I'm a Communist Kindergarten Survivor

Choosing not to work, as evidenced by two blog posts within the hour, at the busiest junction of the year, becomes a much less morally challenging proposition once you square it to yourself that you just.don't.want.to.work. Bullshitty excuses are a moral hazard on par with smoking, abstinence, and driving.

So Aliza and I went to a movie this past Saturday at the ReelAsian Film Festival. It was a properly Asian affair: we are both Asian, which was a start. We started the evening at Traditional Chinese Buns, patronized by an entirely Asian population save two white ass cracker Kensington Market transplants. We then made a quick hop to Chinatown Starbucks where I chatted up with the Asian barista. After that we walked back to the streetcar stop on Spadina Ave., which is basically the heart of emigre China this side of Lake Ontario.

I have a small confession to make: I used to dream about, and still occasionally does, of being a festival circus groupie--whoring myself out all day for free festival film tickets and sneaking peeks of Tilda Swinton's non-existent breasts at after parties so I can share salacious tales of her androgyny with my otherwise apathetic friends. Dreams aside, as it stands now I can only afford maybe four tickets at the International Film Festival each year. I briefly contemplated writing for Innis Herald again, in the slim hope that some magazine critic will pick up this quality paper one day (circulation 500) and contact me on the merit of my sharp and incisive writing.

Thankfully, these ReelAsian tickets for Little Red Flowers are only 7 bucks apiece.

It's, well, ironic, that the Chinese title for this film means "It Looks Beautiful", considering the first shot that greeted me when we walked into the theatre was a 5-year-old's penis. Points of subtle psychosexual interest recurred with unfailing frequency in this 90 minute film: a boy named Qiang Qiang (meaning "guns" or "pushka") was enrolled in a residential kindergarten in post-revolution Beijing; the highly regarded school was a place of toys and seemingly benevolent teachers, but also of regimented exercise routines, group bowel movement rituals, and a ruthless system whereby a child was awarded a little red flower for good behaviour. Soon, the spirited Qiang Qiang began to find himself at odds with people around him.

Kids lined up to take a dump every morning, and were awarded for shitting like clockwork

The film's director Zhang Yuan is supposed to be the first truly underground filmmaker in China, his work routinely censored for political reasons. That Little Red Flowers is a political satire on communism and its group psychology is beyond obvious. Like, the group shitting is totally a stab at the kind of cross-surveillance citizens of communism used to carry out on each other. When you've seen someone's privates up close like that you've seen everything, no?

Child actor Kan exposes his privates for art, and takes on the Chinese equivalent of the name Rammington Steel

It wasn't awfully original to situate a political satire in a communist boarding school; the individual in an authoritarian regime is a theme all too often explored, often with great mastery. Heck, even the spirited-boy-in-a-boarding-school franchise is a bit overdone. But lead actor Kan was a miracle, and for anyone who actually went to a communist kindergarten (me & Aliza), the film surely brought back memories.

It was pretty sad that as late as the 80s, things didn't change that much. The group shitting was abolished, thank god, but the nap rooms were still co-ed, with guys wearing pants that had a slit along the asscrack to facilitate easy transportation of goods. All this indecent exposure probably lead to psychosexual retardation at later ages, which explains why all these asian people have issues with their bodies. We still learned songs that ran something like the following:

Li and I are sharing apples;

there are only two left;

I give the bigger one to Li;

and keep the smaller one for myself.

Ayn Rand would have been livid.

But these are beautiful, sepia-toned memories through the filter lens of temporal distance, and both Aliza and I found ourselves oddly moved--half an hour after the movie we still found ourselves excitedly chatting about food in a communist kindergarten (corn gruel, white flour buns). It was then that I realized Little Red Flowers was bound for the Pantheon of Chinese cinema, not as a superb satire, but as a finely crafted keepsake, a little slice of history.

I tried to search through my memory to decide if I ever wore those pants with ass-slits and found nothing. The memory must have been subconsciously suppressed.

Review: Manufactured Landscapes

Edward Burtynsky’s China photos explore what has always been a veritable fount of intriguing images. Recalling Antonioni’s 1972 Chung Guo China, which in a coolly detached manner examined the ordinary, everyday facet of a society that was nevertheless rife with political tension, his work, with equal detachment, goes underneath the surface of prosperity, and discovers tension of an entirely different kind: us vs. nature.

Burtynsky’s photos come alive on the big screen in Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, as the camera follows his footsteps to China and lingers on some of the very same frames. Opening anonymously enough at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, this documentary nevertheless found some success on its own terms, at least judging by the crowds on a Friday night in its second week of general release.

Not that surprising, because Burtynsky’s photos are gorgeous to look at. His keen eye for unconventional beauty took him to some unusual places: bustling and grimy coal mines; container seaports; remote villages where half of the world’s discarded computers and cell-phones end up; entire cities demolished in the wake of the Three Gorges Dam; mega-factories that employ thousands; and the seamy underbelly of Shanghai, where the living room of one jostles for space with the kitchen of the other, all in the open air on the street.

Interesting framing and lighting manage to bring out things we wouldn’t even think to look for. Through his lens, piles of plastic transistors turn into a vibrant mosaic of colours, piles of coal into a study of sensuous contours; and scenes of people working to demolish their own cities in anticipation of the Dam get imbued with a marmoreal and post-apocalyptic beauty.

The whole notion of “ugly” beauty may seem a little ironic, but Burtynsky’s photos, and Manufactured Landscapes by association, work not because they pander to our sense of irony. These photos are quietly meditative, a quality that the film successfully recreates by moving at a glacial pace and saying little, but the sense of unease underlying the landscapes is unmistakably transmitted. As the film puts those stunning photos of transistors into context, it tells the story of how entire local economies in rural China have come to depend on imported junk electronics from which toxic components are scavenged and sold for money. Even the photos of Three Gorges Dam construction, while upbeat by social realism standards, are given a curious spin; put side by side with images of cities whose destruction it necessitates, and the glistening new ones it will support, the culminative effect is one that questions the fundamental sanity of the whole contraption.

Manufactured Landscapes hastily denies being China-bashing, and it isn’t. Just who are the perpetrators is a question with no easy answer and one that both Burtynsky and the film are wise enough to avoid. After all, most of the polluting junk electronics came from us in the West; and the decidedly un-quaint squalor of the Shanghai slums seems like a good moral case for China’s construction bonanza and energy hogging: who are we to be indignant, when we have had a free ride on cheap energy and, with our endless suburban subdivisions and super-highways, are probably just as guilty of tempering with the landscape?

The succinct “message” of Manufactured Landscapes, if there even is one, is that we are all implicated.

The refusal to be accusatory is the main strength of Manufactured Landscapes—emotionally un-satisfying perhaps, but necessary in light of the moral complexities of the issue. Yet it’s quite clear from Burtynsky’s photos who the victims are. In all his sweeping images of transformed landscapes, people are reduced to mere dots, toiling away complacently or perhaps haplessly, about to be swallowed, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, by the enormity of what they themselves have done. Thus is how civilization savagely but beautifully turns on itself.

Noteworthy, or Just Worthy of My Note: A Review of 6 Movies

I caved into Match Point just about when everybody around me had seen it. That I would be so willing to bypass a Woody Allen movie was due in part to the disappointment I had with his later films, and also in no small part to the good folks at NOW magazine, who panned the film.

Points off for NOW, because actually watching the film was a small delight. Moving from his familiar milieu of Upper Westside Jewish intelligensia to the refinement of London's high society gave fresh impetus to the film's theme of luck and questioning of the notion of justice. The story is familiar enough: poor Irish boy from the province (Chris Wilton, played by Jonathan Rhys Myer) accidentally broke into Waspy high society and stole the heart of rich heiress Chloe Hewett(a rather insipid performance by Emily Mortimer); everybody fell in love with the young, hardworking, upwardly mobile Chris, but he himself couldn't stay settled but accidentally knocked up a drifting American actress Nola Rice(Scarlett, who else?), who, alas, was once due to marry into the Hewett family herself.

As the film itself was not shy to point out, the story had a lot to say about luck contrary to society's prevalent teachings about hard work. Luck saw to it that Chris Wilton would achieve the kind of lifestyle that, had he relied on hard work alone, he would have never attained; luck also set colliding trajectories for Nola and Chris.

The extent to which the plot stretched luck required a small suspension of belief (some are understandably unhappy about it); another charge levelled against this film--and I agree with it--is that most of the supporting characters were mere caricatures. The rich Hewett family seemed like an assembly of rich people stereotypes: the insipid, good-natured daughter Chloe, the slightly irreverrent and langourous son Tom, the measured and reserved father, and the anal-retentive bitchy snob of a mother. Well, it hardly needs to be said, but not all rich Waspy matrons have to a bitch and have names like Eleanor.

Where the film truly gets points though is Chris Wilton's character and the palpable chemistry between him and Scarlett's Nola Rice. Chris Wilton is a poser: in an early scene he was filmed reading Crime and Punishment (for self-enrichment), but gave up midway and started reading the Oxford Companion to Crime and Punishment instead. His purported love of culture was his passport into high society, which he met with a latent inferiority complex and a faint sulkiness. All this was readily understood by Nola, herself an outsider, whose attitude towards Chris's attempt was in equal measure sympathetic, amused, and slightly disdainful.

This nuanced chemistry was most evident when Chris and Nola sat in a bar after a chance meeting, bonding over their mutual outsider status. Then all of a sudden Nola lost her nuanced touch and became this psychotic and possessive bitch. Why this was the case I can't say, but I suspect it was bad acting on Scarlett Johanssan's part (gasp!!) But Chris's rags-to-riches story was sufficient to drive the story along, his evolving relationship with money, power, and his own desires closely paralleled by our identification with him, lending plausibility to his climactic actions.

It may be an old story, but it surely worked. I found myself much more satisfied in the end than at the end of Crime and Misdemeanor, a similar story but more contrived in comparison to Match Point.

I can't say much about the much-hyped London setting; that "touch" Woody Allen has with New York is conspicuously missing in this movie. Also gone are the quips and witty one-liners. I miss these two things: that spectacular opening sequence to Manhattan and his famous witticism and dissection of neurosis in Annie Hall. Match Point can't match the height of those two movies, and I find the philosophy of it a bit trite. But if only for telling a good story, Match Point still marks a sort of return to form for Woody Allen.

And finally, Scarlett Johanssan was a disappointment. Loud and annoying, she was hardly the femme fatale she was supposed to be. Seduction works when it is (or at least appears) effortless, not when she struts around wearing too much make up and uttering lines like "you are playing a very aggressive game".

And while on that subject, Woody Allen needs to go back to film school to study directing more convincing sex scenes.

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I went into A Scanner Darkly with a free ticket, which probably explains why I liked it more than I otherwise would--instead of caving to my urge to yell "Shut the fuck up" when the characters talked too much, I just sat back and reminded myself that I wasn't paying for this.

And plenty of that I did. This Linklater film was, in the same vein as Waking Life and Before Sunset, talky, and a lot of the conversations were no more than exchanges between stoners, one of them played by Keanu Reeves, an undercover agent investigating a brain-damaging superdrug called substance D as the drug flooded the country in a functioning but dystopic near-future. As he was forced to take the drug and the damage began to take effect, he found himself gradually assuming the identity of the very person he was investigating.

This was the founding premise of the main theme of identity. It was further complicated by the availability of "scramble suits"--protective clothing that completely disguises one's identity. Agents were required to wear them for security, and of course, secrets lurked beneath these sinister looking contraptions.

The scramble suits nicely reflected the air of paranoia in the Orange County of near-future: the film's greatest success was creating muted fear within the decaying world at large and the quiet horror of one man's private hell as he was eaten away by brain damage and drug-induced hallucinations.

But the film's attempt at being thought-provoking never really took off from there but was instead undercut by its persistent attempt at not-so-subtle current commentary. The government appeared so sinister with all of its survallence activities, that you almost expected a conspiracy from the outset; and when the conspiracy was revealed, all it got from me was an indifferent shrug.

The use of rotoscope animation was useful for a) creating the kind of hallucination-ridden world seen through the eyes of drug addicts ("are those sofas moving or is it just me?") and b) disguising Keanu Reeves's bad acting skills.

Too self-conscious and bent on becoming an instant cult-classic, a Scanner Darkly is bound to become an instant cult-classic among high school art majors.

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I've been getting my fill of CGI-ladden films lately: Superman Returns, X-men, and Pirates of the Caribean. All three were surprisingly entertaining, although regrettably none of them had enough things being blown up. I mean, that's what they are for, right? And what's with Brandon Routh's face?

Also saw Devil Wears Prada; trivial frivolous fun.

Introducing my own Academy of the Overrated

"-Levitt's overrated. In fact, he may be a candidate for the academy."

"-Right!"

"-Mary and I have invented the Academy of the Overrated for such notables as"

"-Gustave Mahler"

"-Isak Dinesen and Carl Jung"

"-Scott Fitzgerald"

"-Lenny Bruce. Can't forget him, can we?"

It's scary when you watch movies like Last Days, Elephant, and My Own Private Idaho and listen to Gus Van Sant talking about his exploration of the human condition, because what are we supposed to make of a world that heaps all of its adoration onto this supposedly serious artist when we all know that the world is not nearly as vacant, senseless and devoid of motives as he "observes" it?

Comfortingly, most of the films for which he wrote the script were panned by critics.

To someone as boring, irritating, self-indulgent, and nihilistic as Gus Van Sant, my only response is "Up Yours!"

Three Times, and Other Tidbits

Apologies to my dear readers for the lack of updates, but since seeing Three Times on Friday I've felt like I owe it to this blog to write a movie review, which, as I remember from my Innis Herald days, can become really excruciating.

It wouldn't be impudent to draw parallels between Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times and the noltalgic pieces of that other demigod of Chinese cinema, Wong Kar-Wai. Both are awash in lush colours and oriental melancholy, and evocative of the semi-mythical places of yesteryear (Hong Kong, Taiwan). Yet almost over-indulgently Three Times prized style over characters and story, and suffered for it.


Chen Chang and Shu Qi appeared as lovers in three separate stories that spanned almost a hundred years. A Time for Love was a convincingly awkward love story between a soldier (Chen) and a poolhall mistress (Shu Qi) in the pre-modernization Taiwan of 1966. It was the most accessible story out of the three, granted, but also the most charming. The landscape of dilapidated houses and noisy roadside snack joints, symbols of a more innocent and restrained existence, provided the perfect backdrop as the young lovers gingerly fell in love. Shu Qi and Chen were clearly comfortable in their respective roles, and made up for Hou's economy with characters with nuanced and believable acting.

The other two segments, set in 1911 and 2005, respectively, were much more forgettable. There is something to be said about Hou's ambitions--to chronicle of the changing nature of love and relationships throughout the century; but his tendency to linger over scenery and overlook characters proved to be a serious handicap. In a Time for youth, Shu Qi had the very thankless job of portraying an epileptic lesbian singer whose infactuation with a man threatened to destroy her established relationship with another girl. There was supposed to be inner turmoil and confusion, yet with Hou's quick and broad strokes, little of that came across; Shu Qi's character appeared genuinely callous, even loathsome.

Three Times should have been three seperate movies, instead of only one that managed to be both contrived and boring (3 hours!!!)

Having said that, it was gorgeous to look at. The lush interiors of the 1900s brothel dripped with saturated colours and a pervasive sense of claustrophobia; 21st century Taipei was instead shown in a harsh, bluish, searching light that perfectly communicated the quiet anguish of the young and the lost. Unfortunately that was all Three Times was--a beautifully shot dud.



In other news, the Squid and the Whale recently came out on DVD. I beseech you: do yourself a favour and watch it. It honestly is one of the best of 2005, and embodies the best qualities of American independent cinema. It's at once witty, contemplative, incisive, and emotionally honest; if for nothing else, watch it just to see Jeff Daniels (at his best here) as the failed intellectual: his snobbisms are quite something.