Tag Archives: film

Minneapolis hosts an Asian Film Festival this week

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The Girl in yellow Bootsis the opening night film of the Minn/St Paul Asian film Festival

The Denver area used to have an Asian Film Festival held in Aurora; Erin and I loved attending it. It attracted a loyal core audience of film lovers of all ethnicities. But our Asian communities didn’t support the festival as much as they needed to.

Unfortunately, the programming was too cautious, because the Denver Film Society, the folks who bring us the annual Starz Denver Film Festival (which starts this week), had to get approval from various groups. And, the various groups would turn down any movie that might show their homeland in a light they didn’t like (such as showing sex and violence, or a negative image of the country). During the festival, each community attended their movies but didn’t show much interest in movies from other countries.

Erin and I would see Japanese at the Japanese movies but not Chinese, or Filipino, or Vietnamese movies. We’d run into Chinese friends at Chinese movies, and so on. In the end, the festival couldn’t generate enough interest across all Asian communities, in addition to non-Asian movie fans, to keep going.

So I watch wistfully as I get emails and Facebook event invites or a plethora of Asian and Asian American Pacific Islander film festival across the country — Philadelphia, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Tonight I got an email from a blogging pal, Slanty of Slant Eye for the Round Eye, about the first-ever Asian Film Festival in his hometown of Minneapolis/St. Paul. So even the Twin Cities, land of chill and Prince and the Replacements and Prairie Home Companion, land of a significant Hmong community, and land of Slanty (who wrote about the festival last week), has an Asian film festival.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul Asian Film Festival, which has the tagline “In Search of Asia,” opens tomorrow with “That Girl In Yellow Boots,” an Indian film (photo above). Here’s a description:
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Austin Asian American Film Festival screens Nov. 12-15

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The Austin Asian American Film Festival.

Alas, there is no Asian film festival in Denver. There used to be — the Aurora Asian Film Festival was held in Denver’s eastern suburb (people in Aurora hate for their city to be called a suburb). It was sponsored by the Denver Film Society, the folks who bring the annual Deniver International Film Festival to town. But it folded after a few years because the local AAPI community didn’t support it (Japanese only went to Japanese films, Chinese went to Chinese films, Filipinos… well you get it. And, many of the communities tried to have too much of a say in what movie should or should not screen. If it was racy, or showed a negative side of the community, the Film Society would get push back to switch the film, or have to fight to show it. So ultimately, it was too much hassle for the trouble. As the Japanese would say, it was mendokusai (a pain in the ass).

So I read with envy as the months go by about the San Diego Asian Film Festival, the San Francisco Asian Film Festival, and others. Because I can’t go, I usually don’t write about them. I tend to write about things that affect readers here in Debver, whether it’s a national issue that affects all Asian Americans, or about a Denver Asian community event.

But I want to say a few words about the Austin Asian American Film Festival, because 1) it’s in one of my all-time favorite towns and 2) I beat up on Austin a little bit a couple of months ago when I wrote about an Asian festival down there that used the “wonton” font, which bugged me, and 3) because Eugenia Beh is doing the publicity for the festival and she’s cool and works tirelessly for AAPI causes including Asian Americans for Obama.

I traveled to Austin for many years during my music critic days, to spend a blissful week at the South By Southwest Music & Media Conference, and most of the time was spent enjoying Austin and the great food and the great people… and oh yeah, listening to a lot of music.

I wish I could go to the AAAFF — it sounds wonderful. Continue reading →

“Lumina” Asian American/Canadian online web thriller filmed in Hong Kong debuts

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"Lumina" is an online-only series, an independently-filmed thriller written and produced by Asian American Jennifer Thym in Hong Kong.

You’ve gotta love the Internet. I was contacted some weeks back by Jennifer Thym, the Asian American writer and director of “Lumina,” a new online-only thriller serial debuting this summer.

The movie project features an Asian American lead as well as Asian Canadian actors, and the whole thing is filmed in Hong Kong, where Thym has lived for the past two years.

The trailer certainly is cool and mysterious and makes me want to see the series kick off (I subscribed to the email alerts from YouTube whenever a new installment is posted):

Here’s what she says about the project on her Rock Ginger blog: Continue reading →

“Slumdog Millionaire” opens in India, nominated for 10 Oscars

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The British film "Slumdog Millionaire," a rags-to-riches story about an orphaned child in Mumbai, India, has been nominated for ten Academy Awards.

On the eve of its release today in India, the British independent film “Slumdog Millionaire” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It’s already won four Golden Globes: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Score. The movie’s up for all of those categories at the Oscars, and may well win some if not all of them, and then some.

We saw the film just last weekend and I was stunned by its power and eloquence, and for me, its sheer entertainment value in spite of the grimness of the life it portrays. It deserves its kudos.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s the story of a two orphaned brothers from the slums of Bombay — now Mumbai — and their relationship as they survive their childhood and grow into their destinies. One, Jamal, played as an adult by the boyish Dev Patel, falls in love with an orphaned girl, Latika (luminously played as an adult by Freida Pinto).

Poster for "Slumdog Millionaire"Jamal’s devotion to Latika, even though they’re repeatedly separated, sometimes for years, and his dedication to finding her again, is the film’s narrative thread.

But “Slumdog”‘s visual leitmotif is the chaotic and tragic backdrop of modern Indian life. The story follows the characters from childhood through their teen years and into adulthood, in and out of the utter poverty that pervades the teeming slums. It’s structured as a series of flashbacks with Jamal, who’s been arrested for suspicion of cheating after winning 10 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” explaining to a detective how he came to know all the answers he was asked on the show.

His life experiences coincidentally gave him the knowledge and prepared him to reach the next day’s final question, for a possible payoff of 20 million rupees.

Almost immediately, viewers are taken on a breathless tour of the shantytown as a group of kids are chased by police, the camera moving as if the audience is one of the fleeing kids, looking for the next escape route. Then the view shifts to the cops’ perspective, or others in the alleys, even a sleeping dog who’s not the slightest bit fazed by all the commotion. The colors, the clatter and closed-in settings convey claustrophia … and incredible excitement.

The movie opens up visually and feels pastoral only when the brothers get out of town atop a train and live like hobos, then spend some time scamming tourists at the Taj Mahal, and in one striking scene where the grownup Jamal meets up with his brother Salim (played by Madhur Mittal), now a low-level gangster, in a skyscraper construction site high above where their shantytown had been located.

Modern Mumbai’s financial wealth has paved over the poverty and pushed the poor elsewhere.
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The original King of the Monsters

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GodzillaI finally saw Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of “King Kong,” and I’m afraid I was underwhelmed. It was corny, and overly long and not engaging, even when the excitement factor revved up for the final third of the film. It reminded me that although Hollywood has been making monster movies since the original 1933 “King Kong,” the monster with the most staying power and screen incarnations — over two dozen movies — didn’t come out of California, but from Tokyo. Continue reading →