If you want to make me retch a little, just mention an ensemble movie about the archetypal Asian American family. There seems to be a whole industry devoted to milling out stories about reunions between estranged siblings, clashing with parental expectations, coming to terms with alternative lifestyles, and reconciling with x cultural heritage. In the end, they come together as a family, accept each other for who they are, and learn a little something about themselves. fkllllllllllllllllllllljjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkk

Sorry, my head hit the keyboard for a second. Maybe I’m being too harsh. This is powerful stuff… or it was like a decade ago, before “Better Luck Tomorrow” had, for whatever its faults, shown us that the time had finally come to tell stories that don’t coyly implode into awkward self-consciousness about the Asian American experience. Movies like these just seem quaint and desperate somehow, for some kind of reassurance that a) a lot of people have had similar experiences, and b) that Asians are just as American (or Asian) as anybody else. Which is fine, but it’s old news, man.

That being said, this is a fun movie to yell, and throw popcorn, at. The Bai Ling subplot left an opening for a sequel; hopefully we’ll learn the fate of the turkey baster.

“teacher, starve your child / p.c. approved, as long as the right words are used.”
manic street preachers, “p.c.p.”

no one is innocent in the altercation. before reaching the core of this movie’s premise, the death of vincent chin, we’re forced to confront the circumstances leading up to it. by all accounts, he had an active role in what ultimately happened that night.

at first.

two days from his wedding, throwing himself a bachelor party with a few buddies, it’s easy to picture chin’s impulse to add a few invigorating bruises to the night. souvenirs to accompany his hangover and face full of stripper glitter to greet him in the mirror on a shameful and proud walk from the floor to the shower tomorrow morning. a few lasting mementos of what he’d leave behind, ostensibly for the rest of his life.

if only he hadn’t picked a fight with a couple of psychotic crackers in an industrial piss town that is, of all things, proud to make american cars. imagine. worse yet, he had to go and win that fight. against both of them. by himself. then the bastard went and made the fatal mistake of superficially resembling one of those crazy japanese that don’t sleep, eats nothing but rice and human flesh, and is building cars the size of matchbooks you can buy in packs of twelve. of course it was reagan, not competition that killed what made living in america decent by western standards, but i digress.

it’s hard to piece together the scene from the stories, but especially who witnessed what and when. a black cop said he thought that the white guy, parading around in a parking lot at night in a predominately black neighborhood with a louisville slugger, was coming back from a game. another black cop pondered the beating aloud, detailing the level of force and style used by ebens to bring the ash wood club down onto vincent chin’s head to split it open.

the fight had started at the improbably named “fancy pants” strip club over the looks and/or abilities of a stripper called “starlene.” ebens couldn’t abide a comment made by chin about starlene (chin starting shit, like i said), calling chin a “little motherfucker.” words were then traded between the two men, and ebens, finally showing his hand — his sympathy for his unemployed dumb fuck son-in-law’s plight — said something like, “it’s because of you little fuckers that we’re out of work!” starlene was black, so it could be argued that having her as a favorite dancer doesn’t make ebens a racist asshole in any traditional/mainstream/caricature sense, though many racists simply insist that people know their place; so it could be speculated that straddling a filthy metal column in a dank purgatory like fancy pants is an acceptable place for a girl like starlene, in a way that being seen with him in public would not be. he pretended not to know her name when interviewed next to his wife, though that could just be his mundane domestic duplicity rather than any complicated racial dynamics.

the facts that not even the murderers dispute are such:

the fight continued to simmer into the parking lot of fancy pants. ebens went after chin with a bat, but chin bailed when he saw this wasn’t the fist fight he’d seemingly wanted. ebens and nitz somehow get their american car started and sputtered after chin, searching for half an hour (i’ve read they paid a guy $20 to help look). when they spot him in the parking lot of a mcdonald’s, nitz wrestles him into a hold, and ebens wails on the unarmed man with a baseball bat until he’s unconscious. according to the paramedics, chin’s brains are seen on the asphalt. he was dead four days later.

whites may have been a small minority in that neighborhood, as the policeman said, but the grim resignation of local non-whites to ronald ebens’s actions echoed the dead, resigned weight of the staggering ratios of blacks to whites in the mid-nineteenth-century south. a dim-witted managerial prick like ebens would have done well there. no one wanted to call ebens what he was: a filthy murderer. and his loser son-in-law the willing accomplice.

starlene could only go on and on about how ebens was a fan of hers, like anybody could give a shit. a procession of local hicks all testified that ebens and nitz were not racist, ebens had even known chinks in the past that he didn’t beat to death with a stick. they emphasized this, as though this was the fulcrum on which the question teetered, and not whether a deliberate effort was made to locate and bludgeon an unarmed and restrained chin. as far as the beating itself was concerned, everyone just wanted to pretend it was a natural progression for a bar fight, or that he’d only meant to beat him nearly to death, not all the way. as if changing the subject to tolerance or philosophizing about saloon culture could somehow make it go away for the highly inconvenienced ebens and all those other assholes.

“These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail… You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.
“Judge Charles Kaufman [via Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams]

the handling of the case was a joke: evidence not introduced, credible eyewitness testimonies skipped. the imbecile judge kaufman had taken the calvinist route, and anointed the two elect with the handle of his gavel. they got probation and a fine: a suitable punishment for burning leaves or pissing on the alamo, but not so much a deadly beating.

if the roles were reversed, chin would have been crucified. you know that.

the circus of minority advocacy groups that finally converged on the case got it to the federal court, further inconveniencing the already heavily inconvenienced ebens, forcing him deeper into hysterical paroxysms of self pity. but again, the two assholes walked away free, and we learned the value of a chinaman’s life in early-eighties detroit.

the black reporter being interviewed said it all. a sardonic smile twinkled, then slowly faded into solemn recognition. he said when he first looked at the jury, he knew what the outcome would be.

“Stop reading so much into it!” says an imaginary interlocutor. Shut up.

First, there’s the elephant in the room. The movie buckles under a raging homoeroticism typical of so much of the greased-up macho entertainment this country’s middle schoolers had been maintaining as a viable industry those endless and stupefying Bush years. Not that I’m judging; even mid-American heshers need a socially acceptable outlet for sorting out their feelings.

There’s something else here, though. You have people hurting themselves for money, certainly. Their own choice, you might counter.

But then you have them getting other people involved–people who don’t have the drug whore level of internal desolation necessary to consider self-debasement a profession. The corner fortune teller and security guy humiliated by Pontious’s all-but-tea-bagging. The destruction of a miniature golf course, a rental car, crappy outlet shelves in downtown LA.

A fretful shopkeeper watches a disguised Knoxville brazenly attempt to steal item after shabby item from his coldly lit shelves. He intervenes for the sake of his livelihood, not knowing whether the “old man” is a harmless klepto, a distraction for another group of thieves, or an armed nut. Heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, ever closer to that fatal coronary.

Superficially, you have a group of amiable hooligans, like you’d find in any town on the planet; burning their youthful anti-social energy smashing telephone kiosks. Except, most don’t consider it a profession, and more importantly, most aren’t funded by a multinational corporation. Ostensibly, it’s the young taking the piss out of the old; or poor punk versus frightened middle class stiff. But follow the money, think of who benefits. Imagine your grandfather investing his life savings into opening a convenience store. He carefully stocks the shelves, spends money he doesn’t have on fixing the security system, and spends night after sleepless night wearily eyeballing the low-lifes suspiciously meandering through the aisles. One day a gang of cackling Viacom executives pour through the doors–too many to manage. And they all proceed in unison to drop trow and rattle off a deuce on the cold linoleum. Then imagine they all got paid by advertisers for it. Just another case of the rich having a go at the poor.

That is what this movie is. Fuck this movie.

“No crime if there ain’t no law.”
— The Damned, “Neat Neat Neat”

The liberal instinct urges me to say that I disagree with it, but this book and its implications are bigger than me. I almost have to laugh at myself for leveling judgement on it, as if it mattered — me: already living in the world of the leviathan. In the bigger sense, I don’t disagree with it, anyway — perhaps in the normative sense, but as an observer of society I see he seems to have his shit together. With my judgement out of the way, it’s obvious that Hobbes didn’t invent authority — he’s just a messenger after all, so no use blaming him for it. He illustrates and details the structure of power, the rationale behind why he would prefer a monarchy to a democracy.

Book one is where it’s at. In a few lines, centuries ago, Hobbes dispenses with the main premises of childish political conceits — the politics of the healthy and unburdened — that still stink up the fringes of the political landscape: anarchism and libertarianism. As the title suggests, without some ultimate bully to enforce contracts between one party and another, there really are no contracts at all. Libertarian theorists invariably find themselves either defending an apocalyptic scenario where contracts are upheld between equal parties by personal or hired force (e.g. having lotsa guns), or they resuscitate the government they tried to bury under some pseudonym like “the courts.” Never mind the fact that still other parties can’t be expected to stagnate on the arms issue, or maintain a fair policy with regard to their neighbors. They will not have started equal, and they won’t remain equal if they can help it. There will always either be governments or warlords.

Hobbes is a pious man, and so prone to getting caught in the tide pool of infinite regresses. What justifies one part of his argument itself needs justification, but none is to be found. Such is the case with the power of his beloved monarchy. Subjects get their rights from the king, the king gets his rights from god, and god, is, well, god (himself justifiable by the Socratic piss-take, the Cosmological Argument). Which is to say the authority of the king can’t be justified at all. In a similar abuse of logic, geography, demographics, and chronology, Hobbes contorts himself to find the consent of the people for the king to do unto them what he argues is their own will. The king, he says, serves the will of the subjects, so whatever he does is, in a Nixonian kind of reasoning, not illegal or against their will. That, by his being king, well, his subjects have obviously agreed that it be so. Except that the majority of his contemporaries weren’t consulted before his coronation; not to mention the generations to follow which didn’t even exist. What he didn’t know was that it doesn’t need to be justified. The subjects don’t merely give up their rights grudgingly cowed into submission by some undeniable justification of divine right; they relinquish their rights and responsibilities deliberately, urgently, because that’s what people do.

One point which surprised me was that Hobbes said the king’s responsibility is to protect his subjects, and where he falters, so should the subjects’ loyalty. This bleeding heart wouldn’t have lasted under eight years of Reagan or Bush.

Full Disclosure: I have a credit on this movie, but for something inconsequential to the story that doesn’t really bear on my review.

Tad Nakamura completes his trilogy with A Song for Ourselves. Subject Chris Ijima was a pioneering Asian American folk musician, and part of the melting pot of cultural awareness movements in Southern California. In thirty minutes, the film picks up the careers of Ijima, and his bandmates, Nobuko Miyamoto and Charlie Chin, as they rose to prominence in the community. A particularly funny segment involves an unexpectedly archaic-sounding John Lennon introducing them (Ijima and Miyamoto as duet Yellow Pearl) on Dick Cavet as being, “Japanese… or something.” I suppose we have the luxury of laughing at the provinciality of Lennon’s comments (Oh, and thanks to Yoko for piping in there, too! Knucklehead.), rather than gratefully accepting his mainstream/white/western validation precisely because so much ground his been broken in the intervening time by artists and activists like Ijima, et al.

Though the movie must inevitably follow the last days of the artist’s life, it doesn’t dwell, and sends the audience off on a positive note; with one of the more memorable conversations I’ve heard related about the subject of death.

A well written script should have surprises that, on their revelation, seem inevitable given the circumstances. This was the case in the second installment of the new Batman series, which will happily wash away any memories of Schumacher’s, and even Burton’s, tedious and superficial visions. Ledger shined brilliantly in his penultimate role, doing justice to a Joker relishing an ideological deadlock with his moral opposite. Also satisfying are the circumstances which surround Harvey Dent, in which he, Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes, are forced to make choices with terrible and inevitable consequences. Unlike that Spiderman bullshit. Yeah, I said it.

“Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin that you know how
the niggers feel cold
And the slums got so much soul”
Dead Kennedys, HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA

Even in trying to understand this book in its historical context, the impression nags at me that Kerouac was peddling the exotic to and from a white bread perspective. His lovingly detailed passages on the smells of Chinatown, or the intricacies of a black musician playing bongo drums, reek of the tin-eared condescension of a man desperately trying to ingratiate himself into circles to which he has no natural connection. But why does Jack want our permission so badly to be a wandering asshole? Perhaps there was a point when “sensitivity” came into the picture, and American culture lost the nerve to recognize its love of novelty simply as such.

Kerouac’s influence may have carried far and wide into the beat movement, and others so derived, but his actual attitude I see mirrored in the overbearing ethno-tourists and cultural dilettantes of today. The guilty liberals with their naive affection for the theocratic Dalai Lama and his “eastern wisdom.” The Richard Geres, Steven Segals and Madonnas of the world have fleshed out this vulgarity to its inevitable conclusion.

Brillante Mendoza’s second neo-realist film in the festival this year, SLINGSHOT is a frenetic, impressionistic and cynical plunge into the hustle of a Tondo barangay. In contrast to the solemn intimacy of FOSTER CHILD, here we scramble along, via handheld shots, after an ensemble cast struggling to get through lives gripped by poverty and corruption. This movie deftly avoids the broad portrayals that would easily polarize an audience toward characters facing such heavy moral dilemmas; though the movie advances so persistently, it’s not hard to miss that there are dilemmas. Even when they behave inexcusably, the specificity of their problems has a humanizing authenticity that’s natural and relatable. The drama seems effortless and without the manipulation and self-indulgence that’s ravaged Hollywood proper.

I’m looking forward to more from this director.

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.