Tom Vick: Asian Cinema Plus

Two New Pieces on Korean Cinema

2012-02-05T10:42:00.003-05:00

I have two new articles out on the interwebs:

Turn, Turn, Turn: The Seasons of Korean Cinema, in Bright Lights Film Journal

Korean Cinema 2011: The View from Here, in Korean Cinema Today.

Enjoy.

Crepuscule Junction

2011-12-04T17:02:00.001-05:00

My short story, "Crepuscule Junction" is available in Underground Voices' annual anthology, Hotel Oblivion. It's only available in print, so buy it (please).

Dubstep

2011-11-06T11:21:00.002-05:00

Funny that there is a form of dancing that mimicking the artificial motion of slow motion and freeze frames, and it is so convincing that when filmed, you can't tell if it's real or not.

Karin Chien on Independent Chinese Cinema

2011-11-04T11:07:00.004-04:00

A while ago I was talking to a Chinese filmmaker about a Chinese film (not his) that I found lacking. Its style (slow, contemplative) somehow didn’t match its subject matter, draining it of the power it should have had. My interlocutor’s position was that China’s increasing wealth has rendered a significant number of its artists complacent. Their films now lack commitment and energy.

But there is a sector of Chinese cinema where energy and commitment still hold sway, as this essay by dGenerate Films founder Karin Chien proves. Chien, who used to produce American indies, chides American filmmakers for putting business considerations before artistic ones, for spending more time lining up financing and marketing than on the content of their work. Independent Chinese filmmakers, on the other hand, proceed from the opposite side. They don’t expect to make much money, but they are passionate about getting their stories out, and are willing to work underground to do it. In other words, they work like there’s something at stake. It’s a provocative read, and well worth checking out. (Image, by the way, from Huang Weikai's excellent Disorder.)

Taking Chances: The Busan International Film Festival 2011

2011-10-16T16:36:00.003-04:00

Busan (formerly Pusan) is probably the most intense stop on my festival circuit. There’s too much of everything: too many movies, too many meetings, too many friends to catch up with that I only see once or twice a year. In years past this tended to stress me out, but this year I resolved to keep calm and suck it all up like the raw shrimp a mischievous old lady served me in her food stall by the beach one night.

Much of the coverage of the 16th edition of the festival was about the changes - a new name, a new director, a splashy new festival center (pitched to do for Busan what Frank Gehry did for Bilbao), the relocation of most activities from lovely beachside Haeundae to corporate, anonymous Centum City – but the films are the real point. Read on for my take.

My main focus this year was the new Korean films, and I was pleased to see several directors playing with form in interesting ways. The granddaddy of Korean narrative gamesmanship is, of course, Hong Sang-soo, and if The Day He Arrives failed, for me, to live up to his last two films, or its sublime trailer, a pretty good Hong film is better than nothing. Speaking of whom, the catalogue description of Lee Kwang-kuk’s Romance Joe tied itself in knots simultaneously arguing that it was and wasn’t overly influenced by Hong’s work, which actually turns out to be true. The film’s narrative tricks, involving tales within tales, recall Hong, but Lee’s sense of humor is all his own, and, as the conclusion make clear, Lewis Carroll was at least as much on his mind.

Lee wasn’t the only one taking risks. Park Hong-min’s A Fish was both smart an haunting, luring you in one direction before pulling you into a beguiling story involving shamanism and lost souls. Jeon Kyu-hwan’s From Seoul to Varanasi and Roh Gyeong-tae’s Black Dove were both raw, sexually explicit dramas that may have tried a bit too hard. In Jeon’s case, an involving story of emotional violence veered into a terrorism plot that felt a bit forced. Roh’s at times very powerful investigation of guilt and sorrow in the aftermath of a fatal hit-and-run accident was marred by some unfortunate dream sequences that looked like they came from a bad music video, and an unnecessary twist that robbed the ending of some of its impact.

While the positives outweighed the negatives in both of those films, the same could not be said of Kim Sung-hoon’s Ryang-kang-do: Merry Christmas, North, a noxious and poorly made propaganda piece that was all too symptomatic of depressing rightward turn in Korean politics recently. Its sins were balanced, however, by a much more honest political work, Kim Joong-hyun’s student film(!) Choked, which chronicled a family’s spiral into financial ruin thanks to an economy that encourages even the poor to take on massive debt to get ahead.

While I normally try to get in a lot of the Korean Retrospective films, I only saw one from this year’s subject, Kim Kee-duk, who struck me as a solid craftsman, but hardly the revelation that previous honorees like Shin Sang-ok, Kim Ki-young and Lee Man-hee proved to be. But then again talents like that are rare in any country. The festival also honored Hong Kong director Yonfan, whose Hitchcock homage Double Fixation was a perfect slice of entertaining cheese starring my new crush object, Cherie Chung, who remained unspeakably sexy even in a succession of hideous 80s outfits.

The film of the festival for me, though, came from Thailand. Kongdei Jaturanrasmee’s P-047 starts with a shot that plays with offscreen space in ways not seen since Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance, and features a compelling enough premise: two guys break into people’s homes not to rob them but to borrow their lives for a few hours (and then put everything back where they found it). But it soon moves into more and more mystical territory involving reincarnation and Thai folk beliefs. If this sounds like Apichatpong territory, well, it is. But what it helped me realize is that Apichatpong has not so much inspired imitators as much as he has opened up new territory for Thai filmmakers to explore, an aesthetic system that each can use for his or her own ends, just as two other fascinating Thai films from the last couple of years, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History and Sivaroj Kongsakul’s Eternity, have done. May there be many more to come.

Finally: The Chaser

2011-09-05T18:23:00.002-04:00

A while ago my lady and I sat down to watch The Chaser, a Korean film that was generating a lot of buzz at the time. A few minute in, a serial killer, after imprisoning a prostitute in a filthy bathroom/torture chamber, sets about trying to bash her head in with a hammer. Thinking we were in for another serial killer flick trading on the brutalization of women, we turned it off.

Well, I tried watching it again recently, and, as surprising as this may sound, I’m glad I did, because it turns out that The Chaser is a textbook example of popular Korean cinema’s way of confounding expectations by tweaking well-worn conventions into something new and thrilling.

It happens on a structural level, and it’s actually kind of subtle. It’s as if director Na Hong-jin and his co-writers Hong Won-chan and Lee Shin-ho dissected the structure of the traditional serial killer chase movie (you know the kind, there are hundreds), and at every point they could, chose the path of least cliché, creating a winding plot that swerves between the conventional and the implausible without dipping too far into either. A high-wire act essentially. Here is a film with few “positive” characters (its hero is an ex-cop turned pimp, who chases the serial killer not to save lives, but because he thinks he’s stealing and selling his girls) and loads of violence that somehow works as a smart, thrilling piece of entertainment. It won’t do anything to change the minds of those who still think Korean films are more violent than other countries’, but it does prove that it’s still possible to do something new with the familiar tools of genre filmmaking.

TVRB: Can't Stop Won't Stop

2011-09-05T18:03:00.002-04:00

The Hip Hop Kung Fu Connection events we did at the Freer a couple of weeks ago inspired me to dig a little deeper into hip hop history, so I picked up a copy of Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. Chang’s subject is not just the music, but the social and political contexts from which it sprang. This may sound dry, but the result is a compelling, even angry book that recounts in impressive detail hip hop’s rise from underground Bronx party music to global cultural, economic and political force.

What Chang brilliantly emphasizes is that hip hop’s history is inextricably intertwined with the larger, much more depressing story of race relations, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, in the 80s and 90s – a series of firestorms that sparked changes in the music, radicalized its practitioners, and finally exploded in the LA riots of 1992. If, to many, groups like Public Enemy and NWA were scary abstractions, symbols of the dangerous urban youth prowling the streets and in need of suppression, Chang goes to great lengths to the complex set of circumstances that formed their aesthetics, and how the media and political figures cynically reduced them to stereotypes in order to further oppressive and racist policies like James Q. Wilson’s odious “broken windows” theory and the LAPD’s military occupation mindset under its chief, Darryl Gates, in the 80s and 90s, the cumulative effect of which was to essentially criminalize the very condition of being black, young and poor.

Chang’s account tails off just at the beginning of hip hop morphing into a multi-billion dollar global industry. It’s hard to remember now, when rappers like Jay-Z and Kanye West function more like CEO’s (of self-perpetuating corporations that sell boasts about their own financial success) than political firebrands. It took Public Enemy’s still fervent Chuck D to take them down a peg or two for making an album celebrating their incredible wealth at a time when many people (of all races) are suffering in this tanking economy.

A longtime hip hop journalist, Chang is equally adept at slinging slang, summoning up left-wing fervor at injustice, and methodically documenting every step along the way. As people said at the time it came out, it’s the serious history hip hop music deserves.

2011-07-04T17:34:00.002-04:00

Even though I saw it several weeks ago, I’ve been avoiding writing about Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The reason is that thinking too much about those Chauvet cave paintings threatens to make one weep uncontrollably (in the film, even the caves’ curator has to pause to gather herself before discussing the extraordinary wall of horses.) It’s not just their beauty, it’s the palpable presence of the people who made them, people not much different from us, who lived some 35,000 years ago and coexisted with animals, such as cave lions, that don’t even exist anymore, lived so closely with them that they could depict not just their forms but their attitudes, their movement, to the point that we know what they were like simply based on these paintings. They communicated something to us, across what Herzog calls “the abyss of time.”

A similar elemental shock runs through John Vaillant’s book, The Tiger.

Vaillant uses the true story of a series of tiger attacks in Siberia in the late 90s as a jumping off-point for a larger discussion of the complex relationship between humans and animals throughout our evolutionary history, a relationship that goes at least as far back as Chauvet and continues in the wilder parts of the world today.

In this particular part of Siberia, tigers and humans have existed together for centuries, and have developed a kind of shared existence, a mutual respect. Vaillant is particularly good at tracing the ways in which the folklore of the area dovetails with science. Hunters there believe that you should leave part of what you kill for the tigers, and they will do the same for you, and violating that trust can lead to trouble. Siberian tigers, despite being over 500 pounds, ferocious, and brightly colored, can disappear into the snowy woods, willing themselves into invisibility and silence, an evolutionary tactic that goes a long way towards explaining why people believe them to have otherworldly powers.

The balance between species was threatened after perestroika, when all of Russia basically went up for sale, and people living in remote areas lost their safety net. Tigers became valuable commodities and people began hunting them for sport and profit. In The Tiger, one of these beasts, it seems, became so sick of it that he started hunting humans. And not just hunting as in leaping out of the forest randomly, hunting as in tracking a man for days, waiting at his house, and, after killing him, leaving virtually nothing behind but his clothes. Hunting as in, it seems, bearing a grudge for past wrongs and tracking people down for it. According to witnesses, the tiger’s first victim seemed to be in a kind of supernatural thrall to the animal, drawn unwillingly and inexorably to it in the way that characters in legends of tigers are.

Vaillant gives equal time to the victims of these attacks and the team sent to track and kill the tiger. The visceral tension of the chase is equaled by the thoroughly-researched presentation of tiger lore, science and history, with digressions into similarly extreme, intimate man-beast relationships in other parts of the world and other points in history. Like Herzog’s film, it gives an uncanny jolt, a kind of existential reminder of where we exist in the animal world, that some of its mysteries are for us to discover, and some to just exist in.

It's Comedy! Part Two

2011-07-04T17:20:00.002-04:00

Last week two important documents hit the internet. In one, Mrs. Bourne, a stern English mother-in-law-to-be scolded her future daughter-in-law regarding her "uncouth" and "vulgar" behavior during a visit in April. In the other, an ambitious young Los Angeles woman regaled her 15 closest friends (and eventually the entire internet) about her first hand encounter with Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish.

I have mixed them together. After the jump, Quentin Tarantino's victim meets her mother-in-law-to-be:

Friendsicles,

You are getting this email because you are one of my 15 favorite fuck buddies, and if I haven’t had a chance to hook up with you in the last couple of weeks it’s because about a month ago I totally got engaged to this English guy, Freddie. For those of you I have managed to hook up with lately, I know I promised to tell you about the trip I took to meet his crazy uptight family back in April, but getting ready for a wedding is, like, extremely time-consuming and I haven’t had a moment until now to write it all down.

So here goes:

Freddie warned me before we got there that his family eats a lot of weird English food that I probably couldn’t eat because of my diet. So as soon as we arrived I was like, “just so you know, Mrs. B., I’m diabetic, I’m kind of a vegan, and I’m on a gluten free diet.” And then I started listing all the stuff I can and can’t eat. His mom was all “Pardon me?” I thought she couldn’t hear me so I repeated it all louder for her. And then she made this kind of “harrumph” sound. How rude, right?

So then we sit down to tea, which is like a thing in England, and I’m like, “I can’t have caffeine because of my diabetes, and also those pastries look like they have gluten in them.” So what did they do? They put out these little sandwiches which are tiny first of all, and are just a piece of cucumber between two slices of bread. Naturally I couldn’t eat the bread, so I just ate some little pieces of cucumber, so then, to be polite, I was like, “that was really nice and all, but I’m still kind of hungry.” Freddie’s mom just stared at me and then her teacup suddenly shattered.

I should mention that they live in this huge mansion, with servants and everything. The dining room table is one of those giant, long tables you see in movies, and there were, like, eighteen people there at dinner. I guess they were all related to Freddie because they all either looked like Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher or the Monopoly guy. So the servants start serving soup, just like they do in the movies, you know? And they start with me since I’m the guest, and the thing is I’m starving because of the whole tea situation, and they are going so slowly around the table serving the soup that I started getting worried that mine would be cold by the time they got all the way around, so I just started chowing down on that soup! I was done by the time they got back around to me, so I was like “Yo, can I get some more of that?” By now Freddie is like crazy nudging me under the table and I’m like “what?” And he kind of jerks his head towards his mom, who is staring at me literally with her mouth hanging open. I’m not really up on my British manners or whatever, but I’m pretty sure that’s not considered polite. And then I look around, and like everybody is looking at me the same way. One guy’s monocle even popped right out of his eye. I figured they were waiting for a compliment on the food, which is probably the polite thing to do, so I was like, “great soup Mrs. B.!”

So then as we’re going to bed – the family is so old-fashioned that they wouldn’t even let Freddie and me sleep in the same room – Freddie says to me, “we eat breakfast at half-seven, and we do dress for breakfast.” And I’m like, “duh, of course I’ll dress for breakfast. What am I going to do, show up naked? But if I’m not up at half-seven (whatever that is), just go ahead and eat without me. I can fend for myself.” That was the night I kept sexting all you guys. What else was I supposed to do? I was so bored. (Sorry I forgot about the time difference! Justin, I hope the fender bender wasn’t too bad. Susan, why didn’t you tell me your boss was looking over your shoulder?)

I was tired from the jet lag and all, so I figured it was okay for me to sleep in, so when I finally woke up at like eleven I threw on my hoodie and some sweatpants and went downstairs. It was the weirdest thing: everybody was just, like, sitting around the table. I was like “don’t mind me, I’ll just grab something from the fridge!” Nobody said anything, so I got an orange and took my seat. Only then did I notice that they were all sitting in front of plates of stuff like cold eggs and oatmeal and congealed sausage. Freddie told me later that it was his family’s tradition to not start breakfast until everyone was at the table. They had been sitting there for three and a half hours! In suits and nice dresses! I was like, “that’s really nice of you all, but you seriously don’t have to wait around for me. I’m not really a morning person anyway.”

At least that night we got to go to the pub. I was like, “finally! A little fun.” I was barely eating anything (see above re: food), so I guess I got drunk pretty quick. People started making toasts to our engagement and stuff, and when it got to be my turn, I was like, “thank you all for your unique kind of hospitality. I only wish you would have let me know beforehand that I was supposed to bring a stick to keep up my ass all weekend.” Well, I thought it was a pretty witty remark. Aren’t the British supposed to appreciate that? But I guess I guess it’s not considered polite to laugh out loud in public so it got kind of quiet in there.

The next morning, Mrs. B. was actually almost nice to me! First thing in the morning she was like, “we’re walking to the beach today. Dress appropriately.” Which is, like, more words in a row than she said to me the whole time I was there. So I put on my bikini and that wrap I got in Cancun, and my cute little sandals, you know, the whole beach thing. But when I got downstairs everyone else was in, like, jodhpurs I think they’re called, coats, and, like heavy boots. Mrs. B. looked me up and down and was like, “cute outfit.” I was like, oh my god, an actual compliment! Maybe my little joke the night before kind of broke the ice.

Anyway guys, you know how beaches in LA are sunny and warm, and you can drive to them, and they have little places where you can eat, and all that stuff? Beaches in England are nothing like that. First of all, we had to literally hike there. Through woods. And up and down these steep hills. And it was, like cold and misty the whole time. Everyone else was tromping away with their walking sticks and boots, so poor me had to absolutely ruin my cute sandals trying to keep up, clambering over these damp, slimy boulders, and slipping on these muddy trails. Plus I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast, so my blood sugar was really low. When we finally got to the “beach” it was all rocky and cold, and there was no food in sight. I politely mentioned how I hoped the beach was close because I needed some food because of my diabetes. Mrs. B. said something about some “lovely young woman” she knew who had diabetes and never even mentioned it, she just dealt with it in “the English way.”

I asked Freddie later what “the English was, and he was like, “well, she didn’t want to be a bother to anyone so she quietly slipped into a coma. It’s considered the polite thing to do. She is getting married in June, though.”

But you know what the even weirder thing is than that whole weekend? About a week after I got back I got a card in the mail (handwritten! Who even does that?) from Freddie’s mom like scolding me for not sending her a thank you card! Thank you for what? Not literally killing me on that hike to the so-called “beach?” It also said something about finishing school. I was like, “fuck you, bitch. So what if I dropped out of college?”

So, needless to say fucksicles: glad to be home. Hope you can make it to the wedding. We’re renting Gwyneth Paltrow’s castle. Score!

It's Comedy!

2011-07-04T17:02:00.003-04:00

A Nats Fan's Notes: Behind the Foul Pole

2011-06-18T18:56:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago my friend T---, who programs films at another area theater, decided it was time for a business meeting, and what better place to have it then at the ballpark? The date we chose turned out to be auspicious. By some form of science (picking names out of a hat?) or divination (seeing a vision in the pattern of Dubble Bubble pieces spilled from an overturned bucket?), Jim Riggleman had arrived at the idea of batting his pitchers in the eighth spot, and for some reason it was working.

T --- and I arrived at the park to see a team that had won five in a row. Two nights previously, they had come back from a 6-1 deficit to vanquish the Cardinals 8-6, then stomped them the next night 10-0 behind a complete game from Livan Hernandez. (Hernandez, who normally does everything at the pace of a turtle, proved he could move with lightning speed during his previous start, in San Diego, when he speared a line drive headed right for his face. But the energy expended forced him to lie down on the mound for a quick nap before continuing the game.)

Over the past few weeks, Michael Morse had shed his bewilderment and bad luck to become one of the hottest hitters in the league, and this, combined with his long eyelashes, always-stoned-looking appearance and Keanu Reeves-like pretty/vacant good looks have led my wife to begin referring to him (somewhat worryingly for me) as her ”boyfriend.”

On top of that, Ryan “The Slugging Bland” Zimmerman, had returned to the line-up and was hitting well.

This could only mean one thing: the Nats would lose, and lose horribly. And yet, in the time it took T--- and me to order and pay for our food at the new Taqueria on the Promenade Deck (or whatever it’s called) at Nats Park, weird-bearded gaunt ghost Jayson Werth and Jolly Roger Bernadina had led off the game with back-to-back homeruns, much to the delight of the girls taking our orders, who saw both homers on the big screen behind our backs. (How many video screens are there at Nats Park? Better to ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.)

Once at our seats we found ourselves surrounded, annoyingly, by Cardinals fans who, apparently hadn’t gotten enough of watching their team collapse at home and were now following them east for more abuse. Far from the action, behind the left field foul pole, T--- and I were able to have our business meeting in peace while the Nats added a couple more runs and, for the most part, fended off the Cards attacks.

In the ninth, our erratic closer Drew Storen came in to mop things up and promptly surrendered the tying run. Storen is so high strung that you almost expect him to turn into Yosemite Sam, pull out two guns and propel himself into the air by firing them into the ground while yelling “Ooooooohhhhh!” at moments like these, so we once again expected the worst. As the game dragged into extra innings we began to talk about how much more we were willing to take.

But lo and behold, Ryan “Beige” Zimmerman led off the bottom of the tenth with a single, Morse took a pitch to the thigh, and Espinosa cracked a three-run walk-off homer – the second walk-off I’ve witnessed at the park this year.

As of this writing, the Nats have won eight in a row, after beating their alleged rivals the Orioles twice, and Riggleman’s betting order gambit is, against all odds, paying off. All there is to do now is gird ourselves for the next crushing defeat.

A Nats Fan's Notes: Marcia's Birthday Edition

2011-05-31T19:53:00.002-04:00

It’s getting to that point in the season when the Nats have settled into their underachieving ways. Everyone is performing slightly below average. Manager Jim Riggleman’s habitual perplexed grimace has become the default position of his face. I kind of like Riggleman’s philosophy of stacking his roster with just-emerging talent and versatile veterans who can be plugged into the line-up as needed, but this does not a consistent team make.

They were coming off a dismal road trip on Friday, during which they lost seven of eight games, prompting a frustrated outburst by Jayson Werth, who apparently finally realized what it’s like to be on a losing team. So my hopes were not high that this would be the most successful birthday present I ever gave my wife. On the other hand, our opponents, the Padres, were the only team hitting worse than we were.

As could be expected, this was a low scoring affair. The most exciting thing that happened in the early going was a 47-minute rain delay that afforded us the opportunity to take shelter in the concourse and observe the truly astonishing variety, in both size and shape, of beer bellies available to man, a testament, really, to the diversity of the human species.

Once the rain abated, Danny Espinosa gave us a lead with a nifty solo home run, but a one-run lead by the Nats is kind of the definition of false hope. So naturally, the very first Padre in the top of the ninth sent the very first pitch over the left field wall to tie the game.

Now loomed the prospect of extra innings, made doubly daunting by the fact that they cut off the beer after the seventh inning. The young couple beside us, who arrived late bearing little plastic cocktail glasses, had spent most of the game getting even more drinks and sneaking out to smoke. By now they had stockpiled five full beers between them, so at least they were set. The male half told me they were from Centerville, MD (which I guess is a place?), and that he usually spends his weekends riding his dirt bike on piles of mine tailings in Pennsylvania (which I guess is a thing people do?) At any rate, when our half of the ninth rolled around, I found myself saying, out loud, to Michael Morse, “do exactly what they did. Hit one out of here.”

When he actually did blast the first pitch into the Padres bullpen they both looked at me like I’d successfully influenced Morse with my mind, which I also choose to believe, because he looks susceptible to hypnosis.

The Nats celebrated the unlikely feat of an actual bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off home run by smashing Morse in the face with a shaving cream pie and dumping a whole big thing of Gatorade over his head, generally behaving as if they’d won the World Series, which, in context, is what it must have felt like.

TVRB: Richard Brautigan and the Aesthetic of Failure

2011-05-31T17:55:00.001-04:00

When I was in a bookstore in Tokyo a couple of years ago I came across a framed, signed edition of Richard Brautigan’s devastating little “Love Poem.” I hadn’t thought about Brautigan for a while, years probably, and it was somehow reassuring to learn that he’s still, in some way, “big in Japan,” because he’s been virtually forgotten here.

Even more gratifying was seeing his creative spirit alive in a couple of Southeast Asian films I saw over the last couple of years: Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History.

I have no idea if either filmmaker knows his work, but the disregard for traditional forms, the will to take aesthetic risks that don’t always succeed evident in their films reminded me of the freewheeling experimentation of Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, as if the spirit of the American 60s and 70s had been transplanted to Indonesia and Thailand.

A lot of people (me included) discover Brautigan in college, which makes sense when you think about it. College is when you’re being taught the rules and canons of literature, at a time in your life when your natural instinct is to rebel against them. Brautigan’s writing flaunts convention. He takes risks that fail almost as often as they succeed (he sometimes stretches his metaphors and similes so far they collapse), but at his best he’s a writer with the rare ability to circumvent the rules of good fictional form, tap directly into his peculiar, skewed way of paying attention to himself and he world, and to let that eccentricity flow, unchecked but not unedited, onto the page. This is truly something to be admired, and it’s harder than it looks, as a lifetime of reading fiction can inculcate those rules into your heard even if you don’t study them formally.

Brautigan’s aesthetic high-wire act, along with his alcoholism and the crippling depression that led to his suicide in 1984, may have doomed him to failure and (relative) obscurity. His brand of unconventionality pegs him to a particular time for the academics and critics who have never quite given him his due. And he did himself no favors by posing on the covers of his books, a long-haired, moustachioed beanpole in a floppy hat who maintained the look, and the eccentric writing style, long after friends like Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison settled into traditional storytelling and aged into respectable citizens. Brautigan is preserved in amber, depending on your sensibility either as a relic of the 60s or an inspiring spirit of aesthetic daredevilism.

The Madness of Kim Ki-young

2011-05-21T20:18:00.003-04:00

Imagine walking around Washington, DC on a spring night. You happen upon a museum that’s open, and find out there’s a movie playing inside, so you go in. You’ve never heard of the film or the filmmaker, and you’ve possibly never seen a movie from Korea before. For the next two hours you are pinned to your seat watching a husband, wife and housemaid alternately screaming and shambling around like zombies while repeatedly trying to kill and/or fuck each other in a claustrophobic house full of madly ticking clocks and gaudy stained-glass lampshades. This happened to one lucky couple on Friday night.

I met them after our screening of Kim Ki-young’s Woman of Fire ’82, the third iteration of the out-of-control love triangle plot that he first unleashed in his most famous film, The Housemaid (1960). The couple had arrived a bit late, so they missed my introduction, in which I tried to prepare people for Kim’s uniquely outlandish aesthetic. Kim is most often compared to Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, directors with very distinct, florid styles, but with Kim you also have to stir in a bit of Roger Corman and William Castle. You half expect Vincent Price to be lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce.

Kim’s films tend to begin with a modicum of normalcy, then quickly accelerate into total hysteria. (The Housemaid films are apparently based on an actual incident). There are no half measures. Characters are either yelling, pawing at each other in lust or anger, or nearly catatonic, and are often conflicted as to whether they are trying to kill themselves or somebody else. The soundtracks bubble with noise. Visual compositions are crowded with people and objects and, in the color films, garish and clashing. (One Korean critic has remarked that you can almost always identify a Kim Ki-young film based on a single image.)

When the couple approached me in the lobby, agog and stunned, I gave them some background on Kim (the kind of information you can find here), and explained that what those of us who love him value is his exuberance and individuality. I can think of no other filmmaker whose style is at once so personal and so deeply crazy. When they asked me if what they just saw was typical of Korean movies (or Korea in general), I told them that Kim was unique in all the world of cinema, and assured them that what they just saw very rarely happens in the average Korean home.

TVRB: Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, by Geoff Dyer

2011-04-23T17:05:00.002-04:00

Geoff Dyer is a hero for those of us who still don’t know what we want to do when we grow up, both a ray of hope and an object of envy for any writer who ever feels trapped in their specialty (see, for instance, the title of this blog.)

As Luc Sante points out in his reviewof Dyer’s essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, writers are expected to specialize these days in order to be marketable: They are either novelists or historians or art critics or memoirists. Dyer is somehow all these things, earning a living and the respect of his peers by being an enthusiastic amateur with an interest in a wide range of subjects. Photography, literature, music, war, fiction, whatever strikes his fancy becomes the subject of a (usually pretty good) piece of writing.

When I started reading Otherwise, strange coincidences started popping up. His essay on eccentric, pervy photographer Miroslav Tichy sent me to the internet to look him up, only to find he had died the day before. (This is the perfect book to read on an IPad, because you can easily look up the artists he writes about without putting it down). An F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about crying in a taxi because he would never be so happy again showed up in both a Dyer essay and an article I read in a magazine the same day. A Dyer piece on land art appeared in the New Yorker while I was in the middle of his book, and someone in another magazine I read quoted a review he wrote of something or other. I attribute these coincidences not to the mysteries of fate but to the fact that Dyer’s output flies out in so many directions that bits are bound to land here and there in the path of anyone who reads periodicals.

The New Yorker piece kind of crystallized the good and the bad in him for me, its thoughtful insights into and vivid descriptions of Di Maria’s Lightning Field and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty marred by the insistent first-personness of the account. Which is almost the exact opposite of what Sante praises in his review. Sante wonders why he bothers to include work-for-hire pieces like book reviews in his collection, whereas I find Dyer on writers, Dyer on photography, Dyer on music, much more interesting than Geoff Dyer’s Own Adventures: the first-person reporting, the personal essays. Dyer hanging out with Def Leppard, attending a fashion show, flying in a vintage airplane or masturbating in a luxury hotel room is much less interesting than his keen, incisive analyses of photographs and books.

The first-person pieces become too solipsistic for my taste, too convinced that his life is interesting enough to be put in print. The nadir is an early essay in which the madness of van Gogh, the plight of homeless East Village junkies, and the entire history of the blues are nothing compared to his agony at not being able to get through on the phone to some chick in London. Separately they may be tolerable, but read back to back, they coalesce into a portrait of entitlement: the self-absorption of thinking that just because techno music and Ecstasy blew open his mind in the 90s everybody wants to hear about it over and over again.

This might be why his novel Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi strikes me as Dyer at his best. Unclassifiably toeing a line between fiction and autobiography, it conveys extreme mental states (of drugs and spiritual hysteria) effectively because they are untethered from the facts of Dyer himself, yet feel somehow lived and true.

It should come as no surprise, I guess, that a collection by a writer famed for eclecticism should vary so widely in quality. But the fact that he continues to write and publish at all gives hope to those of us striving to broaden the scope of what we write beyond the brands assigned to us.

A Nats Fan's Notes: Double Header

2011-04-23T17:01:00.002-04:00

To devote yourself to a losing team is a strange act of faith. Growing up near Philadelphia I rooted for the Phillies, of course, but by the time I’d come to baseball consciousness they were in the playoffs every year, so why not root for them? But as a DC-area carpetbagger, there’s no real reason I should be rooting for the Nationals, who are even newer to the city than I am, and generally terrible.

My wife and I, however, by sheer force of will, have decided to become Nats fans. Our first trip to Nats Park this year was for a double header against the Milwaukee Brewers. We stopped in at the vast Nats Store at the entrance and spent $250 on jerseys (Werth for me, Zimmerman for her) and caps. Nats Park is the kind of stadium that offends both old-school baseball purists and people who’ve never set foot in a ballpark of any kind. It’s basically a noisy, garish shrine to hyper-capitalism. Video displays and animated advertisements cover every possible surface. Souvenir booths, outposts of local fast food joints and bars selling overpriced alcohol lurk around every corner. And yet, with its perfect sightlines and ample food and beer options, I consider it a vast improvement over Veterans Stadium the concrete tub where I used to watch the Phillies all those years ago.

I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation about sitting down to a Nats double header. By the time we settled into our seats with our beers and Ben’s Chili Bowl Half-Smokes it was the bottom of the first and the Nats were already trailing Milwaukee by a run. The kindly old lady beside us, diligently keeping score, noted that our starting line up only had two guys hitting over .200, and one of them was the pitcher.

The old guy sitting behind us seemed to have come to the game with the sole purpose of yelling abuse at every single player on the field. This, I suppose, is one way to cope with rooting for a losing team. Ours is to provide encouragement, the way you would to a child who’s trying his or her best. This is the kind of attitude you have to take with someone like our leftfielder Michael Morse, who will someday get the hang of this whole baseball thing. A week earlier I had watched him on TV get hit on the knee with one pitch, and foul another off the knob of his bat. I kept waiting for him to figure out what that stick in his hands was for.

In the game we attended he met expectations his first time up by helplessly watching pitches whiz by for a called strike out and heading back to the dugout moving his arm as if reminding himself how to swing. Morse is a big, strong guy, but so bad is his luck that when he finally did get hold of a pitch in the second game he hit it so hard off the left field fence that he was thrown out at second trying for a double.

The Nats did win game one, in surprisingly powerful fashion. By the start of game two most of the fans had cleared out, and the stands took on a much more casual atmosphere. People moved around to better seats. Even Clint, the square-jawed young “entertainer” who hosts various activities on the video screens during games an shoots tee shirts out of a cannon, took time to sit near us and chat with an old couple who were apparently regulars he’d gotten to know. The cheering became desultory. A woman sitting near us didn’t even bother to clap. When the Nats did something positive, she just reached into her purse on the seat beside her, fished out a little cowbell, and rang it a couple of times.

In the second game of a double header, all strategy is laid bare. Milwaukee’s tactic of putting on a different, extreme shift for every single batter (no doubt dictated by some sabermetric-type statistical science) began to unravel as more than one Nats lefthander dropped base hits exactly in the gap between the five guys loitering in the right side of the field. From my vantage point on the first base side I could see the huge space the Brewers were leaving down the left field line against lefties, and finally, deep in game two our Danny Espinosa lined an opposite field triple into it with the bases loaded. Two games, two wins.

But here’s what’s most odd to me: I did get a strange feeling of pride putting on my Jayson Werth jersey and red Nats cap. I am normally not one for uniforms. There’s something scary about a crowd all wearing the same thing. And I know I’m being exploited by simply buying this merchandise. But there is a pleasure to being involved with a baseball team in some way. It’s the reason you can spend eight hours at park and kind of wish all the times you went it was a double header. Intellectually, I should probably hate sports for all the good reasons people have for hating them. But on the other hand all the people I know who hate sports are hopeless bores who abhor pleasure generally, so why should I listen to them?

Anyway, go Nats!

Changes

2011-04-23T16:57:00.002-04:00

Today we introduce two new sections to this collection of rare posts and frequent comment-spam: The Tom Vick Review of Books (TVRB), an occasional series of pieces on books and authors, and A Nats Fan's Notes, occasional thoughts on following Washington DC's sad little baseball team. Enjoy.

To the First Person Ever to Appear in a Photograph

2010-10-26T19:23:00.003-04:00

It’s amazing to think that of all the people on the Boulevard du Temple that day, you were the only one standing still long enough for Daguerre’s machine to catch you.

His machine was up in a window somewhere. You were just getting your boots shined, not even aware, maybe, that an invention had been discovered that could capture your image and preserve it for eternity. It’s the first example of a machine whose power resides in the air, in silence. It can do its work without anyone knowing it’s around.

Daguerre's machine turned you into a ghost, the first image in the age of images, the beginning of our troubles. Or maybe all the invisible people bustling around you that day are the ghosts and you are the only living soul.

And now two more ghosts have joined you, from four years later along the Ohio River. They even look like ghosts, nearly translucent, barely there, and waiting over 150 years for the internet to discover them.

Who's Paying Attention to Iran?

2010-08-09T16:39:00.004-04:00

Well, everyone is these days, politically. But Iranian cinema doesn't seem to be getting the attention it once did.

Maybe this is because the directors who did the most to put it on the map have faded from the limelight. Mohsen Makhmalbaf and family have decamped to France to escape political oppression at home. Jafar Panahi is out on bail after being imprisoned in Iran for nearly a year following last year's political uprising. And the biggest name of all, Abbas Kiarostami, spent the last decade making more and more experimental work, which I happen to love but certainly doesn't bring the attention that his features once did. (He did return to feature filmmaking this year with Certified Copy, but it was made in Europe with European actors.)

For many years, the austere, minimalist style of the followers of the Kiarostami/Makhmalbaf generation dominated Iranian film programs (including the one I do at the Freer), but in researching next year's edition, I've noticed quite a few changes. Among the film's I've previewed so far I've come across a Tarantino-esque multiple POV caper, a drama of romantic longing owing a debt to Wong Kar-wai (no easy feat in a country that bans expressions of desire - even glances - on screen), and a gritty story about drug addiction that features an incredible scene with a young woman taking her grandma along to score crack. Hardly the stuff we're used to seeing coming from Iran.

A couple of interconnected factors might be at play here. For one thing, thanks to the internet and an underground proliferation of satellite dishes (as documented in Mohammad Rasoulof's Head Wind), Iranian filmmakers are probably seeing, and being influenced by, much more cinema from around the world. The recent cycle of protests and crackdowns following last year's elections (themselves prompted and documented by the proliferation of information making it into and out of the country on the Web) seems to have inspired new forms of rebellion.

Bahman Ghobadi, now in exile in London, made No One Knows About Persian Cats as an apparent "fuck you" to the Tehran regime. Granaz Moussavi, an Iranian living in Australia, made My Tehran for Sale, an intense drama about underground artists that includes drug use and (unheard of in Iranian cinema) scenes of a man and woman in bed together, in secret in the streets and apartments of Tehran, then smuggled the footage out of the country for post-production.

What we're seeing here is a variation on the independent Chinese tradition, where filmmakers have been working underground and sneaking footage out for years now. As more pressure comes from above, and more images of the rest of the world become available, Iranian filmmakers have become more willing to leave the accepted road of allegory and subtlety, and to move toward open criticism of the state. Pressure can only build so long before it explodes.

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

2010-08-07T10:33:00.003-04:00

Artist Isao Hashimoto has created haunting yet austere video art work mapping the 2,053 nuclear explosions that happened between 1945 and 1998. See it after the jump.

According to Hashimoto, "This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."

Proximity to Power

2010-08-06T10:14:00.007-04:00

Although I will never watch a TV show with the words "Real" and "Housewives" in the title, Dahlia Lithwick's review of the new season made an interesting point about one of the most pervasive and annoying facets of life in DC.

Lithwick finds this season especially depressing because apparently the usual trappings of Real Housewife-hood are not enough for this batch. She writes: "The real currency in Washington isn't money but 'proximity to power,'....the D.C. Housewives crave something they will likely never even come near: power."

They are the embodiment of this strange desire I've noticed here of not so much wanting to be powerful oneself, as to be next to it. This phenomenon was expertly skewered by the Coen Brothers in Burn After Reading, which includes a great scene with a minor character nattering on about how he finally got to attend the Kennedy Center Awards. It rears its boring head at parties when you find yourself buttonholed by someone who can't wait to tell you about the time they went to a party and stood in the same room as Ronald Reagan, in the sycophantic culture of the workplace, and most offensively in those hideous pictures people plaster their walls with of themselves shaking hands with politicians, which should be considered a crime against aesthetics.

(Seriously, people plaster their living rooms with pictures like the one on the left, only they'll be shaking hands with people much less famous than Nixon. I often wonder if they hang them in ranking order from most famous to least, so they always have to move them around when they get a new one.)

(And even more seriously, they're ugly. No one wants to go to someone's house and look at dozens of pictures of them grinning and shaking hands with people. For the decency's sake, put up a painting or something.)

It even showed up at a charity dinner I once attended, at which the host was proud to acknowledge from the dais the highest-ranking government official in attendance. Never mind that he was something along the lines of the Twelfth Assistant Undersecretary of Agriculture. At least we knew who would be running the country if a bomb went off and all that was left of society were the people in that hotel ballroom.

I can understand the desire to have power. Presumably the people who attain it do so through some combination of talent, ambition, hard work, strategy and luck. But for the life of me I can't figure out why one would go to such great lengths to stand next to Rahm Emanuel or John Boehner at a party. What, in the end, does it get you?

I suppose it's simply the local manifestation of the larger movement in our culture embodied by the never-ending trend of "reality television:" the desire to be famous for being famous, without having to work for it. It's just that here, it seems especially pointless, and - worst of all - dull.

How to Deal With Rejection

2010-07-21T18:37:00.002-04:00

Dear Mr. X----,
Thank you for your email rejecting my story, "Y----," for publication in your magazine, Z------. Unfortunately, your rejection letter does not suit my needs at this time. I must therefore insist that you publish my story.

I wish I could respond to your submission in a more personal way than this form letter, but I receive many rejections, and it is, unfortunately, impossible to personally respond to all of them.

Best of luck in your rejection-letter writing endeavors. I look forward to seeing my story in print.

Sincerely,
T-- V---

Bada Shanren

2010-06-21T21:25:00.003-04:00

In the current Freer exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, one artist stands out, as he always has for me. Bada Shanren and his wild, almost abstract brushstrokes seem to fly in the face of of the more controlled work of his contemporaries, at least to this untrained eye. See more here.

Thomas Chimes

2010-06-21T20:58:00.004-04:00

Since I was a kid I've run across this mysterious portrait of Alfred Jarry whenever I've visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting was made long after Jarry's death by Thomas Chimes (1921 - 2009), a somewhat mysterious figure who studied at the Art Students League, then abandoned New York to spend his life painting in Philadelphia.

The picture always discombobulated me. Why make a portrait of a dead man? And why did it hang for so many years there without explanation.

Several weeks ago I encountered more of Chimes' work on a visit to the Delaware Art Museum. These, which consist of faded images made from scraping away at layer after layer of white paint, are just as mysterious, but in a completely different day. Apparently Chimes was a master of self-reinvention, the one constant being his interest in certain writers and artists, who he depicted or paid tribute to in a variety of styles. Even though I've "known" him since I was a kid because of that mysterious Jarry painting, I'm only now learning about what I've missed.

They call her Special K

2010-06-21T18:15:00.003-04:00

Kuzhali Manickavel (Special K to her fans)is a talented young Indian writer with a fantastic - and very funny - blog. She is one of those rare talents who seem to have no filters between her creativity and the page. For people like me, who find writing a slow slog, and often find ourselves self-editing perhaps a bit too much, she is a breath of fresh air, and someone to be admired.

Her freewheeling, direct from the creative center of the brain style of writing reminds me a bit of Richard Brautigan. It doesn't always work, but most of it hits the eccentric mark it has set for itself.

She specializes in flash fiction and other tiny bites, and when she publishes, she does so in chapbooks or with small presses. (Check out her book of short stories, Insects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings.)

The fact that she puts so much out there for her readers to enjoy, at what seems to be little or no profit to her, is an inspiration to those of us who at least try to subscribe to Lewis Hyde's idea, in The Gift,that art is - or should be - exactly that, something created for others' enjoyment, without consideration for personal gain. Special K comes about as close to that as anybody these days.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Katsura Photographs

2010-03-19T08:50:00.008-04:00

Weirdly only open for two days in DC, the show of Yashuhiro Ishimoto's gorgeous black and white photos of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto is a knockout: stark, beautifully composed images that emphasize the ancient palace's parallels with the modernist architecture Ishimoto was enamored of at the time. They are also rich in contrast and texture, which was, for me, a refreshing reminder that nothing digital compares to old fashioned gelatin silver prints.

Interestingly, Ishimoto returned to the Imperial Villa more than twenty years later to photograph it in color. By then, his thinking had changed. The later images question the "less is more" aesthetic he embraced in the earlier ones and apparently reveal the lush pleasures the palace's architecture and surrounding grounds offer. I only wish some of those had been included. The images above are examples of his two approaches.

Samira Makhmalbaf's Cinema of Cruelty

2010-03-12T11:10:00.015-05:00

A boy missing parts of both legs hires a developmentally disabled older boy to carry him around like a horse. The actors playing the characters are nonprofessionals who actually suffer from the maladies we see on screen. The legless boy turns out to be such a sadist that by the end of the film he has his "horse" trussed up in a saddle and bridle, with a bit between his teeth and horseshoes nailed to his feet, and is renting him out to the local kids so they can ride him around for kicks.

Is this the latest provocation from Lars von Trier or Harmony Korine? No, it's Samira Makhmalbaf's Two-Legged Horse. When I showed this film in our theater a couple of weeks ago, something I had never seen before occurred: during one particularly disturbing scene, at least a half dozen people jumped out of their seats and bolted for the door. Most Iranian films using child actors in allegorical stories do it to couch serious messages in gentle packages. Makhmalbaf violates this rule. The cruelties in Two-Legged Horse are multiplied by the fact that they are being performed by and on children.

Von Trier and Korine always remind me of the creepy kid from sixth grade who used to cut caterpillars in half to watch the two pieces slowly writhe to death. The cruelty and freakishness come from a position of comfort - of those with every advantage seeing how far they can go. I always detect a schoolboy chuckle behind the scenes. Makhmalbaf's cruelty arises from conviction and engagement with the conditions she sees around her. In an interview on the Makhmalbaf family web site, Samira talks about how her father Mohsen Makhmalbaf stayed up all night writing the script out of rage at the political climate in Iran, and that she, shocked by its cruelty, agonized over it for days before deciding, “maybe I came to cinema to make this film.”

She describes the film in terms a kind of reverse-Darwinism: the devolution from man to animal. (She also references Freud, Marcuse and Nabokov.) Her fierce intellectualism and commitment to cinema may sound quaint today - a faint echo of the Godardian 60's - but her commitment extends beyond words. She made the film in Afghanistan, where a hand grenade lobbed at the set killed one crew member and injured five others.

It certainly has divided audiences and critics. In the online film journal Offscreen, Gilda Boffa describes the walkouts, catcalls, and contentious q&a session at its world premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival. J. Robert Parks praises it as a "compelling allegory of our contemporary world," but Robert Koehler, in a scathing review in Variety, accuses Makhmalbaf of crossing the line "between dramatizing physical abuse and causing genuine physical harm to actors." (Someone should let her know that, for a mere $400,000, Variety will gladly make a negative review go away.)

The complicated co-dependent relationships that can develop between the powerful and the powerless, torturer and victim, have been well-studied (I'm surprised she didn't quote Foucault as well, but he may be hard to get hold of in Iran). Two-Legged Horse adds nothing new to the discussion, but rather expresses what we already know, in the microcosm of the two boys' increasingly sadomasochistic relationship. One follows the plot not to find out what's going to happen, but to see how far Makhmalbaf is willing to take the debasement of her characters. I found myself shuddering to think what she would do with unlimited creative freedom and a larger budget. Distant observers like me may wonder why she went to such lengths to reconfirm cruel truths that we already know all too well, but I suspect that, for her, those truths are close enough to home - and real enough - to justify the effort and sacrifice that went into it.

In Praise of Lam Suet

2010-02-26T10:40:00.006-05:00

Let's take a moment to praise the long-suffering Lam Suet. Round of body, square of head, Lam has has been reliably typecast as the fat guy in some 116 movies since 1982. If someone is going to take a bullet in the butt, or have to be dragged away from a bowl of noodles, it's Lam. Among the names his characters have been given over the years are: Piggy King, Fatty, Fat Lok, Fat Lo, Fat Ball, Big Mouth, Fat Tong, Fat Bo, Big Head (twice), Fat Seven, Fatty (at least twice), Bun Man, and, early in his career, Pudgy Triad Member.

Lam takes his lumps with good cheer. Even as the lead actor in Johnnie To's PTU he plays a bungling cop who spends the movie in an escalating series of humiliations as he goes in search of the gun he lost. So let's give him is due. He may not be as handsome or suave as Simon Lam or Anthony Wong, but he makes them even suaver by how he plays off them in movie after movie. His good-natured self-deprecation always adds something to the movies he's in, and his cheery round face is a much an icon of Hong Kong cinema as the chiseled countenances of the matinee idols he works with.

Lam Suet (if I may) knows where his bread is buttered.

Johnnie To's Vengeance

2010-02-26T09:53:00.006-05:00

When I saw Hong Sang-soo's latest film, Like You Know it All, it immediately put me in mind of the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, who's been painting the same arrangement of bottles for decades. You can look at a painting from the 50s and one from the 90s and see very little variation. It's the meditative attention to this small set of objects, and the subtle differences in the way he arranges and paints them, that mesmerizes. Hong, I realized, is becoming like that. He essentially makes the same film year after year, with slight variations. It just so happens that I don't mind watching that film over and over again.

If Hong is a still life painter, Johnnie To is more like a chef at a restaurant you frequent.

His best dishes mix new and familiar ingredients into something delicious. The metaphor is apt for Vengeance, which stars French singer Johnny Hallyday as a chef who travels to Macau to avenge the deaths of his daughter's family. It has exactly what you want from a To movie: continuously rising tension hinging on just-plausible plot twists that incrementally ratchet up the stakes, the easygoing bon homie of his stock gang of actors (which is even more pleasurably evident in Sparrow), brilliantly staged gun battles, and devices that might or might not be borrowed from other movies.

But they're borrowed because they work, in the same way (if I may stretch the metaphor a bit further) a chef might borrow a combination of flavors he tasted somewhere else simply because it tastes good. In Vengeance we find Polaroid pictures with words scrawled on them as aids to memory (bringing to mind Memento), a choreographed street scene of umbrella-covered pedestrians (To's own Sparrow, itself borrowing from Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), the re-enactment of a crime intercut with the actual one (any number of TV shows).

Vengeance is said to be part of a trilogy that began with The Mission and Exiled, both of which play with notions of brotherhood among assassins, but it's also an extension of what tyros of the 1980s Hong Kong New Wave like John Woo and Tsui Hark brought to their early films: the creative remixing of action movie conventions into something maybe not new but certainly satisfying.

Film Comment Poll

2009-12-08T15:21:00.003-05:00

Below are my picks for Film Comment's best-of-the-decade poll. I'll be interested to see the final tallies. The most interesting part for me was picking a top twenty from 1999. I hate to be one of those people eternally lamenting the declining of quality cinema (I'm looking at you, Denby), but in retrospect it seems like a much better year for movies than 2009.

Best Films of 2009 (ranked)
1. 24 City
2. Up
3. The Hurt Locker
4. Still Walking
5. Gomorrah
6. Tokyo Sonata
7. Serbis
8. Ponyo
9. Treeless Mountain
10. Drag Me To Hell

Best Films of the Decade (ranked)
1. In the Mood for Love – Wong Kar-Wai, 2000, Hong Kong/France
2. Spirited Away – Hayao Miyazaki, 2001, Japan
3. Summer Palace – Lou Ye, 2006, China
4. The World – Jia Zhang-ke, 2004/China/Japan/France
5. 2046 – Wong Kar-Wai, 2004, China/France/Germany/Hong Kong
6. Syndromes and a Century – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006, Thailand/France/Austria/Netherlands
7. Goodbye, Dragon Inn – Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003, Taiwan
8. The Host – Bong Joon-ho, 2006, South Korea
9. Platform – Jia Zhang-ke, 2000, Hong Kong/Japan/France/Netherlands/Switzerland
10. The New World – Terrence Malick, 2005, U.S.
11. West of the Tracks – Wang Bing, 2003, China
12. Colossal Youth – Pedro Costa, 2006, Portugal/France/Switzerland
13. Millennium Mambo – Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001, Taiwan/France
14. Three Times – Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005, Taiwan
15. Still Life – Jia Zhang-ke, 2006, Hong Kong/China
16. The Woman on the Beach – Hong Sang-soo, 2006, South Korea
17. Pistol Opera – Seijun Suzuki, 2001, Japan
18. Yi Yi – Edward Yang, 2000, Taiwan/Japan
19. Blissfully Yours – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002, Thailand
20. Tears of the Black Tiger- Wisit Sasanatieg, 2000, Thailand
21. 25th Hour – Spike Lee, 2002, USA
22. Grizzly Man – Werner Herzog, 2005, USA
23. Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Andersen, 2004, U.S.
24. Battle Royale – Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan
25. Kung Fu Hustle – Stephen Chow, 2004, Hong Kong/China
26. Exiled – Johnnie To, 2006, Hong Kong
27. Infernal Affairs - Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak, 2002, Hong Kong
28. Blackboards – Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000, Iran/Italy/Japan
29. Memories of Murder – Bong Joon-ho, 2003, South Korea
30. Lost in Translation – Sofia Coppola, 2003, USA/Japan
31. 13 Lakes – James Benning, 2005, U.S.
32. The Intruder – Claire Denis, 2004, France/Korea
33. Opera Jawa – Garin Nugroho, 2006, Indonesia
34. Save the Green Planet – Jang Joon-hwan, 2003, South Korea
35. Shadow Kill – Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 2002, India
36. The School of Rock – Richard Linklater, 2003, US/Germany
37. Death Proof – Quentin Tarantino, 2007, USA
38. The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow, 2008, U.S.
39. WALL-E – Andrew Stanton, 2008, USA
40. Turning Gate – Hong Sang-soo, 2002, South Korea
41. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – Wes Anderson, 2004, U.S.
42. Werckmeister Harmonies – Béla Tarr, 2000, Hungary/Germany/France/Switzerland/Italy
43. Paprika – Satoshi Kon, 2006, Japan
44. Serbis – Brillante Mendoza, 2008, Philippines/France
45. Dig! – Ondi Timoner, 2004, US
46. Pulse – Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001, Japan
47. Sway – Miwa Nishikawa, 2006, Japan
48. Company – Ram Gopal Varma, 2002, India
49. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – Larry Charles, 2006, USA/UK
50. demonlover – Olivier Assayas, 2002, France

Best Filmmakers of the Decade (unranked)
Claire Denis
Wong Kar-wai
Hong Sang-soo
Hayao Miyazaki
Wes Anderson
Johnnie To
Werner Herzog
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Jia Zhang-ke
Tsai Ming-liang
Pedro Costa
Quentin Tarantino
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Clint Eastwood
Spike Lee
Gus Van Sant
Manoel de Oliveira
Jafar Panahi
Samira Makhmalbaf
Park Chan-wook

Best New Filmmakers of the Decade (unranked)
Wang Bing
Brillante Mendoza
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Bong Joon-ho

Best Reissues of the Decade (unranked)
Ashes of Time Redux – Wong Kar-Wai, 1994/2008, Hong Kong/China/Taiwan
Army of Shadows – Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969, France/Italy
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction – Samuel Fuller, 1980/2004, USA
Elevator to the Gallows – Louis Malle, 1958, France
Killer of Sheep – Charles Burnett, 1977, USA
Play Time – Jacques Tati, 1967, France
Rififi – Jules Dassin, 1955, France
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs – Mikio Naruse, 1960, Japan

Best Films of 1999 (ranked)
1. Wind Will Carry Us, The
2. Princess Mononoke
3. Bringing Out the Dead
4. Run Lola Run
5. Gohatto (Taboo)
6. Beau Travail
7. Limey, The
8. My Best Fiend
9. After Life
10. Eyes Wide Shut
11. Summer of Sam
12. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
13. Being John Malkovich
14. Sixth Sense, The
15. Straight Story, The
16. Felicia's Journey
17. Three Kings
18. Titus
19. Matrix, The
20. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

Audiences, Surprised and Surprising

2009-11-06T15:41:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-03T13:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-28T17:16:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-27T10:47:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-11T10:45:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-09T17:39:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-07T15:08:00.004-05:00

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.

Mark Jenkins on "Roads to the Interior: Another Side of Japanese Cinema"

2009-01-10T15:20:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Mark Jenkins for the thoughtful recap of the Japanese film series I programmed last year at ReelDC.

Sway

2009-01-03T09:25:00.003-05:00

The list of criminally-neglected foreign films is a long one indeed, but one I really want to beat the drum for is Miwa Nishikawa's Sway. According to Nishikawa, it was inspired by a nightmare, and even though there is nothing supernatural about it, that atmosphere of nightmare-dread we've all felt saturates every frame. It's a remarkable feat of sustained mood.

I included it in a program of recent Japanese films last year, and it provoked the most interesting audience reactions in the lobby after the screening. What I, and others, found so powerful and haunting about it is that it's a movie essentially about ambiguity - the impossibility of truly knowing what motivates even those closest to you (to reveal any more would give away too much of a plot that depends on a key not so much plot twist as swerve early on that has the effect of knocking you off balance for the rest of the film.)

Even more fascinating to me were the reactions of the people who disliked it precisely because of its ambuguity. Some of them even seemed angry - they wanted answers that Nishikawa explicitly resists giving. Which makes me think that Nishikawa is a poet in an age that only wants information.

You can read David Wilentz's interview with her at The Brooklyn Rail, and buy the DVD at Amazon.

Harikikigaki, a 16th Century Japanese Medical Manual

2009-01-03T09:10:00.002-05:00

Harikikigaki is a medical manual published in Japan in 1568 which describes how to combat the little critters which were believed to live inside the body and cause disease. Some, like the guy illustrated here, even wear hats in an attempt to avoid medicine. You can see a selection of them at Pink Tentacle.

Favorite Musical Moments of 2008 (In No Particular Order)

2009-01-03T08:54:00.002-05:00

1. TV On The Radio, Dear Science.

2. Esau Mwamamwaya and Radioclit, "Tengazako." It turns out there is room in this world for one more version of MIA's "Paper Planes." This one is from Africa and is full of joy.

3. DJ Earworm, "If I Were a Freefallin' Boy (Beyonce vs. Tom Petty)." The great thing about this mash-up is that it saves you time by allowing you to listen to two great songs at the same time.

4. Lil Wayne, "Mr. Carter." I give up. The guy's great. Even the seasons are jealous of him, or so he boasts here.

5. The dream I had in which Sonic Youth were playing a concert as a kind of lecture-demonstration - they would describe how they were making their guitar sounds while they were playing. As if their music is now so old that it is considered classical.

6. Conor Oberst, "Moab" and Fleet Foxes, "White Winter Hymnal." Talk about classicism. Two great singles by guys who have learned from their forbears.

7. Mavis Staples on the NPR radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. She didn't do much singing, but she stole the show in an old-school, show business way. Plus she revealed that Bob Dylan once proposed marriage to her!

8. Ida Maria, "Oh My God." Full-throttle Scandinavian pop-rock. She is apparently so badass that she broke her ribs during a show when she threw herself into an amp.

You can find a lot of this this stuff on Hype Machine.

Why Nobody Can Write Like Roberto Bolaño

2008-11-12T10:58:00.006-05:00

I've been meaning to post about Roberto Bolaño for some time now, because I am addicted to/envious of his copious output and lean, laserlike prose. Now, thanks to Jonathan Lethem's New York Times Book Review piece on the eagerly-anticipated publication of the English translation of his mammoth final novel 2666, we know why. Lethem writes:

"In a burst of invention now legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the last decade of his life, writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health, constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely such doubts: that literature, which he revered the way a penitent loves (and yet rails against) an elusive God, could meaningfully articulate the low truths he knew as rebel, exile, addict; that life, in all its gruesome splendor, could ever locate the literature it so desperately craves in order to feel itself known."

Is it too romantic a notion to think that Bolaño's awareness of his impending death gave him the mental focus to produce such an astonishing ouevre in such a short period of time?

Fiksi

2008-11-12T10:42:00.003-05:00

If Kim Ki-young were reincarnated today, he would be a young Indonesian director named Mouly Surya. Her wacko gothic psychodrama Fiksi was one of the highlights in Pusan for me this year. Keep an eye out for it.

Abandoned Cities of Asia

2008-10-25T15:19:00.002-04:00

Thanks to my wife for pointing me to Web Urbanist, and their list of Abandonments. Most relevant to this site? The abandoned cities of Asia.

Reports of the Death of Korean Cinema...

2008-10-22T18:56:00.006-04:00

...have been greatly exaggerated. It's a sad fact that there is at least as much, if not more, writing about the business side of cinema as there is about the artistic side. And for a decade or so, Korean cinema has been one of the biggest business successes in the world. All of this ended after the record-setting year of 2006 proved to be unsustainable and the industry went into a steep decline in 2007.

This led the usual prognosticators to declare the Korean Wave over and go looking for the next big thing. Too bad for them. The industry did take a hit in 2007, some producers certainly lost their shirts, but the talent is still there, and the result, at least based on the evidence presented at Toronto and Pusan this year, is that the industry seems to have shrunk to a more manageable size, meaning fewer swing-for-the-fences blockbusters, and - from what I was able to see - a clearer focus on making quality movies.

Only three Korean features were selected for Toronto this year, and all three were excellent choices. Kim Ji-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird proved that Korea can still make the best big, fun movies around. Noh Young-seok did just about everything, including designing the sets and composing the music, for his droll feature debut Daytime Drinking. And In Between Days director So Young Kim's sad, sweet, autobiographical Treeless Mountain even got the business types in a tizzy - the line for the industry screening I saw was at least twice he capacity of the tiny screening room where it was shown.

If the small number of Korean films in Toronto seemed to confirm the conventional wisdom about Korean cinema's decline, Pusan offered a refreshing counterargument. There were more than 300 films in the festival this year, but over and over it was the Korean ones that came up in conversation as particularly impressive.

Top among my favorites were Hong Sang-soo's latest portrait of male ineptitude, the Paris-set Night and Day; Sohn Young Sung's Borges-inspired labyrinth of stories The Pit and the Pendulum; and the rambunctious comedy-of-obsession Crush and Blush, a film that seemed to split viewer into love-it-or-hate-it camps, a generally good sign for its director, Kyungmi Lee, one of a number of talented women directors who seem to be popping up lately. Of the films I wasn't able to see, Ikjune Yang's Breathless and Seung-bin Baek's Members of the Funeral came up repeated in conversation as impressive.

The Korean Retrospective program, which this year focused on Han Hyung-mo and included his awesome 1961 crowd-pleaser My Sister is a Hussy, is always eye-opening. In addition to Han's films, I was glad to see two restorations of film by my favorite madman, Kim Ki-young, on the program. I had already seen his classic psychodrama The Housemaid, which was shown in a newly-restored print, but I was glad that his overheated 1981 period drama Ban Geum-ryun was also on the bill.

So let's hope that the fall festival season is a harbinger of a newly lean Korean film industry which may not rake in the dough like it used to, but can still produce quality stuff.

More on "Still Walking"

2008-09-16T18:47:00.003-04:00

The news that Still Walking won the Indiewire Toronto critics and bloggers poll reminded me of something I forgot to mention in the previous Toronto post.

At least one critic felt that it had a few too many endings, which he felt was its only flaw. My assessment is similar, only I don't see this as a flaw. I remember thinking Still Walking could have ended at any number of points and still been perfect. I like the idea of a movie that can end at any time.

DFW: RIP (WTF!?)

2008-09-15T11:34:00.003-04:00

Like a lot of people, I was shocked to hear of David Foster Wallace's suicide yesterday. It would be trite to call him the voice of my generation, but I think he was one of the few (if not the only?) writer able to voice, and also pierce, the carapace of irony many of us armed ourselves with while growing up in a media-saturated world of composed mostly of advertising images.

One of his great strengths was his ability to pick apart not only the mediated world we live in, but his (our) attitudes towards it, in a self-designed, necessarily wordy style that struck a balance between the self-consciously literary and slacker-slang.

And beneath it all, always a kind of sadness. I mean, Infinite Jest is an infinitely sad book.

You can get a sense of him from this essay he wrote about a radio talk show host, in which he not only explains the machinery of talk radio and its curious mix of bile and faux populism, but find some form of affection for his subject.

But David, I must tell you that it's hard not to be furious with those who take their own lives. I'd like to think I can't imagine the pain you were in, but if I can imagine it, then you have no excuse. Especially since one of your more widely-circulated recent efforts was an inspiring commencement address about overcoming life's difficulties. Also, hanging yourself is a pretty fucked up thing to to, especially w/r/t* your wife, who had to come home and find you. What can I say, except that I am sorry you had to end it this way.

* using "w/r/t" is one of Wallace's signature devices, as are footnotes.

Toronto Report 1: Japan

2008-09-11T18:45:00.004-04:00

Before I even saw a movie, Toronto felt different this year. The city is in the midst of a spectacular construction boom. You can barely walk a block downtown without passing a construction site where a condo complex of a couple dozen stories is going up. A local told me that people were buying units that weren't even built yet, then flipping them for a profit the next day. Canada, have you learned nothing from our little mortgage crisis down here in the States? Or, is this a sign that global big money no longer sees the US as a good bet, and is moving on to our more stable neighbor to the north?

While Toronto the city rises to heights that threaten to blot out the sun, Toronto the festival remains what it has always been: many things to many people. It is big enough to accommodate celebrity-watchers, critics checking out the big fall releases, distributors looking for titles to acquire, and people like me, specialists in some particular aspect of world cinema.

Fate decreed that my schedule was somewhat Japan-heavy this time around, which turned out to be a bit of good fortune because the Japanese films were stronger than I remember them being in years. I and just about everyone else who saw it were smitten with Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film, Still Walking, in which tensions, buried resentments, and secrets emerge during a family gathering. Kore-eda's strength is in his subtlety. The action unfolds over roughly 24 hours, and at a pace that allows for the most dramatic revelations to emerge as they would in life - naturally, through the rhythms of family interaction. Though many drew comparisons to Ozu, Kore-eda, in the q&a after the public screening, remarked that Naruse was more on his mind when he was making it, which makes sense considering the bitter edge that the film retains beneath its considerable good humor.

Kore-eda wasn't the only famous Japanese auteur with a film in the festival. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best known for his nightmarish horror movies, and Tokyo Sonata has some of the same qualities. But in this case, the nightmare is the everyday: losing your job and hiding it from your family; having a talent that no one acknowledges; being so dissatisfied that you wish you could start over again. Kurosawa is a consumate dramatist. There is a moment, late in the film, when you feel things are dragging down, at which point he throws in an ingenious plot twist that surges the thing through the final stretch.

In Japanese cinema, there may be no bigger name than Takeshi Kitano, try as he might to ruin his own reputation. Titled after one of Zeno's paradoxes, Achilles and the Tortoise is the third in his trilogy of films celebrating his own artistic self-destruction. In the first, Takeshis', he focussed on his failure as an actor by playing a dual role, one of which is a younger, better version of himself. In Glory to the Filmmaker he exposes his inability to come up with ideas by putting a compendium of failed ideas onscreen. Although he does paint in real life, the character he plays in Achilles feels more overtly fictional than those in the previous films. My informal poll revealled a divide between those who like the first half, which depicts the hero's rough childhood, or the second, which chronicles his adult career as a failed artist desperately chasing every modern art trend that comes along. How does it end? Let's just say that Kitano is above all a great sentimentalist, and when we find out the reason for the film's title, it becomes one his more satisfyingly hokey endings.

I have often lamented that films like these rarely make it beyond the festival circuit and onto American movie screens. Lacking overt thrills, shocks or a readymade genre peg, even films by acknowledged masters such as Kore-eda, Kurosawa and Kitano may not be picked up for distribution. Which doesn't bode well for Ryosuke Hashiguchi, who is relatively unknown in our region, but who brought to Toronto yet another brilliant Japanese film, All Around Us. Covering about a decade in the life of a married couple, its a film in which what happens during the ellipses is as important as what we see onscreen, and its depiction of love, grief, sadness and ultimately acceptance is every bit as powerful as Kore-eda's.

Next up: Korea.

Creativity

2008-08-25T11:24:00.005-04:00

I sometimes think that we live in a time that denies all achievement, that the Web (especially "Web 2.0") has created a class of armchair-everythings who take pleasure only in cutting down the successes of the genuinely talented. The Olympics tends to bring this out. To some, Michael Phelps' athletic achievements matter less than the fact that he seems like a tool.

It's even worse when it comes to the arts. We know exactly how fast Phelps can swim, but creativity can't necessarily be quantified, nor the work and effort put into it measured.

Which may be why I found myself so attracted by two recent movies that give creativity its due.

My Name is Fame has one of those goofy Hong Kong movie titles, and its plot follows the well-trod path of Pygmalion and A Star is Born, but what really struck me about it was that it takes art seriously. The relationship between the two main characters - Fai, an embittered, washed-up actor, and Fei, the aspiring ingenue who at first idolizes and then surpasses him - is structured as an artistic rivalry, and the questions they confront regarding integrity, and what kinds of achievements and recognition really matter, are given the importance - and the ambiguity - they deserve.

If My Name is Fame is about the hard work of being a creative artist (especially in an industry that rarely values artistry), Be Kind Rewind simply revels in the pure joy of making stuff. The characters played by Jack Black and Mos Def are so unaware of how to make a movie that the obstacles that would thwart someone with knowledge but without means are hardly obstacles at all. Possessing neither means nor knowledge, they happily plunge in with a cheap video camera and whatever else they have at hand. These "Sweded" versions become more popular than the originals among the denizens of the video store where they hang-out, and this exuberance in creativity pervades the entire film (and beyond.)

In both films, creativity is, in itself, both labor and reward. The ingenious ending of My Name is Fame, which deliberately withholds what might have been Fai's triumph in another film, brings this point home in what I found to be a very moving way. The end of Be Kind Rewind is just as moving, but for a different reason. It, and the movie as a whole, evokes a lost Eden, where pure creativity exists unbound by mental or physical barriers.

Robert Ashley

2008-08-25T11:04:00.003-04:00

I was surprised and a little depressed to learn that Robert Ashley has made, like, three or four operas in the last few years, and I was completely unaware of them. Obviously, I haven't been keeping up.

A friend introduced me to Ashley's work when I was in college, and I've been a fan ever since - partly because of the music, but even more because of his use of language. He is truly one of the great manipulators of English. Perfect Lives and Improvement are particular favorites of mine. The best entry point, however, is undoubtably Private Parts (The Record), which is a hushed, mesmerizing recording of what would become the first and last parts of Perfect Lives.

Soccer Blogs

2008-08-20T18:41:00.002-04:00

I came to soccer fandom pretty late. For years I dabbled, watching the World Cup and the occasional Premier League match on cable. But one can only appreciate "the beautiful game" from a distance for so long. Eventually, you really have to pick a team so you can experience the full range of euphoria and agony provided by a sport that so often teases its fans with 0-0 draws after ninety minutes of excruciating tension.

So, last year, I decided to become a Barcelona; supporter. Which is, I know, a little like a newbie baseball fan declaring for the Yankees. Unluckliy for Barcelona, however, I am a lifetime fan of
the losingest sports franchise in history, and my bad luck tends to transfer to whatever other teams I follow. Barca finished the 07-08 season in third place in their league - a grave matter for them - and ended up jettisoning their coach and a couple of star players.

Their new season begins in a little over a week, and I plan to blog their (I hope) recovery from last season's disappointments.

In the meantime, here are some soccer blogs I recommend:

Unprofessional Foul is an opinionated, and often funny, round-up of world soccer news. I especially like the cover art, in which Ronaldhino's unmistakable teeth feature prominently.

Jennifer Doyle is an American professor of Literature, currently living in England, whose blog, From A Left Wing, covers her other passion: soccer (especially women's soccer), with verve and intellectual heft.

Finally, artversussport is by an artist in Barcelona, whose passion for her hometown team manifests itself in watercolors of the players in action.

Comedy

2008-08-18T17:31:00.003-04:00

Why is this clip so funny? Maybe because it's a perfect illustration of three-part joke structure, made even more funny because it happens by accident.

Speaking of Warhol

2008-08-18T15:49:00.004-04:00

There's a great piece by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian objecting to how Andy Warhol is usually depicted in movies, i.e., either as a vampiric manipulator of vulnerable acolytes or a circus freak.

Speaking as a Warhol fanatic, I stand behind Jones when he writes that he'd "rather gaze at the Empire State building for eight hours than see another biopic or documentary that claims to recreate the strange and mysterious world of his New York studio." Warhol may have been just too strange for this world, but this world is better for having had him around for a while.

As Tears Go By

2008-08-18T15:09:00.004-04:00

A new print of Wong Kar-wai's 1988 debut feature, As Tears Go By is making the rounds, and it's well-worth seeking out.

The critical consensus seems to be that it's mainly of interest for the brief glimmers of Wong's mature artistic style that are buried in an otherwise fairly unremarkable film, but there are other pleasures to be had as well. For me, seeing it reminded me of what I always liked about Hong Kong New Wave gangster movies. Namely, the way the narratives are stripped to the bone. Motivation, character development, exposition: all of these are virtually eliminated in favor of velocity and stylistic pizzazz.

In contrast to his later films, which constitute a genre all their own, Wong more or less play by the gangster movie rules in As Tears Go By, but those glimmers, which include some beautifully smeary step-printed action scenes, and a love scene set to a Cantonese version of "Take My Breath Away", are certainly a glimpse of what's to come.

Blog Restart

2008-08-18T14:28:00.002-04:00

Until now, this blog was two things:

1. About Asian cinema exclusively.
2. Rarely updated.

As of today, all that is changing. From now on, I promise to post at least every other day (circumstances permitting), and to mix in topics other than Asian cinema. (Hence, the new title: Asian Cinema Plus.)

This is, in part, a form of self-therapy. Watching Asian films began as a hobby, then became a career, and now threatens to take over my life. Also, as a category, I'm not sure Asian cinema means anything anymore, or, rather, it means too many different things to too many different people. If I allow myself to use this space to write about movies from Iran and Korea, why not France and Senegal? Aren't each of these places equally similar and different, one from another?

Following the same logic, why limit myself to film at all? If I admire both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Andy Warhol as artists, why not write about both? If I enjoy watching soccer and watching movies, why not include that as well?

So without futher ado, welcome to my newly reconsidered blog, Asian Cinema Plus.

Otakon Appearances

2008-08-08T10:59:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow (Saturday), I'll be traveling up to Baltimore to attend the gigantic anime convention known as Otakon. If previous conventions are any indication, the Baltimore Convention Center will be overflowing with people of all ages wearing outlandish costumes.

I will be signing my book at the Borders Express in the Dealers Room at 3 PM, then giving a talk at 5 PM in Panel Room 1.

March 16 Screening and Book Event

2008-03-01T11:26:00.003-05:00

On Sunday, March 16, at 1 PM, I will be speaking before, and signing the book after, a screening of Lou Ye's devastating Summer Palace at the Freer Gallery of Art.

Book Now Available

2008-03-01T11:21:00.002-05:00

Asian Cinema: A Field Guide is now available at bookstores worldwide. Here is the official site. For those of you on Facebook or MySpace, there are pages for it there too.

Fall Festivals, Malaise

2007-10-29T11:59:00.000-04:00

In my trips to Toronto and Pusan this year, I noticed a preponderance of misery in the films I watched. My half-assed theory is that a hopelessness about the condition of the world began after 9/11/01 and has only spread and deepened over the past six years, with no end in sight, and is finding its expression more and more prevalently in films both good and bad. Although the sampling of movies I saw at both festivals may not be representative of a true trend, it seems significant to me that the funniest one I saw in Toronto was Jiang Wen's The Sun Also Rises, which is set during the Cultural Revolution in China, another miserable time.

A.O. Scott, in Sunday's New York Times, sees a similar trend in the slate of upcoming American films about the war in Iraq, and has a similar diagnosis:

"What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?"

Watching the films in this year's
Korean Cinema Retrospective in Pusan gave me a different perspective on our current miserablism. The focus of this year's retrospective was Kim Seung-ho, an actor who specialized in playing fathers in family dramas in the 50s and 60s. The post-Korean War years were certainly miserable ones, but these films aimed to provide comfort to their audiences by reflecting their hardships, and generously leavening the pathos with humor based on the daily lives of ordinary Koreans. Of course, comparing Korean commercial films from a half century ago to contemporary "art films" is probably unfair, but it does make me wonder: Where are the filmmakers willing to confront and combat our global malaise with humor, wit, and, corny as it sounds, hope.

Kaiju Shakedown Returns

2007-10-29T11:50:00.000-04:00

Good news for Asian cinema fans: Grady Hendrix's Kaiju Shakedown is back online, via Variety Asia Online.

This is good news for a number of reasons, the main one being that Grady seems to be going off the deep end, what with his insistence that American distributors unwilling to pick up Memories of Matsuko should be replaced with cute kittens, and his unhealthy love for Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Book

2007-10-20T11:52:00.000-04:00

After a two-year hiatus, I am officially resurrecting my blog with the announcement of my upcoming book, ASIAN CINEMA: A FIELD GUIDE, which will be published on January 8, 2008 by HarperCollins. Look for it in bookstores then, or you can pre-order now at Amazon.