrics, as if I were guided by voices, burrow through my head in a series of non sequiturs. And I did not think the girl could be so cruel. But how strange the change from major to minor. The arc of a love affair, rainbows in the high desert air. I'm on the lawn with someone else's wife. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to. And your telephone's been ringing while you're dancing in the rain. Provided of course you're not dumb enough to actually try it.

Surely this aural affliction isn't just a result of my music geekery, a reminder that I don't consume music; it's the other way around. Being haunted by music is a wonderful thing.

And so, a musical exercise, or is it exorcism: pick an increasing number of favorite pop songs from each decade, maybe to nail down something definitive though inevitably mutable, as if a recitation would dispel these musical ghosts, an attempt to render into digital bits the swirl of words in the ether, or to intellectually justify making a list I would have made anyway. I've done different versions of this before, but this time it's even more restrictive: 5 from the '50s, 6 from the '60s, 7 from the '70s, and so on, with the net of choices widening in proportion to my familiarity with those years. (Granted, I could have picked from the '30s and '40s as well, but I just don't have that many songs. The lyrics cited above -- bonus points if you recognize them without googling! -- don't correspond with my choices either.)

There is no logic to the choices, really -- it's all emotion, with no consideration for historical significance or any of the criteria that musicologists deem important -- except that the songs show that I am clearly one big fucking sap. It's funny how most of these songs are somehow about longing -- I suppose it's what my research is about, in some ways -- but good lord, I'm clearly throwing out any ounce of indie cred I ever had with these selections. (I'd love to be able to boast that I was listening to the Dead Kennedys or the Minutemen or something when I was in high school, but no -- that's the Philippines for you. But true fact: I was the only one listening to Talking Heads in the entire school.)

While this is an essentially nostalgic endeavor, I still think about old friends who unplugged themselves from the radio after graduation, who never moved on musically, people who slipped quietly into a musical lassitude and pronounce, over their drinks, that they don't write 'em like they used to. But of course they do. Either that or they succumb to the sanitized, cheap embrace of Adult Contemporary. May I be struck down by lightning if this ever happens. But here I am, tempting lightning bolts to rain down on my head anyway.

(The first post in this 5-part series appears next week, and the rest -- who knows.)

Boris / Damon & Naomi, The Independent, SF, 10/14/2007.

Last Sunday night's show at the Independent was as pedigreed a concert as could be assembled on one stage in one evening: two-thirds of Galaxie 500 (one of my favorite bands ever), one-fifth of Ghost (yet another), one-sixth of Espers, one-half of nmperign, and all three of the mighty Boris. The "linchpin" for the concert, as Damon Krukowski put it, was none other than Michio Kurihara from Ghost, who was essentially playing that night for a couple of hours with both Damon and Naomi and Boris.

I can't say I envied Damon and Naomi opening for such a legendarily loud band like Boris. (The announcer at the Independent actually warned the audience to get earplugs -- the first time in three years, said the coat-check woman.) Their frail bedroom music didn't seem particularly matched for an audience mostly clad in black and in Pig Destroyer and Converge T-shirts. (I myself was wearing a Swans T-shirt.) But soldier on they did, augmented by folks including Kurihara on guitar, Bhob Rainey on sax, and Helena Espvall on cello; "We're the silent part of the Silent Thunder tour, if only to make Boris sound even louder," Krukowski told the crowd.

Things don't really get rolling until two guitar-related moments: first, when Kurihara launches into a beautifully Allmanesque guitar solo on the second song. And the second, when Naomi Yang leaves the keyboard and finally picks up her Gibson bass. (I'm not a guitar person at all, but Yang's bass lines are as immediately recognizable to me as, say, Peter Hook's.) Excellent set all in all, but slightly marred by all the folks talking in the back. (I haven't heard the latest album yet -- it's on top of my shopping list -- but one great song sounded vaguely familiar from their set list: a Sandy Denny / Shirley Collins / Pentangle cover, maybe?)

I didn't expect Boris's drummer Atsuo to do a stage-dive right on top of my head, but such are the wages of standing front and center. At least I wasn't directly inhaling all the liquid nitrogen from the smoke machines (note to the Independent folks: aim them up like you did at the SUNN O)))) concert!). But it was the perfect place to witness how all those slabs of drone / doom metal / hard rock were produced: Kurihara freaking out with his guitar during the encore, Atsuo yelling in delight, Wata very calmly playing furious solos on a guitar that (and I know this sounds patronizing) looked heavier and longer than herself. Too bad Takeshi was having problems with his guitar at the beginning of the set, but otherwise an excellent evening.

The Wily Filipino's Greatest Hits.

Taking a cue from my brother Benito Vergara (not to be confused with the even-cooler Benito Vergara, here's The Wily Filipino's Greatest Hits (i.e., most read and linked-to articles), for folks new to this blog:

On Eating Balut.

Eating, Shopping and Laughing. Oh, and Massages.

Some Random Thoughts on Adobo.

Agapito Flores.

Kahulugan nang Kakonyohan.

My Cousin, the Pornographer.

My Friend R.

Modern Girls and Modern Rock & Roll.

It's Lack of Circumspection time at The Wily Filipino again! A few years ago I decided to give online dating a try -- which I had never done before -- and so one night put some thought into writing a description for myself (what I was like, my interests, who I was looking for, and so on). And I thought I'd toss in, as a tidbit (but probably also as an unnecessary "test" of sorts), the fact that I was still in shock that my favorite band, Guided by Voices, was breaking up.

So I wrote this all up -- these things take forever to write, by the way* -- and decided to send a copy to my good friend Jane so she could vet it -- and the following frustrating (paraphrased) IM conversation ensued:

me: what did you think?

jane: i think it looks good. except...

me: what?

jane: i think you should remove the guided by voices reference

me [genuinely shocked]: what? why?

jane: they're a real guy band

me: of course they're not

jane: no really

me: they happen to be all guys, but still

jane: you need to find someone more neutral, something women would like

me: but i already namedrop bjork!

jane: see, i'm having second thoughts about including her as well

me: why?

jane: you have no idea how many women hate bjork

me: but it's meant as a general reference to the kind of music i like. besides i really love gbv

jane: potential dates might think you broke up with your wife because you were more into male-bonding**

me: are you serious???

jane: think of someone more neutral

me: i already namedrop "In the Mood for Love!" who should i include, avril lavigne??

jane: not if you don't really like her

me [desperately thinking of my other favorite band]: how about yo la tengo?

jane: that's better. at least they have georgia hubley

me: but what's so wrong about gbv?

jane: potential dates don't like bands that throw beer bottles at the audience

me: they *hand* beer bottles to audience members. that's different!

jane: it's like telling someone on the first date that you're into heavy metal

me: but gbv isn't even close to heavy metal!

jane: but you see what i mean

me: no i don't

jane: you don't want to turn them off before they even meet you

me [getting really irate now]: gbv won't do that!

Suffice it to say that I quickly abandoned that entire avenue of possibility before it even began -- not because I refused to back down on the universal appeal of Guided by Voices, but because the whole online dating thing seemed kind of futile anyway. But not before accidentally coming across a couple of Filipino American academics' profiles whose names I will not divulge. (They were several pages deep anyway, and therefore far beyond any spheres of compatibility.)

However, this made me wonder about all this inordinate interest in music on my part. I mean, it's not as if a date's horrible musical tastes were going to be a dealbreaker... or were they? Is musical compatibility really all that important in general? Would I turn down a hot date just because she was, say, a huge Celine Dion fan? (Very likely, but I'm an idiot that way.***)

Last week a woman I'd never met or spoken to wrote me to say that my "cool taste in music alone would want me to date you." If that wasn't confirmation of, well, something, I don't know what is. (She was married though.)

But... maybe music in and of itself is important, period. About a couple of months ago my friends were regretting not bringing music to the Lake Tahoe cabin where we were on holiday -- not that there were any uncomfortable silences that needed to be filled or anything -- but, as one person put it, "One day we'll hear a song on the radio and it will remind us of this weekend. But unfortunately we don't have any songs to remember it by."

In this example the song seems more powerful a symbol than the referent, i.e., the experience of being in Tahoe, itself! None of us will be likely to forget the Tahoe experience any time soon -- I am still constantly harassed by my friends about my numerous half-drownings while kayaking and wearing a life vest in five feet of water -- but here, music is seen as crucial in creating memory itself.

Music not only serves as a memory-trigger, though. It's an illustration of the way in which music is imbued with the ability to structure and frame experience. (Clothing stores know this, therefore the pianist at Nordstrom's, the bouncy catwalk music at the Gap.) Music charges and changes a room; it creates atmosphere; it generates moods; it summons up memories; it elicits emotions -- all in ways perhaps more efficient, immediate, and sometimes even more indelible than our other senses do. It functions as an aesthetic overlay mapped onto our collective experience. Life in general may simply go better with a soundtrack. Maybe other people do too.

Still, this recognition of the aesthetic importance of music in the everyday didn't explain my unreasonable intertwining of the romantic and the aural. (As if She would walk into a room accompanied by, say, Luna's "I Want Everything." Or Built To Spill's "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.") In any case, an answer came to me, in the way that all good answers arrive, i.e., serendipitously.

A few weeks ago I was holding Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" in one hand and weighing whether I should get rid of it or not. (In this case it was literal weighing; the book is the size of a small metropolitan area's White Pages, and takes up almost as much space.) And suddenly, there it was -- who would have known that a dead French sociologist would know exactly what I was talking about, and write about it in such cruelly hilarious detail?

Taste is a match-maker; it marries colours and also people, who make 'well-matched couples', initially in regard to taste... Hence the astonishing harmony of ordinary couples who, often matched initially, progressively match each other by a sort of mutual acculturation. This spontaneous decoding of one habitus by another is the basis of the immediate affinities which orient social encounters, discouraging socially discordant relationships, encouraging well-matched relationships, without these operations ever having to be formulated other than in the socially innocent language of likes and dislikes. The extreme improbability of the particular encounter between particular people, which masks the probability of interchangeable chance events, induces couples to experience their mutual election as a happy accident, a coincidence which mimics transcendent design ('made for each other') and intensifies the sense of the miraculous.

Those whom we find to our taste put into their practices a taste which does not differ from the taste we put into operation in perceiving their practices. Two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the taste they have for each other.

But still I wasn't convinced. Understanding the social mechanics didn't answer my most pressing questions.

I mean, what if she prefers late R.E.M. to early R.E.M.? What if she drags me to a Josh Groban concert? Or, god forbid, what if she doesn't like the mix CDs I make for her? And, if I were somehow extremely blessed, would she have Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand on her shelf?

*My "About Me" entry on Facebook, just to give you an example, ended up reading: "Must see! Charming, spacious and immaculate. Newly remodeled, granite counter top, utilities included, walk-in closet, views of the Bay. Great location, close to restaurants, MUNI, Safeway, 280 and 101, etc."

**Absolutely not true. But I did check her out and her music collection, and upon seeing Everything But The Girl and Rickie Lee Jones, I knew we'd be cool together. (Needless to say there were more things that attracted me to her than just the CDs, but you know what I mean.)

***Read: obviously *I'm* the one who's being difficult here, and I'm probably shooting myself in the foot because mendicancy doesn't leave people with many options, after all. Yeah, like I have to shoo women away with a stick. And as if all this music-geekery on display wasn't already Danger Signal #1.

The September 2007 Mix.

Only four songs this month (and about ten days late too), but rest assured they're of very high quality.

It would have been five, actually -- the fifth would have been the excellent "Long Summer Day" by Two Gallants, but it threatened to turn into this big disquisition on its lyrics, race, Quentin Tarantino, the "N-word", and one of the funniest scenes in Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical (one of my favorite films this year), and I couldn't hook it all together coherently enough, so I dropped it.

Also, I'm removing the files off box.net once the entry drops off the first page on the blog. They won't be here forever, folks!

1. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Underwater (You and Me)"
from the 2007 album Some Loud Thunder

Some songs see us sailing away
Navigating foreign borders, and climbing the waves
Someday your secret will be revealed
Either one you're thinking of when the sun goes down into the water

We're struck by the still of the moon
Hanging up there in the sky as though a balloon
Anchored by an astronaut's patriot tune
We will buy the ship and fly to the land that would be rediscovered

We'll design a clever disguise
We'll retreat to the bottom of the sea
We were destined to live out our lives underwater, you and me

We'll escape beneath the violet sky
Clouds come and night falls
You seem different on my mind
Upon an endless trail of moonlight
You'll never realize that we have gone, we have gone right out of, out of sight

We'll design a clever disguise
We'll retreat to the bottom of the sea
We were destined to live out our lives underwater, you and me

Fact: Alec Ounsworth is a terrible singer on record and an even worse one live. My friend Eloise and I saw them play live at the Treasure Island Music Festival (along with the aforementioned Two Gallants, a lackluster Au Revoir Simone (but I knew that coming in), a very cool M. Ward, an always-reliable Built to Spill, a very good Spoon, and Modest Mouse, whom we skipped. My humble pictures taken from the center here, by the way; scroll down to the 20 pictures at the bottom).

Our response, unfortunately, wasn't clapping our hands or saying "yeah"; it was more of looking at each other with puzzlement. (Though the lone, barely-sentient Filipino guy who just happened to be standing next to us made the concert way, way better with his generosity, for which I traded a couple of oatmeal cookies. The woman behind us commented that this was "the greatest thing I'd ever seen," referring to our exchange. "This restores my faith in humanity," she said. Eloise was happy too.)

The best thing about the concert was the excellent title track ("Some Loud Thunder"), which we hear in the shittiest mix imaginable on the record, but was now more intelligible through the wall of speakers. Unfortunately they didn't play "Underwater (You and Me)", which does restore my faith in indie rock, at least. There's nothing quite like a good Running Away Song -- like Born to Run is full of nothing but Running Away Songs -- and "Underwater (You and Me)" is a perfect example. If this ever came out as a single, Michel Gondry would do a great job directing the video.

Live version on YouTube.
Amazon link.
Official website.

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2. Monday Michiru, "Slo"
from the 2003 album Moods

I've said it a couple times before, and I'll say it again: Monday Michiru should be a massive, worldwide star. An already-glorious career as an acid-jazz diva, a hugely appealing lyricist, a bold and ambitious plunge into straight-up jazz, a genuine musical pedigree, a remarkably supple and sophisticated voice (not to mention the fact that she's drop-dead gorgeous) -- what's wrong with you people?

Amazon link.
Official website.

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3. Maria Taylor, "A Good Start"
from the 2007 album Lynn Teeter Flower

You're one with the burden of intuition.
You're one with the freedom of a blank stare.
You're one with the best friend you lost,
You wish was still there.

You're one with the dust on that old piano.
You're one with the strings on your new guitar.
You're one with the wind through the open window,
You are.

It was a faint line that brought you here,
And a pulse that kept you in time.
It was the comfort of a tradition,
Like the few that were not that kind.

It's a shame now, baby, you can't see yourself
And everything you're running from.
And it's the same world, honey, that has brought you down,
As the one that's gonna pick you up.
And pick you up.

You're one with the echoes of conversation.
You're one with the strangers you overheard.
You're one with the lesson that was the best one you learned.

It was a faint line that brought you here,
And a pulse that kept you in time.
It was the comfort of a tradition,
Like the few that were not that kind.

It's a shame now, baby, you can't see yourself
And everything you're running from.
And it's the same world, honey, that has brought you down,
As the one that's gonna pick you up.
And pick you up.

It was a cold, dark, sleepy morning walk.
You fell down facing up.
It was a good start.
It was a good start.

It was a cold, dark, sleepy morning walk.
You fell down facing up.
It was a good start.
It was a good start.

It's a shame now, baby, you can't see yourself
And everything you're running from.
And it's the same world, honey, that has brought you down,
As the one that's gonna pick you up.
And pick you up.

And it's a shame now, baby, you can't separate
Yourself from where you stood.
And it's the same world, honey, that made you feel so bad,
That makes you feel so good.
Feel so good.

I'm a not-so-secret admirer of indie female singer-songwriters (whatever that means), and this song goes straight to that indie-female-singer-songwriter-admiring part of my brain.

Video on YouTube.
Amazon link.
Official website.

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4. Kanye West, "Barry Bonds (feat. Lil Wayne)"
from the 2007 album Graduation

And finally, the best song, hands down, from my favorite album of the month and certainly one of the best albums of the year. "Only I could come up with some shit like this." Indeed. (But why Lil Wayne -- in a fantastic, even more gravelly-voiced than usual, guest appearance here, still feels compelled to stupidly say "no homo" in such enlightened times is a mystery.)

Why I love this song: lots of reasons -- "bow so hard till your knees hit your forehead," the way the instruments all tumble together slowly at the beginning, "ice in my teeth so refrigerated," the constant stop-start rhythm, but when it comes down to it -- it's all about the throat-clearing.

Amazon link.
Official website.

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Why Yelp Sucks (Sometimes).

So is it just me, or is Yelp one of the most casually racist websites on the net? (There are, of course, bloggers who make spewing hate rants part of their business; the old Yahoo forums, now closed down probably for the same reason, were way worse than Yelp.) But Yelp seems far more insidious to me because all the slurs are done under the guise of reviews; what's more, they're perpetrated by young people who clearly think this is all funny and cool and hip and vote for similar entries.

I don't think you'd find any other major "review" site -- not Epinions, not Amazon, and certainly not Zagat's -- that would include references to (and this is just a random sampling) Vietnamese gangsters, rat meat, Filipino thugs, cat meat, greasy Mexican busboys, dog meat, the size of Japanese penises, Russian mafia, a waitress's poor English, and diarrhea. Granted, the insults are fairly equal-opportunity -- wait staff and clientele are mercilessly portrayed just a shade below slander -- and I understand that Yelp is supposed to be irreverent and all, but this is ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong: Yelp's a great reference for maps and addresses and price ranges and so on. And the reader familiar with Yelp knows that it's not all like this, of course, and that I'm focusing only on the bad stuff; there are a lot of sophisticated reviews written by people who are obvious foodies and actually know what good food is like, as opposed to what is merely cheap and decent. (The dive bar reviews are also hilarious.) But still.

Probably the worst impulse that Yelp panders to is the delight in trashing a particular place. The wittier the insults are, the higher the ratings, and thus Yelp tends to inflate the value of writers who can trash-talk the most lyrically. Yelp provides a user-friendly venue as well for some of the most egregiously ethnocentric opinions that many of my friends and students wouldn't dare say in public. The writer can then walk away, safe in the knowledge that she or he is now a Reviewer. (I am by no means innocent of this, of course -- I make criticisms from the safety of my blog, just because I can, even without any requisite expertise -- but I'd like to think I'm a little more responsible.)

It's significant, I think, that a common theme to the restaurant reviews is the writer's shock in the face of unfamiliar cuisine. And "unfamiliar" here tends to be anything that can't be found inside a suburban American mall. How one could be rewarded for such willful ignorance -- especially in a city like San Francisco! -- is beyond me.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #6.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate (2007)

I'm a little puzzled about Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff. A much-anticipated viewing at Barb and Oscar's left me cold, and I wonder if it's a reflection of the high expectations that always attend Films That Are Supposed To Be Good For You. (Jean Vigo's L'Atalante was one of those, but I should probably watch it a second time.) Or perhaps it's one of those films that make more sense after an accretion of various elements (life experience, "wisdom", a more expanded filmic vocabulary), like L'Avventura, but I'm not sure about that either. It makes me wonder, then, about the film's critical reception in the West upon its initial release, and whether its entry into the Canon had extra-cinematic reasons beyond my ken, but who am I to question this, really?

I recall reading a list compiled by Errol Morris in some magazine recently where he rather fatuously proclaims something to the effect that there were no such things as great movies, only great scenes. (The Thin Blue Line was a great movie however.) There are certainly a number of great scenes: the parallel crane shots that show the siblings gathering wood, the painful finale on a seaweed-strewn beach. (Foremost in my mind, though, is the scene when the indentured daughter, Anju, violently separated from her mother years before, hears a newly-arrived slave singing a song about Anju and her brother -- singing her life with her words, essentially -- and realizing it must have been learned from her long-missing mother, mourning for her children over the miles and years.) But I'm not convinced that Sansho the Bailiff is a great movie.

I think Mizoguchi's much-vaunted "feminism" is perhaps lost in translation here, especially due to the passage of time. There may, of course, be something completely deliberate here on Mizoguchi's part. The men in the film, when they're not being malicious (and the titular character himself is only a slightly bigger honcho than others, but not by much), are merely ineffectual. The brother is shown to be capable of abusing his power once he starts working for Sansho, but then foolishly squanders that power when it comes to his family. The bailiff's son is depicted as clearly possessing a sense of righteousness, and Mizoguchi sets him up as a potential savior and hero -- only to have him literally walk out of the film. The governor (and father of Anju) is exiled precisely because he has shown too much compassion for the peasants of his prefecture -- but chooses, even as he upholds his principles, to abandon his wife and children. Unlike the more stately Life of Oharu, where the dignified courtesan of the title faces her suffering with something that could even be called "empowerment", the women characters of Sansho the Bailiff are grimly handed over to abuse and suicide. Perhaps Mizoguchi's films should be called "female-centered" instead -- centered, anyway, on the fates of women and the cruelty they receive at the hands of men.

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About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley's Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren't all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a "French independent movie budget". I'm sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas' film -- the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant's kitchen -- and, most important, "a woman in trouble", as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas' fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there's a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there's something larger at stake. There isn't. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it's not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, "Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!")

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento's character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise.* (It's even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I'M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

*Actually I take "humorless" back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn't recognize Kim Gordon, or didn't know who she was -- oh well.