Manifesto

What is purpose of blogging? Self absorption? Existential crisis? Or, as one writer said, defiance of the time passing by? I also remember how one of my elder friends described a younger friend of his: He is one of those generation Y people who would keep on-line journals and put everything about himself there. A little pretentious, but damn smart and interesting. No, I don't exactly know why I want to start this. I doubt I would reveal everything about myself without any inhibition. That is not the point of writing. Whatever that point is, I would discover it from writting them, under the condition that I stay disciplined enough.

But the existential question is definitely one part of my thinking here. It was barely a hundred years ago when human voice got recorded for the first time. And now, all you have ever written, all the pictures ever taken of you, all the home videos ever shot about you, could be well stored in one tiny memory chip and preserved way past your own existence in this physical world. I could imagine that the future mausoleums or tombs not only store the ashes or bodies, but also a small chip with all the digital information about the departued person. Our future generation would be overwhelmed with information about their ancestors if they ever want to find out, unless, hm, you accidently crash your computer and lose all that stored information about yourself. But then, remember, they may be in a Yahoo or Google server too. This does make the life of future biographers or anthropologists a lot easier.

So, blogging, archiving, posting, they can be viewed as a means for leaving a trace in this ever-changing and fast-paced world, or more meaningfully, a way to help communicate our thoughts and understand each other, other than, say, to spread good gossips. But gossips are always fun to read, and in the end, who really cares?!

My Top Ten movies of 2003

It is that time of the year again when every film critic rushes to pick up their favorite ten, either to make a manifesto of one’s own taste or to promote some obscure gem. After watching three critically-acclaimed Hollywood box-officers (Lord of Rings, Cold Mountain, 21 Gram) over the Christmas season, I felt numbed and emotionally exhausted and in the end I did not remember much of them. I finally decided to write down my own favorite ten just to sort out my mind and re-live those unforgettable moments when I walked out of the theater and felt that world around me had changed a little, even if just for that short moment.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, Brazil)A mind-boggling rollercoaster ride through Rio’s slums and ganglands. The violence is both disturbing and numbing, and the myriad of stories are told in such innovative way that it draws you in immediately as if you were walking in and out of all these lives with time leaping back and forth and with bullets barely dodged. Such a pallet of vivid colors and exuberant rhythms!

The Pianist (Polanski)Polanski was born to make this film. Adrien Brody’s understated performance was not a singsong for the courage of survivors but went deeper to touch upon human instinct and dignity against unfathomable terror.

Winged Migration (Michel Debats, France)You got to see this in wide-screen, or the I-Max for the best. I bought the DVD just to find out how they made this film. We all have dreams in which we could fly like a bird, and this film almost made that dream come true. In eighty minutes we followed the birds around the world, from Amazon to Antarctica, from Vietnam to Senegal. What else could be worth my $9?

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Kim Bartley and Donnacha Brian, UK) The directors intended to film Cesar Chavez but instead witnessed the whole coup and filmed the entire historical drama from the inside. Intense and thought-provoking, it showed how media could be so maliciously manipulated by the right-wingers and shed some true light on an event largely ignored and misunderstood by Americans due to their own media’s biased propaganda.

Bolivar Soy Yo (Jorge Ali Trana, Colombia)A political satire that was both sad and hilarious, in the same canon with “Z” and “Modern Times”. In a tangle of soap operas, leftist guerrillas, pompous government and over-used revolutionary icons, the movie captured the idiosyncrasy of the Latin American psyche so well and made us laugh in tears.

Pepper Mint Candy (Lee ChangDong, Korea)Story told backwards can be mentally challenging and suspenseful, and sometimes can be annoying and confusing. Lee made this ambitious film in 2001, same time when “Memento” came out and two years before “Irreversible” was made. It unfolds the charaters’s life chapter by chapter, carefully tracking back two decades of turbulent times when the innocent protagonist slowly lost his grip on life and degenerated into a wounded despair. In the end we saw how humans are just tiny boats in that treacherous sea of history, and a few wrong turns could easily lead one to an inevitable tragic end.

Carla My Dog (Lu Xue Chang, China)Lu never gained much recognition in the international circuit since neither is he interested in exploring the oriental exotica nor does he want to cater to the political underground and settle for the subversive. His last film, “How steel is made”, raised the poignant questions for a generation who grew up in a grand ideology but ended up losing them all in the capitalistic booms. This latest film changed the angle and looked more closely on a more ordinary and underprivileged class of Beijing citizens, putting humanity under a microscope of realism and see how it shines in a chaotic times.

Marooned in Iraq (Bahman Ghonbadi, Iran)Iran continues to be the movie power house, and their films can be both politically urgent and profoundly poetic. Set in post Iran-Iraq war and following an aged musician’s journey (with his sons) into Kurdish Iraq, it dived right into the suffering and terror faced by the Kurdish people but never lost the sense of humor and optimism. Heart-wrenching and uplifting.

Yossi and Jagger (Eytan Fox, Isarel)When I saw the film in the gay and lesbian film festival, some protesters busted onto the stage and were greeted by the shouting and cursing of the audiences. Actually I thought the drama after add another dimension to the bittersweet love story between two gay soldiers on the war front. The love was so real, the loss was heart-breaking, but the harsh reality is still more complex and authentic. 

Spanish Apartment (Cedric Klapisch, France)It is not a brilliant film, but I ultimately enjoyed it, probably out of my own nostalgia of the life as a foreign exchange student, or the fantasy of quitting corporate job and joining the international drifters while there is still the last drop of youth left. Hm…why do all the dropouts universally become writers of some sort? Plenty of European stereotypes are created here, but you got to love that raw energy.

Other art-crowd pleasers, such as “Whale Rider”, “Swimming Pool”, “21 Gram”, or “Dirty Pretty Thing” would not make my list. They were well-made but broke no artistic grounds. But I have to single out a few runner-ups:Weather Underground (Sam Green and Bill Siegel)Documentaries are suddenly getting so much attention, and this one is surely one of the diamonds in the crown. 

Piedras (Ramon Salazar, Spain)Multiple stories told simultaneously with crisscross plots have been done again and again (Magnolia, Short Cuts), but this latest entry from Spain added some Almodovar type coincidences and gay subplots to that standard formula and made it a bit more enjoyable. I noticed that all the gay men ended up finding love and the straight ones breaking up in the end. Hm?

25th Hour (Spike Lee, US)Not Spike Lee’s best but certainly his somber study of personal crisis in the post 9-11 times. Is there any hope to rebuild life from the wounds and relics of the past? The film gave an ambivalent answer.