June 4, 2004|There is possibly no other film festival, Denver's own included, that has more local flavour than the Aurora Asian Film Festival. Embraced by its insular community, exhibited in a revitalized portion of East Colfax that is beginning to take on the look and feel of Boulder or LoDo, the only thing preventing the festival from being a destination was a marked provincialism in its programming that led to screening lists--like last year's--sporting only one marginal winner among a pool of pictures running the gamut from howlingly awful to just barely adequate. The recalcitrance with which Denver's Asian community's leaders met more ambitious programming philosophies (how exactly does one make the Asian film industry seem pedestrian and boring?) was easily the most frustrating thing for the student or cinephile looking to this Denver niche festival to provide the same sort of edification as San Francisco's or New York's. Denver's claim to be more than a second-class metropolis takes shots whenever attempts at providing a diversity of cultural diversions are examined with too critical an eye.

But in the course of one year, Denver's Aurora Asian Film Festival has transformed itself from something of an embarrassment into easily the strongest niche festival in the metropolitan area: eleven films (including a free outdoor screening of Jackie Chan's Operation Condor) from the Pacific Rim, not a one of which matches the low of the worst of 2003's crop. Scattered among this year's program, in fact, is an early contender for best film of the year, another picture that was among the most talked-about at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, and a quartet of documentaries that, while forging no new iron, at least present their stories with professionalism and an eye towards topicality. Though the bulk of the praise for this year's exceptionally strong festival program should go to the Denver Film Society's programming director Brit Withey, not lost in the shuffle are the Asian community leaders who found the courage to aspire for their festival to be more than just a limited-appeal, hopelessly blinkered event. The Seventh Aurora Asian Film Festival is something of which Denver should be proud--it's the big time, even if it takes a couple of years for anyone else to notice.-

Filipino documentarian Romona S. Diaz's even-handed, fabulously workmanlike portrait of former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos begins with unprecedented access to the titular diva and ends with the sobering thought that no personage, no matter how heinous, is completely undeserving of some measure of sympathy. Living like a Gabor in a fog of what is either ironclad denial or blue-blooded stupidity, Marcos comes off as a Chauncey Gardiner-type character unsure why her complicity in her husband's twenty-year reign of corruption in her native land has brought her "trouble." Diaz walks the line between disdain and incredulity with admirable restraint: it was never really in doubt for me which side of the divide she falls on, but I'm not sure that it's that the film shows its hand or just that any sane person would come to the same conclusion. Winning the documentary cinematography award at this year's Sundance Film Festival for Ferne Pearlstein's 16mm lovely and unobtrusive camerawork, it's a model of the traditional documentary form, with a few existential insights to spice the brew. *** (out of four)

Another workmanlike documentary, this one by Brit Daniel Gordon, The Game of Their Lives tracks down the members of the 1966 North Korean World Cup team, which upset Italy in the first round in what remains one of the most notorious defeats in World Cup history. Disappearing from sight soon after the tournament, Gordon finds them as hale old men, some coaching league soccer, others decorated members of the military, all of them at least paying lip service to the succession of tyrants and dictators that, rumour has it, once imprisoned the young team for their drinking and womanizing. What fascinates about the documentary is its archival footage of working class Brits embracing the North Koreans: shots of grinning English school boys wearing the flag of North Korea while hustling for autographs strikes a pleasant chord of historical Fatherland alternate universe surreal. The lack of any real focus beyond "sports are good," however, dooms the piece to hagiography where a deeper analysis (or even just a passing notice) of the restrictive regime (or what we perceive to be a restrictive regime) that spawned these players' facts and ideologies would have lent the picture some measure of insight. Sports may be a great ambassador, but without a recognition of borders, its talents as mediator are obscured. **1/2 (out of four)

An executive producer credit to Tian Zhuangzhuang proves to raise expectations perhaps unfairly that Zhu Wen's plodding South of the Clouds will transcend the director's instinct toward prosaic capitalist skylarking (Haixian), where the realities of the free market on the Mainland results in men being passed by and women being prostitutes. (The same sort of disquiet in the west spawned film noir over sixty years ago.) More of a deadpan comedy than Zhu's other work, the film tells the tale of a man who has lost his lover in late middle-age, takes a vacation in Tibet, gets in trouble for trying to help a prostitute, and wonders what his misspent youth might have been like had he only misspent it in the little town of Yunnan. Subversive in the sense that it's toothless without a political context, even acknowledging the piece's social concerns doesn't make the picture much weightier than a long, sappy drive in the country. **1/2 (out of four)

An oddly liquid film made by a pacific painter named Rithy Panh who survived the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields because, apparently, his captors liked his work. There is a phrase that goes "Hitler painted roses"--I'm not certain where I heard it (I think it's from the title of a Dan Simmons short story), but it haunts me as a reminder that the heart of darkness sometimes fosters the seeds the beauty. And so it was for Panh, who, several decades later, goes back to the place of his imprisonment and interviews his former jailers and torturers, convincing some at one point to re-enact in ghoulish pantomime the day-to-day rigors of their service. If you believe that what happened at Abu Graihb was the work of a small, select group of sadists and perverts, the film is required viewing. ***1/2 (out of four)

After the surprise triumph of his first film, The Cup, Bhutanese filmmaker Khyentse Norbu, recognized as a descendant of a revered 19^th-century Buddhist monk (and himself a respected monk), returns with a sophomore effort that's less successful, if larger in scope. Its predecessor interested in young apprentice monks who prefer televised soccer to studying, Travellers and Magicians concerns the efforts of one man (a dashing Tsewang Dandup) to escape the provinciality of Bhutan for the greener pastures of the United States. Needing to hitch a ride, he encounters a variety of characters along the way, one of whom spins a yarn about a young man on the path to murder and corruption. Heavy-handed to say the least, what salvages the film is the simplicity of its faith and the honesty of its affection for the foibles of human desire in the face of destiny. Open-ended in the picture's loveliest terminus moment, Travellers and Magicians doesn't quite hit the centre of its target, but it flirts with it in a comely way. *** (out of four)

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, director of the only picture worth a damn in last year's Aurora Asian Film Festival (Mon-Rak Transistor), returns with his solemn, trance-like The Last Life in the Universe, an early candidate for the year's best. Starring Japan's hottest actor Tadanobu Asano and the luminously beautiful Sinitta Boonyasak, the film follows the travails of a quiet, lonely, obsessive-compulsive who skylarks constantly about not only killing himself, but also upsetting his carefully ordered piles of books in the process. After accidentally killing a Yakuza hitman sent for his debtor brother and being saved from a bridge leap by the death of a young woman, he falls in with the young woman's sister and discovers too late a different orbit to his life. Shot by Christopher Doyle with his eye for the sublime and the graceful, the film unfolds as a series of still pictures, each of them evocative of ennui and disconnection. A nice companion piece to Keyoshi Kurosawa's Asano-starring Bright Future, The Last Life in the Universe highlights both a talented director coming into his own and a body of work for Asano that speaks almost as highly of his stardom as of his courage. It's essential-viewing for a post-millennial audience, and comfortable in any conversation with the best of our evolving library of apocalyptic romances (Elephant, In the Mood for Love)--Lost in Translation for grown-ups. **** (out of four)

A screen's-eye view of the last audience at a moldering movie palace, these adventures of the cinephile, captured in their meandering, hopeful, voyeuristic glory by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, unfold at the pace of wordless observation. By turns funny and melancholy, there is about the picture a feeling of irrecoverable loss: as some King Hu wuxia unreels before its brief candle, the interplay between reality and its fictions, "word" made flesh, clarifies itself as a dance of sign and signifier. What's lost is more than just time for the watchers, it's true experience. Good bye, Dragon Inn is a chronicle of the way in which memories are made and the act of love at the heart of the consumptive act of cinema. Almost avant-garde in its approach, Tsai is unapologetic in his vision: static long-shots and extended takes rule the day. It's a trance and a chant, a ritual of filmmaking that evokes the ritual of film-watching--and one of the most unique, perceptive pictures concerning why we love the movies since Fellini's 8½. **** (out of four)

Zatoichi is probably Beat's weakest since A Scene at the Sea, but even in decline, his signature style finds some evocation--though, in this instance, it's only obvious to the devoted. Based on Kan Shiwozama's legendary novels about the travels of a blind swordsman through feudal Japan, Takeshi seems to be taking the Eastwood comparison to heart (recalling that Eastwood's star-making turn was as an iteration of Japanese samurai anti-hero Sanjuro), fashioning something of a traditional samurai epic with nary a trace of post-modern snark. Japanese superstar Tadanobu Asano (reunited with Takeshi, his co-star in the haunted Taboo) appears as Zatoichi's rival Hattori, while odes to the Lone Wolf and Cub series as well as Akira Kurosawa's two Yojimbo films locate the piece as affectionate, if only of real significance to the Takeshi completist. Perhaps best-read as a tribute to the American musical, drawing a true line from that tradition to the Asian martial arts tradition, Zatoichi finds Takeshi continuing his trend from Kikujiro of mixing Vaudevillian elements into his Yakuza crime tableaux. The results are mixed, often coming off as more hubris and star vehicle than any of his other works to this point, but worth the conversation just the same. *** (out of four)