Month: July 2012

Robert Flaherty & The Origins of the Documentary: LFM Reviews A Boatload of Wild Irishmen

By Joe Bendel. Robert Flaherty is considered the father of documentary filmmaking. With Nanook of the North, he not only launched the modern documentary film genre, he also introduced the ethical questions that continue to dog non-fiction filmmakers. The legacy of Flaherty and the relatively small handful of films he actually completed is explored in Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín’s A Boatload of Wild Irishmen, which screens as part of this week’s Robert Flaherty series at the Anthology Film Archives.

Boatload opens with the dramatic closing scene of Flaherty’s masterwork, Man of Aran (see above). Struggling against a powerful surge, the salt-of-the-earth fishermen fight their way to shore. Flaherty did not just happen to be in the right place at the right time to capture the action, however. He either sent them out into the roiling tide, or they volunteered to go. Accounts differ, but everyone seems to agree the money Flaherty was offering played a role. Even then it would not have been much by Hollywood standards, but to residents of the Ireland’s hardscrabble Aran Island, it was significant.

Indeed, Boatload’s various on-screen commentators make it clear that staging scenes was a major part of Flaherty’s working method. Opinions regarding the Irish-American filmmaker appear to be mixed at best amongst contemporary Aran Islanders and Irish film scholars. However, such criticism of Flaherty’s authenticity is largely based on current standards of documentary filmmaking, which are rather selectively applied.

Groundbreaking documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (far right).

Ó Curraidhín paints a picture of Flaherty as more of an adventurer than an auteur. Rather than Jacob Riis, P.T. Barnum would be better considered his forerunner. So what if he did stage a scene, or a dozen? It was for the sake of a good show. In contrast, when recent documentaries like Gasland play veracity games, it is far more serious, because they are advocacy broadsides, arguing for punitive measures targeting specific companies and industries.

Clearly, Flaherty was not a take-only-pictures-leave-only-footprints kind of documentarian, as the interview with his Inuit granddaughter fully attests. Yet the Samoans still regularly screen Flaherty’s Moana, enjoying the sight of their ancestors on-screen, even if the episodes they are recreating were from generations before them. Obviously, the point is that there are many different ways to come to terms with Flaherty’s small oeuvre.

Refraining from passing judgment on Flaherty, Boatload emphasizes his larger than life persona and the lasting audience for his films. Ultimately, the people have spoken. Considerably more film patrons will attend screenings of Flaherty’s films this year than those of silent western superstar Tom Mix by a wide margin, a trend that continues this week at AFA. Informative and evenhanded, A Boatload of Wild Irish is a satisfying survey of Flaherty’s work and controversies. Recommended for those who enjoy films about filmmaking, it screens this Saturday through next Monday (7/7-7/9) in New York at the Anthology Film Archives.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on July 3rd, 2012 at 2:41pm.

LFM Reviews 10+10 @ The 2012 New York Asian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Taiwan is a country with a tragic history and rich legacy of pop music. Both factor prominently when ten established Taiwanese filmmakers and ten emerging new talents were commissioned by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival to create a five minute films expressing the country’s unique character. The resulting anthology 10+10 screens this coming Thursday as an official selection of the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.

Viewers going into 10+10 should not get hung up on consistency. These twenty filmmakers will cover a lot of emotional and thematic ground. The tension between tradition and modernization will be a recurring motif, beginning with Wang Toon’s opener, in which a bickering pair of cousins treks up to a remote shrine. They intent to curry favor with the spirits by showing them the 3-D DVD of Avatar. It is a quiet but clever piece.

Nostalgia is also on tap in Wu Nien-jen’s A Grocery Called Forever. Depicting a spirited elderly woman who insists on keeping her family’s corner store open, it is a pleasant slice of life. Taiwan’s aging population play central roles in several constituent films, perhaps most touchingly in Cheng Wen-tang’s Old Man and Me. Told from the persona of a now deceased man suffering from Alzheimer’s, it serves as his thank-you to the townspeople who searched the countryside for him when he wandering off to his demise.

Given the approximate five minute durations, many of the installments are rather sketch-like. Indeed, entries like Wang Shaudi’s Destined Eruption and Yang Ya-che’s The Singing Boy seem to end just as they are getting started. However, several pack quite a bit of narrative into their limited running times. Somehow, Chang Tso-Chi’s Sparkles shoehorns the entire 1949 Battle of Kinmen Island into less than ten minutes. A powerful war film, it follows an innocent girl being escorted to the island’s doctor by the Nationalists, as they desperately try to hold off the invading Communists.

From "The Debut."

Featuring plenty of explosions, Sparkles is probably one of the most NYAFF-esque films in 10+10. The other would be Chung Mong-hong’s satisfyingly dark Reverberation. What starts as a teenaged bullying drama takes a dramatic u-turn into gangster territory. Karma will be a hard thing.

Easily the strongest shorts are those directly inspired by music. Chen Kuo-fu’s The Debut is a lovely ghost story, portraying the spectral encouragement offered to a discouraged pop ingénue by one of the great torch singers from yesteryear. Likewise, Rendy Hou Chi-jan pays tribute to the sentimental ballads of the 1960’s, depicting one song’s power to transcend time. Ranking just a notch below the lyrical pair, Cheng Yu-chieh’s Unwritten delivers some ironic laughs satirizing the concessions made by the Taiwanese film industry to the mainland market. Frankly, it is increasingly relevant to Hollywood as well.

Not every film works particularly well. Wei Te-sheng’s Debut ought to be a DVD extra for his aboriginal war drama Seediq Bale, essentially following his first-time actor Lin Ching-tai as they take the epic to the Venice Film Festival. Arguably, the low point comes with Kevin Chu Yen-ping’s uncomfortably manipulative and awkwardly didactic The Orphans.

From Wang Toon’s opening short in "10+10."

Surprisingly, there is a fair amount of star power in 10+10, including Shu Qi looking typically radiant in marquis contributor Hou Hsiao-hsien’s slight but nonetheless engaging closer La Belle Epoque. Kwai Lun Mei also graces Leon Dai’s oomph-lacking Key. Despite attempts to glam her down, she remains a vivid screen presence.

By their nature, anthology films are inherently uneven. Yet there are enough good things going on in 10+10 to satisfy connoisseurs of either short films or Asian cinema. On balance, it is an effective sampling of Taiwanese cinema, well worth a look when it screens this coming Thursday (7/5) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 at 1:31pm.

Thai Bikini Zombie Attack: LFM Reviews Dead Bite @ The 2012 New York Asian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. If a group of bikini-clad women are attacked by marauding zombies, you are apt to see a lot of bikini-clad zombies before long. That inescapable logic is pretty much the guiding principle for Joey Boy’s Dead Bite (trailer here), which screens with authority during the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.

Joey Boy is a Thai rapper, who convinced his group, Gankor Club, to play themselves in his scrappily independent zombie-mermaid religious cult movie, probably with the help of their co-stars’ wardrobe. Due to the framing device, we know Gankor Club’s latest gig went profoundly wrong. Basically, it was supposed to be the old three hour cruise, shooting promotional videos while partying with some gorgeous women. Unfortunately, they chose the wrong isle: Mermaid Island.

The first clue would be the marine zombies shambling out of the waves. Trying to take refuge inland, they run smack into the Forest Goddess, who rules her Mermaid sect through fear and sexual tension. Of course, Joey Boy and his mates had no idea what they were stumbling into. Yet, for some reason inexplicably connected to WWII, Japanese tourist Miyuki intentionally came to Mermaid Island to plunder a mermaid mummy. It might hold the secret of immortality or something. Meanwhile, the Gankor dudes are dying like flies and then popping up again as the undead.

Dead Bite is sort of like a Piranha 3D, except it is 2D and Thai, both of which make it way cooler. Evidently, Joey Boy and Gankor Club are the real deal in Thailand and also have major cred with their American counterparts. As actors they certainly do not seem very self-conscious, throwing themselves into their Scooby and Shaggy roles with admirable energy.

Thai zombie girls.

As an auteur, Joey Boy keeps it all quite snappy. There is also a strange postmodern aspect to his self-referential story that might be purely accidental. Of course, Dead Bite would not be possible without its game supporting cast of attractive women, including Kumiko Sugaho and Lakana Wattanawongsiri as Miyuki and the Forest Goddess, respectively, whose contributions are obvious. Despite all the lunacy and ogling, they more or less maintain their dignity throughout. Surely their next stop will be Cannes with Joe “Uncle Boonmee” Weerasethakul.

It is nice to see a director’s vision up on-screen, knowing he made exactly the film he intended. Gleefully manic and unabashedly randy (in a PG-13 sort of way), Dead Bite is everything a zombie beach movie ought to be. Just good, clean, blood-splattered fun, it is highly recommended for fans of a wide array of B-movies when it screens next Friday (7/6) and the following Wednesday (7/11) as this year’s NYAFF continues at the Walter Reade Theater.

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 at 1:29pm.

LFM Reviews The King of Pigs @ The 2012 New York Asian Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. If the professional worrywarts really wanted to end bullying, they would start subsidizing karate lessons for the small and less assertive, but it seems they’d rather wring their hands—on national TV. Yes, it is a problem in many cases, but the peculiarly American disinclination toward hierarchy is a positive countervailing influence. This is not necessarily the case in Korea. What we might call bullying is the institutionalized order of things in Yeun Sang-ho’s thematically mature animated feature, The King of Pigs (trailer here), which screens during this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

As King opens, it appears safe to say two formerly bullied grown adults have not broken the chain of abuse. Both Hwang Kung-min and Jung Jong-suk are having bad days—lives might be more accurate. Finding himself at a particularly low point, Hwang reaches out to Jung, whom he has not talked to in years. Eventually, we will learn why they drifted apart.

Hwang wants to talk about Kim Chul, the mysterious transfer student they befriended in their middle school years. Though they came from different backgrounds, Hwang and Jung were both “Pigs,” the proles of their school, who were merciless picked on by the ruling “Dogs,” by virtue of their superior social status or brute strength. An outsider in every sense, Kim threatens their established order like a violently rage-stoked James Dean.

From "The King of Pigs."

For obvious reasons, Hwang and Jung fall under the spell of their rebellious protector. However, the deck is stacked against Kim by the Dogs and their enablers. As he realizes the futility of his position, Kim really starts to get dark and stormy.

This is no after school special. King easily features some of the festival’s most brutal beatdowns. Playing the Battle Royale would be like a reprieve for these kids. Yet, as surely exaggerated as it must be, one cannot help but feel that Yeun is tapping into something very real and deep in his countrymen’s collective psyche.

While at times hallucinatory, Yeun’s animation is mostly straight forward and in the viewer’s face, keeping the film rooted in a sense of urgency. His characters are profoundly flawed and painfully human. Actions have consequences that ripple outward, impacting others, years after the fact. There is also no small degree of class warfare at play, notwithstanding Hwang’s relatively well-to-do, but socially shunned Karaoke owning family. Yet viewers can also see how Jung’s class envy metastasizes into something quite ugly and anti-social.

Holding the distinction of being the first Korean animated feature to screen at Cannes, the angry but cinematic King is absolutely not for children. It lands a heck of a punch though. Despite the somewhat inconsistent pacing, it is viscerally effective. Recommended for hardy animation fans, The King of Pigs screens as part of the 2012 NYAFF this coming Saturday (7/7) and Sunday (7/8), with screenwriter-director Yeun in attendance both dates.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 at 1:25pm.