New York Asian Film Festival
at the IFC Center & Japan Society
June 20-July 6
Still mostly financed on credit cards, the New York Asian Film Festival brings together some of the most exciting and eclectic films from across Asia. The crew at Subway Cinema celebrates their seventh year with screenings at the IFC Center and the Japan Society, including big-budget historic epics (from Thailand, King Naresuan and its sequel), pulpy horror (from Korea, The Butcher), martial arts (from Vietnam, The Rebel), women’s weepies (from Japan, Dog in a Sidecar) and their first documentary (also from Japan, Yasukuni).
What makes the festival so terrific is that they provide a full movie-going package. While soulless disappointments like Iron Man and Indiana Jones continue to rake in box office booty, festival spokesman Grady Hendrix tirelessly cracks the audience up with breathless pre-show introductions and prize giveaways. They bring a personal touch to a wide array of films and make scuttling indoors on a sunny day a no-brainer.
There’s a vital energy at NYAFF, with audiences ever-ready to make even the drowsiest movie a blast with their collective cheering and gasping. I can’t wait to see blockbuster and cult titles like L: Change the World and Tokyo Gore Police with an audience. It’s an unbeatable feeling to be at an event that’s both lovingly assembled and attended by moviegoers with equal ardor. The festival remains a great place to sample a combination of new and familiar filmmakers’ works, and here are the five titles that shouldn’t be missed (in order of preference):
Sparrow: June 26 & July 2
Directed by Johnny To (Hong Kong)
Sparrow proves that Johnnie To is one of the most versatile, tirelessly inventive and exciting directors working today. He makes his love letter to Hong Kong look effortlessly imaginative thanks to his signature graceful panoramic camerawork. It’s no small feat considering that except for Linger, a romantic drama he did just before Sparrow, To’s been making mostly halogen-lit actioners recently, like Mad Detective (also showing at this year’s festival) and the third and final part of the omnibus film, Triangle.
A skilled sensualist, To makes Sparrow a showcase of some of the most playful and bewitching scenes of body language as one-upmanship. Starring his usual stable of actors (Simon Yam, Suet Lam, Kat Tung Lam and Kelly Lin), he follows a gang of four pickpockets as they chase after Lin’s Chun-Lei Chung, a coy woman in trouble. Touch is key in their world, making a sudden jostle or a brush on the hand more important than any words. Talk is cheap, so whoever has the fastest brains and most nimble fingers is a rich man indeed.
To is the best kind of storyteller because, like his heroes, he’s not afraid to hit the ground running and let his actions speak for themselves. And Sparrow is one of his best films because his craft is at its peak, and he knows exactly how to make something so breezy seem so creative and yet remain so simple.
Fine, Totally Fine: July 3 & 5
Directed by Yosuke Fujita (Japan)
Fine, Totally Fine’s aimlessness is its biggest blessing—and its greatest hindrance. It refuses to be about anything more than a portrait of three people just getting by and trying to be happy. Akari, (Kimura Yoshino) a cataclysmically clumsy orderly, is looking for love while Teruo (the always terrific straight man Arakawa Yoshiyoshi) tries to make the scariest haunted house he can; Komori (Okada Yoshinori) is stuck between the two.
Komori best embodies the film, stuck somewhere between persuing his daydreams and facing the reality of his clumsiness. While Akari paints and Teruo chases after the next big scare, Komori isn’t sure what to do. None of the characters’ problems are permanently solved (except for Akari, who lands a boyfriend) or ends up any wiser or worse off than when they started. They’re just as bored and directionless as before, refusing to aspire to anything more than sticking their heads back into the clouds. Without an agenda other than immediate satisfaction, Totally Fine’s belly laughs keep it coasting on fumes long enough to leave you with a big smile and some wonderful and weird memories.
Mad Detective: June 22
Directed by Johnny To & Wai Ka-fai (HK)
Did I mention how terrific Johnny To is already? Well, it’s worth repeating. To’s latest colloboration with Wai is just as cerebral and meaty as the pair’s Running On Karma. Karma had romance, comedy, kung fu, motorcycle chases, Buddhist anti-violence undertones, time travel, Sikhs hiding in small tin cans and, most importantly, Andy Lau in a muscle suit. Four years later, Wai and To’s Mad Detective continues to push the limits of their viewers’ sanity with more brilliant images and ideas.
While there’s a ton of self-contradicting ideas floating around in Detective, that’s the most exhilarating part of the film. Bun (Ching Wan Lau) thinks at a million miles a minute and the audience must try and keep up. Wai’s script hits the ground running, dragging the viewer along with our self-mutilating hero through a hall of mirrors filled with a killer’s split personalities, mundane phantasms, missing guns and masked shooters.
By the time we get to To’s usual panoramic climax, we’re as lost as Ho is: But it’s because we have too many clues instead of too few. Ho desperately wants to see Gigi (Choi-ning Lee) but when he finds out that she’s not really dead, he assumes that Bun’s madness is one ruled by nonsense instead of genius. “Apply emotions to investigate,” Bun suggests sagaciously; and while it makes no sense to throw logic out the window, that’s exactly what makes Detective such an unhinged blast.
Dainipponjin: June 21 & July 4
Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto (Japan)
Dainipponjin, comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s directorial debut, is one of the most thoughtful and funny superhero films for adults because it’s not serious. As a mockumentary about a slovenly superhero with gigantic problems, it hits just the right balance of dry humor and big-dick jokes. Matsumoto seamlessly transitions from Masaru’s (Matsumoto) altercations with his separated spouse to his purely accidental involvement in the destructive copulation of the Stink Monster and an overactive giant penis-flower. All in a day’s work for Japan’s unjustly reviled champion.
Matsumoto shrewdly understands when to make his inquisitive “director” (Tomoji Hasegawa) and his confessional-type camera disappear. The faux-documentary feel is only a frame for the film, so when Dainipponjin (literally “Big Man Japan”) goes into action, it’s time to break out the panoramic lenses. He balances his hero’s quietly hilarious Q&A sessions with a half-serious love for old kaiju films, where the likes of Godzilla and Gamera fight other men in rubber suits.
Matsumoto takes the haggard Big Man down a peg several times, like when he actively flees from a North Korean demon after it breaks his nose; but its all in good fun. He’s a mess that runs away from a fight, whether it’s with a several-stories-high monster or with his family, ditching his grandfather, the fourth Big Man, in a nursing home. There’s no saving him from himself, which makes him ultra-human and really funny.
M: June 27 & July 1
Directed Lee Myung-se (Korea)
No, this has nothing to do with Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre or the Peer Gynt Suite. Lee Myung-se follows up his superbly disjointed Duelist (NYAFF 2006) with M, an equally spastic, labyrinthine exercise in clashing styles. Han Minwoo (Dong-won Kang), a popular writer and stand-in for Lee himself, ponders the identity of Mimi (Yeon-hee Lee), an innocent girl that leads him through a neon and glass maze of abrupt tonal shifts from his current writer’s block to his idyllic past. As he follows his muse, his story switches abruptly from comedy to mystery to self-parody. Lee teases Minwoo, by relating his feelings of disorientation to the elderly bartender at the mysterious Lupin Bar: “When you get old, your mind becomes erratic, like the summer wind changing by the minute. Sometimes it’s very hard to tell dreams from reality.”
M is such a strange and sometimes hard-to-watch mess because Minwoo’s memories and dreams of the past often seem more like masochistic jeering and important rage hiding behind ultra-slick visuals. In a storm of halogen-lit keyboard clicking, he confesses, “I neither expect nor solicit belief,” acknowledging the impenetrably glossy sheen that he drapes his jaded nostalgia. Still, even an anesthetized film by Lee is impressive and bewitching because of his virtuosic visual flair and love for creative experimentation.
at the IFC Center & Japan Society
June 20-July 6
Still mostly financed on credit cards, the New York Asian Film Festival brings together some of the most exciting and eclectic films from across Asia. The crew at Subway Cinema celebrates their seventh year with screenings at the IFC Center and the Japan Society, including big-budget historic epics (from Thailand, King Naresuan and its sequel), pulpy horror (from Korea, The Butcher), martial arts (from Vietnam, The Rebel), women’s weepies (from Japan, Dog in a Sidecar) and their first documentary (also from Japan, Yasukuni).
What makes the festival so terrific is that they provide a full movie-going package. While soulless disappointments like Iron Man and Indiana Jones continue to rake in box office booty, festival spokesman Grady Hendrix tirelessly cracks the audience up with breathless pre-show introductions and prize giveaways. They bring a personal touch to a wide array of films and make scuttling indoors on a sunny day a no-brainer.
There’s a vital energy at NYAFF, with audiences ever-ready to make even the drowsiest movie a blast with their collective cheering and gasping. I can’t wait to see blockbuster and cult titles like L: Change the World and Tokyo Gore Police with an audience. It’s an unbeatable feeling to be at an event that’s both lovingly assembled and attended by moviegoers with equal ardor. The festival remains a great place to sample a combination of new and familiar filmmakers’ works, and here are the five titles that shouldn’t be missed (in order of preference):
Sparrow: June 26 & July 2
Directed by Johnny To (Hong Kong)
Sparrow proves that Johnnie To is one of the most versatile, tirelessly inventive and exciting directors working today. He makes his love letter to Hong Kong look effortlessly imaginative thanks to his signature graceful panoramic camerawork. It’s no small feat considering that except for Linger, a romantic drama he did just before Sparrow, To’s been making mostly halogen-lit actioners recently, like Mad Detective (also showing at this year’s festival) and the third and final part of the omnibus film, Triangle.
A skilled sensualist, To makes Sparrow a showcase of some of the most playful and bewitching scenes of body language as one-upmanship. Starring his usual stable of actors (Simon Yam, Suet Lam, Kat Tung Lam and Kelly Lin), he follows a gang of four pickpockets as they chase after Lin’s Chun-Lei Chung, a coy woman in trouble. Touch is key in their world, making a sudden jostle or a brush on the hand more important than any words. Talk is cheap, so whoever has the fastest brains and most nimble fingers is a rich man indeed.
To is the best kind of storyteller because, like his heroes, he’s not afraid to hit the ground running and let his actions speak for themselves. And Sparrow is one of his best films because his craft is at its peak, and he knows exactly how to make something so breezy seem so creative and yet remain so simple.
Fine, Totally Fine: July 3 & 5
Directed by Yosuke Fujita (Japan)
Fine, Totally Fine’s aimlessness is its biggest blessing—and its greatest hindrance. It refuses to be about anything more than a portrait of three people just getting by and trying to be happy. Akari, (Kimura Yoshino) a cataclysmically clumsy orderly, is looking for love while Teruo (the always terrific straight man Arakawa Yoshiyoshi) tries to make the scariest haunted house he can; Komori (Okada Yoshinori) is stuck between the two.
Komori best embodies the film, stuck somewhere between persuing his daydreams and facing the reality of his clumsiness. While Akari paints and Teruo chases after the next big scare, Komori isn’t sure what to do. None of the characters’ problems are permanently solved (except for Akari, who lands a boyfriend) or ends up any wiser or worse off than when they started. They’re just as bored and directionless as before, refusing to aspire to anything more than sticking their heads back into the clouds. Without an agenda other than immediate satisfaction, Totally Fine’s belly laughs keep it coasting on fumes long enough to leave you with a big smile and some wonderful and weird memories.
Mad Detective: June 22
Directed by Johnny To & Wai Ka-fai (HK)
Did I mention how terrific Johnny To is already? Well, it’s worth repeating. To’s latest colloboration with Wai is just as cerebral and meaty as the pair’s Running On Karma. Karma had romance, comedy, kung fu, motorcycle chases, Buddhist anti-violence undertones, time travel, Sikhs hiding in small tin cans and, most importantly, Andy Lau in a muscle suit. Four years later, Wai and To’s Mad Detective continues to push the limits of their viewers’ sanity with more brilliant images and ideas.
While there’s a ton of self-contradicting ideas floating around in Detective, that’s the most exhilarating part of the film. Bun (Ching Wan Lau) thinks at a million miles a minute and the audience must try and keep up. Wai’s script hits the ground running, dragging the viewer along with our self-mutilating hero through a hall of mirrors filled with a killer’s split personalities, mundane phantasms, missing guns and masked shooters.
By the time we get to To’s usual panoramic climax, we’re as lost as Ho is: But it’s because we have too many clues instead of too few. Ho desperately wants to see Gigi (Choi-ning Lee) but when he finds out that she’s not really dead, he assumes that Bun’s madness is one ruled by nonsense instead of genius. “Apply emotions to investigate,” Bun suggests sagaciously; and while it makes no sense to throw logic out the window, that’s exactly what makes Detective such an unhinged blast.
Dainipponjin: June 21 & July 4
Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto (Japan)
Dainipponjin, comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto’s directorial debut, is one of the most thoughtful and funny superhero films for adults because it’s not serious. As a mockumentary about a slovenly superhero with gigantic problems, it hits just the right balance of dry humor and big-dick jokes. Matsumoto seamlessly transitions from Masaru’s (Matsumoto) altercations with his separated spouse to his purely accidental involvement in the destructive copulation of the Stink Monster and an overactive giant penis-flower. All in a day’s work for Japan’s unjustly reviled champion.
Matsumoto shrewdly understands when to make his inquisitive “director” (Tomoji Hasegawa) and his confessional-type camera disappear. The faux-documentary feel is only a frame for the film, so when Dainipponjin (literally “Big Man Japan”) goes into action, it’s time to break out the panoramic lenses. He balances his hero’s quietly hilarious Q&A sessions with a half-serious love for old kaiju films, where the likes of Godzilla and Gamera fight other men in rubber suits.
Matsumoto takes the haggard Big Man down a peg several times, like when he actively flees from a North Korean demon after it breaks his nose; but its all in good fun. He’s a mess that runs away from a fight, whether it’s with a several-stories-high monster or with his family, ditching his grandfather, the fourth Big Man, in a nursing home. There’s no saving him from himself, which makes him ultra-human and really funny.
M: June 27 & July 1
Directed Lee Myung-se (Korea)
No, this has nothing to do with Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre or the Peer Gynt Suite. Lee Myung-se follows up his superbly disjointed Duelist (NYAFF 2006) with M, an equally spastic, labyrinthine exercise in clashing styles. Han Minwoo (Dong-won Kang), a popular writer and stand-in for Lee himself, ponders the identity of Mimi (Yeon-hee Lee), an innocent girl that leads him through a neon and glass maze of abrupt tonal shifts from his current writer’s block to his idyllic past. As he follows his muse, his story switches abruptly from comedy to mystery to self-parody. Lee teases Minwoo, by relating his feelings of disorientation to the elderly bartender at the mysterious Lupin Bar: “When you get old, your mind becomes erratic, like the summer wind changing by the minute. Sometimes it’s very hard to tell dreams from reality.”
M is such a strange and sometimes hard-to-watch mess because Minwoo’s memories and dreams of the past often seem more like masochistic jeering and important rage hiding behind ultra-slick visuals. In a storm of halogen-lit keyboard clicking, he confesses, “I neither expect nor solicit belief,” acknowledging the impenetrably glossy sheen that he drapes his jaded nostalgia. Still, even an anesthetized film by Lee is impressive and bewitching because of his virtuosic visual flair and love for creative experimentation.
