M/Other [1999] • Japan

Suwa Nobuhiro's follow up to the marvelous 2/Duo. This is another mostly improvised, watching-paint-dry indie flick—although it's more mature in content and character. Makiko Watanabe is superb as Aki, a young woman who's shacked up with an older guy, Tetsuro, who brings his eight year old son to live with them while his wife recuperates from a car accident. At first Aki resents the idea, mainly because she wasn't consulted. She knows she will be tasked with most of the chores related to caring for the child, but soon comes to like her new role and is conflicted when it's coming to an end.

M/Other is a subtle film. Competing, confused emotions and transformation of character are observed, and executed, at a very high level.

★★★★★

Director: Nobuhiro Suwa
Starring: Tomokazu Miura, Makiko Watanabe, Ryudai Takahashi, Hiroo Fuseya

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Buddha Mountain 观音山 (Guan Yin Shan) [2010] • China

By-the-numbers indie. I didn't believe any of the actors made contact with the feelings the characters were supposed to be feeling because everything comes off as an impression, rather than anything of substance. Li Yu, who directed 2007's wonderful Lost in Beijing, doesn't seem to have a story to tell here, as much as simply having a desire to make a film in this style, and feature disillusionment as a theme. The hand-held camera-work didn't bother me, but the framing and composition of shots did. They seemed forced and almost precious, and the actors merely vogued their way through scenes.

Fan Bingbing, who was so good in Lost in Beijing, her first film with director Li, seems to treat this one like it's automatic art-house street cred. The story is uninspired: Three young drifters meet a single mom who is still mourning the death of her only son, and they all have an angst competition. That should be indie grill; it's not in this case. It's just shots of people pensively staring off into space, and scenes of people pensively walking around aimlessly while the fog rolls by and the music meanders. Indie film school 101. It was very hard to finish this film because I didn't care about any of the characters. Caring about characters may not be necessary, although the director clearly hoped for it, so I'm going to make up a word to describe my experience, to differentiate it from not caring. I discared  the characters.

★★

Director: Yu Li
Starring: Sylvia Chang, Bo-lin Chen, Bingbing Fan, Helong Wang

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She, a Chinese [2009] • UK, France, Germany, China

Frustrated with life in a rural village, she's slapped by her mom, groped by her boyfriend, raped by a truck driver, moves to Shenzhen. Fired from a factory job on her first day, she volunteers to work at a Love Salon. Her lover gets killed (good thing he had a pile of money underneath his mattress). She moves to London and gets a job but her first paycheck is taken back because she has no bank account. She goes to work in a massage parlor and marries a wrinkly old white guy with a bank account who reads the newspaper too often and his cat dies. She gets pregnant by an Indian whose cultural identity is calling him home rather than pushing him away, so he leaves her. The quantity of bummers in this film is so thick it skips along too rapidly and loses credibility.

Lu Huang as Mei (The 'She' of the title) does a fine job plowing her way through the endless misfortune (she did the same thing in Blind Mountain—a great film), so props to her. The story, however, which has a heart and good intentions, asks so much of its characters it stretches the limits of credulity creating distance instead of empathy. It begins to suggest that the circumstances "She" gets into are a result of personal selfishness, or stupidity, rather than exposing or exploring the difficult climb from rural Chinese village to downtown London.

I recommend this film because many of the realities and situations it points at are worth considering. I just wish it would have pointed at a few less and explored them more deeply, or with a whisper of hope. I've got nothing against bleak films, but She, A Chinese gives the impression that once the desire to break free of tradition and hopeless circumstances begins, a stream of unrelenting nausea is likely to follow. Which in turn begs the question of whether the scenarios depicted in the film are the result of the personal characteristics of this particular She, in a sense becoming a character study, or if they are some sort of warning siren or social commentary on what a bitch life is if you begin from a certain place, look a certain way, and have unrealistic expectations concerning what can be done about it.

Broken into discreet elements—the film is broken into discreet parts with the use of title cards that offer sometimes whimsical commentary on various events—the execution is pretty good, but the overall impact is diluted. The performances are solid and the director does a good job making things appear realistic so it might just be a case of truth being harder to get on board with than fiction.

★★★

Director: Xiaolu Guo
Starring: Huang Lu, Wei Yi Bo, Geoffrey Hutchings, Chris Ryman, Hsinyi Liu

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Girlfriend • Someone Please Stop the World [2004] • Japan

More Ryuichi Hiroki. This one is love story between a young woman photographer, Kyoko, who gets an assignment to pick a woman off the street and take nude photos of her for a men's magazine, and the woman who turns up as the subject of that assignment, Miho. Kiyoko's professional ethos is one of getting to know her subject deeply, be it a fruit plate or a human being, and as she does this she finds her interest in this particular subject, Miho, turning into fondness. The feeling is mutual, but this isn't a gay-themed film per se. There are just no barriers in the way that might prevent these two wandering souls from exploring each other, trying to find a positive relationship in a world they feel disconnected from, saddened by. The two performances are good enough, but not great, while the underlying drama and psychological trauma seem less satisfying.

I'm never quite happy with films that explore a lesbian liaison by setting up one of the participants as frustrated by bad relationships with jerkball men. It doesn't have to be that way. In this case it's Kyoko, but she has the personality of being frustrated by more than her bad boyfriends. She's a bit frustrated with herself and is trying to find a comfortable compromise between photography as art and photography as commerce. She's idealistic and a bit peculiar. When she meets Miho, who is angry about her father who left her family years ago and hasn't been in contact since, she meets someone who's more bummed out with life than she is so she's able to feel a little bit better about herself, and seems genuinely interested in, listening to Miho's stories. It's not unusual to become attracted to someone that makes you feel better about yourself.

Miho agrees to pose nude for Kyoko partly, well, mostly, as a means of getting back at, and getting the attention of, her father. I'm not sure about that as a method or as a solution but she's hurt and angry and she wants her father's attention. Kyoko and Miho are both presented as empathetic outsiders. Following them is a reasonably enjoyable romp in indie ennui but it doesn't wrap itself up into a grand story.

Girlfriend is part of the Love Collection, a loose series of DV shot features from 2004 with the common theme of love. Other entries include Kihatsusei no onna (A Volatile Woman) by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, OLDK by Masahiro Hara, Nejirin bou by Tadashi Tomioka, Moon and Cherry by Yuki Tanada and Kokoro to karada by Hiroshi Ando.

★★★

Director: Ryuichi Hiroki
Starring: Aoba Kawai, Tomorowo Taguchi, Kinuwo Yamada, Kazuhiro Suzuki, Jason Gray, Aya Sugimoto
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Catfish [2010] • USA

The other Facebook movie. The most surprisingly thoughtful little film of the year. That's all I'm saying.

★★★★★

Directors: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
Starring: Megan Faccio, Melody C. Roscher, Ariel Schulman, Yaniv Schulman

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Twitchfilm (Ben Umstead)
Twitchfilm (Todd Brown and the reason that's all I'm saying.

Stolen Life 生死劫 (Sheng si jie) [2005] • China

This is one of those films that exposes a segment of Chinese life that will likely make you recoil in despair—ever more when you know the particulars of the film are based on a true story. There's subtle and deep social commentary embracing this extremely sad tale of family, love, and one woman's struggle to survive in modern China. I was very surprised by the script, surprised by the brutality of its story.

Yan'ni (Zhou Xun) is a young woman whose parents, intellectuals from the previous generation, have abandoned her for the most part, shuffling her off to live in near poverty with her uncaring granny and aunt. She secretly gets accepted into university, raising her class status momentarily and giving her hope for a better life, but when she falls in love with a truck driver and gets pregnant, her life unravels.

It might seem like a giant spoiler to reveal that the man Yan'ni falls in love with, Muyu, isn't in love with her. He has a business plan in which Yan'ni has an important role. Muyu seduces young women, impregnates them, and then sells their babies. The film isn't structured in such a way that it leads up to this as a revelation. We are made aware early on of the impending doom Yan'ni will experience and our experience as a viewer is centered on how Yan'ni will deal with it. The film is not an expose as much as a character study.

Zhou Xun is one of the most compelling actresses working today and she delivers right from the start. I don't think a lesser actress could have made this film work as well as it does. It's powerful, frightening stuff.

★★★★

Director: Li Shaohong
Starring: Zhou Xun, Wu Jun, Cai Ming, Su Xiaoming, Zhao Chengshun

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The Evening Class

2/Duo (2/dyuo) 2 Duo [1997] • Japan

This is a rare gem. The feature film debut of director Nobuhiro Suwa. It's a no-budget, mostly improvised slice of emotionally repressed life which observes a young couple for a short period of time as they struggle to communicate. I wouldn't say things are going badly for them at this particular point in their lives, they seem very much in love, but the relationship is uncomfortable.

Kei (Nishijima) is a struggling actor, freeloading off Yu (Eri Yu) which makes him impulsive and insecure resulting in unpredictable behavior, fits of anger, and a proposal of marriage. Yu works in a boutique as a shop assistant and seems to be playing the archetype of the abused and unappreciated Japanese woman who tackles her fate with a Zen determinism. Her habit of laughing during the most tense and awkward moments makes her appear a little unstable but also very real, almost surreal.

Even without a handful of scenes where the characters (the actors?) are interviewed about their feelings by an off-screen voice, the film has a fly-on-the-wall documentary feel. 2 Duo is a quietly disturbing character study and the blurring of fiction with documentary might serve to enhance the impact but I'm not interested in critiquing the film from that angle. This is a film which lets us observe the surface interactions of a couple characters that clearly have immense depth. With its crisp vision, assured direction, and most of all its fine acting we really don't need any meta-narrative in order to be fully engaged. I'll leave it to film school students to comment on the ramifications of the documentary style interviews if such a critical look is needed.

This is a small, quiet film with characters that seem overflowing with histories right when we meet them. It's a little sad and painful but it's executed so well there's an uplifting quality to it. This is mostly due to the performance of Eri Yu, who went on to make a few more films but then seems to have disappeared from the industry. Nishijima's performance isn't quite the caliber of Yu's, or perhaps his character isn't as interesting. Being a jerk isn't as complex as being someone who bes with that jerk with their head held high, slightly wobbling.

★★★★★

Director: Nobuhiro Suwa
Starring: Eri Yu, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Makiko Watanabe

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Tokyo Trash Baby 東京ゴミ女 (Tokyo gomi onna) [2000] • Japan

Mami Nakamura's performance makes this one a big winner. She's engaging, endearing, amusing, and sympathetic from start to finish. That's what it takes for a small film like this to succeed, a film which says: "Here's an offbeat character, do you like her? Does she draw you into her life, entertain you, and invite you to wonder what will happen to her?" It takes a clever script and a good performance. Tokyo Trash Baby delivers on both accounts.

Miyuki (Nakamura) is a girl in love with her upstairs neighbor, a musician. Instead of trying to meet him she is content with stealing his garbage and foraging through it to find things that will give her insight into his personality. She collects many things, like empty cereal boxes, cigarette butts, love letters, discarded musical scores, and creates a shrine to her love in her apartment. She discards a used condom. The story falls a little flat after she does eventually meet him face to face, but Miyuki is still fun to spend time with. As are the few peripheral characters in the film.

Tomorowo Taguchi plays the manager at the cafe where Miyuki works and is typical Taguchi odd but doesn't have much impact on the story. Two other characters do, though: Kô Shibasaki plays co-worker, Kyoko, whose screen time is devoted almost exclusively to telling Miyuki stories of her sexual conquests, dreams, and dilemmas ... and bumming smokes. Masahiro Toda plays a customer trying desperately to get Miyuki to go out with him but he's too boring to make an impact on her. His attempts at realizing love are face to face but his loneliness prevents him from catching a clue. Both characters serve as juxtaposition to Miyuki and highlight my favorite theme of the film: loneliness. Kyoko has a very active social life but seems unfulfilled and lost. Miyuki (contrary to most observations on the film) doesn't seem lonely. She seems content and happy with her life. That's what makes her interesting. Director Hiroki gives her the respect she deserves.

Tokyo Trash Baby is part of the Love Cinema series of six straight-to-video releases which also includes Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. It's a low-budget affair shot on Digital Video. It's uses all natural lighting and sometimes the glare from an open window distracts but never gets in the way. It's testament to the strength of the story and performance that technical limitations do not derail the project at all.

★★★★★

Director: Ryuichi Hiroki
Starring: Mami Nakamura, Kazuma Suzuki, Kô Shibasaki, Sayuri Oyamada, Tomorowo Taguchi

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Viewfinder 경 (Kyung) [2010] • South Korea

Hooray for the new wave of women directors coming up in South Korea. This film, the feature film debut of director Kim Jeong isn't quite the caliber of last year's A Blind River, directed by newcomer Ahn Seon-kyeon, but it's got some fine moments and the overall vision is pretty solid. It shares the same general theme of searching, of someone searching for a lost family member, and also shares the notion that the search is really for the self and that the person searched for isn't really lost as much as not being seen.

I watched both films not knowing anything about them, nor anything about who directed them, and felt pretty strongly that both of them were directed by a woman. These are not chick-flicks, though. Both films are propelled by an almost surreal emotional logic which makes them seem a little difficult at first. Not that men don't make films like this and not that all women do. There's just something peculiarly right-brained and double x-chromosoned at work. This kind of approach doesn't replace traditional linear narrative technique. It accompanies it, fuels it, and might require the viewer to relax their expectations and look at the film from a different perspective.

The two films are also quite different. Ahn Seon-kyeon is a musician and scriptwriter and A Blind River is a more artful film. Kim Jeong teaches at a University and Viewfinder is a bit academic. She has also directed several short films and a documentary trilogy on women's history. Not to slight Kim's artistic credentials, though. Viewfinder is a low budget film but it looks very good and is full of creative photography, capturing both the heavily industrialised and the naturally scenic character of South Korea. And it's got a fantastic soundtrack. I wish I could read Korean so I'd know who performs the songs that sound like Chet Baker meets Lhasa de Sela.

I'm going to cheat here and quote the synopsis from the web site for the International Women's Film Festival in Seoul where Viewfinder premiered:

Viewfinder showcases moments in the lives of several people who meet by accident at the Namgang Rest Stop off a highway in southern South Korea. Kyung is in search of her younger runaway sister. Chang is a computer whiz who had recently lost his job, Kim Vac is a reporter-photographer who frequents the place, and Ona is an orphan media artist who works there, dreaming of New Asia Highway. These four form a loose network of loss and negotiate that loss in the digital age.

That's all fine and good. The film does spend a good amount of time observing people using computers. What's remarkable about it, besides the quantity, or rather, what's remarkable about it in spite of the quantity, is that it all seems very natural. Yes, we live in a digital age but this film isn't about negotiating anything that's peculiar to it. The tools are different than they were a decade or two ago but I think it's a disservice to the film to make it sound like it might be nerdy, or SMS messaging trendy. It's more weird and poetic and the focus is on people and their emotions.

If only it weren't for this program note which follows the synopsis, I wouldn't be concerned:

[...] Following her previous documentary "Koryu", director Kim Jeong tries to catch the motions of people staying and leaving, or the space of constant motion. The camera often follows the people from behind rather than watching them from the front and looks around the scenes, passing outside from the driver’s seat, which gives the audience the feeling of being inside the film. Viewfinder is an independent film with a low production budget. It tells about the communication, loneliness, and the emptiness of people living in the digital environment. The traces of people’s views and the results of their motions are delivered through digital texts. The internal emotions are expressed not on the human faces but on the virtual space generated by a computer window. The camera seems to be attracted to the new scenes created by digital technology and concurrently dreams of the space it cannot reach. Viewfinder is a cinematic exploration about the primal scene in the digital age considerately brought by director Kim Jeong.

I like the bit about catching people in the space of constant motion but the rest of it sends my bullshit detector through the roof. I don't care if its a direct quote from the director's commentary track. "The camera ... dreams of the space it cannot reach". Help! I need a class in contemporary film deconstruction.

Viewfinder is a film about people, not the plague of the digital age. It's about people living their lives, dreaming their dreams, and doing their jobs ... and one of the characters is trying to figure out why everything got a little fucked-up. She gives the film its emotional center. Films have been doing this for a long time. All four characters are portrayed well and are engaging. Choi Hee-Jin, as the photographer is a blast. She's sweet and kind and thoughtful but often makes you wonder if she understands other people's personal space. Photographers are like that. Lee Ho-Young is also good as the guy who finds people without ever leaving his computer and he kind of explains the movie through his philosophical poetry. Newcomer and unknown Moon Ha-in, as the popular Internet blogger who works the night shift at the rest stop where most of the action takes place, is the most intriguing, and probably the most together. She also looks a lot like Lee Yeon-Hee. At first I felt like Yang Eun-Yong, who plays Kyung and is more or less the lead, gave a rather flat performance but her character is supposed to be a little flat. There is a moment near the end which fleshes things out.

This is a film about characters, not tools. It's slow-paced and low-key with a few quirky bits thrown in for spice. There's some surreal dialog, some animation, a breaking of the fourth wall, and a supernatural scene where the subject of a photograph doesn't appear in the picture. It's slightly bizarre but also very down home and it's got a great soundtrack. It's not going to play well at the mall but if you like art films with real emotion it's worth seeking out. 

★★★★

Director: Jeong Kim
Starring: Eun-yong Yang, Hui-jin Choe, Ho-young Lee, Moon Ha-in

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12 International Film Festival in Seoul  

Topless トップ (Toppuresu) [2008] • Japan

There's zero nudity in this very sweet film about being lesbian in contemporary Tokyo. Someone is going to argue that the title metaphorically refers to being emotionally topless, i.e., baring your soul, because the film takes the risky approach, like millions of films do, of being about being human. Even though the film focuses on the loves and lives of its central lesbian characters it really speaks a universal language that heterosexual viewers can relate to as well—like having to deny your identity for the sake of marrying a man for security. Uh-huh. No. This film is about being lesbian.

Topless is refreshing and all that. Its themes of love and fear and politics and sadness are universal. Some of its plot points are a little diversitiste though, like the young girl who comes to Tokyo with an anti-lesbian chip on her shoulder to look for her mother who abandoned her several years ago to be with a lesbian lover, meets the film's protagonist who helps her, comes to recognize that lesbians can be good people too. OK. Characters learn from other characters all the time in movies.

The film might appear a little fluffy when you stand back from it, but the journey through it is filled with a number of poignant moments. One is the film's only sex scene, a non-explicit one between the film's central lesbian character and her male roommate. She's lost her true love to a man, is full of turmoil and wants to see what sex with a man is like. The scene is done very well and handled delicately.

My take on the title and the poster depicting two young women about to engage in a passionate kiss is this: the opening moments of the film are a little warm. The two women, as depicted on the poster, are engaged in some very passionate kissing and roaming of hands. And then pop! The top, the attitude many viewers stereotypically enter with, and desire from, a film about lesbians—two chicks going at it will be hot—comes off. The scene makes an abrupt change in tone and direction. All of a sudden the film is about people with personalities and it never looks back. Yes, it keeps saying "my desire to love and be loved as a lesbian is just like yours (as a straight person) except it's a little complicated by all this societal buildup of crud." That's the point.

My biggest takeaway from the film is Mina Shimizu. She's one of those actresses like Noriko Eguchi, except she's very upbeat and not moody and darkish like Eguchi, who owns the screen and everyone else in it every time she appears. I predict big things ahead for her.

★★★★

Director: Eiji Uchida
Starring: Mina Shimizu, Ryûnosuke Kawai, Aya Ohyama, Erika Okuda, Aya Oomasa

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The Road 芳香之旅 (Fang xiang zhi lu) [2006] • China

I'm continuing my Zhang Jingchu marathon and it's going well. This may be her best and most challenging role yet, and it comes from very early in her career. When she is given a starring role (Night and Fog, Red River) she really shines, seeming less remarkable when she plays a supporting role (Overheard, Protégé, Beast Stalker). Here she plays a character who goes from a teenager to an old lady over the course of a film that spans more than four decades. These kinds of roles come along every so often for actors and actresses, their success relying quite a bit on makeup—which in this case is pretty good for such a low budget film—but the challenge, one which Zhang seems to rise to, is also to convince us that the character has grown and changed along with the events of the film.

Zhang is probably weakest as a teenager, not because she doesn't look the part or do it well, it's more like she is so good it's annoying. She's going at 150 miles an hour constantly and is just a little too charming. Moving along we see her as: a young woman coming to terms with her sexual desire amidst a conservative society; a dutiful wife in an arranged marriage; a middle-aged woman coming to grips with the challenges and changes in her marriage; and finally an older woman dealing with tragedy and a society that seems to have fully left her behind. She is better and more convincing with each progression.

Of course it helps when playing this kind of role if the film is good, and this one is beautiful. Filmed in the Yunnan Province of China, the cinematography is breathtaking, the story a poignant one. The film begins in the mid 1960s when the spirit of the Communist Revolution was still high and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution hadn't kicked in. Zhang plays bus ticket girl, Li Chunfen. The bus driver, played wonderfully by comedian exploring serious film roles Wei Fan, though much older than Li, has a crush on her (like almost everybody else). Li's affection, however, is for a frequent passenger, Dr. Liu, who's been transferred to Yunnan because his family was rich and he's a bit of an intellectual, qualities that are increasingly suspect as the Cultural Revolution begins its life. The doctor has been sent to a hard labor camp and when Li sneaks out to meet him one night and is caught, things change dramatically for her. She is forced into an arranged marriage with the bus driver who uses his clout with the local party leaders to help her avoid a fate worse than the surface level crime of losing face and bringing shame upon herself.

I don't want to give a complete play by play of the storyline, suffice to say The Road is not only a personal journey and a love story—a really touching one, it turns out—it's also an educational story for those of us unfamiliar, as a portrait of changing times in China, lovingly told. The "Old Days" are seen as both good and bad, depending on your place in society or point of view, but most noteworthy is how both sides are presented without judgement. It's a tone poem, an ode, to the complexity that is recent Chinese history. The film takes us from a time when a sense of community and shared values were alive, through the violence and upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, and into modern times where some celebrate the loosening of a moral structure and others remember it fondly. And it does it without any political agenda. It's beautiful. Bravo.

★★★★★

Director: Jiarui Zhang
Starring: Wei Fan, Yuan Nie, Jingchu Zhang, Jong Lin
IMDb 7.2 (185 votes)
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Happy Times 幸福时光 (Xingfu shiguang) [2000] • China

I love Zhang Yimou when he does these common-people flicks. This one is funny, touching and real. A fifty-something guy, who so desperately wants to get married and have someone to snuggle with at night, ends up housing and employing the beautiful eighteen year old blind step-daughter of some really unattractive and overweight woman as a sign of his commitment. The fat woman doesn't want the girl because she is a hassle to take care of and the girl was abandoned and dumped on her by some previous loser dude anyway.

As part of his marriage scheme the man lies to the woman, telling her he is the manager of a hotel. But the hotel is nothing more than an abandoned bus in a park that a friend of his had convinced him to slap a coat of paint on and charge young couples to sit inside it and make out. The man had at first hired the daughter to clean up the bus between customers, but when the city hauls the bus away as part of a beautifying the parks campaign the guy is forced to find other means to employ the girl who possesses nothing but cleaning and massage skills. Him and several of his retired friends construct a massage parlor room inside an old warehouse and then take turns getting massages from the girl. He has to pay his friends to get the massages, and they in turn give the money to the girl for tips. The farce can't go on forever, as the guy doesn't have much money to begin with, and it doesn't.

There is some disagreement about how this film should have or could have ended. Suffice to say it's pretty sad, and left rather unresolved. So you just have to accept it and be kind of bummed out (but in a good way if you go for that kind of thing). Dong Jie turns in a sweet and convincing performance as the young blind girl. There is nothing creepy about the film at all. Ebert doesn't get it.

★★★★

Director: Zhang Yimou
Starring: Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Lifan Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
IMDb 7.4/10 (2,306 votes)
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Non-Ko (Nonko 36-sai ノン子３６歳 （家事手伝い) (kaji-tetsudai)) [2008] • Japan

Another nearly great film from director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri. The direction isn't as innovative as in Green Mind, Metal Bats, and the story isn't as novel either but Maki Sakai's performance carries the film more than enough for it to be engaging. I don't know why Saki isn't a bigger star. She seems like such an intelligent and courageous actress. Here she plays a thirty-something divorcee who used to be a popular movie actress starring in films with titles like Sexy Gambler and such. She has retreated to the countryside to live with her family who are caretakers of a Shinto shrine that is about to hold its annual celebration. Sakai's character isn't very likable, by viewers or by the other characters in the film, but somehow she makes her internal disappointment with life palpable and it brings you along for the ride. My only problem with the film is that I didn't like the one character who does like her, mostly because I couldn't understand why she comes to, momentarily at least, like him. He's a younger goofball of sorts who's come to set up a stall at the shrine celebration and ends up staying with Sakai's family. It's probably only his youthful ambition she finds attractive. The film is mostly bleak, punctuated with a few happy moments that seem a little out of place, and a couple sex scenes that require the infamous Japanese pixel blur.

Non-Ko is a successful portrait of a woman who feels anger, isolation, and disappointment in equal measure.

★★★★★

Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Maki Sakai, Gen Hoshino, Shingo Tsurumi, Kanji Tsuda, Ryûto Kondô

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Green Mind, Metal Bats 青春☆金属バット (Seishun kinzoku batto) [2006] • Japan

This is a hard film to describe except to say that it's deadpan funny, delightful and successful in it's earnest attempt to remain off-kilter. It's about two guys who are bummed out their dreams of becoming baseball stars didn't pan out, and a girl who loves baseball and baseball players. One of the guys was a pitcher, played with finely nuanced body language by Masanobu Ando, who's become a bicycle cop and hates everything except himself. He uses his position of authority to do things like get shoplifting housewives to show him the color of their underwear. The other guy is a batter (of unknown position), played by Pistol Takehara, who still wants to make it, practicing his swing a thousand times a day. He's a little numb in the noggin, having been beaned by the bicycle cop pitcher ten years ago and becomes an accomplice in love and illegal activities with a drunken, violent woman who shares his love of baseball. The show stealing woman is played way over the top by Maki Sakai, and now I'm sort of in love with her myself. I generally dislike watching actors play drunk, but with the exception of some of her stumbling, Sakai creates a believable and engaging character who's pushing forty, still hot, not so nice, but fun to have around. She had to wear prosthetics to round out her role as "the chick with a rack".

Green Mind, Metal Bats is a low-key, low budget absurd comedy with an edginess that keeps it unpredictable and unsettling. A bit part by Noriko Eguchi, as the pitcher's wife, gets this one a bonus point. Anything with Eguchi is better for it.

★★★★

Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Pistol Takehara, Masanobu Ando, Maki Sakai, Noriko Eguchi
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Shanghai Dreams (Qing hong) [2005] • China

This is one of those Chinese films about things Chinese. In this case the underlying subject matter is the Third Front, where families were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside in case the Soviet Union invaded China and clobbered its cities. The main interest here, for me, is this historical angle. China has pulled off a number of wacky full-on country-wide social experiments and I found it interesting to become acquainted with this particular one. Imagine for yourself if you are a big city dweller that you are persuaded (or coerced) by your government to move your family to the sticks. You'd probably dream every day of moving back to the city but the reality is that the dream becomes more and more remote as time goes by. You'd try to think about what's best for your children, but they might have different aspirations. All of this is explored in Shanghai Dreams.

The film takes place in the early eighties which means certain seventies western fashion trends were just filtering in and the director captures some of these with a sad hilarity. The "dance party" scene is priceless. Consider the film more educational than emotional. Big complaint: Gao Yuanyuan, so good in Season of Good Rain, is too old for her character and, honestly, doesn't seem to have honed her acting chops just yet.

★★★

Director: Wang Xiaoshuai
Starring: Yuanyuan Gao

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The Man Behind the Scissors (Hasami otoko) [2005] • Japan

Random acts of weirdness turn out to be clues to an unsurprising, yet reasonable reveal. I had a lot of fun watching this. The Japanese are my favorite at plowing through absurdity with a straight face. The director employs a few visual flourishes to remind that this isn't a real crime thriller. The cops provide comic relief while the bad guys are almost frozen in their steadfast psychological drama. Asô Kumiko and Abe Hiroshi are present for credibility. I love Asô Kumiko and the film is mostly hers. She's pretty low key, doesn't swing her arms much when she walks, but she's still engaging, becoming more so as the film progresses and you get onboard with her and her hilarious attempts at suicide. The moral of the story needs a bucketload of salt but who cares? It's not laugh out loud funny but it's a good dark comedy of inner-child pain and murder. Not a lot, but a little, blood. The goriest thing has to be the nicotine stew Asô cooks up for herself.

★★★★

Director: Toshiharu Ikeda
Starring: Kumiko Asô, Hiroshi Abe, Etsushi Toyokawa
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My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? (Eri Eri rema sabakutani) (2005) • Japan

This is an extremely slow paced art-house flick punctuated with lots of found object music and noise rock, so depending on your taste in the art of noise you may or may not like it. I was fascinated by much of the found object stuff, especially the vacuum hose contraption built on an umbrella skeleton and attached to a fan motor, but the overdriven guitar wanking didn't thrill me much. I'm sure it was a near nirvana experience for many folks to see Japanese indie icon Tadanobu Asano, his hair blowing Fabio-iously in the breeze, standing on a hillside letting loose on six strings and four giant stacks of loudspeakers in an attempt to cure Aoi Miyazaki of her suicidal tendencies.

The story is a cute apocalyptic one: it's 2015 and a deadly virus is sweeping the population, causing those infected to become extremely depressed and ultimately commit suicide. The atonal music practiced by Asano and his partner appears to be an antidote to the disease. Music can save the world, ya know. A rich old man tries to persuade Asano, whose musical partner had the disease but committed suicide anyway (for dramatic effect), to jam for his infected granddaughter.

The story is told in typical Aoyama fashion: slowly. I never really felt enough of a connection to the characters to enjoy seeing them get into a vehicle and drive along some seaside road for an extended period of time. Nor was I particularly engaged by the scenes of them sitting there thinking for extended periods of time. This kind of direction is meant to give the audience a breather, a moment to relflect on the characters and on their own feelings with regards to what they are experiencing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I loved Aoyama's Eureka but this one didn't move me much. Fans of art-house noise rock, or whatever you want to call it, might find something to enjoy here, and fans of art-house films who aren't put off by loud noises might like it too. Just know going in that it's slow and loud.

★★★

Director: Shinji Aoyama
Starring: Tadanobu Asano, Aoi Miyazaki, Mariko Okada, Masaya Nakahara, Yasutaka Tsutsui

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Ritual (Shiki-Jitsu) [2000] • Japan

One thing is for sure, this film has some of the most gloriously thought out and constructed set designs ever. A lot of the film takes place in the young girl's "apartment" which is about the size of an average K-Mart. Each room is like a different department but it doesn't seem strange once you give in to the world Hideaki Anno has created. Anno comes from years working in Anime so his visual imagination works on a different level than most. Why not have the girl sleep in a bathtub in a big empty basement that's constantly and willfully flooded?

This is a beautiful film with lots of stunning photography. When the couple are outside they're usually hanging out on or near railroad tracks, creating all kinds of wonderful lines and framing. The cinematography may not be something that grabs you but the composition of shots will.

On the downside, the story is standard "crazy free-spirited girl captivates man" stuff with a little "here's what happens to victims of abuse (real or imagined)" thrown in. The dialog and philosophy get a little precious from time to time, neither of the two can really act—they're just supposed to be attractive cool people (they are)—but Anno makes the best of their limitations. It's fairly easy to spot the scenes where the girl, Ayako Fujitani, (who wrote the original novella the film is based on, cowrote the screenplay, AND is Steven Seagal's daughter!) is left to her own devices to be charmingly a little off kilter versus the ones where she is supposed to act a scripted point of story or character development. I don't mean to dis her too hard because she is an interesting soul to spend a couple hours with. No doubt. Shunji Iwai (real life director of a number of highly rated Japanese disaffected youth films, most notably All About Lily Chou-Chou), who plays the guy, a film director (!), isn't given too much to do or say. He's just intrigued by the girl so he hangs around all intrigued and artistically stressed. He's less of an actor than Fujitani but equally as cool and worth spending a couple hours with. This is definitely an indie/arty bag of ennui, but it does do some interesting things and even goes all Dogme 95 for a scene at the end.

You can watch most of this film at the YouTube

★★★★★

Lost, Indulgence (Mi Guo) (2008) • China • Zhang Yibai

This should be the official submission from The People's Republic of China to the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film. It seems like the kind of film Oscar would like but it’s not the kind of film China likes. It’s part in-depth character study, part coming of age tale, part mystery, and it’s a fascinating portrait of a city. Independent minded films like this that show life in mainland China as it is for what it is don’t see the light of day there too often. It took director Zhang Yibai three tries to get permission from the China Film Bureau to release this to the International Film circuit.

Imagine Davenport, Iowa with a population of 31 million and covered in smog and you might have something close to Chongqing, China, the director's hometown and the setting for Lost, Indulgence. It's in the heartland of the mainland on a big river. It's dreary and foggy. And it looms heavily over the characters and their storied lives here.

The film begins with a taxi cab plunging into the Yangtze River. (Apparently there are folks who make a living fishing bodies out of the massive river. They have knowledge of the places a body is likely to end up. Relatives of the bodies bring photos and pay these people to be on the look out because life insurance monies can't be paid for two years unless there's a body.) The outcome of the crash sets the stage for the lives and relationships Zhang explores in the film as well as being the first clue to a mystery he lets percolate in the background for most of the movie. The driver of the cab is presumed dead but isn't immediately found. The passenger, a street wise bar girl played by the leggalicious Karen Mok, is rescued but badly injured. The wife of the driver feels it is her responsibility to care for the survivor. Unable to pay for hospital care she takes the woman into her home, a cramped little place accessed via a staircase at the back of some factory. The teenage son of the driver, refusing at first to accept that his father is dead, is not immediately happy sharing his space with the wheelchair bound newcomer nor is he excited by the burden of helping to care for her. But things change. Karen Mok’s fashion choice of hot pants and lace stockings soon arouses feelings of interest from the boy. The mother is both unhappy and fearful of what the budding relationship may reveal.

As the boy begins to open up to the invalid he starts to wonder about her relationship to his father, the circumstances of the accident that left his father missing are seen in a new light. Director Zhang lets the mystery unfold delicately, in the background, without becoming the focus of the film. The spotlight remains on the characters’ changing lives while the mystery remains as unsolved to us as it is unspoken among the characters. Lost Indulgence is a marvelous bit of story telling as well as an engaging slice of life. Pay attention to the photo on the wall of the father.

★★★★★

La Capture (2007) • France

This semi-arty little semi-revenge flick from France features a refreshing performance from Catherine de Léan as Rose, a young woman who wants more than payback for the abuse she witnessed and suffered as a child at the hands of her father. She wants her father to understand that his legacy, and the continued abuse of her mother and younger brother, is wrong. So with the help of a couple friends she captures him, gives him a great big grown-up time out and ties him to a radiator in an empty rehearsal studio and attempts to enlighten him.

La Capture also features some nicely nuanced direction from veteran French actress Carole Laure who also wrote the screenplay. Employing not so much a vignette technique as a chaptered one, scenes fade in and fade out the way someone might illustrate a process using bullet points. Sometimes details are left out or unresolved but that only serves to underscore their unimportance in the telling of this story. For example, a scene of Rose doing a poetic reading to her father of man as social animal philosophy is followed a little later by a scene where several animals populate the rehearsal studio and do nothing more than look upon this man tied to a chair. It's a powerful and interesting scene without explanation of how the animals may have come or gone, but it's not that far-fetched a scenario given the portrait Laure has painted of Rose as a seemingly well-adapted, well-liked, sexually happy and satisfied young woman whose life is grounded in practicing that new-age acting technique where people pretend to be animals.

Catherine de Léan has a tough, natural beauty well suited, for the most part, to the role of skirt and boot wearing Rose. Part of the story arc involves changes to her character that occur after she becomes the one in power exerting control. I wasn't as convinced by her portrayal of the gun wielding crazy sister who rescues her brother from drug dealers, but that may be due to the overall inferior telling of that part of the story. Her brother hasn't fared as well in life, hasn't yet "gotten away" and serves as a more typical case juxtaposition to Rose. Director Laure uses a few provocative, though not too explicit sex scenes showing Rose as more atypical from many victims of abuse. Sexually fulfilled is a necessary ingredient in a happy life, right? There's only an implicit case made for the power of new age consciousness in Rose's well adjusted living.

La Capture does a better job showing us than telling us, but that's not a criticism. This is an engaging film to watch and I think the director set out to make it that way and succeeded. I was in the mood for French and La Capture delivered a well crafted, smartly done package. Nice to see Pascale Bussières as la mère (the mother). It's not a big role, and her character is medicated and abused to the point of numbness—a woman who "floats, barely there ... invisible by choice", but just having her around adds to the film's rep.

And the ending is magnificent!

★★★★