Haiku #111

hand on my knee,
our skin melting into light -
dogs die in the sun.

Yu

A couple of movies that make my soul (and/or innerds) stir.

Christopher's last entry spoke of a film that he "still [has] not been able to shake." Here are some films just off the top of my head that have really rocked my world:


Yi Yi (2000), dir. Edward Yang

This was the last film to make me tear up. The plot points definitely hit me emotionally, but it struck me on a much deeper level than that. The filmmaking in Yi Yi is just so goddamn virtuoso, it made me think, "I am not worthy. This film is utterly perfect." I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that Edward Yang had succumbed to colon cancer.


Miami Vice (2006), dir. Michael Mann


Yes, this film is completely ridiculous. Yes, it's pretty much incoherent at parts. Yes, Colin Farrell does switch between accents during the film. Yes, that Linkin Park song sucks. But can you deny the kickassness of the opening of this film? (No studio logo, no titlecards. It just goes straight to Crockett and Tubbs in the middle of a packed nightclub.) That's genius, holmes.


Chungking Express (1994), dir. Wong Kar Wai



In my mind, a lot of folks like this film for the wrong reasons. Many only cite its great cinematography. I think that view is simply scratching the surface of this master work. For me, Chungking Express manages to do the impossible--it perfectly captures the wonderful whirlwind of love on celluloid. Indeed, love is very much like eating pineapples till you puke.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbineder



This film just inspires the hell out of me. It was shot in a mere two weeks but is an totally perfect piece of work. Mix tenderness, anguish, malevolence, and lust in a blender, and this is what you get. Delicious.

Frenzy (1972), dir. Alfred Hitchcock



This film is, bar none, my favorite Hitchcock film. Sick, perverted, haunting, titillating, raw, totally thrilling. It amazes me that he churned this out in the later stages of his career--usually the sick shit occurs early in one's career and fades away as one gets fat off one's fame.

The New World (2005), dir. Terrence Malick



(The above is the conclusion of the film. So, if you haven't seen it, don't play the clip!)

I was pretty close to simultaneously weeping and pissing/shitting my pants during the last five minutes of this film. YouTube does it no justice; if you haven't seen this film before, watch it on at least DVD or Blu-Ray or something (with a pair of Depends on). It is the most beautiful five minutes of cinema ever crafted. Your body won't be able to handle it.

*****

This is by no means a comprehensive list. I just had to stop, because I realized if I kept doing this, I could be typing and looking up clips on YouTube all night. So, that's enough for now.

Keep on keepin' on,
Kwok

Syndromes

An interview with Apichatpong Weerasethkul on the occasion of his wonderful film, Syndromes and a Century -- a film that I first saw over a year ago, and still have not been able to shake. It's a difficult film, but a film that comes from someplace cavernous...

TP: What is the word “film” mean to you?

AW: It is a film that reflects the filmmaker’s own self. It does not necessarily have to be easy to interpret. Like all humans, we are not sure what the other person is thinking. But that’s why it is fascinating. There are unknown viewpoints, which often happen with experimental films. But that is one extreme—what I am doing is not so extreme; I still want to deliver some kind of message.





Chris

I Shrink Therefore I Am

A Poem about Nothing, Written in Two Minutes

I shudder,

sour sweat dripping

down my grimy

(and itchy) back. 

Back, back, back! I yell

to the demonic monstrosity sitting

outside my door.

I draw my sword, but I find

nothing in my hand.

But a black 

telephone.

It rings, I answer.

"Do I do," croons Mister Stevie.

And thus, I yell into the abyss,

"MAYBE!"

It gazes into me.

-Kwok

Another dream

I visited William's place to feed two turtles and water the plants. Elizabeth, the marigold has powdery mildew(some sort of fungus) so I cleaned up the white powder on the edge of the pot. Despite the fungus, Elizabeth bloomed a pretty flower. I watched the flower and the turtles eating and fell asleep beside them. The chill woke me up and I decided to take a real nap in bed until I have to go to work.


I was driving to William's apartment in the dream. I couldn't find where it was and kept missing the turns. I got into the garage in his building somehow(you always get to a place "somehow" in dreams) and tried to find a parking spot. Even though his apartment has only two floors in the garage I went up higher and higher.

I finally parked on the 10th floor and walked downstairs. There were hundreds of carnivorous frogs and a cat. The cat bit and hung on to my right hand and the killer frogs hopped on my back and legs. I smashed them against the walls and railings feeling pain from their biting and disgust from seeing them dying.

Now, I was lying on the bed like I did in real life. I tried to get up and couldn't. After a while, I heard someone in the bathroom. The person urinated, flushed, washed hands and turned the light off. He walked into the room and he was William. Even in the dream I knew he should be in Hawai'i; this William looked different -- lean, shorter hair, and evil grin. He dove for the bed. He acted as though he were playing, but he was stopping me from getting up. I yelled at him that he was not real but he mumbled some excuses about the return. I desperately reached for the door and tried to rise myself up but got sucked into the bed every time I tried. I became so frustrated and mad at him I started kicking and punching him and could finally sit up.


I woke up from the nightmare. Even at the moment of waking up I absolutely believed that the dream was real. I looked at myself in the mirror and everything was same as I saw in the dream except the absence of William. I got really scared.

I think I got hallucinated by the marigold fungus.

A dream

I had a dream last night that I was a fugitive and an old soldier cut my throat at the end when I tried to cross the border.
Obviously I died in the dream.
Christopher said the old soldier was the aggregate of things I fear and I failed to conquer him.
But what I thought dying was it is kind of cool that I get to know the afterlife that I have always been curious about.

BON IVER + DO-HO SUH

BON IVER - Wisconsin
That was Wisconsin. That was yesterday. Now, I have nothing that I can keep.
Because every place I go I take another place with me.

DO-HO SUH, Perfect Home II, installation, translucent nylon, 2000.
A portable apartment sewn with fabric: memory and place.

Yu

inch worm inching

Yu

Eunsoo

Read for the first time this morning

An interview in the Paris Review with William Faulkner, 1956.

FAULKNER
Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was
constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing
in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when
he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to
distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life,
they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion,
and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is
ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality,
he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part.
He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or
later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order
that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the
curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them
the right to dream.

INTERVIEWER
Could you explain more what you mean by motion in relation
to the artist?

FAULKNER
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by
artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later,
when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man
is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave
something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall
of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must
someday pass.

Entire Interview: William Faulkner Interview

Chris

Inspirations II

The film that made me aware of filmmaking--the craft behind this fantastic art form--is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was perhaps the biggest Turtles fan alive. I had the Halloween costume, the lunch box, the Trapper Keeper, the drink, the fruit snacks, the bed sheets, the pillow case, the toothbrush, the video game, and of course, the action figures. When the movie came out on March 30th, 1990--to this day, I still remember the exact date--I dunno, I lost my shit. I couldn't sleep the night before, I couldn't do my homework, I didn't even care that my best friend had kissed my crush on the lips that afternoon during recess.

My Mom took me to 4 p.m. matinee showing at the UA Fresh Meadows 7 right after school. Those 93 minutes went by in a flash--just seeing Shredder, Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Casey, April, Splinter in live action blew my little mind. And when it was over, I wanted to see it again. I called my cousins to come over to the theater, and I stuck around for the next showing. I wanted to stick around for the subsequent one after that, but I wasn't granted permission.

During its theatrical run, I saved up enough money to see it three additional times. Later, I got the VHS as an early Christmas gift from my godmother, and I must've seen the movie on video at least twenty more times.

On approximately my tenth video screening, I started noticing the filmmaking behind the movie. It intrigued me that behind this very tangible product (the movie) lived this strange assembly of abstracts (the cuts, the camera placement, the the action blocking, the music).

I would love to say that at that moment, I realized that I wanted to become a filmmaker. But then, I would be lying. When I was eight, I still wanted to be an MTA subway operator (and part of me still does want to drive trains underneath and above New York City all day). Nonetheless, I feel that that moment still must hold some significance in my life and in my decision to become a filmmaker.

Heroes in a half shell!
Kwok

Documentary Voices

Please take one second to vote for my friend Lisette Marie Flanary's documentary Na Kamalei: Men of Hula for the Independent Lens 2008 Audience Award.

Vote here: Independent Lens 2008 Audience Award Voting

She is so super close to winning, so every vote counts. Voting closes today.



Support documentary filmmaking.

Chris

Inspirations

About a year and a half ago, when the screenplay for Layover, on the Shore wasn't much more than a page of notes on the back of my journal, I watched a film by Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa called H Story—and it changed everything.

H Story is a film about Hiroshima, Suwa's home. Suwa plays himself, a director, who is making a film about Hiroshima by making a shot-by-shot remake of Alain Renais’ classic Hiroshima Mon Amour.



Quickly though, his remake begins to fall apart.

Suwa and his actress, Beatrice Dalle, engage in constant arguments, as Dalle becomes more and more detached and disinterested in the failing production.

Then one morning, in a rage, Dalle walks off set.

Outside, she calms herself down by sharing a cigarette with an on-set Japanese writer. The moment seems inconsequential, but soon we find ourselves watching a blossoming romance between this French actress and this Japanese writer, as they wander the streets of Hiroshima together. By the end of H Story, Suwa’s failed remake is recuperated as a romance in contemporary Hiroshima and ends up being, strangely enough, a successful remake of the original.

It blew my mind. It was one of the most inspiring films I'd seen in a long time, and one of the best cases I’d ever seen of a filmmaker trying to negotiate the idea of his home with the reality of his home.

H Story asked, How does one make a film about a place, when the idea of the place overshadows the reality of the place?

Suwa’s answer was to show how he cannot make a film about the idea of his home, and yet cannot escape making a film about the idea of his home.

Everyone should try to check out this wonderful movie.

Chris

Yogi vs. Kwok

Every now and then, Chris and I get into creative disagreements. Like real men, we let our limbs and teeth do the talkin'.

We don't have any footage of our latest brawl, but it looked awfully like this:


Rip Torn, Norman Mailer Rumble.

Except I had a screwdriver instead of a hammer, and Chris tried to bite my left eyebrow off. That son of a gun! I'm gonna get him!

Yikes!
Kwok

Home and Away

before producing layover, on the shore at full speed,
i went back to Chongqing, China this summer,
my birthplace and a city like an old friend.

Chongqing is a city of two rivers
and a few dozen bridges
muddy waters carry boats, cargo and centuries of strife
white thick mists creep across green mountains and gray highrises
hiding other worlds that disappear when the sun bakes the earth.

when i was in Chongqing, i dreamed of Los Angeles
i dreamed of my little apartment in Ktown,
my little balcony, Wilshire and Western, the sunset on the 10
and when i'm in Los Angeles
i dream of Vancouver who raised me
my old room with the blue corduroy curtains,
the crisp light, mountainview cemetery and cedar forests.

layover, on the shore - to me is about this idea of home, about the characters' relationship to home. and undeniably, it's about chris' relationship to Hawai'i. i don't know, but i imagine it's a place that is buried deep inside. as chris changes and grows, Hawai'i is changing and growing too - not just as an island on earth, but inside of him too. as a producer on layover, i feel i am a part of this intimate relationship, a relationship that struggles to heal an odd chasm: our bodies are always in the present but our mind almost never is.

Yu

The Green Ray

When I was a child, my grandfather loved telling me stories of old Hawaii. And his favorite story was about the green ray, a burst of green light that he would sometimes see flash in the sky moments after the sun set. Grandpa was a child during Hawaii's plantation days, and he would oftentimes work late into the evenings in the sugar cane fields. With his body covered in perspiration and dirt from the strain of a twelve hour workday, he'd watch the sky with a sense of anticipation, eagerly awaiting the flash of green that he, in his youthful naiveté, imagined HAD to be some form of communication from a higher being, a wink, perhaps, from God Himself.

In those days he claimed he'd see the green ray quite often. But he saw it less and less as the years went by, and, when he passed away five years ago, it had been over twenty years since he'd seen it last.

Grandpa had no idea why the green ray disappeared. But he suspected that it had something to do with the industrialization of Hawaii in recent years. Surely, he reasoned, the subsequent pollution had to have had some effect on the green ray. Of course, his theory had no real scientific basis. But still, he believed in it.

When I read a very early draft of Christopher Makoto Yogi's thesis screenplay last year (then titled Layover, On the Beach) all I could think about was my grandfather's story. And once Chris asked me to collaborate with him on the script, and as we edited draft after draft together, I found that Grandpa's story was always in the back of my mind, seemingly guiding me.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned the green ray to my father, and explained to him how much of an impact the story had on me. That's when he told me that my grandfather had never worked in the sugar cane fields.

He said that while Grandpa was a master storyteller, he was also a chronic bullshitter. In fact, he said, most of the stories he had told me, including the one about the green ray, were probably lies, or, at the very least, gross exaggerations.

Today, I have no idea whether my grandfather was lying or not. But still, even if he made it up, his story held more truth than even he realized. And it feels so appropriate that his tale has guided me in the writing of this screenplay, this story of individuals trapped between worlds, haunted by idealizations, longing for pasts that perhaps only ever existed in their minds.

At this point, after all the revisions and changes the script has gone through, I have no idea what Layover means to Chris. But to me, what I will always remember is chasing after that image of my grandfather looking towards the sky, searching for a green light that faded away years ago, believing that one day, against all odds, it would return to him. Truth or fiction, reality or idealization, it really doesn't matter.

I truly feel that Layover captures a side of Hawaii that I've never seen represented on film before, and I absolutely can't wait to see how Chris goes about capturing the images and emotions and ideas in the screenplay. These next six weeks are going to be very exciting.

Kevin

From Los Angeles

All too often, I find myself deeply disappointed in the state of Asian American culture. When did we--despite our disparate histories, beliefs, cultures--become so homogenous? When did we become so whiny, complacent, and passive? It seems like every other Asian American film, novel, poem, painting, or short story is just another vapid, shallow rehash of the ol' trusty why-did-my-mother-pack-me-seaweed-and-fish-when-all-I-wanted-was-a-PBJ-sandwich-like-everyone-else.

I signed onto produce Layover, on the Shore, because I knew that it would be different, that it would be special. Over the past three years at USC, I've had the great pleasure of befriending Chris. What struck me at first about him was his nuanced, humorous, fresh view of the world around us. Chris never accepted the status quo; instead, he always opted to dig deeper, to try new things, to venture where we were forbidden. His screenplays and movies did the same.

This little movie that we're working on here is the concluding project in his and my film school careers. I am confident that Layover, our parting shot, has the potential of creating a truly fresh entry in the oftentimes tired world of Asian American cinema.

We thank you for visiting our website, and we welcome you to be a part of it. (Just click around to find out the many ways that you can join our Layover family.)

Rock on,
Kwok

From Honolulu

In five weeks, we begin production on my thesis film, which is titled Layover, on the Shore. The screenplay comes from a question that I've been chewing over ever since I began film school: "How does one properly represent Hawai‘i in film/art/media?"

I'm not sure if I've gotten any closer to an answer, but what I now recognize is that in order to provoke a conversation on the topic, I'd have to make a film that puts this question front and center. Layover, on the Shore presents two dichotomous Hawai‘i's -- two distinct faces of my home. Although it is nowhere close to a comprehensive portrait, these two faces represent two Hawai‘i's that resonate with my experiences. It is a film that is inspired by the idea of islands, by comings-and-goings, by Yasujiro Ozu and Hou Hsiao Hsien, and by the time that I've spent away from home.

And so, welcome. We will be blogging throughout pre-production and into production, which begins on August 9th in Honolulu. There is a lot of work to be done between now and then, but we will continue with frequent updates on the filmmaking, along with random thoughts and notes on anything that might grab us.

I invite all to participate -- more than anything, I want to encourage feedback & discussion as we move forward with this production.

Check back soon.

Chris