Well folks, in a few hours I'll be flying out west to Los Angeles for my own nefarious purposes. Alas, I was not able to attend the Hawaii International Film Festival. Sounds from the pair of reports we've received that it was pretty darn cool. Here are a few brief looks at what The Pali Lookout saw for us...
Hey Harry, if you care, here's a report of some of the films I got the chance to catch at the Hawaii International Film Festival while it was here in Honolulu last week. It's not the biggest festival, but easily the one with the heaviest Asian slant, while most festivals seem to lean more to Europe for their foreign films. Well, I caught some really good films and here's a brief report:
Striking Back-
this is a Taiwan film from a few years ago so I'm not sure about it's availability by now. The story is a flailing art-house movie company is forced to make a big-time "Hollywood action film" by a mysterious donor. This leads nicely into one of those "movie-within-a-movie" movies. The action film uses all the action movie cliches and ridicules "arty" movies, while the story of the making of the movie is full of art-house movie cliches and mocks action movies. It leads to some hilarious moments in both segments. The question is what the film is really trying to say about the "legitimacy" of film, since he can really have it both ways by mocking the excesses of different genres. It was an extremely funny and entertaining film, and really makes you think, especially when we see at the end that it's actually a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie.
Restless-
This was my favorite film I saw during the festival. It's basically your standard romantic comedy, with two different couples taking parallel paths to romance, but the unusual thing was it's supposedly the first US-China film collaboration, so it's set in China and has a great US-China culture clash dynamic to it. The main character is Leah, a small town girl who wants to see the world. She lives in the expatriate American community in Beijing. With a chinese chess master, she makes up one of the main couples in the film. The other major character is Richard, a Chinese-American slacker who is travelling to his parent's homeland for the first time. His dealing with relatives and a cuture he has never known is responsible for most of the laughs in the movie, of which there are many. I'd easily recommend this movie to anyone--it's a great date movie, a truly hilarious romantic comedy, with bigger issues that are brought up but never bring the movie down. Catherine Kellner plays Leah and is great--apparently she's a stage actress in New York. Jule Gilfillan is the director, apparently she went to the USC and Beijing film schools, and it's her first feature which is truly impressive, since she has both comedy and drama scenes down pat. A wonderfully enjoyable movie.
New Rose Hotel-
I wish I could say something good about this movie. It stars Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe, which makes its failure doubly disappointing. This is simply an atrocious film. Apparently it's based on a William Gibson short story, so maybe the message is that you can't build a movie around 10 pages of story. The director, Abel Ferrara, was supposed to show up, but begged off with a "103 degree fever." I'm diagnosing him with the "my movie blows" fever. The story is your standard industrial espionage cyberpunk, with Dafoe and Walken using a whore to seduce a rival scientist to their firm, but they get double crossed or something. It's really impossible to tell what happens, because just when you think the movie has built to something, there's some brief incoherent babbling about things going wrong, and Dafoe spends the rest of the movie flashing back to the previous action. So there's like an hour of what passes for story, then about 30 minutes of flashing back to the first hour. At first when it ended I was just confused, then I got angry that I had wasted an evening on this crap. The audience was mostly stunned into silence, and there was nearly nothing but extremely negative comments to be overheard afterwards. In talking to Roger Ebert in front of the theater, he summed it up well when he said "the reaction seems pretty negative." If there is any justice in the world, this film will never again be shown except in one of those "this is how to make a bad film" classes.
Free Enterprise-
This film got me back into a good mood. How can you not love a film with William Shatner playing, and mocking, himself as the hero of two emotionally stunted children of the seventies. Basically, this movie to me was Swingers crossed with MST3K. I think it's a much more accessible (and funnier) Swingers. Hell, one of the Swingers crew is in this crew. The movie is an absolute riot, with the two main characters going through their messed up lives in total emotional immaturity, and retreating to their comic book-sci fi world for security. I'll say again, it screamed Swingers, but it's a Swingers about geeks. I'm sure this film will get semi-major release, it's way too good not to, and hell, it's got Bill Shatner. I'm not sure when I've laughed harder than I laughed during the final two minutes of this movie. This film is going to be a classic--no, this film is a classic right now. If you ever were a fan of Star Trek, comic books, or just a sci-fi geek in general, you will go crazy for this movie.
Full Tilt Boogie-
The big buzz about this movie was that Quentin Tarantino was going to be at the showing. It's a documentary about the making of Dusk till Dawn, a film you may remember. It's rather unusual in that it focuses on the crew rather than the cast, and they are funnier by far than the actors probably could have been anyway. Watch for Harvey Keitel's scene where he proves that he is totally insane. Either that or he's got a brilliant dry wit that everyone in the theater missed. There's even a "story" to the documentary, since the film was besieged by some of the trade unions who were pissed they were using non-union crew. If you want to see a nice behind the scenes look at a horror/action flick, or just want to see Clooney/Tarantino/Rodriguez some more, you'll probably enjoy it. Even if you're not into the Dusk till Dawn style of movies, the movie is very funny. Oh, QT did indeed show up, looking pretty snazzy with slicked back hair, mustache, and aloha shirt, and answered a bunch of audience questions.
So there's a pretty long-winded summary of the 5 movies I caught. It was a pretty good festival, I batted .800 in quality movies, which can't be complained about. I'd definitely recommend anyone to come check out the festival in the future. Besides, it's in Hawaii, dummies! Aloha, all.
-The Pali Lookout
