2013 Chinese American Film Festival

The 2013 Chinese American Film Festival returned to 4 Star from November 13 to 19.  It coincided with the dates of New Italian Cinema at the Clay.  I probably would have gone to more films at both festivals if they didn't overlap but frankly I was kind fatigued by films and life at that point so maybe I would stayed home.

Fallen City starring Huang Jue, Yongdai Ding & Ruby Lin; directed by Huang Hong; Mandarin with subtitles; (2011)
Lethal Hostage starring Songlei Sun; directed by Cheng Er; Mandarin with subtitles; (2012)
Unbeatable starring Nick Cheung; directed by Dante Lam; Mandarin & Cantonese with subtitles; (2013)
Love Deposit starring Xia Yu & Jessie Zhou; directed by Qu Jiangtao; Mandarin with subtitles; (2013)
Shanghai Calling starring Daniel Henney & Eliza Coupe; directed by Daniel Hsia; Mandarin, Shanghainese & English with subtitles; (2012) - Official Website

In the past, I have gone to at least one screening per year where English subtitles were not available.  I'm glad to report that all the screenings I attended this year had English subtitles.  My only complaint in that regard is the opening credits of Love Deposit which set up the premise were not subtitled.  More on that later.

Fallen City - a cop in a small Chinese town recognizes the bank robber who eluded him a few years ago.  He chases him down and finally catches him but at that moment, an earthquake strikes and incapacitates the cop.  The robber puts on the cops uniform and heads out in the flattened town to find his daughter who is the reason for his return.  Dressed as a cop, he is constantly asked to help the victims of the earthquake.

I found the CGI effects amateurish and the acting was only marginally better.  Fallen City had a contrived plot and overacting interspersed amongst wooden acting,and characters.  It was the first film I saw and I was worried that the rest of the films in the series would be of this quality.

Lethal Hostage - starred Honglei Sun whom I saw in Johnnie To's Drug War.  The plot was a little difficult to follow but Honglei Sun plays a Chinese drug dealer who years ago kidnapped a dentist's daughter during a firefight with the police.  He used her as a hostage to cross the border back to his homebase of Burma (or Myanmar).  Years pass and the girl, no an adult, marries her kidnapper - Stockholm Syndrome in Burma among Ethnic Chinese.  There is also a cop tracking Sun whose sister lives next to another drug dealer.

The characters aren't given names (like my synopses sometimes) so the audience is kept detached from the characters.  The violence is ratcheted up a notch for a mainland Chinese film.  The scenes move back in forth in time which makes it difficult to understand the plot.  I'd like to see Lethal Hostage a second time.  Nicely photographed and chillingly disturbing at times, director Cheng Er and Lethal Hostage merit future attention.

Unbeatable was the most crowd pleasing of the films I saw.  Nick Cheung plays Scumbag Fai, a 1980s boxing champion in HK who threw some matches and has been living in disgrace ever since.  Chased out of HK due to gambling debts, he ends up in Macau working at a friend's MMA studio.  Siqi (Eddie Peng) is the son of a rich man whose father has lost his fortune.  To prove himself to his father, Siqi decides to enter an MMA tournament.

After the obligatory resistance, Fai agrees to train Siqi.  Siqi needs the cash prize to help his father, Fai needs redemption which he only partially achieves by training Siqi.  In a subplot, Fai rents a room in the apartment of Gwen (Mei Ting) and her precocious daughter.  The three form a makeshift family unit since the Gwen's husband has abandoned wife & daughter.  Gwen also has a screw loose due to being drunk when her son died.

Anyway, Unbeatable takes a slight detour from utterly predictable when Siqi is injured in one of his MMA matches.  Stepping into the breach is Fai, a 40something ex-boxer who was barely qualified to coach a MMA fighter much less participate in the biggest MMA tournament in Asia.  Fai ends up facing the fighter (Andy On) who injured Siqi.  Barely avoiding a broken neck, Fai just his ass kicked until the end when he uses his trick shoulder (a la Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon) to escape a submission move and deliver a knockout blow.

Unbeatable was directed by Dante Lam who made the brassy The Beast Stalker with Cheung.  Lam and Cheung find the right formula again.  If you went to Unbeatable looking for fight scenes, you were disappointed because the fighting didn't start until the final third of the film.  In the meantime, you get Cheung and the little girl playing dress up or Cheung and Peng in training montages which would put Sylvester Stallone to shame.  There is quite a bit of humor in Unbeatable until Siqi is paralyzed after getting his neck broken during a fight and Gwen goes crazy and is institutionalized.

Cheung shows quite a bit of range; especially taking into account his turn The Beast Stalker.  Andy Om also makes the most of his brief screen time which occurs solely within the confines of the octagon.

Love Deposit sounds like the title of a porno film.  Instead it has a clever plot conceit at the center of the story.  He Muyang (Xia Yu) runs a cafe called Love Bank.  As a promotional device, he offers "love deposit."  Couples record their true thoughts on video.  Each video is saved to a memory stick.  They pay a deposit.  If the couple is still together after a year, they can have their deposit and memory sticks back.  If they are broken up, He keep both.  The contract specifies he cannot turn over the memory stick to either partner if they have broken up within a year.  This causes angry confrontations with customers who want to know what their ex said about them.  He is keeps his commitments and always refuses.

Yu Xiaoyu (Jessie Zhou) has broken up with her boyfriend.  She attempts to extort, threaten, wheedle and buy access to the memory stick.  He, in need of employees, agrees to view the message and tell Yu one sentence per day if she works at the cafe.

Love Deposit loses some momentum after setting up the premise.  You know He & Yu have to get together but it's a matter of how to get them together in the funniest way possible.  At this point, we get the backstory of the Love Bank and it involves an embarrassing refusal of He's marriage proposal.  In order to save face, He invites Yu as his date for a college reunion.  He is still hung up on his college girlfriend 10 years later.  He even stalks her.  It's only when learns about the Love Bank and announces that she will be moving to Europe that He finally give Yu a chance - classic rebound relationship!  What's more romantic than that?

So maybe Love Deposit has nonsufficient funds but its a fun ride for the first hour or so of its 93 minutes.

Shanghai Calling put the American in the Chinese American Film Festival.  Daniel Henney is Sam, a thoroughly Americanized ABC lawyer in New York.  After winning a big case, he expects to be made partner at his law firm but instead he is transferred to the Shanghai office.  He reluctantly takes the assignment immediately regrets it.  He gets off on the wrong foot with his relocation consultant Amanda (Eliza Coupe), a Caucasian who can speak better Mandarin than him.  His first case results in patent infringement and furious client (Alan Ruck).  Unwilling to accept the advice of various expats to hire Chinese troubleshoot extraordinaire Awesome Wang (Geng Le), he digs himself a bigger hole as a Chinese company continues to pump out cellphones with tactile screens contrary to the exclusive marketing agreement Sam negotiated.  The only bright spot is that he and Amanda are getting quite cozy.  Sam had to move to Shanghai to get a white girlfriend.

Laughs are fast and frequent in this comedy about a fish out of water, when in Rome, stranger in a strange land, etc.  It seems a little derivative but Shanghai Calling is well crafted and populated with solid actors throughout.  Henney and Coupe get most of the screen time but Ruck, Le and even Bill Paxton shows up in smaller roles which give the film a break from the less than enthralling romance between Sam & Amanda.

A twist at the end surprised me and was the salvation for Sam whose moment of triumph involves laying off a factory full of Chinese worker who probably make 5% of his salary.

The real star of Shanghai Calling is Shanghai which looks incredible in the film.  Shanghai always looks great in films

Ms. 45 and Black Narcissus - Don't Get in the Habit

Let me share a few thoughts while I have a little time to write.

The Lost World was quite a treat. The 1925 silent film pioneered stop-motion animation or claymation. The film is probably familiar to casual film goers because of its iconic images of dinosaurs. The second Jurassic Park shared its subtitle and a large part of its plot with this film.



Accompanying the film was the band Dengue Fever. A couple years ago, IndieFest or DocFest screened a documentary called Sleepwalking Through the Mekong about the band. Dengue Fever combines "Cambodian pop with surf, ska, psychedelia and funk." I don't even know what Cambodian pop and ska sound like but Dengue Fever has a pretty unique and appealing sound based on the performance I saw.

I still did not fully appreciate their soundtrack. Silent films are of a very specific period - 1910's and 1920's so I expect the soundtrack to match that period. Certainly, I may have been conditioned to expect a certain sound from silent films on television. Was every silent film scored with a Joplinish piano accompaniment? Some of the large scale films had full orchestras so who am I to say that Dengue Fever didn't do it right. I'm a guy that paid the admission and has a blog so that's qualifications enough in this day and age. I thought their music crescendoed at the wrong times, was uptempo at the wrong times, etc. I felt the music did not match the action in the film. I actually liked the music and am interested in hearing more of their songs but I didn't think their work was right for the film.



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After a long period of anticipation, I finally caught The Beast Stalker and I was suitably impressed. The plot is fairly unoriginal and riddled with too many coincidences but it has a great villain which makes all the difference. Nick Cheung plays the bad guy - a man going blind due to a car accident that paralyzed his wife. To pay for her care, he becomes an assassin/kidnapper for hire. I appreciated his performance as he caromed between menacing a young captive, kicking ass on anyone that gets in his way and tenderly caring for his wife. There is a great car crash scene and the rest of the film is watching Cheung tear it up.



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Was Last House on the Left (1972) the first film to feature the now ubiquitous fellatio-castration scene?

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Ms. 45 (1981) by Abel Ferrara was an exploitation masterpiece. Reading some reviews and judging by the audience response, it appears this film is held up as a twisted but powerful feminist manifesto. The plot involves a mute woman that is raped twice in one day who turns into a vigilante. Over the course of the film, she goes from avenger to psychotic mankiller. I think that subtlety may have been lost on some of the more ardent womyn viewers.

I thought the film was a brilliant black comedy which benefited tremendously by scripting the eponymous character as being mute. Because she was mute, she never had to explain herself or orate the obligatory expository. Instead she was able to communicate exclusively through facial gesticulation; in particular, she had extremely expressive eyes. Zoë Lund (nee Tamerlis) was perfectly cast as Ms. 45. Ferrara pulls out every trick in the book to advance this simple revenge tale cum girl gone crazy. He gives Ms. 45 a jazzy, saxophone leitmotif whenever she dispatches a man to the afterlife. He plays with the audience by introducing the leitmotif but thwarting the anti-heroine. He introduces a nosy neighbor and annoyingly yappy dog as comic foils. Most skillfully, he directs Lund as she dismembers her first victim and stores the body parts in her refrigerator with great flourishes of black humor. The climax is one for the ages as Lund is dressed as a nun (at a Halloween party) when she goes on her final murderous rampage.



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The single most memorable scene for me in the past month was from Black Narcissus (1947). This melodrama about Catholic nuns in the Himalayas had brilliant technicolor for 1947. Deborah Kerr plays the Sister Superior. One of her nuns (Sister Ruth played by Katherine Byron) is slowly going insane. She lusts for the only white man within 1000 miles and she's convinced that Kerr is thwarting the love affair from blooming. Over the course of the film she buys a tight dress and applies eye shadow in a copious amounts. The end result is an evil looking harpie that has inspired horror film directors for generations. There is a scene where Kerr bursts in on Byron and discover her out of the habit that is played to the hilt. Also, the climactic scene involves Byron in full war paint sneaking up on Kerr as she rings a bell on the edge of a cliff.



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Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - I've heard about it for years and it still holds it's own after nearly 30 years. Great soundtrack too. The film was the proto-Blair Witch Project; a mocumentary about a professor that recovers the film that a documentary crew shot in the deepest regions of Amazonia which is coincidentally the same place The Lost World was set. Rather than being vegan, chai drinking, NPR listening, pacifists, the documentarians rape, pillage and maim their way to what they hope will be an award winning documentary about alleged cannibals. Unwilling to let events unfold at their own pace, the four person crew spice things up with their own special brand of mayhem. By the end of the film, you are cheering on the cannibals as they rape, castrate and likely consume the four über-boorish Americans (they had to be Americans).

The film is disturbing not so much for the cruelties inflicted on the humans which I knew to be staged but rather the cruelties inflicted on the animals which are supposedly real. A sea turtle, a pig and a monkey are killed on screen and if what I read is accurate, the animals were actually killed. The director later apologized for the animal cruelty. The sea turtle butchering was especially hard to stomach. They chopped off the head, peeled off the shell and carved up the entrails. It was very hard to take.

Return of the Beast Stalker and Not in Vogue

A few weeks ago, I went to the Vogue Theater to see I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, a documentary directed by Richard Shepard.

Looking at the schedule, I knew it was going to be trouble. I believe the film started at 7 PM. It was less than an hour long but was followed up by a Q&A by Shepard. The second half of the double feature was Dog Day Afternoon. That was less than 3 hours of movies but my concern was that the Q&A would drag on and on.

Why do people feel compelled to ask inane questions at the Q&A? One woman asked if Shephard was going to make the late-night TV talk show circuit with his film. Leno & Letterman always have independent film makers promoting their non-feature length films as guests.

I will say that Shephard was an energetic & entertaining speaker. SF Chronicle movie critic Ruthe Stein, who functioned as the interviewer and facilitator, moved things along well enough. There was probably 30 minutes of Q&A; quite reasonable in my opinion.

Stein or someone on the Vogue staff announced a 15 to 20 minute intermission before the next film. The Vogue only has one toilet for the men's room so an intermission was quite reasonable. Having spent a lot of time in movie theaters between screenings, I know that the projectionist will frequently project the aspect ratio grid onto the screen to match the film print. For the DVDs, they will project a portion of the movie to size it properly on the screen, test the colors & the sound.

The staff at the Vogue did neither of these for what turned out to be closer to an hour intermission. The length of the intermission left me stewing but what made me really frustrated was that Dog Day Afternoon was being screened from a DVD and even worse, the sound didn't work. It took several minutes to get the sound working. Some people walked out of the "film" at that point; apparently their patience has been exhausted by the endless intermission and technical difficulties.

My clarion call to the Vogue is

1) keep the length of the intermission reasonable
2) test the film/DVD during the intermission
3) show film over DVD whenever possible

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I notice the 4-Star Theater is now listing The Beast Stalker as opening on May 15.

May is going to be an insanely busy month for me if I see all the films I want to see - I Wake Up Dreaming at the Roxie, Women on the Verge at the Castro, a few programs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, three films (Gomorrah, Serbis and A Wink And A Smile) at the Red Vic, The Beast Stalker at the 4-Star, the beginning of the Oshima retrospective at the PFA, the early Kubrick/Altman double bill by Film on Film Foundation and The Lost World with live accompaniment by Dengue Fever as part of the 2009 SF International Film Festival.

Rita Hayworth Burns Up the Screen

A co-worker mentioned this story to me today. The Stanford Theater was evacuated Friday night due to a fire. The cause of the fire was an old nitrate film getting jammed in the projector. Nitrate film stock is very flammable; it is even more dangerous as the film gets older and less stable. There have been several incidents of film vaults catching fire due to nitrate films. A few years ago, as a demonstration, a guy from France lit a small piece of nitrate film at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the combustion was impressive.

It was very fortunate that no one was injured or that the Stanford Theater wasn't seriously damaged. Nitrate fires can be difficult to put out and they produce toxic smoke. I assume the theater is open for business. The website still lists the upcoming film program.

The film that was screening when the fire broke out was Cover Girl (1944) with Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth. I know that Rita Hayworth was hot but this is ridiculous.

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Speaking of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), I read in the Chronicle that Steven Salmons is stepping down as its Artistic Director after 17 years. Salmons and his wife Melissa Chittick were the co-founders of the festival. It's a little surprising that Salmons would step down. I don't know the circumstances but Salmons is the public face of the festival. He introduces each film and seems to enjoy the limelight (or at least the Castro Theater spotlight). In my mind, Salmons (along with Eddie Muller of Noir City) are indelibly linked to their respective festivals. Executive Director Stacey Wisnia (pronounced Visnia) is staying on at SFSFF and Anita Monga is coming on board as Acting Artistic Director.

Monga is a living legend in the San Francisco film community. She was for many years the programmer at the Castro Theater. After having been unceremoniously fired a few years back, has made her presence known on the festival circuit. Wisnia was the manager of the Castro who resigned after Monga's firing.

Monga co-programs Noir City and IndieFest. She helps selects the annual Mel Novikoff Award winner at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). She and Balboa Theater owner/Telluride International Film Festival Director Gary Meyer are close friends and both were acolytes of Novikoff.

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On April 16, the Vogue Theater is presenting I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale, a 40 minute documentary about the actor. Cazale, best known as Fredo Corleone from the The Godfather and The Godfather II, had a short but blindingly brilliant screen career before dying in 1978 at the age of 42. He made five films and all of them were nominated for Oscars. In addition to the two Godfather movies, Cazale appeared in Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation and The Deer Hunter. What a filmography - directed by Francis Ford Coppola (3 films), Sidney Lumet and Michael Cimino, co-stars include Al Pacino (3 times), Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Harrison Ford, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep.

After the screening of I Knew It Was You and a Q&A with director Richard Shepard, they will screen Dog Day Afternoon.

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Last month, I attended a few screenings of the Mostly British Film Series at the Vogue Theater. All the films screened February 26 through March 5 except Easy Virtue which screens May 14. I thought it was odd that one film screened so long after the others. After seeing the program guide for the 2009 SFIFF, it makes sense. Easy Virtue is screening May 6 and 7 at the SFIFF (both screenings at the Sundance Kabuki). They scheduled the screening because the print will be in the Bay Area the week before. I wouldn't be surprised to see it screened elsewhere in the between May 7 and 14. Easy Virtue stars Kristen Scott Thomas, Colin Firth and Jessica Biel.

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The 4-Star Theater has been advertising The Beast Stalker for several months. I predict The Beast Stalker will open at the 4-Star sometime after April 29 because that is the last time it screens at SFIFF. The Beast Stalker, a Hong Kong thriller starring Nicholas Tse, is getting three screenings at SFIFF - April 24, 26 and 29. All screenings are at the Kabuki.