Oct 15/03                                                                         More in weblog archive
	On China's 'great leap' into space Yesterday, China became only the third nation to launch a human being into orbit by itself (albeit with Russian training and based upon a Soviet rocket design). This is four decades since the Soviets and the Americans did so. I think this is the perfect tonic to what has become a rather pessimistic view of advances in space. Aside from the continuing footage coming from the Hubble Space Telescope, there hasn't been much to cheer for if you are of the view that humans should go into space. So this 'lo-tech' launch by China is welcome. Perhaps it may spur more development? Back to the Moon, perhaps? Even further to Mars? The Final Reviews Blind fury ZATOICHI - It's hard to expand further on my love for this film but I will try. Takeshi Kitano has made the ultimate pleasurable experience for this festival, the perfect film to cap off two weeks of non-stop watching. The immensely entertaining Zatoichi will most likely prove to be the audience favourite at the VIFF (as it was for the Toronto International Film Festival). A modern adaptation of a much-loved character from Japanese film, Zatoichi is about the exploits of a blind masseur and deadly swordsman who comes to a town on the eve of a struggle between competing factions of scoundrels. Also arriving at the same time is a masterful ronin played by Tanadobu Asano and his sick wife, and a pair of Geisha who appear at first to be assassins. Known to westerners as someone who plays mostly enigmatic Yakuza, Takeshi Kitano is famous in Japan as a comedian. Flashes of his deadpan humour appear in many of his films but in Zatoichi (which he produced and directed through his company Office Kitano) he has created a film filled with humour and charm. Zatoichi is firmly in the action-comedy vein as Yojimbo (indeed the setup is basically from that film), but also employs a more liberal attitude toward bloody sword duels as the blind master and his rival Tananobu Asano chop and hack their way through multiples of local gangsters. Zatoichi seems to also take advantage of digital effects to add more blood and gore to each encounter. That said, the tone is neither grim nor overly black. The feeling is comic throughout, even as the blood flows. Adding to that feeling is a music and dance groove that provide a giddy, festival feel. Simply excellent. THE GUY IN THE GRAVE NEXT DOOR - A Swedish love story dripping with saccharine about a lonely librarian still seeking to get free from the trappings of her former life with a dead husband and her unlikely relationship with a tubby, coarse farmer she meets at the cemetary. A combination of Bridget Jones and Truly Madly Deeply, it's a sugary combination to be sure. The couple are odd ducks in each of their worlds. The librarian wonders if she is the intellectual superior to the farmer and the farmer believes most 'townies' are stuck up. Of course, you know they will end up together.

	Oct 14/03                                                                         More in weblog archive
	Almost done with reviews ... TO KILL A KING - A cut up historical drama about the friendship and later emnity of the two 'heroes' of the English Civil War. To Kill a King seems to have been edited down from a more enlightening epic film that better draws out the circumstances of the politics behind the rise of the Lord Protector and better establishes the friendship between Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) and Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott). Non-historians in the audience will likely not come away with anything learned from this lavishly costumed film. How can you have a film about the beheading of Charles the I without mentioning, at least once, that Charles was a Catholic and Cromwell a Puritan, one of the major divides that caused the revolution against the English king? This is not even the cartoon version of that history, because the cartoon version would have battles. To Kill a King may have wanted to spend more time on the relationship between Fairfax, the beloved general of the Parliamentary army, and Cromwell, a latter day John Ashcroft destined to become a dictator, but the film begins at the end of the war and does not bother to establish the feats and derring do that may have forged that friendship. Thrown into the mix is the teary-eyed wife of Fairfax, who is extended between her loyalty to her royalist friends and family and her Hallmark marriage to Fairfax. There are beheadings, skullduggery and plenty of shouty scenes to satisfy lovers of historical 'drama'. Also, don't forget the dramatic turns and stalking away from conversations that only characters in those films seem to employ. But Elizabeth, this is not. It is not even the heir of the Richard Harris, Alec Guiness epic Cromwell, which covered even more ground than To Kill a King, had battle scenes and treated Charles I with more sensitivity than here.

	Oct 13/03                                                                         More in weblog archive
	Unclear Danger This is an extremely interesting in depth story by the NY Times on how a group of Muslim young men in Buffalo, NY became involved with an al Qaeda recruiter and travelled to Afghanistan to train in Osama bin Laden's camp. Read it here >> Still more reviews... A face of love THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL - For the most part almost plotless, The Story of the Weeping Camel is one of those odd finds of the film festival that is just so unusual, so unlike anything else that it deserves to be touted everywhere. This German film about a family of camel shepherds at the edge of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia defies categorization. It's anthropology, it's a nature film, it's also a subtly moving story that had people in the theatre weeping (like the camel in the film) at the picture's "climax". The family at the center of the film are the descendents of Genghis Khan, now partly settled in what look like semi-permanent yurts in the middle of scrub land. They are surrounded by a goats, sheep and huge furry Bactrian camels. The title refers to an opening myth told by the patriarch of the family about how camels lost their horns and are always searching the horizon. However, this doesn't immediately lead to a story per se. Instead, we get a leisurely, un-narrated, look at a day's work for the family. The family is shown to lead a simple but seemingly happy existence without much intrusion from modern technology. Their entire existence depends upon their animals, in particular the shaggy giant camels. Almost half an hour into the film, the first inkling of a direction appears. The camel mares are giving birth. The birth of these unusual creatures is fascinatingly gross. One of the camels, however, is having a particularly difficult labour and only through the intercession of the family does it produce an unusual white colt. The drama increases when it becomes apparent, despite the family's patience urgings, that the mother is rejecting its offspring. This incident pervades the family's day until it is determined that a special ritual has to be performed that will bind the mother camel and the colt together. The two young boys of the family are dispatched on camels to the nearest town where they are charged to return with a musician skilled with the Chinese violin. At the town, they are confronted with the perils of civilization (televisions, motorcycles, rascals) but the film's tone is gentle throughout. Although seduced by modernity, they return successfully, followed by a music teacher. The climax of the film is a gorgeous extended observation of the musical ritual involving humans, camels and the spookily beautiful folk song sung by the shepherd's wife as she carresses the mother camel, accompanied by the violinist. That scene is tremendously moving; you could watch (with some amusement) the audience dabbing their eyes at the ritual's conclusion (and its success as mother and calf are rejoined). THE SNOW WALKER - A ethnologically backward film about a Canadian bush pilot and the consumptive (but self-sacrificing) Inuit girl. Despite Canada producing a superb Inuit film last year (Atanarjuat), The Snow Walker is a real throwback, purporting to be a window into the Inuit world, it instead descends into cliches about cultural meeting, romanticizing the Inuit character without showing character. Barry Pepper (the sniper in Saving Private Ryan) is the bush pilot who is out to make a buck flying hunters for an aviation company run by James Cromwell. Pepper is making an unauthorized side trip from his flight plan to sell Coca Cola to remote communities when he is bribed to take a young Inuit girl (newcomer Annabella Piugattuk) to the nearest settlement with medical facilities. However, engine trouble crashes their plane and they are forced to battle for survival against the impending winter. Pepper initially tries to survive using his 'white man's ways' but at each turn is shown up by the Inuit girl and her greater knowledge of the earth, etc. I have no complaints about this setup but the fact is, the characters are uniformly without depth. The Inuit girl is akin to the "magic negro", a self-sacrificing character whose only purpose is to further the white character. Even beyond this criticism, The Snow Walker is predictable and cardboard thin. Although marked by its beautiful cinematography of the tundra wilderness, at times it seems to be just a collection of nice postcard pretty shots ruined by insipid dialogue. Written and directed by Charles Martin Smith, who must have been impacted greatly by his lead role in Never Cry Wolf, The Snow Walker never seems to rise beyond cliche. It's almost like the Walt Disney attempt to copy Atanarjuat. Even the title seems to copy the better film. The Fast Runner? The Snow Walker? No, I did not like this.

	Oct 10/03                                                                         More in weblog archive
	The Vancouver International Film Festival is over... ...but my reviews continue to trickle in. Actually, if you read the Emporium you can see my complete reviews up to Zatoichi already in the film festival thread. But it is a little too much to put up on this website all at once. For myself, I have one more volunteer-only screening, a party on Sunday and this experience will be a nice memory. A rainy day of filming "Chill" On Thursday I did a long day shoot for my friend Bulent Hassan who is in the Yukon preparing to shoot the bulk of his short psychological horror film "Chill". My contribution to his efforts (funded by the Yukon Film Commission) was to line produce a handful of scenes in Vancouver. I got together two friends plus the lead actor, Gavin, someone who bowled me over at an audition for "Chill" last month. We filmed one crowd scene in the concourse of the Vancouver Public Library and another on the streets. Both times we just filmed without permit and without alerting the crowd. The crowd mostly didn't even notice we were rolling. Later we shot driving scenes with Gavin in the car and Dylan in the front seat. That afternoon we shot in Stanley Park, a long difficult pullout over the Lions Gate Bridge. It was pouring rain at that point and Dylan got royally soaked. VIFF Reviews trickle in MORNING SUN - An illuminating documentary about the Cultural Revolution in China, particularly focusing on the rise and fall of the Red Guards, the students who became arbiters of life and death at the height of the mass movement. Morning Sun opens brilliantly, using footage of the The East is black and white Communist Party's filmed version of the musical The East is Red to illustrate the 'official' version of the mythos behind the Chinese revolution. The beaming faces of the actors, the colourful and dramatic grandeur on the stage, show how the ideology of Maoist China was presented as much as a religion as it was philosophy. The first generation of the revolution, those who had fought with Mao and the other leaders of the CP during the Long March, are portrayed as heroes like the ancient Chinese characters of folklore from "The Water Margin" and "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". However, it is the second generation, the sons and daughters of those figures who came to become the terrors of cities during what became known as the Cultural Revolution. Morning Sun uses interviews with former Red Guards and archival footage of those days to paint a portrait of ardent young students who took Maoist philosophy to heart, embraced the cause, and then built up into a whirwind of mass hysteria that shook Chinese society to its foundations. Unlike other versions, Morning Sun describes the Red Guards as a spontaneously formed series of groups, often competing, who first took control of their schools, beating students and teachers they suspected were not in total lockstep with Mao. At the same time, the film describes how Mao suspected other leadership of conspiring against him and, after the failures of the economic and farm reform plans, decided to exploit the student movements to create a cult of personality centered on his words and musings. The Mao depicted in Morning Sun is very much the enigmatic 'pop star', appearing in public only briefly but leaving in his wake hysterical crowds. Beyond the cultural curiousity shown in the archival footage, the real evil perpetrated by the Red Guards is detailed in the personal recollections of the survivors. People brutally beaten in their homes, dragged through the streets; all of these were daily occurences at the height of the Red Guard's sway. All the while, Mao seems poised above the affair like an aloof controller whenever he isn't shown as a big glowing head in a propaganda film. I had the odd flashes of Battle Royale while watching the footage of the chanting, pointing students, all dressed in young versions of the military uniforms. Morning Sun is a great historical documentary. Fascinating.

	Oct 8/03                                                                         More in weblog archive
	THE CORPORATION - Co-directed by Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent) and Jennifer Abbot, The Corporation critically charts the rise and growth of power of the corporate entity, a unique form of business that has become one of the most powerful bodies in the world, challenging governments, people and nature. Rats in a maze Like the popular Manufacturing Consent, The Corporation uses a compelling blend of interviews, file footage, animations and humorous archival films to illustrate its criticism of the corporation. Among the film's most memorable illustrations is the comparison of the corporation as a person (as it is legally defined) with a psychopathic personality. The thesis of The Corporation is that it is protected and has the same status as a person, but lacks the morality of the person. It's only drive is for profit, even though it is run by people and has consequences for both people and nature. Case studies of corporate excess may make a few people's heads shake. IBM's collaboration with the Nazis during the holocaust. Bechtel's battle with the people of Bolivia over the privatisation of its water distribution which made it illegal to collect rainwater. In one telling segment, the recent case where a Fox news station won an appeal where it was ruled that not telling the truth in journalism was not against the law was told from the beginning. It began when two investigative reporters for Fox were pressured to drop a story about the Monsanto corporation's use of growth hormone in dairy cattle which had consequences for cancer in humans and later became a textbook case of how one corporation could pressure another to tell a lie. These examples are disturbing and start stirring the emotions early. The Corporation which suffers a bit from 'preaching to the converted' in its tone. Those familiar with Manufacturing Consent will nod their heads at the appearance of Noam Chomsky and the inclusion of the clown prince of indy media Michael Moore's antics takes away from more interesting interviews with the heads of corporations themselves. The makers of the film afterwards alluded to a certain debt to Errol Morris for a interrotron adaptation they used themselves which allow them to interview with the subject staring into the lens. However, their interviews are more facile. As a prescriptive film, The Corporation is just a starting point, it seems. The makers have laid out some well known and some less well known examples of corporate behaviour using the same entertaining techniques as in Manufacturing Consent but the second half of the film (there is an intermission during this 2.5 hour film) falls down. People power, using the courts and airing bad publicity is shown to affect change against companies dealing with consumer products, but the stories of the victories against monolithic transnationals in the third world isn't quite so well analyzed. Also, although time is spent on the consumers, executives, media and government, no note is taken about an important other actor in the corporation: the stockholders. One heartening example of a CEO (Ray Anderson of Interface, Inc.)who wanted to change his company's extractive policies so that it could become environmentally sustainable was the most novel inclusion in the interviews. That said, The Corporation is as slick and emotionally effective (or if you prefer: manipulative) as Manufacturing Consent. As a film it will be fodder for your local indie theatre and worth watching. Watch your local rag for when The Corporation 'roadshow' (see their website at www.thecorporation.tv) comes to your city. Previous blog here >>