KONTROLL - Superb, stylish, comic 'thriller' set in the underground lines of Budapest. Although touted as a thriller, it is mostly a comedy about the lives and misadventures of a crew of ticket checkers who work for "Control"; all of them misfits who have ended up stuck in the ill-lit hallways and platforms far from daylight. One of them, Bulcsú, was a successful ... something ... before he became the leader of his own crew and now goes so far as to sleep in the station, never quite able to ride the escalators to the surface. Working its way through their stories is a pedestrian (sorry) whodunnit that goes half-unanswered. People are pushed in front of trains. But the Kontroll-ers never really task themselves with finding the murderer, only Bulcsú stumbles upon the killer through chance. The real pleasure in this film is in the gleefully absurd follies taking place in the really strange environment of the underground. Kontrollers and their victims, the passengers, fight daily battles over unpaid rides. The Kontrollers have their jealousies, petty rivalries and dangerous games. And they find love in odd places. The director Nimrod Atal has plenty of style to waste. Highly recommended.

GOOD MORNING, BEIJING - Very raw and obviously first-time feature by a Beijing filmmaker relating the darkly humorous and bitter story of a salaryman travelling all night trying to make a deal with the hostage takers who have taken his girlfriend for 10,000 Yuan. Two end images are striking from this digital video production: the end shot of an angry woman tearing the black tar paper masking an apartment window from the grey towers of Beijing beyond; the salaryman throwing a cloud of fake money he was going to use to fool the criminals into the air. Somewhere in the amateurish lighting and composition is a better feature waiting to be remade. The director was in attendance and was apologetic about the production values through the Q&A period. Asian films programmer Tony Rayns discussed the standard of censorship in China today and made the interesting comment that the state censor board ignores video productions and so directors like Jianlin Pan could make a deeply cynical movie without much backlast - only there would be no distribution.

THE MACHINIST - Brad Anderson's creepy and sometimes funny Hitchockian psychothriller about a machinist who hasn't slept for an entire year who becomes convinced that others are out to get him. In a 'beyond the call of duty' physical performance by Christian Bale, the machinist is a skeletally thin man who still manages to keep his sense of humour at work, where he is part of an assembly line of metalworkers at "National Machine", and in his private life where he conducts a parallel relationship with a prostitute (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the waitress at an airport coffee bar. His life becomes unhinged when he is blamed for an accident in which a fellow worker has his arm ripped off in a lathe (YUCK). His life then becomes a steep spiral downwards as he pursues a strange new worker who no one else is able to see, convinced that everyone is persecuting him. It's hard to believe but at the end of the movie Bale's character looks even worse, beaten up, bleeding, even thinner. Bale's physical sufferings aside, The Machinist is a movie cooked in cool blue-green gels, giving everything a dark tone of a nightmare. Fair comparisons could be made to Mulholland Dr. Brad Anderson's Session 9 had the same feeling of a waking dream where characters wander in and out of miasma, but The Machinist has more overt Hitchockian influences and setups. The end does not come as a real hammer blow as it might have been intended but on the whole, The Machinist is well done and worth a look for its style and Bale's performance.

DIAS de SANTIAGO - A bleak, predictable Taxi Driver-like story set in Peru. Santiago, a Peruvian 'Navy Seal', returns from fighting guerillas and the Ecuadorians to face no work opportunities, a crappy family, former colleagues who want to knock over banks. If that wasn't enough, his own inner demons prevent him from connecting with his estranged wife and with the many chicas who nevertheless want to do him if he would only stop snapping and trying to manhandle them. I've told you everything.

PRIMER - The $7,000 science fiction film that won the Sundance festival. This little film about a group of bright engineers who accidentally create a time machine in a garage is a bit too dense for its 78 minutes. Once the two main characters discover what they have on their hands, there is too quick a ramp up to inevitable questions of abusing their newfound power. What is good about the film is the atmosphere of geer-ism that anyone who has ever hung around smart individuals working in tech companies knows. A bunch of young, smart guys trying to invest something that will make them a lot of money in a consequence-free environment. Only this time they create something that has the potential to change everyone's life. The authenticity is there. The time machines, their equipment, is all stuff you would see in any university lab. However, I never felt close to either of the main characters to root for one over the other. See trailer here >>

The trials and tribulations of Wong Kar Wai's long awaited science fiction romance "2046" are covered in the NY Times Magazine this week. It's a good article that introduces you to the man behind "In the Mood for Love" and who is one of the greatest (and most idiosynchratic) directors today. Read it here >>

The LA Times has a very interesting article about Japan's thousands of WWII veterans who had survived being trained as kamikazes. After the war they were treated as pariah by their own country because they symbolized the futility of the Japan's efforts in the face of defeat. A very interesting passage has one of the survivors defend the veneration of the kamikaze versus today's suicide bombers. At one time Japan's ambassador to Lebanon is said to have lectured a Hezbollah mufti on how that radical group shouldn't take the example of the kamikaze pilots to justfiy their own suicide operations. I wonder if the suicide bombers in Iraq today think about the kamikaze? Read it here >>

The NY Times has an article about a growing trend (I haven't heard of it here) for parents to have "elective" ultrasounds simply for the pleasure of seeing the growing foetus and being able to take photos of it. These are becoming so common that the clinics have begun opening in malls. This is despite some physicians warning of possible risk. Read it here >>

IGN interviewed the creator of the anime classic Ghost in the Shell about the upcoming sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. One interesting comment he makes is that in his opinion the advances in animation technology in the years between the two films has made the animator's job more difficult, not easier. Read it here >>

I'm late to discovering China Mieville, a superb fantasy writer who has revived my love for the genre. This isn't the kind of fantasy with the elves and brooding warriors, this is more in the tradition Mervyn Peake of the "Titus Groan" trilogy, where fantasy doesn't mean ancient, it just means something fantastical. There should also be a fair comparison to Ursula le Guin. I've just finished "The Scar" which is about a floating city of pirates made up of captured ships stuck together from generations of piracy and am half way through "Perdido Street Station", the book that launched Mieville into the forefront of fantasy. This book is about a massive, sprawling city that is home to dozens of species who are faced with an ultra-dimensional horror sprung on them by a secret government experiment. What really makes these two books jump out from the doldrums that is much of the contemporary fantasy shelf is the level of imagination. Pirates, vampires, magic, steampunk, dimensional travel all mix in together in a very rich tapestry in both of these books. Currently there is a third novel in hardcover called "The Iron Council.".

I'd seen "Hero" at least twice before on DVD on Kelvin's projected-on-the-wall format but I decided I needed to see it again in the cinema. My complaints on the story remain the same. Despite its convoluted editing, it is a pretty simple and basic story on which too much weight is placed on the philosophical / political conflict over the personal conflict. As a result, the characters, despite the importance of their actions, are flat and uninspiring. Visually, Hero is spectacular, a real study in the use of colour in mood and in symmetry in composition. It is still very much worth seeing just on that basis. The North American cut I saw has an annoying change in the English subtitles. In the DVD versions, the words tien sha are translated as "all under heaven". In the theatrical version, it has been changed to "our land". Not only is it less poetic, it also makes one of the end cards meaningless. At the very end of the movie, a rolling credit describes what the emperor of Qin accomplished after the events of the movie are over. It ends with the line: "... and that is why the people of China call their country: 'our land'." Huh? Well... yeah!

Those who know me know that I'm a fan of the NHL to the extent that the last spring I began writing for a fan sports magazine online. Now that the NHL has locked out the players there may be no Canucks this year which means ... looking on the bright side ... that I will have an extra 6 or more hours every week to be productive.

This Washington Post article from Iraq is the kind of war journalism I like. It is both interesting, insightful and sometimes absurd ("In retaken Iraqi city, perils lurk"). The reporter follows around a Stryker brigade unit (the name itself is worthy of parody) as they sift through the recaptured city of Tall Afar trying to find among the civilians any rebels who they had just finished fighting. Aiding them is a masked informant they have nicknamed "The Source" who doesn't seem to have any method or real information, just the motivation to pick out men of fighting age to be taken into custody. My favourite bit: "You have the right to remain silent," one soldier told an uncomprehending detainee in English. "Anything you say will result in a punch in the face."

After four tanks of unleaded, I marked down how many kms half a tank of my 55 litre tank gave me (221kms) and extrapolated my fuel consumption (221x2=442kms/55L). 12.44L/100kms or 22mpg. This is quite a bit worse than the state fuel consumption 9.2L/100kms. I do drive fast and I use the manumatic mode about a third of the time now. And the engine is still new. I'll keep on monitoring this. There is a handy page here that will do the ratio math for you.

After the furious activity of the Praxis workshops I had a summer of a lot of blah. Weddings, money issues, and other distractions meant I didn't much of anything with either of my scripts after I said goodbye to the other writers in July. To get me back into the mode of writing I sold my XL1S to a local buyer and I used some of the proceeds last week to buy a laptop - a used Dell L400 - so that I can isolate myself from distractions. (The Dell is a light laptop with a wonky screen and a 2 hour battery but the price was right and I sent off for a longer use battery.) I'm also helped by the return of Vancouver fall weather - dreary rain and grey gloom.

In other good news, I got my car back from the shop and it looks like new.

I've made a preliminary schedule of my VIFF choices here (Excel spreadsheet). As I'm not volunteering this year (too busy, didn't get a call) I can really only afford this much in terms of time and money. I plan to see Primer, Time of the Wolf, Cop Festival: Reloaded, Kontroll, Izo, The Machinist, Good Morning Beijing, Clean, Arahan, and Dias de Santiago.

Lately I've been trying to find good driving music and often I won't leave until I've found some CD to slot in. It made me realize A) how much I regret not getting a CD changer and B) how there's some music that's great to listen to when you're working in front of the computer and not so good when you're driving. I found one good 2-disc mix by Layo and Bushwacka! called "All Night Long" that's really good. Not just the usual hard charging house but a good blend of funk, deep house, hip hop and other nice beats to help you on a long drive. You can listen to samples on their official site.

The 2004 Vancouver International Film Festival schedule is now posted online. See it here. The movies that jump out at me is Oliver Assayas' "Clean" which got Maggie Cheung the best actress award at Cannes, "Primer", the low budget science fiction drama that won Sundance this year, "Time of the Wolf" about a family trying to survive in post-apocalyptic Europe, "Izo" another Takashi Miike film and "The Machinist" a psycho-thriller starring Christian Bale about a man who hasn't slept in a year.

Watching the news in Ossetia where the school takeover by suspected Chechen separatists ended in explosions and gunfire, killing hundreds, many children, I felt a deep gloom followed by a feeling of despair. Previously I had engaged in a debate with an American who was surprised by my contention that the Russians had suffered more terrorism than the U.S. including September 11th. He didn't believe me when I related what I knew about the Chechen situation. That was only a week before the street bombing in Moscow, the hijacking and crashes of the two Russian airliners and now this. The Chechen crisis is relatively recent but follows Soviet fears of fundamentalist Islamic republics on its southern border. This was partly the reason why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, to install a friendly ruler.

During the Cold War westerners (including myself) were cheering the Soviet 'Vietnam' in Afghanistan without really examining all their motivations. I remember trying to publish a 'feature' piece in my university newspaper at the time portraying the Mujahadeen purely as freedom fighters and patriots for which I was roundly criticized by a history grad student. It was only later that I began reading more about the roots of the extremist Islamists. Still later, we now know that bin Laden took advantage of the power vaccuum in Afghanistan to install a base of extremists, many of whom then took hold in Chechnya.

The Russians are in a far worse situation than the U.S. The U.S. is battling Arab terrorists who are based across the ocean. Afghanistan and Iraq are far away. The Russians have Chechnya on their doorstep whose fighters can more easily blend in with the population, who can cross borders easily. Previous to this week's images of fleeing children, naked and bloody, and the rows of dead outside a schoolyard, westerners may have regarded the Chechnyan conflict as a dirty little war to be ignored. But actually it is all connected. Russia requires a friendly government in Chechnya to secure oil and also to guard against an extremist government. The U.S. is doing the same thing in Iraq. Both countries now are home to Islamist terrorists doing their best to bleed the occupiers of resolve and blood. Both are using their military superiority to try and 'win' conventionally and, by doing so, are causing civilians to choose sides. The difference is that the U.S. can go home, the Russians will always have this gaping wound within its borders.

I had happy news to begin the week. ICBC ruled in my favour and I won't have to pay any deductible (just the hassle of getting the car fixed). It turns out that my stall neighbour in fact had reported the incident two days after I did. They had just taken a couple or more days to think about it. I suppose it was just the wheels of bureauracy that made it seem like I had to push some sort of case.

Zhang Yimou's epic "Hero" (Xing Yong) opened as the number one movie at the box office in North America this past weekend after sitting two years in Miramax's vault. I've seen it a couple times already on DVD and I recommend seeing it on the big screen otherwise its powerful imagery is lost. I am trying to make time to catch it in the theatres. By the way, the movie trailers are pretty misleading as far as the plot of the actual movie goes so don't be surprised.