Michael Clayton – 4 stars

I had heard both good and bad things about this movie prior to seeing it, the bad being chiefly that it didn’t live up to the hype, nor deserve the Oscar nomination. Not having seen the other movies or acting performances up as contenders at this year’s Oscars, I can’t really make a statement regarding that one way or another, but I will say that I liked this movie quite a bit.

It was an understated thriller that demonstrates how they should be made; the skillful layering of story elements and Clooney’s quietly intense performance deftly raise the tension without ever lapsing into histrionics or preachiness, a common pitfall with this type of story. In tone, it reminded me a bit of Dirty Pretty Things.

Writer/director Tony Gilroy executed this film with a low-key grace; the filmmaking, quite rightly, never overwhelms the story, and the final product is a powerful drama that never hits you over the head or insults your intelligence. Very nice work.

unfashionable enthusiasm, but this is the first time ever that I’m watching a season of American Idol, so it’s all very new and exciting to me. I’m going to throw down and say that David Cook is—or at the very least should be—the next American Idol.

By all accounts, there is a hell of a lot of talent in the show this season, so much so that the truly deciding factor is going to be song selection—and that’s exactly where DC has it all over the other contestants (with the possible exception of Brooke White, but she’s not as compelling a performer).

Maybe he seems so remarkable to me because at the beginning of this competition, I didn’t think he’d get very far; he just seemed a bit of a nonentity. But week after week, he shows his vocal versatility, his charisma (something I didn’t think he had a lot of initially, but which I have done a 180 on), his incredible instinct for picking songs—and more importantly, arrangements—that showcase his talents, and somehow on top of all that doing something unusual to make himself stand out from the crowd even more. He deserves the win.

I’ve installed a nifty new (well, new to me) plugin that enables users who comment on a post to subscribe to the comment thread by clicking on a checkbox at the bottom of the comment form, so that those who are interested in a particular conversation no longer have to monitor the entire comments feed or keep checking back at the site. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyone who buys the “More bars in more places” ad campaign by AT&T Wireless, nearly as ludicrous as its previous “Fewest dropped calls” campaign (it should be fewest connected calls, instead) has never lived in San Francisco. The entire year and a half I lived in the Mission, I had zero signal, or near as made no difference, in my house. I had to step out onto the driveway in order to be able to make call on my cell phone. Really.

But that’s not even the most frustrating thing. In the past few months, I have noticed a disturbing and steadily worsening pattern of AT&T not even connecting calls made to me. I am hearing increasing reports of people trying to call and getting routed directly to my voicemail, even though I have my phone charged up, turned on, and am in an area with good signal strength. To add insult to injury, I often don’t get the voicemails or text messages people leave until hours afterward.

Just this morning, in fact, when my colleagues were coming over for work (this week is my turn to host the rotating office we’ve instituted at work), they experienced the same problem. The intercom system on my building is tied to my cell phone, and they reported that the call they made from the front door went directly to voicemail. Then they tried a direct call to my cell phone, and that didn’t work either. Finally they were able to reach me by calling my home phone.

The worst part of it? The voicemails showed up a half an hour later, and nothing at all in my missed call list. Somebody ought to sue. I’d switch to T-Mobile, but they and AT&T share the same physical network. It is incredibly frustrating.

So when I moved earlier this year, I bought an Airport Extreme base station. And typical of my luck, Apple announced the release of Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution (and the only realistic way to use Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature with a laptop) just a few weeks afterward.

I wasn’t too exercised by it, though, because I figured that I could just hook up a USB hard drive to my Airport Extreme and do the same thing. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that Time Machine wouldn’t recognize drives connected to the Airport Extreme as valid backup locations. Pretty dumb, I thought.

Thankfully, Apple released a firmware update (7.3.1) last week that enables you to use drives connected to the Airport Extreme as Time Machine backup destinations, so after much rejoicing, I went to my local Best Buy and bought myself a 1TB My Book external hard drive; I was going to have the poor man’s version of the Time Capsule, or die trying.

Now picture the tragic scene when I plugged the hard drive in, and neither of my Leopard laptops’ Time Machine installations saw the drive, even though it was mounting properly through the Finder. After floundering around a bit and searching the internet, I found out that Time Machine requires backup drives to be formatted with the HFS+ Journaled file system, and the My Book had shipped formatted in FAT32.

OK, simple enough, I thought. I’d just use Disk Utility to reformat the drive, and I’d be good to go. But, alarmingly, the the reformat kept failing with an error, and the only format I could get the drive successfully reformatted in was FAT. On a whim, I thought I’d try to make two smaller partitions on the drive and see if that worked. It did. But that’s odd, seeing as the HFS+ spec says the maximum volume size is 2 exabytes, and even regular HFS can handle 2 terabytes. What gives?

Regardless, now I have two 500GB partitions on my wireless backup drive, which actually works out for the best, so that I have a cleaner separation of the backups of my two different computers. All’s well that ends well.

The festival is now over, and overall was one of the best ones I’ve seen.

• Desert Dream – 3 stars
  Low 3. At first I thought I liked this movie better than director Zhang Lu’s previous offering, Grain in Ear, but now I’m not so sure. I wasn’t a big fan of that movie, and I wasn’t a big fan of this one, and I think it’s to do with Lu’s directorial style.

  He has his actors deliver their lines with almost no expression or inflection, preferring to let the viewer guess at the undertones through the context. In that sense, Dream did a better job than Grain, was in fact more engaging overall, but some confusing plotting and some incomprehensible (well, at least to someone who is not Chinese or Mongolian) symbology just left me cold.

  In general, while what Lu attempts could potentially be very successful and is certainly intriguing, I don’t really think he’s gotten there yet; in order for his methodology to work, I think that the situation the characters are in needs to be so emotionally fraught, so distressing, that the deadpan actors serve as a soothing counterpoint as well as adding a fine tension to the story, of control barely leashed over powerful emotions. Far better than Grain in Ear, this film shows that potential, but as I said, I don’t think Lu’s there yet.

• Flight of the Red Balloon – 4 stars

  What a great way to end the festival! Acclaimed Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien’s latest offering, this movie was beautifully realized, with the gratifyingly high production value I’ve come to expect from him.

  Hou is a master of light, and this movie was the fruition of the potential in 2003′s Café Lumière, capturing the warm, magical quality of afternoon light in Paris. Lead actress and French cinematic darling Juliette Binoche acted the quietly emotional storyline (Hou’s tensest by far) with typical aplomb and undeniable skill; she is a master in her own right. Hou and Binoche together are a formidable combination, and the result is a gorgeous, warm film that I will definitely be looking for on DVD when it is released. Very highly recommended.

Coming soon: SFIFF 51!

Anyone who’s as…intemperate as I am about spending money will have thought a time or two about figuring out where it all goes. Or more specifically, about tracking expenses and generating statistics, spotting trends, et cetera, et cetera.

Back in the dark ages, we would do this by keeping up our checkbooks, or even using full-blown ledgers. A little later on, we’d maybe use spreadhseets on our computers. Until very recently, we’d use specially-designed personal finance software like Microsoft Money or Quicken. Now, these last two options were by far the most powerful we had at our disposal.

We could download financial statements from our banks and credit cards, upload them into the software, and with a little^* work on categorizing expenses, Money or Quicken would make all these pretty charts and graphs that we would then study and presumably use to better our financial health. Simple, right?

But wait. Back up. Download, upload, categorize. Three small words for one gargantuan task. Even if your accounting software can connect directly to some of your financial institutions (but not, mind, all), the categorizing—oh god, the categorizing—still remains. You have to go through literally hundreds of transactions to designate this one as grocery shopping and that one as your monthly cell phone bill. Only then can the software perform its magic. And you have to do this for every credit card and bank statement? Thanks, but no thanks. I mean, I’ve got 7 or 8 credit card accounts, and several banks handling my checking, savings and retirement accounts.

The activation energy required to use this accounting software is so huge that every time I try to use it, I give up after a few days. If only there was an easier way…

I discovered (OK, I was told) last week that there is an easier way. Mint is an online version of these desktop personal finance applications, with the important distinction that it does all the work for you; all you have to do is put in the login credentials for a supported financial institution that you use (and with a stable of 5000, yours is pretty much guaranteed to be in the list), and Mint will log in and download all the history it can find. What’s more—and this is the killer feature—it’ll automatically categorize every transaction, with a very high accuracy. The first time I logged in, I only had to (re)categorize around 6 transactions, from about 3 months of data from approximately 12 financial institutions. Not too shabby.

In fact, within a quarter hour of first signing in, I had a comprehensive look at my finances, complete with pretty pictures. What’s not to like?

Mint does have a drawback in that it’s not as powerful as its desktop cousins—it doesn’t have some of their more advanced budgeting and customization features—and provides no manual upload functionality, choosing to rely instead on its vast stable of supported institutions. But the flexibility you lose there is more than made up for, IMO, by the utter ease with which you can get up and running. Great stuff!

^* And by “little”, I mean “ginormous amount of”.

• Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara – 5 stars

  This is probably my favorite movie of the festival thus far, though it wasn’t quite as tightly produced as Planet B-Boy. A dreamy and contemplative look at the inner life of acclaimed artist Yoshitomo Nara, this documentary followed him to his exhibitions in various cities around the world, culminating in the magical AtoZ exhibit in Hirosaki, Japan, his hometown. Tragically, the exhibit is now closed, preventing me from ever exploring it in person, which saddens me more than I can say.

  The movie was bittersweet and beautiful, and gave me a deep appreciation for an artist whom I might never otherwise have taken the time to notice. Wonderful.

• Always Be Boyz – 2 stars

  I probably would have been—a bit, though not much—more sympathetic to this movie had I not seen it so very soon after Planet B-Boy, to which it paled in comparison. While I will grant that the acting and script weren’t actually that bad (a hell of a lot better than the similarly pop-culture-underworld-themed Quattro Noza, heretofore the third worst film festival movie I’ve ever seen, after Sorry, Haters and Blackout), infantile plotting, extremely low production value (think Powerpoint-style transitions and iMovie effects, not to mention the use of the abominable Comic Sans as the subtitle font) and severe projection problems (the sound kept cutting out; I can’t tell whether this was the fault of a bad DVD print or the projectionist at theater itself) fairly ruined this movie experience for me.

  If you really want to learn about Korean b-boy culture, watch Planet B-Boy instead; it has more intelligence, drama and pathos than this fictional drama ever could.

• A Gentle Breeze in the Village – 4 stars

  I will admit I was expecting a lot from this movie, considering it was directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita, the same man who directed Linda Linda Linda, one of my favorite movies of the last few years. I will also admit that I was a bit disappointed; it’s not as good as Linda³, but has its own charm.

  Gently humorous and relaxingly paced, this movie was strongly reminiscent of Shunji Iwai’s Hana and Alice, though not ultimately as good. Yamashita possesses a measure of Iwai’s skill at working with young actors, and it shows in this movie, but while it possessed charm in abundance, it lacked the brilliant hilarity of its predecessor. Very good, but not awesome.

• Yasukuni – 3 stars

  This documentary was by far the most thought-provoking one of the festival, exposing as it did the festering wound under Japan’s serene exterior, centered at Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, the simultaneous symbol of the nation’s pride and its shame. Director Li Ying took a very interesting approach to this film, using long, unedited takes that started out serene and almost boring (I fell asleep a couple of times), and then exploded into conflict.

  The film was profoundly disturbing, and had the most impact of any movie I’ve seen in a good long while, but had two big drawbacks for me: the cheesily-scored montage of Japanese wartime brutality near the end of the film, and the unnecessarily shaky camerawork (I had to look away to keep from losing my dinner more than once).

• Amal – 4 stars

  This is the best Indian movie I’ve seen in the last 5 years, and it was directed by an Indian who was born and raised in Canada (Richie Mehta, whose brother, Shaun, wrote the short story upon which it was based). Astonishingly well made for a debut film, if a trifle predictable, Amal boasted some powerhouse acting talent, including Naseeruddin Shah and Roshan Seth, and painted a sympathetic and painfully accurate picture of modern India.

  You may have heard me say before that I generally am disappointed by director Q&As at film festivals, because the directors are invariably less interesting than their films, and tend to express themselves best in that medium rather than in speech, which has the unfortunate effect of removing some of the lustre from the film itself. Not so with Amal. Mehta is intelligent and well-spoken, and his commentary about the film and its production really enhanced the experience for me; I look forward to the extras on the DVD. He is definitely a director to watch.

Just two more movies to go!

It has begun. SFIAAFF 2008 has gotten off to an excellent but at the same time rocky start; excellent because each of the three features I’ve seen so far has been better than the last, and rocky because they just don’t seem to be very organized.

First, the movies:

• Wings of Defeat – 3 stars

  We’re seeing an unprecedented number of documentaries—almost half of our planned 12 showings—this year, and this was the first. A documentary about the Japanese kamikaze pilots in WWII, as told by those of them still living, the subject matter was fascinating and given a delicate, sure-handed treatment by filmmakers Risa Morimoto and Linda Hoaglund. Employing a scrupulously nonjudgmental stance and skillful filmmaking, this documentary struck just the right chord in telling the story without any of the histrionics that could so easily have accompanied the emotionally-fraught narrative.

  So why didn’t I give this movie a higher rating? The first half was a bit weak, frankly a trifle boring—I fell asleep through some of it—and the narration was poorly scripted. The highlight of the experience? Three of the WWII vets interviewed in the film—two former Kamikaze pilots and one survivor of the sinking of the USS Drexler—came to the Q&A following the screening and showed every evidence of a lovely camaraderie.

• Borderlines – 2 stars

  One word: meh. This shorts program was aggressively mediocre, with me not liking 3 of the 4 selections very much at all. The one I did like, about a North Korean boy who defects to the South in order to pursue his dream of being a rock musician, was very good until about the last 30 seconds, and then it got stupid.

• The Killing of a Chinese Cookie – 4 stars

  This documentary about the history of the fortune cookie was magnificently entertaining and at times flat-out hilarious. Some simply masterful editing and an at-first confusing but ultimately well-executed narrative structure really made this documentary stand out. The tongue-firmly-in-cheek sensibility of the story made for an interesting, informative experience. The only drawback was that they used some unnecessary footage that was, though entertaining, not really relevant to the story, and which made the focus meander a bit.

• Planet B-Boy – 5 stars

  This movie was awesome, just about the perfect documentary: a interesting, little-known subject—B-boying, more commonly known as breakdancing (but don’t call it that; they don’t like it)—portrayed flawlessly. And I mean flawlessly. Director Benson Lee did a wonderful job of selecting and cutting together 102 minutes of his 400+ hours of source footage, constructing a tightly woven narrative around the Battle of the Year, the annual international B-boy competition held in Germany.

  As engaging as Air Guitar Nation and as beautifully put together as Tales of an Osaka Love Thief, this movie is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen, put together with energy, pathos and style. Bravo!

About the rocky start: starting with them sending our tickets to the wrong address, the festival staff just seems to be amateurish and disorganized this year. Their crowd control, never very skillful, has broken down altogether, and though each volunteer is sporting a Secret Service-style headset and walkie-talkie kit, they seem, if it’s possible, to be less informed and more confused than if they weren’t talking to each other at all. Yeesh.

I’ve recently overhauled the template for this site and also my main personal website. In addition, I’ve made many small but significant changes to the template for my music site that should make the reading experience easier. Check them out and let me know what you think!