Seattle Dispatch. 2.

The "Asian Trade Winds" sidebar has gone with the wind this year, but Asian films are still the festival favorite source for odd, offbeat and cult programming. The 50th anniversary Godzilla: Final Wars is presented as Toho's last Godzilla movie (right, they've said that before) and they've brought Japan's adolescent action stylist Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) on board for the occasion. He delivers something unexpected: a blithely campy, altogether good-natured love letter to the classic Godzilla films of the 1960s and 1970s. The first Godzilla film in decades to embrace that early "history," it brings back all the old monsters (even Minilla!), tosses in an alien invasion force to send the monsters rampaging across the globe, and creates a team of Power Ranger-ish mutants (led by a Jesse Ventura-like American soldier) to enlist Godzilla in their battle to take back Earth. It's all classic suitmation effects (except for one suspiciously familiar CGI lizard, who is hilariously tromped by the real lizard king) and stomped-on miniatures, with CGI flourishes and classic clips from the original movies. Directed by a true fan of the old school, it's lusciously, knowingly cheesy in a loving way.

Takashi Shimizu's Marebito goes for a more insidious kind of horror than his trademark Ju-On films, somewhere between the supernatural and the terrifyingly human. The film's hero, a freelance videographer, all but lives through his camera lens, through which he glimpses a hidden world of creatures and terrors he becomes obsessed with, and his odyssey takes him to a subterranean Lovecraftian hollow-Earth realm, where he adopts a feral vampire girl as a pet and stalks the alleys for fresh blood to feed her. Shimizu delivers blood and brutality with a dispassionate directness, giving the unnerving imagery and insidious madness a weird crackle, and undercuts the fantasy with a revelation that turns the psychotic madman cliché inside out. It plays more like a rough draft than a completed feature, but the inspired insanity is the stuff that real nightmares are made of.

Which is what Three... Extremes, the Asian horror trilogy with contributions from Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike and Park Chan-wook, lacks: inspiration. Chan's Dumplings, a take on the Countess Bathory legend with a cannibal twist, may lack the visual panache of the other films display, but the focus is squarely on the emotional and mental state of its youth-obsessed character and its climax pays off. The same can't be said for Takashi's quiet, controlled, eerily austere dream horror Box or Park's Cut, an eye-grabbing but unimaginative tale of a sadistic psychotic on a deluded quest for revenge. It's all show-off and no payoff. And what's with the title? This is awfully restrained, given the careers of Takashi and Park.

The surreal McDull, Prince de la Bun, an impressionistic, melancholy modern fairy tale about a sweetly slow-witted young pig with a hyperactive leg twitch, falls in the chasm between kids' film and adult animation. In this underhanded satire, kindergarten piglet McDull chants service industry slogans in class and endures abusive practice job interviews while in his fantasy life (or, rather, his mother's fantasy - she takes on JK Rowling with her bedtime story) he's a dimwitted Prince who wanders out of his kingdom and tries to fit in with normal folk. There's a wistful, longing quality to the film as it explores the space left by loss (the Prince transforms from McDull to his absent father) with a gentle, sweet, and sad sympathy.

Not Asian but certainly offbeat, the Danish Strings is a high concept fantasy with strings attached. Marionette strings, to be exact, which are not merely acknowledged but embraced as a physical and spiritual component of the fantasy world. It's what gives this otherwise overwrought epic with Shakespearean undertones its defining details: the strings shoot up through the sky, giving life and defining movement. Form follows function as gates and prisons are tailored to stop the puppets by blocking the strings. Granted, puppet wars look a little silly in action and the "all things are connected" lessons become literal, but the puppeteering is accomplished and the execution inspired - it's the grandest looking puppet film I've every seen. I seem to hold the minority opinion, however, as it was roundly dismissed by everyone else.

In the fascinating documentary The 10th District Court: Moments of Trial, director Raymond Depardon shot the proceedings of twelve cases in front of Judge Michele Bernard-Requin (a clear-eyed bench veteran who cuts through the bullshit with a sardonic commentary) and pared them down to brief but vivid portraits of the defendants. The glimpse into the French legal system is fascinating - judges not only question the accused but serve as the jury tribunal - but ultimately, it isn't about law or the legal system. It's about people before the court, an array of characters as they present themselves to the judge. They range from an indignant middle-aged drunk driver to a stalker who can't deny that he terrorized his duly terrified ex-girlfriend (his attorney's closing remarks are so unbelievable that you'd swear they were a joke) to a five-time loser pickpocket who protests his innocence all the way to prison. You wouldn't expect such a seemingly simple, direct piece of observational documentary to be so fascinating, but Depardon's lens captures human behavior under pressure in all its dimensions. It's the greatest people-watching documentary in ages.

Olivier Marchal's 36 Quai des Orfevres is an old-style policier that doesn't explode so much as smolder from friction between up-from-the-streets OCU Captain Daniel Auteuil and bitter alcoholic and by-the-book BRI officer Gérard Depardieu, friends turned rivals in the competition over a career-making case. Good enough to be disappointing in its failings, it's the kind of film more likely to get remade than released in the US. I can see Michael Mann making it - and making it better - by tightening the drama around the friendship pushed to the breaking point and really investing in the antagonism within the force as this struggle delineates the difference between bending the law and corrupting oneself for power.

Don McKellar's Childstar is a Canadian indie that takes potshots at Hollywood arrogance and American runaway productions in Canada in addition to the cliché of the snotty child star and blithely manipulative stage mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). His adolescent sitcom star (Mark Rendall) is a horror. He's also a child living in a world of adult expectations and adult companions who are determined to wring every last moment they can while he's still cute. The film is best when it's cutting, or at least ambivalent, and McKellar sneaks much of the humor in under the dialogue. Everyone has their reasons - and their price - but McKellar is understanding and even forgiving of them.

Alice Wu's Saving Face is another romantic comedy where the gender gap is complicated by culture clash, this one set in the Chinese American community of New York and complicated by the fact that its heroine is a lesbian who has yet to come out to her widowed mother (Joan Chen) who, in turn, has a surprise of her own. Pleasant and unsurprising, it has a nice community feel and first-time director Wu is surprisingly adept at handling comedy. How can you not smile at a film that ends on a spit take?

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2005 1:55 AM