Annyong Yumika, making its North American premiere at this year's New York Asian Film Festival, takes its name from legendary Japanese porn starlet Yumika Hayashi, who also had a big career in Korea. But perhaps most intriguing about this odd nonfiction look at the woman who took top honors at the Pink Grand Prix for the softcore Japanese flick Lunchbox—and who met an untimely death in 2005—is that it's truly not made for Western eyes. Practically experimental in his whimsical collage approach, director Tetsuaki Matsue takes as his jumping off point the discovery of his subject's previously lost film, Junko: The Tokyo Housewife. That softcore Korean production, which cast Korean actors speaking Japanese, becomes the catalyst for not only retracing Yumika's life (through old home movie footage and bizarre reenactments at actual locations), but also for exploring, to use the title of one talking head professor's book, "the Japanese as seen in Korea." Continue Reading »
The House Next Door
Archive: June, 2010
A Movie a Day, Day 38: Vagabond
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 23rd, 2010 at 2:05 pm in Film
Writing about the latest from Agnès Jaoui yesterday made me think about another Agnès who makes movies in France: Varda, that great soul in a little body. Varda's late-career autobiography, 2008's The Beaches of Agnès, was my first taste of her work. Since then, I've since seen only Cléo from 5 to 7, so the pleasure of watching everything else for the first time still lies ahead. Except for Vagabond, that is, since I watched that last night on Mubi.com, which is hosting a pretty comprehensive Varda retrospective. Continue Reading »
New York Asian Film Festival 2010: Dispatch One
by John Lichman on June 23rd, 2010 at 9:00 am in Festivals, Film
There's a degree of expectation when it comes to the New York Asian Film Festival and its assortment of genre-bending films, which have a larger range than most would give them credit for. The festival, running from June 25 to July 8, has a few central themes (kung fu, the obligatory Takashi Miike film) to attract the majority of genre kiddies. But NYAFF is traditionally about surprise and opening up your boundaries when it comes to Asian film. Essentially, come for Yatterman but stay for the print of Eastern Condors, which you'll likely never see in theaters again.
The opening-night film, Ip Man, is the most representative of NYAFF's allure. Donnie Yen is the titular Wing Chun master, who can furrow his brow and wax poetic koans with the best of them. Everything else is fairly simple: Master Ip doesn't take students, is wealthy, everyone respects him, local gang comes to promote their kung fu, beats everyone, hears of Ip Man, challenges him, Ip Man politely declines but changes his mind once he has his wife's approval. There's nothing shocking or surprising, aside from the incredible kung fu choreography. Continue Reading »
Beyond the Game: The Two Escobars
by Jason Bellamy on June 22nd, 2010 at 8:19 pm in Television
If one of the things that June 17, 1994 reminded us is that we can't watch professional athletes on the playing field and know what kind of people they are, The Two Escobars offers the equally important reminder that no amount of media coverage can provide us with a clear understanding of what these athletes are going through. The latest release in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series opens with shots of the Colombian soccer team looking less than enthusiastic as they walk onto the pitch in front of a passionate capacity crowd at the Rose Bowl for a crucial match against the United States in the 1994 World Cup. To most, the Colombians look as if they're feeling the pressure of having been upset by Romania in their opening game, and they are. They also look as if they're suffering an unfamiliar lack of confidence, and that's probably right, too. But there's something else there, something that's more difficult to detect because it's not something most of us expect to find at a soccer game. That something else is fear, real fear—the fear of losing something much more significant than a game. To spot that fear, you have to be able to crawl inside the minds of the Colombian players, to understand where they come from, what they're playing for and what they stand to lose. To see that fear, you have to see beyond sports. That's what The Two Escobars does so well.
A Movie a Day, Day 37: Let It Rain
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 22nd, 2010 at 5:30 pm in Film
Director/writer/actress Agnès Jaoui is often compared to Woody Allen. I can see why: Her talky, often obnoxious protagonists generally come from or aspire to the cultural elite, the observational humor that suffuses her films lightens even some of the darkest scenes, and she has a way of touching lightly on deep issues in movies that at first appear to be interested only in the daily concerns of a small clan. But if I were going to compare her to an American filmmaker, it would be Nicole Holofcener (Please Give), who has those same things in common with Jaoui and then some.
Maybe because they're women, Holofcener and Jaoui root their movies in the shifting sands of interpersonal relationships, while Allen's pictures tend to explore the internal landscape of one (usually male) protagonist. Maybe that's also why the questions Jaoui and Holofcener raise aren't about the big existential issues that torment Woody, whose characters are always ruminating about the meaning of life. Instead, they're about things that devil us on a day-to-day basis: like class, race, gender, and social mores. And surely it's why, like Holofcener, Jaoui generally puts women at the center of her stories, though her films include plenty of sympathetic men—including Michel, Let It Rain's likeable loser, who's played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui's creative and life partner (he co-wrote and stars in all three of Jaoui's films). Continue Reading »
Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010: Presumed Guilty
by Simon Abrams on June 22nd, 2010 at 9:00 am in Festivals, Film
While trial documentary Presumed Guilty's narrative arc is genuinely compelling and heartrending in its depiction of an innocent man's struggle to prove his innocence, the film at large only serves to reinforce the hopelessness of his case. Tono Zuniga, the film's everyman and exhibit A in its case against the corruption of the Mexican judicial system, was sentenced to 20 years in prison despite the fact that there was no physical evidence incriminating him. Presumed Guilty builds up to the new trial that will hopefully acquit him, but while filmmaker and law student Robert Hernandez had unprecedented access to the court and was able to film Zuniga's new trial, the deciding motions in Zuniga's case weren't filmed. The real make-or-break actions were decided off-camera for reasons that are never understood, let alone even speculated on by Hernandez or Zuniga's public defender, though there's a vague hint from one of the three judges that decided his appeal as to what decided his case. Continue Reading »
A Movie a Day, Day 36: Last Best Chance
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 21st, 2010 at 4:54 pm in Film
Yesterday's movie was Last Best Chance, a powerful documentary about the Senate's fight over whether to make U.S. immigration policies more sensible and humane in the post-9/11 era. The title refers to the comprehensive reform bill that was seen by its supporters as the "last best chance" this nation would have to get this right for a long time, and the film drives home what we lost when we failed to pass it. Here's my review, which is part of Slant's coverage of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010: Last Best Chance
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 21st, 2010 at 4:54 pm in Festivals, Film
Another documentary about the foiled fight for U.S. immigration reform from How Democracy Works Now, Last Best Chance delivers the message that was missing from the other film from this series that's playing at the Human Rights Watch festival. Mountains and Clouds zooms in so tightly on the macro view of the fight to pass or derail a relatively small piece of legislation that we never learn what motivates the fighters, but Last Best Chance takes the wide-angle view.
Directors Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini and editor Jane Rizzo lay out the stakes this time with admirable clarity and impact, starting with a prologue that explains the need for immigration reform. The filmmakers aren't above using PowerPoint-style lists or that honeyed, voice-of-reason voiceover that I found so annoying in both films, but they don't resort to those often. For the most part, they stitch together powerful snippets of conversation, speeches, and lectures by eloquent and impassioned people. Continue Reading »
The Best Albums of the 2000s
by Ed Howard on June 21st, 2010 at 1:00 pm in Music
This list of 200 great albums, my belated decade retrospective, is an attempt to capture the essence of the past decade in music, as I've experienced it. The years from 2000-2009 happened to coincide almost exactly with my own education in music, the time in my life, from college onward, when I became deeply invested in and immersed in music of all sorts. It was during this time that I began writing about music, that I explored previously unimagined styles and forms, that I started my own record label and began recording my own work. This list is a tribute to the artists and albums that opened my ears to the dizzying diversity of sonic possibilities that we so conveniently lump together as "music." It is an attempt to corral the breadth of my listening, without subduing the catholicity, sprawl, noise and messiness that make music so exciting to me in the first place.
The fact that this list is composed of so much varied music made it difficult, if not impossible, to assemble in any coherent fashion. In some respects, it's a pointless exercise to balance the relative merits of records so different from one another as to be from different universes—but nor did I want to separate out different musical areas into their respective ghettos. All rankings here are approximate, then, general markers of my appreciation for a particular album. In the interests of preserving the list's variety, I've also limited each artist to a maximum of three separate entries. Scattered throughout the blurbs are quotes from reviews I wrote when these albums were new, to connect this list back to my last ten years of listening and writing about music. I hope this list does for perhaps a few people what the music I'm talking about here did for me: excited me, suggested new possibilities in sound, made me happy, moved me, shocked me, made me sit up and listen intently.
Perfecting the Nostalgia Kick: Super Mario Galaxy 2
by Kurt Shulenberger on June 21st, 2010 at 9:11 am in Video Games
How many times have we returned to Mario, and how many more times will we be returning to him still? Nintendo's beloved icon, as easily identifiable by his blue-collar duds and quiet, goofish mannerisms as his graceful athleticism and chameleon-like adaptability to peril, continually asserts himself as a permanent fixture of video games. Nintendo has done quite a rare and amazing thing with the stout plumber and his army of supporting characters: As far as the medium of video games has come, both in terms of conceptual ambition and the technology developed and utilized to realize those ambitions, Super Mario games still matter. They are still relevant. So, like always, the sphere of Mario has come around to the same place again, and now here is Super Mario Galaxy 2.
In this case, however, the sphere is quite literal. Super Mario Galaxy, released in 2007, introduced the concept of "planet platforming," with stage layouts resembling archipelagos suspended in foreboding space, many with their own unique looks and mechanics. In this universe, gravity is circumferential; Mario will always land toward a land mass's surface no matter which direction he faces, even if on the underside (the rule of thumb: If it's round, downward forces are relative, and if it's not, it's absolute). Even though historically it isn't entirely original, it was a revelation for the 3D "platformer" genre and especially for Mario games, as it required new methods of spatial thinking (time and space are perpetual mantras of the platform gamer), increasing the sense of surprise and alertness tenfold. Nintendo's masterful level design and gameplay twists, doled out in drips instead of globs, brought everything together in a sense that seemed both startlingly new yet assuredly familiar. Continue Reading »
Summer of '85: A View to a Kill
by Robert Cashill on June 21st, 2010 at 7:50 am in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!.]
Roger Moore saved my evening once. I took a friend for a drink at Elaine's, near where I lived on the Upper East Side. My friend knew that celebrities congregated there, and refused to leave for our appointed dinner until we saw one. I sighted a New York character actor, but no go—it had to be a name-above-the-title star. For a seeming eternity, none came into our orbit. Then, when I could stand the waiting game no longer, who should enter but…Beau Maverick. Simon Templar. James Bond. There could be no argument: Roger Moore was the real deal. Dinner was served.
Karmically speaking he did me a good turn, given how thoroughly he had ruined another evening of mine in May of 1985. I was 19 years old, the film critic for the Daily Northwestern, and eager to convert another friend into Bond-age. (I was a fan since my dad took me to see a double feature of Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die in 1974 or thereabouts.) Things were looking up: 1983's Octopussy, with Moore, was divertingly silly, and Never Say Never Again later that year was a more-or-less satisfying one-off for the returning Sean Connery. A View to a Kill, which we were seeing at a preview screening at the Esquire Theater in Chicago, should have clinched it, and brought another fan into the fold. Continue Reading »
A Movie a Day, Day 35: The Killer Inside Me
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 20th, 2010 at 6:37 pm in Film
Even if it weren't directed by Michael Winterbottom, I'd have gone to The Killer Inside Me just to see what gets people riled up over movie violence these days. The first question after it screened at Sundance was from an outraged woman who asked why the festival had shown it, and the discussion since has focused mainly on whether or not the film is unforgivably violent and misogynistic.
Well, I've seen it now, and I don't understand the objections. No doubt, violence is too common and way too commonly sanctioned in our society. And yes, movies are partly to blame, since they're a big part of the way we communicate with each other about violence—not to mention the way we exploit and glamorize it. But I believe movies are more a reflection than a cause of our love affair with violence, so our protests against movie violence are usually a matter of killing the messenger. That seems to be the case here. Continue Reading »
Summer of '85: Gateway to the zombie apocalypse: Day of the Dead
by Jesse Miksic on June 20th, 2010 at 1:21 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!.]
Day of the Dead, unleashed in July of 1985, was the third in George Romero's Dead trilogy (not to be confused with Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy), which has created a foundation for a whole horror subgenre and its attendant culture of obsessives. It wasn't as blithely satirical as its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead, and it was far more technically sophisticated than either of its forerunners. Owing to these improvements, Day of the Dead is the most direct reference point for all subsequent "serious" treatments of the zombie archetype. Despite its landmark status, it's accorded far less acclaim than Dawn of the Dead, which is often heralded as the pinnacle of the trilogy. This is unfair to Day of the Dead, which seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, so much so that its iconic contribution to the genre has been overlooked.
After the carousing and confusion of Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead shows us a world where humans have gone from being entirely reactionary—desperate, safety-seeking, and ineffectively attempting to maintain their institutions—to being proactive, fortifying their positions, rebuilding society, and assessing the wider situation. The underground bunker of Day of the Dead is a society struggling to find a political form, with a fascistic military element vying with a cadre of scientists, working against all odds toward some sort of utopian solution. This distills into a conflict between hopeless rumination and hopeless impulse…and between short-term tactics and long-term strategy. Continue Reading »
Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010: Backyard
by Joseph Jon Lanthier on June 20th, 2010 at 12:52 pm in Festivals, Film
The Mexico of Carlos Carrera's Backyard terrifyingly resembles—and yet comfortingly confirms the alarmist subtext of—an American funhouse nightmare of subaltern stereotypes: Corruption has leeched through every social stratum, from indolent municipal executives to workaday laborers who lack the savvy to benefit from their turpitude and merely perpetuate the slimy ambiance; women are subjugated by all, including themselves, but especially by significant others and guardians gripped by various appetites; and the gradient of urban evil is easy enough to decipher by following the varying manifestations of gringoismo (several of the film's most dastardly creeps either speak English or sport a pale complexion, and one of them is Jimmy Smits). Focusing on a real-life series of female rape-murders in Ciudad Juarez all but dismissed by local authorities until investigated by Ana de la Reguera's officer and sexy tough-girl exemplar Blanca Bravo (a fabrication, if the piss-poor allegorical nomenclature isn't enough of a tip-off), Backyard attempts to study the self-punishing psychology and hegemonic political climate that maintains the menacing law of the junkyard and sex worker-laden land. But while a handful of scenes possess the icily obtrusive splash of a border crossing wakeup gesture, the remainder of the movie's conscience is drowned out by stultifyingly inane dialogue, contrived essays at violence-threatening tension, and a sour desert-sepia color scheme that seems inspired by lower-echelon TV-crime melodramas. Continue Reading »
Doctor Who: Season 5, Episode 9: "Cold Blood"
by Steven Cooper on June 19th, 2010 at 9:45 pm in Television
"Cold Blood" completes the two-part story of the clash between the Silurians—a species of intelligent reptiles that long ago dominated the Earth—and present-day humanity, showing the two sides being unable to overcome their seemingly irreconcilable differences. For the most part, the story quite closely follows the path taken by the original Silurian story (called, surprisingly enough, "Doctor Who and the Silurians") forty years ago. However, there's a real sting in the tail, courtesy of the overarching plot arc of this season, the "crack in the universe" that seems to be following the Doctor (Matt Smith), Amy (Karen Gillan), and Rory (Arthur Darvill) wherever they go. Previously, the crack had been most prominent in "Flesh and Stone", where indeed it provided the actual resolution of that story's threat; here it simply arrives as an appendix to the main story. But more of that later. Continue Reading »
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