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This weekend, I watched “Saving Face” and “Mr. and Mrs.
Smith.” They were the first movies I’ve seen in a theater since “Star Wars:
Episode III – Revenge of the Sith,” but I hope to get into theaters more
regularly now that summer is almost officially under way, with “Batman Begins,”
“War of the Worlds,” “Fantastic Four,” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”
all coming out. After watching “Saving Face,” I couldn’t resist hopping into a
showing of “ROTS” to catch the middle hour. After three viewings, “ROTS” still
holds up.

I saw “Saving Face” because it was written and directed by
an Asian American and because it stars Asian Americans. It could have been
about anything, and I would’ve watched it. Why? Because it is so rare to see
Asian Americans with prominent roles anywhere in movies, both on screen and
off. The movie itself doesn’t even have to be interesting for me to enjoy it
because it is a thrill just to see Asian Americans on screen, looking good,
speaking good English, being a part of society, confirming an existence I see
every day in real life but not in movies or TV shows. “Saving Face” is actually
a good movie, too.

Saving Face

“Saving Face” is the feature writing and directing debut of
Alice Wu, a Stanford alumna who used to work at Microsoft before a writing
adventure at a local college led to the development and production of this
movie. In press interviews, she’s called the movie a love letter to her mother,
and she cites her experience coming out as a lesbian and her relationship with
her mother as inspirations for this movie. “Saving Face” owes some of its
feeling of the authentic, Chinese American experience to Wu’s real life, but
the movie also owes a great deal to the Chinese American experience itself. I
would think any 1.5 or 2^nd generation Chinese American can relate to
this movie because it shows the awkward collision of a prevalent American
society and youth culture with an isolated Chinese culture.

“Saving Face” is at its best when it is taking chances with
its characters and situations. The movie primarily deals with how young adults
are supposed to both satisfy and survive in both cultures, but it also dares to
break from the conventional generation gap between mother (“Ma,” played by Joan
Chen) and daughter (“Wil,” played by Michelle Krusiec) and flips their roles. We
are treated to seeing the calm daughter prepare her nervous mother for dates
and resolve the conflict between her mother and her grandparents. We are also
treated to a sizzling, thoughtful romance between Wil and Vivian (played by
Lynn Chen), nothing of the Jet Li-Aaliyah or Kelly Hu-The Rock variety, thank
GOD! Krusiec and Lynn Chen are both extremely intense, but they also tend to
act in monotone, often wearing the same pained smile for different moods and
situations. On the other hand, Joan Chen gives an outstanding veteran
performance here, using her full range of body language and voice to make up
for her relatively small amount of lines.

Despite the engaging characters and conflicts, the movie
also subjects us to overplayed stereotypes to get some cheap laughs. When Wil’s
mother moves in with her, we’re shown how the mother completely redecorates –
the movie cuts to shots of a kitchen inevitably overrun by Chinese ingredients
and to a bedroom draped in, what else, a sea of red! Although most of the
audience laughed at this, I just cringed. Also, why do all of the mother’s
friends have to be whiny, petty, heavily made up bitches? Jokes and
observations like these don’t come across as self-mocking but as self-hating,
as if Wu is attempting to distance herself from the stereotypes rather than
mock them for being forced onto her. I hope I’m wrong about that.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

I saw “Smith” because it seemed to have what I’d want in a big
summer movie: reality-bending action, star power and an amusing premise. When I
come out of this kind of movie, I want to be excited and to forget about the
stupidity of the movie. Unfortunately, when I came out of this movie and talked
about it with friends, I just felt reminded of its stupidity. The consensus is
that the key to enjoying this movie is to ignore plot and focus on the stars,
action and married couple humor. The problem is that there’s too much plot in
the middle of all the action and comedy. Nobody really cares about what’s going
on. The movie runs almost two hours but should be an hour and a half. Perhaps
with all this star power, the director couldn’t resist squeezing in that much
more of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Trust me, it’s too much!

Ingmar Bergman’s
“Trilogy”

Ingmar Bergman’s “Trilogy” of questioning humanity’s faith
consists of “Through A Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light,” and “The Silence.” I
recently got to watch the first two, but for some reason, Blockbuster Online
doesn’t carry “The Silence” even though all three movies were released together
in a Criterion Collection boxed set. Blockbuster even carries the Criterion
editions of “Through A Glass Darkly” and “Winter Light” – what the hell is
going on around here!? Perhaps, I’ll consider a switch to Netflix …

Anyway, these movies came at a time when Bergman reached
perhaps the peak of his creative maturity and further explored his faith,
something he had always lived with yet had never truly reconciled his doubts
with. Although he had explored similar ideas in “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild
Strawberries,” these movies find Bergman at his most ambivalent about the
subject. Even as an atheist, I can relate to the personal dramas within these
movies. For me, Bergman is just using God as the ultimate dramatic device.

Through A Glass
Darkly

This movie is only 89 minutes, but it feels as if it was two
or three times as long. The strangest thing is that by the time it finishes,
you feel that the ending is too abrupt and that you want more. It feels so long
because Bergman isolates the audience in a single, claustrophobic setting with
only four characters and because he makes the audience dwell on the suffering
of his main character, Karin, played by Harriet Andersson. Karin suffers from a
mental illness that makes her imagine God as a giant spider, and it is her
illness that finally brings her family together. Her father is a writer who has
been deeply disturbed by the loss of her mother years ago and by her illness
now. It is a challenge for him just to stay home and confront her because he
fears losing her, too. His weak emotional connection to his young son and his
fears for his daughter have broken his sense of faith. Throughout the movie, he
attempts to escape his family in order to regain faith, but it is the ultimate confrontations
with daughter and son that allow him to find a reason to believe again. It as
if seeing Karin communicate with God in her dementia allows him to finally see
God himself and reassuring his son about Karin’s health allows him to reassure
himself.

“Through A Glass Darkly” is painful yet exciting to watch.
Each actor, especially the captivating Andersson, gives a wrenching performance
convincing us how conflicted and isolated his/her character is. Bergman’s
deliberate pacing and relentless allusions to God add to this heavy atmosphere,
and his insistence on a sparse cast and island setting keeps the focus squarely
on these characters’ relationship with God. By the end of the movie, God really
seems necessary to cope with this kind of existence.

Winter Light

“Winter Light” clocks in at just 81 minutes, but it feels
even longer! And this time, when the movie finishes, you’re ready for it to be
over. The basic themes of this movie are the same as in “Through A Glass Darkly,”
but “Winter Light” is more stark and doesn’t achieve a resolution. Here,
humanity’s uncertain relationship with God is represented in the journey of a
pastor who delivers sermons from one small town to the next. During the
journey, he is challenged by a parishioner’s suicide, the memory of his dead
wife,  and a dwindling audience for his
weekly sermons. The latter presents an interesting spiritual question: does a follower
lose faith because his pastor does, or is it the other way around? Bergman leaves
this question unanswered initially, but in the end, the answer seems to be that
faith is a two-way street: a shepherd needs sheep, just as sheep needs a shepherd.

Once again, Bergman uses a small cast and isolated settings
to create an atmosphere of abandonment by God. The movie basks in winter
landscapes and close-up shots of the characters’ pained faces. It is a good
follow-up to “Through A Glass Darkly” because it expands the question of faith
to the church itself.

The Silence

The title of this movie pretty much reveals what the movie
is about, but I hope to see it sometime soon, at least while “Through A Glass
Darkly” and “Winter Light” are still fresh in my mind.

Best Picture 2004
Nominees

Million Dollar Baby

“Million Dollar Baby” won Best Picture this year at the
Oscars, and after just watching the last of the five pictures I hadn’t seen, I understand
why none of these movies had a chance against Clint Eastwood’s drama. It’s not
that the other movies (“The Aviator”, “Finding Neverland”, “Ray” and “Sideways”)
are not worthy, it’s just that “Million” has so many things the Oscars love to
reward, especially the heroic performances of its three stars, the politically
controversial ending and grand themes of redemption, loyalty and family.
However, the standout of this movie is the acting, not the controversy nor its
themes. For those of you that have not seen the movie, I won’t spoil the ending
other than to say it’s not really a surprise ending, just an ending that has
riled up some conservatives. One way or the other, you will have an opinion on
it. The themes I mentioned above are really universal themes in Hollywood, and from the
outset, especially with as blunt a director as Eastwood, they are easy to spot.

Although Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman both won Oscars for
their performances, it may be Eastwood that gives the best. His character is
the most conflicted of the three, and Eastwood demonstrates a vulnerability
here that’s been missing in his other famous performances. This may be Morgan
Freeman’s best performance, combining his trademark gravitas with wry humor and
physicality that he doesn’t get to show in “Shawshank Redemption” and “Driving
Miss Daisy.” It’s good to see Freeman can still do good drama, after playing so
many one-dimensional men in fluff like “The Sum of All Fears”, “Along Came a
Spider” and “Deep Impact.” Hilary Swank is dependable as always, giving her
role its necessary heft. She added over 20 pounds of muscle and took on a white
trash dialect for the part, but more importantly, she made the character
sympathetic without making her pathetic. Eastwood handles his actors so well in
all his movies and is notorious for giving little direction and shooting few
takes. That style gives his movies a raw, natural feel like some old John Ford
movies, but then again, I don’t actually know how Ford was with his actors.

The Aviator

At the opposite extreme is Martin Scorsese, who has shot as
many as 80 or 100 takes for a scene. For “The Aviator,” Scorsese collaborated
again with the perfectionist Leonardo DiCaprio, becoming one of Hollywood’s most
interesting director-actor duos. In 2002 they made “Gangs of New York,” and in
2006 they will release “The Departed,” a remake of the 2002 Hong
Kong hit, “Infernal Affairs.” Many people I know didn’t like “The
Aviator.” They complained that the movie was too inconsistent, at one point
celebrating Howard Hughes and at the next point defeating Howard Hughes. They also
complained that the movie ended awkwardly, perhaps even pessimistically. I
think these people expected a different movie and misplaced their complaints.
This movie studies a complex person who suffers through many ups and downs, not
some hero that overcomes all.

DiCaprio gives not only an accurate performance (at least
from what the DVD special features show), but also a confident, nuanced
performance that makes the character engaging for the whole 170 minutes. A
lesser cast would make this just another really long and boring biopic, but
DiCaprio is joined by both great stars and top character actors. Cate Blanchett
gives such a courageous performance as Katherine Hepburn because impersonating
anybody, let alone the biggest female movie star ever, is a great
accomplishment. Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda, both ordinary actors in lead roles,
squeeze so much fun into their supporting roles here, all trying to steal the
show.

Ray

“Ray” also attempts a complex character study, but it
doesn’t work as well as “The Aviator.” It’s harder to translate great music to
film than it is flight and movie stars, and at its heart, “Ray” seems to be
about Ray Charles’ great music. If it’s supposed to be about the man, then I think
the movie missed its mark. The movie presents many obstacles to the man’s
pursuit of musical greatness. Although some obstacles (such as his extramarital
affairs and heroin addiction) add to the story, they are not milked for their
full dramatic potential. We see Ray become addicted to heroin, then overcome by
heroin, then in rehab, but we see neither the threat to his musical mind nor
the pain it causes him, until he’s already in rehab. Director Taylor Hackford
also misses opportunities to bring us into Charles’ mind and show the
incredible process of creating music. Only in one scene does Hackford show us
the birth of a song, when Charles tries to reinvent himself, takes a song from
his producer and records it with his own interpretation in the studio. For the
rest of the movie, Hackford prefers instead to show us already completed songs.

Of course, Jamie Foxx gives a great performance here,
especially without the use of his eyes. Much in the same way as Charles, Foxx
has to emote with his entire body and not just his face. Acting with the entire
body is a delight to watch because it is hard to do and increasingly rare.
Great actors like Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp can regularly pull it off, but
don’t expect to see much of it in this summer’s blockbusters.

Finding Neverland

Johnny Depp is at his best when he goes to the extreme. The
great thing about Depp is that he can go to so many different kinds of
extremes, whether it’s extreme eccentricity in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”
and “Ed Wood” or extreme dramatic intensity in “Donnie Brasco” and “From Hell.”
Depp also has a side that is extreme understatement. He has shown this in films
throughout his career, including “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “Chocolat,”
and he revisits this extreme as author J.M. Barrie in “Finding Neverland.” With
a soft Scottish accent, Depp’s understated performance allows the movie to
focus not on Barrie but on Barrie’s inspiration: the family that inspires
him to create Peter Pan.

Director Marc Forster and Depp portray Barrieinnocently and sympathetically. An
audience overwhelmed with Michael Jackson news would, nevertheless, not suspect
anything less than wholesome occurring between Barrie and the four young boys
he spends every afternoon with. An audience would also forgive him for
neglecting his wife, forcing her to leave him. With this kind of naiveté,
“Finding Neverland” works especially well as a family movie. The story is
simple and sentimental and about a man finding his family. I saw it with my
family over the holidays, and we were all moved by it.

Sideways

“Sideways” could have easily indulged in the gloom of its
main character, Miles Raymond, and gotten mired down by it (as some Woody Allen
films do, even his great ones), but instead, it capitalizes on the comedy and
the peripheral characters of Miles’ midlife crisis. The movie’s cast does a
terrific job of making us enjoy every moment of the characters’ journey. Although
the journey can be interpreted as exploring one’s midlife, taking it at face
value, as a journey exploring California wine country and sampling all that it has to offer, makes the movie just as
enjoyable.

This movie received so much praise as an indie comedy that I
was expecting a letdown like “Lost in Translation,” a similarly praised indie
comedy yet one of the most overrated movies recently released. However,
“Sideways” succeeds for me where “Lost in Translation” fails. “Sideways”
gathers momentum along the way while “Lost in Translation” builds momentum with
a scene and then completely kills it with a disjointed follow-up scene.
“Sideways” also balances the serious with the comedic while one is never sure
with “Lost in Translation” because Bill Murray’s persona always gets in the way
of his characters. Anyways, enough “Lost in Translation” bashing – enjoy
“Sideways.”

“Batman Begins” shows the potential of movies based on comic
books. The cast is resplendent with movie stars, disappearing into each role by
giving their characters a sense of mystery as if we are just meeting them for
the first time and not the second or third. The visual style intelligently
swings with the action – the movie can be comic book, but it can also be
sweeping epic, gangster flick, zombie fest, noir. The story gives an important
respect to its source material and title character, giving us a movie as
focused on Bruce Wayne’s past and motivations as on Batman’s cool toys and
heroic feats. Batman also kicks ass in a truly cool way – he fights baddies
with purposeful efficiency, not with the silly flair that you find other
superheroes that seem as if they know they’re in a comic book movie and, thus,
must flaunt their powers. I also give props to the writers for involving
discussions of class struggles and the nature of injustice in a superhero
setting. It makes Batman an altruist yet a flawed citizen, more than ordinary,
dutiful crime-fighter.

“Batman Begins” runs 141 minutes, longer than “Mr. and Mrs.
Smith” and nearly the same length as “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the
Sith,” but “Batman Begins” is the most brisk of the three. Even the scene of
Bruce’s parents’ murder is quick and not stylized, allowing the audience to
escape the melodrama of the original “Batman.” Fight scenes, while predictable,
are also not drawn out – instead, they serve to develop characters and drive
the story. By the end of the movie, we have just begun to understand Batman and
can’t wait for a sequel. I only hope that the cast, especially Michael Caine as
Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler and conscience, return to balance Batman’s
intensity.

Star Wars: Episode
III – Revenge of the Sith

“Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” (“ROTS” for
short) is one of those movies that’s easy to write about. Everyone has already watched
“ROTS” or at least a previous “Star Wars,” so I don’t have to elaborate on the
mythology of the Force or on the history of George Lucas. It’s almost
impossible to think about “ROTS” by itself because the other five movies
include so many juicy characters, plot twists and backstories. The movie relies
on its predecessors for its great strengths, namely, transporting the viewer to
a different reality and making all of its action critical to the very existence
of this reality. With the opening notes of the musical score and the Star Wars
logo emblazoned on the screen, you are instantly transported to the Star Wars
reality and all the mythology that it carries.

And with each lightsaber hum or blaster shot, you wait
powerlessly in fear that maybe your favorite character might be the next to
become one with the Force. Okay, that’s exaggerating, but you get the idea. In
no previous “Star Wars” did every action sequence critically affect the plot or
character development like in “ROTS.” Throughout the film, Lucas cleverly
manipulates the action sequences to threaten our expectations of our most
beloved characters, whether it’s main characters like Anakin in his execution
of Jedi children or characters on the periphery like R2-D2 in its spirited
attacks on enemy droids.

There’s more at stake here yet no surprise as to what the outcome
will be, and as a result, the action reaches a more emotional level – even
though we know the Jedi will be killed in this movie and that Anakin will
betray them, we still hope that somehow Anakin can be saved from the Dark Side.
Contrast this with the bloated Gungan-droid war and made-for-video-games pod race in “The Phantom Menace” or even the
silly escape from the garbage disposal in “A New Hope.” Action sequences alone,
“ROTS” is in a different class from the rest of “Star Wars.”

This movie is also the “darkest” of the six, which many have
pointed out and which is certainly true. However, I hope people do not rush to
say that just because this movie is the most violent. Lucas should be credited
for fleshing out the dark characters and consequences in this movie that are
only hinted at in the others. The fact that the Galactic Republic has given way to a fascist Empire and the fact that this transformation was
brought about by the greed, disillusionment and hatred of a young person with
good intentions should be far more disturbing than the cartoonish violence. I
mean, really, does every wound have to be self-cauterizing?

I read that Lucas’ first cut of the movie lasted nearly
three and a half hours, a whole hour longer than the released version. Whether
he squeezed the final movie into a shorter time for aesthetic reasons or for
commercial reasons, the movie’s ending teases about important events rather
than explains them. Having browsed some message boards (on the official site
and on www.theforce.net, if you’re
interested), there seem to be many deleted scenes that could have filled out
the rushed ending. You have to question a director’s priorities when a scene
explaining the formation of the Rebel Alliance, the foundation of the original
“Star Wars” trilogy, is swapped for a scene where Anakin and Padme playfully
joust over who loves whom more. The checklist-style ending has been compared to
that of “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King,” but where Peter Jackson
had a revered text to adhere to, George Lucas has only himself. The “ROTS” DVD,
like the other prequel DVDs, ought to have an entire second disc’s worth of
deleted scenes, but if the final “Lord of the Rings” can go three and a half
hours, why can’t the final “Star Wars” also?

How would you rank
ROTS among the Star Wars movies?

Although I think the action and the plot of “ROTS” are the
best of the six, the movie is just too clumsy to compare to the original
trilogy. The acting is inconsistent, the pacing is rushed and after five movies
about the same thing, nothing in this movie feels fresh. This is not to say
“ROTS” isn’t a good movie, this is just to say that the original trilogy is
great and incomparable. I’m still a devoted fan. This is just my take after
having seen the movie twice so far, but I do plan to see it in theaters at
least another time. I suspect that after I’ve seen it as many times as the
others that it will move up in my rankings.

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Return of the Jedi
4. Revenge of the Sith
5. Attack of the Clones
6. The Phantom Menace