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Love for Share – 2 stars
My friends and I have learned something the hard way: avoid triptychs. Never watch a movie with three stories in it. They all suck, or are mediocre at best (cf. Three Needles, Three Times). I’m not talking about movies telling multiple concurrent stories in general, but movies with three stories specifically—two stories is fine (Chungking Express), five stories is fine (Do Over)—are no good. Had we known that this movie had three stories, we wouldn’t have bought tickets. The three stories in this film were only very superficially tied together, and in mostly trivial or nonsensical ways. What’s more, two of the three were dumb. Only the first of the three was any good, and given my inevitable bad luck, I missed the first fifteen minutes of it. Sigh.
This movie was doubly disappointing, having seen it so soon after Do Over, which had a similar M.O., but was executed infinitely better. Not a great way to end the film festival, but overall I had a very good experience: I liked about 3/4 of the movies we saw.
Tomorrow night will be the last night of movies for us, and then SFIAAFF 2007 will, sadly, be over. The latest:
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time – 4 stars
You know I’m a sucker for animated movies, so I went into this one with relatively high expectations, and the reviews I had skimmed had been uniformly positive. I was not disappointed. This film had some powerhouse talent on the back end, and it showed. Very high production value (some truly stunning backgrounds, e.g.) and a charming, well-told story made for a supremely satisfying moviegoing experience.
An aside here about trends in Japanese animation I’ve been noticing in the past few years: it seems that hand-drawn cel animation is making a comeback. This may partly be in reaction to the ubiquitous use of CG in 2-D animation in recent years, and its subsequent loss of mystique, but the bigger budget shows and movies I’ve seen recently—Beck, Samurai Champloo and Samurai 7, notably—including this one, are using more of a hand-drawn, studiedly imperfect look in the 2-D sequences. I, for one, mostly approve of this trend; it gives the visuals a certain warmth by removing some of that computer-generated slickness.
Do Over – 4 stars
So I don’t really know what happened in this movie, but it was cool. Do Over, director Cheng Yu-Chieh’s debut effort, has an astonishingly high production value for a first film. Cheng is a technical master; every sequence in the film is stunning, every transition and cut and frame assured, smooth, beautiful. Add to that a talented cast and a striking, understated score, and you’ve got a very nearly perfect* film. It’s very much a case of style over substance, but what style! Just a pleasure to watch. I very much look forward to Cheng’s future efforts.
* I came this close to giving this movie a 5, but I figure there’s nowhere for this guy to go but up, so I’ll leave him some room for improvement.
I walked out of the theater with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, but I didn’t know why. It took me a little while, but I think I’ve figured out what I didn’t like about this documentary. Its focus wasn’t tight enough. Instead, it was an almost random pastiche of images from in and around Kabul, a meandering travelogue of sorts with no clear message or goal.
Don’t mistake me: I usually don’t like my documentaries to have “messages”, but giving this particular documentary one would have improved it immeasurably. If the goal was to show life in modern Kabul, I think it would have been much better to have taken a sort of day-in-the-life-of approach with one person as the central figure to give it focus and to give the viewers someone in particular to relate to. Because, in fictional as well as non-fictional filmmaking (the same as in writing), the most powerful tales are those with people at their center, people whom you get to know well throughout the course of the film or novel or whatever.
That is the common factor in all the best documentaries I’ve seen (including Ken Burns’ sprawling epic, Jazz): the focus on people, on telling the tale through the people who lived it. Shake Hands with the Devil focused on Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire during the Rwandan genocide, Air Guitar Nation was as much about C. Diddy and Björn Turöque as it was about the International Air Guitar Championships, and The Great Happiness Space told of Japan’s host club culture by focusing on one club in Osaka, on its owner Issei and his fanatically devoted clients, rather than taking a more impersonal tour of many different clubs.
So while the subject matter was something I was interested in learning more about, the execution was poor and unfocused.
Panel: Filmmakers, Meet Web 2.0 – 4 stars This panel was very well organized and conducted, and informative. I would have liked it a bit better, though, had it been longer to allow for more audience questions, and had there been a bit more ideological diversity to allow for more interesting discussion.
How to be Good – 3 stars This shorts program was mostly OK to middling, with the exception of Jaime Lo: Small and Shy (4 stars), a beautifully illustrated—though cutesy—animated short (there must be something in the water up in Canada that grows great illustrators).
Air Guitar Nation – 5 stars It is hard to detach from the awesomeness of its subject matter to try and evaluate the quality of this documentary as a film, nearly impossibly so. But the filmmaking was, in the end, competent—skillful even—and was understated enough to step back and let the story take center stage. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, was completely engaged, and left the theater with a smile on my face. Awesome!
The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief – 5 stars
This documentary, about the fascinating topic of host clubs in Japan, was simply superb. It was beautifully made, scrupulously non-judgmental (rarer than you’d think in documentaries), thought-provoking. Very highly recommended.
Blackout – 1 star
This is the most flat-out terrible movie I’ve seen since Sorry, Haters. You know, I used to say that I liked suspense as a genre. But now I know better. Some of my favorite movies are suspense movies (Primal Fear, The Usual Suspects, Sneakers, Zero Effect, Charade, Memento, to name a few), but there are so very few that are done really well, and so many that are horrible excuses for film (Basic, for instance, and now this one), that I can no longer ethically say that I like suspense as a genre.
This movie sucked. It was so bad that by the time its halfway point rolled around, I was wishing for a quick, merciful death, if only to avoid the rest of it. To be fair, it could have been a compelling movie, a nuanced and compassionate portrait of a hopeless alcoholic, but after about 10 minutes, it crossed the line into the realm of the absurd and the torturous, and all I could think was, make it stop.
And I don’t mean St. Patrick’s Day—though I do want to remind everyone to celebrate their Irish heritage today. I mean the beginning of the film festival season here in San Francisco. As you know if you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while, my friends and I like to attend several film festivals every year, and we’re kicking this season off by attending SFIAAFF (or the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival). I just got back from watching the first movie of the eleven we’ve planned this festival, and I thought I’d do something a little different this year: I’ll blog about the movies as I see them, instead of waiting until the end of the festival to provide my review.
Tonight’s movie was Year of the Fish (2 stars). This movie, based on the earliest recording of the Cinderella myth (Tang Dynasty China, according to one of the actors there for the Q&A), was unfortunately not very good. Shot in video and rotoscoped, I found the imagery somewhat gimmicky, but my biggest problem with it was the very poorly written script. What saved this movie from a 1 star rating was the acting of the three leads and the very well done score.
Not a good start to the festival, all told, but half the fun of film festivals is seeing bad movies, right?
As you’ve heard me mention, the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival recently finished, and this year was an exceptional one. It was also the first year where I saw so many films at SFIAAFF. So, without further ado, here are my impressions of the movies we saw:
Linda Linda Linda – 5 stars Yes, this is the third time I’ve seen this movie, and it is as good or better each time. I got a bit more of the jokes this time around. Great!
Grain In Ear – 3 stars This movie was beautifully photographed (and depressing!), but I found the performance of the main actress to be a bit wooden.
Be With Me – 2 stars This movie was just cheesy. Also boring and poorly plotted. The only saving grace was that some of it was quite funny.
Letter from an Unknown Woman – 4 stars This was my favorite of the films new to me in this festival. It was sumptuously photographed, beautifully acted and just very very good all around. If this comes out on DVD in the US, I am totally going to get it.
Cafe Lumiere – 3 stars I didn’t like this Hou Hsiao-Hsien movie as much as Matt did, but it was nicely photographed and quite entertaining. And as quirky I’ve come to expect most Tadanobu Asano films to be.
Mystery Arcade – 4 stars This shorts program is probably one of the best ones I’ve ever seen, and the only one where I’ve liked every one of the short films included. My favorites: Missing and Hiro.
Punchcards and Preoccupations – 3 stars This was another good shorts program. There were a few I didn’t like at all, but they were in the beginning (in fact, each short was better than the one before). My favorites: What Remains, Stationery, The Women’s Kingdom.
American Fusion – 2 stars The first thing I thought when I saw this was: I’ve seen this movie before. And: I liked the Greek version better. To elaborate, this movie was trying too hard to be My Big Fat Chinese Wedding, and the bad script and worse acting (except for stars Sylvia Chang and Esai Morales) dragged it down to the depths of mediocrity. The only thing that kept me from walking out (I seriously considered it) was that there were some parts of the movie that were really very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. But not funny enough, in the end, to make this a good movie.
And on another note, I have to congratulate the festival organizers for getting the balloting system right this year. They took the tear-ballot system Sundance uses and improved on it. Very good job. Now let’s see if this year’s SFIFF gets it right.
As you may have concluded from my being completely incommunicado (or inburrito, as my friend Eric likes to call it) for a little over two weeks now, I have been swamped, simply swamped, with things not-internet of late: my real work, some freelance web development, and the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival.
I am near the end of my swamped-ness, and am starting to get some more free time to surf, to think, to waste. So you will start, very soon I hope, seeing a bit more of me here, which I know you are all very happy about.
Teasers on what’s to come: SFIAAFF rants and raves, piñatas, writing. Hasta la vista. Baby.
the 48th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, and I am irritated. Not with the movies, of course. Just the organization of (some parts of) the festival. Now, seeing as this year was the 5th year that I went to the Sundance Film Festival, the 2nd that I went to the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, and also the 2nd that I’m going to SFIFF, I consider myself a seasoned film festival goer. And in my informed opinion, the organizers of all these festivals should get together and take lessons from one another, because not one of them gets it right completely. There are too many small annoyances to count, but the focus of my wrath today is the audience award ballot used by SFIFF. It is incredibly poorly designed. Let’s take a look:
So, what’s wrong with it? A better question would be: what isn’t? You have to write on the ballot; you need to fill in the film’s name, as well as circle your rating. You need a writing utensil. This means that either you need to carry a pen with you, or the festival needs to provide pencils for you to write with. This is a pain for you as the film goer and an unnecessary expense for the festival organizers. What they should do is follow the Sundance balloting method:
Use tear-through ballots: print the 5 numbers in a large font, well spaced from each other. Then the viewers can just tear through the rating number; no writing implements required.
Print the category of award the film is competing for on the ballot.
Finally, make a bunch of ballot boxes, each labeled with the name of the film; this means that the viewer doesn’t have to write in the name of the film on the ballot, again obviating the need for a writing implement as well as making it easier for the organizers to organize and count the votes later.
Oh, and one more thing; this is not related to the ballot design per se, but they shouldn’t hand out ballots for shorts programs. How the hell do you give one rating to a collection of films? I mean, what would you be rating? The ability of the programming team to put together shorts that complement each other? Come on. You’d think they’d been running this festival for 48 hours, not 48 years.
