Archive for March, 2009
No Regrets: San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, part two
Xun Zhou abuses her lungs, The Equation of Love and Death, 2008
I’m sick as a dog this week with a pernicious chest cold and I blame it all on the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. I’d just started recovering from version one of this malaise when the Film Fest started last Thursday. But I had so much fun at the Opening Night party, the screenings, the receptions and the afterparties that I made myself thoroughly ill again. So now I’ve got version two, with a hacking cough that won’t go away. I’m chugging Wal-Tussin straight from the bottle and using up all of my Tiger Balm to try to get some sleep at night. But I’ve got no regrets, even when I’m coughing uncontrollably at three in the morning.
The SFIAAFF was especially good this year, with an embarrassment of riches of Asian American and international features, documentaries and shorts. I previewed several programs before the festival but I also went to see a bunch during the festival itself. It’s a testament to the depth and quality of the programming that the festival could only find a slot at noon on Saturday for an excellent film like Cao Baoping’s The Equation of Love and Death, starring chain-smoking A-list Chinese actress Xun Zhou, which in other years or at other festivals might have been an Opening Night movie. It’s equally telling that the screening at the cavernous Castro Theater was crowded with viewers despite its off-hour scheduling. It was like that for every show that I went to, including a Wednesday night short film program, the romantically inclined It’s Easy Because You’re Beautiful, which included Object Loss, A. Moon’s excellent, wistfully sad meditation on adoption, loss and patterns of behavior, as well as several slick Korean shorts that played like miniature versions of Coffee Prince.
Anushka Sharma & Shak Rukh Khan get down, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, 2008
I also had the pleasure of experiencing my very first Shah Rukh Khan film, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, which has made me a fervent fan of the sexy and charismatic King of Bollywood. I’m a sucker for men who can dance and Shah Rukh Khan brings it on that count in spades.
The parties, social events, and casual meet-ups with old friends make up the other half of the festival and they were especially fun this year–sometimes the SFIAAFF feels like one big frenetic Asian American filmmaking convention. I talked to a half-dozen people who had specifically planned their vacations around attending the festival, including journalist, author and muckracker Pratap Chatterjee, who showed me his string of tickets to about two dozen festival shows.
Trending
I also noticed the latest trend in headgear for fans of Asian American cinema. Everywhere I went there were stylin’ dudes sporting porkpie hats—at one party I counted twelve wearers of this little topper, including two of the bartenders.
Queues and toppers, San Francisco Chinatown, Arnold Genthe, 1895
Of course porkpies and other fashionable hatwear go way back in Asian American history. Turn-of-the-century San Francisco Chinatown was full of men in queues and felted hats.
Carlos Bulosan, fashion plate
Famed Pinoy author and poet Carlos Bulosan often wore a tasteful fedora in his publicity stills, and the porkpie was favored by other manongs as well.
Kaba hat, 2008
And Kaba Modern brought the porkpie to last year’s edition of America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV.
Tad Nakamura and Kevin Lim, porkpiers
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the porkpie has found favor in the Asian American scene. Here’s a couple natty porkpie wearers at the festival.
Mas porkpie, Temple Nightclub, SFIAAFF Closing Night Party, 2009
And here’s the picture I wished I’d taken that I cribbed from the festival’s Best Photo contest website.
So I’m laid up with a cold this week, rewatching my collection of Francis Ng dvds and trying to keep up with my responsibilities like feeding my children and editing my film. But even though I overdid it, the festival only comes around once a year and I’m glad to have been able to participate in such an excellent, significant event. As someone once observed, Chuck D. claimed that rap music is the CNN of the black community and filmmaking has become the Asian American equivalent. Maybe it’s because it’s a little less scary for Asian American parents if their kids want to make movies instead of, say, becoming performance artists or abstract painters, but the Asian American film community is alive and kicking and the SFIAAFF’s continued health and well-being is a testament to that fact. Here’s hoping it continues to successfully channel our cinematic glories for many more years to come.
Update: Xun Zhou just won Best Actress at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, for The Equation of Love and Death.
Get It While It’s Hot: The 2009 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
Hee Yeon Kim and Song Hee, Treeless Mountain, 2009
The 2009 version of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival starts next week (March 12) and runs until March 22 in San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose. Herein follows some of the movies I previewed from the festival, which is in its 27th year and will include 108 films in its ten-day run. The SFIAAFF is the biggest and one of the oldest of its type and kicks off the season for Asian American festivals around the country. Even if you don’t see something you like described below there are plenty of other treats to be had—go to the SFIAAFF website for more details. And buy your tickets early—shows sell out fast and some of these movies will never have another theatrical screening in the Bay Area again.
Ha Jung-Woo and Jeon Do-Yeon duke it out, My Dear Enemy, 200
My Dear Enemy, Lee Yoon-Ki
Powered by a charming, engaging performance by the talented Ha Jung-Woo, who may be becoming one of my favorite actors, this romantic drama follows two former lovers as they travel the streets of Seoul trying to settle a debt. Ha plays a ne’er-do-well ladies man and unemployed gambler whose fed-up ex-girlfriend (Jeon Do-Yeon, recent Best Actress winner at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival) finds him at the racetrack and demands repayment of a loan she’d made him before their breakup. The film skips lightly from one situation to the next, along the way commenting on life, relationships, intimacy, and dreams. One memorable scene features a newlywed couple whose husband is obsessed with his wife’s past lovers; another takes place at a barbeque party with a Korean motorcycle club. Throughout the film Ha and Jeon maintain a wary relationship with each other, trying to resist falling into old patterns while keeping from strangling each other.
Kim Yoon-Suk has a rough night, The Chaser, 2008The Chaser, Na Hong-Jin
A Korean movie of a completely different sort than My Dear Enemy, The Chaser also starts the versatile and charismatic Ha Jung-Woo, this time as a psychotic serial killer on the loose in Seoul. Brutally violent, with a touch of horror film layered on its crime-drama scenario, the film is a cat-and-mouse game between Ha’s nasty murderer and Kim Yoon-Suk’s world-weary pimp. The film features some gorgeous night-photography and good performances from its two lead actors but with a bit too much fetishized violence even for me, as well as too much psychosexual posturing, The Chaser doesn’t manage to transcend its genre into greatness.
Balmy Alley, Fruit Fly, 2009
Fruit Fly, HP Mendoza
Mendoza’s follow-up to the divine Colma: The Musical, and his directorial debut, Fruit Fly follows the story of Bethesda, a nice Filipina performance artist from Maryland (duh) who’s looking for her biological parents. Set amongst San Francisco’s queer boho crowd, the film lacks Colma’s poignancy and sympathetic characters, as well as Colma director Richard Wong’s cinematic flair. Fruit Fly makes good use of its San Francisco setting, including scenes in Balmy Alley, Dolores Park and various other real-life, non-touristy locations, and it has a great title sequence and nice graphics throughout, but it doesn’t quite have the urgency of Colma’s coming-of-age story, with Bethesda’s search for her birth mother shunted to the side in favor of backstage antics involving a vain magician and a few too many musical numbers with the quirky patrons of a gay bar.
David Choe, insane, Dirty Hands, 2009
Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe, Harry Kim
A lively and comprehensive portrait of batshit-crazy bad-boy Korean American artist David Choe, Dirty Hands follows Choe from his beginnings as a grafitti artist and tagger in Los Angeles to his current status as a blue-chip gallery artist. Choe is an insane mo-fo, but in a productive, creative way, channeling his self-described kleptomaniac, sex-addict, bipolar, OCD personality into a highly successful career as an illustrator and painter. Choe energetically narrates his own story, describing his experiences as an illustrator for porn magazines, his stint in a Japanese jail (for punching a plain-clothes cop), his discovery of and subsequent disillusionment with God, and his various trips to the Congo and other non-industrialized parts of the world. The doc goes easy on its wacky subject, skimming over the misogyny and messed-up violence in Choe’s art in favor of portraying him as a happy lunatic, but it’s a compelling portrait nonetheless. We also meet his long-suffering girlfriend, his family, and his friends, all of whom think Choe is the best thing since sliced bread. The focus is a bit too Giant Robot-hipster-Asiaphile-friendly to be a truly great film but it does a good job of capturing Choe’s insane outlook on life. As he succinctly notes, “If I’m normal in real life it fucks up my art.”
Que paso? Nuevo Dragon City, 2008
The Secret Lives Of Urban Space
This program of short films includes a couple intriguing selections. Sergio de la Torre’s Nuevo Dragon City focuses on a group of Mexican Chinese teens who gradually barricade themselves in an appliance store. Shot without dialog with beautiful cinematography, their mysterious actions lead to serenity. No answers are given for their inexplicable acts but the imagery is lovely and the mood is profound.
Chris Chong’s Block B is a single static long shot of a high-rise housing project in Malaysia, moving from darkness to daylight and back through to night. The film’s bare-bones structure forces the viewer to focus on small mundanities during its twenty-minute running time—a woman drops a piece of laundry from a balcony and it flutters down the side of the building. Children run from one side of the frame to the other. Conversations in Malay emerge and retreat. At some point fireworks go off. Though some might find it incomprehesible, the film is beautiful and intriguing and truly challenges the way that we are accustomed to watching the moving image.
Two good kid actors, Children of Invention, 2008
Children of Invention, Tse Chun; Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim
One of two “recession dramas” that I previewed, this engaging film looks at the tribulations of a Chinese American family in Boston falling through the cracks of the economic crisis. A single mom with two young kids gets caught up in “multi-level marketing,” a fancy name for a pyramid scheme that preys on immigrants and poor people. After mom gets thrown in jail as a material witness, the two kids are forced to fend for themselves. As the Top Ramen runs out and no adults are in sight, what will happen to our young protagonists? The movie has good, non-cloying performances by its two kid actors, following their fate in a realistic, unsentimental way.
A similar fate faces the two kids in the second recession drama, Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim’s follow-up to her subtle and intriguing debut film In Between Days. Set in South Korea, the film follows two young sisters whose mother leaves them with an alcoholic auntie when she can no longer support them. Said auntie turns out to be an indifferent caretaker and the girls eventually end up catching, roasting and selling grasshoppers to local schoolkids to assuage their hunger and to make ends meet. Then things really start to go downhill. The movie is grim and beautiful, with an observational style that never veers into melodrama or histrionics, and its conclusion demonstrates the redemption of small kindnesses in the face of hardship.
The late, great Chris Iijima, A Song For Ourselves, 2009
A Song For Ourselves, Tad Nakamura
This short documentary centers on Chris Iijima, the seminal sansei musician who, along with Charlie Chin and Nobu Miyamoto, recorded A Grain of Sand, one of the most significant albums from the 1970s Asian American movement. Layered and emotional, the film looks at Iijima’s community activism, his music, and his later career as a lawyer and professor in Hawaii until his untimely death in 2005. Nakamura follows up on the promise of his earlier docs, Yellow Brotherhood and Pilgrimage, investigating the ties of family, friends, community, and creativity in a moving, resounding portrait of a singular personality.
Lam Yiu-Sing, future idol? High Noon, 2008
High Noon, Heiward Mak
24-year-old Heiward Mak brings it in her debut feature that follows a group of teenage Hong Kong schoolboys as they do drugs, chase girls, fight, eat and get into trouble. Shot on video, with frenetic computer graphics, the movie nicely captures the disposable lifestyle of post-millennial youth. The movie gets bonus points for featuring a sex scandal spread virally via cellphones (the internet is so five years ago). As the characters’ mischief escalates into more serious business, Mak’s strong visual sense and her sure direction of her peers makes the film a quintessential look at teenagers slamming up against their own mortality. Interestingly, Mak almost won the Hong Kong Film Critics Society’s 2008 Best Director award for this flick, nearly upsetting 30-year-veteran Ann Hui for the distinction. Side note: As I watched the movie I couldn’t help wondering which of the cute boys would be picked for this year’s idol status by the relentless Hong Kong media machine. Probably the dreamy one with the orange hair, though lead actor Lam Yiu-Sing has a quiet charm as well.
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