Vancouver Dispatch. 1.

I've always found Vancouver the most enjoyable film festival of my year, whether for a couple of days or a full week. It's an easy fest to navigate, with seven screens of a downtown multiplex dedicated to the festival and all but one of the ten screens within a few blocks of one another. Set two weeks after Toronto, showcases many of TIFF's North American premieres. And it's Dragons and Tigers sidebar is a fascinating snapshot of Asian cinema that takes chances on early works by promising directors in addition to the big names and domestic hits. More on the smaller films and early works later. For this dispatch, let's take a look at some of the established filmmakers and bigger films.

Takashi Miike is still cranking out three or four features a year (down somewhat from his absurdly prolific era of the late-90s/early-00s, surely for the better), but fewer of them seem to be making it stateside, even on DVD - and those that do often seem undercooked. Where so many of his earlier films rode a crest of creative adrenaline to carry audiences through the narrative incoherence, he no longer seems able to sustain himself and too many of his recent films play as strings of set pieces and visual ideas stitched together with halfhearted scenes to create an illusion of continuity. With God's Puzzle, he dials down his stylistic flamboyance and erratic narratives and does something I haven't seen him do for a while: tell a story.

While hardly inspired, God's Puzzle is an amusing drama of a rocker and part-time sushi chef (Ichihara Hayato) who takes the place of his brainy twin brother and ends up floundering through college physics and teaming up with a reclusive 17-year-old girl genius (Tanimura Mitsuki) on a theoretical project to create a universe with our own universe. The film sprawls over more than two hours, and much of it is dedicated to quantum physics and metaphysical debate, which Miike manages to make interesting (he directs one lesson as an action movie, with Ichihara leaping through a lecture and breathlessly delivering his summation). The finale turns into a kind of WarGames with a metaphysical foundation and a God complex, which Miike leavens with a little humor, courtesy of the amiable goofball Ichihara. Throughout the film he launches the flashbacks and fantasy scene with the click of a "button" dropped on screen like a website link, and for the end, he transforms an action thriller into a rock musical. Miike lets the cheeky humor bubble up through the film, as if reminding us not to take the science-babble too seriously. After all, it is a film that concludes with a contemplation of the theory of sushi relativity. It's almost refreshing to see Miike loosen up so much, but he's still marking time.

Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise premiered at Toronto to general indifference and hasn't found any champions since. Ostensibly the final film in a trilogy inaugurated with Takeshis' and continued through the fragmented mess that is Glory to the Filmmaker!, this tale of a frustrated artist sends a confused message. The young son of a passionate art collector and artist patron is inspired to become a painter. The early scenes of the boy and, later, the young man learning his craft and exploring possibilities are full of the excitement of creative potential and artistic expression. He's feeling his way around, looking for affirmation and latching on to every minor encouragement of an art dealer with overzealous intemperance. His dedication is admirable but the attempt to find his voice gets lost in his efforts to find success. The film turns into glib parody by the time Takeshi himself takes over the role as the middle-aged failure so obsessed with making a name for himself that he lets his family sink under his neglect. It's a sour satire of the commercialization of the creative impulse and Takeshi's portrait of the artist as an unfeeling obsessive falls between emotional apathy and amoral neglect. When he looks on the corpse of a loved one (dead from his own failure as a father and a human) and sees only a new idea for a conceptual piece, the body merely raw material for his use, he's no longer pitiable, he's just despicable. If this is some metaphor for his corruption as a commercial artist, then his message is lost on me.

Moving on to South Korea, The Good The Bad The Weird is self-proclaimed "Oriental Western by Kim Jee-woon," and sure enough it's a treasure hunt right out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by way of Peking Opera Blues and Dragon Gate Inn, set in 30s-era Manchuria and filled with Korean expatriates, Chinese bandits, Japanese occupiers, and a whole mess of thieves and killers and bounty hunters, all chasing the treasure map that scruffy train-robber (Song Kang-ho) has inadvertently snatched from under the noses of everyone. Now he races (via motorcycle) his pursuers to the promised fortune. It's the most expensive Korean film made to date and it's all there on the screen in madcap action scenes and carefully choreographed chaos in the collisions of bandits, gangs and Japanese troops. Song Kang-ho (of The Host and Kim's own The Foul King) handles most of the comedy, which makes him a bumbling goof until he's forced to rouse himself to gymnastic feats and sharpshooting skills when the chips are down. Kim establishes the breakneck pace and shaggy humor right from the beginning, and his mix of breathless action, busy set pieces, visceral violence (all blood and body count) and tongue-in-cheek tone gives it a very different feel from the humorless South Korean action thrillers of the past, somewhere between the scrappy, silly Hong Kong blast of the 80s and early 90s and the slick Korean action craftsmanship of late.

Hansel and Gretel, directed by Yim Phil-Sung and produced by the same company that made The Good The Bad The Weird, is more deserving of the "weird" appellation, a horror/tragedy spin on the fairy tale, played out with the kids in charge of the "House of Happy Children" hidden deep in the forest. Into this artificially cheerful happy nuclear family wanders crash victim Eun-Soo (Cheon Jeong-myeong), a young man who wrecks his car while talking to his pregnant girlfriend on his cell phone (the scene feels so much like a selfish flight from responsibility) and is led to the magical house by a literal red riding hood. It's like Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" (made twice into Twilight Zone segments) reworked as a J-horror drama with a melancholy ending. Yim never quite gets beyond the surface set-up of damaged children distrustful of all adults yet desperate for parental love and rather than dig into the grim dimension and primal fears of the fairy tale mythos, he unleashes a new villain in the form of a serial-killing religious zealot who really digs the creepy magic of this candy house. But it's utterly gorgeous in a way that Japanese horror never manages to be, saturated with storybook colors and unreal idealized settings and childish imagery tweaked just enough to be discomfortingly alien - the only portraits to be found in this family home are paintings of anthropomorphized rabbits in human clothes, and they just get creepier and creepier every time we see another one. And there's no fairy tale ending here. The evil that men do to helpless children, it seems, can never be healed in this world.

I wrote on Hirozaku Kore-Eda's Still Walking in my Toronto coverage, but it's worth noting that it placed in the number one spot of indieWIRE's TIFF poll.

Films I didn't see but which come with some major recommendations by friends: I ran into Chi-Hui Yang, the Festival Director for the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco, on my first day as he was still reeling from United Red Army from Koji Wakamatsu. "I can end my festival now," he said as we lined up for evening tickets. It was his first film of the festival, mind you. And the other day at breakfast, I overheard David Bordwell tell Dragon and Tigers co-programmer Shelly Kraicer that "Parking restored my faith in cinema."

Coda

I'm no longer in Vancouver, but I watched a near-disaster play out via press releases the other day. On Thursday morning, I was alerted that the "management of Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is doing everything in its power to avert a serious disruption of our event by construction work just now beginning outside the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas at 855 Granville Street. The noise generated from this work could well mean the cancellation of many of the 200 screenings remaining at this venue." The Granville 7 is a multiplex where all seven screens are dedicated to the festival for the majority its 16-day run and there was little hope of rescheduling so many films in another venue. "We received assurances from street engineers that consideration would be made of the fact that the Film Festival attracts 100,000 attendees to this block between September 25 and October 10. That consideration appears to be inconvenient now." Wow. "Since no explanation has been forthcoming as to why this work absolutely needed to coincide with our brief event, it is time to warn our public. Hopefully a more public airing of our concern will encourage reasonable action to be taken in time." (By the way, that is the first time I can recall in recent memory that I have seen sarcasm used in any way, let alone so deftly, in a press release.)

Whether or not the "public airing" (and subsequent bad publicity that was sure to make its way through local Vancouver papers to national and international coverage) was responsible, the situation was resolved within hours, at least by the evidence of the time stamp of the follow-up E-mail: "Thanks to all the media and friends of the Vancouver International Film Festival who helped raise the alarm at the deafening construction going on in front of the Empire Granville 7. Our director, Alan Franey, finally visited the site this morning, spoke to the supervisor who said it was a Hydro project and Alan connected him with a Hydro boss, who had the construction shut down until after the end of the Festival on October 10th."

The festival goes on...

- Sean Axmaker

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2008 6:55 AM