Category: Film

Review: Dream in Silence (2020)

yifeiy 1 Comment

Running time: 75 min

Director: Huang Xin / Bao Ye

Countries: USA, China

Genre: Documentary

Dream in Silence has all the qualities an engaging documentary should have: an immigrant story, set in NYC, about a man’s end-of-life dream, and a collision between young and old. Self-proclaimed as a dying man, the subject, Fang Sir, is a funny, sensitive, and unpredictable graybeard who is like someone out of fiction. Before he immigrated to the U.S., he was a promising director in Taiwan. After decades of being distant from creative business, he decides to remake what he calls a “western” version of his award-winning short film from 40 years ago. A dozen young Chinese filmmakers were on board to help Fang Sir fulfill his dream. However, if you think this story may be no different from the touching ones that happened in the home-renovation shows, you might want to hold that thought, because how Fang Sir’s film project started and how the shooting went through are just beyond bizarre. Fang Sir isn’t any ordinary guy. He is wacky. He has a young heart. He makes you love and hate him at the same time.

Fang Sir’s initial capital is $300 that is supposed to be used on fixing his teeth. He tries to convince his producer, whom he met while waiting in the line for the restroom, to ask Ang Lee for financial support. The only thing that crossed their paths was that Lee had won the same Golden Harvest Award as Fang Sir did 30 years ago. He joked about the possibility of getting hit by a car and then using the insurance money to make his film, but it seems odd that he often positions himself not as the point person solving problems but more like a demanding customer. People on his team seem to be mostly film school graduates and professionals in the industry. By contrast, Fang Sir is laughed at as an amateur and is not on the same page with his young teammates.

Dream in Silence follows Fang Sir and his team’s preparation and official filming. The original short film, Silence (缄默), was directed by Fang Sir and shot by Christopher Doyle in 1979. Unsatisfied with Doyle’s cinematography, Fang Sir reshot the film in 1989. The 2020 version is the second-time remake. Fang Sir is currently consulting another film crew to make his third remake because he wasn’t happy with their collaboration. It is questionable why Fang Sir is so obsessed with this one story and yet has not developed anything new to give it a new life after 40 years.

The fast-paced editing in Dream in Silence is a successful hook and makes Fang Sir’s filmmaking journey incredibly entertaining to watch. The documentary not only truthfully documents Fang Sir’s over-excitement and adorable statements, but also his insecurity as an artist, his panic moments, and self-contradiction. For better or for worse, Dream in Silence does not pity Fang Sir and does not track down the reasons behind his awkward and irresponsible behaviors. It seems to me that he relies more on the team’s help than the film crew ever needs him. Young filmmakers took it for granted that Fang Sir was lonely and much happier when they were together, but that might be too shallow of a conclusion to make. I can’t help to compare his life with the film he is remaking. Coming to the U.S. did not help him achieve his movie dream but rather became a thorn in him, for he could not stop thinking about what-ifs. The reality has poured cold water on his dream, and he gradually lost his voice.

 

Now playing at Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival till November 15.

 

 

REVIEW: Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival, Short Films

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Short stories, done through any medium, have always felt the most challenging and striking to me. Reading Neil Gaiman in high school English really sealed that feeling for me, especially the story collection Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. There’s a good amount of slack inside a full-length text that simply doesn’t exist for short story tellers, and in losing that there is a whole lot of additional meaning, interpretable and explicit, that invites itself in. Maybe that’s why I think and write and feel only in vignettes.

So let’s not waste any more time: here’s what I thought:

Tumble, style-wise, did not meet my expectations. True, the colors were moody and there was an interesting rabbit motif hanging around (symbolic of timidity, hiding away, uncertainty in oneself, I think), but it was weirdly repetitive even while having a small running time. The lack of explanations for how Adam’s guardian angel becomes visible to others and solves the problems Adam shares with his mother (they fight to the very end, and nothing is resolved) had the potential to be open-ended mysteries for the audience to consider, but they just feel too much like actual plot holes.

Marcel was no doubt my favorite; I will always, always be a sucker for a soft and quiet romance. The frank tone of the film’s setup reminded me of my favorite movie, Amelie. The idea of a stark change like that happening (going from virtual invisibility to becoming a member of society) as a result of a chance event has so much magic in it. I was also a fan of the division of warm and cool colors/lighting throughout the movie; the glow of little changes. The ending was a point of disagreement between my friend and I, though–for whatever reason I assumed the last line implied she had jumped from the balcony while he slept, but my friend argued that Marcel was only expressing his happiness that the two were together in the same apartment. The ability to have two wildly different interpretations like that makes the movie all the more powerful. 

View to the Wall had a physical pull to it, like I was being closed into a clearly-defined, small space, drawn into Larysa and Borys’ new home.

While I describe that like affection, I was cold throughout. Being artists, the characters were appropriately expressive, the actors who played them able to communicate minute, complicated emotional shifts very well. So much of the hopefulness of starting a family and starting anew as immigrants felt quite tragically earnest. Making a life for yourself is such a fragile thing.

Ricochets was more austere than I thought it would be, or maybe had hoped. The relationship between the brothers was not as thoughtful as it could have been, made a little too dichotomous. Still, it spoke quite clearly to how easily the state of the world can dissolve closeness.

While these movies are no longer available to stream on the Michigan Theater site, be sure to check back periodically for more–the Michigan and State Theaters have been hard at work providing opportunities to see movies while their capacity for in-person viewing remains altered. Keep up to date at https://www.michtheater.org/blog/

Review: The Neurosurgeon (2020)

yifeiy 1 Comment

Running time: 80 min

Director: Magdalena Zagała

Country: Poland

Genre: biography documentary

Our brains learn, remember, solve problems, and they are at the same time fragile, deceptive, and mysterious. The winner of Ewa Pięta Award for Best Documentary at this year’s AAPFF is The Neurosurgeon/ Neurochirurg, a film that gives an inside look at world-leading neurosurgeons’ daily work and work philosophy.

The main subjects Dr. Mirosław Zabek and Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz are two pioneers in the field of vascular microneurosurgery. Both have lots of titles and awards after their names, and most importantly, they are the experts who have cured some of the rarest brain diseases and performed surgeries that have never been done in history. Following these two legendary Polish neurosurgeons in meeting rooms and operating rooms, the film not only presents a career and working environment less familiar to the public but also showcases the process of difficult medical surgeries and a heart-to-heart talk about brain diseases and death.

 

Blending both the doctors’ and patients’ experiences, The Neurosurgeon documents five families coming to a Warsaw hospital looking for help. There aren’t many dramatic moments in The Neurosurgeon. Rather, it’s in little moments we the audience recognize fear, compassion, and love. The first case is a young father of three, who has a recurrence of a brain tumor. The camera captures him asking his wife to keep his wedding ring safe, and it is uncertain when he can put it back on. The second patient has been agonizing over her uncontrolled jerky body movements due to Parkinson’s disease. The film also introduces the audience to AADC deficit, an incurable genetic disease that affects children’s breathing, speech, and motor development. Around the world, there are about 130 children diagnosed with AADC. Two of them are in Poland and appear in this documentary. The last case is a popular Polish actor facing the risk of losing his ability to ever speak again. The camera goes into the operating room with these patients, filming neurosurgeons cut a bony opening in their skulls, conduct deep brain stimulation, and other medical procedures that are otherwise not seen by the general public. After recoveries, patients almost magically regain control over their body and are able to function more normally.

Although health impairment is a heavy topic, the tone of The Neurosurgeon is rather calm and even cheerful in the sense that it celebrates technological advancements, vibrant science communication, and the positivity to embrace uncertainty in life. There are times when a doctor has to refuse a surgery for the consideration of the patient’s life quality, or simply because there is nothing the doctor can help with. There are also times when the doctor sees the patient coming back to breath and gain a second chance to live.

REVIEW: I NEVER CRY

Jack Taylor Welsh Leave a comment

Spoilers ahead.

 

Isolated in the basement of my house on a Saturday night, I try to tune out the pounding music that somehow manages to penetrate the two small windows separating me from fun. The rage of the closet light that won’t turn off is getting to me, so I waste no time in beginning my foray into the Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival, by way of Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry.

I Never Cry is a long awaited film for the “Euro-Orphans:” the kids whose parents left countries like Poland to work in the Western powers of the UK, Ireland, France, etc. The film’s protagonist, Ola (Zofia Stafiej), is one of these kids. When her father dies in a construction accident in Ireland, she must leave her mother and disabled brother behind in Poland to retrieve his body. With only a backpack and a dwindling pack of cigarettes, the 17-year old girl bounces around Dublin, doing her best to thwart the different levels of bureaucracy that stand in the way of her father. Ola’s story is one of amusing despair, as she drinks around Dublin and desperately clings to the few cigarettes she finds (12 euros for a pack of cigarettes? No thanks). In this search, Ola finds she knows very little about her father, and the mission gradually becomes about understanding him rather than finding him.

In stories about grief, by now it’s a cliché for the characters to spend the course of the narrative soothing their loss by trying to figure out who the deceased “really was;” if I’ve lost you already with my trite summary, I’m sorry.

But where Domalewski succeeds in this film is the subversion of that trope, because for Ola, she can’t seem to find out anything about her father. From the man at the hiring agency, to her father’s boss, to his roommates, Ola gets nearly nothing of significance about her father. The most she learns about her father is from his mistress, a hair-dresser scraping by who shows him a framed picture that Ola’s father drew of her—“he likes to draw.” And that’s it. That’s the most we learn of Ola’s father. Domalewski holds the man of the narrative’s longing at arm’s length, trapping us in Ola’s feeling of ignorance, of lostness.

The Euro-Orphan does not get a conventional redemption here. Instead, after discovering that her father’s mistress is pregnant, Ola gives the mistress the money that her father left Ola for a car, with the hope that she uses it to go to makeup school and get a better job. Her dreams of a car mean an escape—but realizing there is no escape from her cycle of poverty, she defers her dreams to the next generation. Like Ola, the viewer isn’t left with much hope with regard to the story at hand. But we must hope with Ola that her gift to her father’s future child pays off. At best, we hope with Ola for a do-over, for a kid that has a better life in a better place.

Psych 101 tells us that between ages 40 and 65 is the stage of development in which we worry about our contribution to society, to the next generation, to the things that will outlast us. But, with our legacy ever-present in the social media era of recording everything we do, I think it’s easy to find ourselves wondering at younger and younger ages, “what world do I leave my kids?” For the generation of “savers,” I Never Cry is a brutally realistic picture of what we have to sacrifice for the rest of humankind.

REVIEW: Tenet

Nellie Shih Leave a comment

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet opens with a thrilling hostage sequence that introduces the film’s central concept of inverted time. Shortly after the conclusion of the sequence, we see the lead protagonist seek out a scientist who advises him, “Don’t try to understand.” As the movie progresses, you realize that this line was written in for the audience.

Tenet follows a CIA agent who must prevent World War III by manipulating and traveling backwards through time. It isn’t time travel, but it is. It’s about inverting entropy. It’s confusing. However, the character motivations that drive the main plot are straightforward enough that even though you have no idea what’s going on, you’ll still have a good time.

The film’s action sequences can be largely credited for preventing the audience from leaving the theater or turning the movie off in frustration. I personally can lose interest in a movie during long fight or chase scenes, but Tenet’s action sequences are unique and engaging because of the inverted time. Objects that are inverted move differently – cars drive backwards, bullets are caught in guns, and waves flow in reverse. And because time can be manipulated, characters can move backwards in time to revisit certain situations. And though these characters are moving normally in their own eyes, non-inverted individuals will see these characters moving in reverse. Regardless of whether you think this concept is ridiculous or intriguing, you will surely appreciate the dedication of the cast and crew to the filmmaking process. Some scenes featuring time manipulation were filmed forwards and backgrounds. The composer, Ludwig Göransson created music that would sound the same forwards and backwards. Although the film is easy to criticize because of its debatably unnecessary complexity, there are just so many layers to the film that make the act of watching it such an immersive experience.

Furthermore, this is Nolan’s first film starring a nonwhite lead. John David Washington shines – he’s suave, funny, and has a strong moral compass. Some of Nolan’s past films have come under rightful criticism for only featuring underdeveloped female characters, and Tenet has come under scrutiny for presenting its female lead as a damsel in distress. However, I understood this character, Kat, played by Elizabeth Debicki, to be someone who merely starts out as a damsel in distress. Over the course of the movie, she develops more of a sense of self and comes to understand her own capabilities. Although Kat’s main motivations are centered around being a mother, she is not portrayed as weak or overbearing. Her character arc revolving around being reunited with a child is similar to that of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception. Although Kat is treated as a punching bag by her husband and she is a pawn in the Protagonist’s larger plan, I believe that she has a satisfying conclusion to her arc, and that Debicki’s stellar performance was that of a woman who proves she is no longer a damsel in distress.

If you like Inception and Interstellar or just Nolan’s films in general, you will at least be able to appreciate Tenet. I think it’s a pretty perfect film to watch right now: the action, cast, and score are all just engaging enough to fully immerse you into the movie-watching experience. I would recommend Tenet for anyone who is looking for a two-and-a-half hour break from reality.

Tenet is playing at the State Theater through Tuesday, November 10th, and it will be available digitally and on Blu-ray starting December 15th.

PREVIEW: Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival, Short Films

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Movie Night Clipart

This weekend is Ann Arbor’s 27th annual Polish Film Festival! If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly searching for ways to put off doing actual assignments or anything remotely productive. Lucky for you, here’s another opportunity to do just that!

I’m a big fan of foreign film; it seems that many countries are far more in tune with the creativity is takes to make a truly weird, mind-bending movie (I have a lot of French and Thai favorites in that category). It’s interesting to note the differences in styles of acting and plot progression as well.

There are a few different sections of the film festival, so if you have the time, I’d encourage you to check out all of them. But I’ll just be watching the short films section; I have a whole list of other things I’m using to avoid work this weekend. On the menu are four 2019 movies, all dramas with some interesting spice, from political tension to a supernatural entity.

The short films are free to stream Friday, November 6 at 7pm through Saturday at 7pm, via https://www.michtheater.org/aapff2020/