San Diego Asian Film Festival Archives

SDAFF ’23: New Strains

November 20, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Sci-Fi

***½/****
starring Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan
written and directed by Artemis Shaw & Prashanth Kamalakanthan

by Walter Chaw Prasanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s New Strains is perhaps the definitive film about the COVID shutdown, addressing it both straight-on and metaphorically in adopting the central conceit of Michael Tolkin’s dystopian novel NK3, in which a world-ending virus has as its primary symptom the infantilization of the infected. “New Strains” refers to both viral evolution and the manifold tensions introduced into the new romantic relationship of vacationing couple Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan), who land in the Big Apple right when the world shuts down. Trapped in a well-appointed, centrally-located flat, they bicker, watch television, have spiritless sex, and disagree over how seriously to take the risks of infection. Kallia, giving off some Lena Dunham vibes, is loose about masking and decontaminating when entering the living space. Ram, notably more uptight, freaks out a time or two in response to her laxness. It doesn’t help that she deals with strife through giggling and taunting. Indeed, for all of Ram’s irritating quirks–his fastidiousness and jealousy–I instantly despised Kallia for her schoolyard cruelty.

SDAFF ’23: Grounded

November 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Time Travel

***/****
starring Whit K. Lee, Katherine Leidlein, Angela Chew, Alfredo de Guzman
written and directed by Justin Chan

by Walter Chaw Justin Chan’s Grounded is triggering for me. It opens with a sunny prologue in which William (Whit K. Lee) proposes to longtime girlfriend Mackenzie (Katherine Leidlein). She accepts–with the caveat that he must finally introduce her to his parents (Angela Chew and Alfredo De Guzman) after three years of dating. If that seems like a long time, well, he’s Asian-American, and she’s happy to say how often she’s mistaken for Nicole Kidman. My wife and I share the same racial dynamic with William and Mackenzie, though I had no problem introducing her to my parents, because a large part of me hoped they would disapprove of her and I could complete my divorce from them. I mean, I did care, but I was angry and looking for the fight. I wanted them to present me an ultimatum so I could choose not-them. Grounded made my blood-pressure rise immediately–the ol’ fight-or-flight closer to my surfaces than I thought possible after all this time. The danger of films like this lies in how I will struggle to find any distance between it and my exposed nerves; Grounded cleaves so close to the bone I thought about tapping out a few times. I’m glad I stuck with it.

SDAFF ’23: Day Off

November 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

Ben ri gong xiu
本日公休
½*/****
starring Lu Hsiao-fen, Fu Meng-po, Annie Chen, Shih Ming Shuai
written and directed by Fu Tien-Yu

by Walter Chaw Fu Tien-Yu’s Day Off is heartfelt pap in the Garry Marshall style: soft-focused, episodic, sprawled like a drunken floozy across a flight of stairs in a Tennessee Williams melodrama. It’s a movie scored, every inch of it, with the kind of music honey and treacle would make if they had sticky little tentacles. The film is insinuating, probing for soft spots to geek for uncontrollable emotional gag reflexes: dying fathers, generational trauma, reunions, separations, triumphs… You know that minor chord you learned in your first guitar lesson? Think about a sad day and play that chord. Play each of the strings individually. Slowly. Close your eyes. You want a job, kid? Day Off is genuinely awful. It shares a personality with Precious Moments figurines. Moreover, it shares a vibe with the lonesome old lady you somehow got trapped in a conversation with who is shoving her Precious Moments figurines in your face and asking what you think. “This is A Decade of Dreams Come True, isn’t it sweet? And this is My Heart Beats For You, isn’t that adorable? ISN’T IT?” It isn’t. It’s sad, a lonesome transference of underdeveloped and frustrated social longing onto a plaster mold of literal children pretending to be adults.

SDAFF ’23: The Secret Art of Human Flight

November 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito, Maggie Grace
written by Jesse Orenshein
directed by H.P. Mendoza

by Walter Chaw Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) isn’t doing very well. He writes children’s books with his wife (Reina Hardesty), but she just died of an allergic reaction; all those arguments they used to have seem so stupid now. H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight is about being grateful for what you have while you have it–which isn’t novel, you’ll agree. One night, while doom-scrolling through TikTok, Ben watches what appears to be footage of a guy killing himself but is, in fact, footage of a guy who has taught himself to fly, blasting off from the edge of a cliff. Why he needs to jump in order to fly is what I think liberal arts majors call a “metaphor.” Also a metaphor is how Ben gets on the Dark Web to buy the multi-step process through which he, too, might learn to fly. What he doesn’t know is his five grand is buying the personal attention of flight inventor Mealworm (Paul Raci), who, with a combination of unctuous Peter Coyote cult-leader charisma, puts Ben through his paces. It’s that kind of movie.

SDAFF ’23: Quiz Lady

November 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, Will Ferrell
written by Jen D’Angelo
directed by Jessica Yu

by Walter Chaw I don’t hold any particular rancour for Jessica Yu’s confused, miscast Quiz Lady. No bile, even when it seems to be trafficking in racist tropes rather than satirizing them, even when its feeble attempts at wit and timing fall shrilly by the wayside. It’s always a minefield for me to review a film by an Asian American this negatively, especially an Asian American woman working from a script by a (white) woman, but there’s a point at which our community should be allowed to make disasterpieces and still get another shot, if equality is the real goal. There’s a point, too, where pulling punches or pretending not to have seen something becomes patronizing and an act of making a work invisible, which is what we’re often complaining about in the first place. I’ll allow that Quiz Lady likely has an audience and that this film exists at exactly the wrong frequency for me to tolerate, much less appreciate; I do worry, however, that the range in which it vibrates is the one in which people who like to laugh at my people live.

SDAFF ’23: In Water

November 7, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

물안에서
Mul-an-e-seo
***/****
starring Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun, Shin Seokho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad lately, It’s the time of year when he died, and though I’m terrible with dates, my body seems to remember. I usually think my moods must have something to do with autumn and the change in the weather–but I love the autumn, the smell of rotten leaves, the halo around the moon, the chill. And then I remember. Korean master Hong Sang-soo reminds me of my dad, too. It’s how he’s so irritatingly self-assured, I think. So mulishly iconoclastic. My dad never really listened to anything anyone else told him. Sometimes that worked out for him; often it didn’t. But the path of his life was defiantly his. My dad was learned, extraordinarily well-read in books written in languages I can’t read, and tortured. He’s been gone twenty years this year. Is it the “china” anniversary for death, as it is for marriage? Are the traditions the same, or do we fail to memorialize loss in the same way? My dad’s death is almost old enough to drink. When I was much younger, I would ask him big questions–life, the universe, everything–and he would answer with quotations and philosophies: aphorisms, fables, poems. I don’t remember anything about them except that they made me feel frustrated, mocked a little, and left to worry my thoughts alone like a cat with a tail of yarn. And now he’s gone.

SDAFF ’23: Cobweb

November 6, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

거미집
Geomijip
**½/****
starring Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Song Kang-ho
written by Kim Jee-woon, Yeon-Shick Shin
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw Kim Jee-woon is such a fine technical director that, for a while, the slapdash of his behind-the-scenes, Living in Oblivion insider piece feels like a meticulously orchestrated machine where every piece hits its mark instead of what I think is intended: silly slapstick arising from sloppy improvisation. There might be a path charted for this picture, but it all plays a little like Calvinball. What I like least is how many edits are timed to various shrieks: the last refuge of the desperate and the wayward. Screams of comic frustration, screams of theatrical fear, screams of manufactured ecstasy, screams of the righteous artist at war with a corporate machine trying to grind him down. Such is the plight of Kim (Song Kang-ho), a director labelled as a peddler of pop “content” who, wounded for the last time by a table of smug film critics, rewrites the ending to his latest endlessly-replicable soaper and, swimming upstream, seeks to wring two extra days from a fickle cast under the nose of state regulators suspicious about the sudden change in direction in a state- approved and financed picture. Kim Jee-woon handles the meta, film-within-a-film conceit by shooting Director Kim’s magnum opus in Universal Horror black-and-white while leaving his studio-bound escapades in vivid, drawing-room colour. The picture he’s making looks to be a Hitchcockian thriller of some kind–a metaphor for the labyrinthine cobweb the truly inspired must navigate in order to realize their vision.

SDAFF ’23: Monster

November 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: No Bears

November 8, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Iran, Pseudo-Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is about imprisonment–a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker’s heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran’s fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course–good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He’s directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza’s earbuds. “It’s not the same without you,” Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can’t pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn’t one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they’ve said. I’ve seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too–letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

November 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

SDAFF ’22: Riceboy Sleeps

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Choi Seung-yoon, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang
written and directed by Anthony Shim

by Walter Chaw Anthony Shim’s emotionally lacerating memoir-cum-melodrama is an intimately observed cultural piece molded around a Mildred Pierce framework. There’s nothing it doesn’t do reasonably well, even switching aspect ratios to reflect expanding consciousness and experience in a way that’s useful rather than simply distracting, yet there’s a certain tidiness to it all that makes it feel calculated. I think it ultimately fails to do what it most wants to do, that is, express the fullness of the immigrant experience as one based as much on hopeful aspiration as on struggle and generational trauma. I got the sad part to the extent the film is willing to go there in an honest way. The other part? Not so much. Maybe moments of connection and love would clash with the typical blue stateliness that defines the Canadian film industry: self-seriousness undermined by the picture’s slavishness to prestige formula. One part defiant individualism, one part obvious insecurity. Or maybe there isn’t a non-traumatic aspect to immigration and the challenges of assimilation, and Riceboy Sleeps is acknowledgment that life for perpetual aliens is just unrelieved–indeed, unrelievable–pain. I think, really, the problem with Riceboy Sleeps is that it arrives after watermarks like Minari, Columbus, Spa Night, Driveways, The Farewell, and Everything Everywhere All at Once–films that provide a fuller portrait of the Asian-American experience while also covering the key trigger points this one covers. If it were the first rather than the latest, it would be closer to revelation than to parody.

SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

SDAFF ’21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

November 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo’s films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo–and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can’t get out of his head anymore. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren’t necessarily invited.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

SDAFF ’21: Catch the Fair One

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Revenge, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kali Reis, Tiffany Chu, Michael Drayer, Kevin Dunn
screenplay by Josef Kubota Wladyka
directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Josef Kubota Wladyka follows his Colombian drug-trafficking adventure film Dirty Hands with the concussive, propulsive sex-trafficking thriller Catch the Fair One, announcing himself as an artist with the chops to handle an efficient action vehicle that functions as a vibrant social statement, too. It’s a rich, angry work that has not a hint of sentimentality to it nor an ounce of fat on it. The uncharitable would maybe call it too straightforward: a march, brutish and uninterrupted, with a message that’s more like a klaxon than a statement–but the picture is admirable for its unwillingness to gild the intensely ugly lily of vanished Native American women and white law enforcement’s utter lack of interest in doing anything about this epidemic. Kali Reis collaborated on the story, a personal one for her as one of the most visible spokespeople for the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement–visible because, as a boxer, she’s the WBA super lightweight world champion.

SDAFF ’21: 7 Days

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally… with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they’re getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren’s call of assimilation. I don’t use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I’m no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it’s necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

SDAFF ’21: Drive My Car

November 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car” is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose–inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation–is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the “Drink Me/Eat Me” invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland–the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven–or, on occasion, American soft rock–on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the play in which he’s playing the lead role. Some days, he’ll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine’s sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.

SDAFF ’21 – Introduction

November 1, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

by Walter Chaw Brian Hu and his ace staff, including programmer Christina Ree, walk the walk. Their work with the Pacific Arts Movement in San Diego is consistently rewarding, revealing the deficiencies in not just the distribution of Asian films in North American theatres but also the paucity of such fare in our mainstream festivals as well. Without the kind of careful curation provided by the San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF), these titles have a tendency to fall through the cracks. What Brian and his team do year upon year is vital for the visibility of Asian film in the United States and, not incidentally, for the cause of Asian-American filmmakers of the diaspora. It’s at this festival that Kogonada, then E. Joong-Eun Park, premiered his underseen debut, Late Summer. (He returned five years later with his breakout, Columbus.) It was one of the first fests to feature Better Luck Tomorrow, I Was a Simple Man, and Minari. It engaged in the discourse while I was still avoiding the discourse. Even as I joined the movement late, I was welcomed as if I’d hopped the train at the first station.

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

November 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, San Diego Asian Film Festival

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.

SDAFF ’19: To the Ends of the Earth

November 21, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Qatar, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Uzbekistan

***½/****
starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, Shota Sometani, Adiz Radjabov
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Kiyoshi Kurosawa's still best known to Western audiences, if he's known at all, as one of the progenitors of the Japanese J-Horror movement, which gained traction in the United States in the years immediately following 9/11. Once the U.S. joined Japan as an industrialized nation experiencing the detonation of a large-scale weapon of mass destruction over a populated area, I think it also took on Japan's cinematic mechanisms for coping: nihilistic horror films where evil comes with neither warning nor explanation–and city-levelling kaiju eiga in the form of a nearly-uninterrupted glut of superhero movies. Kurosawa's twin masterpieces, Cure and Pulse, deal in issues of technophobia and isolation with a painterly eye and a poet's patience. They are among the most frightening films of the last quarter-century, proving perpetually current as our world, and our reality with it, continues to fray. His movies used to feel like cautionary tales; now they feel like prophecy. Pulse, especially, with its tale of ghosts in the machine and airplanes falling from the sky, throbs with an insistent, hopeless melancholy that speaks to the essential loneliness of existence. It's as important a work in its way as anything by Camus or Sartre.

SDAFF ’19: Stray Dolls

November 19, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***/****
starring Geetanjali Thapa, Olivia DeJonge, Robert Aramayo, Cynthia Nixon
written by Charlotte Rabate & Sonejuhi Sinha
directed by Sonejuhi Sinha

by Walter Chaw Its title calling back to both Akira Kurosawa’s seminal noir Stray Dog and Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s miserablist masterpiece Stray Dogs, Sonejuhi Sinha’s Stray Dolls would fit most comfortably on a double-bill with Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Like it, Stray Dolls is set almost entirely in the impoverished world of permanent-residence motels, where the desperate do their best to grab their slice of the pie. Unlike Baker’s film, Sinha’s is essentially a crime movie centred on two room-cleaners: rough-and-tumble Dallas (Olivia DeJonge) and her roomie, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), from whom Dallas immediately steals her belongings and holds them as ransom. The price? Riz must steal something from a guest’s room that Dallas can turn over for a quick buck. The stakes are high for Riz, who, as we see in the first of the film’s cynical turns, has her passport confiscated by her employer, Una (Cynthia Nixon), who immediately, surreptitiously shreds it. Riz is well and truly on her own, more than she knows, even: marooned in a strange land without allies or papers.

SDAFF ’19: Lucky Grandma

November 18, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Corey Ha, Michael Tow, Woody Fu
written by Angela Cheng & Sasie Sealy
directed by Sasie Sealy

by Walter Chaw There's no arguing with the craft of Sasie Sealey's Lucky Grandma, nor are there any aspersions to cast on the diversity of its crew and the inspiration of its funding as the million-dollar winner of an AT&T- and Tribeca-sponsored screenplay contest. But its backstory is ultimately more interesting than the film itself. In the end, it feels like a support system for the star-making performance of its octogenarian lead, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club); it's not serious enough to make much of an emotional impact, was never meant to be an action film, and is just amusing enough to force comparisons with Stephen Chow's depictions of bad-ass grandmothers. In other words, Lucky Grandma sort of trundles along for a while and then stops. Along the way, however, there's that central performance, married to a few fine supporting turns (especially ex-basketballer Corey Ha as a gentle-souled bodyguard) and an end product that looks like it had a budget many times its actual budget. There's promise here as a feature debut.

SDAFF ’19: Driveways

November 15, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole, Brian Dennehy
written by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen
directed by Andrew Ahn

by Walter Chaw A sentimental film neither cheap nor schmaltzy, Andrew Ahn's sophomore feature Driveways is a rare beast in more ways than that. It's a measured character piece featuring standout performances from Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy, and a kid, Lucas Jaye, who, in his unaffectedness and ease, is one to watch. Along the way, the picture is also a calm conversation about racial tension, economic privation, and mental illness in these United States, following a woman, Kathy (Chau), who's investigating a house left to her by a sister recently passed. It's tempting to dismiss anything that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve (and so uncomfortable to look at directly sometimes for all the guilelessness), but you come to find that it's maybe the kind of palliative cure for the collective melancholy ailing us right now. Driveways doesn't condescend or try to teach something, it simply exists alongside its characters and gives us, and them, the space to recognize each other. In that, in this day of big entertainments and embittered satires, it's something like a unicorn.

SDAFF ’19: Just 6.5

November 13, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Iran, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi’s Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he’s bought for his parents. It’s the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime–and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn’t quit while he was ahead, “My eyes were still hungry.” The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world’s late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser’s tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It’s a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn’t take it because of “his honour,” but he might as well have. It makes no difference.