The A-List is available here.
Thursday September 25, 9:15pm 1/2 The Rent
Computer hacker Peter (Stephan Kampwirth, charming) sees his world unravel in a hurry: he's about to get busted and his longtime girlfriend has just overdosed in the bathtub. In a daze, he bolts Berlin for Cologne, where he starts to "hack" into the lives of strangers by living in their apartments while they are away at work. Gradually, he begins to form a kind of bond with his "victims"-- among them a would-be screenwriter who, in one of the film's funniest scenes, Peter anonymously helps with his story structure; and the reticent, semi-depressed Paula (Doris Schretzmayer), a woman ripe for a change in her life. As Peter's unwitting landlords begin to realize that someone is occupying their apartments, they, too, begin to evince a curiosity about just who the heck is breaking in. Given that nothing is ever stolen--and, in fact, that their lives are sometimes enhanced by Peter's intrusions--they too start to feel a bond...
Friday September 26, 2:00pm If You Were Me
Portmanteau features are always mixed bags, of course, but this anthology of shorts by six leading Korean directors is more coherent than most--largely because it was made for the National Human Rights Commission, and so all but one of its episodes deals with a human rights issue.
Friday September 26, 3:00pm Last Life in the Universe
Pen-ek has followed the sardonic-but-sincere Monrak Transistor with an uneventful-but-gripping tale of the strangeness of our emotional bonds. It boasts Chris Doyle's best camerawork since Happy Together and has a pearl beyond price in Takashi Miike's cameo as a vengeful hitman from Osaka in shades and snakeskin suit. (Watch carefully and you might also glimpse Miike's frequent star Takeuchi Riki in a cameo, not to mention his Ichi the Killer and Gozu screenwriter Sato Sakichi.) The Thai title, punning on the names of the two sisters, means "Tiny Enormous Love Story." That says it all, really.
Friday September 26, 3:00pm My Flesh and Blood
The Tom family may be the most remarkable family you will ever see on screen. A divorced single mother, Susan Tom of Fairfield, California, has made mothering her career, choosing to raise 11 special needs children in additon to her three biological offspring. Tom notes: "I have no income... I have no retirement plan. I have no Social Security. I have no savings. I am their mom, and that's plenty." Three time Emmy award-winning television journalist Jonathan Karsh chronicles a year in the life of this unique family and the result is a riveting directorial debut that won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Jury Award for Best Director of a Documentary at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
Friday September 26, 3:00pm Last Life in the Universe
Pen-ek has followed the sardonic-but-sincere Monrak Transistor with an uneventful-but-gripping tale of the strangeness of our emotional bonds. It boasts Chris Doyle's best camerawork since Happy Together and has a pearl beyond price in Takashi Miike's cameo as a vengeful hitman from Osaka in shades and snakeskin suit. (Watch carefully and you might also glimpse Miike's frequent star Takeuchi Riki in a cameo, not to mention his Ichi the Killer and Gozu screenwriter Sato Sakichi.) The Thai title, punning on the names of the two sisters, means "Tiny Enormous Love Story." That says it all, really.
Friday September 26, 3:00pm Love is not a Sin
Moon lives next door to her classmate and best friend Man-Man, and without quite understanding it begins to develop a girly crush on her. Her furtive surveillance of Man-Man's room at night leads her to suspect first that Man-Man has a secret boyfriend--and then that Man-Man is secretly a boy herself. Later, when Moon emigrates to study in Australia, a feeling she can't shake makes her call Man-Man. But the person who answers is a boy who claims to be Man-Man's long-lost brother. A kind-of romance blossoms via satellite, and Moon flies home to find out the truth...
Saturday September 27, 3:20pm 8 1 5
There's enough disparate material here to keep half a dozen indie features in business. Chugoku cuts from, say, a ciné-vérité sequence to psychodrama, or from a stage performance of sodomy to a video documentary about the sex industry. If you want central characters, let's go for the call-girl Daisy (she gets the strangest jobs in town, starting with a taciturn, impotent muscle-queen who wraps himself in the Japanese flag) and her gay driver Takeru (who suffers the fate of all too many gay men in a straight world). Nobody could call this ordered or even controlled, but a lot of it is very funny--and almost all of it is highly transgressive by the standards of Japan Inc. By the way, the lengthy film contains its own built-in intermission, lasting--you guessed it--exactly 8' 15".
An INTERMISSION!
Saturday September 27, 6:00pm Al-Jazeera Exclusive
The so-called "Second Gulf War" did nobody any real credit, but the BBC emerged with an enhanced reputation for fairness and objectivity, at least when compared with the US news-gathering teams. Only after the major assault on Saddam's Iraq ended was it revealed that the BBC went further than licensing images from the Qatar-based satellite station al-Jazeera to provide some sense of the Arabic perspective on events. The Corporation also sent producer Ben Anthony to the station to record the processes that brought al-Jazeera's coverage of the conflict to the screen. His film (made for the often distinguished BBC series Correspondent) offers a unique and extremely valuable insight into the Arabic view of the Coalition's invasion of Iraq.
Saturday September 27, 6:00pm The Handcuff King
My Life as a Dog Finnish-style, might be one way to describe The Handcuff King, a rare co-production between Finns and Swedes that shows tension and farcical humour in a border town... [The film] is set in the mid-70s in the dead of winter. Twelve-year-old Esko (Miika Enbuske) stands on the railroad bridge over a small river separating Finland and Sweden in the far north. He has a hood over his head and his hands handcuffed behind his back and he's ready to jump--all this despite, according to flashbacks, the miserable failure of the same Harry Houdini trick earlier that night... Other factors have led to this dire stand: his scrappy, long-suffering mother (Maija Junno), has finally left his ineffectual, drink-prone dad (Heikki Hela); his big brother (Arttu Kapulainen) fancies himself a rock star; and his almost mute, frequently incontinent grandfather (Sulevi Peltola) keeps wandering off...
Saturday September 27, 6:00pm Cop Fesitval
In this special one-off presentation, Mr. Shinozaki will introduce a selection of Cop Festival shorts, none of them ever seen outside Japan before. The final selection wasn't confirmed at press time, but it will comprise some ten or eleven films, each ten minutes (or less) in length. Some will be by such well-known directors as Kurosawa Kiyoshi or Aoyama Shinji.
Saturday September 27, 6:00pm Mutt Boy
This comedy is the latest, a father-son story with shaggy dog characteristics which explores the gap between parental expectations and filial achievements. Dad (Kim Gap-Su, last seen in KT) is a small-town police chief in Gyeongsang Province; his wife died when their only son Cheol-Min was still a boy. Cheol-Min (ex-fashion plate Jeong Woo-Seong, here demolishing the image he cultivated in his early hits) is a seemingly slow-witted loner-slacker, nicknamed "Mutt Boy" for his early attachment to a mongrel from the police pound. Worried that he hasn't bonded with his incipiently criminal son, dad "adopts" woman offender Jeong-Ae, hoping that her presence will civilize Cheol-Min. But the son goes his own way, fighting crime (in the shape of a corrupt businessman) while coming to terms with his inner macho. Often riotously funny (the climactic fight in a prison cell has to be seen to be believed), this puts character above plot and local flavour above spectacle. Great performances animate a cherishably idiosyncratic movie.
Saturday September 27, 6:00pm Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
Beautifully scripted, the Glasgow-set tale centres on two brothers and a mousy but endearing single mother whose fortunes gravitate around an old bookshop and local hospital. The screenplay--which feels almost effortlessly plotted, even though what happens is extreme--is noteworthy for its stoic wit, to which the actors do complete justice. Jamie Sives' Wilbur is hostile and self-loathing but kind of lovable all the same.
SUNDAY ALL DAY (I'm not kidding)
Sunday September 28, 10:00am-8:43pm Tiexi District: West of the Tracks, Part 1, 2, and 3
This is normally a $21 series, but is ONLY $14! I am thinking I am alone in this adventure, but I get to call you guys wusses come Lord of the Rings all-day marathon.
Wang's monumental documentary is the pinnacle of China's independent underground, a vast, poetic study of the death-throes of three heavy industries (copper smelting, sheet-metal production, cable manufacture) in Shenyang, Northeast China. The area is much like any other post-industrial zone, but the fact that these blighted enterprises were supposed pillars of the Maoist economy gives it a special poignancy.
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