Bangkok Knockout
[Screened at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2011]

I didn’t go into this movie for a plot. If anyone did, I’m shocked and bewildered by their naivete. The unfortunate fact is they tried for one anyway, and though it’s as flimsy and superfluous as the proverbial pizza delivery scene, it whiles away its (and our) time for far longer than it needs to. The audience got antsy waiting for people to start bounding off walls and kicking each other in the face.

What there was of a plot read like the intro to a Double Dragon game, complete with the damsel in distress; she fights, too, but her vulnerability stems from simply not being as effective at it, as she inevitably gets kicked in the face — though never visibly injured to preserve necessary hotness and thus motivation to see her rescued. Would the audience care as much if she were all purple and inflamed? I don’t know. There’s a second damsel, a backup one, that is about as differentiable from her counterpart as the male fighters are from each other.

Without giving too much away, and spoiling the plot for anyone (as I usually do), I’ll say that I enjoyed the overt racism of this film. Partly because it’s fun to see a bigoted perspective different from that held by American hicks, and partly because this country is so stifled by political correctness you almost forget just how backward much of it really is. It’s no enough to see backwoods hicks portrayed by Hollywood (a kind of prejudice in itself); you have to see through their eyes; their clouded, inbred eyes. This Thai-born production is unashamed in offering a panel of stereotypes, through that country’s perspective, of course. The villain is a generic white guy, complete with vague mid-southern drawl; there’s a sell-out, whitewashed Thai dude; a presumably Russian guy, judging from the approximate eastern European accent; a mute black guy; and a Japanese chick that, far from being exotic, is just a rambling nitwit, who insists on speaking in some of the most unintelligible English imaginable.

The motley model UN also provides many of the bizarre and inessential dead ends that I suppose constitute character development and suspense. I have no idea what they were going for — to build upon their effete depravity and menace? Unimportant; just endure it, and laugh at these lulls.

There are a ton of false rescues, and people bounding off things and kicking each other in the face. It’s entertaining — I won’t qualify that.

Living in Seduced Circumstances
[Award winner, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2011]

As many have felt obliged to preface it like so, I’ll say this is filmmaker Ian Gamazon’s third feature, and that he’s best known for his earlier festival darling, Cavite. His debut film can be filed away with Better Luck Tomorrow, The Debut, and especially The Flip Side, as a movie that furthered “the cause” during the dark (or should I say extremely white) ages of film, with regard to ethnic representation. These films made a point, though as the context which cultivated their pioneering defiance fades from memory, it’s easier to unfairly dismiss them as running the gamut from bad to average. Like Flip Side, Cavite was a bluntly pedantic work; a narrative vehicle for a lesson in the impoverished despair of Filipino slums. Though it’s not a favorite, it was innovative in its bare-bones production and obscure content.

Now that the inroads Asian American filmmakers and actors have made into the mainstream have gotten a bit less rugged, artists like Gamazon are freed from distilling ethnic studies courses into awkwardly expository plots. It also lets us chuck our political awareness for a while, and evaluate some of these folks more objectively within the craft. Seduced Circumstances gives a quick nod to some tragic events in Vietnamese history, and it’s somewhat subtle about it, but the main draw of the movie, if there is one, is torture porn.

Director Gamazon frets in his statement about the film his decision not to include a second act. Frankly, the presence of any divisions, tonal shifts, or character arcs at all didn’t occur to me while viewing this film. The briefest explanation I can offer: imagine the last act of Oldboy protracted across an hour and a half. Seriously.

It could’ve — it should’ve — been a 12 minute short. Only rather we’re given scenes of a pregnant woman antagonizing her captive, who she’s tied down to a wheelchair. Over the course of eight months, she pokes, prods, burns, stabs, chops, slices, and most of all harangues wheelchair dude with monotonous taunts and menacing non sequiturs. The scenes repeat with minute variations, but never advancing any discernible plot. The big reveal only comes through a long motion graphics hallucination wherein the wheelchair guy lays out the sole piece of exposition provided to backdrop any of this repetitious, gory inanity.

If the point of this movie was to communicate his feelings of captivity and torment to an audience, mission accomplished; that was my experience exactly.

Looks wise, imagine it being shot by a camera mounted on a labrador, and fed through an aggressive procession of effects filters.

A documentary directed and produced by Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin about the former’s journey to find and interview the killers of the Khmer Rouge, including Nuon Chea, second in command to Pol Pot. Subtly powerful. Patrick gives it 0 crickets.

Official Film Site

Enemies of the People Trailer

From Their Website:
The Khmer Rouge ran what is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most brutal regimes. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now.

In ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE the men and women who perpetrated the massacres – from the foot-soldiers who slit throats to the party’s ideological leader, Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two – break a 30-year silence to give testimony never before heard or seen.

Unprecedented access from top to bottom of the Khmer Rouge has been achieved through a decade of work by one of Cambodia’s best investigative journalists, Thet Sambath.

Sambath is on a personal quest: he lost his own family in the Killing Fields. The film is his journey to discover not how but why they died. In doing so, he hears and understands for the first time the real story of his country’s tragedy.

After years of visits and trust-building, Sambath finally persuades Brother Number Two to admit (again, for the first time) in detail how he and Pol Pot (the two supreme powers in the Khmer Rouge state) decided to kill party members whom they considered ‘Enemies of the People’.

Sambath’s remarkable work goes even one stage further: over the years he befriends a network of killers in the provinces who implemented the kill policy. For the first time, we see how orders created on an abstract political level translate into foul murder in the rice fields and forests of the Cambodian plain.
We have repeatedly used the expression ‘for the first time’. This is because Sambath’s work represents a watershed both in Cambodian historiography and in the country’s quest for closure on one of the world’s darkest episodes.

The United Nations and the Cambodian government have set up a tribunal to try the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge for international crimes. Brother Number Two’s trial is expected to start in 2010.
The trials are widely expected to deliver a form of justice but fewer expect the truth finally to come out through this process.

Sambath says: “Some may say no good can come from talking to killers and dwelling on past horror, but I say these people have sacrificed a lot to tell the truth. In daring to confess they have done good, perhaps the only good thing left. They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if my country is to move forward.”

A documentary set in China, produced primarily in Canada. Directed by Lixin Fan. One of our favorite films of the year. Patrick gave it 0 crickets.

Official Film Page

Last Train Home Trailer


FROM THEIR WEBSITE:
Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. The homes they seek are the rural villages and families they left behind to seek work in the booming coastal cities. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance.

Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration. Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. But in a bitter irony, the Zhangs’ hopes for the future are undone by their very absence. Qin, the child they left behind, has grown into adolescence crippled by a sense of abandonment. In an act of teenage rebellion, she drops out of school. She too will become a migrant worker. The decision is a heartbreaking blow for the parents. In classic cinema verité style, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ attempts to change their daughter’s course and repair their ruptured family. Intimate and candid, the film paints a human portrait of the dramatic changes sweeping China. We identify with the Zhangs as they navigate through the stark and difficult choices of a society caught between old ways and new realities. Can they get ahead and still undo some of the damage that has been done to their family?

A drama set in the Philippines. Written and directed by Raymond Red. Starring Raul Arellano, John Arcilla, and Ronnie Laza.

Film’s info page on director’s website.

Manila Skies Trailer


FROM THE DIRECTOR’S WEBSITE:
Inspired by a true event, Himpapawid (Manila Skies) tackles the astounding story of a lone deranged hijacker who is pushed to the edge as he struggles with the oppression of surviving in modern Philippine society. The film dwells on the common story of a desperate simple man from the countryside searching for a decent means of living in the big city, Manila. He keeps stumbling as he moves from one “station of the cross” to another. In dire straits, he later joins an amateur gang plotting a heist to get even with a corrupt employer. This ultimately goes wayward and ends in devastation. Further hounded by guilt that his father is helplessly ill in the province, he draws his last straw and plots the insane hijacking of a plane to finally take him to his ultimate destination – home or hell.

An independent musical comedy. Directed by Chil Kong and written by Kong, Erin Quill, and Ryun Yu.

Official Film Site

The Mikado Project Trailer


FROM THEIR WEBSITE:
The Mikado Project is a musical comedy (based on the stage performance written by Ken Narasaki and Doris Baizley and adapted for film by Chil Kong) of a struggling Asian American theater company that, in a desperate publicity stunt to save their company, decides to produce a modern reconstruction of Gilbert and Sullivan’s, The Mikado, to stir controversy and jolt ticket sales.

The Mikado, one of the most beloved comedy operas by legendary collaborators, Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert, first opened on stage in 1885 in London. The story was set in Japan (considered an exotic land to the British during that era) which allowed Gilbert & Sullivan to satirize British politics. However, by doing so, Asians around the world and Asian Americans today have found this opera hard to embrace—making the notion of Asian American actors performing The Mikado controversial and palatable only through a comedic reconstruction.

A comedy / romance set in Taiwan. Written and directed by Arvin Chen.

Au Revoir Taipei Trailer


SYNOPSIS:
Kai, a brokenhearted young man from Taipei, yearns to be with his girlfriend, who’s left for Paris. He spends his days working at his parents’ noodle restaurant and his nights trying to learn French at the local bookstore, where he meets Susie, a sweet but lonely girl who works there. Afraid of losing his girlfriend, and in need of money to get to Paris, he accepts a dubious offer from a local gangster to deliver a mysterious package to Paris. It’s the beginning of a wild night for Kai, at the end of which he realizes that leaving both Susie and Taipei will only take him further away from true love.