Hawaii Dispatch.

The Hawaii International Film Festival kicked off its 26th edition with Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu's multi-part paean to multi-cultural misery. But a rather more convincing - not to mention utopian - brand of internationalism could be found in the festival's programming philosophy. HIFF has several obvious advantages over its mainland counterparts: an idyllic setting, terrific hospitality, suitably laid-back scheduling (no morning screenings!). Above all, though, the festival's defining quality is its proximity to the Pacific Rim. This is an event that fully reflects its crossroads locale and the diversity of the local population.

Though not as expansive as Pusan or as focused as Vancouver (the two other major fall pitstops for Asian film fans), HIFF pulls off an impressive balancing act. Broadly speaking, the something-for-everyone program breaks down into three main components: a generous harvest of Asian hits, the best of the year's Asian American independents and a strong focus on emerging names and movements in Asian art film - which increasingly means keeping close tabs on developments in South East Asia.

Unavoidably, there's also plenty of attention heaped on Lost, the Oahu production turned local industry goldmine. HIFF '06 devoted a "seminar" to the TV show, grandly titled "Is Television the New Cinema?" (The question was barely raised, let alone answered, at the event, which more closely resembled a fan convention, with stars Jorge Garcia, Michael Emerson and Henry Ian Cusick in attendance.) Lost was also given a special Hawaii Film Office award at the closing ceremony. Even the festival trailer, a long and perplexing ramble featuring sponsor-emblazoned aquatic life and inexplicably set to "Ballad of a Thin Man," was the brainchild of Lost executive producer Jack Bender.

The Asian blockbuster contingent was led by this year's odd pair of South Korean juggernauts: Bong Joon-ho's ubiquitous The Host and Lee Jun-ik's The King and the Clown. But the real surprise was Dirty Carnival, the fourth feature from writer-director Yoo Ha (still largely unknown outside his home country). At once propulsive and ruminative, Yoo's gangster epic recalls Goodfellas not just in scope but also emotional weight and complexity (the Korean title translates as "Mean Streets"). Punctuated by periodic outbreaks of ultra-violence involving baseball bats and sashimi knives, the movie follows a low-level, 30-ish hoodlum (TV star Jo In-seong) up the ranks of the criminal underworld. In a neatly reflexive framing device, the anti-hero's fate is unwittingly sealed when he agrees to serve as a consultant for the gangster movie that his childhood friend is directing.

The would-be crowd-pleasers from Japan were less on the mark. Kenta Fukasaku's Yo Yo Girl Cop, based on the popular manga, proved shockingly tedious for a movie about schoolgirl law enforcers wielding all-powerful yo-yos. Which left the "Best Japanese Teen Flick With 'Yo' In Its Title" honors to Rieko Miyamoto's Check It Out, Yo!, an amiable Okinawan hip-hop goof featuring Hawaii-born sumo wrestler Konishiki in a cameo.

HIFF's "Extreme Asia" section served mainly as a reminder that the continent's horror film output is, not even a decade after the first Ringu, mired in creative bankruptcy. The slick, nonsensical APT, in which residents of a Seoul highrise are driven to suicide during a nightly blackout, and the amateurish, pseudo-folkloric Filipino Canadian ghost story Ang Pamana: The Inheritance, are symptomatic, obliviously proceeding through a checklist of hoary genre ingredients. The white-smocked girl with the face-obstructing curtain of unwashed hair remains unconscionably popular.

By comparison, Shinya Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective seemed a minor miracle. Fresh off its Pusan world premiere, this is one of the Tetsuo auteur's most accessible efforts and easily the most inventive J-horror film in some time. Investigating a wave of grisly suicides apparently committed during sleep, the cops call on the titular sleuth, who specializes in infiltrating the dreams of others (he's played by Ryuhei Matsuda, best known as the pretty young thing in Oshima's Gohatto). Tsukamoto works with familiar tropes - the horror is technologically rooted, triggered by dialing "0" on a cellphone - but he doesn't breathe life into the genre so much as mock, sully, and dismantle it. The handheld camerawork has a rattling immediacy and the queasy mood is tempered by a rude wit (the Girl With the Hair is dispensed with, hilariously, in the first scene).

To mark the centenary of Filipino immigration to Hawaii - and the resurgence of independent film production in the Phillipines - HIFF '06 assembled a "Filipino in Focus" sidebar. Notable entries include the languid family melodrama Summer Heat and Just Like Before, in which members of the 80s new wave band The Dawn (whose singer was killed at the height of their popularity) enact a fictionalized version of their midlife crisis. Best of the Filipino crop was Jeffrey Jeturian's The Bet Collector, which focuses, with Dardennes-like tenacity, on the daily activities of the titular queen bee, Amy (a remarkable Gina Pareño), a hustling, chattering big momma who runs numbers and collects alms in her slum neighborhood. There's barely any plot, but the inimitable Amy, fond of gossip and prone to magical thinking, is a narrative motor unto herself.

HIFF also paid tribute to Focus: First Cuts, the new transnational production company founded by Hong Kong star Andy Lau and run by Malaysian producer Lorna Tee. The first six Focus productions were on show; at least one, Ho Yuhang's Rain Dogs, should be a career-maker. A constant presence on the festival circuit since premiering in Venice, this is the most mature and satisfying film yet from this linchpin of the Malaysian new wave (who previously directed Min and Sanctuary). Ho has never attempted to disguise the influence of Hou Hsiao-hsien - here, he even works with Hou's regular editor, Liao Ching-song - but the uninflected observation and musical sense of time and space go far beyond homage this time. A steady accumulation of suggestive, even poetic details, the film is an intensely melancholic portrait of a young man adrift - between adolescence and adulthood, between the rural and the urban, and among a set of flawed parental figures - a state of suspension potently crystallized by the film's unofficial theme song, Odetta's version of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

Another Malaysian highlight took top prize in the shorts competition. Directed by Azharr Rudin (editor on Amir Muhammad's The Last Communist), the 15-minute, single-take Majidee is part of the young director's Amber Sexalogy: six connected shorts that mostly pertain to the relationship between two recurring characters (one of whom is played by a different actor each time out). Walking from a bus terminal to a train station in downtown Kuala Lumpur, a college student is approached by an older man; the ensuing conversation, like the film, is both simplicity itself and fraught with ambiguity.

Two of the best films in the small, well-curated feature competition (five fiction, five docs) concerned the disintegration and reconstitution of family in modern Asian societies. Family Ties, the first solo effort from Kim Tae-yong, co-director of the Korean horror hit Memento Mori, tells three related stories involving two extended clans, sundered and realigned by adultery, divorce, remarriage, adoption and death.

The main jury - which consisted this year of SXSW director Matt Dentler, critic Elvis Mitchell and actor Kal Penn - awarded top prize to Nia Dinata for Love for Share, a scathing, often comic attack on the polygamy epidemic in increasingly Islamic Indonesia. Told, like Family Ties, in three overlapping parts, Love for Share is a personal film: Dinata says that the first story, in which a female doctor stoically bears her husband's decision to take several more wives, is loosely based on her parents' experience. But it's unmistakably political, too: Dinata locates subversive comedy in the polygamous complications (in one story, two wives fall for each other), but the humor only hardens the anger and disgust at the film's core.

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2006 4:19 PM