Documentarian Grace Lee discovers after a white-bread Midwest upbringing (almost identical to mine, it seems) that the greater world outside is rotten with Grace Lees: small, musical, smart, and nice--even when they try to torch their high schools. Lee's exhaustive name-check of all her serendipitous namesakes is as whimsical as it sounds, touching only in an ancillary way on the Asian-American experience insomuch as the feeling of alienation and the crippling effect of "positive" stereotyping runs across the board. Most fulsome is the exploration of Christianity as the foundation for most of the "grace" names, culminating in a particularly devout Grace Lee who all but burns with holy light--an idea, sneaky, that Asians do their homework even when it's something as esoteric as The Bible. There's a running theme in here about shit I could try to formulate into a theory on debasement and irony, but shit is shit. It does get serious with brief forays into a Korean lesbian activist who recants before the film's completion, retracting her permission to be shown (not to mention the bits about two families on the run from an abusive husband), but the attempts at transcendence exist only uneasily with the film's broadly-appealing facility. It's possible that Lee is so good at pleasing (in the Grace Lee mold) that the grit got sanded off the edges. For what it's worth, The Grace Lee Project is an easy trip at just over an hour and should prove a popular ticket on the festival circuit.

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There's no arguing with the absolute beauty of the Inner Mongolian landscape captured by Chinese filmmaker Ning Hao (I used to say of Brokeback Mountain that you could send a donkey with a disposable camera into that kind of landscape and it would come back with a calendar), but from the condescending English title Mongolian Ping Pong (the original translates as something closer to "Green Grasslands") to the story that justifies it, I found the picture boring at best, a confused mess at worst. It's a cross between The Gods Must Be Crazy and Travellers and Magicians, perhaps--a farce about culture clash and impossible naivety wherein three little Mongolian boys find a ping pong ball, are told that it's a magical glowing pearl from the heavens, and then, upon discovering that it's "the national ball of China," endeavour to return the ball to Beijing, where they must be missing it. Insightful about neither childhood nor the Mongolian people (nor the collision of tradition with modernity; nor the influence of sports in a Communist country fixated on "face"; and so on and so on), the picture's really about transferring our own desire for an impossible Eden onto the faces and experiences of fictional children in a prelapsarian state. If only puerile wish-fulfillment didn't so often feel like patronizing bullcrap onscreen.

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The exhausted, threadbare standard biopic formula applied to, as always, a fascinating subject, the Indonesian production Gie documents the life of Soe Hok Gie, an ethnically-Chinese student protesting the tyrannical, homicidal rule of President Sukarno and then Soeharto. His pro-democratic writings over the course of his too-short life (dead at the age of 27), his angelic features (Nicholas Supatra), his communion with the Natural, and his possible homosexual leanings remind of the wistful Ché of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries--but without enough background in the history of Indonesia during this period, I was left with neither a satisfying characterization nor a complete document of rebellion. Hagiography without context stretches the idea of intellectual exercise to the breaking point. Based on Soe's Catatan Seorang Demonstran, the film is handsome but overlong at 147 minutes (shaved down from a reported four hours), and disjointed in the biopic fashion of seeming mainly to be interested in highlights from the life of an introspective, generally non-demonstrative young man who expressed himself primarily through writing. Not a promising subject for a film, to be sure, and though there are glimmers of romance suggested with two composite women, it serves the picture's purpose that Gie be in love with his own sense of justice.

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Located somewhere between L'Atalante and Baby Doll for the uninitiated (and director Kim Ki-duk's The Isle and Bad Guy for the rest of you), Hwal describes a loopy Zen between the making of music and the making of war. (The suggestion, as is often the case in Kim's films, is that love and hate aren't opposite sides of that devalued human coin, so that brutality shares time with creativity in the same, loving, procreative quantities and gestures.) The bow of the translated title is both the spine of a musical instrument and the body of an instrument of war employed by an old man (Jeon Seong-hwang) in the defense and wooing of his underage inamorata (Han Yeo-reum). Biding time until his foundling turns sixteen and, thus, a marriageable age, the old man fends off various fishermen/rapists who visit his barge hoping that his skill with the bow will rub off on them as luck in their hunting. It's all told in near-silence, broken often and heartbreakingly by Kang Eun-il's astounding score and the stray lines of dialogue that bridge Kim's emotional throughways. If it doesn't reach the existential heights of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, the emotional grandeur of 3-Iron, or the visceral grindhouse of The Isle, Hwal at least manages to present a survey history of Kim's films to this point in what feels at the end like a caesura amid movements. Too soon to call it a flagging of inspiration, Hwal is a minor work from a major talent who already has a new film--the Seconds-like Time, about the obsession with plastic surgery--in the can.

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The martial arts genre receives a minor makeover in mainland hack extraordinaire Feng Xiaogang's typically smug, abrasively amateurish A World Without Thieves. Andy Lau and Rene Liu play a veteran pair of cutpurses taking one last interminable train ride to nowhere, deciding on a whim to protect the belongings of lovable oaf Fu Gen (Wang Baoqiang) from a band of thieves led by Uncle Bill (You Ge). A few dance-choreographed fight sequences seem like they'd be a lot of fun, but they're written with so much smarmy quirk and edited in such an obfuscating manner that when they're not irritating with their patter, they're flashing around randomly like an epileptic firefly. Narrative is loose, performance is broad, and though it's not worse than Feng's Big Shot's Funeral, the fact that the faux-teur is so busy trying to cozy up to the communists while making a stab at the wu xia big time on a limited budget and even more limited imagination produces a product several degrees more canted towards the intolerable. It's proof, as if proof were needed, that the majority of state-approved Chinese cinema is a few decades behind not only the Western mainstream, but also its brothers (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam) in the Pacific Rim.

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Zhang Lu presents a minimalist tableau mort in the style of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Fassbinder, or Aki Kaurismäki (only without the Romanticism of the first, humanism of the second, and sense of humour of the third) with his study of a Korean woman trying to raise her son in the poverty and racial intolerance of China in Grain in Ear. Potentially devastating material is leavened by too much intimation and a general sense throughout of unrelieved foreboding. It feels like it's striving for neo-realism through a certain Brechtian sensibility, yet the end result is a visually and structurally arresting piece that demonstrates a curious paucity of attachment. That may be the point, this feeling of total alienation in a story about creeping alienation, but it leaves the picture for aesthetes and students of form--and as fascinating as a deconstruction of the piece might prove, there remains a suspicion that the effect is a result of a fear of the emotional devastation of its themes. Still, Grain in Ear is one of the more unusual examples of cinematic cultural diffusion where a foreign director takes on the attributes of the arthouse fringe rather than (like Feng Xiaogang, for instance) the mainstream.

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