The Assassin (2015)

Screen capture from trailer.

WHO: The legendary Hou Hsiao-Hsien directed and co-produced this film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Xie Hai Meng, Zhong Acheng and his longtime collaborator Chu Tien-Wen.

WHAT: Although I was able to view Hou's first feature since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon at a Mill Valley Film Festival-sponsored press screening, I'm not supposed to provide more than a brief "capsule" review until its commercial run a week and a half from now. Just as well, as I'd need at least one more viewing to feel comfortable talking about it in any depth. For now I'll just call it a visually sumptuous, anti-kung fu film that verges closer to "avant-garde" than anything else Hou has done. Ninety-nine percent of the film is presented in a square-ish Academy aspect ratio, which along with its black-and-white opening makes The Assassin seem more like a 1950s Akira Kurosawa film than like the wuxia pian made by King Hu and others (always in widescreen) in the 1960s and beyond. Though honestly Mizoguchi, especially a late color film like Princess Yang Kwei Fei, feels like a more relevant referent (and one I'm not surprised to see Danny Kasman had perceived long before I did). Hou has worked with square ratios before, but (I'm pretty certain) only in his framings-within-framings in widescreen films like City of Sadness and Good Men, Good Women. It's as if he's reclaiming 4:3 Academy as a more truly "cinematic" shape in this era of wide televisions and phones.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at the Embarcadero Cinema at 6:30 and 9:15, and 8:30 on October 17th at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. All these showings are "at RUSH", meaning advance tickets are sold out and would-be buyers must form a line in hopes of obtaining seats as they're made available. The Assassin opens a regular theatrical run at the Metreon, the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and Camera 3 in San Jose starting October 23rd.

WHY: Although tonight's screenings will take some persistence to get into for those who haven't already secured tickets, it's fair to say they'll be worth it, as Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself is expected to attend at least the first one, a rare occurrence here in San Francisco indeed. An auteur of his stature visiting this city is cause for real celebration, and the SF Film Society has complied by making Hou a main focus of its entire Taiwan Film Days mini-festival tonight and tomorrow. In addition to the two showings of The Assassin there's a revival showing of what many consider Hou's first great film, The Boys From Fengkuei, and although Hou is not (as far as I understand) expected to attend this showing, he does make a cameo appearance in a very early-eighties perm. There are still advance tickets available for this screening as well as for the Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, a recent documentary about the 1980s and 1990s heyday of Taiwan's cinematic production history, focusing attention on famous names like Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-Liang and Hou (whose Flowers of Shanghai obviously inspired the doc's title) but also on lesser-knowns like Wang Tung, who employed a pre-Rebels of the Neon God Tsai as a screenwriter on multiple films. Director Chinlin Hsieh will be on hand for tomorrow night's showing.

Although the Mill Valley Film Festival The Assassin screening on the 17th is also at "Rush" (as was its Frisco Bay public premiere via the festival this past Thursday), there is still a lot of this festival to go that has plenty of tickets available. There are still seats for tonight's second screening of the Hungarian prize-winner Son of Saul, for instance. I'll be attending this as consolation for missing Hou in person, thankful that the film's distributor insisted it be screened in 35mm. It's the only new film in the festival (and so far, to my knowledge, any 2015 Frisco Bay feature-oriented film festival) to screen in this format, but MVFF has also booked a couple of retrospective titles showing on actual film reels: The Sorrow and the Pity October 16th with director Marcel Ophuls on hand, and on October 18th Autumn Sonata, Inmgar Bergman's final made-for-the-cinema film and his only collaboration with Ingrid Bergman. A documentary about her, Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words also screens at the Rafael Film Center tonight, launching an eight-title series celebrating her centennial. I'm told than the program page for this series contains a typo and that the documentary will not screen in 35mm but that Autumn Sonata and Notorious definitely will (the latter is also newly booked to play the Paramount in Oakland in that format) . As will Confidential Report and F For Fake in the Rafael's upcoming Orson Welles centennial conclusion, and Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home on December 3rd. In fact, between the Mill Valley Film Festival (which is far more thoroughly explored at The Evening Class by Michael Hawley and by Michael Guillén) and the upcoming Rafael winter calendar, I feel safe to say the California Film Institute holds a commanding lead among local cinephile institutions stepping up their game in the absence of the Pacific Film Archive this Fall, at least from my perspective. No, the Stanford's current Rogers & Hammerstein festival is not going to cut it for me, and though the Castro and Roxie both have some interesting programs on their slates (I'm most excited by Ken Russell's The Devils October 20th, the Brothers Quay shorts in December and Audition Halloween week), neither venue is doing quite enough to prevent me from wishing it were as easy to get to San Rafael in public transportation as it was to get to Berkeley.

HOW: The Assassin screens as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

City of Sadness (1989)

Screen shot of City of Sadness clip from Music Box Films DVD of The Story of Film

WHO: Hou Hsiao-Hsien directed this.

WHAT: Almost certainly the most widely-acclaimed of Hou's seventeen feature films. As I wrote on this blog after my first viewing of City of Sadness back in 2009:

Every shot in the film is impeccably framed and lit, each scene impeccably staged, often in a way that stresses the relationship between the weight of history and the ordinary life of citizens living it. For example. As a group of students or intellectuals sit and debate politics, Wen-ching and pretty, young Hinomi (played by Xin Shufen) sit to the side of the room, exchanging notes with each other while a folk song plays on the phonograph. Hou situates his camera in the space between the table of students and the clearly smitten couple. It could be a point-of-view shot from the position of one of the debaters, but that seems unlikely. The students are swept up in their discussion and do not seem to be paying attention to the room's other occupants and their activities. No, this shot isolates the spirited discussion from the would-be lovers' attempts to lead a normal life unhindered by the intrusions of politics. At least for this moment, the two are able to exist in their own world; this sense is accentuated as the sound of the conversation subtly drops out and all we hear are sonorous musical notes as they are released from the record grooves. 

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at the Pacific Film Archive at 7:00 PM.

WHY: As excited as I was that the PFA had programmed a full Hou Hsiao-Hsien retrospective this Fall, I must admit I've attended far less frequently than I'd hoped. I forget that Fall is always by far the busiest time of the year for me when it comes to non-movie-related responsibilities, and that even screenings I wish with the whole fiber of my being I could attend, often slip through my fingers. I fear I may have missed my last-ever chance to see 35mm prints of highly-acclaimed films like A Summer At Grandpa's or A Time To Live and A Time To Die but I'm glad to at least have been able to view three exceedingly rare items in Hou's early filmography. His second film Cheerful Wind, made in his "pop cinema" period, was no masterpiece but had a fascinating reflexive quality as it followed a commercial film crew on location in a small Taiwanese village. The Boys From Fengkuei, his fourth feature, was a brilliant statement of autobiography and independence that launched Hou's long phase of working almost exclusively with non-professional actors, and feels like a thematic template for another Taiwan auteur's debut, Tsai Ming-Liang's Rebels of a Neon God. And Dust in the Wind, Hou's seventh feature, lives up to its reputation as one of Hou's most formally controlled and emotionally heartbreaking works.

Kathy Gertitz, the curator who organized the PFA's participation in this touring series, has been emphasizing in her introductions for these screenings the difficulty of including Hou's ninth and tenth feature films, City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster, in the retrospective due to rights issues that have kept them out of American cinemas in recent years (although the PFA did show City of Sadness, at least, in 2010, I'm almost certain The Puppetmaster has not been seen in a Frisco Bay cinema since 2000). To screen these particular films, the PFA would have to keep the showings entirely non-commercial and educational in nature, which means the tickets are all free, and Friday's The Puppetmaster showing will include an introduction and book-signing by Richard Suchenski, a Hou expert who has recently edited a lovely volume of essays on the director.  Initially the plan was to only offer tickets to tonight and tomorrow's showings to Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive members who signed up in advance, but in the past weeks the PFA has decided to offer remaining tickets on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone who arrives at the door starting at 6PM each evening. So head on over to Berkeley and experience a pair of 35mm screenings that, unless some legal wrangling is able to be managed in the near future, are very unlikely to repeat themselves anytime soon.

HOW: The entire PFA Hou Hsiao-Hsien series screens via 35mm prints from here on out.

The Hole (1998)

THE HOLE by Tsai Ming-liang, Courtesy Celluloid Dreams.

WHO: Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang co-wrote and directed this.

WHAT: This apocalyptic tale was the first of Tsai's films I ever saw well over a decade ago, on videocassette, and it immediately hooked me on a filmmaker who would later make some of my favorites from the past decade (Goodbye, Dragon Inn, The Wayward Cloud, and pending another watch Stray Dogs). Some quotes from my original notes on seeing The Hole (which I have not revisited since): "definitely the strangest musical I've ever seen, it makes Dancer in the Dark or Jeanne and the Perfect Guy look about as unusual as Rodgers & Hart!" "Tsai arranges his spaces through the camera to maximize alienation and isolation, and the constant sound of running water (sometimes punctuated by alternatingly inane and alarming broadcasts) contributes greatly to this feeling as well."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 2PM today only at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

WHY: This screening kicks off the YBCA's Invasion of the Cinemaniacs series, the film component of the museum's seventh triennial Bay Area Now celebration of local arts. The "core idea" of this year's exhibition, according to YBCA's own pitch, is "to decentralize the curatorial process and centralize the public presentation of some of the most exciting artistic voices in the region today." To do this, the YBCA curators have essentially curated curators from art spaces around the Bay Area ([ 2nd Floor projects ], the Chinese Culture Foundation, the San Quentin Prison Arts Project, etc.) to present works by artists associated with them. Works of particular interest to cinephiles in the gallery space include Paul Clipson's incredible book of storyboard-esque sketches preparing film projectionists for reel changes, presented by the Bay Area Art Workers Alliance, and Christina Marie Fong's elaborate installation of a bedroom bedecked with dozens of her own interpretive posters from horror movies, part of Creativity Explored's contribution to the show.

On the Film/Video side of the YBCA program team, Joel Shepard has already used the curating-curators concept for programming moving image at Bay Area Now- back in 2008 when he picked several local independent film programmers to choose selections to screen in conjunction with Bay Area Now 5. This year he's gone further, selecting people who normally don't get a chance to choose what screens in local theatres, yet who are, in his words, "hugely invested in film exhibition, but generally behind-the-scenes." I'm deeply honored to have been selected to be one of these selectors, and have been diligently preparing what to say when I introduce Robert Altman's The Company at the venue this coming Thursday. But I'm excited to hear what local-legendary publicist Karen Larsen has to say about Tsai Ming-Liang and the Hole this afternoon, and to hear all my fellow Cinemaniacs' introductions over then next few months. I hope you can join me for as many of the ten screenings as you can.

HOW: All the Invasion of the Cinemaniacs screenings are sourced from 35mm prints, except for the most recent one, Pietà, which as far as I know has never screened in that format.

Stray Dogs (2013)

A scene from Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, playing at the 57th San Franicsco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations "stolen" whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness.

That 75-word capsule is all I'm allowed to write while we await a potential commercial distribution of this film, but there are plenty of more untethered critics who have written very thoughtfully and substantially on Stray Dogs and most (though surprisingly not Martin Tsai's useful reading) are linked on the addictive Critics Round Up website.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3:15 PM today at New People and 6:30 PM tomorrow at the Pacific Film Archive, both thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: It's been just over seven years since a new Tsai Ming-Liang feature film has appeared in Frisco Bay cinemas. The last was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which debuted here in April 2007 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. In the meantime, Tsai's 2009 film Face received mixed-at-best reviews at other film festivals around the world, bypassed local cinema screens, and has not even been officially released on DVD (though I've been told it's on Netflix Instant, I've never subscribed and have still yet to catch up with this work; I suppose I still hold out hope it may arrive through another means). And a new featurette called Journey To The West has just started making festival rounds, though it has yet to land here yet.

Watching Stray Dogs made me realize how rusty I've gotten at watching Tsai's films in cinemas, and made me want to have that experience again with one of his prior films. Not a moment too soon, I received an advance look at a program YBCA's Joel Shepard put together for this summer. One of the selections in this screening series is my own (a real honor and my first stab at programming 35mm, I picked a Robert Altman film that means an awful lot to me) but I think I'm equally excited to see the other nine films in the series. Eight of them I've never seen at all and in most cases have longed to for years, and the ninth (or should I say the first), screening July 20th, is a Tsai film I've only seen on home video before: The Hole. It was my introduction to his work way back when, and I'm thrilled to be able to get a chance to watch it in 35mm in just a few short months. Here's the full line-up for the YBCA series:

Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!
July 20 - Sept 25
Sun, Jul 20, 2pm Karen Larsen presents The Hole By Tsai Ming-liang
Thu, Jul 24, 7:30pm Brian Darr presents The Company By Robert Altman
Sun, Jul 27, 2pm Jonathan L. Knapp presents Colorado Territory By Raoul Walsh
Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm Cheryl Eddy presents Death Wish 3 By Michael Winner
Sun, Aug 10, 2pm Adam Hartzell presents Madame Freedom By Han Hyeong-mo
Sat, Aug 23, 7:30pm Michael Guillén presents Hell Without Limits (El Lugar Sin Límites) By Arturo Ripstein
Sun, Aug 24, 2pm David Wong presents The Exile By Max Ophüls
Thurs, Sept 18, 7:30pm Alby Lim presents Pietà By Kim Ki-duk
Sun, Sept 21, 2pm Lynn Cursaro presents Little Fugitive By Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley
Thurs, Sept 25, 7:30pm David Robson presents The Brides Of Dracula By Terence Fisher

HOW: Stray Dogs screens digitally, as it was shot.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 6 allows festgoers a final chance to see Manuscripts Don't Burn, Blind Dates and All About the Feathers, and features the first of two silent film/indie rock pairings of SFIFF57: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down playing new music for Charlie Chaplin's The Pawn Shop, Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, and more.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's Too Soon, Too Late screens digitally at Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland.

BANG BANG: Ryland Walker Knight

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Earlier this week my Indiewire ballot appeared. I still stand by it, I suppose, but even just a week after publication I itch to change things. In fact, the whole enterprise gives me hives to a certain degree. The whole idea of absolutes in general, in any context. If you take a look at that list, you'll see a collection of films, I'd wager, premised on contingency, or some form of mystery or mess or exuberance. Even the more "straight" narratives (Cronenberg's & Jacobs' portrait-films) exhibit an interest in how things do not fit, or ever fix into reliable—much less accepted, normal—forms. Perhaps the best term I can reduce this idea to is a favorite on this blog: navigation. Life's not a maze, but there are hurdles every day, including waking up, not to mention the unexpected tidal wave every so often. We're so used to the narratives we're given or that we give ourselves that eluding the unwanted can wreck a day, a month, a year. (Lucky me: my year saw hiccups and headaches but nothing got wrecked. Truth is, I had a fantastic year. And I'm grateful.) Naturally, I'm attracted to films about finding ways through life.
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Finding a way to make movie-going more a part of my movie-watching has been difficult this year, the past couple years. Granted, I got to attend Cannes. But the pleasures of that were certainly "extracurricular" as much as within the salles and theaters. The dinners, the new friends, the jokes over whiskey and rosé with Danny and Adrian after long days. But I still cherish movie-going.

Early last week, in fact, I had the supreme pleasure to take in one of the best double bills in recent memory at the Roxie Theatre (with Brian, yes): the early show was Borzage's Moonrise followed by Renoir's first H'wood venture, the insanely under-seen and apparently under-recognized Swamp Water. Two films about the south made by not-southerners that understand the south and southerners in ways you rarely see anymore. (Of course, I'm not a southerner; I'm a Californian. My Okie roots are roots and my relationship to GA/SC is tertiary at best.) But aside from any obtuse anthropological/ethnological reading I can offer, the films exist and excel simply as films. Borzage's at his Murnau best and Renoir is at his dollies-everywhere (and "people as people") best. And they spoke to one another in delicious ways the way a double bill is supposed to work. Steve Seid usually knows what he's doing but this was a special program. The swamp has different narrative functions in the films, but in both the swamp is a hunting ground, a space of violence, something untamable that few can master or at least negotiate (or inhabit!). Again, this speaks to how I see the world at large. Life takes skills we never anticipate requiring, but nonetheless accrue. True to this optimism I harbor—inside an unavoidable but I hope healthy cynicism w/r/t life's obstacles, including people (above all people?)—both protagonists of these films find ways to join the world by their stories' ends.

Then again, not every path is a success. The film I felt worst about leaving off my "official" top ten was Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. That movie's all about the disconnect we're forced to confront as we grow through adolescence. It's about a lot more, too, including light, but there's a violence in adolescence that it understands (something Haz and I talk about as he is a teacher). This is true of all the Yang pictures I've seen, but this one is obviously special. Its length affords its narrative the space for us to observe characters rationalize their way through choices good and bad alike (though mostly bad) all the way. This is what critics mean when they call a film novelistic: time affording space for character. Granted, that's a limited view of what "the novel" is or can be, but this film in particular, as with many likewise classified films, is after a Dickensian kind of scope forever grounded in place and details. This, too, is how best to think of something like Breaking Bad, which Jen talked about yesterday.

Television, after all, is serialized much how the early money-making novels were; both are strategized as much as constructed with plot doled out in delimited chunks. But, as Jen noted, one of the pleasures of BB is just how digressive it is, how much air time is given to behavior and go-nowhere episodes of bickering. And it's not like this show's hopeful. It's got a pretty grim take on human desire and nature and intelligence. As I've said before, these characters are idiots. Walter White seems to have figured out a few things watching Gus operate, like the cost of survival in such a dangerous game as the drug racket, but he's still a bald, selfish, myopic stranger to himself and his oh-so-beloved family by the end of this last season. And the person he's closest to has every reason in the world to want to slit his throat.
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I've been using my tumblr more than this home base throughout the year. Part of it is simply ease of use. Another is desire. The last is time. I like the scrapbook/notebook feel of the microblog. It feels like a repository of reminders. And it usually takes very little effort. Writing here is more work. (Writing anything is work!) Not sure what the new year will bring, but I'm not quite ready to quit my baby. But I quit making zines to make this blog and I may wind up quitting this blog to wind up making more films. Even if they're just little goofs about the sounds of seagulls or odd poems about light and memory. The future has more answers than me.
———


One thing I know for sure: though I've made some great friends via emails (cf. this week), there's a lot I'm proud of from this past year outside the walls and tubes of the internet. Thank you to everybody who helped make those realities real. You know who you are.

________________________________

Ryland Walker Knight is a writer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He has three names, which you can read above, at left, and all over this blog.

BANG BANG: Eric Freeman

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

Things I Found Interesting in Things I Saw This Year by Eric Freeman

A Brighter Summer Day (dir. Edward Yang): I saw this in January at a mostly empty screening with no intermission in Berkeley, and it’s still probably the best thing I’ve seen all year, old or new. Read Rosenbaum's longer piece if you want more comprehensive breakdown. I’ll just note that what strikes me about ABSD (and Yi Yi, as well) is that the epic scope follows not from stunning natural vistas or loud pronouncements of import, as we’ve come to expect from the medium, but finding an interesting situation and treating the context and its characters with complete respect and as much depth as necessary. It’s an epic because it’s so true to the way people relate to one another.

World on a Wire (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder): If ABSD is the best movie I saw this year, then this one has proven to have fascinated me the most. It was my first Fassbinder, and since then I’ve steadily run through a good chunk of his career. One thing I love about this one, apart from the “what if we shot through four panes of glass?” aesthetic, is how RWF sets up shots where a pan finishes in a hilariously overdetermined setup. It’s the movie in microcosm: things may appear free-flowing, but everything has been decided already.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (dir. Sean Durkin): A disappointment even as I enjoyed it, if only because it’s so easy to see how it could be better. While the structure is indeed very clever, many of the match cuts fall flat because it’s immediately when and where the scenes take place. As the last shot proves, Durkin wants the audience to identify with Martha’s displacement, yet continually keeps her at remove. Which is all a way of saying that the film needs more moments of actual ambiguity, like the several shots of Martha walking through a dark hall, when it’s unclear where she is until she ends up in a room she herself might not have expected to enter.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami): Ryland thinks this film is fundamentally a work of criticism, and I mostly agree with that statement. But I also think it comes across as more dismissive than it should, because in this case the criticism gets at important points about how relationships change over time, the value of authenticity in everything from art to interactions, and all sorts of other deep philosophical questions that we tend not to consider on a daily basis. So, yes, it’s criticism, but also proof that criticism isn’t really about the thing it directly addresses, but deeper conceptions and feelings about how people relate to the world around them.

Mildred Pierce (dir. Todd Haynes): It’s no surprise that a director who regularly gets great performances from actresses does so well with Kate Winslet, who plays this role as a mix of her usual technical strength and the rare looseness usually lacking in her most awarded work. What’s less expected is that Evan Rachel Wood acquits herself so well. Veda can easily come off as a monster, but Wood instills her with enough relatable pride to seem human. Her best moment (and also the one that will make me seem particularly pervy for noting) comes when, directly after Mildred finds out about the affair with Monty, Veda gets out of bed fully naked, struts over to her vanity, and regards herself in the mirror, all as a sort of victory celebration after embarrassing her mother. It’s a triumphant moment for the character, the point at which she believes to have finally proven herself as a dominant woman. For different reasons, the scene makes the same case for the actress.

Drive (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn): I’m of the camp that takes this movie as a massive spastic fuckup, mostly because NWR has no idea what he was trying to do and not for some difficulty in melding tones and styles. But there are some delightful moments of clarity, especially the opening set-piece and the various music videos (not like music videos) that distill the latent emotions of the piece into perfect pairings of image and sound. For all the talk of Drive as an arthouse action movie, the best parts are almost always the most overtly commercial.

Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski): It’s become standard in some circles to say that the home-viewing experience is almost as good as the theater these days, but Rango is the first movie that ever made me think it could be true. I loved the movie in March, mostly for its gag-a-minute pace, but I don’t think I fully appreciate the visual dazzle until I saw it on the very excellent Blu-Ray transfer on a reasonably-sized TV. Multiplex projection standards are so poor that, for a detail-driven, wide-audience movie like this one, it’s almost preferable to watch it on a couch.

Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig): As the thinkpieces all said, an important step forward for the status of women in Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, the movie itself is a sad commentary on exactly what those Hollywood comedies entail. Almost all the best parts are moments of emotional discord between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph or throwaway lines from the amazing Melissa McCarthy -- the worst are the zany, insert-setpiece-here laugh-generators that could have been ported in from any Apatowville (or, worse yet, Farrelly Bros) creation. Turn this into a movie about adult friendship with regular laughs, and it might have felt a little more true to its characters. Instead, it’s all too familiar.

Enlightened (created by Mike White and Laura Dern): This HBO series isn’t especially cinematic, but it deserves mention on this list for Laura Dern’s performance as Amy Jellicoe, in my opinion the best acting work of the year. It’s easy to caricature Amy—the pilot arguably does it too often—as a hypocritical woman who believes herself to have found inner peace when she falls victim to the same sort of jealousies and grudges she did before getting a few weeks of new-age counseling. In Dern’s hands, however, Amy is fascinatingly complicated, oblivious enough to peacock a new friend in front of past confidants but introspective enough to acknowledge that pettiness a few hours later. In a TV landscape heavy on melodrama, Enlightened stands out as a series about the everyday difficulties of trying to be a better person in a world that tends to incentivize the opposite behavior. It’s about self-awareness and emotional processes, and those battles register on Dern’s face as often as they manifest in an external conflict.


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Eric Freeman writes regularly about sports at The Classical and Ball Don’t Lie, and intermittently elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @freemaneric.

Pinoy Sunday, by Adam Hartzell

Last Thursday the Mill Valley Film Festival opened, and with it a run of forty-five straight days of the thus-far foreseeable future where there will be a minimum of one film festival happening somewhere here on Frisco Bay every single day. According to the running list on this blog's right-hand sidebar, on most days there will be three or four festivals running somewhere in the area, and on a few as many as six or seven! It's a testament to the vitality of Frisco Bay audiences for movies outside the usual multiplex offerings that so many festivals can co-exist year after year in the same month-and-a-half period. But tickets sell briskly for many of these festivals, and it's worth obtaining them in advance if there's a particular film you're set upon seeing. There are still (pricey) tickets available for the MVFF closing night film gala The Artist this Sunday. I've seen it, and though it couldn't possibly live up to my expectations after its triumphantly successful screenings in Cannes and Toronto, I do think it will charm just about anybody else who watches it, and I'm not alone in hoping will function as an evangelizing force for the authentic silent film art that I so dearly love. Unfortunately, tickets to an MVFF feature I liked even better have been at "rush status" for over a week: tonight's screening of Pina, which is the best Wim Wenders film in in years if not decades. At least in my case, it's definitely an evangelizing force for choreographer Pina Bausch, who I previously knew next to nothing about, and for 3-D presentation of great dance. I'd certainly pay to see full versions of some of the works excerpted in Pina on a local 3-D screen.

Next to open are this weekend's Arab Film Festival (Jonathan Curiel has an article on Muslim lesbian drama Three Veils), the South Bay's Poppy Jaspar Short Film Festival, and the 10th annual edition of DocFest, which is called "SF's quirkiest festival" in Cheryl Eddy's new Guardian preview. And the San Francisco Film Society's Fall Season enters its next phase with Taiwan Film Days. I understand that the sf360 website is going to publish my writing buddy Adam Hartzell's preview of this mini-festival's selections imminently. In the meantime he has generously offered a piece on a film playing this Saturday and Sunday,Pinoy Sunday, for Hell On Frisco Bay. Here's Adam:

Ho Wi-ding's Pinoy Sunday is one of those films I watch while preparing a festival primer that has me itching to write more about it than a primer will allow. It isn't a brilliant film, but it is a fairly entertaining one that touches on issues I wish more films explored, in this case, the lives of migrant workers. And considering it's a Taiwanese film, (although with production help from the Philippines, Japan, and France, and a Malaysia-born director), I'm particularly happy to see the film highlight migrant issues unique to Taiwan, specifically the lives of Filipino migrant laborers in Taiwan. Along with the particular, Pinoy Sunday also enables more general discussion of the lives of migrants regardless of where they toil.
　
Pinoy Sunday follows two Filipino migrant laborers, Dado (played by Bayani Aqbayani) and Manuel (Jeffrey Quizon). Dado has a family back home but a girlfriend in Taiwan, posing an ethical quandary he seeks to resolve early on in the film. Manuel is the wanna-be playboy who puts up a good front to survive the romantic rejection he receives. He also is a bit of a player when it comes to the rules of the factory where he works, particularly the factory's curfew. Arriving on occasion just after the curfew, he is able to finagle his way around possible deportation from such violations of his contract by slipping the Taiwanese guard some betel nut for his troubles.
　
Besides his playboy dreams, Manuel has another simpler dream. He wants a couch, a sofa, (or what my grandmother called a davenport), for the top of their factory dormitory where they can sit and drink beer after a long day of manual labor. As Manuel and Dado recover from opposite ends of romantic rejection (Manuel the rejected, Dado the rejecter) in a public park, they stumble on an abandoned sofa. They begin their journey to take this sofa back to their dorm before curfew, a journey that has them at each others throats as well as discovering a deeper bond. They find kindness where it wasn't expected, along with finding themselves mistaken for heroes, thieves, and Indonesians.
　
Since Hell on Frisco Bay caters to the San Francisco Bay Area, most readers here are likely familiar with the slang term 'Pinoy'. Some may also be familiar with some of the controversy around the term. North Americans of Filipino descent often use the term affectionately, but some from the Philippines still hear the term tied up to ridicule from U.S. soldiers before and during World War II. In this film, as evidenced on his t-shirt worn early on in the film, Manuel wears the moniker with pride. (This same scene where the t-shirt is introduced also underscores a class/race transportation divide in that all the Filipino migrant workers are riding bicycles, perhaps made at the very factory where Dado and Manuel work, in contrast to the ubiquitous presence of the motorized scooter ridden by many, many Taiwanese.) The 'Sunday' in the title represents to the single day of the week many migrant factory workers in Taiwan tend to get off. The key words there are 'factory workers', since domestic laborers, mostly female and many Filipina, often do not get their Sundays off, or any day off at all. In Pinoy Sunday, Dado's girlfriend Anna, (played by Meryll Soriano), underscores this point in a nicely nuanced way. At first, you might assume she gets her Sundays off too because she and Dado meet up every Sunday at church. But then why is the elderly woman for whom Anna is a caretaker always with her? As much as Anna might get to do what she wants on Sunday, she still has to bring her ward with her. The ward is portrayed as mute, rather than demanding and difficult, partly as a means to contain the plot. But I find the nuanced portrayal here poignant. It hints at the conditions and differences between how gender is policed in the lives of migrant laborers rather than pummeling us over the head with it. (For those who want to explore that particular issue in more detail, check out an article from National Taiwan University professor Pei-chin Lan's available as a pdf here.)
　
Besides wrapping up issues faced by Filipino migrant laborers in a tight little title, there are other scenes particular to the transience of the migrant experience. There is the mall specifically catering to needs of Filipinos/Filipinas. These malls are often only open on the weekends. In these malls you will find restaurants serving Filipino food and the ubiquitously Filipino balakbayan box stores that send goodies back to families in the Philippines. A couple other issues the film highlights are the serious ramifications of violating curfew and the moment they are mistaken for Indonesian. According to Lan, the Council of Labor Affairs "dictates that a migrant worker can work for only one particular employer during a stay in Taiwan." There are some specific exceptions to this, but failure to make curfew at the factory could result in being sent back to The Philippines, and this strict policing of bodies is demonstrated at the very beginning of the film, when Dado runs into a fellow Filipino washing his face in the airport bathroom while still in handcuffs, escorted all the way to the airport gate to be sure he is deported. Such policing also confronts Manuel when a colleague is caught while on the lam. Another matter detailed in Lan's article is how Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers are played off each other in media stereotypes of fabricated essential natures. This makes the moment in Pinoy Sunday when the media mistake Dado and Manuel for Indonesian a much more layered critique, and the peppering of accusations upon brown bodies all the more poignant, as the film helps the political medicine go down by playing up the comedy involved in such outlandish media theatre.

One of my problems with Pinoy Sunday is the ending. But for spoiler-avoidance I won't go into how the ending ignores global economic realities otherwise prominent in the film. I understand this film doesn't want to be a serious downer. It wants to entertain, to show respect for migrants who too often go ignored. So I won't harp on Pinoy Sunday too much since it does bring to the attention of Taiwanese audiences some of the plights of those brought into Taiwan in order to make their economy work in ways more privileged citizens demand.
　
In its portrayal of present Taiwan (Film) day reality, Pinoy Sunday avoids being The Help. As Noy Thrupkaew so expertly critiques in The American Prospect, The Help may "peep into the past" of American injustices, but without any hint that that past is still with us in the present treatment of domestic workers in the U.S. (now more likely Latina than African-American). But it takes a movie like this to inspire a great (yet underappreciated) writer like Thrupkaew to school us on the lives of domestic workers in the U.S. today, so I'm glad The Help is out there hoping viewers smitten by it might stumble onto Thrupkaew's online history lesson. Pinoy Sunday may not confront all the issues of Filipino migrant laborers in Taiwan, but it confronts nonetheless, while staying more entertaining than didactic, which might make all the difference regarding its ability to reach folks who sequester themselves off from facing up to economic realities.

SFIFF54 Day 14: Let The Wind Carry Me

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is in its penultimate day, ending tomorrow, May 5th. Each day during the festival I've been posting a recommendation and capsule review of a film in the festival.

Let The Wind Carry Me (TAIWAN: Chiang Hsiu-chiung & Kwan Pun-leung, 2010)

playing: at 3:45 PM at the Kabuki, with no further screenings during the festival.
distribution: no U.S. distribution is currently planned.

A documentary portrait of the cinematographer behind the lens of nearly all the famous films of great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien? Sign me up. The film begins with a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of The Electric Princess House, Hou's 3-minute contribution to the 2007 omnibus Chacun Son Cinéma, which has still never played theatrically here on Frisco Bay (though the DVD is available to rent at Le Video). Getting a glimpse of any part of Hou's process is priceless for a fan like me, and we are also treated to peeks at on-set footage from the filming of Hou masterpieces like Flowers of Shanghai and Flight of the Red Balloon.

But I get ahead of myself. this is not a film about Hou, but a tribute to Mark Lee Ping-bin, a slightly bohemian-looking cinematographer who, in addition to working with Hou, has also shot films for dozens of other auteurs from across Asia and Europe. I'd seen a surprisingly high percentage of them, most often at previous SFIFF editions, and got enough pleasure out of realizing, "oh, Lee shot that film as well?" from the clips excerpted in this documentary, that I'll leave a listing out of this review, but link to his imdb page for a full recounting. The image quality of these clips has been taken to task by a few reviewers, inlcuding Michael Hawley. For my part, watching on 35mm, the only clips that seemed particularly degraded were those from Flowers of Shanghai. I appreciated that in the clips, when dialogue is spoken, it's left unsubtitled, alllowing English readers fewer distractions from Lee's compositions. The impression one gets from watching Let The Wind Carry Me is that Lee will accept any job that he feels will allow him to continue to elevate the art of cinematography; we viewers may rarely appreciate that many of the greatest contributions to cinema as an artform come from the kind of devotion to craft and work that involves a good deal of personal sacrifice.

The arc of Lee's relationship to his mother is the film's main illustration of this; though he lives and usually works abroad, while she has remained in Taipei, he makes efforts to visit her whenever he can, and to credit her in his acceptance speeches for awards he receives around the globe. I was surprised to verge on tearing up at one particularly emotional reunion moment between mother and son. Others may find the moments we're taken away from Lee's artistic process to be extraneous, but I found the tension between the subject's crossed desires to be a dutiful son as well as a prolific filmmaker to save the film from becoming a pure hagiography; it veers close enough as it is. It also seems to fumble around for a dramatically satisfying ending. Indeed, Let The Wind Carry Us is not a masterpiece. But it's a film about masterpieces, that helps enrich the relationships we can have with them.

At the screening I attended, one of the film's two co-directors, Kwan Pun-leung, was on hand to answer questions from the audience. During the q-and-a, it was announced that Mark Lee Ping-bin himself is expected to join Kwan for the post-screening q-and-a this afternoon!

SFIFF54 Day 14
Another option: Detroit Wild City (FRANCE/USA: Florent Tillon, 2010) Local archivist Rick Prelinger did an excellent job interviewing Serge Bromberg before last Sunday's Mel Novikoff Award screening, but he also wrote a piece for SFMOMA Open Space blog on Detroit, and has an interesting take on French director Florent Tillon's documentary on the unique city. Tonight's Berkeley screening is the last for this film in the festival.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Strangers On A Train and They Live By Night at the Castro, a double-bill in memory of Farley Granger, who died just over a month ago. These are certainly two of his greatest film roles; no wonder when you work with Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. The pair screened as part of Noir City five years ago, and I was lucky to be able to attend. Granger appeared in person at the event; a blogger's recap has been preserved here.