June 12, 2005|I met Greg Harrison on a sunny Colorado day. Lanky and stylish, if a little over-dressed for the temperature in black pinstripe-on-pinstripe, his appearance betrayed a man who's been living out of a suitcase and looking at the indistinguishable insides of hotels. In town to pimp November, his sophomore follow-up to Groove, Mr. Harrison has surprising heroes and an interesting story of how he got into the business; a shame that his film is an empty experiment in styles and homages that tend to titillate the festival audience–where November has found its momentum–but infuriate or bore the wider audience to which the picture now aspires. It looks great, but it's a gimmick stretched just barely long enough to fit the "feature" description. Mr. Harrison seems like a smart guy with a good, healthy respect for the history of alternative cinema. Here's hoping his next project is up to his speed.

June 5, 2005|There's perhaps no better illustration of the generation gap between Chinese persons who've grown up in the United States and their immigrant parents than sitting down at a table in the conference area of Denver's Hotel Monaco with Joan Chen, crowned the "Chinese Elizabeth Taylor" at the tender age of 14, and Alice Wu, the young former software engineer making her writing/directing debut with the lesbian ethnic sitcom Saving Face. Resplendent at 44, Ms. Chen has a deliberate way of speaking that's almost as intimidating as the fact that she never once met my eyes, while Ms. Wu, talking fast, using her hands, addressed me in a way forthright, almost aggressive. I felt admonished more than once by Ms. Chen as she talked about the creative arts as essentially selfish, and I felt challenged a time or two out of the blue by the irrepressible Ms. Wu, who chose to take adversarial positions on a few occasions where there wasn't any kind of natural polarity. Two different ways of approaching conversation, both instantly recognizable from my own experiences with a Chinese mother and father and the women with whom they would occasionally set me up before I did the near-unthinkable and married a white girl. Blonde, too. You could hear the screams back in Nanking–and Cape Cod, come to think of it.