Fuk Sau
Johnny To - 2009
IFC Region 1 DVD

Until I had read this posting by Kimberly Lindbergs, I had no idea that Alain Delon was Johnny To's first choice to star in Vengeance. That To is a fan of Delon, particularly the films he did with Jean-Pierre Melville, will be no surprise to the who have read To's list of favorite films from the Criterion Collection. The character that Johnny Hallyday plays in Vengeance is named Francois Costello. Delon portrayed a hit man named Jef Costello. Did To hope for Delon to play a continuation of the same character? There is the possible suggestion that the two fictional characters are related, not only because of the shared family name, but also because To's Costello runs a restaurant in Paris called "Les Freres" (The Brothers).

Vengeance is still very much a Johnny To film, even with a French star shooting it up in Macau and Hong Kong. If you want to see a film much closer in spirit to Melville, let me suggest Donnie Yen's Ballistic Kiss with its brooding hit man. Aside from Hallyday, and Sylvie Testud as his daughter, the rest of the cast includes To's usual crew including Simon Yam, Anthony Wong Chau-sang, and the incomparable Lam Suet. The basic story is not too much of a variation on To's explorations of male camaraderie and loyalty.

Costello comes from Paris to Macau after his daughter and her family have been shot by unknown gun men. The daughter, Irene, is the only survivor. From her hospital bed, she asks her father to take revenge on her behalf. Costello enlists three Chinese hit men, encountering them the kind of coincidence that could only happen in the movies. Ignoring some of the contrived situations that bring the characters together is made easier by some of the visual pleasures of Vengeance. Demonstrating his ability with a gun, Costello and the gang shoot at a bicycle seemingly propelled by the blaze of bullets nudging it forward. There is also a big gun battle outside a garbage dump, with both sides protecting themselves with huge bales of newspaper, push forward like giant blocks, appearing almost like large, crude mechanical devices from a distance, the flying paper debris adding an other worldly touch.

Costello is on the verge of losing his memory. He takes photos of his team to remember who they are, with their names on each Polaroid. Some of the implications of Costello's memory loss are not explored as deeply as they could have been. Johnny To's visual bravura usually succeeds even when Wai Ka-Fai's screenplay elides all manner of questions and plot holes. To seems to be borrowing from himself in a scene where Hallyday gets lost in a rainy night in Hong Kong, surrounded by scores of people with black umbrellas, a scene similar to one in To's far better Sparrow. Several scenes also revolve around eating, with Costello cooking a meal for his new Chinese friends, and a confrontation between rivals taking place at a barbecue. In a Johnny To film, you can almost count on the gang, if they are not going to shoot each, getting together around the dining table.

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Dana Wynter and Rock Hudson in Something of Value (Richard Brooks - 1957)

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Loong Boonmee raleuk chat
Apichatpong Weerasethakul - 2010
Strand Releasing 35mm film

I had made a point of seeing Uncle Boonmee theatrically while I had the opportunity. I would recommend the same to others. There are too many shots in the film that need to be seen on the big screen, the bigger, the better, to be understood.

One of the first shots is of a water buffalo, barely visible in the distance. A later shot in this first sequence of the loose water buffalo is of the animal barely visible, walking through the foliage. Throughout the film, Apichatpong uses extreme long shots so that the characters are in a sense, lost within nature. The themes of man, nature and animism are continuations explored in Tropical Malady, although it is more explicit in this film.

There is also a fantastic scene that takes place in a cave. Boonmee and two others go exploring in a cave for reasons only understood by Boonmee. They go at night, carrying a lantern for illumination. At one point, the lantern is lowered enough so that the walls of the cave a lit up just enough to resemble an extremely starry sky. This is a magical moment that no amount of computer generated special effects could ever match.

This is a contemplative film as has been stated before. What isn't discussed much is Apichatpong's sense of humor. The ape like creatures that appear with laser red eyes resemble variations of Chewbacca from Star Wars. One of the creatures is the reincarnation of Boonmee's late son. Introduced by Boonmee, while sitting at the family's outdoor dinner table, a worker protests, stating, "But that's a monkey". No matter. Family is family, whether it's a humanoid creature or a ghost.

I can't pretend to fully understand of of what Apichatpong was trying to relay in Uncle Boonmee. What I know and understand about Thailand and Thai culture fits into a thimble. There are political references that got by me. I have only the most general idea about some of the general culture of Northeastern Thailand, a culture that is rooted more deeply in geographic terms rather than any artificially set borders. When the film was introduced at the Starz Denver Film Festival, the person doing the introduction couched Uncle Boonmee in terms of a horror movie because of the presence of ghosts. I think I understand what he was trying to say, although it might have been expressed more accurately. My own lesson from briefly living in Thailand is that ghosts are not necessarily to be feared, you just have to learn how to live with them.

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Lev Anderson & Chris Metzler - 2010
Pale Griot Films

I've been thinking about Everyday Sunshine since I saw it yesterday. For myself, the film raises more questions. Yes, the film is a documentary that rushes through the twenty plus years of the history of the band, Fishbone. But I think the real story is that the band is emblematic of bigger and broader ideas regarding popular music and black culture and identity in the United States. The person I would love to see analyzing this film and all of its possible meanings would be Nick Tosches as the writer who would be able to put it all together.

The documentary is an assemblage of concert footage, interviews with past and current members, and others with varying connections to the band. Most of the films is devoted to the sometimes rancorous relationship of founding members John Norwood Fisher and Angelo Moore. The original founding of the group is played in cartoons of the band members when they met in high school, Fisher being the too cool kid, and Moore coming off as the smiling nerd from the suburbs. That part of the film provides a brief history of public school students bussed from South Central Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley. It may also be key in establishing that Fishbone, whether intended or not, was always a group of black musicians who functioned in primarily white milieus.

At the beginning of the film, narrator Laurence Fishburne (was he chosen for the Fish in his name?), mentions that one of the strengths and weaknesses of Fishbone was that the tried to operate as a democracy. This brought to mind something I had read about Buffalo Springfield, possibly on the liner notes of their first album, which if recall was, "Steve (Stills) is the leader, but we all are". It could well be that the nature of a rock band is to be combustible, or to be capable of setting the ego aside for long term benefits. The history of rock music is a history of variations of this particular story.

The music that Fishbone plays can't be called rock music in the traditional sense, but the combination of ska, free jazz, and a stage show that might be described as the punk rock equivalent to Spike Jones, couldn't fit any where else in a musical landscape that demands categorization. There were a couple other bands that briefly appeared, The Bus Boys and Living Color come to mind. Interestingly, Kevin O'Neal of The Bus Boys, and Vernon Reid, of Living Colour, both are members of the Black Rock Coalition. Reid also is one of the people discussing the influence of Fishbone on his music. Why this is important is because the film fleetingly discusses what might not be racism per se within the music business, but the difficulty of dealing with music that doesn't belong to easy to explain categories. Also, quite tellingly, the musicians that were inspired by Fishbone, that achieved the greatest financial success, are white.

There is a brief excerpt of Fishbone performing with Annette Funicello in Back to the Beach. I haven't seen the film since the year it came out, in 1987, but it provides some idea of Fishbone's manic energy in concert. Angelo Moore is the one with the mohawk, while John Fisher is the guy wearing lederhosen. That scene was the high point of that film, and always made me wonder about the reaction of those people who came in simply to see the onscreen reunion of Frankie Avalon with Annette. I suspect that Fishbone getting dropped by Sony had something to do with the music industry moving in a direction similar to the film industry, of being only interested in formula product that would result in big sales. Everyday Sunshine is primarily worth seeing as documentary about musical artists who doggedly maintain their sense of artistic integrity without regards to the more obvious rewards of fame and fortune.

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Nigel Cole - 2010
Sony Pictures Classics 35mm film

There's a scene in Made in Dagenham where Sally Hawkins gets up in front of her co-workers to call for a strike. Maybe it's a fuzzy memory at work here, but a couple of the shots seemed to invoke another actress named Sally who led a strike of female workers, Sally Fields in Norma Rae. Any similarities are probably intentional. The film is based on a strike by 187 women who worked at the British Ford plant in 1968, a strike which effectively helped create a law regarding equal pay for women.

This is more feel-good movie than dialectic cinema, more entertainment than art, especially as there is no drama regarding the outcome. A sharper film might have been written by Peter Morgan, or directed by Ken Loach. What the film is primarily interested in exploring is the entrenchment of sexism in the workplace, both by the managerial team at Ford, both in Britain and in the U.S., and the initial lack of support given by the union that claimed to speak on behalf of all workers. As factual as the story may be, it seems to exist in a vacuum where the feminist movement is nowhere to be seen, nor is there any connection made with any of the other political activity of the day. There is a reference to the fashion revolution of the time, when Carnaby Street seemed to dictate fashion trends, with one of the younger workers, Sandra, proudly showing up wearing Mary Quant hot pants.

Where Made in Dagenham shines is in the acting. Most of the weight is carried by Sally Hawkins as Rita O'Grady, the initially reluctant strike leader, who tries to balance her commitment to her friends and co-workers, with maintaining a household with a husband, also a Ford worker, and two school age children. Bob Hoskins plays the mischievous union leader who truly supports the women, always averting his gaze when entering the factory during the hot days when the women work without shirts. It is Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, a member of Harold Wilson's cabinet, who steals the film, with her caustic remarks. Whether dealing with dimwitted underlings or negotiating with a Ford manager who threatens to shut down the factories rather than acknowledge the strikers' demands, Richardson is so eminently entertaining, one might hope to see her in a film about the real Barbara Castle.

One might also put a contemporary reading on the film for what it does present in the ways that management views labor, and how multinational companies exert their power. The political aspects to Made in Dagenham take a back seat to easy to recognize heroines and villains. The film begins on a small wave of nostalgia with vintage television ads for British Ford cars, and concludes with some documentary footage, some of it from the actual strike, as well as filmed interviews with some of the women who participated in the strike, older, but no less spirited. The film ends with almost obligatory, end credit title song, the kind that's placed in order to get a Best Song nomination for the Oscars. What makes this song of more interest is that the lyrics are by activist singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, a former resident of Dagenham, while the song is performed by Sixties pop star Sandie Shaw, herself a former employer, as a key punch operator, at the Degenham Ford plant.

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Aaron Katz - 2010
IFC Films

Recently at Glenn Kenny's blog, "Some Came Running", Glenn ran a series of screen caps under the heading of "Mumblecore or Murder, She Wrote?". I didn't pay attention to the comment about Cold Weather at the time. Sometime later, when starting to sift through the films I wanted to cover at the SDFF, I was reminded that this is the newest film by Aaron Katz, a filmmaker given the mumblecore label. I liked Katz's earlier features, Quiet City and especially Dance Party, U.S.A. enough to take a look at his new film.

Genre labels short change this film. The initial premise is one that on the face of it seems generic, with a young man, dropping out of college where he studied forensics, working at an ice factory in Portland, Oregon. The young man, Doug, lives with his sister, Gail, hangs out with his co-worker, Carlos, and starts seeing his former girlfriend, Rachel. Nothing much happens between going to work, meeting at coffee houses, or going to a night club where Carlos has an occasional DJ gig. Carlos starts getting together with Rachel, until one night when Rachel seems to have mysteriously disappeared.

The fictional detective invoked here is Sherlock Holmes. In one of the film's lighter moments, Doug goes pipe shopping, hoping that smoking like the famed literary character will assist in his own powers of deduction. Of course it doesn't work that way. Later Doug pursues a shady character with a briefcase full of money. Or at least that's what is assumed to be in the briefcase. There is some mystery, and scenes of Doug and Gail unraveling a secret code. Still, the mystery aspect to Cold Weather is not entirely resolved as it would be in a more traditional narrative.

While the film is ultimately about Doug's relationship with Gail, it is also Aaron Katz's love letter to Portland. Only a person who really loves a city would take a cinematic journey all over town, not only in the more industrial and more out of the way places, but also into The Dalles and Cannon Beach. There are some picturesque moments, a scene of Doug and Gail gazing onto the Pacific Ocean, whale watching although no whales appear, and a shot of of neon illuminated Bagdad Theater at night. One striking shot is a slow zoom of Doug and Gail at a bridge by a waterfall.

It should be noted that this is a very handsome looking film, shot with the video RED camera. Katz works again with Chris Lankenau as Doug, but I suspect that it will be Trieste Kelly Dunn, the actress who plays Gail, who will be gaining more professional attention. The film score, by Keegan DeWitt, mostly guitar and a couple of other instruments which to my ears seems to incorporate Indonesian gamelan instruments, is quite inventive. For brief moments, there is just a touch of Bernard Herrmann during the more suspenseful moments. That the film has been picked up by IFC indicates the potential for wider exposure of this film. Where Aaron Katz will go from here is unknown, although this interview may offer some suggestions.

(Viewed as DVD screener)

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Preston Miller -2010
Vindaloo Philm-Wallah

The basic facts would seem ripe for condescending treatment of the people involved here. And some of the confusing and contradictory statements made by the group leader, Teacher Chen, in God's Land will no doubt raise eyebrows. And while the film does have its comic moments, it is a tribute to Preston Miller that he essentially respects all of his characters, no matter how wrong headed they may seem.

Even before it is brought up in conversation, the events in Waco with David Koresh are not too far from anyone's thoughts. The Hou family comes from Taipei to Garland, Texas to join Chen's group. Chen predicts that God will make his presence known on a certain cable television station, and that his followers will be leaving Earth for another dimension on a special space craft. Part of the drama is the waiting for what is suggested to be an apocalyptic event. But there is also the concern about what if Chen is wrong. Tension arises within the Hou family regarding the father, Ming-Tien, who believes that he has been called to be with Chen, his wife, Xiu, who expresses skepticism about the enterprise, and young son, Ollie, who is trying to find a place where he belongs. Throughout the film, those observing Chen's group from the outside seek reassurance that there are no plans for group suicide.

Chen's group does look odd, with their uniforms of white sweatshirts, white pants and white cowboy hats. They are certainly strangers in a strange land. Some of the shots of Dallas make the city appear as alien as Antonioni's Rome in L'Eclisse or Godard's Paris in Alphaville.

It should also be noted that Miller has created the film almost totally with carefully composed shots, the camera moving perhaps a couple of times. A recurring visual motif is of extreme close-ups, the faces of the actors filling the frame, looking straight into the camera. At a time when too many filmmakers feel the need to move the camera, or explain everything with expository dialogue, Miller allows the camera to stay still, letting the camera roll while Jodi Lin, as the wife Xiu, looks in the mirror of her former home before leaving.

It is also this ability to just observe the action within the frame that creates two of the funniest moments within God's Land. First, the Hou family is sent to stay in a somewhat shabby motel. As soon as they enter, the young son, Ollie, takes to the bed, treating it as a trampoline, jumping merrily up and down, while the parents consider their current living situation. Also, quite funny, is a scene when Xiu's cousin, Maggie, comes home to find a news report about Chen's group on television. She calls for her off-screen husband to find a tape to record the news, rummaging for blank tapes, and getting into panic mode, popping in and out of the camera frame as the television broadcast continues. In Maggie's living room are a couple of pillows with American flag patterns. While in the scene at home, Maggie speaks Chinese, in a later scene when she meets Xiu, she speaks English with a decided Texan accent.

Chen's expression of faith, which incorporates elements of New Age and other religions, goes as far as having two of his children named Jesus and Buddha. Forming what might be considered a traditional counterpoint is the soundtrack, with songs by country singers Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams and Frankie Laine.

Prospective, and even some active filmmakers might want to take a look at the production diary by Preston Miller and producer Jeremiah Kipp. In spite of all the possible obstacles, this is both a good, and good looking, film.

(Viewed as a DVD screener)

Also thanks to the ever erudite Sheila O'Malley for alerting me to the links.

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