Saturday Night At The Movies
SIFF-ting Through Celluloid 2: Half-Life & Blood Brothers
By Dennis Hartley
The 2008 Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so I thought that for the next few posts I would take you along to some of this year’s screenings.
Navigating a film festival is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. This year’s SIFF is screening nearly 400 features and documentaries, over a period just shy of four weeks. It must be a wonderful opportunity for independently wealthy slackers, but for those of us who have to work for a living, it’s a little tough catching the North American premiere of that hot new documentary from Uzbekistan that is only screening once at 11:45am on a Tuesday. I’m lucky if I can catch a dozen films each year, but I do take consolation from my observation that the ratio of less-than-stellar (too many) to quality films (too few) at a film festival differs little from any Friday night crapshoot at the multiplex. The trick lies in developing a sixth sense for which titles “feel” like they would be up your alley (or, in my case, embracing your OCD and channeling it like a cinematic divining rod.)
Some of the films I will be reviewing will hopefully be “coming to a theatre near you” in the near future; on the other hand there may be a few that will only be accessible via DVD (the Netflix queue is our friend!). BTW, if you are lucky enough to go to Sundance, Toronto or Cannes, let’s get this out of the way now-Yes, I am quite aware that Seattle gets sloppy seconds from some of the more prestigious festivals; so go ahead, we’ll wait while you do your little “superior dance”. Okay, feel better? Good! Now let’s move on.
Half-Life: Global warming, family meltdown.
First up this week: Variety has already beat me to the punch (DAMME you, sirs!) and dubbed writer-director Jennifer Phang’s Half-Life as an “Asian-American Beauty”, so I’m going to describe this sometimes overreaching but consistently provocative suburban dramedy as The Ice Storm meets Donnie Darko. An audacious mélange of melodramatic soap opera, dark comedy, metaphysical conundrum and apocalyptic doom, the beautifully photographed Half-Life ambitiously poses a causality dilemma from the old “chicken-egg” school: Which came first, the dystopian society or the dysfunctional family?
The dystopia in question is our near “future”. Global warming has created worldwide coastal flooding, displacing millions of people. The sun (possibly dying) belches massive solar flares, which wreak havoc with technology and environment. Perky news mannequins chirp about a Tiananmen Square style massacre of environmental activists and tsk-tsk over a family murder-suicide conducted via chainsaw. A world gone mad!
Phang uses this sense of looming environmental and societal catastrophe as a metaphor for the emotional storms raging within the souls of her protagonists (much the same way that Ang Lee did in his dark suburban drama The Ice Storm) The global chaos serves as the backdrop for the travails of the single-parented Wu family, living in a Spielbergian California desert suburb and led by the exasperated Saura (Julia Nickson). Saura is the classic “mad housewife”; perpetually exasperated and dead on her feet from trying to juggle a full time job and still spend quality time attending to the needs of a live-in boyfriend (Ben Redgrave) and her two children. Saura, along with her introverted 8-year old son Timothy (Alexander Agate) and confused teenaged daughter Pam (Sanoe Lake) have all been dealing with abandonment issues since Dad took a hike some time back.
Young Timothy, who becomes the central character of the piece after a fashion, escapes from all the truly fucked-up adult behavior that surrounds him (and possibly averts years of therapy in the process) by losing himself in escapist reveries, triggered by his imaginative crayon doodles. These brief but visually arresting scenes are nicely interpreted with a colorful blend of CG effects and Waking Life style rotoscoping. There is a splash of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in these sequences (a traumatized child finding solace and personal empowerment through unfettered fantasizing). Unfortunately, Phang makes an arguably fatal misstep by taking this concept to a more literal plane. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say the film weirdly veers off into Carrie territory.
Phang wrestles some nice performances from a mostly unknown cast, particularly from Nickson and Lake, who give an air of immediacy and authenticity to the mother-daughter dynamic. We could have another Haley Joel Osment in young Agate. Redgrave is quite effective playing a certain type of creepy suburban WASP character that has become a staple in twisty indie family angst dramas (e.g. Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather, Dylan Baker in Happiness, Brad William Henke in Me and You and Everyone We Know).
Assessing Half-Life is one of those tough calls. I didn’t “hate” it- but I’m still vacillating as to whether or not I “liked” this film. I do think it is safe to say that Jennifer Phang shows great promise, and is definitely a director to keep an eye out for. This is one of those made-to-order-for-Sundance entries that diehard art-film enthusiasts delight in; so undoubtedly there are others who will detest it with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Blood Brothers: Woo me, baby.
No film festival would be complete without a fistful of entries from the Hong Kong action factory. One of the more visually stylish genre pics I’ve seen so far at this year’s SIFF is from first-time director Alexi Tan. Although the story is pure pulp and could have stood a little script doctoring, it’s shot with the rich tones of a Bertolucci film and plays like a 90-minute dance mix of Sergio Leone’s greatest hits. Produced by Hong Kong cinema legend John Woo, Blood Brothers is a noodle western posing as a gangster saga, with a narrative more than a tad reminiscent of Woo’s 1990 classic, Bullet in the Head.
It’s a story setup that you may have seen once or twice. Two brothers, Feng (Daniel Wu) and Hu (Tony Yang) make a pact with their lifelong buddy Kang (Liu Ye) to break out of their backwater hick village and head off to an exotic and sophisticated metropolis to find fame, fortune and, uh, exotic and sophisticated babes. Think HBO’s Entourage, substituting the race to the top of the criminal underworld of 1930s Shanghai for success in present day Hollywood as the brass ring of the tale. Handsome and charismatic Kang is the babe magnet of the trio (he would be the “movie star”, the Vincent Chase if you will). His younger brother Hu is the frequently overshadowed and more chronically underachieving of the two siblings (um-there’s your Johnny Drama). And last but not least, there is the physically intimidating, fiercely protective Kang, who is thuggish but cunningly “street smart” (sort of a morph between Eric and “Turtle”). Or, perhaps we could just refer to them as Michael, Fredo and Sonny Corleone? Naw…that’s too easy!
To carry the Entourage analogy further, the “Man” in Shanghai who can make or break the three friend’s fortunes happens to be (wait for it)…a movie producer. In actuality, Boss Hong (Sun Honglei) is more adept at producing piles of bullet-riddled corpses than he is at producing films; it’s a ruthless propensity that has made him one of Shanghai’s most successful and feared crime lords. Among his many enterprises is the Paradise Night Club, which is where Hu finds a job and brother Feng spots an object of instant desire: the lovely Lulu (Shu Qi), Boss Hong’s squeeze and the requisite femme fatale of the piece. Serendipity lands all three pals into Boss Hong’s employ, and eventually into his most trusted inner circle, where friendship and blood ties get sorely tested by the corruption of power (see Godfather II, Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America, etc).
Despite the fact that this is a somewhat cliché gangster tale, and has a lot of plot points that don’t bear up so well under closer scrutiny, I really enjoyed this film because it is done with such panache. I don’t know what it is about those Hong Kong directors, but they’ve got some kind of cinematic Kavorka that just oozes “cool”. Just watch any of John Woo’s pre-Hollywood era classics, and it’s easy to see why Tarantino and his contemporaries geek out so much over this genre and do their best to ape it in their own work (although the American imitators, try as they might, can never quite match the effortless vibe of their overseas inspirations; I liken it to comparing Kansas with Yes). Genre fans will want to watch for domestic distribution or perhaps a DVD down the road.
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