Audiences, Surprised and Surprising

As a person who works in a museum, I found last night's episode of Project Runway (which, yes, I watch) pretty intriguing. The designers were sent to the Getty Museum to be inspired by its collection. Their choices - which were, for the most part, things I would probably ignore - were surprising. One chose an ornate 18th Century bed, another picked a sort of boring painting that interested them because of the diaphanous fabric on one of the figures. Another chose a fountain, and another chose the building itself. It reminded me of how educational it can be to look at a museum through someone else's eyes.

It also for some reason reminded me of the time I saw Brillante Mendoza's film Serbis at the Pusan film festival last year. In the audience in front of me were a group of well-scrubbed American guys and Korean women on some kind of group date. The thing is that Serbis is that it's full of squalor, nudity and explicit sex between people of the same and opposite sexes, sometimes with a goat in the room. In other words, not exactly a date movie.

When it was over I ended up riding the elevator with the group of daters, and I found their reactions fascinating. It had obviously taken them by surprise and made them uncomfortable, so at first there was a lot of nervous laughter and joking, but as they discussed it, they began to see why Mendoza did what he did, and ultimately agreed that the film had to be as raw and shocking as it was, that its explicit nature was integral to the points Mendoza was making about the lives of the Philippines' poor. They created their own educational experience.

Which got me to thinking about Lars Von Trier. I haven't seen any of his movies in years because The Five Obstructions made me despise him. But I wonder if anyone's gone on a date to see Antichrist, and if so, what did they learn?

Versus/Onion Interview

Here is an interview with me in the Onion AV Club about our screening last week of Versus. Watching it again, I noticed a whole bunch of awesome things I had forgotten about, not least of which was Kitamura's bizarre notion of narrative structure: There is virtually no plot until the second half of the film, when the bad guy enters with a delivery of exposition. Then it gets right back to the interdimensional zombie/yakuza fighting.

Kitamura's innovation struck me the next night, when I made the mistake of watching The Fast and the Furious 4: Fast and Furious, which is supposed to be about car chases, but contains far too few of those, opting instead for endless, lengthy dialogue scenes that contain nothing but exposition. For a movie like that, how much do you need, really?

Contrarianism-ism

I'm fully aware that Slate's bread and butter is, along with explaining things, a peculiar brand of tepid, middle-brow contrarianism. I sometimes think their writer's guidelines consist entirely of: "Pick a thing, then disagree with it a little bit." So when someone pointed me to this article by Grady Hendrix about Chinese cinema, my first reaction was along the lines of "meh." But the more I thought about it the more its biases bugged me, so here we go.

I should state at the outset that I personally like Grady, who is a quick-witted and funny guy, but I'm starting to think that he drank a little too much of the Variety Kool-Aid when he was on their payroll, which is clear from the very first sentence of his Slate piece: "The traditional path for Chinese directors was to make art films in China, get acclaimed at overseas festivals, be banned once or twice at home, and then be permitted to become art-house darlings in America."

This is the jaded Variety position in a nutshell: Serious art films are a bogus racket, just like Hollywood, but at least Hollywood is honest about its base motives. For many a Variety critic(except for the ones who actually like movies), the idea that someone would make art for art's sake is laughable. All anyone wants to do is make money. Hendrix's second sentence clinches it: "If they were good boys, they might even get a Hollywood deal." He then goes on to lump Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke - four filmmakers whose work and relationships with the authorities in China are far more complex and disparate than he lets on - into his category of Hollywood aspirants, before claiming that the blockbusters that actual Chinese audiences enjoy are "better" than than the art house films that succeed overseas.

I'm not going to go into much more detail. The whole article reads like the editorial philosophies of Variety and Slate had a very ugly baby together, and it's clear that Hendrix is more interested in raising hackles than in accuracy or intellectual honesty. Which is fine. And some of the movies he mentions to bolster his thesis do deserve a wider audience, although he does himself no favors by praising Feng Xiaogang's Cell Phone: just because a movie stirs up controversy doesn't mean it's any good.

I suppose the best way to refute his argument is by analogy. Imagine a writer in another country denigrating the work of our more adventurous independent filmmakers because real Americans are into "better" movies like Tranformers 2. (Speaking of which, check out this hilarious review from Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian. Now that's how you take a director down!)

Chinese Films Withdrawn from Melbourne

Jia Zhangke and two other directors have withdrawn their films from the Melbourne International Film Festival because of the festival's decision to include a documentary on Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. dGenerate Films has posted a translation of Jia's official statement on the matter, and Richard Brody provides some context.

The End of Oshima

I have to wonder if, when he made Gohatto, Oshima knew it would be his last film, because its final image - of Takeshi Kitano hacking down a cherry blossom tree - so perfectly distils his lifelong rebellion against all things traditionally Japanese.

Although the retrospective continues for a couple more weeks at the AFI Silver, Gohatto was the last screening at the Freer, and its ending was even more appropriate, since it took place smack-dab in the middle of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.

For Further Research: Oshima and Math

It occurred to me after seeing both Three Resurrected Drunkards and Sing a Song of Sex this weekend, that the plots of both revolve around numerical imbalances. The eponymous three drunkards in the first film keep running into problems because there are only two Korean spies trying to switch identities with them, which in the other, the four male students are chasing after three female students (and a fourth who is unattainable.)

I'm sure there is a screenwriting manual somewhere that advises that imbalance is what sets plot in motion, but I've never seen this put into practice to mathematically before. Unless I'm totally wrong.

Watching Three Resurrected Drunkards with Two or Three Minds

About halfway through watching Three Resurrected Drunkards I began to wonder if it was the right choice for the opening film of the Nagisa Oshima retrospective. This is because, at that point in the film (which is already deliberately, provocatively nonsensical), Oshima essentially pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet with a structural gag that, without revealing too much, goes on for a while and, to the inattentive observer, could appear to be a projection error.

I was sitting in the back of the theater, and after a couple of minutes people began making their way back to tell me there was a problem. I had to repeatedly reassure them that what was going on was intentional. Some of them became desperate. “How long is it going to go on?!” shouted one distraught soul. “Why is he doing this?!” agonized another. More than a handful of other people didn’t bother complaining and simply walked out, probably convinced that they never need to see another Oshima film. I began to fret and wonder if I shouldn’t have opened with something easier to digest. Washington audiences, more, I’ve noticed, than audiences in some other cities, crave certainty, and they were clearly not going to get it from this film. I began to dread the comments I would have to face in the lobby later.

Things settled down when it became clear what Oshima was doing, and afterwards the comments were actually mostly positive. A Korean friend thought his treatment of Korean-Japanese relations was quite brilliant. Others made connections to Godard and Hard Days Night, and appreciated the political use Oshima’s radical aesthetic experimentation was put to.

After it was all over and I had some time to think, I realized that I had been watching the movie with too much of my film programmer mind engaged – I was too worried that Oshima’s project of challenging the audience was too alienating, that people weren’t ready for it, when I should have been appreciating his cantankerous audacity. Because, as a film fan, I loved it, kind of in the way the masochist loves the pain of the slap. Oshima had created an extra-cinematic experience, forced people to question what they were seeing, caused some of them to make the decision to get out of their seats in anger and confusion to seek answers.

So I changed my mind. Three Resurrected Drunkards was the perfect opening film. Now those who can take it know what they’re in for, and the timid can stay away.