Reviews Cinema

Another year, another Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. I’ve attended such fests in the past as a member of the press, as a presenter, as a judge, and as a contributor. This was my first time it was a committee member who helped select the movies that were shown, write synopses for the program, and then introduce movies and conduct post-screening interviews. Honestly, it was a little more work than I expected but how could I say no when I was recruited by my friend/Visual Communications Creative Director Anderson Le? And the festival duties have turned out to be a lot of fun.

Last night I was assigned to The Sound of Crickets at Night. I chose to write the program’s essay about the movie because I Ioved its honesty, rawness, and creativity when I saw the screener. So it was a real treat to introduce the Marshall Islands indie flick, see it on a big screen, and then have a brief chat with co-producer/co-director/writer/gofer Jack Niedenthal. Jack is a really personable and outgoing guy with a fascinating story (visiting with the Peace Corps, staying and entering local politics, becoming a self-taught filmmaker to represent the culture after his young son asked him why there were no movies about the Marshallese) so, really, I just had to hand him the mic and get out of the way. Almost too easy, but more of him and less of me is what the audience came for.

Tonight is the fest’s closing screening of the Japanese dark comedy Key of Life, which will be followed by encore presentations of some of the its most popular movies (none of my pics, oh well) over the weekend. Support indie film! Support film festivals!  Who knows when you’ll get to see these films at the movies, meet the filmmakers again, or surround yourself with like-minded cultural connoisseurs and  patrons of the arts again?

AUDIO REVIEWS

The Three O’Clock – Live at the Old Waldorf
Sadly, I missed the Paisley Underground band’s reunion shows at Coachella, The Glass House, and The Troubadour. But I couldn’t pass up this limited-edition live album, which captures The Three O’Clock at their arguable peak in 1983 with all of the swirling, ripping songs off their perfect Baroque Hoedown EP (one of the first records I ever bought back in junior high) as well as selections from their more psychedelic Salvation Army era (Befour Three O’Clock) and previews of their yet-to-be-released pop opus, Sixteen Tambourines (alas no “Jet Fighter”). The fact that the wafer-thin audio sounds like a bootleg taped off a Walkman will alienate lesser fans and the merely curious–who should pre-order the 20-track anthology with outtakes and demos from Omnivore Records instead–but this is a real artifact and a must-have for fans and survivors of the mod revival like me. [Burger Records]

King Tuff – King Tuff Was Dead
While I don’t have one friend who isn’t addicted to King Tuff’s self-titled perfect garage pop album on Sub Pop, I haven’t known anyone who has possessed or even heard his first album. Until now. The folks at Burger have resurrected their pressing of his impossible-to-find debut LP on Colonel Records and the grooves didn’t even require any dusting. It’s practically fuzz-free compared to his universally loved follow-up but has all of the hooks and melodies. Songs like “Just Strut” and “Animal” come across like an unholy mix of T-Rex and Bob Dylan–or just plain old great, stripped-down King Tuff. If you don’t have the budget to spend 15 bucks on the vinyl you can buy the $6 cassette version like I did since you’ll want to listen to it in your car al the time anyway. [Burger Records]

JT Habersaat & The Altercation Punk Comedy Tour – Hostile Corporate Takeover
I am totally out of the comedy scene and haven’t owned a comedy LP since Dr. Demento’s Dementia Royale. But I can connect to this sampler because of its connections to punk. Beyond having cover art by Raymond Pettibon, M.O.D. and S.O.D.’s Billy Milano has an extended and hilarious gag about being a single guy on tour masturbating into all the black T-shirts that bands would gave him as a bouncer for C.B.G.B.’s  and Riverboat Gamblers’ Mike Wiebe recounts his encounter with The Boss. As for ringleader Habersaat, he is totally aware of his place in punk as well as comedy; when a comedian pal talks about performing alongside The Melvins, Slayer, and Skeleton Witch, he reluctantly recalls hitting the road with emo bands with ridiculous names like Cute Is What We Aim For on the Warped Tour. Meanwhile, his Clash of the Titans story is necessarily listening with the recent passing of Ray Harryhausen. Also features thoughts on lazy protesters, hipster chicks, and Panopticon’s Pet Money Shot by  Mack Lindsay and Joe Staats. [Stand Up! Records]

Watch this on the 10th! Imagine… a theater filled with folks who looked like they were cutting onions. It’s touching and deep. This is the story of a guy who is the best in the world at ukelele and you can see this free. A film by Tad Nakamura.

JAKE SHIMABUKURO: LIFE ON FOUR STRINGS

A production of the Center for Asian American Media

and Pacific Islanders in Communications

Directed by Tadashi Nakamura

Watch trailer:  www.lifeonfourstrings.com

PBS National Broadcast Premiere

Friday, May 10, 2013 at 9:00p (check local listings)

Please set your DVRs!  On your cable box search for “Jake Shimabukuro”.  Record in HD if possible.

Find your local PBS station at:

http://www.pbs.org/about/faq/station-finder/

Still can’t believe my friend Cate invited me to watch The Rolling Stones kick off their current tour at Staples Center last Friday. Still can’t believe how great they are live. Like the blues musicians they grew up idolizing, The Stones have become not only timeless but ageless masters… Yes, to kick off the evening they had the UCLA marching band play “Satisfaction” following a video montage of musicians, filmmakers, and fans sharing their devotion to Their Satanic Majesties; there were guest appearances by Gwen Stefani and Keith Urban; and the CSULB choir sang a chillingly beautiful intro “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to make it a special night. But really it’s all about their enormously heavy catalog of songs. Everyone from The New York Dolls to Aerosmith has tried in their own way to channel The Stones’ primal, evil grooves but The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band remains just that. Everyone talks about how Mick and Keef have survived with style but Ronnie and Charlie are effortlessly on point and cool… (more…)

Just got back from the opening night of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. The featured flick was the Los Angeles premiere of Linsanity, a real crowd-pleaser of an underdog story that we’re all familiar with, but for a guy like me who doesn’t get out much the highlight was seeing friends. Clockwise from top right are Eric from GR, Working Man/Perfect Time/SGV skateboarding homie John Lee,  Patrick from NFS, and Eugenia Yuan, who appears in the movie Chink on Saturday night. Also saw my pal Kristina Wong decked out in a bridal gown and met Judy Lei from the Asian American International Film Festival, who is going to bring the Animal Style skate program that I put together to New York City this summer. More on that later. First comes Los Angeles…

Have I ever mentioned that my friend Anderson Le (Visual Communications’ Artistic Director) recruited me to be on the programming committee this year? Part of my duties include introducing films and filmmakers as well as conducting Q&As after screenings. These are the four that I’ll be handling, and it would be cool if you came by to check them out and say hi.

Saturday, May 4 (Director’s Guild of America on Sunset)

12:15 – A River Changes Course. Winner of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary.

2:45 – Stateless. Like a spelling bee movie on steroids, Duc Nguyen tells the story of Vietnamese War refugees who never made it to America, settled illegally in the Philippines, and are preparing to interview with U.S. State Department officials when the immigration department decides to open new cases.

7:15 – Abigail Harm. Director Lee Isaac Chung does a remarkable job of crafting a compact but open-ended fable that can be as deep as you want it to be. As sad as you want it to be. And as fantastic as you want it to be. But gorgeously and masterfully executed in any case.

Thursday, May 9 (CGV Cinemas in Koreatown)

7:00 - The Sound of Crickets at Night. Displacement from home, broken family, loss of identity, and eroding tradition are only some of the themes that are presented dreamily yet effectively in this modest and skillful film from the Marshall Islands.

Seeya then. Support independent film! Support film festivals!

After following Milk Music for a while but never getting a chance to see them, I had mixed feelings about finally getting to catch them at a big place like the The Echoplex. But then I found out that the headliner was pretty interesting (Iceage) and the cover was still fair (15 bucks). If you stand right in front, it doesn’t matter how big the venue is, right?

Of course, Milk Music were great. Doubly fuzzed rock ‘n’ roll with the stony riffs of Dinosaur Jr. and unedited power of Hüsker Dü, they sounded amazing live. Then they took it down a notch for a song that was “half written by someone else” that happened to be Johnny Thunders. Wow. Their first LP is impossible to find these days (being repressed as I type by Perennial Death) but they had a box of the new one which I snatched up. I’ve only listened to it a hundred times. The band said they came from Joshua Tree, which I thought was a joke, but I heard that they are indeed moving there from Olympia. Hopefully they’ll play Los Angeles more often as a result. See them when you can.

When Iceage asked all the photographers to leave the space between the barrier and stage, I told my friend Ben that they are either totally punk rock or they’re assholes. Maybe it’s both? The young Copenhagen band’s first release mixed the angular sounds of Joy Division with the fay vocals of The Church, which they ditched for hardcore on their second (and superior) album. They ripped through their short set like well-dressed animals and walked off after less than 40 minutes. It was a statement more than a show, and they nailed it.

INDIAN FILM FESTIVAL OF LOS ANGELES PREVIEW

Next week the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles opens. I’m a big fan of the film fest, which is in its eleventh year, because they always come up with an interesting mix of arty blockbusters, lo-fi indies, and cool oddball documentaries. I was lucky enough to watch some screeners…

Eega is doubly, maybe even threefold weird. The big-budget and unabashedly commercial flick starts off as a straight-up love triangle movie between a pretty girl (Samantha), a nice but poor guy (Nani), and a ruthless and rich man (Sudeep). Following a sweet courtship complete with sappy songs and dancing, the story takes a serious left turn when the businessmen offs his rival who is reincarnated as a housefly. That’s when director S S Rajamouli turns it up as the fly defends the naive love interest by creating spa accidents, causing sleep deprivation, and pestering the villain as he drives a motorcycle. The cg insect writes on the dirty windshield of a crashed car: “I will kill you.” It’s darkly funny and oddly sweet, and it wouldn’t work as well as it does if the escalating reactions of Sudeep weren’t at least as good as the special effects.

Miss Lovely is an arty indie flick about India’s pre-Internet exploitation cinema scene. The recreated softcore horror and smut scenes look great–almost as if reimagined by Wong Kar Wai–and the atmospheric scenes of alleys, factories, and slums are simply gorgeous. In the middle of this are two brothers (Niharika Singh and Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who are trapped in the crime-infested low-budget movie scene. Can the younger one break out of the grindhouse circuit to make a legit movie with his sweetheart? Director Ashim Ahluwalia paints a straightforward and bleak picture complete with double-crossing and extortion that doesn’t have the whimsy of Ed Wood or energy of Boogie Nights. It’s completely sordid but also unique and absorbing (and started off as a documentary but none of Ahluwalia’s interviewees wanted to be involved) and I was more than a little sad to see it end like a Jack Chick tract.

See these and other incredible films on the big screen at the amazing ArcLight in Hollywood from April 9-14, 2013. Check out the IFFLA site HERE.

If you’re a writer, you have to like this man. Roger Ebert wrote tons of reviews, watched plenty of movies, but understood how to keep doing it and at the same time adapt to new technology and changing times. That might have been one of his better gifts. He also championed films from a wide spectrum of people and understood what the playing field was like for them and worked accordingly. I’m glad to have met him at the Hawaii International Film Festival. I’ll see him at the movies. (Chicago Sun Times – Roger Ebert)

Roger Ebert’s cancer has come back. Well, when you read it, you realize it’s not the fact that it came back, it’s sounds like it’s in another spot. That said, he’s moving to a different role in his mini-mega empire that’s not only about cinema but about media across different platforms. The man even wrote about cooking in a rice cooker. You can read about his current doing and situation at his blog. I wish him well and it was great to meet him a few years back in Hawaii.

Without seeing it just yet, the idea of this movie surely will stir some emotions in folks. Will they address the internment camps in the America? Either way, it’ll be a topic of conversation. (LA Times – Emperor) That’s Tommy Lee Jones as the General.

He was the hero of the 80s-90s. He starred in tons of movies that you probably never saw. If you did, you may or may not have liked them. Before that, he was a kickboxing champ. This is him today. (Examiner – Don the Dragon)

Asians and Asian Americans are thrilled. His second one! Congrats. (SFGate – Ang Lee)

Ai Weiwei Never Sorry to be on Independent Lens today. Watch it! (PBS.org – Never Sorry) Also here’s an interview with director Alison Klayman from August 2012. (giantrobot.com – Alison Klayman)

She’s legend. Michelle Yeoh was once dubbed a female Jackie Chan, but she’s now a dramatic actress and is set to receive this high honor. Wish we could be there. (WSJ – Michelle Yeoh)

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Amazing how Lost in Translation that’s been sort of forgotten, but also relevant, at least to myself thanks to My Bloody Valentine’s new album, (Kevin Shields did some music for Lost in Translation) still has legs. A bank robber who saw the movie, stopped to talk to Bill Murray.

“I saw this man in the street running towards me with a bag in his hand. Then he suddenly stopped when he saw me. He asked me if I was Bob Harris, the character I played in Lost in Translation. I told him, ‘sure, why not’. Then he started telling me how much he loved me and how great he thought I was. I was polite, I told him that was very nice of him to say. Then kind of out of nowhere, police showed up and tackled the man,” Murray said. (Superoffcialnews – Bob Harris)

The Jeremy Lin machine continues in Linsanity, a doc film about the greatest Asian American basketball player ever. The underdog continues, this time in film. (Hollywood Reporter – Linsanity)

He’s most notable for directing “In the Realm of the Senses.” A proper article about his passing is readable at (NY Times)

One of the things I really miss about editing Giant Robot magazine is assembling the reviews. Did you know that I actually purchased most of the movies that were listed in the TV Party section? I can’t really justify doing that any more, so I was stoked to receive a couple of interesting screeners from WellgoUSA. Back-to-back viewings of Tai Chi Zero and The Assassins doesn’t quite replace double features at the Kuo Hwa–which got me into Asian movies to begin with–but it’s as close as I get these days. (more…)

Wrote a couple of reviews for the ACV National Tour. I thought these were perhaps the best among a series of shorts. My Spiritual Medicine by Liang Cheng and Comrades by Paolo Bitanga. They’re here.

Fans of mainstream romantic comedies and arty head-scratchers will wish that Save The Date was either funnier or weirder. But fans of indie comics will feel right at home with its understated storytelling, awkward-but-honest banter, and minutest of details. Right away, I was stoked to see a couple of titles by first-time scriptwriter Jeffrey Brown going into an IKEA bookshelf and a cat getting out of a box–inside jokes for Brown’s followers checking out his first screenplay. And there are other references that were made for subculture dwellers like me: The Blue Hearts’ garage hit from Japan, “Linda Linda,” many shots of The Smell, and a cameo by Brown that you’ll miss if you blink. The One A.M. Radio‘s soundtrack is rad, too. (more…)

My curated program of skate shorts had its third and final showing at the San Diego Asian Film Festival on Saturday afternoon, and it still hasn’t gotten old. Having skateboarding-related or -inspired videos made by friends alongside indie flicks like Daylight Savings and old-school kung-fu classics like Five Fingers of Death is not only cool but important. It puts a niche genre into a larger context, and hopefully exposes skate video junkies to other forms of moving pictures while turning on film festival folks to the energy and aesthetics of skateboarding. (Above, left to right: Me, Wing Ko, Tad Suzuki, Eric Matthies, Ben Clark, Willy Santos.) (more…)

Hong Kong movie freaks in the U.S. should be stoked that we’re finally seeing some Chinese movies that are fun, cool, and even anarchic–and not just overblown historical epics. On the heels of Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (actually a China-HK coproduction) comes a crowd-pleasing, special effects feast starring Zhou Xun (Hollywood Hong Kong, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate) and Zhao Wei (Shaolin Soccer, Red Cliff). Not since Green Snake have two A-list actresses fully embraced such fantastically pagan roles, slithering, sauntering, and sometimes even bathing together onscreen when they aren’t kicking ass. And while the production value, action, effects, and bad guys in Painted Skin 2: The Resurrection might resemble the biggest-budget videogame ever, the plot actually has a lot going for it. The two-hour sequel is surprisingly tight and packed with gender confusion, role reversing, a shockingly endearing subplot, and even some poetry to the outcome–not to mention juicy topics of conversation. Who did the leads play in the first movie again? Why are such supremely badass and powerful women so hung up on dudes? Maybe that’s the point? Let me know what you think after November 13, when you can buy, rent, or stream the movie legally. (more…)