Each year, the last week of the New York Asian Film Festival shifts uptown to Japan Society where programming overlaps with the first week of co-presenter sister fest Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film. This year I caught of number of my NYAFF’09 favorites here (Vacation, All Around Us, and unexpectedly delightful Magic Hour), as well as picking up a handful of tickets to Japan Cuts.

I’d challenge viewers seeing any pairing of these films to come up with a “Japanese contemporary film is [x]“: the range of themes, topics, and styles ever tacks “Japan” to the top of my national-cinemas-to-watch list. But as has happened to award-winners at NYAFF the past few years, some of the more unusual, passionate work will never get US theatrical distribution (Sad Vacation, Funky Forest, Princess Raccoon, etc.). But if you hunt far and wide (and graymarket), DVDs at least may be obtained.

LOVE EXPOSURE (Japan, 2008)

I am going to have a difficult time speaking about Sion Sono’s gleefully sacrilegious four-hour Love Exposure without resorting to extremes. This partially due to the film’s intentionally tripelbock hot-button content, but mostly because (for all of its pile-it-on plot hijinks) this was my favorite experience of the festival.

Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is a quiet, dutiful son born unto zealous Catholics. One of the last thing Yu’s mother tells her son before she dies of illness: she hopes Yu will someday meet his very own Mary. Yu’s father enters the priesthood in the wake of his wife’s death. Haunted by a disastrous love affair, he forces his goody-goody son to make daily confession to him, berating his son for insisting, timidly, that he hasn’t sinned that day.

Yu responds as any quiet, dutiful son placed in this position must: he makes confession. After getting caught out for his initial, awkward fabrications (”I didn’t help an old lady cross the street” when in fact he did) he commits himself wholeheartedly to true sin. The worse the sin, the more his father revert from his priestly deportment to Yu’s red-in-the-face, screaming dad. So in a sequence evoking Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Yu transforms himself from altar boy into the King of Perverts: a blackbelt upskirt panty photographer. (Asked about research for this work in the q&a, Sono talked about getting arrested a few times when going out shooting with his photographer consultant.)

On the other side of the story, swaggers tough-as-titanium Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Raised by an abusive, ceaselessly philandering father, she achieves an epiphany looking around her bedroom at posters of female pop culture icons: she resolves to hate men and love women. She runs away from home with her father’s latest ex-lover (also the object of Yu’s father’s disastrous affair) determined to invent a new life for herself, not as a daughter but as the ex-lover’s peer.

And then comes The Miracle (anticipated by a series of countdown title cards):  the collision of Yu with Yoko in a city park — while the two of them face off against a gang of scores of male thugs. Preparing to fight the entire world single-handedly, or die trying, Yoko draws a gauzy scarf down around her face and steadies herself — evoking for Yu his mother’s demand to meet his own “Mary.” (Yu: “Who is this woman!”) However, Yu joins the fray dressed in drag as the costumed exploitation hero “Lady Scorpion” (his fighting skills honed by hard training as a committed sinner) having earlier that day lost a game of upskirt-photo high-card with his friends. (Between punches, Yoko asks herself: “Who is this woman!”) Love at first fight.

This inciting incident, one hour into the film, is followed by the film’s opening title sequence. (Greeted with cheers at the screening I attended.) Much of the rest of the film backs into this sequence and the consequences that follow, to reveal the Miracle not as an act of God, but as the master manipulation of giggly, white-clad schoolgirl Koike (Sakura Ando), a Zero Church capo, in the service of a deep dark religious cult purpose (inflected by her own personal craving for sadism, mayhem, and destruction).

–Matt Griffin

In the spirit of some of the greatest duels in the history of drama (we’re thinking Shakespeare here, of course), we present to you a month of duels: we put forth two contenders, you decide the winner.

First, the original Russian trailer for Tarkovsky’s Solaris:

Second, the 2002 George Clooney-starring Solaris remake by Steven Soderbergh.

Who’s the winner? Remember you can see the Tarkovsky original here on Thursday and Friday.

Stay tuned for more duels in the coming weeks!

From our friends at The Film Talk, a special look at the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and why you should clear the 3.5 hours to see Andrei Rublev on the big screen. The podcast also includes an interview with filmmaker Dmitry Trakovsky, who made the documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky, which will screen at the Film Society next week with a Q & A with the filmmaker.

Revisiting Tarkovsky at the Film Society of Lincoln Center
July 7 – July 14, 2009 – See schedule and buy tickets

Listen to The Film Talk podcast here

To get a weekly dose on opinionated film discussion, you can subscribe to The Film Talk on iTunes.

I LOVE this idea! The Toronto transit system is hosting a competition for short films, under one minute in length, that will ultimately be screened on subway platforms. According to the official website of the competition: “The Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) is the only film festival of its kind in North America, and one of the largest in the world with an average daily viewing audience of over 1 million. The 3rd annual TUFF is programmed on the Onestop Network of 270 subway platforms screens throughout the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC).”

Better yet, the contest is open to us Yankees. It’s true that little time is left before the deadline on July 15th, but cool prizes are at stake. And you can’t beat a captive audience.

Full info here

MTA, are you listening?

The Human Rights Watch 20^th International Film Festival closed last week with a righteous guffaw.

The Yes Men Fix the World left a packed Walter Reade Theater in tears of laughter… and social awareness. The documentary drew its comic prowess from the hysterical deformity of corporate America’s moral compass.  And while it’s hard not to laugh at a lodestone that points to a bottom line, it’s also hard not to see the danger in such a perversion.

The second documentary created by “Yes Men” Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, Fix the World begins with a voice over explaining that Andy is getting ready to impersonate a DOW spokesperson on the BBC in front of 300 million people, “…and that’s why he looks so nervous.”  Some well-assembled backtracking shows us how The Yes Men function. For the most part, they create fake websites said to represent the various unjust organizations of the world, and wait until people fall into the trap and contact them. They then take various opportunities, for example, to participate in conferences, or to appear on international television.

Early in the film, Mike presents at a conference as a so-called representative of DOW. He claims to have created a model by which a company can calculate whether the human life an enterprise may cost is worth the probable monetary benefit. A character they have created personifies the model: Gilda, a gold skeleton. Alluding to a tragedy that occurred in Bhopal, India in 1984 when a plant belonging Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of DOW, released 42 tons of toxic gas into the air, Mike explained how a worthwhile “gold skeleton” can be differentiated from a futile “skeleton in the closet”: Mike asks, “how many Americans does it take to screw in a light bulb? Twelve. One to screw it in, and eleven to file the lawsuit. How many Indians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Oh, just one.” The Yes Men hoped that the concept of such a model would shock and disturb a room full of white collars, but instead the group embraced it with applause.

Unfortunately, all of the Yes Men’s other attempts at unearthing hearts beneath suits are similarly futile. It is thus that the documentary becomes not a story of problems fixed, but of problems illuminated. This is best illustrated by the pair’s biggest stunt. Masquerading as “Jude Finisterra,” a representative of DOW, Andy went on the BBC and promised at long last to compensate the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Bhopal tragedy. Upon realizing the hoax, DOW immediately released a statement saying that no such compensation would be provided, even though the hoax made it pretty evident that this would be the right thing to do.

Despite this stunt’s impotence when it came to actually changing corporate policy, Andy said in a Q and A following the evening’s screening that he saw the BBC appearance as the Yes Men’s biggest victory, because it succeeded in arousing awareness about the Bhopal tragedy. According to Green Peace, hundreds of articles that would have otherwise went unwritten came into being as a result of the hoax. While Andy concluded in the Q and A that, “DOW would never do the right thing” on its own, he sees a possible solution in further regulation of corporations on the part of the government.  The hope is that the Yes Men’s reawakening of public awareness will somehow translate into public policy.

The most optimistic move the Yes Men make is the mass distribution of a “special edition” of the New York Times.  Researched and compiled by a huge team of Yes Men, the paper is a vision of what the world could be like at a point in the future. Given that the future date chosen for headlines such as “Iraq War Ends,” and “Maximum Wage Law Passes,” is this Saturday, July 4, 2009, it’s obvious that the paper’s socialistic optimism is more than a little bit cock-eyed. But that’s the big upside of keeping your tongue in your cheek: outrageous hope.

The Yes Men Fix the World has its television premiere on HBO July 27. It will be screening at Film Forum beginning October 7.

-Morgan H. Green

It’s summer, yay! You could be watching Transformers 2, but you would be better entertained catching the spirited critical lambast hoisted at it (especially here and here).

Thankfully, There are other options: I’ve been attending Subway Cinema’s New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center. Here’s another tasting menu of mini-reviews from the festival bringing to New York City some of the most interesting contemporary Asian cinema you have never seen before.

20th CENTURY BOYS, Chapter One / 20th CENTURY BOYS, Chapter Two: The Last Hope (2008)

Do you remember inventing stories about the future with your grade school friends? What secrets would adulthood hold for you, your friends, your playground enemies? Naoki Urasawa’s manga epic — manga’s The Watchmen — considers: “what if you were confronted with your childhood playground fantasies as an adult?” Not the fluffy talking bunny pal or the castle-fort in a local park, but the scariest nightmare that you and your little friends came up with: the villain mastermind your gang would band together to overcome. Would the pushing forty adult-you be up to the challenge of saving the world, the task you assigned yourself as a child?

Director Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s three-film epic treatment of this epic subject offers audiences a remarkably close adaptation — in terms of narrative, casting, and even camera framing — of the original manga. While this film might be poppier fare than Shūsuke Kaneko’s mature, challenging Death Note adaptations from NYAFF ‘07, and less crowd-pleasing than Shimako Sato’s K-20, Tsutsumi’s summer blockbuster-scale production nonetheless brings to the subversive, culturally critical source material compelling performances and memorable images unlike any $800 million dollar blockbuster you will ever see again. Confronted with the challenge of compressing 4k manga-pages into even a generous 5 hours, Tsutsumi reorders the narrative to deliver jaw-dropping, paradigm-switching end-sequences for the climax of both Chapter One and Chapter Two. An improvement over occasional meandering “why is this story not over?” feeling of the original.

K-20: LEGEND OF THE MASK (Japan, 2008)

Drawing from a number of masked man action/adventure references, from Fantomas to Zorro, director Shimako Sato compiles a new blockbuster franchise from the character “K-20: the Fiend with Twenty Faces.” In an alternative universe 1949 (in which World War II never took place), Tesla has survived to invent his electrical energy broadcast technology, and the division between the Japanese aristocracy and the disenfranchised poor resembles, well, contemporary America. A new loud-cackling villain is on the loose: a man assuming perfect false identities in order to steal precious objects and technology from the aristocratic and scientific community. Because no one knows what K-20 looks like, the naive wrong-place-wrong-time circus acrobat Hekichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) gets fingered as the bad guy. His efforts to escape and redeem himself lead him to train in the very skills the real K-20 mastered. Sato’s film is a surprisingly successful crowd-pleaser, a Speilberg-at-his-prime steampunk adventure film.

TACTICAL UNIT: COMRADES IN ARMS (Hong Kong, 2008)

Milkyway veteran director Law Wing-cheong’s feature joins other broadcast and theatrical films created with the same team of actors and creative staff over the past few years in the wake of  Johnnie To’s successful Hong Kong police franchise PTU (2003). Comrades in Arms follows two infighting factions of a Hong Kong PTU assigned to pursue armed bank robbers into the mountains. While in many ways this film is simply the latest pressing of a well-respected, well-oiled creative team, the performances and solid filmmaking effortlessly set this film above Hollywood police action fare, and I admire the piece enough to track down To and Law’s other Milky Way “Tactical Unit” pictures.

EYE IN THE SKY (Hong Kong, 2008)

Another police procedural offering from Hong Kong-based Milkyway. This debut film directed by veteran screenwriter Yau Nai-hoi (wr. Election (2005), The Mission (1999)) leverages its subject matter, the Hong Kong Police Department SU (surveillance unit), to permit a compelling (if frenzied) camera-and-cutting style that distinguishes it from the PTU series and any other police/crime films in the NYAFF series. Locating itself in style and content somewhere between the unspeakably dangerous (Bond-free) UK contemporary espionage/counter-terrorism series Spooks/MI5 and Greengrass’s overdriven, grab-at-a-glance Bourne Ultimatum, Yau’s film manages to turn the media-as-metaphor suggested by surveillance footage into an engaging, accomplished feature that I continue to recommend.

-Matthew Griffin

Perceptions of India volley between the extremes of luxurious wealth portrayed in commercial Bollywood flicks and the news beat struggle the forty percent of the nation’s population living in poverty. The latter is a hairy picture for a Western public, to which the outrage over Slumdog Millionaire can attest. With every portrait of a country with enormous divides between class, caste, culture, language and religion, the question must be asked, “Is this the real India? Is this the India that Indians want the world to see?” To its credit, the Museum of Modern Art’s The New India series, sixteen films screened from June 5^th through June 18^th included thought-provoking documentaries about the reality of rural villages, including Megan Mylan’s film Smile Pinki, and Sourav Sarangi’s Bilal against large-scale Bollywood features like Luck by Chance by Zoya Akhtar, and subtler portrayals, like Buddhadev Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs that raise questions as much about the rise of India in the global eye and portrayals of poverty.

The line between an honest portrayal of rural life and “poverty porn” is fine and often blurry. Smile Pinki, directed by Megan Mylan stays beautifully clear of dangerous territory, recounting the story of poverty-stricken children with cleft lips and their magical transformation upon receiving free surgeries from a charity organization, The Smile Train. The film pivots around the vitality of the patients, a young girl in particular whose courage comes as a unnerving reminder of the astounding resilience of children. Sourav Sarangi’s Bilal is a far more complicated, ambivalent affair, following a young boy living in poverty with blind parents, unsure of itself as a documentary or a more stylistic narrative. Sarangi often films at Bilal’s eye-level, seeing the world from his perspective picks fights with peers and roosters outside of the 8×10 foot partitioned room he shares with his blind parents and little brother. Life is hard, as the parents are led around infamous Calcutta streets and struggle with debt, abortion, and violence portrayed matter-of-factly. Moments of hardship are obviously downplayed and others are not, muddying the line between slum exotica and a tale of real hardship and strength.

India cannot be seen without the role of fantasy and escapism provided by cinema’s ubiquitous cultural presence. Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance transitions from the aesthetic world of glossy Bollywood parties to the humble lives of struggling artists, to the sets gaudy day-time soap operas. The deliberate moves between the glamorous celebrity-studded dream and the reality of an industry run on nepotism and corruption a simultaneous self-consciousness and great love for the industry the film criticizes and participates in. While revealing an industry that thrives on its incestuous breeding of star cache, Zoya Akhtar never loses sight of the impact of this world on the quotidian reality of Indian life across social stratum.

Buddhadev Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs, zooms in a little closer, painting a poetically stylized portrait of contemporary urban Calcutta, telling the sad tale of two young men and the effect of technology and popular culture on their lives in a modern environment run on traditional values. Much of the film is delightfully acted in the saccharine style of old Bengali comedies, the dialogue sing-song theatrical. Old Indian cinema plays a significant role in the film as the two protagonists’ small, circumscribed lives are rendered less lonely by their admiration for a picture of Madhubala, a beauty from 1940s Indian cinema over whom they rhapsodize, sharing woes – another manifestation of the emotional role of Indian film in the lives of Indians across the socio-economic board.

Shaik Nasir’s short brings role of film in the Indian consciousness most emphatically to the fore in Superman of Malegaon which follows the making of Malegaon-ka Superman, a regional parody of Superman whose production is a comedy of errors, the final product is a hilarious mash up, YouTube style. The importance of such a small production in the lives of the desperately underprivileged speaks to the changing nature of film in India and the growing interest in using the medium for poetic statements about Indian life – without compromising the tremendous need for escape that Bollywood provides. In a much needed attempt to offer a deeper look, the series offers a largely textured and broad, if not complete, view of a growing, changing Indian film industry, and in the best testament to the nature of the country, leaves one with a sense of paradox and questioning of perception of the diversity and portrayal of Indian life and cinema.

-Ashna Ali

D.A. Pennebaker is definitely one of my favorite documentarians of all time. Just stop and think for a second about all the classic moments he and his team have captured: a 25-year-old Dylan acoustically bitch-slapping Donovan in Don’t Look Back. Carville and Stephanopoulos hashing it out over their underdog candidate Bill Clinton in the War Room. And Pennebaker was there to document history in the making during that famed festival of flaming guitars with Monterey Pop, where Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Hugh Masekela, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, The Mamas & The Papas, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix appeared in their prime.

You can relive every moment of that dramatic concert on Thursday here at the Film Society, when we screen an incredible high-definition version of the seminal documentary. With screenings at 4:30, 6:30 and 8:30 how can you resist starting your holiday weekend a little early to the sweet strains of Ravi Shankar’s amazing twenty-minute finale?

P.S. Monterey Pop made film history in a surprising way. Per Wikipedia: “Jean-Luc Godard  was so taken by Jefferson Airplane’s performance in Monterey Pop that later in 1968 he set out to make a never-finished film called One A.M. (for “One American Movie”) in collaboration with Pennebaker and Leacock. Godard shot a sequence of the Airplane, (included on the 2004 “Fly Jefferson Airplane” DVD) , playing at high noon on a business day on the roof of a New York hotel across the street from the Leacock-Pennebaker offices, with the tower of Rockefeller Center in the background. Attracted by the extremely high volume of the music, the police arrived and put an end to the shooting. This incident inspired other bands, notably the Beatles in their Let It Be film, to mount their own rooftop performances.”

See it Thursday!

Subway Cinema’s New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center is one of three festivals in New York City I attend every single year, because this curatorial collective consistently find the wildest, most interesting contemporary Asian cinema you’ve never seen before. Here’s a taste of what I’ve been seeing.

The Clone Returns Home

THE CLONE RETURNS HOME (Japan, 2008)

The Japanese space program, already hurting for resources and budget, faces the demise of a veteran astronaut in a minor space station repair operation. Vowing to prevent similar tragic, public occurrences in the future, the space program asks astronaut Kohei Takahara to consent to a cloning/memory recording process in the off-chance of a repeat tragedy.

When Kohei dies on an outer hull space walk, the clone policy is activated — and the moral question of the film comes into focus. One of the reasons Kohei had been uncomfortable about cloning policy stemmed from the childhood death of his own twin brother. When Kohei (the Second) is restored to life, with the body and memories of the original, his consciousness tangles up in these memories of the past — memories he had spent a lifetime repressing — and he is unable to progress internally through his past memories to reach his clone-template’s own present. Most painfully, he is unable to recognize his emotionally shattered wife. While the cloning facility successfully modeled the astronaut’s body and memory, what of the astronaut’s consciousness and soul?

This film was a Sundance Film Festival darling this year, and was one of the strongest films I have seen at NYAFF so far. While thematically (at times aesthetically) the film echoes Solaris, Lem’s excellent novel as well as Tarkovsky’s feature (playing at the Walter Reade in early July), I’d caution the viewer from thinking too much about Tarkovsky or Kubrick when catching Kanji Nakajima film. The film establishes its own rhythm and breath separate from its predecessors. Still, Michael Atkinson’s write-up about Solaris/Clone at Criterion.com is worth a look.

Written By

WRITTEN BY (Hong Kong, 2009)

As a huge fan of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai ’s Mad Detective (2007) from NYAFF ‘08, I highly anticipated catching the international premiere of Wai Ka-Fai’s idiosyncratic, emotionally devastating Written By at NYAFF ‘09.

A tragic car wreck ends the life of the father (the inimitable Lau Ching-wan), blinds daughter Melody, and leaves mother/wife and son injured and inconsolable. Some years later, facing the unlikelihood that her mother will ever again be happy, daughter Melody comes up with a plan: she will write a novel. In this work of fantasy, the father will survive the car wreck, though blind, while the rest of the family instead dies.

But given that this is a Wai Ka-Fai film, it is not enough to stop there. In her novel, her father attempts to console himself for his loss by writing a novel. In this novel-within-a-novel, it will be possible for his wife to return as a ghost, the son to be reborn as a puppy, and the daughter to apprentice herself to Meng Po (figure from Chinese realm of the dead) to make this wizardry possible. But a second tragedy reverberates across the structure of both novels. As the film spirals deeper and deeper through its impact, director Wai Ka-Fai creates a remarkably mature and challenging portrait of the limits of our success to assuage experiences of deep loss through our fictions.

Dream

DREAM (Korea, 2008)

When I heard the English title of Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk’s (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 2003) latest film, I felt a twinge of concern: given the eccentric, elliptical quality to his previous narratives, what wildness was in store for me this time? With Samaritan Girl (2004) and The Isle (2000), Kim switches narrative strategies midstream, dropping central POV characters and dollying back to the critical distance of parable just when I  hope to learn more about character’s internal lives. (As much as I protest at the time, Kim’s decision tends to connect with me by the time I make it back to the subway.)

While the atmospheric landscapes and striking images are there as ever, the narrative at the heart of Dream is atypically coherent, even pitch-able high concept: When Jin (Joe Odagiri, Plastic City) dreams, a woman he has never met before, sleepwalker Ran (Lee Na-Young), acts out his dreams, with a crucial qualification: When Jin dreams of catching up to his ex-girlfriend who broke his heart, Ran acts out his fantasy by stumbling back to the horrible man she ran away from and seducing him.

As with all of Kim’s films, this film has a deeply serious metaphysical and moral inquiry at its heart — are we responsible for our dreams, what effects do our dreams have upon other people? And spending time with Jin and Ran, complementary opposites struggling to keep each other from sleeping at the same time, I come to a similar conclusion to the dream shaman: she  advices them to fall love with each other instead of resolving their issues with their exes. Ah, but it is a Kim Ki-duk film, so easy solutions are unlikely to do the trick here.

– Matthew Griffin

There’s a  haziness to Beewswax, Andrew Bujalski’s third and most recent feature, which appeared in this year’s BAMcinemaFEST and had its North American premiere at SXSW in March. But haziness and languor are the pervasive feelings in Bujalski’s distinctively diminutive on-screen universe, a place that schleps awkwardness and twenty-something listlessness toward an unusual level of palbability. Like director Hamid Rahmanian’s The Glass House, also included alongside the nearly twenty features selected for this year’s festival, Beeswax is a film about young people in limbo, about decision-making when the idea of having to make decisions carries with it all kinds of unwanted anxieties and implications.

Unlike Bujalski’s film, however, the people of The Glass House are all young women – most of them from broken homes, some of them runaways – enrolled in an experimental Iranian rehabilitation center that encourages, rather than disciplines, their creativity. Moving between the stories and situation of a handful of these girls, following them through their homes and streets in working-class Tehran, Rahmanian’s documentary is a refreshingly non-partisan portrait of inner lives desperately trying to develop under pressure.

Compare again to Bujalski’s film, which feels ardently partisan, hopelessly romantic in its endearing evocations of Texas hipsters under duress. Twin sisters Jeannie and Lauren (Tilly and Maggie Hatcher) bemoan their professional and sexual relationships, their career misgivings, their friendships and their family obligations while mutual friend Merrill (Alex Karpovsky) uses his expertise as an aspiring lawyer to help Lauren, his love interest, escape a legal fiasco instigated by her business partner. The Hatcher sisters are expectantly charismatic personalities; Bujalski – a filmmaker whose naive fetishization of the quirks and mannerisms of generation raised on late Eighties pop cultural residue helps to secure his spot in the leagues of Swanbergian mumblecore – would have nothing less.

However, charisma is what keeps mumblecore away from the honesty and relevance of more provocative – and ultimtely more serious- films about men and women navigating the contestory zones of young adulthood (think of Nanni Moretti’s Ecce Bombo, for example). The Glass House is, perhaps, an appropriate counterpoint to Bujalski, a film more alert to the nuance and features of a group of young people in need of guidance. And yet, Bujalski’s voice has matured since the days of Funny Ha Ha, he’s become more assured and comfortable behind the camera (unlike his previous two films, he’s nowhere to be found in front of the camera this time). He shares with Rahmanian an interest in the shifts and shuffles of personal lives, and the tensions they leave behind.

-Ricky D’Ambrose