Category: 4. Joe Bendel

By Joe Bendel. There is a fugitive in the woods. He might be an innocent man, or a dangerous psychopath. Determining the truth is a tricky proposition in Dreileben, a trilogy of interlocking films produced for German television in the tradition of Red Riding, which screens in its entirety this coming Saturday as part of the 49th New York Film Festival.

Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead begins the cycle, but keeps most of the crime drama off-screen. While visiting his dying mother in the hospital, the convicted murderer Molesch essentially walks away from his police guard. A manhunt ensues. To shield him from inquiries, Dr. Drier gives some time off to Johannes, the nursing intern on duty that fateful night. It allows the pre-med student time to pursue a passionate in-the-moment romance with the tempestuous Ana, a Bosnian refugee working as a maid in the hotel that will eventually factor into the police investigation. He might even forget Sarah Drier, the head doctor’s daughter, who dumped Johannes in no uncertain terms.

Petzold’s Dead and Dominik Graf’s subsequent Don’t Follow Me Around are like some of Claude Chabrol’s craftier late films, presenting the nefarious business obliquely, while ostensibly focusing on the workaday lives of those seemingly on its margins. Yet Petzold creates a palpable undercurrent of menace that carries over for his filmmaker colleagues. He also presents an unusually dark and intense vision of young love (or lust) that sometimes borders on the unsettling.

Luna Mijovic burns up the screen as Ana, viscerally projecting her raw self-destructive impulses and insecurities. Jacob Matschenz is also quite effective keeping the audience off-balance as the everyman Johannes, while Vijessna Ferkic is appropriately hot and shallow as Sarah Drier. Indeed, not only is Dead the strongest film of the trilogy, it also (quite conveniently) stands alone better than its companion films.

Still, for those willing to buy into Dreileben, Graf’s Follow is also quite clever, nicely explaining a few of the confusing moments in Dead. Johanna is a single-mother police psychologist in the tradition of the old Profiler show, sent to help the corrupt and incompetent local constabulary capture Molesch. Yet, she is considerably more interested in revisiting some important episodes from her past with her old friend Vera, with whom she is staying. We also briefly meet Marcus Kreil, the one competent copper who will be featured prominently in the final film. Continue reading Libertas @ The 2011 New York Film Festival: Dreileben

By Joe Bendel. The geography of Zanskar is decidedly harsh. While physically cold and arid, its position as a minority Buddhist enclave amid the tinder box of Kashmir is politically and culturally precarious. As a result, the needs of Zanskaris, particularly the education of their children, have not exactly been a high priority for either the national or local Indian authorities. Concerned with the nearly uniform illiteracy in Zanskar and the potential extinction of the Tibetan language, two monks led a group of Zanskari children to distant Manali, where a place in school and hope for a better life awaited them. Their arduous trek is documented in Frederick Marx’s Journey from Zanskar: a Monk’s Vow to Children (trailer here), which opened in New York this past Friday.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, “Geshe” is an honorific bestowed on the completion of an advanced course of academic studies. As a Geshe originally from Zanskar, Geshe Lobsang Yonten keenly understood the value education and was alarmed by the lack of opportunities for children in his native region. Identifying Zanskar’s most promising children, the Geshe and his order arrange their enrollment at a school in Manali, where they will be taught both Tibetan and western academic curriculum. However, getting there will be a trick. Continue reading A Perilous Educational Journey: LFM Reviews Journey from Zanskar

By Joe Bendel. In the dead of December, New York sports fans turn their attention to Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings. Of course, Yankee fans are always hoping their well-heeled team pulls off a blockbuster deal. Yet the business side of baseball holds a fascination even for fans of so-called ‘small market’ teams. Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane tried to radically alter the business operations of shallow-pocketed teams. His somewhat successful efforts spawned a host of imitators, a nonfiction bestseller from Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis, and a subsequent, long-in-development Hollywood adaptation, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, which opens today nationwide.

As a teenager, Beane was recruited hard by MLB scouts. Foregoing a full-ride Stanford scholarship, Beane pursued glory on the baseball diamond and failed badly, scratching out a front office management career instead. As Moneyball opens, his team has just been knocked out of the post-season by the dreaded Yankees and is about to be gutted by free agency. With an owner unwilling to pony up the big bucks, Beane spurns the star system of free agency, using unconventional methods to select players.

With the help of his Ivy-League educated numbers cruncher, Beane signs statistically under-valued players, placing greater emphasis on on-base-percentage than sexier stats like home runs or stolen bases. This produces a roster full of players considered rejects by the sports media, because they mostly were. They were cheap, though, and could fulfill their specific roles.

Not surprisingly for a film co-written by Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball takes a few liberties with the historical record, ignoring the fact that Beane’s predecessor (and current Mets GM) Sandy Alderson initiated the team’s “sabermetric” approach. Unfortunately, Alderson looks nothing like Brad Pitt, so that’s Hollywood for you. Using the Yankees as a symbol of large market imperialism is also getting to be a tired cliché, especially considering many of the players on their late 1990’s championship teams were farm system products. Continue reading Small Market Blues: LFM Reviews Moneyball

By Joe Bendel. At best, the peasants live at subsistence level. The workers are exploited and young entrepreneurs forgo today to invest for the future. Yet there are those making enormous sums of money and consuming conspicuously in contemporary China. Whether it is called globalism, crony capitalism, or old fashioned authoritarianism, Guo Xiaolu (born in China, based in Britain) gives a human face to those grappling with realities of today’s China in Once Upon a Time Proletarian (trailer here), which screens at the Asia Society this Sunday, launching their latest film series, Visions of a New China.

Like a documentary sampler platter, Proletarian presents twelve (or an uneven baker’s dozen) sketches of life in post-Olympics go-go China. Not surprisingly, the old peasant is bitter, expressing open nostalgia for the days of the Mao regime, when the peasantry was at the top of the country’s social hierarchy. Migrant workers are nearly as disillusioned, including those employed at luxury hotels. Though it might sound more pleasant than factory or farm work, their long shifts without bathroom breaks certainly would not pass muster with OSHA. Perhaps most intriguing is the young partner in a prospective chain of economy hotels. She is overseeing the construction of their second hotel, which when finished will cater to construction workers. That’s one way to ensure quality control.

As connective tissue, Guo films young school children reading ironic stories (the term joke would be too strong) from their readers, which do not really relate to the following profiles per se, but express the peculiar zeitgeist of unbalanced times. Eventually, though, Guo turns her camera on them in earnest, getting a sense of their personalities and ambitions. They are all bright and engaging. Indeed, they represent the best of their country’s future, yet for some reason the government is trying its best to make them scarce (particularly the girls, who appear somewhat under-represented). Continue reading Vérité Visions of a New China: LFM Reviews Once Upon a Time Proletarian

By Joe Bendel. Prepare to watch the themes and motifs of the Marvel superhero universe get put through a Hong Kong action blender. (And as the Marvel editors used to say in the 1980’s: ‘nuff said.)  Produced before his recent epic Shaolin as well as the blockbuster Captain America (that it parallels in unlikely ways), Benny Chan’s clobbering City Under Siege (trailer here), screens this Saturday as part of the San Francisco Film Society’s Hong Kong Cinema series.

In a secret bunker in Malaysia, the Imperial Japanese military was perfecting their super-soldier formula. The results were not pretty to look at, but undeniably effective. Fortunately, an Allied bombing raid halted the program in its tracks. In more or less present day, Twin-Dagger Sunny is a terrible circus performer, stuck playing the sad clown because nobody trusts him throwing knives. A bit Gumpish, Sunny is forced to help some of his less savory circus colleagues looking to plunder gold from the secret Japanese bunker. Of course, the knuckleheads accidentally let loose a major dose of the mutant soldier formula.

Yet, for reasons never coherently explained, the chemical compounds do not affect Sunny in the same manner as the others. Washing up on the Hong Kong shore (through a set of circumstances borrowing heavily from Dracula), Twin-Dagger finds himself in the Klump fat suit, but once he dries out he resumes his normal skin-and-bones body weight. Somewhat relieved, he happily stumbles across Angel Chan, the gorgeous newscaster who captures his improvised super-heroics on film.

Suffering from the criminal mayhem of Sunny’s freaky-looking fellow mutants, Hong Kong needs a hero. Seizing the opportunity, Chan becomes his agent, putting the affable Sunny on a full media tour (Steve Rogers, can you relate?). They also have the dubious protection of permanently engaged Men-in-Black, Sun “Old Man” Hao and Cheng “Tai” Xiuhua, who are using him as bait to draw in the marauding mutants. Right, good plan.

It is important to understand Aaron Kwok is a huge pop star in Hong Kong, because his underwhelming screen presence does not help Siege anymore than it did Christina Yao’s otherwise striking Empire of Silver. Still, Siege’s all-star ensemble and Benny Chan’s razzle dazzle largely compensate for the weak protagonist.

Frankly, martial arts up-and-comer Wu Jing almost usurps Kwok’s Twin-Dagger, capably carrying the film as Agent “Old Man,” while the charismatic Jingchu Zhang holds her own kicking butt as his intended. Their weaponized acupuncture is also a cool twist, neatly choreographed by action directors Ma Yuk-sing and Li Chung-chi. With Shu Qi looking radiant enough to convincingly inspire the monstrous chief mutant’s beauty-and-the-beast affections and enough pyrotechnics to level a mid-sized city, Siege pretty much hits all the bases.

Sure, Siege can be a touch melodramatic and over-the-top. It is a HK genre film. Viewers have to check their film snobbery at the door and get down with the chaos. There is definitely a lot of the latter, rendered with appropriate adrenaline – and the film also suggests the action pairing of Wu Jing and Jingchu Zhang is worth repeating in future films. Highly entertaining for fanboys, Siege screens Saturday afternoon (9/24) and Sunday evening (9/25) at the New Peoples Cinema as part of SFFS’s Hong Kong Cinema showcase.

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Fifty years ago, there were still quiet family neighborhoods in Hong Kong, where everyone knew everyone’s business. Writer-director Alex Law pays tribute to this innocent world of his youth gone by in the unabashedly sentimental Echoes of the Rainbow, Hong Kong’s recent official submission for best foreign language Oscar consideration, which screens during the San Francisco Film Society’s Hong Kong Cinema showcase.

Shot on-location around historic Wing Lee Street, Rainbow saved that last remnant of “old” (meaning 1960’s era) Hong Kong from redevelopment after his partly autobiographical feature won the 2010 Berlin Film Festival’s Crystal Bear in the children’s division. Run down but respectable, it is a neighborhood where a cobbler’s family might live. Times are difficult, but the Law Family sacrifices for the sake of older brother Desmond’s education. A star in the classroom and on the track field, all their hopes rest in him. Continue reading Hong Kong Cinema Triple-Header @ The San Francisco Film Society: City Under Siege, Echoes of the Rainbow, Punished