Kershner, Frakes, and um, Pitof are not exactly household names. Sci-fi fans will recognize Kershner as the nominal director of The Empire Strikes Back. Those fans will be equally quick to note that George Lucas was fully in control of that blockbuster. That’s not to say that Kershner, the quintessential journeyman director, did not have his moments, including the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars and the bootleg Bond film Never Say Never Again. It is to say that Kershner has not directed a film since 1990’s RoboCop 2, and has only one real producer credit, a direct-to-video number. And he is 85.

Frakes has been more active recently, scripting (actually, co-scripting) a number of direct-to-DVD actioners starring Mario Van Peebles, Charlie O’Connell (brother of Jerry), and Mark Dacascos (martial artist, now of Iron Chef America fame) According to IMDB voting, his most widely-viewed work is 1987’s Hell Comes to Frogtown with then-wrestling star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Screenwriters aren’t wholly responsible for the fate of their works, of course. Acting, directing, production values count. If only he’d had Irvin Kershner to direct. I think the script will be scripted first by co-writer Jiang Hongyu, and then translated into English and film convention by Frakes, who has done is share of co-writing and novelization work.

And the mono-monikered Pitof? Again, I went to trusty IMDB to find his next film, called Only in New York. One of the user comments is titled simply, OMG! Pitof? NOOOOO!!!!! Apparently the commenter fears for the career of Jim Cavieziel (The Passion of the Christ, The Thin Red Line). To his credit, Pitof directed the well-received Vidocq, the Gallic fantasy which was the first filmed entirely with high-def Sony-Panavision cameras, using technology that Lucas developed for the Star Wars prequels. And he did visual effects work with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection.

What’s really going on? Even with the weak dollar, 100 million is still nothing to sneeze at. The Variety fluff piece goes on to say the film is being put together by “China’s Fontelysee Pictures in collaboration with the Emagine Studio of Hollywood.”  Though that line depicts a grand US-Chinese partnership, I believe these two entitles are in fact run by the same people, and that “Emagine” is a Chinese company with offices in the US. Check out for yourself: here is the Chinese Emagine site, and here is the US Emagine site.  Even the name “Emagine” seems designed to conflate it with Imagine Studios, a real Hollywood entity, much in the manner of those Asian knockoff “Adidos” and “Pummas”. Same with Irv Kershner - the very mention of his name is supposed to evoke sci-fi spectacular, though his involvement in high-profile movies is two-decades old. Chinese entrepreneurs will soon learn Western audiences and mass-media are more sophisticated than that.

The real connection between the two, and the actual producer of this film, is “Harrison Liang, PhD” whose bio on the Chinese site states he was an investment banker who moved to China in 2001, and is now Fontelysee’s CEO as well as head of China’s sister city program. Somehow I feel comforted that a competent businessman will be in charge instead of an 85-year-old. Even if this venture does not become, as Mr. Liang puts it, “Star Wars under the sea”, it will be one interesting step into the brave new world in commercial movie-making.

I didn’t think especially highly of the film, but there were a couple of things worth mentioning: one is that the modern day love affair between the Taiwanese male and Japanese female protagonists suggests that in the present, Taiwan and Japan can meet as “romantic” equals, that is, they can, in their own circuitous way, fall for each other. In the present day, Japan is gendered as a woman, Taiwan as a man. Both are initially wary of each other, afterwards, its rip each other’s clothes off, head over heels.

In contrast, in the flashback love affair, which happens at the end of the second World War, Taiwan is gendered as a woman, Japan as a man, and it is only the man that speaks of his love of the woman and Taiwan. He cannot take the woman with him: why, exactly, we are not sure. Japan had to relinquish Taiwan and other colonial pretensions. But again, it is only the Japanese man’s voice that we hear. The woman is never fully seen—we get a few brief glimpses of her in the past, as she watches the boat with her Japanese lover leave the harbor, and in the present, we only see her back and weathered/withered hands. We never hear her side of the story, and thus we never understand her pain. I think this is quite interesting–it seems that the Japanese male never mailed the letters, and so the Taiwanese woman never replied–nonetheless, that isn’t exactly a justification for why her voice is absent from the film. It does suggest that people of that generation, and especially those that had “sensitive” relations with the colonizers, have many more secrets than we’ll ever know, things that we of the latter generations may accidentally happen upon, or even consciously uncover, but which will always just be the tip of the iceberg.

On a less highfalutin level, there is also the fact that this film has been the most successful local film in Taiwan for a long, long time, and everyone is trying to figure out why that happened. One of the more thought out articles on this is from Asia Pacific Arts magazine, where writer Brian Hu comes up with a list of seven reasons why he thinks the film was so successful in Taiwan, while debunking some of the pat and what he thinks are incorrect answers. His list begins with 1. Because it appeals to both local and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Hu points out that in this regard, this film can only be understood within the context of the Taiwanese film industry, including among other things the Hou Hsiao-Hsien pioneered Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Hu argues that the appeal of Cape is not in some “realism” a la the Taiwanese New Wave. Verisimilitude and social realism don’t necessarily equate with box office success. Hu’s second point: 2.Because it makes people laugh. Anyhow, there are seven total and the article is a good read.

Hu’s conclusion is quite thoughtful and is worth quoting here in its entirety:

Cape No. 7 got great word of mouth because it got great word of mouth. For a local film — that most despised category of film in Taiwan — to get good buzz was enough for everyone to want to see it to believe it. In that sense, this inflated box office may only be a one-time deal, since the next Cape No. 7 won’t come with that element of surprise. But what the Taiwanese industry doesn’t need are more shocks like Cape No. 7. What it needs are directors interested in making comedies that are funny, romances that are romantic, and melodrama that’s moving. I’m fearful that Cape No. 7 will lead to copycats rather than craft, which is what Cape No. 7 demonstrated most impressively. The industry can’t rely on word-of-mouth to win back the audience. It needs to win back the audience’s trust, not just its attention.

My ambivalence stems from my opinion that Chen Kaige has become kind of a hack of late, though he has, on the whole, made many more decent films than shitty ones, and has even made a couple of near brilliant or at least close to seminal films in the last thirty odd years.

Of course, this is a pretty good omen for Chen, who has a highly anticipated upcoming film, the Mei Lanfang biopic. They’ve already released the official MV/theme song for the movie, sung by the film’s two co-stars, Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi.

Then Li Mi takes on a fateful fare: two shifty migrants that have something to hide. Many convenient coincidences later, in a plot invovling hostage-taking, extortion, drug mules, mistaken identities, and changed identities, and Li Mi just might be close to finding her missing lover and closing the door on that part of her life.

It is in the nature of these films to rely on coincidences and other deus-ex-machina elements to move the plot forward—it doesn’t matter that they aren’t realistic, because movies aren’t based on probability theory in the first place. However, you sometimes wish that there could be a bit more judgment exercised as to when enough is enough and it’s time for you to sober up and go home. The tangled skein of the plot does get unraveled by the end, but as enjoyable as it is to know (almost) everything that transpired in this movie universe, there in a sense in which presenting all the facts makes the film seem too pat, too clever. It would have been better to leave the audience some unsettling loose-ends to quibble over.

As far as performances go, Zhou Xun, as Li Mi, is obviously the center of the film. She has plenty of good moments and a few maudlin ones, but otherwise manages to carry the film. Variety seems to concur:

Pic is motored by another saturated perf from the remarkable, throaty-voiced Zhou, who’s ably partnered from the halfway mark by Zhang (the lead in the big-budget war drama “Assembly”) as the tough but fair cop. Deng, also from “Assembly,” is fine as the slippery Ma/Fang.

However, there was one performance bothered us a bit, which was that of Wang Baoqiang’s, the young actor that has become quite popular in China for his small but often memorable roles in films, ranging from A World Without Thieves to Li Yang’s Blind Shaft, as well as
the main role in the hit TV series Soldier Sortie. What tends to grate is the fact that he plays similar roles in so many of the movies:the innocent, hapless migrant worker. It was, in his earlier films, somewhat endearing. No matter what side of the law he was on, he was always the victim and the hero—he represented the pure heart of inner China, the migrants who can no longer make (or want to make) a living off the land and are forced to the move to seamy underbelly of Chinese cities, a moral vacuums where dodgy characters operate and manipulate them. Wang’s performance is not bad as it goes, but you wonder whether or not the guy, barely twenty-five years old, has already been typecast.

Final verdict: nothing life-changing, but not a bad yarn. This is a step in the right direction.
We wouldn’t mind seeing a few more Memento-esque films come out of China. Missing
people, mistaken identities, desire, obsession—take these ingredients and give it a dark spin.

I should hope not. From my view Stateside it seems that Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) has just arrived. After all, I had been waiting since 2006 for the U.S. release of Still Life (Sanxia Haoren: literally, “The Good People of Three Gorges”). So I waited. And waited. And wouldn’t you know, I waited.

Still Life made its American premiere in January 2008 at New York’s IFC Center. It reached the West Coast in April, at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and a month later, showed for a week at one of the Lumiere Theatres in the Bay Area. In other words, an art house. So is Jia leaving the art house, just as he has entered it?

I think two different meanings of that phrase at play. One is subjective, about the film itself: serious, often experimental and avant-garde, produced independently, with a singular vision (i.e. that of an auteur). One is objective, the circumstances in which the film and by extension, the filmmaker, is received: where it plays and what audience.

The term “art house” or “art film” turns out to be a uniquely American one, due to the monopoly of commercially-oriented Hollywood films in American theaters (and abroad), leaving acknowledged serious films domestic and international limited to certain theaters. They could be specialty film centers such as the IFC in New York or Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, or repertory theaters that show classics for a day and new releases for a week, two on popular demand. In the suburbs, they could be the occasional chain-operated theater set aside for niche movies, or the single screen reserved at the 30-plex theater.

An independent film with strong prospects may open at several dozen screens. For example, a Jane Austen adaptation starring Emma Thompson (and a not-so-famous Kate Winslet). Sense and Sensibility opened at 70 screens in 1995. That sounds like a lot, but with nearly 300 million people and 400 metropolitan areas, it clearly did not show within driving distance of many Americans. In contrast, The Dark Knight opened at over 4000 screens in the US. The art film’s initial unqualified success did allow it to expand to several hundred screens, thus “leaving the art house”.

A more recent example is the phenomenon known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Buoyed by the art house successes of Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s film was able to open at . . . 16 screens!! Two reasons come to mind. Foreign language films have smaller potential audiences, and so they started smaller. Also, they opened smaller at the start of December to build up to Christmas season.

Well Christmas came and went, and a month later it was playing at close to 200 screens, so it was bumped to 700 screens for another three weeks. But wait, it wasn’t going away. In fact those 700 screens were packed. So well after the holiday season, Crouching Tiger played at 1200 screens, then 1700…until it reached an unheard-of 2000 screens for a foreign language film. The punctuated equilbrium of this theatrical progression is fascinating to chart. It appears the powers that be expected such a film only needed 173 screens when it opened those screens, and when it exceeded all expectations, took some time before it made non-art screens available to the wire-fu epic. Put another way, it was the Obama of the cinema world.

At its theatrical peak, in February 2008, Still Life played at two screens. The World, his previous international success, hit three screens in the US. Of course, none of these record film festival screenings, which are lovely feathers in the cap but do little for accessibility. Seattle on May 23 and Austin on October 12? No thanks. Given the 4000+ screens available in the US, it seems even the proliferation of international films can find their, um, niche in a physical art house. Perhaps Netflix and soon the Internet will render inconsequential the movie bottleneck in the theaters. But the reviews, the buzz, the “event-ness” of a film today accompany generally just its theatrical release.

There is another world, one that falls somewhere between the visibility of repertory theaters and the singularity of film festivals. That’s the art museum world. At some point art museums decided to show international films as part of its regular exhibitions. Perhaps it’s an extension of their experimental film and video showings, or as a long awaited acknowledgment of narrative film as art with a capital “A”. While each film shows for a day or two, the program (often focusing on one filmmaker) may last weeks, giving the curious time and opportunity to taste some of the oeuvre.

The San Francisco Bay Area is fortunate to have several such venues for film. This month, SF Museum of Modern Art is showing the film series Rediscovering the Fourth Generation as part of its exhibit on Chinese contemporary art. Films include Wu Tian Ming’s River Without Buoys, Xie Fei’s Black Snow, and Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tends to focus on experimental and documentary type films. Next month it premieres Fengming: A Chinese Memoir by Wang Bing, which showed at last year’s Cannes. Here’s the Variety review. He Fengming survived “anti-rightist” persecutions for decades and lived to tell her three-hour tale.

Across the Bay, the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive functions more like a stand-alone film center. Though nominally tied with the art museum’s contemporary Chinese art exhibit, the PFA had an extraordinary program this month. Unknown Pleasures: The Films of Jia Zhangke allowed Bay Area audiences to see for the first time “the quartet of beautifully constructed, profoundly astute examinations of a changing China”, as the Village Voice called Pickpocket (Xiao Wu), Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and The World.

That series has ended but is followed up this weekend with a four-day, five-film seriesI Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying , capped by a “master class” from Ning Ying (宁瀛) herself. But wait, there’s more! November features Mahjong: New Independent Chinese Cinema, a sample of 21st century visions from Beijing, Sanxia, and Anyang to an art house, I mean art museum, near you.

Xie recalled in the 2002 interview that his parents committed suicide amid the political pressure — his mother jumping off a building and his father overdosing on sleeping pills — and he had to collect their bodies himself.

Xie was also denounced at a rally attended by more than 100,000 people.

Top young Chinese director Jia Zhangke said it was still risky for Xie to make films about the period in the 1980s, when China had started to open up and implement economic reforms.

“He was very bold, he had a rebellious spirit for that time,” said Jia, whose movies were also once banned.

Not surprisingly, Xinhua mentioned that Xie’s films tackled the Cultural Revolution but never mentioned what he himself experienced.

6th generation director Jia Zhangke mentioned that he had recently talked to Xie and that Xie had always been quite supportive of his films. He also said that he hoped to give the old man a bottle of maotai to take over to the next world, since that was Xie’s poison of choice.

Xie’s Chinese movie database (Chinese language IMDB) page is here.

In the early 1980s, Fujian became a vital hinge on the open door policy that fostered China’s economic miracle, which brought suburbs, video games, and minvans to the province. At the same time, it lured many Chinese to seek their fortune abroad, and has made Fujian a center for human trafficking, particularly the “golden triangle” of Fuqing, Changle and Pintang. Into this picture step the Neon Knights, the gang of Roppongi, Amerika, and Dragon, who capitalize on the void left by emigre husbands by catching their “remittance widows” with local lovers (sometimes one of their own), and blackmail them. Call it a Chinese version of trickle-down economics. That some knights bear nicknames reflecting their fathers’ destinations adds poignancy to this sad state of affairs.

“Neon Knights” is also the title for the movie’s first half, which focuses on Amerika and his mother, a woman involved in the local church and local trafficking operation. Bonds are already strained between mother and son - the college grad won’t get a job, hangs around bad influences. The plot picks up when he finds out she’s also taken a local lover. Amerika convinces his reluctant friends to videotape and blackmail her mom. It works, but his expressionless face at seeing his mother make the cash drop is telling. There is no victory in this game, and no joy in their decadant lives.

Mom is angry and asks “the Czech”, the local underworld leader and smuggler in Fuqing, to smoke out the extortionists. This development puts a little fright to the little gang and sends them to chill out in Pingtan. Here, for the first time, the young folks seem to enjoy themselves and their youth, riding ATVs on the beach, taking a ferry ride to visit their friend, and having sex with the local girls. One of Fujian Blue’s achievements is its street-level perspective and non-judgmental tone, which allows us to become involved with its characters, and draw us into experiencing their world as they live it, including its moments of elation and wonder.

A couple of such moments come near the end of their merry vacation from petty crime, when Amerika and a friend are visiting Dragon, who is hiding out back home for reasons of his own. On the very old and small ferry, one of them acts out the scene from Titanic where Jack Dawson (a stowaway, incidentally) is flying without wings. Later on that ferry trip, he notices a mass of Taiwanese boats, and wonders why on earth they would be here, off the coast of China. To refuel for their fishing trips, comes the ferryman’s reply. Can ships that small cross the Straits? Even smaller than this one, says the ferryman. You can picture the gears turning in Amerika’s head.

Dragon is the subject of the second half, “At Home, At Sea”. It is set in motion when the gang decides to give him the windfall from Amerika’s mom. We realize why when he returns home to his poor fishing village and family in debt for his older brother’s emigration. Dragon uses part of the illicit cash to help pay off those debts as well as support his mom and sister. The rest of it - let’s just say its fate involves an even younger group of rogues in a scene both hilarious and sad.

In an especially plangent scene, his younger sister declares during a break from school she doesn’t want to head back, but instead wants to go abroad. No, Dragon says, go back to school. They have a fight. Pretty basic stuff, but the following silence is heart-rending. How can he explain how cruel adult life can be? They compromise: she skips school that day, her brother taking her to walk along the breakwater. If the neon wilderness of Fuqing is disappointing, there are no hopes to disappoint in his homely backwater village. The price of his family’s survival may be its ultimate fracture.

Eventually, Dragon decides to go abroad and seek his fortune in the West, perpetuating the cycle of debt and desperation, but also hope and persistence in the face of a two-faced globalization that welcomes the movement of goods and ideas but is cruel to the movement of human beings, all of which it fuels. This persistence may seem absurd, when sometimes emigres leave to pay a “snakehead” for having previously smuggled their relative, or even a prior unsuccessful trip they’d taken themselves. A reference to the human-trafficking tragedy at Morecambe imbues real-life gravity to their plight. But this persistence of dreams is also a persistence of memory, of the fact that Fujianese are everywhere, making up a majority of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the United States. It also reflects the persistence of a buccaneering spirit, reckless but not always self-destructive, which fuels both the crimes and the dreams that feed on each other. Like generations of Fujianese before them, they don’t accept their truncated roles - not in the new China of great expectations.

Several qualities make Fujian Blue a unique standout effort. Weng’s employ of non-professionals punctuates the palpable realism in every scene, whether its the young men teasing the sole woman among them in a gently sexual way, or giving running commentary on the date in their blackmail video. His use of ribald humor also anchors the characters’ authenticity - the Czech tells his card-playing friends that Czech detention wasn’t so bad because they let you watch porn. I also have to give props to the subtitles team, as I’ve never seen Chinese or any other foreign language translated as “beayotches” and “bros before hoes” (sic).

Speaking of the colloquial, yet another unique and daring feature is the liberal use of the Hokkien dialect (Fujian), which is as different from Mandarin as English is from French. Such use is both accurate (reflecting how people really speak) and illuminating (of China’s true polyglot history and sense of regional identity). Indeed, it’s mentioned that two of the gang hail from Hunan and Sichuan (which also signals that in much of China, Fujian is a placed to be envied). Finally, it is also politically and even psychologically daring to suggest that young men in Fujian (the winners of globalization, both in the world and in China) look wistfully at Taiwan. Perhaps it’s not that Fujian itself is envied, but it’s the closest to what is enviable in the world.

Along with some other features, the attitude towards the characters and their lives reminded me a bit of a breakthrough Scottish film called Trainspotting. Like that movie, we have young men and one woman, lives of petty crime and decadence, and sometime exuberance that the audience is invited to share. Even the usage of dialect lends a superficial resemblance. More likely, much of it is coincidental, or rather convergent - they share distinguishing traits of a great narrative, lightness in the face of gravity, specificity in the face of stereotype, and multiplicity in the face of dogma.

The problems they face are ultimately different, too: whereas the struggles of Scottish addicts are self-induced, that of these Fujianese rogues result largely from their legitimate though MTV-fueled dreams and the contrasting reality of their horizons. The Chinese title Jīn Bì Huī Huáng is an idiom literally meaning magnificent looking in green and gold. It is used to describe a building, or to use an English idiom word, a facade. After watching the movie at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I learned that Robin Weng is just 26. I have every hope that he will continue to seek out facades and with his remarkable vision, penetrate them.

Squat - The Moss via kwout

Unfortunately, we haven’t had enough time to devote to this website. I wrote a review that appeared on Batgwa/Squat, which you can read by clicking on the link above.

moss, shawn yu, violence, hong kong, society, police, cops, China, drama, action

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