TVRB: Is This England? On Zadie Smith and Martin Amis

Two of my go-to airplane authors, Zadie Smith and Martin Amis, have recently published novels (to less than enthusiastic reviews) that both depart from their usual styles and take on similar issues of race and class. I don't know if this says anything significant about the "State of England" (as the subtitle of Amis' novel puts it), but I couldn't help comparing them after reading them virtually back-to-back.

Beijing Flickers

"Despair can be so amazing sometimes," muses San Bao, the hero of Zhang Yuan's stunning new film, Beijing Flickers. He's broke. He's lost his girlfriend, his dog and his apartment. But it's also late at night, he's drunk and roaming the empty streets with his friends, and the first snowfall of the year is coming down. This accumulation of details, the pressure and pleasures of the city, is a kind of euphoria, which will soon lead him to his second half-assed suicide attempt of the movie, in the same way a more stable person might burst into song or dance down the street.

Newly rich, ever changing Beijing is the backdrop for many movies nowadays, but this is the that rare film in which it actually becomes a character.

Tweeting Now

I'm now Tweeting @tomrvick. Follow me unless you're like this:

Follow-up: John Cage, Marx Brothers, Margaret Leng Tan

Here is the Marx Brothers clip I saw in the John Cage exhibition many years ago:



 Read on for more, and news from Margaret Leng Tan.

On John Cage in his Centennial Year

Today's New York Times article on John Cage (placed right next to one on another great composer, Pauline Oliveros!) prompted me to look back on my long-term relationship with him. During college and the years after, Cage's work and thought had a tremendous influence on me, but as the years have gone by, our relationship has turned into more of an argument.

The Presence of Lau Ching-wan

Sometimes you have to take what you can get with a movie. In this case I'm thinking of Fairy Tale Killer, which I saw at PiFan. Despite director Danny Pang's attempts to goose it with stylish camera work and lots of noise, it's in the end yet another cookie cutter serial killer flick.

But one thing did keep me going with it, and that was the performance of Lau Ching-wan.

Korea Trip Blog 2

And here is my second Korea Trip post on the official Freer and Sackler Blog.

The Problem with Google Street View Art

I've written about Geoff Dyer before. Since then, my ambivalence about him has only grown. In his New York Times Book Review column, for instance, he often seems to be reaching for appropriately quirky subjects. But this article in The Guardian about Google Street View Art is equal parts fascinating and disturbing, for reasons he's probably not even aware of.

Korea Trip Blog 1

Here is the first of two posts on the official Freer|Sackler Blog re: my trip to Korea this month.

Two New Pieces on Korean Cinema

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

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

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

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

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.

Finally: The Chaser

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.

TVRB: Can't Stop Won't Stop

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.

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.

It's Comedy! Part Two

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:

It's Comedy!

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, Mrs. Bourne writes to Mr. Tarantino regarding their recent one night stand:

A Nats Fan's Notes: Behind the Foul Pole

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.