Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s PLOY is the movie David Lynch might have made if he hadn’t squandered his talent on the “reference the beginning at the end” school of surrealism. This dreamy, lethargic, pleasant trip of a film is a long and graceful swerve across lines of perception, fantasy, dreams, and reality — and it is, thankfully, more entertaining than it is confusing. Though it is confusing!

In a good way.

I did take off a point when it abruptly turned into an action flick, but I added it back when I realized it was another in a broad range of unexpected tangents.

What was true for a Berlin devastated by war in Roberto Rossellini’s GERMANY YEAR ZERO is true for the precariously laid-out squalor of a village in Manila. Brillante Mendoza obviously has a knack for knowing what his audience knows and can gather from a scene. As the camera is confidently trained on what appear to be, on their own, mundane situations, the implications gradually build to an overwhelming sense of immediacy. All of it is presented in a way that feels natural, with an emotional tempo closer to real life than to the abbreviated melodrama most films on this subject would tend toward. Rather, we have a staccato beat punctuated with cab rides and corny ring tones.  It assumes that you’re smart enough to get it, rather than beating you over the head with orchestral swells and sweeping panoramas.

My first instinct is to say I wish there were more films like this in the mainstream; studios not afraid of genres like neo-realism. But this style has to keep its integrity and subtlety to retain its value. So, instead I ask you, dear reader, check this film out, and think about it for a bit. Think about what film can be.

If I have anything to give readers, let it be a naive candor. The elephant in the room is that USC student films have a reputation for being extremely well-made, but ultimately kind of ‘meh’ on the entertainment scale. A pleasant surprise-exception was this evening’s BLOOD DEBTS, which was part of the late-night crime shorts program, NO TURNING BACK, shown at the Laemmle. The story was a simple one, but skillfully crafted, well-acted, and cleverly relevant to the Asian American experience.

I’d also like to plug is BOOKIE, which was written/directed and produced by my VC buddies Bao Tran and Michael Velasquez, respectively. Set in a mid-sixties Seattle nightclub, it is a gorgeously lush black and white piece. The tension seething beneath the surface of the festive locale is artfully brought into view by the intensity of some great R&B performances.

Oh, and “Cola” from the BACARDI AND COLA ads is in it.

I’ve sat (however fitfully) through feature length experimental montages, and I still had to walk out on THE MACHINE GIRL. I’ve never been a fan of the exploitation genre (I’ve yet to make it through SWEET SWEETBACK’S BADASSSSS SONG), and I happen to consider the self-indulgent pop-clusterfuck, KILL BILL, the flashing of the expiration date on Quentin Tarantino’s directing career, so maybe I’m a bad one to ask.

I’ll grant that the unrelenting cartoon violence, though not my taste, is legitimate in the genre, but the jarring attempts by the filmmakers to steer the plot where they needed it to go pretty much eliminated any enjoyment I could get from this film.

Filmmaker Ho Tam invites you to examine the role of Asian masculinity in media in a series of challenging montages fastidiously assembled from stock footage, film clips, newspaper clippings, “found” photos, and even home movies. Like many films in the experimental category, concepts are invoked without a definite intent for their meaning. A familiarity with the context is helpful in interpreting the piece, but it’s still difficult to know what decisions are informed by obscure knowledge, and which are totally proprietary. I found out from the Q&A a few of my assumptions about a montage were completely false, and I’d entirely missed the point: which is often the case, in my experience, with such films.

The squirm factor is high in screenings like this, though the process of watching them can sometimes be enlightening.

Julia Kwan (EVE AND THE FIRE HORSE) takes a microscope to the drama behind the family portrait in her short, SMILE. 1980s Vancouver sets the stage for preening, familial politics, and adolescent angst — with a particular focus on the latter, as our two young protagonists must decide whether parental quirks provide adequate justification for a concerted rebellion.

…and all in under twenty minutes.

Director: Sarab Neelam, Writer: V. Prasad

When new ideas confront us we have a choice to adjust to the new information — and allow the implications to ripple across and alter our perceptions — or reject them, and seek ways to justify our prior assumptions. It’s us or them; our identities versus our honesty.

There’s a restaurant advertising on TV (in Los Angeles, at least) calling itself “Pick Up Stix.” I couldn’t figure out what it was about it that bugged the shit out of me. Was it the obnoxious spelling? the muttering dragon spokes-character? the incredibly generic menu? It was when they introduced the concept of “Asian” chicken wings that the problem dawned on me. Asia, I thought, is a massive fucking continent, comprising a wide variety of cultures with differing ideas on how to prepare chicken wings. And we know that. If you don’t know that, you’re a bad person and should have known it. Then there are the “stix” themselves; just the shallow impression an outsider might have of a culture’s utensils. It’s anachronistic, and rather inexcusable, to regress to identifying an entire region’s cultures with a few bastardized elements of one (or two), and to refer to the lot with what amounts to a euphemism for the disfavored “oriental.”  It’s Chinese food re-imagined as a midwestern caricature; a brand that will literally cater to your prejudices and promise not to scare or annoy you with challenging new ideas.

So, shall we raise our consciousness and become more aware of those around us, or not? That’s the choice we’re faced with at the cusp of prejudice and reality.

I had worked with V. Prasad at VC during the festival season ‘07, and knew he was in the middle of writing a feature project. Having finally seen it, I must say I really liked the film — so I guess I don’t need to avoid him at the festival this year (j/k… maybe).

On to the movie…

During a conversation about his Sikh beliefs, protagonist Amrit introduces his companion, and the audience, to the concept of “Seva” — serving humanity to the point of self-sacrifice; which I think is an appropriate motif to a film in this genre. Many Asian American writers and directors would probably like to simply tell their stories, and not have to spend any time on exposition to try to get general audiences up to speed on the premises on which all the story’s conflicts hinge. But this simply is not possible, and is not a luxury a film about the challenges of maintaining Sikh traditions in America country has. With that in mind, the story could have easily been bogged down in establishing a baseline for the drama through straight exposition and pedantry, but unlike many films about such cultural dilemmas, the filmmakers did a fantastic job introducing new ideas to the audience in a way that feels natural, is well-paced, nicely-presented, and most importantly, entertaining.