Broad, sweeping melodrama in the Michael Cimino mold, triple-threat Ham Tran's epic of the aftermath of the Fall of Saigon--the effect the United States' premature withdrawal had on the Vietnamese who emigrated to California and those left behind--is not exactly a preservation of a place and time, but rather a maverick feeling mostly lost now in American cinema. (Tran, Saigon-born and an infant when it fell, is a graduate of the UCLA film school.) There's a feeling here of intensely personal subject material married to genuine filmmaking chops. If this leads to some dialogue best described as "earnest" and a score that tends to overpower when understatement would've facilitated a more delicate apocalypse, call it the cost of doing this kind of business. Still and all, Journey from the Fall stands as melodrama wrought fine and true--a picture, like Jim Sheridan's In America, that's unashamed of the heart bleeding gobbets of sentiment onto its sleeve while it essays the immigrant experience as a stew of magic, love, despair, and heartbreak. Half prison-camp pot-boiler, half resident-alien intolerance, it's the first movie to talk about the Boat People experience, but more importantly, it flirts with importance (not to mention topicality) for being an Asian product with genuine crossover potential. A product of cultural miscegenation, if you will, more than diffusion, Journey from the Fall could only exist as the child of desperate assimilation, attendant divorce, and finally reconciliation. It's sloppy, yet you forgive it that because for all its excess, it's a small film about how fate intervenes in the lives of families only to march on without them.

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The quietest of China's so-called "Fifth Generation" auteurs, Tian Zhuangzhuang (his cohorts in the movement are Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) makes films about contemplation and reserve, enough so that they play a little like modern--that is, post-bellum--Japanese literature. Small wonder, then, that his The Go Master, a philosophical biopic (not entirely unlike Michael Mann's Ali in this one respect) about the life of expatriated Chinese Go savant Wu Qingyuan, confronts in the most Zen-like way possible the possibly-irresolvable tensions defining Sino-Nippon relations. One of the few pictures deserving of the description "visual poem," its movements pulse in and out like breath and blood as every move of a stone in its centrepiece Go matches take on, as they should, the weight of centuries of tradition. The Go Master is heavily into legacy: the stones used in this ancient game come to represent ripples in the lives of man, expanding outward in shapes of ritual and ephemeral structure. A moment during a match played out the day the United States ended WWII with the bombing of Hiroshima (a flash, a spray of broken wood, and a continuance of play) eloquently crystallizes a multitude of inexplicable cultural attitudes and opaque attitudinal distinctions. It's stoicism articulated not as some strategy towards victory but as the most honourable way towards enlightenment. My father was a master Go player and, especially in the last years of his life, I know he took comfort in re-playing endless, legendary matches (a great many involving Wu) on a little board I keep in my office. I regret that he didn't live to see this picture--and regret more that I didn't see it in time so that I might've understood before his passing the shape and poetry of his passion.

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Japanese anime auteur Satoshi Kon, after the blazing success of his "Paranoia Agent" series, continues raking the same fertile ground in Paprika. Somewhere between the black of his Perfect Blue and the incandescence of his Millennium Actress, it's another of Kon's razored examinations of fame, in particular fame's corrosive affect on personal identity. His vision of madness assumes the form in his pictures of celebrity-stalking and schizophrenia--indicting the entertainment media as a form of that obsessive voyeurism in the process. Paprika conflates these themes with the act of dreaming--not an original idea (film and dreaming), but in Kon's hands, it takes on the featherlightness of revelation. Titular Paprika is a cyber-shrink armed with a device that allows her to enter into her patient's dreaming. An ideal companion to Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (and Cronenberg is the best analog to Kon--better than Hitchcock, to whom Kon is often, even by me, compared), Kon's dreams are visualized herein as corrupted by new "archetypes" extruded from advertising and Disney. (Sly reference is made at one point to the wet dreams most boys coming of age at a certain time had/have about The Little Mermaid™ and the rest of Disney's coterie of pre-feminist hotsie-totsies.) Tossing traditional narrative sense gratifyingly to the wind, Paprika is alive with surreal detail and disturbingly loaded representations. Pat to call it "dream logic," there is nonetheless a gestalt to be drawn here, an undeniable intelligence behind all the inscrutable, jarring jump-cuts and rules-breaking that points its way through to a path to the genuine Sublime. This is how post-modernism should always behave: like an acid trip narrated by Derrida.

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Johnny To's genius-level macho flamboyance reasserts itself in Exiled, a sort of Ocean's Eleven with balls that cements To as the true successor to John Woo's carnal Hong Kong wonderland. His best picture since The Mission, it's a tale of "Ronin" hitmen run amuck in a musty Macao, calling on their childhood friendship and turning against the Boss system in the Chinese underground. Beautiful to look at, the picture is slick perfection in almost every quantifiable technical aspect, but more, it has about it the feeling of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western: it's dirty, sweaty, and ugly for its lush hedonism. A back-alley bullet-extraction involving a doctor freshly dismounted from a hooker matches, queasily, one wet withdrawal with another. A sample of To's unapologetic testosterone ethic (one sutured wound in particular is undeniably vaginal, making its manual closure that much more pointed), when the moment's interrupted by another set of gangsters bringing in their own walking wounded, suddenly Exiled's sense of wicked satirical humour rears its horned head. A commentary on Hong Kong's "noble bloodshed" action subgenre and a sterling, fine-vintage example of it, Exiled is wonderful, I suspect, even without much of a background in certain traditions. But with one, its Godfather send-up in a restaurant peopled entirely with Mafioso, its shootout in a diaphanous operating theatre like a similar, if unpaid, set-up in Woo's The Killer (consider too the cartoon-character names, the charnel epilogue's fashionable shades of A Better Tomorrow I and II, and a rooftop escape and baby peril that jointly recall Hard-Boiled), and its vertical, Tsui Hark long-shot running gun battle are almost pleasurable enough in their subversion and exaggeration as to be almost physical. Oh, and as if its fanboy raptures weren't already ratcheted up to their trembling zenith, there's sharp political subtext in the picture's millennial tale of another colonial outpost returning to the Motherland; it all ends up somehow as Treasure of the Sierra Madre. As a "by the way," it stars the great Anthony Wong. It's a goddamn masterpiece.

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There are people who wince when they hear about "lost children" in a documentary title and people who pop a boner; I'm convinced that I can't be the only one who arches a skeptical eyebrow whenever a movie purports to be a searing exposé of how hard life is for kids in the great big ugly world. I'm leery because it's so easy to exploit a child's suffering that the filmmakers, and what is often their Anglocentric missionary activism, are often as guilty of misusing images as the guilty parties--whatever/whomever they might be--are of being agents of misery in the first place. That said, Dutch filmmaker Mark Verkerk's Buddha's Lost Children generally eschews much proselytizing on his part in favour of allowing its subject, missionary Buddhist monk Khru Bah, to spout on at length in his serio-religious crazy-talk. The frightening thing is that Khru Bah's zeal renders him indistinguishable from other psychotic holy rollers of any creed--the twofold suggestion that too much exposure to actual misery makes fools of us all and that if there's anything to this over-soul thing, it becomes clearest at the extremities. That elemental relationship between pictures of children in need and the holy idiot dedicating himself to their care, though, is undeniably affecting, and there are scenes and stories in Buddha's Lost Children remarkable for their insensate inspiration. The veneration of Khru Bah, an ex-pro Thai boxer in the Father Flanagan/Dead End Kids tradition, in the area of his influence verges of the Kurtz-ian--it's freaky--but remains as unexamined as the rest of it. Though the picture is lovely to look at and pulls familiar strings, there's no real message here, just a congratulations for coming and that vague, unexamined relief at not really having to do what he does in wherever it is that he does it.

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