Last Friday night the NY Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) opened in New York. This is the thirteenth year for the annual event, one that I have been covering from its inception. After some general comments on Asian film, I will conclude with a review of “The White Storm”, a festival film showing at Walter Reade Theater tonight.

Unlike the Indian Film Festival that I covered a month ago, this one features movies that are geared to local audiences rather than Western film festivals and theaters specializing in indie and foreign films. So the typical NYAFF film will be about samurais or gangsters while one from the Indian film festival will be about the plight of Dalits. I would have preferred that the NYAFF curators include more political films but I confess that I am not even aware that they are being made. From what I have gleaned from the Japanese film industry over the past five years or so, there are very few—if any—directors or screenwriters in the Akira Kurosawa or Yoji Yamada tradition nowadays. Perhaps if there were a stronger left in Japan or Hong Kong for that matter, we’d see films being made with a social and political message.

That being said, I am totally devoted to Hong Kong and Japanese gangster and samurai films. In an age when Hollywood “entertainment” means the latest Michael Bay movie, we are better off with a lobotomy. I thought that Atlantic Magazine’s Christopher Orr got the latest installment of “Transformers” just right: “If it truly takes this long to save the world from the depredations of robots that turn into muscle cars, it may be that the world is no longer worth saving.”

It would appear that my first article on Asian action films dates back to July 3, 2003, just two years after the launch of the NYAFF:

Hit Men Movies

 posted to http://www.marxmail.org on July 3, 2003

 I had selected Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 “Le Samouraï” and Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s 2001 “Fulltime Killer” pretty much at random from the local video store. But comparisons between these two ‘noirs’ involving hit men and the cops who pursue them began to suggest themselves immediately. Especially after ‘fulltime killer’ Tok (Andy Lau), whose main interest outside of killing people on contract is movies, berates a thug for never having seen “Le Samouraï”.

 Melville’s Parisian hit man is improbably named Jef Costello. Played by Alain Delon, this character has the same laconic charisma as the just as improbably named master burglar Corey he played in Melville’s 1970 “Le Cercle Rouge”, a film I reviewed a while back (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Le_Cercle_Rouge.htm). With their American names and their wardrobe lifted from a Bogart film, these quintessentially Melvillian characters live outside of society and eschew intimacy of any sort, except camaraderie with fellow outlaws.

 “Le Samouraï” begins with bogus quote from the East: “There’s no greater solitude that the Samurai’s, unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle.” Written by Melville himself, but attributed to the Japanese “Book of Bushido”, this is the same gimmick that he used in “Le Cercle Rouge.” The film opens with a saying attributed to the Buddha, but written by Melville himself, that men who are destined to meet will eventually meet in the red circle of fate, no matter what.

 Of course, the affinity between bowdlerized Japanese culture and American b-movies is more than skin-deep. When Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai” inspired the western “Magnificent Seven”, one might be led to take into account the influence of classic western films on Kurosawa himself early on in his career. Such is the nature of the film ‘lingua franca’ that fertilized and cross-fertilized the work of so many directors and screenwriters in the post-WWII period.

Speaking of cross-fertilization, even if you have never seen an Asian action flick, you can probably detect its influence here in many different ways. Quentin Tarantino’s films reflect the Hong Kong influence even before “Kill Bill” came out. His first film “Reservoir Dogs” was deeply influenced by “City on Fire”, a 1987 Ringo Lam film whose title also adorned a scholarly study of Hong Kong cinema by a couple of Marxists and old friends, Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes. The book can be read in its entirety here. You can get a flavor of their approach from the first paragraph of chapter three, “Whose Better Tomorrow?”

What better contemporary vision to describe early capitalism than the imprimatur of John Woo’s martial-arts-with-automatic-weapons movies, where competition rages among petty capitalists in the guise of Triads? From “A Better Tomorrow (1986) to “Hard-Boiled” (1992), Woo has tackled ethical questions by pitting his hero against a corrupt world built on the value of a dollar, where ‘necessity knows no law.’ In these movies, gunplay abounds and high body counts result. In the history of capitalism, ‘weapons were the means of expansion for commerce and conquest.¹ From multi-round 9 mm pistols to pump-action double-barrel shotguns, Woo’s films unleash the destructive power of an arsenal as internecine feuds erupt between Triads over money and turf, and cops battle the underworld.

Internecine feuds erupting between Triads over money and turf…cops battling the underworld. This pretty much describes “The White Storm”, the 134 minute film whose original title was much better: “The Cartel War”.

The three main characters are Hong Kong cops in the anti-drug department who are trying to track down the elusive Eight-Faced Buddha. With a villain so named, you know that you are entering the rarefied realm of Hong Kong policiers.

One cop is Chow, who is working undercover. The other two are Tin and Tsz-wai, childhood pals of Chow. Recently relations between the three men have become strained as Chow’s wife has threatened a divorce over his growing distance from her, now in her late pregnancy. As frequently occurs in this genre, cops are torn between loyalty to their mission and family ties.

Undercover cops figure in many Hong Kong gangster movies. They are a natural for dramatic tension since they are always in danger of being identified and for their uphill battle to maintain a life outside their job. Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” starred Leonardo DiCaprio as a Boston cop trying to penetrate a gang led by Jack Nicholson, obviously influenced by Whitey Bulger’s South Boston crew. It is nowhere near as good as the Hong Kong movie it was based on, “Infernal Affairs”, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak.

Eventually the three cops end up in Thailand trying to capture Eight-Faced Buddha in his lair inside The Golden Triangle. Without divulging too much, Chow reveals the plan of the impending assault to the gang in order to avoid a battle that might cost him his life. His wife has just given birth and is suffering major complications that might cost her life.

Expecting Eight-Faced Buddha’s gang to avoid running into the cops, Chow is shocked to discover that he has set a trap for them. In a wild fifteen-minute scene, gangster helicopters annihilate the cops until only a handful remain, including the three cops. Tin, Chow and Tsz-wai’s superior, is given a choice. Either Chow or Tsz-wai will be spared. Which one will it be? After agonizing for several minutes, Tin decides to sacrifice Tsz-wai who is shot in the chest and falls into a crocodile pit. Don’t forget—we are dealing with Hong Kong action films, not Sundance Festival mumblecore.

After returning to Hong Kong, Tin is blamed for not anticipating the ambush and demoted to running the police department’s IT. (Gosh, what a blow to my self-esteem.) Chow, of course, is stricken with remorse and even fails to save his marriage. And what about Tsz-wai, who was likely eaten by crocodiles? My recommendation is to go see “The White Storm” tonight and to catch as many of the NYAFF movies as you can. They will entertain you beyond your greatest expectations as well as give you an idea of where the future of filmmaking lies.

Look for more reviews of NYAFF films in the coming period.

In trying to explain my doubts about the latest installment in the “Hunger Games” series to a fellow leftist who adores the film, I stated that there is no radical art coming out of Hollywood. There is nothing like, for example, the movies I will be reviewing for the 2013 South Asian Film Festival in New York (https://www.saiff.org/) that opens today.

Over the past couple of days I have had the chance to see three of the films being shown there and am happy to have had my beliefs confirmed. As both art and as a political statement, “Good Morning, Karachi”, “Siddhartha”, and “The Good Road” are reminders that in a deeply divided class society like India, there are filmmakers rising to the occasion. It is unfortunate that America has so few willing to make such films outside the documentary genre. With “independent” film in the U.S. having become the province of the Sundance Film Festival and the “boutique” divisions of Hollywood powerhouses, there are two strikes against the radical filmmaker who has something to say. One only hopes that if any such person based in New York is reading this article, they will make an effort to attend as many films in this festival as possible since South Asia is leading the way.

As the title would indicate, “Good Morning, Karachi” (Friday, December 6^th, 7:30pm)  is a Pakistani film. The title refers to a radio personality who starts his show each day in the same fashion as the deejay character Robin Williams plays in “Good Morning, Vietnam”. While there is no open warfare in Pakistan, the film depicts a low-intensity version that is ripped from the newspaper headlines as the cliché puts it. Set in 1996, the year of Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, the film begins with a scene of Islamic fundamentalists protesting a billboard advertisement of a skimpily dressed model. They chant, “American whore—out, out!”

Rafina is a tall and beautiful young woman who feels chafed by her mother and fiancé’s expectations that she will become a traditional housewife. Her main ambition is to get a job and be economically independent. Although she would never admit this to her fiancé, she also dreams of having her own apartment.

Arif, the fiancé, would have little use for the Islamists since he is an activist in the Pakistan People’s Party, the Bhutto electoral machine widely viewed as secular but corrupt. He is the son of Rosie, Rafina’s neighbor, who works as a body wax beautician not so much because she wants economic independence but because her husband has died and left her without any income.

Rosie works at Radiance, a Pakistani advertising agency that is responsible for the kind of ads that the Islamists were protesting in the opening scene. Rafina tags along as an intern to learn the waxing trade but barely tolerated by the bosses who never invited her there. Like a scene out of “42^nd Street”, Rafina is asked to substitute for a model who has no arrived for a shoot. And like “42^nd Street”, Rafina becomes an instant modeling star with a billboard showing up at the same exact spot as that in the opening scene.

The film is about as old-fashioned as it comes, hearkening back not only to the 1933 “42^nd Street”, but also to “The Jazz Singer”, a film that preceded it by six years. Like  the character Al Jolson played, Rafina is forced to choose between family ties and a career she loves.

Director Sabiha Sumar combined filmmaking and political science majors at Sarah Lawrence College from 1980–83 and then studied history and political thought at Cambridge University so she is clearly the right kind of person to make such a film that combines politics and human drama. The film is a perfect companion piece to “Wadjda”, the stunning Saudi film about a young girl’s struggle against gender oppression that premiered this year. Sumar’s first film, the 1988 documentary “Who Will Cast the First Stone”, led to the overturn of death-by-stoning sentence for Shahida Parveen, who was accused of adultery. This is just another example of filmmakers constituting an informal worldwide vanguard.

“Siddharth”, that plays immediately after “Good Morning, Karachi” on Friday at 10pm in the same location, is spare but deeply moving neorealist fare about the human costs of poverty in today’s India.

Mahendra fixes broken zippers on the street on the streets of Delhi, another member of India’s vast informal economy who is barely eking out an existence. When circumstances become even more difficult than usual, he allows his twelve-year-old son Siddharth to leave school and sends him to work illegally in a far-away factory.

When Siddharth fails to return home on the expected date, Mahendra files a missing persons report with an indifferent police department that regards the case as it would a purse snatching it would seem. They assure him that Siddharth will return home on his own accord and that he should not worry. This leads him to borrow money from fellow “chain-wallahs” and go on a trek to find his son, who his roommate at the factory suspects has been kidnapped and forced to beg on the streets. In some cases, the child has his or her eyes plucked out to generate more sympathy and more alms.

Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” might seem outdated when considering the streets of London in 2013 but “Siddharth” corresponds unfortunately to a Victorian-era social problem that still exists in India. The National reports:

About $3.6 million is the annual amount collected by beggars in Mumbai, according to the Maharashtra state government. In Delhi, where an estimated 30,000 child beggars roam the streets, the figure is even higher, approaching $7m annually, according to researchers. Adults are also kidnapped and forced into begging. Often, to entice empathy among potential contributors, their limbs are amputated or they are disfigured with acid. Sometimes blood vessels are stitched to block blood supply to parts of the body, bringing about gangrene.

Director Richie Mehta is a Canadian who was interviewed by a N.Y. Times blogger on September 20, 2013. He was asked about the inspiration for the film. He answered:

I was stuck in New Delhi for five weeks because of the volcano in Iceland. I was staying in East of Kailash, and wanted to meet my friend Rajesh Tailang in Khan Market. I had worked with Rajesh on my first film “Amal”; he did the translations, and was [lead actor] Rupinder Nagra’s dialect coach.

I ended up taking an auto-rickshaw, and there was this old Muslim man driving it. I got in and asked him how long it would take me to get to Khan Market. He said, “10 minutes.” Then he asked me if I am from Punjab. No, I said, my father is from Punjab. He asked me if I knew where Dongri was. I said no, what is it? Is it a neighborhood? And he said, “I don’t know but I think that’s where I lost my son.”

I asked what his son’s name was. He told me it was Rehemat Ali, but he didn’t know how to spell it. He didn’t have a photograph of his son. I asked him if he had filed a police report, but he didn’t know how. I asked when this happened, and he said a year had passed. For a year, he’d been driving his rickshaw asking passengers for help. It was all he could do because he couldn’t take a day off of work. He had a wife and another child. I asked for his phone number. He didn’t have one, and gave me his neighbor’s phone number.

This is pretty much the plot of “Siddharth”, a testimony once again to Indian filmmakers’ commitment to combining art and politics.

Finally, there is “The Good Road”, the final film in the festival that can be seen on Sunday at 7:30pm. What a perfect way to end the festival since this film, also about missing children, not only makes important political points about Indian society but is stunning as a work of art. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The film bears some resemblance to the “coincidence” genre that includes works such as “Amores Perros”,  “Babel”, and “Crash”. In such films, people with not much in common find their paths being crossed in plots that often defy logic. “The Good Road” is not one of them. It breathes new life into the genre and does so by making the coincidences not only plausible but also deeply emblematic of Indian social reality.

The film begins with a husband and wife driving along a desolate stretch of road in Gujarat in their SUV, with a bored 7-year-old Aidtya in the back seat. They are out on a vacation that appears to be the Indian version of a “rough guide” vacation.

At a road stop diner (nothing like the American, to say the least!) Aditya wanders off to play with a puppy and is left behind by his parents. Eventually he becomes the passenger of truck-driver Pappu and his assistant Shaukat, who are involved with some kind of shady deal. Since they are taking risks to start with, Shaukat urges that they leave Aditya by the side of the road. But Pappu, who is reminded of his niece of the same age, refuses. The interaction between the two men and the child will remind you of any number of films in which gruff and criminal adults find themselves accidentally in the care of a child, such as “Tsotsi”, a South African film based on an Athol Fugard novel.

Another child figures prominently in the film. Poonam is a 9-year-old girl out on the road trying to find a ride to relatives in a nearby city. When she ends up unwittingly in a brother catering to men exactly like the truck drivers looking after Aditya, she becomes the ward of a protective young prostitute. In the climax of the film, she and they literally bump into each other.

“The Good Road” has been nominated by India as the best film of 2013 for the Academy Awards. It will certainly be my choice for best “foreign” film at the New York Film Critics Online awards meeting next Sunday. I put “foreign” in scare quotes since movies like “Zero Dark Thirty”, a past NYFCO winner, seems much more foreign to me in terms of the word denoting strange or outlandish.

Limiting myself to the nine Vimeo-based press screenings for this year’s NY Asian Film Festival is proving to be a mixed blessing. While the menu is more to the taste of the curators than my own, it does give me a good idea of developing trends in the Asian film industry not to speak of the convenience. While my comments on the films under review today are decidedly mixed, I still regard what I have seen so far as an indication of the industry’s overall health.

“Aberya” is representative of what they call the New Filipino Cinema. If so, I think that I will stick with the old—moldy old fig that I am. “Aberya” is a willfully obscure film that obstinately refuses to tell a story, any kind of story. The two main characters are a boxer (with a face as pretty and as unmarked as a male in a Calvin Klein cologne) and a time-traveling drug dealer. Except for an early scene in which the drug dealer brings over a package to the hedonistic boxer, their paths do not cross.

The most frustrating scene has the drug dealer visiting another client—a gangster surrounded by his menacing looking bodyguards. Since the gangster owes him money, the package he is delivering does not contain drugs but a kaleidoscope. The gangster holds it up to his eyes but we do not see what he sees—an incredibly lost opportunity. Furthermore, as the dealer stalks off without his money and minus his expensive briefcase that the gangster has expropriated, he is heard muttering to himself about revenge. Finally, I say to myself, some kind of story might be developing. No such luck. The two men do not encounter each other again.

The entire film consists of the two men having conversations with their girl friends over the kind of “trippy” matters we used to talk about at Bard College in the early 60s after getting high. All about god, the meaning of life, love, etc. It is enough to put you to sleep.

When I was watching “Aberya”, I made mental note to myself to find out about the director’s influences. I found the footprints of people like Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze all over the film. As it turned out, I was pretty close. Asked to name his five favorite films, the director named one very much in their spirit as number one.

Off the top of my head:1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – What’s not to love? How the hell could you do those crazy things in a film and still make it accessible? The ending ‘okay’ still works for me no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

Wikipedia says that with the advent of digital filmmaking, “indie” productions have flourished in the Philippines but mostly intended for international film festivals. This obviously describes “Aberya” to a tee. It plays tomorrow at 1pm at the Walter Reade Theater. If your tastes generally clash with mine, this should be a must.

Back in April, I reported on “Investment”, a feature that was par of the Indian Film Festival. It was a scathing portrait of India’s materialistic and grubby nouveau riche, and particularly the evil embodied in a teen-aged boy who is a pathological killer that his parents protect. While the film is focused on the family’s drama, it is obviously an indictment of the rotten social structure that neoliberalism has wrought. The next two films to be considered are very much in the same spirit but aimed at the moral rot of the Filipino and Thai middle class.

Directed by Gino Santos, the aptly titled “The Animals” is described on the NYAFF website as an “indictment of the Filipino 1% via a decadent high-school party that degenerates into an orgy of sex, violence and class warfare.” Just my kind of movie, in other words. I loved it!

The plot couldn’t be simpler. It is the last day of school and a bunch of rich kids are getting ready to go to a big party that evening. Their conversation is utterly banal and you grow weary of them, even as you begin to wonder what will happen to them. There is a pervasive sense that they will get nailed in the conclusion since the director and screenwriter hate the characters so much.

Two of the characters are trying to get into a high-school fraternity where the hazing is utterly sadistic. You have no sympathy for them since their goal is obviously to be able to make life miserable for the next set of applicants. When one of the two boys is asked to smack a stranger at an adjoining table in a restaurant, he shows no remorse after smashing a beer bottle over his head.

The final hour of the film takes place at the party where the obnoxious female characters drink themselves into a vomiting stupor and generally degrade themselves. All of the principal characters have private drivers who take them to the party. As they are inside debauching themselves, the drivers hang around outside laughing bitterly at the “animals” they serve.

“The Animals” plays on Tuesday July 2^nd at 2:45 at the Walter Reade. While superficially related to John Hughes, it has much more in common with Buñuel. Just think of it as “Los Olvidados” featuring rich kids instead of the poor.

Finally, there’s an entry from Thailand that is not all bad. Titled “Countdown” and directed by Nattawat Poonpiriya, it is also a go-for-the-jugular attack on rich kids, in this case three bored and decadent “hipsters” living in downtown Manhattan.

Two have conned their parents into believing that they are in school but have been wasting their tuition money on partying and smoking pot. About fifteen minutes into the movie, they contact Jesus—a man of undetermined ethnicity—who is the guy who used to supply their old connection who has gotten out of the drug trade.

Jesus comes over to sell them some killer pot but before after they have sampled the weed, things take a turn for the worse. Jesus turns out to be fluent in Thai, even though they had assumed he was an American (for some odd reason). The more stoned they become, the more menacing Jesus becomes. At a certain point, the film evolves into a fairly standard capture-and-torture grindhouse affair familiar to anybody who has seen Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” or “The Strangers”. But the genre is wedded to a kind of morality play in the spirit of Dostoyevsky with Jesus exercising the wrath of god against the wicked. Since nearly the entire film takes place entirely in an apartment, it has the character of a staged off-off-Broadway play.

Like the director of “Aberya”, Poonpiriya has made a film targeted for film festivals rather than the local Thai marketplace. At least it has the merit of being less pretentious than “Aberya” even if it is nowhere near as successful as “The Animals”. It plays on Wednesday 10:20pm, July 3^rd at the Walter Reade. It’s worth a shot for those of you into the grindhouse genre.

This is a follow-up to my initial post on the New York Asian Film Festival, which included a review of a pre-festival screening of “High Noon”, a Hong Kong movie about disaffected teenagers. The festival began officially last night and I strongly urge people in the Greater New York area to try to make it as many screenings as possible since on the evidence of the 7 movies below you will simply not find anything better—starting with Woody Allen’s latest flop.

Unfortunately, only three of the movies discussed below have youtube clips with English subtitles. I do include still photos for the others to convey some sense of what these altogether marvelous films are about. I should add that if you do want to see the youtube clips sans subtitles, you can. All are available through youtube searches.

1. “When the Full Moon Rises” (Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang, Malaysia, 2008)

Remember “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, the TV show from the mid-70s that featured Darren McGavin as a reporter for a National Enquirer type tabloid? In each episode McGavin as Carl Kolchak tracked down one mysterious killing or another, inevitably involving some supernatural creature or another—from an abominable snowman to vampires. By many accounts, this show was the inspiration for “X Files”.

This Malaysian flick (the first I have ever seen) was directed by Mamat Khalid and stars Rosyam Nor as Saleh, a reporter in the Kolchak mold. But rather than playing it straight, Khalid made a movie that borrows liberally from Leslie Nielsen movies like “The Naked Gun”. Nor bumbles from one scene to another, having little clue about what is going on about him.

Set in 1956, on the eve of Malaysian independence, Saleh stumbles into a vast conspiracy of Communists who seem to style themselves as Nazis, ghosts, were-tigers, vampires and midget gangsters. The plot is almost incidental to the movie, which is much more about genre-subversion. Mamat Khalid is a huge fan of cheesy 1950s movies in Malaysia (apparently it was a thriving industry) and has created a pastiche that both honors and pokes fun at the past. The movie’s style is one part Tim Burton and one part Charles Ludlum’s Theater of the Ridiculous. Any attempt on my part to analyze the movie would prove futile, except to say that it is a pie in the face to conventional nationalist mythology.

2. Dachimawa Lee (South Korea, 2008)

This is very much in the spirit of the flick above. Dachimawa Lee is a comic version of the Korean version of James Bond anti-Communist movies of the 70s and 80s. Like Saleh the reporter and Inspector Clouseau, superspy Dachimawa Lee often creates havoc no matter his best intentions. The plot revolves around Lee tracking down Japanese spies who have stolen a Golden Buddha. But as was the case with “When the Full Moon Rises”, the real purpose of the movie is to set up one comic scene after another and to mock nationalist mythology, all of which involve a running sight gag—namely lead actor Lim Won-Hie’s baby face. It is rather like casting Lou Costello as James Bond.

3. Breathless (Ddongpari, South Korea, 2009)

This is a powerful study of a loan shark enforcer who despite his sadism and his misogyny emerges in the end as a sympathetic character, at least within the context of a society that accepts such behavior as normal.

Yang Ik-June, who directed, wrote and played the thuggish anti-hero Sang-Hoon, touches raw nerves in this his debut film. As a young boy, Sang-Hoon witnessed the killing of his mother by his father who has just been released from prison after 16 years.. This brutal act has done nothing except make Sang-Hoon eager to brutalize the rest of the world, including his father. In the very first scene, a man is beating his girlfriend on the street. Without a word, Sang-Hoon drags the man away and beats him to a bloody pulp. When he is finished, he begins slapping the woman around. Clearly, social improvement was not on his mind when he stepped in.

A day later he crosses path with a high school girl who calls him to order for spitting on the ground, a little too close to her feet. This prompts Sang-Hoon to punch her in the face. Yeon-Hee (Kim Gol-Bi) is no pushover and demands restitution from Sang-Hoon, who lives by his own warped code. Her insistence, however, impresses him and the two rapidly become companions even if much of their conversation consists of him calling her a cunt and her calling him a gangster scumbag.

Yeon-Hee developed her own callousness living with an abusive brother who aspires to be a gangster himself. As it turns out, he eventually lands a job as Sang-Hoon’s trainee and puts up with daily beatings for not being tough enough with the hapless souls from whom they extract repayment.

As is the case with the best Korean movies, the personal becomes the political. Sang-Hoon’s is the prototypical Korean male, even though his toughness is exaggerated for effect. Director/writer Yang Ik-June is really interested in diagnosing a deep-seated malaise through the film medium. Unlike “The Raging Bull”, which this film bears some resemblance to in its relentless brutality, this is more than just the portrait of an individual. In an interview with Twitch magazine, Yang tried to put the domestic violence that occurs throughout the film in a broader context:

As for domestic violence, the ones who commit that are always the fathers, as you can see in the movie. And there is a reason for that: in the past Korea was colonized very often, it was also invaded very often, so the economic situation in Korea was very hard, very difficult. And so the fathers, who were responsible for the family, they did not have an attitude of good behavior or love towards the family. What they were thinking was: “I need to earn money, so that my family can live good”. So there is a difference between that. Instead of love for the family they want to earn money. Because they are so obsessed with earning money they drag their family with violence towards that goal, instead of going there together. And that is where all that domestic violence comes from.

4. Equation of Love and Death (Li Mi de caixiang, China, 2008)

This movie should appeal to the audiences who go for the “coincidence” movies like “Amores Perros”, “Crash”, “Babel”, et al. As is the case in this genre that has gone viral in international film circles, the major characters bump into each other to life-altering effect. And as is the case with the rise of China economically, this particular film not only competes with the Western product but also exceeds them handsomely.

The main character is Zhou Xun, a young female cabdriver whose boyfriend disappeared years earlier and whose memory still haunts her. In the beginning of the movie, she runs into two poor and desperate peasants trying to make their way home. They are not above robbing her to pay for their airfare back to the rural village that they have not seen in practically as many years as she has been separated from her boyfriend.

In a scene that evokes the crashes in Paul Haggis’s dreadful movie “Crash”, Zhou Xun and the two desperados come together in a highway accident that sets the gears of the movie into motion.

What makes Equation of Love and Death far more interesting than its Hollywood counterparts is its relentless energy and brilliant acting. Of particular note is the performance of the two captors played by Wang Baoqiang and Wang Hanyui, who effectively stand in for the hundreds of millions of farmers and temporary workers screwed over by the Chinese capitalist system. Wang Baoqiang might be familiar to those who have seen “Blind Shaft”, another Chinese movie about super-exploited workers in the coalfields. Wang Baoqiang plays a hapless peasant desperate for work that is victimized by a couple of con artists promising work. He is outstanding in both films.

5. Plastic City (Dangkou, Hong Kong, 2008)

This has a most unusual setting for a Hong Kong crime movie, namely São Paulo, Brazil. This joint Hong Kong-Brazil production tells the story of a crime boss involved in counterfeit goods trafficking, a far cry from the drugs or professional assassination angle these movies rely on so often. It is also a male bonding movie with the older crime boss Yuda (Anthony Wong) relying on a young and handsome Japanese man named Kirin (Joe Odagiri). Their relationship is like father and son, but has homoerotic overtones as well.

Yuda and Kirin have rivals in the counterfeit goods business, as might be expected. They are also pressured and extorted simultaneously by crooked cops. Although I expected the movie to unfold according to the conventions of Hong Kong crime movies, it took on the character of a magical realist novel before long including a confrontation with an albino tiger in the rainforest.

6. Ip Man (Hong Kong, 2008)

An “old school” martial arts movie based loosely (very) on the life of  Ip Man, who trained Bruce Lee in Kung Fu. As might be expected, the movie involves one choreographed fight scene between Ip Man (Donny Yen) and the bad guys after another. In keeping with the proud traditions of both Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, the fighting is pretty close to the real thing.

As it happens, the bad guys are Japanese soldiers who are occupying China during WWII. The movie makes no attempt to render them as complex characters and they serve mainly as punching bags for Ip Man, who seems capable of ridding China of its occupiers all on his own.

If you are looking for shaded characterization and subtle dialog, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for the exciting, kinetic action that put Hong Kong cinema on the map, this is a must-see.

7. Warlords (Tau ming chong, Hong Kong, 2007)

This is a historical drama based loosely (very, once again) on the Taiping Rebellion with superstars Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro in the leading roles. As the movie begins, General Pang Qingyun (Jet Li) finds himself the sole and bloodied survivor of a battle between the Taiping rebels (who had been led by a man claiming to be related to Jesus Christ) and the Qing army that Pang served in.

After being nursed to health by Lian (Jinglei Xu), a peasant girl that he becomes intimate with, Pang moves on to a nearby village where he tries to blend in with the local population that is being victimized by a bandit gang led by Zhao Er-Hu (Andy Lau) and Zhang Wen-Xiang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Drawing upon his tested combat skills, Pang confronts Er-Hu and spares his life just when he has his sword at the bandit’s throat. Impressed with Pang’s prowess, Er-Hu invites him to join his gang. In no time at all, Pang becomes co-equal with the two bandit leaders as the three embark on a series of confrontations with the imperial army.

Showing his strategic acumen, Pang suggest to his two comrades that they enter the imperial army as a group so they can get their hands on rifles, which were essential to further success. In those days, soldiers were often rewarded with spoils of a vanquished city rather than wages so being properly equipped was a sine qua non.

As the three warlords become ever more powerful, Pang succumbs to hubris and begins to identify more and more with the royal family. When it becomes necessary to slaughter 4000 soldiers who have surrendered, Pang does not hesitate. This act of cruelty costs him the friendship of Er-Hu and Wen-Xiang who had long given up their bandit ways under Pang’s guidance. When they remind him of how he has forsaken his principles, he replies that the ends justify the means which for him is defeating the enemies of the throne.

Although the movie is first-rate entertainment, I was disappointed in its utter lack of interest in the historical context and which even the usually sagacious Subway Cinema, the organizers of the film festival, refer to as “an insane putsch led by a warlord claiming to be Jesus’ younger brother and it resulted in 20 million deaths.”

Despite the strange religious beliefs of the top Taiping rebel, farmlands under his control were seized from the feudal overlords and distributed to the peasants. He also banned foot binding and declared equality of the sexes. It also sought to eliminate class distinctions and in so doing was hailed by Mao Zedung as a forerunner to the revolution he led.

One of these days, a movie might be made that is sympathetic to the Taiping rebellion (if one has not been made already.) Now that’s one I’d pay good money for!

Last week I mentioned to my wife that very few things keep me committed to the hedge fund manager’s playground that Manhattan has become other than the ethnic restaurants we love exploring and the film festivals that feature the offbeat and the interesting. Despite being a film enthusiast, I have only stepped foot in a neighborhood theater once this year and that was to see Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” (not recommended).

But when I received word a couple of months ago that the yearly New York Asian Film Festival was scheduled to open on June 19th, I felt like a tot awaiting a visit from Santa. I have been covering this festival as a NYFCO critic since it began and it has afforded me some of my greatest film experiences over the past decade.

As you might expect, the festival includes low culture as well as high. To be more exact, the low culture martial arts/gangster movies that Hong Kong pioneered incorporate many high culture aspects, incorporating innovative film techniques and penetrating looks at an Asian society where cops and gangsters often play interchangeable roles.  For those who want a Marxist analysis of this genre, I strongly recommend “City on Fire”, a Verso book written by my friends Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes which can be read online here.

Additionally, the festival screens movies that represent serious efforts to examine the human condition and that are clearly influenced by classic traditions in film going back to Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa, not to speak of great American and European film.

Last night I attended a pre-festival screening for “High Noon”, a movie made in Hong Kong last year by a 24-year-old director named Mak Hei-yan who spoke during a q&a session. Mak’s movie utilized a screenplay about teenage angst and rebellion written by Tom Lin that also figured in companion movies made in Taiwan and Mainland China.  Each director took liberties with the script to capture the local conditions where the movie was made. Mak’s movie captures the febrile energy of Hong Kong where at least some young people from the lower classes apparently remain immune to its dubious charms. If her title “High Noon” evokes the 1952 western classic about a sheriff discovering himself under the crucible of an outlaw threat, then the plot and style of “Rebel Without a Cause”, the 1955 movie about teenage angst.

Whether or not Ms. Mak has seen the James Dean vehicle, she has as acted as a medium for its message. Like the U.S. in the 1950s, today’s Hong Kong seems to have lost its moorings despite material abundance.

During the q&a, in response to my question about what social or economic conditions could be driving its youth to self-destructive behavior, Mak stated that they still have hope that friendship and love are possible despite all odds. For someone like me who was about the age of the characters in “High Noon” when “Rebel Without a Cause” was popular, I felt that this dialog between James Dean and his love interest would have fit in with her film:

Judy: I love somebody. All the time I’ve been… I’ve been looking for someone to love me. And now I love somebody. And it’s so easy. Why is it easy now?

Jim Stark: I don’t know; it is for me, too.

Judy: I love you, Jim. I really mean it.

Jim Stark: Well, I’m glad.

The travails of Mak’s characters are not that different from those that afflict characters in American flicks, including drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and mindless gang violence. But it is what she does with these problems that set her apart from her peers in the West, including the feckless producers of “Juno”, a movie about teen pregnancy that treats it like a lark. Additionally, a key plot element involves one of her male protagonists uploading a video showing him having sex with his girlfriend that eventually becomes viral—to shattering consequences. All of these problems are treated without kid gloves and to greater dramatic impact than what we have become accustomed to from Hollywood.

Beyond her ability to treat the inner lives of her characters with a depth and maturity that belies her own youth, Mak has a flair for the dramatic visual statement that is the mark of a real genius with a camera. In one scene, one of her seven male students and a ketamine addict (a drug originally used by veterinarians but has emerged as a drug of choice at raves) tries to shut himself inside his mother’s vinyl suitcase, a gesture evoking a desire to go back into the womb in some ways. When he proves too large, he begins jumping up and down on it instead. This mad behavior serves to describe his psyche much more dramatically than the words of a social worker or priest, the customary Greek chorus in Hollywood teen angst movies.

“High Noon” will be shown again at the film festival. I can only urge New Yorkers to bend every effort to see as many of these movies as they can since they are unique opportunities to get a bird’s eye view of Asian society as well as superb entertainment. Scheduling information is here.

High Noon trailer

Interview with the director