Penultimate AFFD post

I’ve consumed a lot of Asian films since last Friday. I had stopped really caring about movies since I’d been on a steady diet of weak AFI 100 films and lackluster theatrical releases most of this year. Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild, Cavite, Kamikaze Girls, Infernal Affairs II, Kim Ki-Duk’s Bad Guy, Last Life in the Universe, Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, Takashi Miike’s Gozu, and tonight’s documentary about controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki called Arakimentari have all inspired me.

A couple of them, Dolls, and Last Life, required an empathy on my part that I’m not used to. Movie watching had been such a passive thing for me this year, it was difficult at first to engage the movies on their own terms. Both movies have so little dialogue that I really had to throw myself into the characters on the screen and not just watch the film as a neutral third-party.

Seeing Wong Kar Wai on the big screen for the first time helped me to finally connect with him. While I enjoyed Chungking Express I think I lost a lot of it on the small screen because he packs so much visual detail in every frame. I’m very much looking forward to the release of 2046 this weekend.

I’d like to single out Kamikaze Girls as the one movie just about anyone should be able to enjoy. It follows two girls in high school. One is obsessed with 18th century Rococo French fashion, and the other is a tough biker chick. The look of the movie is a mix of reality, surrealism, animation, actor’s asides, and uses a color palette I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a movie before. The movie focuses on the friendship between the two girls as they prepare for life after high school, and discover real friendship. If that doesn’t clinch the deal then watch it for the Yôko Kanno soundtrack. It’s different from her work on Cowboy Bebop and Escaflowne but still full of all the energy and passion she brought to those soundtracks.

Tomorrow the festival ends and I’ll see the movie that I picked out earlier this year as one of the ones I wanted to see: Save the Green Planet.

My hats off to the good folks at AFFD because I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen, and had I more time I would have seen more.