i’ve got the blues

(25 May 2018, Broadway Cinematheque screening, limited release)

The 42nd Hong Kong International Film Festival blurb describes director Angie Chen’s 2017 documentary on Hong Kong painter Yank Wong Yan-kwai as “a high-octane cat-and-mouse game between filmmaker and subject: one tries to capture; the other evades.” I couldn’t possibly sum it up better. This is a fascinating glimpse into the lives and personalities of both documenter and documented. To paraphrase Angie Chen describing her relationship with Yank Wong, by film’s end I felt as if I’d known both the artist and the director for years, even though I can’t really say I know them.

Angie Chen, who received her BA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, is also the director of One Tree Three Lives, her 2012 award-winning documentary about Nieh Hualing, wife of Paul Engle and co-founder of the International Writing Program at the university. The two films are nothing alike, however. Based on what I saw in i’ve got the blues and my own interactions with Hualing while completing my MFA at the university, I would say this has a great deal to do with the very different personalities of the two films’ subjects. Wong’s decisions about how he would and would not play along with Chen necessarily shape the film, cutting off paths the story might have taken and forcing the filmmaker down others. The finalized work is undoubtedly a collaboration, the result of Chen and Wong’s push-pull dynamic.

One significant discussion between filmmaker and artist in i’ve got the blues deals with an artist’s motives for creating. Chen points out that films, unlike paintings, are quite expensive to make and must therefore be approached as a mass medium, taking audience into account. If only three or four people are willing to watch a film, it doesn’t work. Wong, who is not just a painter, but also a writer, blues musician, and one-time filmmaker, argues passionately against this point of view, asserting that the only thing that really matters is the work itself, which is not work if one is doing it for its own sake. Money should never be a primary consideration. Chen’s dogged persistence in seeing the project through, however, is tempered by her willingness to risk capturing her own emotional exposure on film as she responds to Wong’s repeated refusals to compromise. This being so, and given the film’s successful outcome, it would seem Chen has more than proved the merit of both points of view.

Watching this documentary was an almost overwhelming experience. It was dizzying, exhausting, and unpredictable, much like the artist it sought to capture. You could feel Chen’s frustration but also deep affection for Wong, their incessant wrangling resulting in a film that ultimately says much more about the processes we use to create than any straightforward revelation of facts about an artist’s life possibly could. 

Solo

(HK release: 25 May 2018)

Well, it’s another Star Wars movie. And that pretty much sums the film up. Before I embark on further discussion, however, full disclosure. I am a Star Wars fan in a mild way. I have not read any of the books, apart from a brief glance at one, so I don’t know what, if anything, in the script was borrowed from them. I grew up with the original trilogy and am a rabid Princess Leia fan. I can remember seeing The Return of the Jedi in the theatre and later on listening to a radio version of The Empire Strikes in our kitchen. I’ve also seen the “The Hero’s Adventure,” the first episode in Joseph Campbell’s 1988 miniseries The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and suspect that what made Star Wars IV: A New Hope a hit was a powerful, primal story told in a new way. Episodes I-III didn’t even come close to the original trilogy for me, for a number of reasons. Among these was the fact that the prequels had nothing new to say. They just filled in the story we already knew with terrible acting and worse dialogue.

As yet another prequel, Solo does much the same thing in terms of filling in details to a story we already know, but with the advantages of better acting and a better script. This is not to say that there’s anything close to Oscar worthy going on, but certainly the film went all out casting big name actors who turned in decent performances. (Seldom have I watched a film that so frequently called to mind a successful film or TV series every time a new face appeared on screen.) The story is solid, perhaps even slightly mechanistic, rather than inspired. Given all the real and rumored production difficulties, we should probably give the last-minute replacement director, Ron Howard, a pat on the back for the fact it turned out as well as it did.

Despite the flaws, the movie does offer reasons to go see it and find it enjoyable, including abundant Easter eggs for fans of the original trilogy. (Mild spoilers ahead.) Some notable moments: Han Solo and Chewbacca’s first meeting. Han correcting Lando’s pronunciation of his name. Chewbacca kicking ass on behalf of some other Wookies. Fairly compelling villains, both obvious and not so obvious, and a story arc that teases intriguing backstory for a bad guy from a later film. Chewbacca playing holo-chess, badly. The Millennium Falcon. Chewbacca. Han acquiring his famous blaster. Chewbacca. Lando Calrissian’s capes. Qi’ra trying on one of Lando’s many capes. Chewbacca. Cool weapons that aren’t even vaguely like lightsabers. And did I mention Chewbacca? The Hong Kong film distributers marketed the film with an appearance by a live-action Chewbacca and Chewbacca masks. Enough said.

And now for things in the film that made me sigh. If you don’t want to know who dies, stop reading.

Thandie Newton is fabulous as Val Beckett. She plays what promised to be an interesting, strong female character, and also happens to be a person of color. So why, script writers, why? Was it really necessary to kill her almost immediately? I don’t wholly object to the way she died, but the role seemed more like a cameo inserted to help drive the plot than an integral part of the movie. Sigh.

L3 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) serves the function of the obligatory smart-aleck droid, this time a female version who is a militant advocate for droid rights. She not only dies, but as others on the internet have noted, is not actually allowed to die with dignity. She is literally reduced from a fully-rounded (if mostly one-note) sentient individual to the one component required to—you guessed it--move the plot forward. What gives, script writers? Sigh.

In fairness, they did kill off another, non-female character quite early on, but he seemed to have a lot more lines than Val Beckett. And that said, he too died for the sake of the plot. The scriptwriters needed to clear the field for what was to come. Part of the problem is that the other characters are so clearly there to revolve around Han and Han’s character arc. One gets the feeling that if Han Solo’s character didn’t exist, neither would any of the others. There’s little meaningful interaction between anyone else in the film, and almost none at all in which a scene focuses on them as people independent of Han. Even (ahem) a solo conversation between L3 and Qi’ra is about Han (and thus fails the Bechdel test). I know the film is called Solo, but the result of this very Han-centric story is even weaker character development than usual for a Star Wars movie. Sigh.

As a new character, Qi’ra seems unremarkable but fine. Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), however, is just too self-satisfied and smarmy. Billy Dee Williams was smooooth and quite charming. Glover plays the role like an arrogant, condescending jerk, calling Han “kiddo.” If, as I believe is meant to be the case, Han and Lando don’t meet again until the events of The Empire Strikes Back, Lando’s attitude toward Han in Solo creates a huge disconnect between the two films. Sigh.

As for Han, Alden Ehrenreich gives him his best shot, but never quite gets there. I blame this too on the script, actually. One of the best aspects of the Han Solo character was always that he was a bit of an anti-hero, a rogue whose cynicism hid a good but mostly reluctant heart. Solo asks us to believe that Han started out as an idealistic, trusting do-gooder immediately loyal to anyone who wanders into his life and remains there for more than five minutes. He’s the naïve kid in this story, despite his life as a thieving street rat/indentured gang member on Corellia, and the only one allowed any character development at all. And by the end of the film, Han Solo does seem to move a little closer to the cocksure, badass cynic we know and love, even if he’s nowhere near being Harrison Ford’s loveable rogue. Simply put, the Han I know would never have let someone else choose a last name for him. Sigh.

Submergence

(HK release: 10 May 2018)

Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Variety, describes Wim Wenders’ newest film, Submergence, as “an arthouse weeper.” If Wenders wanted me to cry, he should probably learn how to write a better female character, and then offer his audience a story that does her and the rest of his cast justice. (Warning: spoilers and snark to follow.)

Submergence is the story of James, a spy, and Danny, a bio-mathematician who studies the ocean (please do not call her an oceanographer; if you do, she will glare at you), who meet and fall in love while on vacation in Normandy. James is on vacation because he’s undercover as a water engineer from Nairobi and is about to undertake a top-secret mission in jihadist-overrun Somalia. Danny is on vacation because she’s about to set off on an expedition that will take her deep beneath the Greenland Sea in a tiny submersible, where she will explore the origins of life on our planet. (A remote part of Normandy is apparently the place to be right before one goes on a months-long, potentially dangerous mission/expedition.) James’ eventual goal is to locate a particularly nasty jihadist thought to be in Somalia and to help take him out of the picture, forever. Danny’s goal is to be featured on the cover of Nature. (Danny has already fallen behind on the character likeability scale at this point.)

After a brief initial encounter on the beach, James’ brash Scots charisma is so fascinating to Danny the driven scientist that, when they meet again in the hotel lobby, she immediately agrees to have lunch with him. Then she gets back to work and apparently forgets all about him. James manages to remind her that they have a date, and lunch goes well, despite Danny being too busy to even look at her lunch (two forlorn oranges) because she is telling James all about the five levels of the ocean while he has his eyes closed. (This woman does not need food; she is apparently quite literally sustained by passion for her work.) Unfortunately, since everything James has to say about himself is essentially a lie (per the spy thing), his only meaningful contribution to their conversation is to ask Danny if she ever worries about dying in the event something were to go wrong with the submersible and she gets stuck under the ocean. (Foreshadowing, anyone?) This initial tactlessness, which in addition to various later comments that make you think James might actually be something of an asshole (or possibly a gentleman in disguise trying to let Danny get ahead with the audience), is evidently a huge turn on for Danny. We assume this because she not only continues to spend time with him, but abandons her normal practice of never seeing anyone the morning after a hook up. This, she tells James, is because she always kicks the guy out after sex and then gets right back to work. James is now besotted.

Over the next few days, Danny’s work continues to get the push in favor of delightful interactions with James in a hotel with no guests (after the lunch date dining room scene) and no staff (after we meet a single bar tender the first day). Meanwhile James’ continued passion for Danny is evidently due to her very sexy glasses, which she sometimes wears on a cord around her neck (when she isn’t fiddling with them or wearing them in order to convince us she’s a very intelligent scientist), and her penchant for ripping off her clothes to jump into freezing cold sea water. Finally, James must depart Normandy. After they declare their undying commitment to one another, however, he is almost tempted to abandon his mission (a mere three-hundred meters into his journey) when Danny calls him to tell him how much she misses him. Not knowing that he’s really headed to Somalia to fight terrorists, Danny insists that he shouldn’t turn around, and off James goes. Needless to say, things do not go well for him in Somalia, pretty much from the moment he lands.

As a love story, the success of Act Two depends mainly on the degree to which you have come to believe in the profound love and special connection these two people supposedly share. This is because the rest of the film attempts to set up the now separate James and Danny story lines as both parallel and equal in emotional weight. This approach could have worked. But it doesn’t. Instead, the film works very hard to make us believe that both characters are experiencing the same degree of torment, even though there is simply no comparison between the two characters’ situations. Danny’s situation isn’t even particularly convincing.

On the one hand, we have James, who has only his love for Danny to keep himself sane during weeks of captivity and physical torture that could end in his death at any moment. On the other, we have Danny, who never really gets her work mojo back and instead suffers the emotional torture of not hearing anything from James despite the two hundred messages she has left on his voicemail. Never mind that it would be more believable if she, too, were largely out of touch. She is on a boat, after all, in the middle of the ocean, on her way to the Greenland Sea in order to pursue her dream of being on the cover of Nature. Never mind that James could have given her a stronger indication that his job could take him out of cell range for a period of days or even weeks without doing undue damage to his cover. They might even have agreed to hold off on communication until her project is finished and she is back on land. Instead, we get a woman who has become unhinged by the fear that a man she has known for a matter of days might have dumped her. She’s so out of it that she drops a test tube and her male colleague has to remind her (with an unbelievably creepy and emotionally manipulative speech) to get it together.

Later, the inevitable scene in which her submersible does indeed run into mechanical problems while submerged does nothing to increase her story line’s emotional stakes. Her ordeal lasts what appears to be five minutes, two of her colleagues are in the submersible with her and helping to solve the problem, and even though they must return to the surface immediately once it’s clear that they can, she has the samples that she needs.

At film’s end, I found myself thinking how much more poignant this love story could have been if Danny’s story had been about joy rather than pain and despair. What if her situation had been set up to reflect how love can empower us to be even more successful when we are doing what we do best? What if Danny, ignorant of James’ plight but energized by her experiences with him, had allowed her work to be profoundly joyful rather than merely driven?

Ultimately, neither Wim Wenders’ direction nor James McAvoy pouring his heart into his role could save this film’s highly contrived plot riddled with clichés, some of which are downright offensive. If you’re in the mood for torture-induced angst, go see The Mercy. It wins hands down in terms of story building, believable relationships, and overall quality of acting. Interestingly enough, it also offers some insight into what the love story in Submergence could have been.

A Hologram for the King

(HK release: 18 August 2016)

A largely faithful film adaptation of Dave Eggers 2012 novel, director Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas, Run Lola Run) gives us a film version of A Hologram for the King that is an excellent example of how a few minor tweaks can change the tone of an entire piece. In both book and film the story is told from the point of view of Alan Clay, who is struggling against ongoing and devastating economic change. This is economic change that Alan himself helped set in motion years before by deciding to move the Schwinn manufacturing facility to China. Now, like so many products, Schwinn bicycles are being made in China for less, and Alan, who is working as a consultant out of his home, finds himself just short of unemployed and deeply in debt. He’s also trying to cope with his failed marriage; the conflict with his ex-wife plays out in angry discussions regarding his inability to pay his daughter’s college tuition. He has put his house on the market, but it won’t sell. His only hope lies in selling a holographic teleconference system to the wealthy Saudi monarch, King Abdullah. If he can seal the deal, all his problems will be solved — with the possible exception of a strange lump near his spine that may or may not represent everything that is wrong in his life.

The book focuses on the isolation and evident helplessness of Alan Clay, whose despair is only barely kept in check by a hope born of desperation — desperation that he will be able to pay off his creditors and make a financial recovery certainly, but also an even greater desperation not to fail his daughter, Kit. Were this to happen, Alan fears Kit will write him off as a failure in the same way she has written off her arguably psychotic mother. The novel’s somewhat ambiguous ending suggests that life will continue to hand unfortunate outcomes to Alan, who never really succeeds in getting back his mojo as either a salesman or a human being. His continued hope in the face of despair seems truly pitiful.

In contrast, Tykwer’s film offers a decidedly different take on Alan and his situation. We are introduced to Alan (Tom Hanks) via a music video-like montage set to the Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime,” and from almost the first frame, our impression of him is not so much that of a man in despair as a man frustrated to the point of smoldering anger by his circumstances. As the story gets going, this impression gains strength as Alan’s initial reaction to those around him is either barely repressed hostility or complete cynicism. In the course of the movie, his attitude undergoes a subtle change, however, the result of certain unanticipated interactions with people he meets during day after day of interminable waiting for the king and his representative, both of whom seem to be always somewhere else. In marked contrast to the book, by film’s end, Alan has become someone for whom hope is no longer a hollow (holo?) thing.

Two characters deserve special mention. These are Yousef the driver (Alexander Black) and Alan’s doctor, Zahra Hakem (Sarita Choudhury). Tykwer’s screenplay rearranges and compresses the action of the book into a much tighter storyline, with the happy result that Black and Choudhury’s characters are given greater emphasis and the opportunity to fully develop their roles. Black plays Yousef with an apparently ingenuous but subtly sardonic humor that is delightful, while Choudhury’s performance transforms Zahra into a strong, complex female character of tremendous strength and dignity — as a character, she sits head and shoulders above the somewhat two-dimensional original in the novel. Both actors have excellent chemistry with Tom Hanks, who also turns in a strong performance. Dialogue in the film is taken verbatim from the novel, but all three actors imbue it with layers of meaning the book seems to lack. Ultimately, while some of the devices used to advance the plot and the film’s conclusion prove predictable, outstanding performances make Tykwer’s most recent film worth the watch.