The press materials or the LAAPFF 2011 lead with this image:

I won’t bullshit you; this didn’t inspire enthusiasm.

Which is too bad. There were a lot of films recommended for me to review during the film festival, and this wasn’t among them. Had I not watched the trailer some time back, I wouldn’t have bothered. Even though the brief segments included in that promo didn’t say much more than the synopsis, or offer any solid impression of the acting, the pervasive atmosphere of understatement was different enough for me to remember it when cycling through the screeners.

I can understand the need of the filmmakers to court the film’s core LGBT audience, doing so further confined it to a niche. I also can’t fault them for going with imagery that, though startling, is marginal in the scheme of it, since the lion’s share of frames convey nothing but a lo-fi realism. Beyond the blinding camp of the promo materials, there’s a film with a unique voice, and a potential for broader appeal. Maybe I’m selling audiences short, but I doubt it (I really, really… really — really — doubt it). Or maybe I’m merely criticizing appeals to one niche (the LGBT audience) to tout an even more marginal one: discerning film-goers, scouring the cinematic wasteland for good indie films. In any case, more people could benefit from seeing this movie than probably actually will.

I was born into the era of AIDS (and Reagan: 1981) — in fact, the child of an unnamed celebrity was born the same day, in the same hospital as I was; he ultimately died thanks to the novel mystery sickness delivered in a tainted blood transfusion. The full 180º swing from the “rebellious,” self-important promiscuity of the so-called counterculture hovered, along with gang wars and crack cocaine, over my childhood; a palpable, if nebulous and largely personally irrelevant, sense of dread. Family friends were lost. Every decade in America has its boogiemen — dreadful, yet never fully realized — be they “inscrutable” cultures, bombs, or diseases.

Topics like these translate easily into crypto-Victorian fables, like the vastly overrated Requiem for a Dream; an overbearing morality play on substance abuse. Such a pastiche of clichés might flatter the status quo for its middling tedium, and drape a fresh smirk across its polar certitudes, but what does that illuminate? Move with open eyes in any direction, and realize the world is an impossibly complicated place; one that will crush the thoughtful beneath its burden once they realize their imperfect, ad hoc roles in it. An inattentive storyteller doesn’t even pause at copying already 30th generation copies of themes that were specious to begin with; the ideas are familiar in so many movies, but are they as often credible? Fuck no. But they give reality a dramatic, video game symmetry. It’s satisfying enough to many — especially with the rising escapism of the decade — but if we watch too much of that shit we end up wondering why life itself refuses to play by the rules.

What sets this film apart is its steely resolve to face the anticlimactic mundanity of life’s tragedies. At the apex of its despair, a scene doesn’t fade mercifully out; it persists as if propounding the reality that life goes on, as shitty as it may be (and may become still). Time, the objects around you, and the vast majority of the people, answer only with indifference. Even if everyone, and everything, wanted to care, there is just too much soul-gnawing misfortune in the world to keep track of. That recognition reigns in the kind of hysterical, cathartic, falsely-final dramatic outpouring that might absolve one of truly examining an event and its implications.

Our protagonist, Jesus, doesn’t get a nice, clean dip to black when he gets the news. Instead, he has all the awkward, monotone consolations; the skirted liability assessments — even the goddamn telephones won’t stop ringing out of respect for the claustrophobic misery of his diagnosis.

The film’s credibility lies in its attention to detail, and its deft navigation of complicated topics no surface understanding of — or at least concept of — could advise. Jesus is given a month’s regimen of pills; a bubble-packed ribbon wound tightly, yet edging toward the heft of a Progresso can, that could easily unravel to a length approximating the pharmacist’s explanation of the damn things (preemptive antibiotics, anybody?). And, in another skillful evasion of the after school special, they touch upon the potential for their abuse — the pain killers in particular.

One of the best darkly comic scenes was the Coens-esque confrontation between Jesus and his ex, in which his struggle to make peace with his decisions is confounded by said ex’s insistence on diffusing/deflecting Jesus’s contrition from their own relationship to that of a broader community, entertaining the question whether being part of any minority inherently (or justly) harbors such baggage.

It’s not a perfect film. Though the acting is natural, characters unique, and subject interesting, the plot is nudged along by an irksome, melodramatic philosophizing. However, the actor’s dry, emotionless delivery, and that the narration is more often absent than not, keeps it from being too much of a distraction.

I have to admit to cracking up that Jesus’s ex-boyfriend was a female to male transgendered person. If that’s not an “O. Henry” story…

I didn’t go into this movie for a plot. If anyone did, I’m shocked and bewildered by their naivete. The unfortunate fact is they tried for one anyway, and though it’s as flimsy and superfluous as the proverbial pizza delivery scene, it whiles away its (and our) time for far longer than it needs to. The audience got antsy waiting for people to start bounding off walls and kicking each other in the face.

What there was of a plot read like the intro to a Double Dragon game, complete with the damsel in distress; she fights, too, but her vulnerability stems from simply not being as effective at it, as she inevitably gets kicked in the face — though never visibly injured to preserve necessary hotness and thus motivation to see her rescued. Would the audience care as much if she were all purple and inflamed? I don’t know. There’s a second damsel, a backup one, that is about as differentiable from her counterpart as the male fighters are from each other.

Without giving too much away, and spoiling the plot for anyone (as I usually do), I’ll say that I enjoyed the overt racism of this film. Partly because it’s fun to see a bigoted perspective different from that held by American hicks, and partly because this country is so stifled by political correctness you almost forget just how backward much of it really is. It’s no enough to see backwoods hicks portrayed by Hollywood (a kind of prejudice in itself); you have to see through their eyes; their clouded, inbred eyes. This Thai-born production is unashamed in offering a panel of stereotypes, through that country’s perspective, of course. The villain is a generic white guy, complete with vague mid-southern drawl; there’s a sell-out, whitewashed Thai dude; a presumably Russian guy, judging from the approximate eastern European accent; a mute black guy; and a Japanese chick that, far from being exotic, is just a rambling nitwit, who insists on speaking in some of the most unintelligible English imaginable.

The motley model UN also provides many of the bizarre and inessential dead ends that I suppose constitute character development and suspense. I have no idea what they were going for — to build upon their effete depravity and menace? Unimportant; just endure it, and laugh at these lulls.

There are a ton of false rescues, and people bounding off things and kicking each other in the face. It’s entertaining — I won’t qualify that.

As many have felt obliged to preface it like so, I’ll say this is filmmaker Ian Gamazon’s third feature, and that he’s best known for his earlier festival darling, Cavite. His debut film can be filed away with Better Luck Tomorrow, The Debut, and especially The Flip Side, as a movie that furthered “the cause” during the dark (or should I say extremely white) ages of film, with regard to ethnic representation. These films made a point, though as the context which cultivated their pioneering defiance fades from memory, it’s easier to unfairly dismiss them as running the gamut from bad to average. Like Flip Side, Cavite was a bluntly pedantic work; a narrative vehicle for a lesson in the impoverished despair of Filipino slums. Though it’s not a favorite, it was innovative in its bare-bones production and obscure content.

Now that the inroads Asian American filmmakers and actors have made into the mainstream have gotten a bit less rugged, artists like Gamazon are freed from distilling ethnic studies courses into awkwardly expository plots. It also lets us chuck our political awareness for a while, and evaluate some of these folks more objectively within the craft. Seduced Circumstances gives a quick nod to some tragic events in Vietnamese history, and it’s somewhat subtle about it, but the main draw of the movie, if there is one, is torture porn.

Director Gamazon frets in his statement about the film his decision not to include a second act. Frankly, the presence of any divisions, tonal shifts, or character arcs at all didn’t occur to me while viewing this film. The briefest explanation I can offer: imagine the last act of Oldboy protracted across an hour and a half. Seriously.

It could’ve — it should’ve — been a 12 minute short. Only rather we’re given scenes of a pregnant woman antagonizing her captive, who she’s tied down to a wheelchair. Over the course of eight months, she pokes, prods, burns, stabs, chops, slices, and most of all harangues wheelchair dude with monotonous taunts and menacing non sequiturs. The scenes repeat with minute variations, but never advancing any discernible plot. The big reveal only comes through a long motion graphics hallucination wherein the wheelchair guy lays out the sole piece of exposition provided to backdrop any of this repetitious, gory inanity.

If the point of this movie was to communicate his feelings of captivity and torment to an audience, mission accomplished; that was my experience exactly.

Looks wise, imagine it being shot by a camera mounted on a labrador, and fed through an aggressive procession of effects filters.

A film like this is begging to be done wrong. Tragic themes, like death and estrangement, are so well-worn into the doc landscape it takes a surprising amount of will to make them interesting — or even distinguishable from one another. It’s difficult to say in what measures the film owes its strength to an intuitive first time filmmaker, a dedication to candidly documenting these two lives, or the personality of the eponymous subject, but I’m going to lean toward crediting the third the most.

Louise Nutter seemed like a person that would irritate me in real life. However, her overflowing extroversion and over the top exuberance consistently deliver the perfect counterpoint to a topic that threatens to drag any story into numbing sentimentality. She alone may be responsible for making this movie interesting. Her expertise and unique relationship with the malady in her professional life denied her the uncertainty of a layman, and so what would be a shocking barrage of unanticipated horrors to most became a sparring match with a familiar opponent.

[This review is first in our series on AFI's Film Festival, and one of two reviews of this film that will be posted. Watch for a follow-up by guest reviewer, Melanie Taylor.]

You see the Bimmer pull into the driveway of a couple that owns a spacious home, in a homogenous little neighborhood, and you realize what you’re in for. They’re about to point a microscope at the petty dramas of an angsty yuppie family. There’s a certain quaintness in illuminating the safe, self-important martyrdom of the bourgeois upper middle classes. Consider “Ice Storm,” “American Beauty,” “Donnie Darko,” “The Savages,” etc. It all seems so anachronistic now given our economy’s rapid death spiral — AKA the American Drain?

Adding to its frustrating triteness is a story that plays like a collage of previous — not always better — film moments. There’s the addiction to support groups, recalling “Fight Club” — Chuck Palahniuk being the one author most Gen Y’ers have read since their mandatory introduction to Salinger in high school. There’s the strange relationship between the victim, Becca (Nicole Kidman), and the (however unintentional) perpetrator, which comes uncomfortably close in theme and execution to overlong Belgian crime film, “Revanche” (maybe the play version of “Rabbit Hole” came first, but I don’t really care enough to find out).

Then there are basic clichés, like: yuppie protagonist, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), playing racquetball, then having a serious talk in the locker room; middle-aged yuppies giddy at their middle-aged flirtation with weed, giggling that it reminds their middle-aged selves of their delinquency in high school. As in “Sideways,” Sandra Oh plays the (pseudo?)mistress. The Canadian-born Korean actress is just good enough to play a vulnerable, needy woman on the side — a position that shames all parties — while Kidman’s Becca is the one with whom to build a life.

Which brings me to the only other actor belonging to an ethnic minority. They cast Giancarlo Esposito as a musician, which in WASPy screenplay shorthand means a bum without a steady paycheck. He’s part of an unwed couple, the other half of which happens to be the heroine’s now pregnant sister. There’s a certain subconscious pigeonholing to making the father in this contra-mainstream and perhaps — by the film’s own suggestion — trashy family unit, an actor with some melanin. It subtly hints at the writer or director’s insular, simplistic view of things outside his bubble. As usual, art imitates art.

There were a few redeeming factors. It was funny watching Nicole Kidman skulk around like a sex offender, naively thinking a baseball cap provided sufficient camouflage. It reminded me of Jackie Chan early in the horrible “Karate Kid” remake. It was refreshing to hear a primary character complain about all the “god shit” in the support groups, while not later receiving some ironic comeuppance. Kidman and Eckhart gave emotionally charged performances, convincingly portraying a (WASPy) couple straining to preserve their beigeist marriage.

Some of the cast and crew were apparently there for the Q&A, but something has to be preternaturally interesting for me to tolerate that maddening bullshit. I stepped on some toes. Literally — in my rush to get out before the lights came on.

by guest reviewer Melanie Taylor, The Feminist Guide to Hollywood

Am I the only one who’s noticed? Leonardo DiCaprio plays the same character in every movie. He’s the leading man of our day, but he can’t seem to play anything beyond the same Jack Dawson character he was in Titanic. That was truly his heyday. He was the Robert Pattinson of the ‘90s. Only Robert Pattinson is probably less concerned with exclusively dating Victoria’s Secret models, therefore making him exceedingly cooler.

My point is that Inception sucked, and the leading man’s tired acting didn’t help. Inception was written by Christopher Nolan, and stars Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It doesn’t really matter who plays who in Inception, because all the characters sounded exactly the same.

The movie starts with a passed out Cobb (DiCaprio) washing up on the shore. He’s brought to an intimidating boss man (an almost comically over-acting Ken Watanabe), and asked for information he can’t deliver. Bullets start flying, and Cobb’s partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is shot. Suddenly, Cobb and Arthur wake up in another world — the real world. It is then we realize it was just a dream. But it’s a dream that’s as real as real life, with wounds that hurt; except that when you “die” in the dream, you just wake up. This is Cobb’s job. Accompanied by Arthur, he goes into people’s dreams and steals their secrets.

The real story starts when Cobb is hired for the complex job of entering a dream inside a dream inside a dream to implant ideas into a target’s mind. The agreement and completion of the job will give Cobb a chance to see his children again. He debates with himself throughout the film over whether or not their existence is real. Enter Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young architecture student, needed to manipulate the dream world, and create a complex “maze” dreamscape to help them evade discovery.

We are given a complex, intertwining, special effects-dazzling show of a mind-created reality outside of anything that exists in real life, and Ariadne is taught all about the experience and possibilities of entering people’s dreams. As he is explaining everything to her, he is explaining everything to the audience, and the film becomes more of a medium for exposition about the concepts than a fluid, cohesive story with heart. There is a certain sterility to the film that leaves you lacking a connection to the characters. Cobb’s motive for taking this great dream-inside-a-dream risk is supposed to spring from the guilt he feels over his family, but throughout the exhaustively long action scenes it just plays out like a video game.

As their plan unfolds, Ariadne learns more about Cobb’s secret dream world, where he regularly visits a dream-version of his deceased wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). She soon discovers that the violence hidden in Cobb’s mind manifests itself through Mal, with whom she has a savage encounter. As the crew enters the dream inside a dream, they discover the threat of violence has become much more real, and Ariadne becomes a liaison between Cobb’s dream world and his reality in an attempt to save them all from his mind.

The film keeps the viewer teetering between dream and reality, and it works in that respect. Cobb’s job is being an Investigator of the Future kind, and this is the gimmick that is used to keep the film’s flame lit. It’s an original concept, and one that resonates with a world entrenched in a high-tech gadgets and ideas, and stands out in an industry drowning in remakes, biographies, and sequels. However, the new and uncharted territories explored here seem to showcase action and special effects, rather than a new way to tell a meaningful story with any kind of primal emotion.

The internal conflict of Cobb seems almost an afterthought, as if it were fitted and crammed around the dream theories and special effects. The personal journey of the leading man felt completely secondary to the “coolness” of the special effects and the Carl Jung-like theories of dreams within dreams. We’re supposed to care that Cobb misses his children, can’t let go of the memory of his dead wife, and continues to visit her in his dreams, but I really just found myself checking my phone the whole time, and occasionally raising an amused eyebrow over a sporadic special effect.

When the emotion of a story is only there to satisfy an obligatory character arc meant to give purpose to glamorous action scenes, it loses its authenticity because it’s forced. If the screenwriter doesn’t care, then why should we? He was more interested in writing “cool scenes” with giant mirrors that fold landscapes, and bending walls while people walk upside down. Please, save that for a special effects short film class, Christopher Nolan. You can’t put special effects over the actual story and characters, or you end up with a Michael Bay film — and nobody wants that.

From Their Website:
The Khmer Rouge ran what is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most brutal regimes. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now.

In ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE the men and women who perpetrated the massacres – from the foot-soldiers who slit throats to the party’s ideological leader, Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two – break a 30-year silence to give testimony never before heard or seen.

Unprecedented access from top to bottom of the Khmer Rouge has been achieved through a decade of work by one of Cambodia’s best investigative journalists, Thet Sambath.

Sambath is on a personal quest: he lost his own family in the Killing Fields. The film is his journey to discover not how but why they died. In doing so, he hears and understands for the first time the real story of his country’s tragedy.

After years of visits and trust-building, Sambath finally persuades Brother Number Two to admit (again, for the first time) in detail how he and Pol Pot (the two supreme powers in the Khmer Rouge state) decided to kill party members whom they considered ‘Enemies of the People’.

Sambath’s remarkable work goes even one stage further: over the years he befriends a network of killers in the provinces who implemented the kill policy. For the first time, we see how orders created on an abstract political level translate into foul murder in the rice fields and forests of the Cambodian plain.
We have repeatedly used the expression ‘for the first time’. This is because Sambath’s work represents a watershed both in Cambodian historiography and in the country’s quest for closure on one of the world’s darkest episodes.

The United Nations and the Cambodian government have set up a tribunal to try the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge for international crimes. Brother Number Two’s trial is expected to start in 2010.
The trials are widely expected to deliver a form of justice but fewer expect the truth finally to come out through this process.

Sambath says: “Some may say no good can come from talking to killers and dwelling on past horror, but I say these people have sacrificed a lot to tell the truth. In daring to confess they have done good, perhaps the only good thing left. They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if my country is to move forward.”

After Han mends Dre’s injuries using fire cupping, they go to Cheng’s teacher, Master Li (Yu Rongguang), to attempt to make peace, but the brutal Li, who teaches his students to show no mercy to their enemies, challenges Dre to a fight with Cheng. When Han declines, Li threatens him, saying that they will not be allowed to leave his school unless either Dre or Han himself fights. Han acquiesces, but insists the fight take place at an upcoming tournament, and that Li’s students leave Dre alone until the tournament. The amused Li agrees.
Han begins training Dre, but Dre is frustrated that Han merely has Dre spend hours taking off his jacket, hanging it up, dropping it, and then putting it back on again. After days of this, Dre refuses to continue, until Han demonstrates to him that the repetitive arm movements in question were Han’s method of teaching Dre defensive block and strike techniques, which Dre is now able to display instinctively when prompted by Han’s mock attacks. Han emphasizes that the movements Dre is learning apply to life in general, and that serenity and maturity, not punches and power, are the true keys to mastering the martial arts. During one lesson in the Wudang Mountains, Dre notices a female kung fu practitioner (Michelle Yeoh, in an uncredited cameo[4]) apparently copying the movements of a cobra before her, but Han informs him that it was the cobra that was imitating the woman, as in a mirror reflection. Dre wants Han to teach him this technique, which includes linking Han’s hand and feet to Dre’s via bamboo shafts while practicing their forms, but Dre’s subsequent attempt to use this reflection technique on his mother is unsuccessful.

As Dre’s friendship with Mei Ying continues, she agrees to attend Dre’s tournament, as does Dre her upcoming recital. Dre persuades Mei Ying to cut school for a day of fun, but when she is nearly late for her violin recital, which has been rescheduled for that day, Mei tells him that her parents have deemed him a bad influence, and forbid her from spending any more time with him.

When Dre finds Mr. Han despondent, he learns that it is the anniversary of his wife and son’s deaths, which occurred years ago when he lost control of his car while arguing with his wife. Dre reminds Han that one of his lessons was in perseverance, and that Han needs to heal from his loss, and tries to help him do so. Han then assists Dre in reading a note, in Chinese, of apology to Mei Ying’s father, who, impressed, allows Mei to attend the tournament.

At the tournament, the under-confident Dre is slow to achieve parity with his opponents, but soon begins to beat them, and advances to the semifinals, as does Cheng, who violently finishes off his opponents. Dre eventually comes up against Liang, another of Master Li’s students, who is instructed by Master Li to break Dre’s leg. When Liang insists that he can beat Dre, Master Li sternly tells him that he doesn’t want him beaten, but broken. During the match, Liang delivers a devastating kick to Dre’s leg, along with a series of brutal follow-up punches. Although Liang is disqualified for his illegal strikes, Dre is incapacitated, which would allow Cheng to win by default.
Despite Han’s insistence that he has earned respect for his performance in the tournament, Dre convinces Han to use his fire cupping technique to mend his leg, in order to see the tournament to the end. Dre returns to the arena, where he confronts Cheng. Dre delivers impressive blows, but Cheng counters with a debilitating strike to Dre’s already injured leg. Dre struggles to get up, and adopts the one-legged form he first learned from the woman on the mountain, attempting to use the reflection technique to manipulate Cheng’s movements. Cheng charges Dre, but Dre flips, and catches Cheng with a kick to his head, winning the tournament, along with the respect of Cheng and his classmates, both for himself and Mr. Han.