The Wily Filipino

Entries on Wayne Wang.

I have two entries on the director Wayne Wang on my American Pop blog. One is called The Saga of Wayne Wang and will probably inaugurate a whole series of reviews (if not a full-on retrospective) of his work to date on my movie blog. The second is an interview with Wang himself, called Insider / Outsider: An Interview with Wayne Wang.

And on film, eyeballs, brain, I have reviews of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska.

New Blog!

I was playing with WordPress this morning and thought I'd repost my longer blog entries on movies into a new site. (The category page was getting too unwieldy to load anyhow.)

So: three entries will be uploaded a day until the old posts run out, which will probably be a month. I won't be editing any of them (regardless of how wrong they might sound to me now), just reposting them as I go.

It's interesting to see that, in the 11 years or so I've been blogging, my writing has actually changed -- for the better, I think. Whether it's an improvement in style (debatable), an acquisition of both writing and cinematic vocabularies, or a genuine attempt in taking the stuff more seriously, it's a reflection of an ongoing, immersive, giddy education in consuming movies. Or, perhaps more aptly, being consumed by them. I can't think of any other art form that has given me as much pleasure.

It should be clear that this cinematic "education" is not formal at all; when it comes to movies I'm a total amateur -- and yes, in the older sense of the word too. (And I should add that despite the mention of Tarkovsky and Kubrick -- and that screen capture from Last Year in Marienbad, which will change from time to time -- I'll still be mostly writing about flicks you can find at your local multiplex.)

The name of the WordPress blog -- Film, Eyeballs, Brain -- partly comes from an essay in The New Yorker by Jonathan Lethem called "The Beards". An excerpt from the piece is reproduced in a sidebar, and it should be self-explanatory. (However, I've actually taken it a bit out of context. It may be best not to reproduce the succeeding paragraphs as they're probably a little too revealing -- not of Lethem, but of myself. You can find it in anthologized in Lethem's essay collection The Disappointment Artist, but he rewrote the passage I quote.)

Please add me to your feedreader, link to me on your blogroll, tell friends, and most of all: please leave comments! (And please don't tell me that the url looks like it's four separate words ("Film, Eye, Balls, Brain") -- I know that already.

From the Wiretaps.

A sampling of topics from my e-mail and IM conversations of the last seven days:

- the Joker as the Übermensch

- Gotham = Baghdad

- "Is Batman a Jack Bauer-like Republican vigilante figure, who takes the hatred of the world upon himself to do the necessary work of getting rid of terrorism, or a slightly-more-liberal figure who represents the moral gray zones surrounding every good action?" [quoting my friend Eleanor here without permission]

- "I was just watching Les Miserables... here was the symptom of postmodernity if there ever was one -- a musical phenomenon that hit the world globally as the... faith in revolution declined. Now that there ain't large metanarratives, all we're left with is Harvey Dent..." [quoting my friend Kiko here, also without permission]

- Alfred as servant and father figure

- the burning of currency and postmodern chaos

- Bruce Wayne is to Harvey Dent what the Batman is to the Joker -- or a different configuration altogether?

- Does power still lie in the hands of "the people" (including, paradoxically, the incarcerated), and do they ultimately correct the extralegal excesses of the state?

- The Dark Knight, the new iPhone, queues, obsessive consumer mentality, and the demise of national ritual, secular and otherwise

- IMAX and the aesthetics of scale

- Christopher Nolan quoting Michael Caine in Entertainment Weekly: "Superman is the way America sees itself, but Batman is the way the world sees America."

- and Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero"

I haven't responded yet to Gladys' comments, on female identification and Wanted -- it's over at my American Pop entry -- but more food for thought: according to EW, 48 percent of the audience at The Dark Knight were women. (I can hear your answer already, though: "Christian Bale, duh.")

Two Movies That Actually Have Something To Do With Each Other: Hellboy 2 / The Dark Knight.

Almost five hours of movies (Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight) and four hours of sleep later, I find that I can barely string together a coherent review. (This is also a break from my usual Two Movies That Have Nothing To Do With Each Other series, because they're pretty similar.) I'll leave the real reviews up to Barb, who (we're such nerds) just posted hers within minutes of my posting this [WARNING: SPOILERS in her entry!] and Oscar, so here are some random notes instead. I tried keeping this under 1000 words, but no dice:

1. As great as Hellboy 2 was, The Dark Knight blows the 2008 summer movie lineup out of the water. Easily one of the best films I've seen this year. I missed seeing Iron Man and Hancock, and sure, that X-Files movie won't be out for another week or so, but The Dark Knight was simply fantastic. Leave work early, find babysitters, cancel unnecessary meetings, even promise to see Mamma Mia or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 as a trade -- just go.

2. The guy at Jack London Square Cinemas told me last night that 600 people were coming to the midnight show. People were lined up before 10 pm, so strategize!

3. Selma Selma Selma, lovely as ever. (My friend Jane once said, "Selma Blair?? Ugh! She looks like some Comp Lit major from Radcliffe!", or words to that effect, to which I answered, "Exactly.")

4. What The Dark Knight "lacks" in terms of visual variety -- it's practically a uniform palette of washed-out blue and gunmetal -- Hellboy 2 delivers in spades. The surreality of Pan's Labyrinth (a film I didn't care for very much, actually) runs gloriously riot in Hellboy 2: carnivorous tooth fairies spilling out of the woodwork, caverns with enormous cog wheels, a truly frightening Angel of Death, and an entire bestiary seen only in bad dreams. (Thank goodness they're del Toro's and Mike Mignola's dreams, not mine.)

5. And three reasons to go early: previews for Quantum of Solace, Terminator: Survival (Christian Bale as John Connor!), and a third, shiver-inducing preview, which you may have heard about already, but here's a hint about what that movie is: "This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."

6. The Dark Knight wins the prize for best casting, a prize made sweeter by the fact that the infinitely cooler Maggie Gyllenhaal has replaced Mrs. Tom Cruise this time around. And it's great to see Eric Roberts, Keith Szarabajka, and Anthony Michael Hall on the big screen.

7. What left me somewhat cold in del Toro's film was that the stakes didn't seem terribly high -- not cinematically, but in terms of the film's narrative. Perhaps the most stunning sequence has to do with an Elemental, a cross between Alec Holland and Cthulhu (and at the conclusion of the scene, more reminiscent of those forest giants in Princess Mononoke) -- and then it's unexpectedly dropped. Mignola and del Toro hint at an epic backstory, in an opening storytelling scene right out of Pan's Labyrinth, but what happens between then and 2008 is tossed aside.

8. The Dark Knight is surprisingly violent (I was shocked to discover that it was only PG-13), and references film noir more directly than any of the previous Batman movies. In fact, it's probably best seen not as a "comic book film" -- del Toro's movie is closer in spirit to the comics -- but as an urban policier, complete with a whole series of crosses and double-crosses, of unmaskings and deceptions, and a suffocating sense of an irresoluble moral impasse.

9. And lots of explosions. God, the things they blow up in these two movies.

10. Heath Ledger's Joker isn't just some buffoonish criminal mastermind like Jack Nicholson's Joker; his Joker feels genuinely psychotic and unhinged, and he's not the sort of sadistic villain that easily inspires any identification from the audience. As Barb will probably point out, Heath Ledger doesn't exactly deliver an Oscar-worthy performance. It's too one-note, on the level of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, but it hints, sadly, at an untapped talent cut short. As Oscar will probably point out, the heavy lifting is performed here by Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent: unctuous, ambitious, charming, and blinded by rage in the course of the film.

11. I now have no doubt that The Hobbit will be fucking awesome.

12. Hellboy 2 was genuinely heartwarming, even if these feelings were mostly earned by an unexpectedly sweet use of a Barry Manilow song. (And yes, it's a love story too, though as written above, the choices made in Hellboy 2 are nowhere near as consequential as the decisions in The Dark Knight.) It also has more of the humor of Mignola's books, though it's a little more forced here.

13. There's no similar exhilaration in The Dark Knight as you walk out of the theater, simply because it's almost relentlessly bleak; you're sitting at the edge of your seat almost the entire time, for starters, and the cumulative effect of two hours and forty minutes of this leaves you feeling bruised.

14. Though there's a nighttime scene of Batman flying over Hong Kong which is just marvelous.

15. Finally: two new movies, set in Manhattan, set in two major American cities, that no longer reference 9/11. (EDIT: Thanks, Eleanor from Urbana-Champaign, for the Gotham/Chicago correction.)

16. As with many good superhero movies, the protagonist struggles with the duality of her or his concealments, the split between public and private, the thin line between criminality and order, the meaning of heroism and the divided life, whether you're a lumbering, cigar-chomping spawn of the devil with a liking for six-packs of Tecate (and Ron Perlman is excellent here, his best role since I saw him last in Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter) or an asshole billionaire with a big R&D budget (and Christian Bale is also very good).

17. But in Hellboy 2 this struggle comes too late and undeveloped. The Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense is sworn to protect humanity from rogue supernatural elements, but the B.P.R.D. is composed of "freaks" themselves. (In fact, the word "freak" gets mentioned a lot in both films.) And thus, Hellboy's dilemma: he's there to eradicate one of his own, but he entertains this doubt for maybe a full minute.

18. In contrast, the struggle is front and center in The Dark Knight. I don't think I've seen a genre movie in a while -- maybe Ben Affleck's very fine Gone Baby Gone? -- that has explicitly foregrounded these questions regarding morality, and the consequences of one's actions, as this one.

New American Pop Entry: Cool Stupid.

My summer class got cancelled (long story having to do with new job opportunities in combination with low enrollment), so I guess I get to watch summer movies instead.

Xavier Gens' Frontier(s).

Horror movies, as any Comp Lit freshman would tell you, are often allegories of something or other. They can, on occasion, be a little more direct and literal in their targets, as seen in works like George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005) or Joe Dante's Homecoming (2005), The first is a thinly-veiled call to smash the oligarchy; the second, an anti-war film about zombie soldiers and elections and the war in Iraq, with no veils at all. The French director Xavier Gens' unremittingly nasty Frontière(s)(2007), a refreshing breath of dungeon-dank air, doesn't quite fall in the same category -- it takes too much pleasure in tormenting its characters for it to be taken seriously as political contestation -- but there is, at least, an intriguing undercurrent of criticism to the entire grotty mess.

The setup should be vaguely familiar: two groups of young bank-robbing Parisian Arabs fleeing from the police -- and also running away from suburban rioters, in the wake of a right-wing election triumph -- make a wrong turn and end up at a bed-and-breakfast run by (youll never guess) a neo-Nazi cannibal family. The first two men arrive and are greeted by two suspiciously friendly women; they have sex, and -- well, it's obviously too good to be true. By the time the second pair -- an estranged couple, the woman a few months pregnant -- gets to the inn, the mayhem has already begun.

The dysfunctional family members range from two brothers with hair-trigger tempers, to a couple of sullen silent women, to a gun-toting blonde straight out of an Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS movie. But the most frightening of all is the grand old patriarch, looking spiffy in his brown shirt, played by Jean-Pierre Jorris, who delivers speeches on the virtues of racial purity.

There are no Leatherfaces in this family, but the movie's gore ancestors are clear: Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1976), and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005). Like these three films, Frontier(s) specifically emerges from a particular historical moment filled with state-sponsored violence, but at the same time frolics in the puddles of blood.

And frolic it does: fans of violent horror (and I count myself among them) would undoubtedly relish all the hijinks with the meathooks and a huge bolt cutter. There's a moment when one of the antagonists flips on the switch to a table saw, and one can practically feel the delicious, anticipatory collective thrill ripple inside the theater. Gens has a good feel for pacing, even if we've seen this narrative structure played out many times.

The reader is correct if you think all this gore overwhelms any kind of meaningful critique of Sarkozy's immigration policies. But Gens clearly wants to utilize his film as a way of violently intruding into the recent debate, as the notion of frontiers and their political significance resonates throughout the movie. One of Gens' interesting points made here is that even the extreme right -- at least before revenge by butcher implements is exacted against them -- would have to make concessions to immigrants in order to literally survive.

But the fact that France has long claimed a coterie of luminaries like Emile Zola, Marie Curie, Maurice Ravel, Charles Aznavour, Isabelle Adjani, and Serge Gainsbourg -- of Italian, Polish, Swiss, Armenian, Algerian, and Russian descent, respectively -- as quintessentially French optimistically points to a kind of pluralism historically embedded in the French national character.

Or this long list of foreigners may be seen, alternatively, as evidence of the assimilation of immigrants into le peuple franc -- but in the case of this film, assimilation in a disgustingly literal fashion.

In any case, it seems somewhat hypocritical on Gens' part to gesture towards political critique as a tasteless way of adding depth to what is otherwise torture-porn. For instance, one of the final scenes in the movie shows the gaunt and traumatized heroine -- all a-tremble, shuffling numbly into the sunlight, her hair crudely shorn, drenched in blood and pig filth -- and it looks as if she's staggering out of Buchenwald in 1945.

The title Frontier(s)is generically, perhaps deliberately vague, as it could mean nothing and everything; "frontiers" could be applied to a science-fiction TV series, a medical documentary, or even gauzy erotica. In this case, it refers to the borders of both nation and good taste -- as if everything that came before it didn't cross those lines already.

(Thanks to Rumsey Taylor for some of the revisions!)

SFIFF Note #4.

Jia Zhangke's brilliant new film is no ghost story, but it's nevertheless filled with figures of the walking dead. It's titled Still Life, perhaps an apt title for a movie filled with movement and travel, but towards an imminent entropy.

The setting is Fengjie, the province with the most people affected by China's Three Gorges Dam project. The movie follows Sanming, who has come to town to look for his wife and daughter, who he has not seen in 16 years. An unscrupulous motorcycle rider takes him for a ride to see them at their last-known address, and he discovers that this is now under water, flooded by the dammed river. "Haven't you heard of the Three Gorges Dam?" the driver asks him, incredulously. Sanming barely responds.

It's tempting to dismiss him as merely being some slightly dimwitted yokel, but his slow, deadpan reactions are more likely integral to his acting, as it sets the tone for the film. Sanming shuffles numbly in and out of the frame, mostly disengaged from the swirl around him, as if he (and indeed, the others around him) are perpetually in a state of shock.

It is an apt reaction to what will apparently be four million people displaced (some, if not many, forcibly) from their homes. There is no better visual metaphor for the impending devastation than the gutted insides of apartment buildings, held together only by their near-crumbling frames of concrete, or workers with sledgehammers slowly rendering bricks into dust. The words of apocalypse – "186 m. water level" – painted on the walls, or “OK for demolition” on houses, are constant reminders of the coming flood.

Jia, at least in the three films of his that I've seen so far, is clearly fascinated by the contradictions of modernity as seen in present-day China, and of people swept up in national and global currents well beyond their control. But I place "contradictions" in quotation marks because it's not always clear that they are seen by his characters as such. (There's a bit of a running joke in this vein, where Zhao Tao's character is drinking water in practically every scene.)

In this film, and in The World, for instance, there's a lot of business with cell phones as a medium for communication. But it doesn't change the fact that families are constantly separated and estranged due to the demands of capital. The cell phones, as symbols of progress, can barely assuage the psychological and emotional wounds of labor migration. No technological marvel -- Mao's dream, which entranced him so much that he wrote a poem about it -- could make up for the human and environmental ruin, and Jia's movie intelligently records this sense of 21st-century dislocation.

(Saw the movie with Ben, Jun-dai and Lucia.)

-----

It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang's excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia, but the comparison is inevitable: Chang's movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu province. His documentary focuses on the tourist trade, as it follows a girl who works in the kitchen of a cruise boat on the Yangtze ferrying Western tourists -- the apparently willing believers of official government discourse. Yu Shui, renamed Cindy for easier pronunciation, also happens to come from a dirt-poor family of peasant farmers whose riverbank shack is about to be inundated.

Chang has such a remarkable sense of drama and rhythm, for the elegant ebb and flow of the parade of ordinary images before the camera -- so much so that it feels less and less a documentary than a narrative feature. It may not have the desolate poetry of Jia's images, but Up the Yangtze proves there is nothing more gripping or painful than the reality of desolation itself.

SFIFF Note #3.

Alexander Sokurov's latest film, Alexandra, derives its understated humor from its narrative premise: an elderly woman from St. Petersburg visits her grandson, an officer stationed in an army base in Chechnya. This, in and of itself, is already humorous in its faintly comic juxtapositions, as we see her barrelling stubbornly through the barracks, handling an AK-47, clambering in and out of tanks, complaining about how the soldiers don't wash. One touching element is how it seems all the soldiers -- all boys, really -- are eyeing her almost hungrily; it's a hunger, all right, but not for generic female contact, but a precisely maternal one.

And so it continues in this quietly funny vein, until there's a jarring scene of the grandmother walking alongside the occupying army's rumbling tanks, and shots of apartment buildings with the ceilings caved in from bombing, and you realize there is a good chunk of the world for which this is normal. At any rate, the film slowly builds up to its inevitable anti-war message, but it's a complicated and ambiguous one like its characters. Alexandra herself is part of the occupation, after all, and even if she feels a kindred sisterly spirit with the Chechen women, she neither receives nor demands absolution -- not from the viewer, in any case.

Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy is an uncommonly fine film, and easily one of the best I've seen this year so far. Indie romances don't always sit well with me, probably even well before Natalie Portman gave Zach Braff her headphones, precisely because they follow such a well-worn formula. But Jenkins gets the formula -- for his debut film! -- absolutely right (and more): a kick-ass soundtrack (follow the link and you'll see what I mean), two attractive leads, and a beautiful city.

Halfway through the movie, it didn't seem that this seemingly shaky combination of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Rebecca Solnit's "Hollow City" would work. But it's to Jenkins' credit that Medicine for Melancholy -- essentially a "Sunday morning after the Saturday one-night stand" movie -- pulls this off beautifully. (Visually there are some standout scenes as well, like a rapturous carousel ride, and an extended wordless dance sequence at The Knockout.)

On paper it seems iffy: two hungover twenty-somethings stumble out of bed, have the most uncomfortable breakfast afterwards, and go their separate ways -- the girl ("Angela") to the Marina, the boy (Micah) to the Tenderloin. We know they'll inevitably meet up, and they do, and threaded through all this are earnest discussions on race and class. It seems like an academic treatise, and at times it does (notably, in a visit to the Museum of the African Diaspora), but once it becomes clear that Micah's anger is inextricably tied to place, to a city that has increasingly pushed people of color out in another diaspora of its own (particularly African Americans, a frighteningly tiny 7 percent of San Francisco's population), then the film coheres satisfyingly, in ways deeper and more meaningful than indie romantic comedies usually do.

Oh, and did I mention that it's a love story? And no, I'm not talking about the two leads -- Medicine for Melancholy is a rapturous, bittersweet love letter to San Francisco as well.

SFIFF Note #2.

There's a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer's powerful debut film Ballast -- a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast -- but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story's nothing we haven't seen before, including the way it's structured: the slow accumulation of details, then some (expected) emotional outbursts two-thirds of the way in that fill out some of the back story. But the way Hammer patiently lets the relationships between people unfold is a welcome change from the way characters are quickly sketched out in American movies.

Nonetheless, the movie -- about a convenience store owner devastated by his brother's suicide (and already I feel I'm revealing too much) -- could probably have taken place anywhere, except that the ghostly blue light of a Mississippi winter plays a central role. This shade of blue colors the sky, the mud, the bare tree branches, the burnt-out trailers, and its haunted characters alike, the latter rendered immobile by their grief, the crippling burden of the rural economy, and the emotional weight of things left unsaid.

Speaking of immobility, Bela Tarr's latest film, The Man from London, is also worth seeing, but good god, it's slow -- slow even for Bela Tarr. The movie has a classic noir setup: ordinary station guard witnesses a crime, comes into possession of a large sum of money, and ponders what to do with it as various characters (the police, the money's true owners, the thief's wife) slowly arrive at the seaside village. But The Man from London an even more spare take on the genre, as if Tarr had hollowed it out, leaving only skeletons and gestures to remain.

Everything I love about Tarr is here: the rumbling ambient sounds, the long back-and-forth pans inside rooms, the almost-constant drinking, a bunch of familiar folks from Satantango, the excruciating repetition of musical motifs -- and yes, a surreal dancing scene with an accordion and balancing things on foreheads! -- but all in all it feels too patently an experiment in form. The (almost) all-Hungarian cast's French and English, it seems, is overdubbed (including Tilda Swinton's French) -- a nice touch to foreground the artificiality of the entire venture, as if no one truly fit their role -- but it seems forced. (It's like the reverse of Eastern Promises, another film masquerading as noir, where you had all these non-Russians playing Russians.) I hate to say this: for fans only. I'd see it again, but beginners should treat themselves to his earlier films instead.

SFIFF Note #1.

I struck gold with my Movie #2* of the San Francisco International Film Fest yesterday with Roy Andersson's queasily funny comedy You, the Living (Du Levande), a film I'm already anxious to see again. There is no narrative (although the movie does begin and end with two pieces of a story): just a barely-connected series of almost-frozen tableaus in pea soup-green living rooms, offices, kitchens and bars (and an execution chamber), the camera in one corner dispassionately eyeing, the surreally ordinary lives of urban dwellers. (One review I read afterwards said that the camera moves exactly twice; too bad I missed one of those scenes!). There are a few recurring characters, most notably the disparate members of a brass band, but otherwise we catch people for the single minute they're on screen, and then they're gone, their escaping feet already licked by Lethe's ice-cold wave. I'll be writing more about this movie at the end of the year, I'm sure.

*Movie #1 was Fernando Solanas' latest documentary, Latent Argentina (Argentina Latente), which I think is closer to "Dormant Argentina" -- about the privatization of companies, concessions to multinational firms, and the vast economic inequalities within the country -- had promised to be less dry than the subject matter only because it was by Solanas, but no such luck. Nonetheless it was quite stimulating, if only because I kept thinking of the Philippines the entire time. (It's wonderful how the last time I heard the phrase "el patrimonio nacional" was in a Spanish class reading Claro M. Recto -- something worth thinking about there.) Visually, Solanas gets some beautiful images of the landscape, but this grandeur is dissipated once we get to the second half and we're treated to shots of laboratory after laboratory. (They're not contrasted ironically either, as they're both classified under resources meant to be used.) One treat for Pacific Film Archive viewers: the one time the documentary leaves Argentina is to visit, of all places, Berkeley, and an interview with an Argentinean professor takes place right outside the lobby, a few feet behind where we were watching.

The SF Film Fest: What I'm Watching.

The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival is coming up soon, and this year I've taken the unusually restrictive step of watching only films screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Last year -- and I write this without embarrassment -- I lived inside the Kabuki in San Francisco for almost a whole day, beginning with Bunuel's Belle du Jour at noon and finishing up with an Icelandic horror film that let out at 1:30 in the morning, popcorn and nachos for lunch and dinner and a side trip to Playground for a carafe or two of soju, and three rotating groups of friends with myself as the common denominator. But my move to the East Bay has made it easier for me to watch films on different evenings (and, conversely, more difficult for me to watch movies in SF).

This means I miss out on the lone Filipino film in the festival this year -- Sanchez's The Woven Stories of the Other -- which I probably won't be seeing. I was hoping for the latest films by Auraeus Solito, John Santos, Khavn de la Cruz, or Lav Diaz, but no such luck. (I'm rather happy with the Brillante Mendoza films from the recently-concluded Asian American film fest though.)

I'm also missing out on other potentially interesting movies like Du's Umbrella (documentary on Chinese umbrella factories, which sounds fantastic), Ferrara's Go Go Tales (this happens to be the third Asia Argento film in the entire fest, along with flicks by Breillat and Asia's dad), Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (I'm thinking this is probably minor Rohmer, but who am I to say), and Akbari's 10+4 (a sequel of sorts to Kiarostami's Ten, probably a painful film to watch).

I'd love to write a preview like the one on Evening Class, but all I can really do is provide links. Anyhow, here are the films I'm watching, in alphabetical order:

1. Andersson, You, the Living

- Review in the Observer.

I actually don't know much about this film except for a lengthy interview with the director in Cinema Scope.

2. Assarat, Wonderful Town

The critical buzz seems quite high on this one (including a Tiger award at Rotterdam), except for an abysmal review in Slant. I'm on a big Thai film kick right now, so I really want to watch this.

3. Chang, Up the Yangtze

- Interview with Chang on indieWIRE.

See Jia below.

4. Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

- Interview in Cinema Scope.

Some of you Pinoys might recognize John Gianvito's name from an email circulating a couple of years ago looking for contacts / resource persons for his next film on the U.S. military bases and environmental toxic waste in the Philippines. (The synopsis of Profit Motive reminds me of a talk given by Benedict Anderson back in 1991 or so called "My Own Private Ilocos" (I think), accompanied by a slideshow of neglected statues and grave sites, Rizal in his overcoat in countless elementary schools. I'm thinking infinite reproducibility, nationally-generated amnesia...)

5. Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy

- Interview in Premiere.

I don't know anything about this movie except that it looks interesting and that it's about sex in the city I used to live in.

6. Jia, Still Life

- David Denby's review in The New Yorker.

Any movie made by the director of Platform will be well worth seeing. This should be a good companion to Chang's Up the Yangtze above.

7. Maddin, My Winnipeg

- Interview in Cinema Scope.

Maddin's first documentary, though I suspect it'll be a "documentary" in the same way that, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon was a documentary.

8. Sokurov, Alexandra

- J. Hoberman's review in the Village Voice.

Promises to be dreary and slow, which is right up my alley. See also Tarr below.

9. Solanas, Latent Argentina

I've never seen anything by him (this is Fernando, not Valerie -- though the latter would be very cool). Here's my chance.

10. Tajima-Pena, Calavera Highway

That's two decades of groundbreaking documentaries under her belt -- including the classroom favorite Who Killed Vincent Chin? and the very good My America... or Honk If You Love Buddha -- and this one promises to be excellent as well.

11. Tarr, The Man from London

- Review in Reverse Shot.

Promises to be dreary and slow, which is right up my alley. See also Sokurov above. Plus Tilda Swinton is in it!

Wayne Wang, "The Princess of Nebraska" (A Review, Kind Of).

There's a scene about halfway through Wayne Wang's 2007 film The Princess of Nebraska that's the complete stylistic opposite of the ending of his 1982 masterpiece, Chan Is Missing. You'll be forgiven if it reminded you of those Christopher Doyle-filmed handheld scenes in Chungking Express, and maybe it's even done on purpose: the scene is all a blurred swath of neon and Chinese characters, at once both immediately recognizable and illegible. (The man messing with the camera is Richard Wong, the talented director of Colma: The Musical.)

In contrast, the conclusion of Chan Is Missing consists of unmoving black-and-white scenes of Chinatown, of its residents walking with their groceries and waiting for the bus, of store facades and empty sidewalks reminiscent of Atget's Paris, while "Grant Avenue" from Flower Drum Song plays semi-ironically on the soundtrack. (Most people seem to remember the preceding scene as the conclusion -- a Harry Callahan-like image of gray ocean ripples, while our accidental detective "summarizes" the case on the voiceover -- but that's not the real ending.)

These two scenes -- shot in the same location, a little over twenty-five years apart -- exemplify not only a cinematic difference. They also invoke two different Chinas, the filmic embodiments of the vast cultural and socioeconomic differences produced in that short quarter-century. As with Jia Zhangke's film The World, this conjured homeland is awash with unequally distributed capital, with twittering cellphones and designer clothes.

But the China in this particular film is both absent and perpetually present, therefore mirroring the dislocation in the film as a whole. The new China seems incomprehensible to and utterly removed from Chinatown, but the main character is constantly connected to that China electronically. Even if her messages and videos do not seem to require or elicit a response.

The Princess of Nebraska has a fragile shell of a plot: Sasha (newcomer Ling Li), a 16-year old Chinese college student, is not in Nebraska anymore (the first shot, after all, is of her red shoes), but has arrived, by way of the Oakland airport, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I won't reveal the reasons for her arrival (though any internet search will tell you, unfortunately), but it probably doesn't matter: plot is decidedly subservient to mood and image here, the background to the narrative only barely hinted at.

Sasha stands in for a new Chinese generation, born way too long after the Great Leap Forward. When asked about Tienanmen, Sasha simply answers, "I heard about it from my grandmother." Whether her answer is given out of pique, boredom, or honesty is irrelevant; the point is that she and her generation (to echo the new American turn-of-phrase Sasha learns) has "moved on".

Despite the superficial quality of her interactions with other people (and I think this is deliberate) -- her friends chattering about going to parties to meet hot men, reading other people's letters never sent, engaging in aimless theft, wandering the city streets as a dazed flâneuse -- the film masks a deeper discontent. These interactions can also be seen in contrast to Chan Is Missing, which, despite its improvised meanderings, is full of discussions about identity without them being specifically denoted as such. (I'm also reminded of two recent movies -- Lost in Translation and Cafe Lumiere -- which feature women navigating through foreign cities alone.)

Sasha's world is almost constantly mediated by the cellphone videos she takes: confessional fragments, snatched from the swirl of life around her, crammed into a small screen. The Princess of Nebraska skims across surfaces, and Wong's camera catches glimpses of Sasha obscured through dirty glass, half-hidden behind walls, or captured in smeared reflections. (There's a sound cue employed throughout the film that sounds like the whooshing of a BART train, suggesting perpetual transit.) These filmic gestures serve to heighten a sense of restless desperation on Sasha's part: a need to relate, to simply connect, to actually hook up in an existential manner -- to find anything that makes any sort of sense -- in order to save herself, a woman adrift between allegiances and continents.

Ultimately, however, the film is something of a weaker effort, as wispy as the skirt Sasha wears in her After Hours odyssey through San Francisco. It's certainly comparatively insubstantial in the context of Wang's oeuvre. This assessment, however, is unfair because Chan Is Missing is in my top ten films of all time; if we're only talking about Asian American films, then Chan Is Missing is without a doubt the greatest of them all -- an impossibly high standard in my book, to say the least. But The Princess of Nebraska is nonetheless a fascinating, beautifully filmed work.

During the Q&A portion, Ling Li joked that there was "no ending". But of course there was one. It isn't as magnificently sublime as the last four minutes of Chan Is Missing -- this one's about four minutes and a half, precisely choreographed to an achingly beautiful Antony and The Johnsons song -- but it's haunting and shiveringly enigmatic all the same. I don't want to spoil it for future viewers -- I'll just say that I think it's about infancy and the struggle to speak the inarticulable -- but who knows what the scene is really about? It's still the equivalent of those floating, bobbing, shifting waves of meaning at the end of Chan Is Missing, and with that Wayne Wang comes back full circle to Chinatown and his own cinematic ambiguities.

Ashamed Again.

Where: outside of the Clay Theater, Fillmore Street, San Francisco, at the premiere of Richard Wong's Option 3.

Who: Richard Wong, H.P. Mendoza, and one excited fanboy who's hung up on his friend over the cell phone once he saw Wong and Mendoza outside the theater (me).

Me [walks over to the two who are deep in conversation]: Hi -- I'm gonna interrupt and be a total fanboy and just wanted to say I really really loved Colma.

Both: Thanks, thanks.

Me: And I'm really looking forward to the new movie.

Both: Thanks, thanks, we hope you like it.

Me [to Mendoza]: You actually posted on my blog once.

Mendoza [glimmer of recognition]: Yeah, I was shaming you into seeing it!

Wong: Oh, I saw that. You were going to a concert.

Me: Yeah, I couldn't go to the premiere because I had a Belle and Sebastian concert that evening.

Mendoza: [bigger glimmer of recognition]: You're the Wily Filipino!

Me [big toothy grin]: Yes!

Wong: We have a Colma: The Musical singalong tomorrow, you should go.

Me: I know! I can't make it though.

Mendoza: You have a concert.

Me [ashamed]: Um. Yes. I have a concert. [slinks away]

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #10.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) and Ivan Reitman's Juno (2007).

It's something of a paradox to state that Daniel Day-Lewis' towering, fiery oil derrick of a performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's undeniably brilliant There Will Be Blood is both the best and worst thing about this film. His acting, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is amazing, both subtly nuanced and overpowering -- so much of the latter, really, that it tends to swallow the entire epic whole. Plainview is also impenetrably amoral, a man of few sympathies, and consequently the viewer has none in return for his character. It's a tough hook to hang an entire movie on, but the film succeeds despite of it.

We see Daniel Plainview first as a gold and silver prospector (and not a very successful one) in a nearly wordless 20-minute opening sequence. Toting along his cherubic adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview begins to buy up land, practically for pennies, from under unknowing farmers' feet. It's not a pleasant sight, and it is testimony to the power of Anderson's movie that we find ourselves cheering, at least in the first half, for this robber baron. By 1911 Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in the region, though (in a crucial distinction) significantly small fry in relation to the big oil companies.

Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (played by an excellent Paul Dano), who offers not oil, but information: his family's farm in Little Boston, California, is floating on an "ocean of oil", and would he be interested in scoping it out? Father and son, pretending to hunt for quail, arrive at the Sunday ranch and find not only oil seeping from the ground, but Paul's twin brother Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), a young, charismatic preacher and faith healer, against whom Plainview wrestles for Little Boston's soul. (Full confession: when my friend Eloise and I saw this the other night, we completely missed the point about the twin brother.)

It's clear early on in the film that Plainview and Sunday's different brands of hucksterism run on parallel railroad tracks. But Anderson seems to lack the confidence in his audience to appreciate what little subtleties there are in this presentation and chooses to bludgeon us with this obviousness. The abrupt tonal shift in the last twenty minutes, as Plainview descends into Charles Foster Kane madness, simply seems different from what came before; let's just say that "There Will Be Blood" isn't just the title, but a promise as well.

There's little in Anderson's previous work that suggests the heft of There Will Be Blood, unless you count the Old Testament metaphors made flesh in Magnolia, or the scams in Hard Eight, or Tom Cruise's penis-evangelist in Magnolia. The movie is beautifully photographed, lingering over the fires of hell spurting uncontrollably from the earth, or the sere, rocky ground out of which such black bounty must be forced (and on which Jonny Greenwood's Ligeti-like score falls like rain). It's the visual antithesis, in more ways than one, to Days of Heaven.

This will be the film that Anderson will probably be most remembered for -- for its epic breadth; the conflict between God and Mammon, or of fathers and sons; the invocation of Welles, Polanski, and Huston, or of West and Sinclair; the way it has Great American Movie written all over it. But if you ask me for a favorite Anderson film, I wouldn't hesitate to name the brilliant but flawed Magnolia; despite its stylistic cleverness (and "clever" isn't necessarily a compliment), vague spirituality, and full-on ripoff of / homage to Short Cuts, there was at least something questing, something more vitally human, about Magnolia and its ruined characters. It's certainly more alive than the cold, dead heart in Daniel Plainview.

----------

In the last week alone, at least four people who don't know each other have been sending me links to the Stuff White People Like blog. (Did it suddenly get Dugg last week or something?) I figure that Ivan Reitman's wonderful film Juno -- with its Kimya Dawson / Belle & Sebastian soundtrack*, the Sherman-Palladino & Palladino-style banter**, the Andersonian eccentricities (Wes, not Paul Thomas), plus two (count 'em! two!) cast members from "Arrested Development" -- would certainly be on that list. [Note: as I was writing this, Ver posted a comment on my blog saying it was already on their list. That damn White People blogger!]

None of the above are necessarily characteristics of some sort of White indie-cinema aesthetic, of course. (The idea is as ridiculous as, say, a Black indie-cinema aesthetic, which would be one that encompasses both Tyler Perry and Charles Burnett.) But these are elements that perhaps resonate, even if indirectly, with White liberal middle-class audiences, as strands of some primordial genetic affinity with Whole Foods and L.L. Bean. (As a cultural anthropologist, I'm kidding here.)

But back to Juno. You probably know about the film already: a feisty 16-year old (in indie films the girls are almost always "spunky" or "feisty" -- or Feisty, even) gets knocked up, and she decides to give the baby up for adoption. But -- and I'm about to go out on a limb here because I can't quite articulate this -- the nature of the cinematic fantasy in Juno seems to be discursively White. But after all it's a White world -- a stereotyped world of charmingly kooky middle-classness and sterile (here, in two senses of the word) gated communities -- in which Juno is located.*** (There are a couple of Asian kids though, one of whom protests outside an abortion clinic and yells "All babies want to be borned.")

Juno is unreal in an odd white liberal wish-fulfillment sort of way, surely even by white working-class standards (Juno's father and mother are air-conditioning repairman and "nail technician," respectively). It's a total fantasy, really, because parents aren't generally so forgiving or practical, and such willing adoptive parents aren't found the same week, and accidental fathers probably end up facing the barrel of a shotgun at some point, and health insurance isn't a problem, and her pregnancy allows Juno to not have to drop out of school or flunk her exams. (Young women of color, especially poor and lower middle-class ones, wouldn't be off the hook so easily, as the odds against them rise exponentially.)

But back to Juno again. So can I tell you folks that I really, really loved Juno, even if I'm not white, and despite all the political iffiness? That I loved the breathless, canny dialogue; the giddy intertextuality sprouting cultural parentheses and asterisks everywhere; the musical nerdiness; the nuggets of vulnerable truth; the painstakingly cluttered production design; the glib linguistic archness -- all crammed, sometimes a little queasily, in the first fifteen minutes.

Thankfully, the film settles down after that (though I laughed really hard anyway). All the caffeinated, superficial quirkiness is peeled off to reveal a surprising, empathic depth -- not just with Juno and Bleeker and her parents, but also the adoptive couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The movie really belongs to Ellen Page; it's a performance that projects a perfectly calibrated smartass vulnerability. But Michael Cera -- who, once again, is just excellent in communicating that mix of cluelessness and discomfort -- and a great ensemble cast (including Allison Janney, Bateman, and a very good Garner) should also share the honors in this hilarious, very sweet film. Even if I'm not white.

*Though a person who counts the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways as her favorite groups of all time wouldn't really use the Moldy Peaches for the soundtrack about her life, would she? (I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and I'm deciding I'm allergic to this.)

**I mean, doesn't Kimya Dawson essentially serve the same function as Sam Phillips' "la la las" on "Gilmore Girls" -- as appropriate / ironic commentaries on the scene? (In fact, it's easy to see Juno's musical debates on 1977 vs. 1993 (i.e., what was the best year for rock and roll) as taking place in Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Remember that episode of "Gilmore Girls" where Lane (okay, she's Asian) was vinyl-shopping her way through that copy of the Mojo Collection? What indiegeekgirl hotness.)

***Come to think of it, Cloverfield was set in a rather White Manhattan as well, but that was probably because all the people of color were smart enough to get the fuck outta there.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 5: Hong Sang-Soo's "Woman on the Beach".

Hong Sang-Soo's Woman on the Beach (2006) is a beautifully crafted, minutely observed gem of a film, and I'm at a loss for words, even after a second viewing, to tell you what it's about. I can tell you that it's refreshing to see a film about relationships that isn't an unreal romantic comedy or a lacerating Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? deathmatch.

I can tell you about Woman on the Beach's perfect cinematic architecture: a triangle, turning into a dyad, then to another pairing that's a cracked reflection of the one that came before, then to another triangle, and finally, the image of the heroine driving off into the horizon. There's a wonderful visual symmetry and repetition at work in Hong's film, from one character's encounter with three trees to another's nighttime plunge into the thick woods, to the similar pa jun and soju meals (and there are unbelievable quantities of the latter consumed) that are eaten at crucial junctures in the narrative.

Not much happens in Hong's film, but the small shifts in the relationship dynamics (and the narrative focal point, for that matter) are crucial, if slow, in the context of the movie: a director (Joongrae), a production designer (Changwook) and the production designer's mistress (Moonsook, played by the utterly lovely Ko Hyun-jeong) go to the beach for the weekend and work on a screenplay. She's a composer and a fan of the director's work (he's constantly called "Director Kim" throughout the film), the screenwriter's actually married, and the relationships between them aren't exactly as they seem.

Early in the film, Joongrae tells the married Changwook that he admires the latter's courage -- and trust in the director's discretion -- to bring his girlfriend along for the weekend. (It's not immediately clear whether Joongrae -- played by an excellent Seung-woo Kim -- is saying this in a "Damn, dawg!" male-solidarity sort of way, or deliberately trying to elicit more information, and it's this constant ambiguity of intention, in all of the characters, that underlies the narrative.)

"By the way, he's not my boyfriend," Moonsook adds.

"Come on! Do we have to have sex to be boyfriend and girlfriend?" asks Changwook, surprised.

"Of course there has to be sex," says Moonsook, then turns to Joongrae and asks, "Don't you agree, Director Kim?" (Joongrae laughs and says, "I love this," and so do we.)

"We're just friends, you and I," she continues calmly, addressing Changwook.

"Do friends kiss?" asks the screenwriter, aghast.

"We kissed once," she reminds him, annoyed. "Big deal."

It's both painful and funny and truthful and shot through with ambiguity all at the same time, and Hong lets all this unspool with a careful patience. (His camera framing is absolutely precise; you can almost tell, depending on the words spoken, when the camera will zoom in to isolate two people in the frame and shut out the third.) There's no real contest in this triangle, though; Director Kim, who is (seemingly) more intelligent and more charming than Changwook, starts asking more probing and seriously disarming questions, and manages to steal Moonsook away.

He turns out, in any case, to be something of a cad and a serial philanderer, as we see him two days later, prowling the same seaside town, ostensibly looking for a woman to interview for a casting project. He picks out Sunhee, a divorcee vacationing at the beach, because she reminds him of a character he's working on. But we are told, at least according to one of the restaurant owners, that Sunhee resembles Moonsook (though not really). We can't tell what this means for sure: is this the director's usual casting-couch method, or has he, in fact, been pierced, Jimmy Stewart-style, by Moonsook's absence, and therefore doomed to obsessive repetition?) And all goes well until... Moonsook returns, for reasons which are, again, not entirely clear.

It's this flirtatious resistance to explanation, the refusal to pin down the characters' motives, and the way words hang expectantly in the air, that makes for fascinating viewing. (In fact this sense of in-betweenness is also reflected in the setting: indeed, we hardly ever see the ocean in all of the actual scenes on the beach -- just people gingerly skirting the edges -- and the weather is this constant cloudy gray, like San Francisco's Ocean Beach in the summer.)

If there's anything the movie is "about" thematically, it's probably about the temporary nature of love and solace, male helplessness and immaturity, and (this is explicitly voiced in the film) female choice. But there's a particularly illustrative scene, which for me sums up the film better: in a subtly comical scene on the beach, when one of the couples kiss for the first time, Moonsook has time to break away from his embrace and put her hand to her forehead in embarrassment.

Woman on the Beach is also about sudden vulnerabilities, calculated confidences, occasional silences, white lies and how they work (or not), moments of discomfort, awkward pauses, or the small, cutting things people say unconsciously (or not), the ways in which people sit or stand, or look at each other, the moment when one touches the other, accidentally or purposefully, or brushes the other's sleeve meaningfully (or not), how people are often accurate or inaccurate readers of character, of stolen embraces in stolen rooms. The gestures of the mating ritual are imbued here, in one of my favorite films of the year, with a heightened, shimmering significance.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 4: Carl-Theodor Dreyer's "Ordet".

I thought it might be fruitless to write about a film that thousands of other people have written about in the past five decades, particularly one which for some reason left me cold the first time. But it was only last year when, after repeated viewings -- to use a quote from Carl-Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) in a different context -- "something snapped inside me."

Ordet seems, in an odd way, to unfold outside of time, but of course its concerns are as bound to time and place as any other: the action happens in a windswept Danish farmhouse in the fall of 1925. It's a cramped but cozy interior, and probably something of a hothouse for the disappointments, large and small, harbored by the patriarch, Morten Borgen. These inner hurts are revealed slowly, indeed very slowly -- "the nearest thing to immobility that the screen has thus far achieved," Richard Hatch apparently wrote dismissively in The Nation, which is so blastedly wrong in many respects. But the snail's pace also lets the minute, warm intimacies between the family members blossom, and the unfussy camera, in the inimitable Dreyer fashion, patiently records the family dynamics as they move into their respective halos of Dreyer's light. (I say cramped interiors because there's an obvious contrast to the luminous exteriors, with feathers of light descending upon waves of grass.)

The family's characters feel like they're roughly carved directly from Catholic doctrine, i.e., everyone seems to represent something, but I'm not actually sure Dreyer meant to trouble his audiences with doctrinal differences (as explained below). Morten has three sons: there is Mikkel, the agnostic, who is married to the angelic Inger, about to give birth. The youngest son, Anders, is in love with the tailor's daughter, but she is of a different sect -- and those differences are, tellingly, never really spelled out by Dreyer, probably because they do not matter -- and therefore their partnership can never be.

And finally, there is Johannes, the gaunt, bearded son who has gone unblinkingly insane -- how exactly I don't want to reveal, only to point out that it provokes a laugh in a sometimes dryly funny film -- and believes he is Jesus Christ. He is the key figure in this film for different reasons, yet his presence is confined to a perhaps deliberately alienating physical acting: he pops into rooms unannounced to deliver his judgments, shuffling in a trance (like all the main characters), his rapt attention almost always focused on something just off to the audience's side, an ear cocked toward the divine whisperings in his head.

Dreyer opens up Kaj Munk's play with exteriors (and in the final scene the interior is opened up radically), but chooses to leave the theatrical sight-lines intact; people twist away oddly from each other, just like the inquisitors in The Passion of Joan of Arc, or are staring off into space. It is by no means a filmed play, but it's a strangely constrictive move; people have entire conversations without once looking at each other. But it is no less peculiar than, for instance, Johannes' performance, or the surreally casual conversation about death between Johannes and Inger's daughter. (The camera movements aren't stagey, however, as the frame almost always expands in anticipation of new characters entering on either side.)

Perhaps there is little, especially in an explicitly religious film, to appeal to an apostate like myself grown intolerant of Christian piety. When Inger talks reassuringly about God performing small, secret miracles every day, there's something almost cloying in this sentiment. But then why, even on later viewings, was I already sobbing, tears flowing down my face, by the time one of the characters appears at the door in the final scene?

Structurally, artistically, the sheer jawdropping impossibility of Dreyer's ending transmutes itself, especially with repeated viewings, into something so right, so necessary, that it is difficult to see the film culminating in any other way. (One could even argue that it is necessary for the audience's disbelief to make the ending, and the film itself, actually work; you have to make that leap.) Which therefore accounted for my emotional reaction: just knowing what was going to happen next attested, somehow, to the inevitability of amazing grace. Ordet, a genuine miracle of cinema, is simply, stunningly, perfect in every way, inexhaustible in its mysteries.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 3: Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence".

(Reposted from April 2007.)

There's little I can add to the rapturous reviews of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence (2005) -- an almost three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in France and its monks who have taken a vow to live their lives as silently as possible. It's not nearly as forbidding as it sounds, even if there is no voiceover narration, or hardly any subtitles -- there is no need for them for the most part -- or no artificial light. (Some of the most beautiful passages in the film are set at Vespers, sometimes lit only by a lone candle.)

The monks do speak, for starters, and the part Gröning chooses to show is their rather funny quibbling about certain rituals. But immediately, at the beginning of the film, the audience is already drawn into contemplation: we watch a monk, barely discernible in the dim light, kneeling in prayer, for about half a minute; he stands, adjusts the heater in his bare room, and kneels again.

The theme of the eternal present is movingly raised by an elderly blind monk, testifying joyfully about his blindness and his peaceful embrace of his mortality. There are no distinctions between past or present with God, the monk says; only the present prevails, and when He sees us, he always sees our entire life. In contrast, the ineluctable passage of time is seen outside the monastery: seasons follow one another, the snows end and the blooms appear. (Gröning also presents the monks not as timeless, ahistorical figures: one monk puzzles over bills on an IBM Thinkpad, another practices his singing on a small keyboard, airplanes fly overhead.)

The cinematography, both intimate and grand, is something else: some high-definition video shots echo the Old Masters in their composition; we see, in painstaking detail, new leaves peeking through still-frosted stems, or the slow drop of water from a bucket. (Indeed, the swarming motes in the grainy Super-8 footage -- sometimes, of nothing but blue sky or gray cloud -- suggest a perpetual movement in what is ostensibly still.) Gröning also gets a lot of mileage from close-ups of shaved heads, the camera peering over monks' shoulders as they read or pray, inviting the audience to imagine the secrets inside their skulls, to wonder about what inspires such devotion.

Viewers will come away with different things. For me it was the effortless way in which the deeply ordinary was invested with a deep, spiritual gravity; they shovel snow, feed cats, saw wood, sing, and kneel in prayer, and somehow the divine is felt as a trace, lingering in all their labors. There is a scene, for instance, in which a monk repairs a shoe, and his simple act of blowing on the glue to dry it becomes, in the world of Into Great Silence, the seeming exhalation of a prayer. The less generous will wonder about the political implications of a retreat from all the sorrows of the world. But many will surely remark upon the temporary transformation of the movie theater into an extension of the monastery; indeed, the hush follows you outside into the night as you leave.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 2: Bong Joon-Ho's "The Host".

Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, in their book Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, write that South Korea's relationship with the United States, much like that of the U.S. and the Philippines, vacillates on the love-hate continuum. "Through military and civilian contacts," they write, "the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder. Material desire and moral approbation, longing and disdain, have been twin responses to many of the trappings of American culture...."

One wonders what they would have thought of Bong Joon-Ho's The Host (2005), one of the finest movies I saw last year. (Come to think of it, it shouldn't be too difficult to ask.) Monster movies are said to be symbolic of anxieties burbling up from the depths of a murky id, writ large: postwar fears of a rampant industrialism (Gojira), nuclear annihilation (also Gojira), the savage Other (King Kong), Communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), untrammeled adolescent sexuality (The Exorcist), or the simple money-driven compulsion to destroy New York City again (Cloverfield). The Host needs no metaphor to hide this fear of the "reactionary intruder": the monster here is a paranoid, militarized American chauvinism gone awry, the teratological result of the deliberate dumping of formaldehyde bottles into the Han river. (Something also happens to the protagonist three-quarters of the way through the movie, which I can't reveal, but how much of him (and what is done to him) represents the Korean body politic is not clear.)

The Host is Bong's third feature film, if I'm counting correctly, and like the first two, he takes a well-worn genre (the police procedural, the urban yuppie comedy) and injects it with unsettling social critique. (Memories of Murder is actually a finer, more nuanced work, but I saw it the year before last. Incidentally, practically the entire cast of Memories appears in The Host in various configurations, which, I swear, already feels like a full third of the entire Korean film industry.) But Bong's forte is the way these films slip uncomfortably into different emotional registers: thus the incongruity of a perfectly-timed pratfall (there are two), or the slapstick of a grief-stricken family collapsing clumsily to the ground and hounded by camera-bearing reporters.

But enough about analysis. The Host is genuinely frightening, and Bong knows how to deliver the thrills in the classic monster movie tradition. The second time I saw the film, grown men in the theater were screaming like little girls. (On my third viewing, I was still holding my breath during an entire sequence -- let's just say it involves a girl, a boy, and a tail.) It's also grimly funny -- with visual gags involving squids here and there -- but it's not funny in the same, schlocky way that American (or British, or Australian) horror-comedies are. Bong has a way of undercutting the sober scenes with humor -- if only to make the genuinely horrific scenes even starker.

But the personal, as they say, is also about the political, and Bong's decision to focus on a family unit (rather than, say, a group of attractive college students on vacation) is a wise one, as it adds an emotional heft to the movie. (Contrast this, for instance, with the young interchangeable heroes' inexplicable decision to return to midtown Manhattan in Cloverfield, to save some woman I barely remember.) Our protagonist -- the perpetually sleeping owner of a food stand, portrayed by the always good Song Kang-ho as something of a simpleton -- is motivated by nothing less than the rescue of his daughter, whom he has witnessed being abducted into the water by the monster. Despite its horror movie trappings, the emotional core of the film, seen most eloquently in its quiet scenes, is a simple family reunification. There's one such scene right in the center of the film: a quiet, haunting, one-minute scene that says more about grief than words could express.

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition, Part 1: Richard Wong's "Colma: The Musical".

Richard Wong's exhilarating movie Colma: The Musical (2006) is set in a town south of San Francisco most famous for its cemeteries and the fact that it has more dead residents than there are alive. Colma's writer and actor, the ridiculously talented H.P. Mendoza, who plays Rodel, gets a lot of mileage from this central metaphor. The suburban deadness that infects the characters -- fresh high school graduates with nary a clue about what to do with themselves -- is only a little more vital than the graveyards all around them.

Colma revolves around the lives of three characters: an aspiring actor working "the highest-paying shit job" he can find at the mall, an aspiring writer thrown out of his house by his homophobic father, and a woman -- well, it's not really clear what she does, but as the emotional center of the film, the lovely Maribel (L.A. Renigen) does have the best monologue (and taste in interiors, for that matter).

What elevates this from your run-of-the-mill comedy is the fact that it's a musical, perhaps the most cinematic of forms, the combination of its general grounding in reality -- in the case of Colma: The Musical, the enervating flatness of suburbia -- and the unreal compulsion to burst into song. This unaccustomed exteriorization of the characters' emotions, erupting into the narrative, is part of the technique; the viewer is always aware that she or he is watching a movie. But Colma is also quite conscious, and not just in a mocking way, of the absurdity of the genre. (The digs at regional musical theater, for instance, are particularly funny.) The mawkish, sometimes unbearable honesty that accompanies teen angst is lovingly recontextualized here.

"We are so mature for our age," Billy (Jake Moreno) sings to himself after kissing his brand new girlfriend-to-be for the first time. It's something of a joke in the context of the movie: a kind of late-adolescent inflated sense of self, made funnier by the emotional immaturity constantly on display. One has the growing awareness that the way they torment each other, sometimes affectionately (or, in some cases, rail against the shallowness around them), is proof of a couple of things: 1) that there really isn't much of anything else to do in the burbs anyway, and 2) that it reflects their chafing at the bit at the lot that the suburban deities have dealt them.

Colma: The Musical shows Mendoza to be a prodigious wit, both profanely funny and incisively smart, if a little too reliant on a synthesizer, probably recorded in a basement. (This may indeed have been the case.) Lyrically, the easiest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds. The writing, in any case, is sharp and all too real, from the stern immigrant father to the cluelessly hilarious way Renigen says the N-word with too much relish. It's hard to pick a favorite scene: the eight-minute uninterrupted camera shot orchestrated by Wong at a drunken college party (ostensibly, a bunch of SF State hipsters), the cheerfully vicious sing-along in a bar, the unexpectedly poignant dance sequence in a cemetery, or even the goofy montage that introduces the movie.

Yes, it's a first film, and it looks like one, and if my mention of that fact makes it sound like a disclaimer, it's not. Wong has a surer, more deft hand here than many other veteran filmmakers. A weaker comedy would have cast "a lovable pack of misfits" -- or if this were a drama, a group of Abercrombie & Fitch models -- so it's quite refreshing to see normal-looking people in this movie. Sometimes they're not entirely lovable, sometimes they sing off-key, but I'd take this over any new Hollywood musical any day.

(If I do have one minor quibble, it's the way the screenplay takes liberties with the geography. Sure, it's fine to pass off The Bitter End or Java On Ocean as being in Colma -- though that's not necessarily implied in the film -- but Serramonte Mall and Westmoor High and all those fogged-out little boxes are in Daly fuckin' City! Plus the cast should have fought to have their real butts on the DVD cover.)

The Best Movies I Saw All Year, 2007 Edition.

In case you were wondering what happened to 2007, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep was the best thing I saw on the big screen last year, but I already listed it a couple of years ago, so it doesn't count. I also really liked Danny Boyle's Sunshine, but it didn't quite make the cut. Plus I couldn't get out most of December to see any of the Oscar nominees or other films that dominated the critics lists -- actually, I don't even know what they were. People liked Juno, I'm told.)

These films have nothing in common, either. They're from all over the place (two from Korea, one from Germany, one from Denmark, one from the U.S.), and from totally different genres (one horror film, one documentary, one romantic comedy (kind of), one musical, and one Miracle Play).

At any rate, I'll be posting the entries slowly over the next few days.

The 2006 list.

The 2005 list.

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #9.

Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) and George Lucas's Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).

So Barb emails me and asks me for my review of Drunken Angel. There's little I can add to what Barb has already said so well, except to note that the real highlight of the evening was culinary rather than cinematic. (Barb, let me tell you that that was the best arroz caldo I have ever had in my life, scout's honor.)

But back to Drunken Angel. The excitement here is seeing a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimizu -- Mifune, in particular, looking oddly like an even more dissolute Bryan Ferry circa 1982 -- gain each other's wary trust. Shimizu is a doctor who lives in the slums not out of any commitment to the downtrodden; it's because he is downtrodden, reeling in a drunken haze most of the day and with no one to call family except for a former gun moll / bar girl he is harboring in his house. That is, until Mifune arrives, as a similarly dissipated Yakuza gangster who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

It has all the elements of noir, and it's filmed that way, with oblique shadows and pinstripe suits. In his pre-color films, Kurosawa seems to have a visual fascination for soiled squalor, suggesting the indignity of the proceedings, and there's a knock-down, dragged-out fight scene in spilled white paint, the equivalent of all that mud in Stray Dog and The Seven Samurai.

Drunken Angel has the muscularity of a "character study" film from the '70s -- you can almost imagine an alcoholic Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges (or Nick Nolte, later), gargling with vodka in the morning and flailing around in impotent rage the rest of the day -- and if it sounds somewhat hackneyed, it kind of is. Shimizu, in his inexplicable eagerness to save the dying gangster, will inevitably save himself in the process as well, and he does. In the end, it's probably lesser Kurosawa, which -- considering his body of work -- means that it's better than ninety percent of the films out there. Especially the one below.

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It took me all of three evenings to try to finish Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, one of the more unwatchable movies I've seen in a while. More like "Revenge of the Shit", actually.

It's a shame because this is the one episode of the series that had the most potential in terms of character development, because it's not just get-the-Princess-to-the-Hidden-Fortress, but about a psychological and emotional turning point in the series, i.e., how Darth Vader came to be. (In fact it could have been easily subtitled "The Seduction of Anakin Skywalker", and that just might have been a far more interesting film.)

Instead, the last temptation of Christensen is dealt with in a couple of dispensable scenes, dripping with fake, obvious portent, and with many sideways glances IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN: "This Jedi had the power to prevent death NUDGE NUDGE." "You can learn that power, but not from a Jedi WINK WINK." And so on.

We are at least rewarded with the little thrill of recognition at the end: "Look, there's the Death Star!" "Look, it's the dark helmet!" "Listen, it's that heavy breathing!", but, like love, it's fleeting, and takes up only a sixteenth of the screen time accorded to an increasingly ludicrous lightsaber fight on some collapsing big iron thingie at some planet that looks completely uninhabitable because it's, like, made of fire, and at this point I can't even remember why Anakin went here in the first place, and how Obi-Wan managed to track him down, and later on they still manage not to behead each other with their lightsabers or get burned despite the thin clothes they are wearing or slip into the lava or fall off those tiny scraps of metal they're actually surfing on or get beaned by any of the countless hurtling balls of fire, probably because they're not just any kind of Jedi, they're Jedi Masters, except one is Lawful Good and the other is slowly turning into Chaotic Evil, which probably explains why one turns into Alec Guinness and the other into barbecue at the beach.

The acting is uniformly terrible, and it's indicative of the film's level of acting that Yoda is the most humanly expressive of the characters. If this were a different film, the actors' delivery might be called "mannered" -- but the context of this film obviates such magnanimity. The humorless, artless dialogue lands with the proverbial thud, and those bleeps you hear in the background is the sound of ATM buttons being pushed, as a group of generally able actors -- MacGregor, Portman, Smits -- deposit their paychecks. Even the beloved Samuel L. Jackson is reduced here to further a plot twist we knew was going to happen anyway. Couldn't George Lucas have at least let him get away with saying something like, "You're Darth Motherfuckin' Vader?" That would have made me happy.

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #8.

Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (2007) and Kenny Ortega's High School Musical (2006).

Eloise: I never thought I'd have Angelina Jolie's butt that close to my face.
Me: I never thought I'd have Anthony Hopkins' butt that close to my face.

Which just about sums up Beowulf, really: a relentlessly puerile cartoon aimed directly at 12-year old boys and savvily hitting the ceiling of a PG-13. (I can't believe Neil Gaiman (and Roger Avary) were partly responsible for this crud, which, acting- and writing-wise, is only a few degrees removed from a videogame's cutscene. Actually, that's what it is: a videogame on the big screen, complete with different quests and big bosses at the end of every level.)

Still, it's worth seeing the film on the big screen for one reason alone. My friend Eloise and I saw it in 3-D and on an Imax screen, and ten minutes into the film -- and that includes the Paramount logo -- my 12-year old mind was screaming HOLY BEJEEZUS EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE FROM NOW ON HAS TO BE IN 3-D!!! To have spears, bodies, rocks, arrows, and boobs all flying at you within inches of your face is absolutely thrilling, and there aren't very many real-life situations that would let you have that experience. (I mean all at the same time.)

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Don't knock it till you've actually seen it, they said. It's really not that bad. Well, I've finally gone and seen High School Musical, and they're right: it's really not that bad, but that's saying very little. The melodies are fairly catchy, but the lyrics are irredeemably awful, as if the writers put words like "free", "brave", "believe", "fly", "you", "me", and "together" into a blender and figured out how many variations they could come up with. Despite its "Up with People" blandness and plot schematics right out of "Clifford the Big Red Dog", High School Musical is charming, and there's something to be said about young people who can act, dance, and sing. And there's a sweet chemistry here, particularly in the first scene when the two young leads tentatively discover themselves (and each other) during an impromptu karaoke session.

Every decade needs its Grease or Dirty Dancing, and this is the 2K version. (I must confess a general dislike for musicals, and the fact that I'm not the target audience for HSM probably renders my complaints pointless. But Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical was one of my favorite films this year, and Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is probably in my top 50 of all time. So there.)

Interestingly, there's a way for the movie to be read as a Coming Out narrative, but I won't bother. I guess it's also pointless for me to say that it's a happily sanitized vision of high school, with no drugs or concealed weapons or teenage pregnancies or No Child Left Behind to menace the students. It's perfectly harmless and inoffensive, which, I suppose, is better than a lot of girl-oriented merch (the impossibly thin Barbie, the slutty liplinered Bratz, the disempowered Disney Princesses). If anything, what's most disturbing is Disney's aggressive marketing to pre-tweeners. If there's any real upside here, it has to do with introducing different standards of beauty for little kids out there, especially for my Chinese Pinay daughter: perhaps my favorite part of the movie was Vanessa Anne Hudgens' beautiful, beautiful, Chinese Pinay nose.

In Vino Veritas.

Setting: Express checkout lane, Safeway.

Woman at register [eyeing my bottle of 2006 Coppola Pinot Noir]: Now, sir, are you buying that because you like drinking it, or just to taste it?

Me: I've never had it.

Woman: How do you pronounce that? Cop-PO-la?

Me: Well, he pronounces it COP-pola, but back in Italy they probably pronounce it Cop-PO-la.

Woman [smiles]: That's what I said! So why this bottle?

Me: Oh, me and a couple of friends of mine are watching a movie about him tomorrow night.

Woman: About his wine?

Me: No, about a movie he made.

Woman: He's a winemaker and a director??

Me: Yup.

Woman [shakes her head]: Man. Sounds like someone oughta make up his mind.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #7.

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever (2007).

(Some mild spoilers follow.)

Like Neil Marshall's The Crying Game, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg's adaptation of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly.) Or at least that's how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis is attached to one Viggo Mortensen. (Actually, come to think of it, vaginas, or substitutes thereof, play supporting roles in Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Crash as well. Plus there's a talking anal sphincter in Naked Lunch, but that doesn't count.)

Okay, I'm just kidding about the penis. Featuring easily the best naked male wrestling scene since Larry Charles' Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Eastern Promises is, on its surface, a fairly conventional thriller, in much the same way that Mortensen seems like a fairly conventional Russian gangster. You probably already know the story: an underused Naomi Watts stumbles upon a child prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia after a young pregnant woman dies on her operating table. (The temptation here is to call it the structural (but not thematic) inverse of Cronenberg's A History of Violence -- same director, same lead actor -- but I won't reveal any plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that, like the Asian American Studies grad class I taught for four years or so, it's about Family and Identity.)

Critics (okay, David Denby, the only review I've read so far) have singled out the gore in Eastern Promises -- and how it simultaneously detracts from the film's seriousness, as well as confirming Cronenberg's more lurid impulses -- but I'm wondering whether that may be part of the point. What's odd about the film is that the gore doesn't seem real somehow, and I wonder, again, whether it's deliberate. There are a couple of throat slashings in Eastern Promises that look like they came right out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film -- in other words, patently, stupidly, fake -- and then there's the eyeball-stabbing scene, which results in a rather chaste (and cinematically classic) pool of blood growing underneath the victim's body. (The way the throat cuttings are shot -- front, center, and very slowly -- don't help but foreground their artificiality.)

Contrast this with the oeuvre of another North American director who makes "serious" films but similarly traffics in gore -- see Casino, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York -- and you'll see what I mean; Scorsese clearly enjoys this stuff, and makes sure to pummel us with its nauseating realism. Compare this again with Cronenberg's earlier splatter-filled work in Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Scanners; despite their horror / fantasy-based context, the scenes of violence in those films are excruciatingly detailed.

But more instructively, compare the odd fakery of Eastern Promises to A History of Violence, which is itself bookended by a kind of staging of the fake: the wholesomeness of Small Town America that, upon a second viewing, takes on a surreality that borders on Blue Velvet; the John Woo-stylings of the cartoonish bloodbath at the end. Eastern Promises also seems set in a London that (deliberately?) doesn't look like the moviegoer's London (but probably familiar to its residents); the fact that the film is populated by a cast and crew (Cronenberg, Mortensen, Watts, Cassel, Mueller-Stahl, Cusack) that seems like they're from pretty much everywhere *except* Russia or London -- well, I don't know where this is going. Maybe some grad student can figure this out.

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I've never been particularly taken with concert films: they inevitably pale in comparison to the experience of being at a live venue, and the cinematography usually runs the gamut from queasy oblique shots to cameras zooming in and out while sitting on tripods. Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever sidesteps the usual cliches for a largely impressionistic and immersive experience into MONO's European tour and on stage.

Instead of the usual shots of the musicians setting up their gear (or generally static shots of the lead singer, interspersed with shots of the lead guitarist as she or he goes into the solo), Kishida's fluid camera swoops unobtrusively over the proceedings, lingering over the tangles of wires on scuffed floors, the blur of the hi-hat, the top of the guitarists' heads as they hunch over their guitars. (MONO is an instrumental band, which naturally diffuses any focus on any single member of the band.) Perhaps most interesting (at least from a cinematic point of view) is the way the director pointedly includes the audience in the film during the performances: people drumming on the monitors, a couple swaying with their eyes closed -- an acknowledgment, perhaps, that they matter just as much as the music itself.

But this is all at the expense of any kind of insight into the Japanese post-rock quartet's impenetrable (or completely opaque, depending on your views) music: we vaguely hear interviewers asking questions on a voiceover track, but they aren't exactly answered. There's an inconsequential piece of footage with Steve Albini at the mixing desk, and another short scene while they rehearse with a string section, but there's nothing else about the creation of the music. The hyperbole on the MONO website doesn't exactly deliver, and maybe that's a good thing. The suitably moody, beautifully shot scenes of wintry landscapes, the sun's glare through leaves, freeways through rain-spangled windshields perhaps illustrate the emotional pull of their music best.

I realize that the words "for fans only" sounds like I'm panning the film, but it won't necessarily make a convert of the casual listener; the best way to do that is to take your friend for a drive outside of the city and put "Yearning" on really loud. In the end, the viewer gets what should have been promised in the first place: a solid and fascinatingly filmed visual souvenir of their concerts. Everything is thrillingly here: the ritualistic swaying, Taka's wall-of-sound freakouts, the 10-minute monolith of pure feedback in the middle of "Lost Snow."

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.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #5.

Abbas Kiarostami's Five and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times.

There isn't a single boring moment in Abbas Kiarostami's Five, but it's difficult to convince people of this when the "protagonists" of the film are, in order of appearance, a piece of driftwood, the crashing surf and a railing, sunbathing dogs silhouetted against a glaringly bright sea, a platoon of ducks walking one way and then the other, and finally, the moon reflected in a pond just before a rainstorm. (After giving her this synopsis, my friend Jane paused for a beat, then said, "You really need to start dating again.")

I write "in order of appearance" because this merely pertains to the visual elements of the film; the sounds of waves crashing and frogs croaking are as essential to the comprehension of the movie as what the audience sees. (In short, the film enacts a re-privileging of the sense of hearing, which perpetually plays second fiddle to the gaze. If people talk about sound in cinema nowadays it's always about THX vs Dolby Digital.)

Five's secondary title is "5 Long Takes Dedicated To Ozu", but I haven't seen enough Ozu to see the similarities, I'm afraid (and I'm not familiar with the whole transcendentalism thing either). And I won't attempt to philosophize over the meaning of the piece of wood being buffeted by waves and the odd dramatic tension when it disappears from the camera and returns, a few minutes later, already (tragically?) swept out to sea. Or the ducks, intent on waddling to a destination off-screen, only to return en masse to the other direction.

It's a little easier to write about particular segments and how they work. My favorite is the fifth: a barely visible reflection of the full moon on a pond, with an oppressively loud chorus of frogs (and a lone barking dog, followed later by crowing roosters) croaking on cue. The otherwise perfect circle of the moon is stretched, sliced, and chopped by the ripples on the water; it's hard not to think of the instability of light and chemicals on celluloid in this scene. Sometimes the turbulence, and clouds across the moon, render the light into a milky gray. When the rain comes down, only the intermittent lightning on raindrops is left to illuminate the scene. It's an impressive aesthetic minimalism -- cinema literally reduced to nothing but sound and flicker -- and all the more conceptually interesting in its technology because Kiarostami relies only on the vicissitudes of nature to prove his point.

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And (in keeping with the blog entry title), a few hastily-scribbled notes (to J-Lu, on e-mail) on Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw perhaps two years ago, and little of which I remember. The film could be seen as a kind of career retrospective, that is, the three segments clearly refer to Hou's own cinematic arcs, in terms of style. An exercise, perhaps, in seeing whether he could film three phases of his career in miniature: A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Flowers of Shanghai, and Millennium Mambo. (Like any good band, Hou has three distinct periods, and here he charts three moments in a century of Taiwan history.)

The first part, set in the mid-'60s, was oddly straightforward (I didn't expect anything so narratively pat, if a little less linear) but also just gorgeous, the second I'd quite frankly seen before in Flowers of Shanghai, right down to Lee Ping-Bin's cinematography (though radically changed here by the fact that intertitles are substituted for dialogue), and the third... well, Shu Qi is a babe and a half (and a quick Google Image search for "Hsu Chi" will result in all of her NSFW softcore pics prior to becoming Hou's cinematic muse), but even her presence can't carry the aimlessness of the segment. But lesser Hou is better than most anything out there; the first segment alone, featuring the most rapturously beautiful shots of beautiful people playing pool, is well worth watching.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #4.

In Ten, Abbas Kiarostami provides the viewer with the most spartan of setups: one car, one woman, two camera angles, ten dialogues. We -- by way of the lone camera mounted on the dashboard -- follow a beautiful divorcee driving in a car. She picks up ten passengers, one after the other, in ten different vignettes -- a prostitute, a jilted friend, her sister, a stranger on her way to a mausoleum, and her precocious, frighteningly articulate son -- and takes the audience along for a ride through the streets of Tehran.

The shallowest thing to appreciate about the film (too superficial an observation, really) is that it gives voices to people not usually heard from. It's also a valuable corrective to the recent emergence of civilizing discourse about Iran -- "They drive cars in Iran??" and the like. But there is no easy female identification to fall back on, even if their concerns sometimes seem to coincide with those of Marin County housewives.

There is much to admire about the compactness of Kiarostami's formal rigor; it's like Flowers of Shanghai in an economy car. Actually, the Hou reference isn't entirely inappropriate, because the vehicle slips easily into its role as the, um, driving metaphor for the film: women similarly imprisoned in the confines of their surroundings while the world swirls around them. At least in Ten there's a dusty windshield that lets you look outside.

But the dialogues themselves are not necessarily meaningful; they are just steeped in the ordinary, which is just fine by me. Much of the film depends on the fascination inherent (at least for me) in hearing the thrusts and parries of arguments, or in seeing how the more passive labors of driving and riding almost naturally elicits talk. Lots of talk. It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most weighted (and, at the same time, most banal) conversations were not about a sisterly solidarity, but between the mother and her pre-adolescent son, the only male physically present in the film: a seemingly endless, circumlocutory series of bickering that echoes the tangled, but not aimless, driving through the Tehran traffic.

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Not much to say about Greg Mottola's Superbad, which stars one of the funniest comic trios I've seen in a while, trying to lose their virginities before they go off to college. The casting is just perfect: Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the hapless "McLovin", Jonah Hill (who looks like a young Chris Penn), and Michael Cera (who is excellent as George-Michael Bluth in "Arrested Development"), plus more dick jokes than you can shake a stick at. It's the latest film in a series of vaguely sweet and romance-affirming but generally raunchy sex comedies to which guys can take their girl dates -- kind of like couples-porn for the multiplexes, if there were such a thing.

Because of all the vulgarities, Superbad is obviously meant as a big filmic nose-thumbing, but it pulls off something slightly more subversive: it's really a tribute to the kind of affection straight dudes have for each other. You might as well see it because your annoying coworker will be talking about "the funny thing about my back" for a while.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #3.

There's nothing like a sci-fi film in space: the impossibility of giant tin cans floating in the void and the people stuck in them. Danny Boyle's Sunshine is the latest addition to the genre. It's a visually stunning film, first of all: spaceship interiors floodlit and bleached orange by the sun, golden shields rotating in space, creepy subliminal flashes, plus a damn good-looking cast (Michelle Yeoh! Rose Byrne! Cillian Murphy!). The sun is apparently dying, and an intrepid (of course they're intrepid) multicultural (of course they're multicultural) team of astronauts are burdened with dreams of the apocalypse (of course they're burdened with dreams of the apocalypse) and a bomb the size of Manhattan, which they plan to drop on the sun to create a new star. (My students, who apparently know better, told me it wouldn't work.) Alas, all this agreeable tension gets ejected into space after the introduction of a total wild card in the third act, which subsequently turns the film into something it shouldn't be. (Plus you don't put Michelle Yeoh in a film and not have her kick some ass.)

Jaume Balagueró's Fragile is a more than competent horror film with the requisite elements: a creaky children's hospital with a boarded-up second floor, ailing children who see things, and the tough heroine with the fragile exterior. The said protagonist happens to be Calista Flockhart minus the short skirts, and she plays the replacement night nurse -- her predecessor got spooked and left -- who then witnesses what the kids repeatedly warned her about. Fairly gripping and atmospheric all in all, though marred by an ending that seemed too much of a Street Fighter-like showdown.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other #2.

There's no meat in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later -- well, there's a lot of it, actually (chewed up, mangled by helicopter blade, torn to shreds by machine gun fire, incinerated by flame thrower) but the stripped-down narrative is strictly about getting people from Point A to Point B and wondering which member of the team gets eaten alive in the process. I think I'm all alone in giving this a must-see recommendation (fans and critics both hated it, probably because it jettisons the political allegory of Danny Boyle's first film), but the action sequences have an appealing, telegraphic visual style to them that reminds me of the ending of Richard Linklater's Slacker: throw a running camera in the air and see what gets caught on film.

Auraeus Solito's Tuli is a disappointment coming after the heels of his brilliant debut Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros. But it's a very good sophomore slump nonetheless: a town circumciser (played by Bembol Roco, who I haven't seen on the big screen in ages), his daughter, and her best friend, and the relationship between the three. (The copy I saw at the SF Film Fest, probably not really meant to be projected on a huge screen, was in not-so-great DV.) The screenplay is a little schematic in the way it sets up indigenous traditions versus Catholic practices (and the enforcement of morality wielded by the latter) -- quite in contrast to the slowly-unfolding, delicious ambiguities of Solito's first film.

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other #1.

I stopped calling movies slow a long time ago, but Ato Bautista's Blackout is sloooow. A psychological thriller about an alcoholic landlord (nicely played by Robin Padilla, complete with greasy hair and ugly glasses) prone to blackouts, the film could use faster pacing to communicate the main character's rising panic -- either that, or the turgidity is meant to represent Padilla's alcohol-addled mind. In any case, it's a bit of a slog, and Bautista squanders the opportunity to mess with the audience's heads: there's some promising scenery-fiddling early in the film that I thought would lead to a good "Can You Spot the Difference?" game, but unfortunately not. Instead we get a more conventional "Is This Alcoholic Delirium, Or Is This Really Happening?"

Lee Yoon-Ki's Ad Lib Night was easily the best film I'd seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival (after Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth). It's a rather moving character study, but I was caught off guard by the initial almost-comic premise: a young woman is stopped in the street by two strange men who ask her to do a favor -- pretend to be the estranged daughter of an old man at his deathbed. Surprisingly, she agrees, and off the film goes, as it segues imperceptibly from an emphasis on the impenetrable protagonist to the harder work of familial mourning and squabbling.

Random Movie-Related Stuff.

1. No time to write a real write-up, but Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse is up there with Bong Joon-ho's The Host (and Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence) as one of my favorites this year so far.

(And in case anyone wanted to know: QT's was better than RR's. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that Eli Roth's "preview" for Thanksgiving was better than Planet Terror. And indeed I'll go out on another limb and say that Death Proof is probably Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. It's a structural marvel, plus Tarantino lets his characters simply luxuriate in the pleasures of the rhythm of simple conversation. Words, speed and metal -- yeah.)

2. Great roundtable in the L.A. Weekly -- though it's mostly Tarantino yapping -- between various grindhouse auteurs.

I love the shout-out at the end to The Siege of Firebase Gloria, on which a cousin of mine was a producer; that was also when I found myself sitting at my kitchen table with R. Lee Ermey!

3. Reading the latest issue of Cinema Scope. The Rotterdam film fest has all the Filipino films I want to see! (We in SF have only one, and it's not the ones at Rotterdam. It's the latest Auraeus Solito film though.)

4. Plus two missed cinema-related opportunities just about a month ago:

I was out of town (in Austin for the weekend), so I totally missed the Apichatpong Weerasethakul fest in Berkeley, which comprised a showing of his latest film and a shot-by-shot director commentary accompanying Tropical Malady. If that wasn't bad enough, an email arrives on Thursday, inviting me to a small reception for the director. Drat. At least I can console myself with my last moment of director-fanboy interaction a couple of months ago, i.e., holding the bathroom door open for Bong Joon-Ho and stammering about how much I enjoyed Memories of Murder, and he smiled and said "thanks" and ran in, clearly needing to use the facilities.

So back to Austin: I step off the plane and to the Advantage car rental counter and the clerks there (all women) are all excited about something.

Me: What's going on?
Clerk: Oh -- you should have been here ten minutes ago!
Me: What do you mean?
Clerk: Just ten minutes ago, Rosario Dawson was standing right where you are.
Me: Are you serious?
Clerk: Yes, she just left! She was soooo nice.
Other clerk [in a whisper]: And she was stacked.

I figure I would have stammered about how much I enjoyed watching her in Clerks 2, and she would have smiled and said "thanks" and ran off to get her car anyway.

5. Saw Samuel Fuller's White Dog on the big screen. (For those of you who don't know it, it's Fuller's unreleased movie about a German shepherd specifically trained to attack black people.) I still don't know what to make of it -- a somewhat ham-fisted if certainly original attempt to address racism (though movies like Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon were much worse), terrible acting from Kristy McNichol, dialogue (co-written by Curtis Hanson) that's really unable to transcend its pulpy origins -- but there's something about the movie that gets under your skin. (This mainly has to do with the anti-racist dog de-trainer played by Paul Winfield, whose nobility of intentions places him on the continuum of Noble African American Men of Hollywood, but it's a compelling role nonetheless.)

6. Takeshi Furusawa's Ghost Train: sorry -- just dull all around.

7. Hirokazu Kore-eda's superb Hana is that rarest of things: a samurai comedy. Junichi Okada from V6 has sworn to avenge the death