Day 5 10pm City of a Thousand Planets

I went into Central World on Tuesday night to see a movie, and as luck would have it, picked this one. Something about it spoke to me: a gloriously over-the-top adventure set in a dazzling, decadent “city of a thousand planets”. It had more than a touch of Bangkok about it. Leaving the film was an even more surreal experience as the film wound up at midnight and I exited to a huge, gloomily abandoned mall, empty except for a pitch black but seething mens bathroom, out a side corridor where manual workers were furiously lugging in boxes of mysterious cargo, and out disorientingly on to dark and quiet streets I only ever see in the day. Through a taxi window, I saw a sparkling faced drag queen clown wander past a food stall where some tired construction workers ate under a fluorescent light, and then whizzed back to my adopted home “planet” of Saphan Kwai.

This breaks the world…

Weird weekend

It was a strange, disorienting weekend. The weather veered from rain to the return of the baking heat. I spent Friday night at a friend’s vegetarian restaurant and then we ventured to an obscure location in an industrial building in suburban Fo Tan. A shadowy group of people had gathered in a dark room to watch one of the trippiest movies of all time:

Walking back at midnight, back in Shatin, by the river, I felt utterly disoriented . I had no idea where I was or what I had just seen (and this despite the fact that it was my third time to see the movie!  I had somehow forgotten its impact).

The next day I accompanied my boyfriend to a number of cute little Parisian bars in Tai Hang, through surging post-Ramadan crowds in Victoria Park, ran into a friend at the bakery at the Mandarin Oriental hotel and was suddenly ushered into a property exhibition where, to my surprise, my boyfriend promptly bought a flat.

A strange, anything-goes weekend!

Mexican men

A short film omnibus by Julian Hernandez and Roberto Fiesco.

Dear white people

I recently enjoyed two great, sharp pieces on race -and specifically blackness – in America. Dear White People is the TV spin-off of the 2014 movie, and actually an improvement on the original. Its funny and involving with a cast of likeable – and all deeply flawed – characters, giving it much more nuance that you might assume from the title.

Get Out, meanwhile, is a witty examination of race and racism through through the lens of a horror flick – and it works, as scary as it is thought-provoking.

La Moustache

Although its is not featured in this trailer, the Sai Kung village of Ko Lau Wan was a filming location for the French thriller Le Moustache – the protagonist flees from Paris to an unnamed village in Hong Kong as he faces a bizarre and disturbing crisis of identity. I haven’t seen the film – but I’m quite intrigued, and looking forward to it!

Modern loneliness

 

I saw two films at the International Film Festival which, by coincidence, both explored the theme of loneliness. Oliver Assayas’s “Personal Shopper” stars my new fave Kristen Stewart, as a searcher, a psychic, looking for something more than the unwanted life she has found herself in at the periphery of the fame machine, as a Paris celebrity’s personal shopper. Its a strange, meandering little film, full of moments of stillness but also little revelations, not the least of which is Stewart’s great central performance or her effortless normcore lesbo-chic styling. I saw it on a rainy day, the last day of my holidays, at Kowloon’s eighties-tastic Cultural Centre with the director himself in attendance.

 

A few days later, the Monday night of my return to work to be precise – I journeyed out to Kowloon Tong, to see “Corpo Electrico” – the Body Electric. It is the first film from Marcelo Caetano, who previously worked on Neon Bull, and that film’s tone is evident again here: an almost plotless (and some might find, pointless) slice-of-life drama, but filled with beautifully observed scenes of every day life, almost like an anthropological documentary, and human warmth. We watch the handsome main character Elias as he daydreams at work, drinks with friends, smokes and does his laundry. Elias, played beautifully by Kelner Macêdo, works as a pattern maker in a Sao Paulo garment factory, passing his time with semi-flings with friends and ex-boyfriends.  At the time, I was charmed but slightly bored by his life, but now the day after I find the film lingering in my thoughts for its loving and very real portrayal of gay life in the early twenties : its intense and flirty friendships,  camaraderie and cliquishness, non-career job boredom and hedonistic weekends, all floating under an unformed and seemingly ominous future.

The amazing images of…

  

https://vimeo.com/211519393

Silver screen

This weekend was marked by two great – and very different – movies. Despite their differences, both films had one common element; they powerfully explored the idea of a sense of place.

Ghost in the Shell was, surprisingly, fabulous.  The film is a blazing rush of CG-bling shot in a techno-enhanced Hong Kong. Yau Ma Tei alleyways, Quarry Bay, the Lai Tak Tsuen tower and Aberdeen cemetery appear behind filmy layers of GIF-like holographic billboards and Blade Runner Asia-futurism. Plus: creepy robo-geishas, handsome men, Juliette Binoche appearing in almost a parody of the sci fi blockbuster role her character derided in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and an intelligent script that stayed true to the spirit of the original and made short work of those would decried Scarlett Johansen’s casting as whitewashing (no spoilers!) I saw it twice.

“Wake in Fright” by contrast is an oldie, 1970s “Ozploitation.” A schoolteacher finds himself in the isolated Outback town of Bundayabba (“The Yabba”) and descends there into a circle of alcoholism and degradation. Its classic 1970s Australian cinema in its horror and loathing of the Australian landscape, portrayed as vast, cruel and trapping. As they say though, the past is another country. The Australia of the 1970s – both in the Hellish Yabba and the free-spirited and progressive outlook of the film itself (hello, male nudity!) both now seem like things of the distant past.

Cavemen and Kristen Stewart

My twin obsessions this week, oddly, were Kristen Stewart in the strangely luminous “Clouds of Sils-Maria” and prehistoric man, courtesy of the surprise hit book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

My curiosity for Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of…” was piqued by the rave reviews for his upcoming “Personal Shopper” (for which I had snagged tickets at the Hong Kong International Film Festival) and which also starred his (rather unlikely) new muse, Kristen Stewart.

The formerly much-derided Twilight star has been amassing accolades. I have seen her variously described as “the greatest actress of her generation” and “a star for our times.” I didn’t get it. What was the buzz about? But halfway through this movie, which I had originally found slight and rather dull before it totally sucked me in, I twigged. Stewart is a naturalistic actress par excellence. She doesn’t look like she is acting. So at first I took her for granted – where were the virtuoso emoting I associated with “great acting”? Where was the transformation?  She looked like she always does, shaggy dark hair, stumbling over her words, willowy frame in clothed in grungy lesbian-chic. But then I realised that despite that, this character isn’t HER. She is a multimillionaire, not Julian Binoche’s ambitious assistant in the Alps, and the fact that I had forgotten that shows what a great performance it was.

“Sapiens” was also something of a revelation. The book, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, traces humanity from its origins to the present day. Powerfully written, Yuval kicks off with the sensational reminder that although today there is only one human species, used to thinking of itself as the pinnacle of all evolution, we know that once we shared the world with at least six other human “species” – the homo erectus and Cave of the Red Deer people in China, the dwarf-like homo floresiensis of Nusa Tenggara, the Denisovans in Sibeia. the neaderthals in Europe…. The book claims that humanity’s “original sin” was perhaps the genocide of our brothers and sisters, leaving us alone as the sole surviving humans on the planet.

 

Stars of Neon Bull

What a strange, strange movie this is. Neon Bull is set, like the other Brazilian movie I watched recently, Aquarius, in the Northeastern state of Pernambuco. And like that movie it is a meandering, understated story – more a character study than a traditional narrative. It offers a documentary-like slice of life view on an outrageously sexy rodeo worker, his friend (or sister or ex-girlfriend?) played by my new favourite actress, Maeve Jinkings, and her pre-teen daughter.

The film doesn’t play by the usual rules of independent cinema. Although the story centres around an itinerant group of cowboys and cowgirls in the parched sertao badlands of the Northeast, don’t expect poverty porn. The film downplays the characters’ lack of economic prosperity to show a (generally) happy family (of sorts) striving gently for their own little dreams – with occasional flashes of surrealist imagery.  Maeve Jinkings dances in a strip club in a horse costume and argues with her stroppy daughter while sweet (and very heterosexual) cowboy Juliano Cezarre dreams of becoming a fashion designer. This is interspersed with many scenes of life on the farm, some dreamy interludes and a pretty noteworthy sex scene.

I’m really not sure what to make of Neon Bull. While watching it, I veered towards being bored several times – as well as confused – but afterwards it has lingered in my mind…and  star Juliano Cezarre exudes cinematic pheromones in every scene. He is simply sexy, even eclipsing  Maeve Jinkings, the wonderfully expressive actress I had originally wanted to see, and star of both Aquarius and Neighbouring Sounds (below).

Here Maeve talks (in Portuguese only) about her role in Neighbouring Sounds:

Age of Aquarius

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Neighbouring Sounds” was a strange, understated tale of deeply submerged injustice played out on the sunny streets of an upper-middle class beach-side suburb of Recife.

The same theme and setting is explored again in “Aquarius.” This time though the director’s trademark light touch, so powerful in his last film, underwhelms. It is all so subtly and slowly unwound that I found myself wondering where the story was in endless scenes of Sonia Braga letting her hair down and listening to 1970s Brazilian records in her lovely oceanside apartment. There are also rambling flashbacks and passing mentions of unexplored plot points, metaphors for cancer and gay sons, flutteringly light social commentary and surprising sex scenes. But what there is not is any sense of tension or excitement, or – in the end – meaning.

It did have one powerful and unexpected side effect though. The boyfriend was inspired to go out and buy a vinyl record player!

Moonlight orchestra

This track, The Middle of the World, is a highlight of the sumptuous classical score of Moonlight. The much-heralded black gay arthouse sensation also incorporates a performance by Janelle Monae, a song by Caetano Veloso and a flurry of references to Wong Kar Wai, to name just three of this blog’s favourite people.

 

La La Land at the Lido

 

I went to see La La Land (which I loved) at the refrbished Lido theatre in Hawthorn, an eight screen arthouse complex above an inner-suburban arcade, complete with rooftop gardens screen and jazz bar.

Weekend report

It was a weekend of perfect Winter weather and aimless wandering. I spent a clear-skied Saturday walking, first from Central to Sai Ying Pun, via streets selling dried seafood and a stop in Winston’s, the inexplicably annoying expat hipster cafe by Sai Ying Pun station, where I waited an ill-tempered eternity for a flat white. Then I hopped on the train to Mongkok and wandered over to Sham Shui Po, shopping at street markets for knick-knacks on the way. This was followed by a lunch of eggplant and fish at the Kam Mong robot restaurant in Mongkok.

On Sunday, again glorious, I hopped on the ferry to Lamma for a party at an islander’s apartment, before heading home for some movies, one French (Girlhood, disappointing) and one Spanish (Julieta, better if not perfect. I loved the tiled kitchens and the scene of the deer by the train, Rossy de Palma’s frumpy cleaning lady, the Hitchockian score and Miquel Navarro’s savagely primal sculptures.)

Rage

On the night of the “supermoon” I went to see director Lee Sang-il’s new movie “Rage,” featuring an all-star Japanese cast and an intriguing premise. After a grisly murder, the story cuts to three separate stories. In each strand, a mysterious stranger has arrived into a community. Gradually, all manner of repressed anger and anguish is revealed. In one segment, a Tokyo gay party boy finds a new boyfriend with an obscure past. In another, a quiet drifter turns up in a Chiba fishing village. And in Okinawa, a girl finds a backpacker camping out on an isolated beach. Which of these three men is the killer?

It is a grippingly well-executed film, largely keeping melodrama at bay (despite the weepy trailer) and Satoshi Tsumabuki’s all-out gay role was something of a revelation – he just got a hell of a lot sexier in my opinion.

There are also impressive turns from Ken Watanabe, Aoi Miyazaki, Kenichi Matsuyama and music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Recommended.

Beauty isn’t everything…

With its lingering pauses, jerky dialogue and plotless re-iteration of a rather cliched point (“the fashion industry is, like, mean”) this is not a movie that will please everyone. But, but, but. It is also ravishingly beautiful to look at, and in its spaces and its silences, weirdly hypnotic. The pulsing, insistent electro soundtrack, the wonderful face of Jena Malone and Abbey Lee’s revelatory stick-thin Aussie badass chick villain made it, for me, one of the films of the year.

Wknd report

After a sunny, productive week of work back in Hong Kong, it was time for a leisurely weekend. I saw my second great Korean zombie movie in as many weeks, and then the next day enjoyed a Saturday breakfast of organic baguette slices at Le Pain Quotidienne, while reading  Knausgaard on my kindle , (as I probably will for weekends to come).

On a whim, I went to an exhibition of conceptual artwork by Cannes Palm d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, held at Quarry Bay’s Parasite art space. The show confirmed that as much as I love both things Thai and arthouse cinema, I don’t quite *get* Apichatpong. The show here consisted largely of projections of ordinary-looking Thais, doing everyday things, slowly, in mundane surrounds. Whatever it was that these were meant to say I missed. There were two pieces that struck me though – a portrait of a reclining dude (which, it turns out, is the director’s real life partner) and finally a darkened room where another image was projected, the naturalistic silhouette of a red dog which wandered and faded, skipping between the different walls.

Gym. The hot press of Mongkok weekend crowds. A few hours of housework and domestic loafing, with the windows thrown open. For dinner, we had good Lebanese food: baba ganoush and pitta bread, and roasted cauliflower.

This was followed by a sunny Sunday of swimming, reading on a dozy cafe terrace overlooking the Pok Fu Lam straits, then the schlockfest of Jaws. All in all, not a bad weekend.

Train to Busan

This tense and cerebral Korean zombie-as-allegory flick lives up to all the hype. Definitely recommended!

Meanwhile in the gay world…

The trailer for hotly-tipped forthcoming indie movie “Moonlight” featuring Janelle Monae! And below, “Spa Night”:

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-Wook’s latest, The Handmaiden, is a dense, dizzying work of dazzlingly beautiful surfaces and murky depths. Its a (much more interesting) version of Fifty Shades of Grey, dressed as Downton Abbey, and relocated to East Asia. Cue: devious dealings, dialogue that pings between Japanese and Korean, gorgeous flapper-era dresses, geisha hair, spyholes in dark wood-panelled drawing rooms, kinky dialogue, lovely gardens, lesbian sex scenes, some serious Junichiro Tanizaki vibes and an octopus. Four stars!