PIFF: Dust to Dust

In travel, as Spalding Grey used to say, you’re always holding out for that “perfect moment.” With this year’s PIFF festival, I’ve been waiting for my “perfect film” to come along. It almost happened yesterday. For me to really love a film it has to be what I feel is exceptionally well-made and also hit me personally. In short, I want to be impressed and moved at the same time. Dust, a movie out of Luxembourg, accomplished about 95% of each.

Dust is what good cinema is all about. The great thing about movies as a storytelling device is the way they reveal a story through images and sounds. Film is not really about dialog; it’s about presentation. Books can’t do this, and neither can theater. Director Max Jacoby utilizes the full spectrum of what is available in the form to his advantage. Little is said in this movie because the camera and soundtrack take up that narrative role more than any dialog could. Jacoby, through cinematographer Fredrik Bächar, is an expert in blocking and framing. Every shot seems intended to give you a clue about what these three characters are thinking and feeling. It could be choice in focus, a slow dolly into one character’s face, someone intentionally cropped out of the frame, or someone moving in or out of the frame. The sound design also plays a strong role, with liberal use of offscreen sounds. We hear a door open and we wonder; we hear the crackling of glass under footsteps and realize something happened here; we hear the arrival of a car and we feel what that means.

In essence, Dust is a post-apocalyptic love triangle. But the setting is not simply a device. The environment and situation almost acts as a fourth character. It’s something the other three must contend with. It has a say in their decision-making and it forms the particularites of the relationships that have developed and will develop. Jacoby presents the landscape as monumental in size and scope, both containing and reflecting their own dilemma. This space and setting, combined with the sparse dialog, also gives the audience plenty of headspace to wonder how all of this is going to work out. I found myself a lot of times thinking “well shit, they can’t…” or “oh right, so how…?” The slow pace kept me in suspense and kept me wondering. And when that happens, when you realize how involved you are, that’s when you know you’re watching a great movie.

Which brings me to the remaining 5% of this movie that I didn’t like, that being the ending. Again, it’s revealed by the camera, and it was… not hugely disappointing, and not unexpected. But it wasn’t enough. We needed a third act and we didn’t get it. The director had done such a fine job of telling this story and creating an atmosphere of tension, and three minutes before it ends I’m thinking, oh crap, now they have to deal with x. But Jacoby let me off the hook. He had me in suspense and I was gearing up for an interesting final 20 minutes or so, but then he let me go. In short, we needed a conflict and we didn’t get one. I warn you that the next sentence is a bit of a spoiler: Yes, the penguin kept the ring, but the spell was broken without the penguin having to face the consequences of that, so it didn’t really matter anyway.

Still, good lord what a beautiful work of art this movie is. Unfortunately, the movie I saw afterward, The Dust of Time, wasn’t. It was horrible. Seriously, my god, I hated this movie. That wooshing sound you hear is the sound of this movie going right over my head. I had no clue who these people were and what was going on. Well, I did eventually, but by the time I caught up to what the director was trying to do, I didn’t care. Willem Defoe is laying it on so thick that it’s almost campy. This movie has so much melodrama — heavy moments, crying, slow motion — that was empty because I didn’t give a damn. It’s so strange to be watching actors on screen pouring it all out and I’m just empty. And I had to endure this for over two hours. I kept thinking “it has to end sometime it has to end sometime it has to end…” but it just kept going and going and going. After a while I’m just staring at a point in the center of the screen like a laser, not looking at anything, just waiting for the damned thing to end. When that didn’t work I tried to open up some latent telekenetic ability so I could peel the corners of the screen in order to make a paper airplane out of it. Anything just to end the damned thing.

Every movie experience is like a relationship between the maker and the audience member. And in this relationship, maybe it’s not about you, it’s about me. Maybe I just missed what all this passion was about. I’d like to give some benefit of doubt and think that. But I could see other people squirming. And when it finally faded to black and those first text images started to roll onto the screen, people practically lept out of their seats heading for the exits. Usually PIFF-goers will wait for the credits to end, clap, and then leave. But not here.

Luckily this isn’t my final film. I’m seeing my last one tonight, the one I was hoping to see — Paju.

PIFF 2009 – Day 1

I’m sitting in the second-floor guest lounge at PIFF Center, which at this time of the day, 4pm, is very active. It’s the first day of the 2009 Pusan International Film Festival. Or, as I like to think of it, the best time of the year to be in Busan. People are greeting and meeting, perusing the catalog, reserving tickets, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, taking pictures, and doing business. As a media professor, I get a guest pass every year. So for a whole week, I watch as many free movies as I can squeeze in and enjoy some prime people-watching.

This spot always brings out an odd combination of young hipster types (filmmakers and film buffs) and older dudes in black suits (producers and other money people). This is like my little slice of Seoul. A good chunk of these folks are down from Seoul, but it also brings out the rare artists within our own relatively humble cowboy town of 4 million. You can usually tell who the directors are — something about the choice in eyeglass frames and sweater pattern. Creative people also, for whatever reason, have that look about them. They carry themselves differently. Outside I mostly see college students hanging out on the beach, laughing and gathering into small groups, just wanting to be part of the action I suppose.

I’ve got four tickets for tomorrow. I like to gravitate toward Korean offerings, or those films that seem weirdly constructed, or have a possible sound design angle to them. Tomorrow I’ll see Scandinavian film Metropia (“Roger hears voices…”), Korean films Dear Music: That is, their fantasy heading for the sea (seriously, that’s the title) and Like You Know It All, and Sleepless by Italian director Dario Argento, a guest at this year’s festival.

I’ll be carrying my laptop around all during the festival, so I hope to post a good supply of updates and reviews over the next eight days. Happy PIFFing!

The Uninvited

I guess I’m enamored by the dark stuff. I just finished watching a fantastic Korean horror film called The Uninvited. The Korean name is “A Table For Four,” or 4인용 식탕. Adding to the multi-title confusion, there’s also a U.S. film called The Uninvited, a remake of, not this Uninvited, but a different Korean movie, my favorite so far, A Tale Of Two Sisters, or in Korean, 장화, 홍련.

Confused? Nevermind. The point is this Korean movie is called, in the English world, The Uninvited, and it’s outstanding.

Korean horror films are not really horror films. I would call them scary, psychological dramas. What makes U.S. or European horror different from Korean “horror” is that in the former style, the terror exists outside the individual; in the Korean style, the terror resides almost fully inside the mind. This makes it fun because you’re never sure what’s real and what’s imagined. There is no supernatural boogey man out there. What’s out there is the all too natural world, a world that is sometimes cruel and tragic. What’s horrific is how these characters cope when tragedy strikes.

Acupuncture v2

My shoulder is turning into an ongoing medical experiment. There are too many previous blog posts to link to, so I won’t do that. I’ve been pretty open about how the damn thing is rotting to the core and nothing shows any hope of saving it. I did a round of physical therapy at one hospital (limited success), another round of physical therapy at another hospital (less success). I’ve taken meds (against my wishes), gotten two x-rays, diligently done exercises, stopped playing music, and tried my best to sleep only on my right side. Evil is winning over good so far.

I’ve stopped short of doing some things my doctors have recommended. I don’t want to do the cortisone injection, because it sounds like it’s more about pain relief than a cure. I don’t want to get an MRI because it’s expensive. So I haven’t gotten a conclusive diagnosis. Rotator cuff strain seems the most likely, as three different doctors have mentioned it. Bursitis is also a likely cause. The pain has shifted and evolved somewhat. The epicenter remains at a small, tender point on the front of my left shoulder. But I’ve got a host of other ailments: muscle strain from compensating, neck pain, nerve problems in the left elbow, and occasional tingling in the last two fingers of that hand. Most of the doctors and therapists say most of these things are probably not related. My body gives me a different message. I can feel something shifting around in there—muscles or tendons or whatever, swimming around, clicking, fighting for space. When I feel that, I feel it in my fingers, and I feel it in my neck. I’m not paranoid; it’s all connected.

So the new adventure in treatments is acupuncture. I’ve done a bizarre version of it before, but nothing happened. This time I wanted to go someplace with some reputation. Dong-eui Hospital has an Oriental Medicine center, which is offered with English translation. So I decided to give this a shot today. I got my blood pressure tested (110/70), met with the doctor, and then sat on a table. He showed me the needles. I, being a wimp, asked if it hurts. “Oh yes,” he said, “we have at least two or three deaths a day.” Ha ha, I laughed. Very funny.

He walked around to my left side, talking to me, and tapped my shoulder casually with the first needle. No pain, no problem. Then he did another, and I’m thinking, this is easy. Then he went in with a third, at a spot far down on the back of my shoulder, near the shoulder blade. A jolt went through me like nothing I’ve felt before. The weird thing that came to mind is that it felt like a sound reverberating around my body, but if the sound were a form of pissed off electrical energy out for revenge. It was as if this jolt, at light speed, hit my right side, then settled somewhere in my midsection. Something shuddered, my lungs or my heart, I’m not sure. I gasped from the shock and felt for a moment like I was going to fall over. He did this weird kind of vocal “coo” like I was a baby who just spit up some milk. And then he drove the damned thing further in, sending these waves of… something… inside my body.

This interplay of benign pokes with the occasional shocking one went on for the next 10 minutes or so. Then his nurse hooked the needles up to a machine and sent some voltage into me. My upper shoulder twitched aggressively. “Is this normal?” I asked. He told me it should feel weird but not hurt. I told him that this was the case. Then he left me and my quivering body alone for the next 15 minutes. A nurse came, detached the metal and electronics from my body and that was that.

The doctor gave me an exercise to try and then asked me: “Do you still feel the pain?” I thought about it. “Well, the pain seems to be better (I thought, unsure), but I feel a little stiff.” He told me to do the exercises and come back Thursday for my next session.

So here we are, in the next round of treatment. The thing I like about the idea of acupuncture is that it’s not a cure, but it helps the body cure itself. In theory, anyway. If it works, great. If not, I’m on to harder drugs, an MRI, and possibly, last on the list, surgery. I’ll give nature a shot at redemption, and save the magnetic resonance and scalpels for when I’m truly desperate.

Reconstructionism

I was on the subway today, listening to some prog on the iPod, when a group of three young girls sat down in front of me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying because the music in my head was too loud. But somehow I knew by watching them that they weren’t speaking Korean. I took out my earbuds and sure enough they were speaking in fluent English. Not just English but American English. There was a slight accent, but the mannerisms, the colloquialisms, the verbal punctuation told me that this wasn’t simply a trio of good students.

They were young, maybe 17. They talked about their teachers, how strict they are. One was saying how she can’t sleep at night because she’s so worried about her classes. On and on and on like this, and there I am, staring at them with no shame.

This shouldn’t be a rare thing, but it is. It’s also, for some strange reason, strange. This only happened to me once before and I stared then too. The first thing I wonder is if they’re Korean. They could be exchange students from China or Taiwan or Japan. (I still can’t distinguish the features of ethnic Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.) The other thing I wonder is why they’re talking in English. They have accents, so they’re not U.S. natives. Are they practicing? Are they each from different parts of the world and English is their common second language? Are they children of wild geese families, recently home for summer vacation?

I spend my daily life meandering through the crowded streets of Busan absorbing language as ambient sound. I can’t decode 95% of it. It is simply sound with various shades of emotional inflection. So when I hear English being spoken, my brain switches sharply into a state of attention. Hearing becomes listening. I understand. Not only that, but I want to become involved, I want to talk too. It has nothing to do with loneliness or nostalgia or anything like that. There’s some compulsory pull at work. I see it in other foreigners as well. If I’m talking with a group of foreigner friends on the subway and there’s another foreigner I don’t know some distance away, I can see him eavesdropping.

But it’s much more weird when it’s a group of Asian girls in Korea, who in that moment usurp the conventions of the audiovisual contract. What I see and what I hear don’t match. There I am on the subway experiencing a real-world aesthetic disconnect.

I hoped those girls were going to get off at my stop, one of the major university hubs in town. I wanted an answer to the mystery, so I was going to ask their story. But alas they kept on, probably off to enjoy this nice, sunny day at the beach.

June

It’s not necessarily neglect, more lack of followthrough. I started a few posts, as I can see in my drafts page, and then failed to complete them. It was mostly political stuff, with one big personal one. But on both fronts the winds changed and the news — both out there in the world and inside my brain — quickly became outdated.

Junes and Decembers are strange months for me in Korea. At the ends of semesters there’s always a ramp-up of activities and emotions and confusion that seem to magnetize and explode into… events. It’s different every time, but the feelings are eerily consistent. It all leaves me both exhilarated and depressed. So in the come-down stage, where I am now, I hide a little more than I normally would. Lately I’ve been watching a bunch of movies, playing with sound, reading, and spending a lot of time re-writing my textbook. I seem to be constantly tired lately, but I’ve got a nice little inspirational burst going. It feels good to have time, and it feels especially good to be productive.

Summer plans are set, barring any more last-minute drama. I’ll be in the States late July to late August. It’s my third trip back to the U.S. I’m mostly looking forward to family and food. Mexican food, Indian food, Thai food. We’ve got all that here, but it’s done so poorly that I don’t even bother. I will return a fatter man.

The trip will climax with a wedding in Portland. Two friends whom I miss dearly are tying the knot. It’s gonna be a great week. We’re putting the band back together yet again. We’ve hit the stage in Busan, Gimhae, Singapore, and we’re now set to conquer America.

“Computer…”

Wolfram|Alpha was unveiled today. I’d heard about this a few weeks back — a search engine of computational knowledge. No banner ads, no “supported links,” no… capitalism. Ask it a question and it will do its best to answer.

Google, for all its power and reach, is great. But you usually have to sift through a lot of crap to find what you’re looking for. To me, the two best things on the web are Wikipedia and Youtube. The former is, of course, a communal encyclopedia of just about everything. The latter is a treasure trove of media, letting you see and hear just about any kind of content, from obscure songs to drum lessons. The nice thing about both is you can go in there and find what you’re looking for very easily.

Wolfram|Alpha appears to be trying to take the next step, not beyond Google or Youtube, but beyond Wikipedia. It compensates for Wikipedia’s weakness, in that it can extrapolate what information you’re attempting to seek. Wikipedia’s good when you enter a specific subject. Wolfram|Alpha handles questions, comparative data, events, computations, etc. It’s more like the computer in Star Trek. Ask a question and it will compute from its knowledge database and provide an answer. What’s creepy cool is that it makes assumptions based on what you’re trying to ask.

So it sounds great. Unfortunately, my first attempts didn’t lead to much success. I tried “Korean language outside Korea” and various other combinations, trying to find out how much Korean is spoken outside Korea. It sort of gave me an answer. Ninety-three percent of Korean speakers are in Korea. So that means 7% are outside Korea, but it didn’t tell me where. I also tried “sample rate” and it just gave me an equation without any additional information. “All major scales” returned no results. “D# major scale” did, complete with sound, but I already knew it could do that.

Its creators admit this is a work in progress. I’m excited about it more for its potential that what it is now. Check out the excellent video introduction, and you’ll get a sense of what they’re trying to do.

Van Sant sound

I’ve been on a Gus Van Sant kick lately. He’s one of those oddities who can do mainstream, then dip into arthouse, then re-emerge into the mainstream without skipping a beat. I watched Milk the other night, which was kind of an interesting intersection of the two. The content was arty and gutsy but the aesthetics, for the most part, were big Hollywood studio drama.

Last night I watched Elephant (hey, that oughta confuse the Google search bots!). This is the third time I’ve seen it and I always manage to fall right into it. One of the really interesting differences between his mainstream and alternative films is the way he handles sound and music. Milk, composed by Danny Elfman, is very Hollywood. Elephant, with its combination of natural sound, subjective ambience, and musique concrete, is not. This difference is magnified in the murder scenes. Elephant’s violence is cold, dry, devoid of emotional guidance. Harvey Milk’s assassination is dramatic, sad, and has a grandiose quality. This difference in emotion is directed in large part by sound and music, or lack thereof.

I started scanning the internet, looking for interviews about Van Sant’s sound designer, Leslie Shatz. I found one of the best interviews about sound I’ve ever read. Here’s what he says about story, style, and the all-too-common ignorance many in the industry have about sound:

People in Hollywood, they’re just like everybody: they cling onto trends. After I did Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I would get these phone calls from people saying they wanted “a Dracula soundtrack.” … I didn’t want to say it, but if you want a Dracula soundtrack than you have to make a Dracula movie.

And:

This is one of the suggestions I make to directors: if you think of sound when you’re writing the script, then you’ve really integrated it into your movie. It’s easy to do that since sound is so suggestive and so capable of creating imagery. … I think what happens with Gus’s films and other films we talked about is that you take a sound that’s a complete juxtaposition of what’s going on in the image and it forces you to listen — you have to look to the sound for the cues of what’s going on. Even if the sound doesn’t give you a specific direction, it gives you a sort of broader experience than if it was just the dialogue being repeated over and over again. I think that filmmakers are having trouble making this break. They think of film as a visual medium. I’ve worked with a director recently who said, “I want a soundtrack like Elephant.” I said, “Fine, but you gotta be ready for what that means.” This was a studio film, and I thought, the studio isn’t going to go for this. Sure enough, they didn’t.

Yep, nicely said.

Busan news

I added a “Busan, South Korea” category in my Google News feed. The overwhelming majority of news from Korea happens in Seoul. Our humble little village of 4 million people hardly gets mentioned. So I wanted to see what kind of results I’d get. I learned two interesting things today:

1. Busan has opened its first ever film post-production facility, called AZ Works on the Beach. OK, actually a colleague told me about this the other day. But I sort of put it in the back of my mind. Busan has been trying to establish itself as an emerging film hotspot. It’s a popular film locale for domestic movies, and we have the always awesome PIFF festival every year. But all the gigs happen in Seoul. There are no jobs down here. This is exciting news and will hopefully kick things up a notch.

2. Busan has launched its first ever all-English radio station, called Busan e-FM. It’s a partnership with Airirang FM Radio and broadcasts at 90.5 mHz. I can do without the K-pop and the English-language cheese songs, but I listened to the news hour at 6pm and it was pretty good. They had some in-depth analysis of the North-South military tensions, some Korean politics, the crappy economic situation, Busan weather, and some pretty lame chat about who’s the best point guard in the NBA right now. There was very little Busan-specific news, but hopefully that will change with time.

I also learned through my little news feed that Jin Air will stop flights between Busan and Gimpo, Starbucks will add another 50 cafes in Korea, and the guy who ran that Cosco Busan tanker into the Bay Bridge was “taking lots of meds.” So there you go.

Slumdogs

So Slumdog Millionaire did what it was supposed to do and won most of the major Academy Awards. Although I find the Oscars to have more or less lost its relevance, I still wanted to see what all the buzz was about, so I tonight I watched the movie.

It was… good. I can see why the Academy loved it. It’s indicative of the film industry’s new interest in globalism and multiculturalism. Maybe it’s upper-class white guilt, maybe it’s sincere, but I feel like the wrong movies are being singled out. Crash, for example, is a piece of shit, a bullhorn continually screaming in your ear, whereas Babel is a beautiful, nuanced meditation on the same subject. The beauty of that film in comparison is that the filmmakers don’t tell you what the point is, they let you come to it yourself.

Slumdog Millionaire is not a piece of shit. It’s good. But something like City of God is far superior. The former tries to be riveting through creative editing (I did really like the editing style) and intense sound design. But the latter is riveting and electric throughout, in what feels like a pure and effortless manner. You are fully invested in this world from the very beginning and it’s breathless until the very end. I think my real problem with SM is that underneath the setting and the style, there’s a very conventional story with little surprise or suspense. Brothers become estranged (one becomes good, the other bad), boy devotes his life to girl and saves her, the good guys find redemption, the hero wins the contest, and they live happily ever after. I saw all of this coming.

Another thing that bothered me is that every stereotype of India was fully on display — not just stereotypes but tourist stereotypes. I’ve been to India and I know all the stories, because what we don’t experience first hand, we read about in Lonely Planet: re-filling water bottles with tap water, kids begging to make money for some abuser, purposeful disfigurement to gain sympathy, fake tour guides, stealing shoes, corrupt police, the train dumping them at the foot of the Taj Mahal for god’s sake. A few I can take but not all of them.

Maybe my microscope is too strong and narrow, given all the great things I’ve heard (the media, but also from friends whose opinions I value). I thought it was well made and had a lot of heart, but it makes me wonder what LA is looking for in the films they choose to celebrate. There seems to be some kind of, not conspiracy, but strange group mindset at work, some sort of social agenda. I’d rather they went back to simply honoring good filmmaking.

Truth be told, I’m just pissed off that The Dark Knight beat out Wall-E for Best Sound Editing. I mean COME ON!