Posts tagged film
Bumbershoot 2011: What I Enjoyed, Disliked and Missed
Oct 1st
I think there’s no better time to reflect on Seattle’s 2011 Bumbershoot®: Seattle’s Music & Arts Festival, which I had a three-day pass to, than exactly four weeks after the start of the festival. Instead of writing detailed reviews for everything I saw, I decided to break it into what I thoroughly enjoyed, what I didn’t love and what I wished I saw.
I thoroughly enjoyed:
- The Improvised Shakespeare Company
- MarchFourth Marching Band
- YACHT (music)
- The Trey McIntyre Project (dance)
- Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue
- Dan Savage and Terry Miller: It Gets Better (words and ideas panel)
- Manos: The Hands of Felt by Puppet This
- 1 Reel Film Festival - Frankly Female films: Election Day, Worn, 0507
I didn’t love:
- Why Censorship? Why Revolution? Why Now? (words and ideas panel)
- Kristin Hersh: Paradoxical Undressing (music/monologue one-woman show)
- 1 Reel Film Festival – Frankly Female film: Connect To
- Visual art: The Magic Show, Skaters Gauntlet, Bumber by Number
I wish I saw:
- Spectrum Dance Theater
- Vendetta Red
- Lots of 1 Reel Film Festival: Best of SIFF 2011 Jury Award Winners, Best of SIFF Audience Award Winners, Around the World in 50 Minutes
To see what other Bumbershoot attendees’ opinions on what they saw? Check out the BumberDiaries Channel on YouTube.
I used Foursquare to check into not only into the Bumbershoot festival but individual venues I went to. I amazingly became the Bagley Wright Theatre mayor after just my second checkin of the festival and have kept this title with four checkins total and no checkins in the past month. This doesn’t seem like a very competitive mayorship.
Image taken without permission from official Bumbershoot site.
Contemporary China’s Generational Differences in “Aftershock (唐山大地震)”
Nov 8th
I recently saw “Aftershock (唐山大地震)” at Seattle’s Uptown Theater on Queen Anne, thanks to reading about it in MusicDish*China. The film is China’s highest grossing domestic movie of all time, the first commercial entertainment film made outside the United States for IMAX, and apparently the 83rd Academy Awards’ Chinese nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
“Aftershock” deserves its popularity and critical acclaim for several reasons, including its special effects, acting, dramatic narrative, and tastefully placed humor. One of the film’s most controversial aspects is, predictibly, that it takes the Chinese federal government propaganda standpoint on depicting the poorly handled tragedy and resulting history. I have very little problem with this, though, as it enabled the film’s expensive budget and wide distribution. Jeremiah Jenne’s post “Aftershock and the legacy of the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake” on Granite Studio sums up my opinions of the movie pretty well.
As a Millennial who recently lived in China as a foreign national, one of the aspects of the film that touched me most was its realistic depiction of huge differences in priorities and lifestyles among Chinese generations since 1976 due to rapid political and economic changes tied to urbanization.
Take, for example, my friend my age who I spent Chinese New Year with this past year. His father’s parents are farmers in a village with basically no running water and electricity. They speak only the local language, so I had a very hard time communicating with them. My friend’s father is a wealthy, college-educated entrepreneur in the closest major city Kunming where he and his wife live an extravagant lifestyle and speak the same local language plus Mandarin. My friend spent four years in Australia, teaches English in Beijing where he buys real Apple products and Ray Ban sunglasses, and struggles to hide his homosexuality from his family even though he is out to most of his Beijing friends. “Aftershock” contains similarly wide generational differences within the family at the center of the story.
Have you seen “Aftershock”? What aspects of it did you like and dislike the most? I look forward to your comments.
Bet You Haven’t Seen These, Yet – New Beijing International Movie Week
Mar 8th
The Third Annual New Beijing International Movie Week is actually three weeks long this year and continues through March 21, 2009. It features independent films, both long and short, from around the world, most of which premiered in 2008, in various popular venues around the city, such as nightclubs. All movies have subtitles in Chinese, English or both, depending on the language of the film. I’ve had the pleasure of going to the festival on two nights so far. Many of the films are so new and unknown that it’s hard to find information about them online.
This was my first time at White Rabbit, and so many people attended that night that the staff needed to bring in extra chairs. The movies on the bill:
ARITHMATIC LESSON (USA) - Short story of a Chinese American girl whose babysitter abuses her while her mother lies comatose.
AWKWARD SILENCE (Canada) - Short story of people who fall in love without speaking over the course of an elevator ride.
THE CAVE (USA) – Short claymation using Plato’s allegory of the cave as its base.
STAUBKASKADE (Germany) – Experimental short film by a graphic designer.
SES (Denmark) - Short story of a 14-year-old whose new classmate looks just like her dead twin brother. My favorite film of the night.
YO SOY OTRO (Columbia) - Feature-length thriller related to terrorism and identity crises. Obviously draws inspiration from Fight Club or at least the same inspiration sources as Fight Club.
Also my first time at The Boat, I was more impressed with the films that night than on Thursday, maybe because Saturday had a small entrance fee while Thursday did not. Movies on the bill:
LARRY AND ROZ (Italy) – Short animated film about the real-life love story of the filmmaker’s grandparents
ONE CUP OF COFFEE (Jamaica) - Promotional short documentary on free-trade coffee in Jamaica
REEL ZOMBIES (Canada) - A full-length mock documentary about filmmakers’ shooting a low-budget Zombie movie during an actual Zombie apocalypse.
SLEIGH RIDE (USA) - Relient K‘s music video for their rendition of the song.
TALES OF A YELLOW BIKE (Canada) - Promotional documentary on bicycle policies in cities around the world.
WARRIOR QUEEN (Ghana) – Beautiful short film on the Ashanti’s battle to keep their Golden Stool away from the British.
My favorite film of both nights? REEL ZOMBIES, even though I’m normally not into this kind of movie at all. Watch the trailor for it here:
A Laundry Field, Golden Globe Nominee and Terrorism
Dec 26th
It’s exciting to see so much attention directed at Mumbai. India has the second largest population and film industry in the world, yet many Americans know little about it. For example, who in the U.S. studies any of the languages spoken in India, which combined have more speakers worldwide than Spanish?
I just finished watching Slumdog Millionaire, which is an amazing film. My brief review is that not everyone will like it because it has disturbing imagry, but this contrasted with its themes of beauty is one of the film’s points of brilliance.
A theme I looked out for while watching the film was brightly colored, gorgeous clothing up against the backdrop of brown and otherwise disgusting slums. What called my attention to this was the exhibition Mumbai: A Laundry Field, which I visited twice in Beijing. Korean artist Kimsooja depicts this striking both aesthetic and emotional contrast between Mumbai’s clothing and poverty.
The massive installation includes narrow hallways with clothing tacked to the walls to simulate slum alleys, and photographs of people sleeping on the street underneith beautiful blankets. What touched me most was a video of the dilapedated public trains, like subways above ground, with people hanging off the sides of them because the cars are so crowded. Trains also play a key role in Slumdog Millionaire.
Both Slumdog Millionaire and Mumbai: A Laundry Field were finished before the Mumbai terrorist attacks. I visited Mumbai: A Laundry Field twice, once before the attacks and once shortly after, and I watched Slumdog Millionaire weeks later. To say the least, tragedy’s impact on how I percieved these works of art and film brings up issues of art’s relationship to world events.
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