SFIAAFF Opens March 15 With "Finishing the Game"

The 25th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival opens this week with "Better Luck Tomorrow" director Justin Lin's new indie comedy, "Finishing the Game", starring returning members of the "BLT" cast, including Roger Fan, Sung Kang and Parry Shen.

Other festival highlights include Grace Lee's "American Zombie", Saigon-set "Owl and the Sparrow" from Stephane Gauger, controversial Chinese feature "Summer Palace" and "Tre", from "Charlotte Sometimes" writer-director Eric Byler.

Closing night features "Dark Matter", a penetrating drama set in a U.S. university by Chinese opera director-turned filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng.

Both "Finishing the Game" and "Dark Matter" screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival -- read the Sundance reviews for a sneak peek at what SFIAAFF has in store.

"Finishing the Game"

Sundance Film Festival
Bottom Line: A boisterous '70s comedy spoofing the flaws of studio moviemaking.


American Zombie

Returning to narrative filmmaking for the first time since her Student Academy Award-winning short film “Barrier Device,” prolific documentary director Grace Lee fuses the two genres into a trenchant black comedy focusing on Los Angeles’ fictive underground zombie community.

Playing themselves, Lee and filmmaker John Solomon set out to explore the world of the living dead in a documentary profiling four different zombies: health-food obsessed lonely heart Judy (Suzy Nakamura), convenience store clerk and zine artist Ivan (Austin Basis), self-obsessed florist Lisa (Jane Edith Wilson), and Zombie Advocacy Group community organizer Joel (Al Vicente).

While Lee is more interested in delving into the psycho-social challenges faced by the undead, Solomon remains obsessed with uncovering whether zombies actually eat human flesh and indulge in any of the other atrocities that popular media attributes to them. Their differing perspectives clash when the filmmaking team attends the zombies-only Live Dead annual retreat, leading to unexpected revelations.

Lee navigates the film with tongue planted firmly through cheek, her deadpan delivery countered by Solomon’s off-kilter intensity, while Nakamura engagingly enlivens Judy’s dramatic transformation from denial to full self-realization. The filmmakers’ mobile camerawork and documentary stylings complement the movie’s conceits, although the narrative undergoes a major tonal shift late in the film.


Year of the Fish

Adapting an ancient Chinese version of the Cinderella fable, David Kaplan's animated debut feature set in New York's Chinatown is gratifyingly unlike the sanitized Disney version.

Ye Xian (An Nguyen) immigrates illegally to Manhattan hoping to help her family in China, but quickly discovers that Mrs. Su (Tsai Chin), the cruel woman she's indebted to, expects her to join the other girls servicing clients in her massage parlor. When Ye Xian refuses, Su tasks her with doing all the chores.

One day Ye Xian meets the blind, deformed fortuneteller Auntie Yaga (Randall Duk Kim), who gives her a magical goldfish. Ye Xian's only other distraction from drudgery is daydreaming about handsome young bandleader Johnny Pan (Ken Leung).

After Su refuses to let Ye Xian attend a Lunar New Year's banquet where Johnny and his band are playing, the girl reluctantly approaches the forbidding Auntie Yaga for assistance rendezvousing with her beloved.

Although the outlines of the story are familiar, writer-director Kaplan imbues the tale with enough cultural detail and local flavor to reinvigorate the story. Newcomer An Nguyen is charming as Ye Xian and Chin plays Mrs. Su with appropriate venom. Kaplan's unique animation technique -- a form of live-action capture -- exhibits an attractive watercolor quality.


Ghosts

Mainland Chinese migrant workers seeking economic opportunities in the UK form the subject of documentarian Nick Broomfield's thoughtful first feature.

When Ai Qin (Ai Qin Lin) has to leave southern China, seeking work abroad to support her young son and parents, her family borrows from the moneylenders to pay the snakeheads' $25,000 fee to smuggle Ai Qin and two acquaintances on a six-month journey across the breadth of Europe.

Arriving in the UK, they're turned over to Mr. Lin (Zhan Yu) who rents them a room in a crowded shared apartment and helps them find work with forged permits. A succession of menial jobs wears Ai Qin down as she struggles with debt and supporting her family while Mr. Lin takes a cut of her earnings and tries to seduce her.

Casting nonprofessionals in the principal roles, Broomfield keeps his camera tight on his subjects in true verite style, using realistic, drab locations to stage much of the action. Lin, a former illegal immigrant to the UK, plays the conflicted Ai Qin with a convincing range of emotion washing across her expressive face. Shot digitally in the tradition of British social realism, Ghosts is a bracing depiction of desperate lives incongruously filled with hope.


Dark Matter
(originally published in The Hollywood Reporter, January 26, 2007)


Sundance Film Festival
Bottom Line: Challenging subject matter best suited to discerning audiences

Park City – Venturing into delicate emotional territory, opera and theater director-turned filmmaker Chen Shi-Zheng crafts an unsettling first feature that examines issues of personal ambition, academic ethics and the obstacles to cultural assimilation in the U.S.

The film’s inspired-by-true-events pedigree will interest discerning viewers, although its dark tone may prove a challenge for theatrical distribution. With careful handling by a specialty outfit, “Dark Matter” could reap modest rewards from art house markets.

Referencing an actual incident at an American university more than a decade ago, the filmmakers reimagine the events as a story about Chinese cosmology student Liu Xing (Liu Ye). Leaving university in Beijing, Liu immigrates to the U.S. in 1991 to study astrophysics at fictional Valley State University with renowned researcher and academic Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn). With great admiration for his mentor, Liu quickly becomes Reiser’s favored student, although fitting into American society and the university hierarchy isn’t quite as easy.

Social support for immigrants is available from the local church, where wealthy Joanna Silver (Meryl Streep), a devotee of Chinese culture and philanthropist of the university’s astrophysics department, frequently assists newly arrived students. She quickly develops an admiration for Liu’s keen intellect, particularly after he explains the concept of dark matter to her, a theory positing that 99 percent of the universe is comprised of invisible material.

Reiser and his graduate students are developing a model of the universe that doesn’t include dark matter theory, so when Liu presents his thesis topic on the subject to Reiser and the dissertation committee, he meets with resistance, rather than the support he expected. Liu suspects that Reiser is withholding the committee’s approval because his ideas contradict his professor’s and indeed Reiser resorts to some questionably ethical tactics to thwart Liu’s candidacy.

Although Joanna encourages Liu to pursue his own cosmological model, even her intervention can’t convince Reiser to give Liu a chance to prove himself. Meanwhile, a newly arrived Chinese student (Lloyd Suh) -- Liu’s nemesis from Beijing University -- becomes Rieser’s new protege.

The tension engendered by academic politics and the demands of advanced astrophysics push Liu toward a mental and emotional crisis as he becomes increasingly delusional and dangerous, finally erupting in a shocking act of violence.

Chen, himself a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., explores the difficulties that students from China face when relocating to the U.S. through the lens of the academic community that is often the gateway for many new arrivals. Through Liu’s frequent letters to his parents detailing his academic progress, voiced-over scenes of his working-class family in China, Chen demonstrates the importance of the American Dream to many newcomers.

The director’s theatrical background is apparent in Liu’s occasional fantasy sequences about becoming a famous researcher and the final climactic scene. However, neither the main narrative nor these stylistic devices go deep enough to reveal his motivations and Liu Ye’s acting abilities alone are insufficient for the task.

In an evocatively tamped-down performance, Streep skillfully evokes Joanna’s drive to assist new immigrants, but her fascination with Chinese culture and Liu in particular comes across as rather obscure. Quinn is strong as the alternately affable and acidic Reiser, who expertly manipulates university politics and hierarchies to inflate his own importance.

Like the dark matter that forms the film’s essential metaphor, Liu’s desperate downward spiral from model student to disgraced outsider remains essentially mysterious.


DARK MATTER

American Sterling Productions presents in association with Saltmill LLC

Credits: Director: Chen Shi-Zheng; Writer: Billy Shebar; Producers: Janet Yang, Mary Salter, Andrea Miller; Executive producers: Kirk D’Amico, Linda Chiu; Director of photography: Oliver Bokelberg; Production designer: Dina Goldman; Music: Van Dyke Parks; Costume designer: Elizabeth Caitlin Ward; Editors: Pam Wise, Michael Berenbaum.

Cast: Joanna Silver: Meryl Streep; Jacob Reiser: Aidan Quinn; Liu Xing: Liu Ye; Laurence Feng : Lloyd Suh.

No MPAA rating, running time 88 minutes.