Category Archive

I eventually found my way through the intimidatingly large program of the San Francisco International Film Festival, and to the festival itself.

The movie I most enjoyed was Sleep Dealer. It is set in a near-future where the kind of low-paying jobs now often held by immigrants from developing countries (driving taxis, constructions work, waiting tables) are done by machines that are controlled remotely via a virtual reality technology. And the machines are operated, of course, by low-paid workers in developing countries, so that the richer countries can have all the benefits of immigration, without the immigrants. During the Q&A, the filmmaker Alex Rivera made the point that (as far as he knows) this is the first movie to look into the future of developing countries. One often sees SF movies that imagine the future of New York, or London, but not of Tijuana or Delhi. One woman asked him how he reconciles the political message of his movie with the corporate sponsorship. (She noticed an acknowledgment to Coca Cola in the closing credits.) I liked his response: “we are all steeped in inescapable horror,” he started, “the Gap clothes I am wearing were made in a sweatshop, and the meat I ate for dinner came from animals that were treated inhumanely.” And he went on to say that we cannot fight everything, we have to keep on living, but for the big things, then it is worth trying to push back as much as possible. (I completely agree.)

Big Man Japan, about a middle-aged Japanese super-hero was also a lot of fun.

I also saw two movies from Chinese “sixth generation” directors. Still Life won the golden lion (the top prize) at the 2006 Venice film festival, and I should have known better than to go see it: European film festival juries are populated by the worst kind of film snobs, and watchable movies are not their thing. In the spirit of Italian neo-realismo, the movie is interested in seeing great societal change through the eyes of the “little people” that are affected by them, and via small, disjointed, stories. I don’t get it. I concede, however, that the scenes about the towns being demolished in preparation for the rising level of water after the Three Gorges Dam is completed, are incomparably more moving, if considerably less polished, than the same images in Manufactured Landscapes Umbrella was a fascinating documentary shot as part of a large project that will produce ten documentaries a year for ten years. Following umbrellas from the places where they are produced, to the places where they are traded, to the places where they are used, the movie looks into five classes of Chinese society, factory workers, merchants, college students, soldiers, and farmers. The shots inside a PLA training facility are fascinating, and the final segment was very moving, with a peasant complaining about the rising costs of farming, the lack of welfare, and then reminiscing about the various farming policies from the 1950s on, and finally weeping by just thinking about the time of the cultural revolution.

The San Francisco International Film Festival starts in less than two weeks, and the program includes 104 movies, described in a 146-page program guide.

If any of you Bay Area readers has already done the work of studying the program and picking good movies, please do leave your recommendations in the comment thread. (I am writing notes on PCP for my class, I haven’t done my taxes yet, there is a long-overdue post on Cheeger’s inequality coming, and the energy to read through 104 movie reviews is lacking.)

The San Francisco International Film Festival is under way, and they are showing, today and on Wednesday, Il Caimano, Nanni Moretti’s latest movie. It’s a movie-within-a-movie story about Berlusconi’s ascent to power and the inability of contemporary Italian left-leaning moviemakers to make movies with political content, unlike the earlier generation of, say, Elio Petri (the director of Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto).

Last weekend there was the North American premiere of The Heavenly Kings, by Bay Area’s own Daniel Wu. Part mockumentary part Borat-style guerilla filmmaking, the movie follows four Hong Kong actors in their 30s as they form a “boy” band despite their inability to sing or dance, trick the Hong Kong press into believing they are for real, and eventually deliver a series of three concerts in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Shanghai. They came in person to the screenings for Q&A sessions, to the delight of a group of camera-wielding women sitting in the first rows.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, don’t miss this movie playing at the Castro this Tuesday at seven. One of my favorite movies ever, it has an unforgettable soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, a stunning performance by Gian Maria Volonte’, and a very clever, and perfectly executed, premise.

When I was in high school, I watched Young Frankenstein a few times too many, and so did some of my friends. We would sometimes reenact the “Sit down please. No, no, higher” gag at inappropriate times, or say “What a filthy job” when the weather threatened rain, and repeat our favorite lines (”You take the blonde, I’ll take the one with the turban,” “he is going to be very popular,” “A.B. Normal”) for no particular reason. Overall, I knew the movie pretty much by heart, in Italian, that is. (In Italy, foreign movies are dubbed, often by famous actors, not subtitled.) And the “quiet dignity and grace” scene is always with me whenever the excitement of the proof of a major result gives way to the realization that the proof has a fatal flaw.

I have never, however, seen the movie on a big screen. That’s about to change, because the Castro Theater, that has already delighted me with big-screen showings of Manhattan, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odissey, The Rear Window, Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and several other movies that came out before my time, is showing Young Frankenstein this weekend!

The funniest scenes in the movies are surreal and incongruous, so the context in which the movie is being screened is oddly appropriate. The movie will show on Saturday at midnight, preceded by a show by Heklina (of Trannyshack fame) and Peaches Christ (of Midnight Mass). What do drag queens have got to do with a nerd cult classic that, as far as I can see, is not camp at all? And then, the whole thing is somehow part of the International Bear Rendezvous of 2007. The bigger (and fatter, and hairer) question then being what do bears have got to do with drag queens and Mel Brooks?

All I can say is that this is the kind of thing that in New York, for all the superior choice of several art movie houses, cannot be found. Score one for San Francisco!

And The Seventh Seal is going to play next week! Now if only they would show The Blues Brothers…

[Update 2/19. I stand corrected. Now I see that every good comedy ought to be preceded by a drag show and to be seen with more than a thousand roaring bears.]

San Francisco is the city of the many film festivals, but this month the programmers of the Castro Theater are having too much fun. This weekend, there was a first annual canine film festival.

At the end of the month, there will be the the first ever Crispin Glover film festival in the world, and, just in time for FOCS, you can catch Crispin Glover in person on October 20, 21 and 22.

And who is Crispin Glover, you may ask? Older readers may remember him from such movies as Back to the Future, where he played George McFly, the nerdy father of Michael J. Fox’s character.

Being back in San Francisco for a few days, I had a chance to catch Paper Doll, a documentary profiling a group of Filipino immigrants in Israel, working mostly as caregivers for the elderly.

The Philippines are, for some reason, great exporters of caregivers. Italy has a large such immigrant community, and so do many countries in East Asia. In Taiwan, for example, the exploitation of Filipino maids and caregivers made possible by immigration laws is a cause célèbre of leftist groups. The same legal problems arise in Israel, where a work visa is immediately voided if one is fired, resulting in illegal status and the possibility of deportation. Indeed, the same is true for software engineering on H1B visas in the US, but the difference in class, education, and type of employment (not to mention the possibility of permanent residency) does not quite create the same situation.

The main angle of the movie, however, is that the Filipinos profiled in the documentary are all transgender, and they have formed a group, called Paper Dolls, that performs drag shows at community events.

They are met with acceptance and prejudice in a way that is not always predictable. Their clients, including religious ones, are accepting (even though those working in ultra-orthodox neighborhoods are uncomfortable there). The relation between one of them and the elderly man that she cares for, in particular, is very touching. Their attempt to play their act at a big-name gay club in Tel-Aviv, however, ends in a disaster of cultural insensivity.

Eventually, the group disbands, partly because of the vagaries of the Israeli immigration laws, some of them going back to the Philippines, and some of them moving to London.

The movie does not quite have a point, and its own sensibility oscillates between exploitation and sympathy. If its point was to express this conflict, then it succeeds quite well.

Tuscany is a fierce place. Locals are famous in Italy for their imaginatively blasphemous way of swearing, their biting sense of humour, and their propensity for practical jokes. Citizens of different cities have rivalries that go back hundreds of years, and in some cities, like Siena, there are centuries-old rivalries between neighborhoods. Thanks to books like this, however, many Americans have an image of Tuscany as an extended, mellow, countryside where gentlemen sit in the gardens of their villas dipping fresh produce into olive oil, in the time that is not consumed by flirting with foreign women.

In fact, the theme of idyllic, if backwards, countryside/small town recurs even in the few Italian movies that achieve wide distribution in the US. (For example Io non ho paura or, a long time ago, Academy Award-winning Nuovo cinema Paradiso.)

Sometimes, people who have to listen to me complain about the above, or who are planning a trip to Italy, ask me what movies they could watch to get a sense of what Italy is like. Unfortunately, my first recommendations (Il Caimano or Aprile by Nanni Moretti, anything with Alberto Sordi) cannot be found in the US. Two good choices are Caro diario and La meglio gioventu’, but it is L’ultimo bacio which comes to mind first.

(Note: I am not talking about the best recent movies from Italy, which are definitely Ozpetek’s movies, but the best movies about Italy.)

L’ultimo bacio is mostly about the character flaws of the four male protaganists, all in their late 20s. The movie was a sensation among my friends (who were also in their late 20s and early 30s when the movie was released), and it spoke to them very personally. They saw an unflattering image of themselves, but, at the same time, the movie is sympathetic to its characters. I had already lived abroad for several years when I saw the movie, and it still felt too close for comfort. This was perhaps the most intensely and specifically Italian movie I had seen in a long time.

Now, however, there is an American remake. This sounds as implausible as an Italian remake of American Beauty, and I wonder what the producers were thinking and whether the movie will work at all.

The 30th Frameline film festival is under way. It can exist, and be such a big production, thanks to the contributions of the Frameline members and to the major sponsors. In addition, each screening has its own sponsor. The movie I saw today was sponsored by … Canada!

No kidding.

This is not an isolated act of kindness. The Frameline programmer who introduced the movie said that, over time, the Canadian government has contributed more than the US federal government to the festival.

I have two things to say: (1) foreign aid to needy countries is very noble; (2) I blame the electoral college.

Yesterday the International Film Festival featured Three Times by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. (His given name Hsiao-hsien is romanized as Xiaoxian in pinyin.)

There are three love stories, set in Taiwan in 1966, 1911 and 2005, and played by the same lead actor and actress. As usual in a certain recent style of Chinese film-making, the director does not have much use for such things as story and dialog.

The 1911 story, indeed, is played as a silent movie: even though the actors talk to each other, we hear no live sound, only music. Part of the dialog is reproduced in “interstitial” subtitles, that is, subtitles presented in separate frames. It is intriguing at the beginning, but it gets old very quickly. The 2005 story is completely useless. A guy goes out with a girl, who suffers from epilepsy and has a lesbian lover. That’s it, made into a half-hour section.

The 1966 story is actually beautiful. A guy meets a girl in a pool bar just before he has to leave for his military service. The two correspond by letter. On a weekend break he searches through all of Taiwan for the girl (who, meanwhile, has moved twice). He finds her when he has only a few hours left before having to go back to his base.

Contemporary Chinese filmmakers have perfected the art of telling love stories that are ill-timed (or made difficult/impossible by duties/circumstances), and of depicting the resulting feeling of longing. Just think of any movie by Wong Kar-Wai, or even of more commercial ones like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Brokeback Mountain.

Indeed, every time I see a Chinese movie like this, I am reminded that Western film-makers haven’t been able (or willing?) to take a love story seriously in a very long time. One finds romantic comedies, surely, or very dark movies about sexual attraction, usually treated as a destructive force. (I am thinking of American Beuty as a mild example, or The Piano Teacher as an extreme one.) But is there a recent Western movie about love that is not about destructive sexuality, not about being funny, and that is not an unwatchable chick-flick? To clarify the terminology: if one of the characters is dying of leukemia, it’s a chick-flick, and if one of the characters is a prostitute who looks like Julia Roberts, that’s funny.

By the way, Chen Chang, the male lead in Three Times, had supporting roles in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and in 2046 and, most notably, he was also the “third guy” in Happy Together.

New York is probably the movie-lover capital of the world, but the San Francisco film festival scene is outstanding. Counting only the major ones, every year there is an Asian Film Festival, an Independent Film Festival, the International Film Festival and the Frameline (gay and lesbian) Film Festival. In addition, there is a German Film Festival, a Jewish Film Festival, the various cycles of movies run by the PFA in Berkeley, the retrospectives at the Castro and so on. A couple of years ago, a horror film festival was introduced, called Another Hole in the Head. Clearly, the tagline of the advertising campaign was

San Francisco needed another film festival like Another Hole in the Head

(The 2006 edition is coming up, by the way.)

At these festivals I have seen a number of unforgettable movies that never received wide distribution in the US. One such movie was Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn. Tsai Ming-liang is part of a generation of East Asian directors that have been inspired by a certain French style of movie making: through the movie, nothing really happens, except that you start to read between the lines of what the characters are saying, and to gain some insight about what they are thinking. When a resolution feels imminent, the movie ends abruptly. Tsai Ming-liang has taken this style and worked out a reductio ad absurdum. Two scenes from Goodbye Dragon Inn are seared in my memory. One scene is set in the restroom of a movie theater. There is a line of urinals, each with an ashtray next to it. A man is standing, smoking, at the urinal closest to the camera. He stands there, smokes, then puts the cigarette down on the ashtray. He keeps standing there. Other people come and go at the other urinals. He picks up the cigarette, he smokes. He puts the cigarette down, and so on. This goes on for a very, very long time. When an empty scene is kept going so long, what happens is that it becomes funny, then annoying, and finally funny again. It takes a tremendous sense of timing to make it work. (Actually, the scene is not completely empty: it is understood that some cruising is going on in the theater, and possibly, in the restroom, so one expects the scene to go off in a certain direction, but nothing happens.) Later, the cashier of the movie theater goes through the theater to pick up the trash. She wears a tutor on her knee, and so she walks with a limp, and she makes a metallic noise at each step. The theater is huge, and she goes, for ever, up and down the stair picking up the trash. The genius is that, at the end of this truly torturous scene, during which the audience alternatively groans and guffaws (a few people left), we see the cashier exiting the scene, and the scene does not end: we see the empty theater, and the noise of the limping cashier walking out of sight.

As an immediate reaction, I hated this movie. Somehow, the following day, I loved it. I tried to see other movies by him, but What time is it over there did not work for me (the scenes just felt annoying), and I was told not to even try to watch The river.

Right now, the International Film Festival is going on, and tonight’s main attraction was Tsai Ming-liang’s last movie, The wayward cloud. The movie was introduced as a pornographic musical, and that’s a fairly good description. What is the movie about? That’s obviously not the right question, but suffices to say that the premise is that Taiwan goes through a water shortage, and watermelons become the cheapest source of hydration. Indeed, watermelons figure quite prominently in the movie.

We get to see Lee Kang-sheng, the inscrutable projectionist of Goodbye Dragon Inn, shake watermelon seeds off his pubic hair, chase live crabs on a kitchen floor, sing a musical number in a dress, and repeatedly have intercourse with an overweight and accident-prone porn actress. The timing is almost always flawless and the last scene is unforgettable for the classical French style it is shot in (with the long takes and the close-ups) and the scandalous content. It goes without saying (it’s part of this style of film-making) that the movie has no dialog. Some supporting characters have lines, but nobody ever says something to which someone else replies. The main characters, of course, speak no line in the entire movie.

In Beijing, I bought a DVD of Crash for 75 cents from a street vendor.

I was advised not to buy movies off the street, because they would be likely to be very bad pirated copies, shot by some guy with a video camera in the movie theater, like in the famous Seinfeld episode. Indeed, this only made me more eager to buy DVDs from street vendors. So what if the video quality is bad and you hear other people’s voices: just to be able to tell the story of that one time I bought a movie in Beijing and it turned out to be shot illegally in a movie theater, I am more than willing to spend 75 cents.

The movie, however, is an original copy, or perhaps an illegal copy of an original one. It has all the extra features, the subtitles are available in English, Chinese traditional, Chinese simplified, and Spanish, and so on.

Even in legitimate stores, DVDs rarely cost more than $4. I had a long list of movies I wanted to buy, but that I could not find in the short time I had to look for them. One more reason to regret the shortness of this trip.