2014 - Some Interesting Films?

I am not a great fan of film lists such as Top 10 etc. They seem to be artificial impositions. But lists do help focus, and if you compile them without trying to remember too hard, then they give you an idea of what films impressed most (whether good or bad) in say, a specific year.

BIRDMAN – Michael Keaton has been scarred by Batman. He is haunted by the monsters of Gotham, he believes he has power over inanimate objects. He exhibits all the signs of dementia including running through Times Square in his boxers. His Icarus leap of faith into the unknown tells us that you win some, lose some.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY – I never imagined Harrison Ford would be re-invented as a chatty Raccoon, or that Wookie would turn into a talking tree (thanks to Vin Diesel) but they have and Star Wars has entered the Twilight Zone.

INTERSTELLAR – Matthew McConaughey is almost the Man Who Fell to Earth. From Top Gun astronaut to farmer, we meet him fighting an advancing Dustbowl that spells the end of the world. Sent back into space on a rescue mission, he discovers worlds that each presage Earth’s impending environmental destruction (tsunami waves, bleak rocks, an ice world). But Kubrick’s narcissistic interpretation of the theory of relativity still rules. Birth to death understood as a four dimensional trip around a floating library is Nolan’s mind-blowing interpretation of spaceship Kubrick and the Stargate trajectory.

BOYHOOD – someone asked me if it would be as interesting (on the assumption that it is interesting) if it had not used the 12-year technique. Linklater, like quite a lot of his contemporaries, is a technician of things – dialogue, emotions, and here of time. The mundane rendered – by Time – as lived experience. The film’s essential question: who cares?

LEVIATHAN -   great film noir that follows the classic adage, cherchez la femme. A worthy successor to CHINATOWN in its charting of political manipulation, personal ambition, and lives frustrated. Curiously a more biblical film than Ridley Scott’s EXODUS.

FARGO – a unique (?) case in film history where the TV derivative has equaled the original movie. A worthy candidate for binge viewing!

A Flowering Promise

Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)

An American embalmer comes to bury a priest in Nanjing. Trouble is, it’s 1937 and the city is under attack by the Japanese. The American gets involved with the chaste church girls and a group of prostitutes who have sought refuge in the church. In the end, the embalmer puts his cosmetic skills to good use to save the church girls when they are commanded to attend a military celebration. He makes the prostitutes up to look like the church girls and off they go to what is almost certainly going to be an orgy of sex and death with a Japanese army battalion.

Much maligned, especially in its conjunction of sex and holocaust of the rape of Nanjing, Zhang’s Flowers of War has as much to do with that tragic episode in Sino-Japanese relations as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia had to do with the British flirtation with the Arab National Council during the First World War. Which is to say that historical catastrophe in cinema is seen as just cause for a love story. In Lean’s case it was a case of O’Toole’s (was a screen name ever so apropos) passion for Arabica and in particular men. But Zhang is no David Lean – he just cannot manage the transition from the rural intimacy of individual struggle (cf. The Story of Qiu Jiu) to a a more sweeping historical embrace. Qiu Jiu is a Rohmerian peasant who is relentless in her pursuit of bureaucrats, while Zhang Ziyi in House of Flying Daggers is some kind of whatever-dynasty pole dancer turned on by drum vibrations. His view of women turns on a gimmick, which is often underpinned by self-determination. Intriguing as this may be as a premise for a movie, it’s still not the incisive critique – sexual or otherwise – of imperial dreams that lie at the base of any worthy historical epic.

Actually Zhang is lucky – as China’s answer to David Lean, he would go down in the homosexual glory that is both Lawrence and Doc Zhivago. And Zhang is neither – by which I mean gay, or a literary filmmaker. Watching Flowers of War I was struck instead by his genius for the rambunctious and the faux-macho which means that he is emerging surprisingly, as Chinese cinema’s answer to Raoul Walsh.

Flowers of War is a great film – not in the way that its maker intended it but as a rupture of a filmmaker’s career and view of life. It has the devil-may-care approach to women that one finds in Walsh’s A King and Four Queens – the title says it all for it is a gamble not only with women but what they represent, which is life itself.

There is a Hawksian sentiment to Flowers of War in the presentation of Christian Bale as a drunk (embalmer) who in the Hollywood course of the film is redeemed not only by his life-saving good work (clearly an irony given his profession) but also by his passage to sobriety. This trajectory closely follows Dean Martin in Hawks’ Rio Bravo – a drunk who redeems himself by restoring order in the town that originally despised him. It’s marked by his physical appearance – from bearded loser to well-shaven professional – in the same way that Deano moves from drunk to crooner (though in real life he played on a conjunction of the two).

This passage of the American – as presented in a Chinese film set during the hegemony of Japanese imperialism – is as loaded as it gets, mainly because it relates to the contemporary situation. And like any great Walsh (as opposed to Hawks) film, it’s because the attitude towards women protagonists is at first simple but then very complex. For Hawks, women were guileless, they reflected the repressed trickiness of men. For Walsh, women were the bravado side of men, the “closers” in any deal. Look at one of Walsh’s finest films, Colorado Territory, where Virginia Mayo gives not only one of her greatest screen performances, but also one of the most manly performances in order to lay down the law.

Zhang has not yet reached that apotheosis – he stills see women as subordinate to men in social terms but superior in narrative plot strategies. He cannot yet conjoin the two because the dialectic still needs some syncretisation. But one expects that, like China itself,  it is only a matter of time.

Lino Brocka in San Francisco

I was recently asked for some comments on Lino Brocka by cinesource magazine, a filmmakers' industry newspaper in the Bay Area. Four films by Brocka are being shown at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March, 2010. You can find the report here.

www.cinesourcemagazine.com

My original comments which I sent them are below.

Lino Brocka

I invited Lino Brocka to Hong Kong when I premiered his masterpiece INSIANG in our Hong Kong International Film Festival after its debut at Cannes. Over the years that I knew him, Lino was a dynamo of energy whose mind and body were in perpetual motion, a man who constantly seemed to live on the brink of financial collapse (he wanted to talk more to me about his finances than his films!), and an eternal optimist who somehow kept making great movies. We last spoke in Los Angeles where he was visiting family. He was full of gossip and plans for the future. A few weeks (or was it months later?), he was dead. When I think back on Lino, what strikes me is that he is certainly one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century and in the first rank of classic Asian filmmakers along with Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa.

Knowing Lino made his films all the more interesting to me because they are not exactly reflections of his high-strung energy, of his ebullient outward personality. Rather, they are somewhat quiet contemplations about the individual and society, and how individuals at first victims of social injustice try to fight back. Whether they succeed or not is the chronic condition of Filipino life, as lived in Lino’s time especially under the corruption and cronyism of the Marcos dictatorship. Often his protagonists were women who suffer oppression in both their personal and work lives – think of Insiang, and Bona – these great titular roles of films which present their heroines manipulated by both men and women to whom they are close. As an openly gay, politically outspoken filmmaker, Lino clearly identified with this oppression and the need to fight it.

Lino’s depth of understanding of his society – an understanding sprung from personal condition, artistic intuition and political insight – meant that his films proceed from the basis of his audience, not the filmmaker’s ego, and that is what makes him a great artist. His cinema is not about “me” as so many of today’s films shamelessly proclaim, but about the respect of “you.” And his audience responded, at home and abroad. His domestic audience was largely working-class, and I suspect, mostly women who were drawn to the stars like Nora Aunor and Hilda Koronel. Through Lino’s lens, these stars gave dignity and value to their portrayals of working-class women in the audience.

A cinema based on an audience oppressed in a class society was Lino’s legacy, and it’s yet to be followed by today’s filmmakers perhaps because they do not fully understand the extent to which he was politically and socially engaged at the time (the younger generation of Filipinos have little idea of the destruction caused by the Marcos regime!). However in the past few years there have been retrospectives of Lino’s work beginning with the Torino Film Festival, Italy in 2005, and continuing in Vienna in 2009. Some of his works, like INSIANG, are now available on DVD and ready for a new generation to watch and understand. It’s timely that San Francisco will now get a chance to see some of his works on the big screen.

Good Afternoon, Vietnam!

I recently gave a talk to young Vietnamese filmmakers.

Please click on title above for the link to the report.

The Lush Interview

Hosanna Leong interviews Roger Garcia on Singapore radio, September 3, 2009.

Click on link below (website page with interview will open and start playing after a slight delay depending on your connection and computer speed. Scroll down to bottom of website page for audio control).

Singapore Lush Interview

PREMIER SCREENING OF BLOOD TIES IN SINGAPORE


L to R Chia Yee Wei (Director), Roger Garcia, Jason Lai (Producer)

G.I. Freud

G.I. JOE - The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommer, 2009)

To the unsuspecting, G.I. JOE is being marketed as an action film based on Hasbro's time-honored action figure dolls that takes place in the not too distant future. In fact the film is something like the diary of a madman, written by a deranged Freudian who is falling in love with his Dominatrix.

The whole film can be seen as an allusion to an intoxicating session in a S&M house, perversely encoded as childhood pain and the pleasure of innocent love. The characters wear quite macho leather-type outfits (even the foxy Rachel Nichols whose battle suit shows her snugly encased breasts); the evil doctor (Joseph Gordon Levitt) wears an oxygen mask and sounds like Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET; and all the goons wear masks and head-gear that make them look like denizens of some domination dungeon. The "rush" of the action is all about physical thrills and endurance of the beating kind, even the use of armed weaponry is depicted graphically as waves (of pleasure, of pain). This is all brought to a head at the end where the evil doctor, demanding to be called "Commander," puts on a very phallic looking silvery head mask - an image that gives greater dimensionality to the sub-title of the film "The Rise of Cobra". Can you get anymore S&M than that? A movie inspired by Action Figure Dolls? Hardly (or perhaps at some sub-conscious level of Freudian play - very deeply).

There is much more but let me settle on one or two "dreams." In a sustained action set piece, two of the "Joes" (the ostensible white hero, Duke, and black side-kick Ripcord) don special suits which enable them to run faster, jump higher, and shoot endless rounds of high-velocity bullets all in the blink of an eye. Looking like a cross between mini Robocops and Buzz Lightyear, they chase the bad guys all over Paris, speeding through the streets like two crazed spermatoza desperate for survival and trying to save the symbol of French potency, the Eiffel Tower, from being eaten (yes, eaten!) by metal crunching nano-ants. It all seems somewhat reversed to me - two spermatoza looking for the phallus - but then we have seen a number of Hollywood entertainments that seem enamoured of reversing the natural order of things by fiddling around with the space/time continuum from Back to the Future, all the way to Benjamin Button.

There are explosions, phallic play of gun and sword that you normally see in action films but here also are instances which might be called Freudian male fantasies. Proto-lesbian bitch fights where Sienna Miller - a Mother and Whore character - toughs it out with the younger Rachel Nichols who rejects men at first until she finds some sympathy in a black man (every Hollywood film reflects the President in power, and this is the Obama factor).

There are fantasy sequences coded as flashbacks - in particular infantile regression where bad guy Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) flashes back to his childhood when he was a kung fu rival to good guy Snake Eyes (Ray Park). No matter that they seem to be performing a hybrid version of Chinese kung fu in a Japanese temple with a Chinese monk who would seem more at home in Thailand; what's important is that they have watched Sammo Hung and Jet Li movies from the 1980s and are now imitating them badly. Part of this infantile regression is signalled by the old school Hollywood racism of the film - when will studio pictures reject the stereotype of Asian men as faintly gay and dangerous villains, and African American sidekicks as just modern updates of Jack Benny's Rochester, a figure of fun and abuse?

We know from Freud that infantile sexuality in its first phase is characterized by an inability to distinguish between oneself and the external world, and that pleasure is derived largely from sucking which is equated with eating. Thus, the scene of young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes fighting each other with the violence of adults, is set in a kitchen and centered around hunger and food (Storm Shadow catches Snake Eyes stealing food from the kitchen and fights him). And it is a fight - in patterns and behavior - that the protagonists bring into their current lives. In that sense, the characters are still marked by infantile sexuality and cannot distinguish the past from the present, fantasy from actuality, the Real from the Fake. They have yet to grow up. Precisely like this movie.

Toys Gone Wild

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Poor planet Earth. It's always being invaded by strange creatures, or getting in the way of asteroids from outer space, or - for the umpteenth time - threatened with the Apocalypse. Earthlings are scorched in vast numbers as their cities crumble. Survivors do not fare much better - men are abducted, women raped, children enslaved. If it's not aliens, it's the environment. Earthlings pay the price for ignoring signs of global warming (and who can blame them when those signs are freezing snow, pouring rain, electrical storms and a President - in The Day After Tomorrow - who looks like Dick Cheney?)

Michael Bay's latest addition to the Hasbro Transformer toy genre is the second film in the series and begins by laying waste to Shanghai. There's no organic connection between this and anything else. But it doesn't matter anyway because this teaser is really a revenge fantasy of the American worker against outsourcing toy manufacturing to China (even if the Shanghai scene was shot in Pennsylvania). However I doubt if that's what the censor at 国家广播电影电视总局 (aka State Adminstration for Film, Radio and Television) had in mind when he asked for trims of a Chinese police car being crushed.

It takes Michael Bay about two and a half hours to explain these aliens who have insisted yet again on bringing their battles and personal hang-ups to earth. The mythology is not too different from a Star Wars movie and to be fair to Michael Bay, it also took George Lucas about the same amount of time to explain the same story. Revenge of the Sith, Revenge of the Fallen - same difference! But I think the Cesar-inflected hard-edged look of Michael Bay's Autobots are preferable to Lucasarts' soft-toy floppiness of Jar Jar Brinks. (Cesar was the French artist who made a career out of exhibiting blocks of crushed, compacted cars in the 1960s.)

Reportedly Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst reviewed mainstream films of recent times so some critics may dispute its characterization as a movie. I'm not one of those but the film should be seen as a component of a totality that includes - and this was a surprise even to me - hands-on playing with toys.

Now, just as not everyone has directed a movie, not everyone has played with Transformer toys. It's not that difficult. As a prelude you "deconstruct" them from familiar Earthling vehicles (truck, sports car, compact) into creatures that could have been Masters of the Universe until the onset of the Great Recession (more of a threat than Aliens or Global Warming). In this supreme mode, your toys are ready for battle. You hold one in the left hand, and hold one in the right hand. Then you weave and bob them around each other, exchanging glancing blows which sometimes knock off an arm or a leg. It all leads to the inevitable climax which is to smash one figure into the other in any number of creative ways (feet first, head down, crotch angle and so forth) all the while making a range of sounds that go from squealing to spittle static to full-throated explosions. And you have to do this all before bedtime.

There is collateral damage of course. Other toy figures (often of the military variety but occasionally some hapless barnyard animal types or dinosaurs) scattered on the carpet are crushed underfoot, upholstery gets ripped, that oh-so-precious china handed down for generations is smashed.

So too with Michael Bay's choreography in his latest action ballet. In fact I have not seen a film that quite so accurately simulates the feeling - albeit on a fairly gigantic scale - of playing with toys. The toy characters - by which I mean the Autobots, Prime, Decepticons but one could also include star Shia LaBoeuf (where's the beef?) Megan Fox (what's with all these animal names?) - are all brought to life by the swoops, dives, jumps, barrel rolls orchestrated by CG and camera technicians. The Transformers beat each other up from California to Egypt flattening ancient temples and passing camels with wanton abandon. The intervention of US airforce planes and ground troops, despite heroic background music, is rendered as irritating as gnats at the end of their short lives.

Probably for the first time in film history, we have a film whose mise en scene is wholly based on playing with toys as opposed to playing with story, or even girls, both of which Bay tiredly includes. It's obvious that he's more interested in the movement and grinding conflict of robots, the transformative arcs of cars and motorbikes. For example, the camera lingers on the curves of a motorbike as much as the nubile Megan Fox. And the dynamics of twisted, clashing, clanking metal as Prime engages Decepticon in gladiatorial combat is more interesting than LaBoeuf's TV soap opera struggle with his dumb parents.

In truth, the sensation of watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is overwhelmingly like reverting back to childhood and playing with toys in your hands while running amok in your parents' living room making strangulated dog sounds. To some, it is pure nostalgia. To others (usually big sisters with bratty brothers), it is as irritating as it ever was. And still to many more, it evokes irrelevant bemusement (aka entertainment).

While Steven Spielberg (a producer of this film) evokes childhood as a state of innocence (think: starchild at the end of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey ), Michael Bay presents childhood as a state of violence without consequence. Toys serve the will of the imagination rather than the circumstance of reality. With all its desert war scenes, and apocalyptic ideologue-driven inter-galactic war, it suggests that recent American foreign policy has been something of a childhood phase which we've all grown out of. You might say that's one of the reasons why this movie - apart from its politically-regenerative title - has been one of the fastest and largest grossing box-office movies of all time.

The Real Bruce Lee?

I just watched the truly appalling "The Real Bruce Lee" with Bruce Lee, Bruce Li, and "new sensation" Dragon Lee and "produced" by Serafim Karalexis. Even its use of 1950s Hong Kong Bruce Lee film clips is inept. To claim as the credits do, that it is "directed and edited by Jim Markovich" (he of the equally despicable "Riot on 42nd Street") is surely stretching the limits of credibility and borders on the insulting. This is what happens when you pick up cheap videotapes (and it really is cheap - it's one of those 30 minute VHS cassettes where the 90 minute film has been recorded at extended play to save tape) at the local supermarket.

My Cannes 2009 - V

Epilogue

The most interesting film in Cannes - from the point of view of symbolism, metaphor and all-round significance - was very short and concise; was seen by all the Cannes audiences but will not be seen outside the festival; and featured no stars, indeed it contains no actors nor any dialogue.

What fascinating work is this? Of course, it's the festival trailer.

A CGI work sans actors and words, it nevertheless conveys perfectly an attitude, moral philosophy, and hegemonic aesthetic all in one, and all in the space of about a minute.

The film (and it deserves this moniker more that some of the other rubbish on display) begins UNDERWATER. To a music soundtrack that mimics Bernard Herrman's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo, the "camera" ascends the red carpet stairway whose correspondance with reality is all too real since the audience (at least in the Grand Palais) has just walked up the real version of these steps. We surface - presumably on the Bay of Cannes - water all around but still those stairs and that crazy compelling music lead us onwards and upwards. The stairs go higher and soon we are in the clouds (good weather, no rain, no thunder, no lightning) and keep going until we are in OUTER SPACE! Yes we are in Star Wars territory; there is no frontier, just twinkling stars. Suddenly a huge sign flips up in front of us, it says in gold, and surrounded by gold palms, "Festival de Cannes."

This film contains not just an apotheosis fantasy (that confirms the semiotics of the tribute ritual I described in My Cannes 2009 - 1), but also an evolutionary myth that in its simplest form suggests that cinema has evolved much like life itself. It moves from the basic form (fish) from water, to surface (ok there isn't actually land in this movie but which film really has its feet on the ground anyway?), all the way up to the stars where "heaven" is the Cannes film festival.

To paraphrase, you have died and gone to Cannes. The trouble with Cannes-as-heaven is: would you really want to spend eternity with these people, let alone these films?

My Cannes 2009 - IV

Impressions...

Attendance: Opening night - Empty streets, last orders in bars at midnight. Closing night - crowds on the Croisette, Majestic Bar empty, restaurants quite full. Conclusion - more people at end than at beginning!

Water: no free bottles this year, so tank up on free Nespresso - but then you get quite wired on this highly caffeinated fuel. No wonder I couldn't sleep in some of the more boring films.

Le Petit Paris Bistro: can get quite expensive. Got stomach ache after eating a salad there. A lot of Italians go there for breakfast - so I was told.

Sushi Time: actually it's a Korean restaurant. Decent bibimbap.

Le Monnot: reasonable Lebanese food. Good dinner.

Majestic Bar: still one of the best places to see people. $12 pastis...

Carlton: lot of people looking lost, looking for a deal.

Gay Night at American Pavilion: The US contribution to international village culture - not very gay but a lot of fun. One of the few places to get a worthwhile sized cup of coffee.

Le Crystal: despite non-stop European soccer blaring from the TV screen, still a good place to sit and have a pastis (for $4) while people-watching. For some reason (unknown to me) a lot of manly looking women walk past this place.

Chez Astoux: classic seafood place and decent plateau des fruits de mer. But with a dinner bill of almost $300, I do expect a little less rudeness from the maitre d'. Next year, another place.

Chez Louis: shared antipasti (French style) and shared desserts book-end individual entrees. Variable but good atmosphere - hey, there's John Boorman at the next table.

Taiwan party: a mixture of panache, chaos, good food, and great location, still the best place for Asian celeb spotting - hey, there's Shu Qi, and Anthony Wong... and Ang Lee and Zhang Yuan, and Tsai Ming Liang and...

Hong Kong party (known this year as China Party): good, unending flow of French champagne. Long live one country, two systems!

Red carpet: how do they keep it clean?