Jason watches "Run, Fatboy, Run"

And it was okay. Simon Pegg is funny, the movie is a pretty standard goofball romantic comedy. The end.

Jason goes to the Niles Film Museum and sees a night of Chic Sales movies

Here I've been running all over the bay area watching movies at different film festivals all over the place, and I've been neglecting my own backyard. Right here in Fremont, in the historic Niles district (site of the Niles Essenay film studio), we have a silent film museum and the only theater in the country that plays silent films every week (Saturdays, 7:30 pm, at the old Edison Theater). I've been meaning to get over and check it out for a while, and I finally did last night.

So they tell me it's unusual for them to do a program devoted to just one performer, but that's exactly what they did yesterday. A program on Charles "Chic" Sale, with three generations of his descendants in attendance.

I'd heard the name before, but didn't really know who Chic Sale was. In a nutshell, he was a vaudeville comedian and "quick-change" artist who was famous for playing many characters on stage and at rotary clubs around the country (more on that later). When he broke into movies, he again capitalized on his talent for playing multiple characters, often playing the majority of the characters in a movie.

Now back to the rotary club. He toured the country as Lem Putt, entertaining rotary club dinners with a detailed description of his specialty. He was a carpenter, specializing in building privies. And this monologue was transcribed in a book called "The Specialist" and a sequel "I'll Tell You Why". The first of these was put on film and was the first film of the night. Chic, as Lem Putt, expounds on the philosophy of design, construction, and maintenance of you basic privy. He brags about the 8-holer he built for a union workhouse, he discusses the merits of inward-swinging doors vs. outward swinging. He even expounds upon the proper paint schemes (red with white trim, or white with red trim, for better visibility at night). Very funny. Oh yeah, this was a "talkie".

We then were treated to a silent showcase of his chameleon talents, as he played all the characters in "The Rural Sunday School Benefit". Not much of a story, just a collection of characters, introduced with the explanation that he did not use facial makeup to play characters from children to the elderly, it's all in his extraordinary face muscles. Pretty talented.

Then we saw perhaps the last sample of Chic Sale on film ever. A screen test where he played a schoolteacher in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". Another talkie, and he hams it up wonderfully as the prim schoolteacher expounding on the scientific names for the common dandelion, scolding Tom Sawyer for talking to Huckleberry Finn, and drunkenly drawing the Great Lakes and Mississippi River on his birthday (that last one was odd and kinda out of place).

So then we had an intermission, and I got to tour the original projection booth that was used in 1913-1923 (As best I can remember from the talk, it was at least close to those dates), and is used again today. That was freakin' cool! I wanna hand-crank an antique film projector one day!

So then it was time for the main event, "His Nibs". This is another movie with Chic Sale in multiple roles, including a movie-within a movie. Sale plays Theodore Bender (nicknamed, "His Nibs"), an old codger who owns the Slippery Elm nickelodeon theater. He also plays many members of the audience, an uptight censorious newspaper publisher, a lousy singer, the emcee, and even the female piano player. In his theater, he plays "He Fooled Them All", a comedy about scammers, starring...Chic Sale (hey, I thought my generation invented meta-comedy!) A pretty weird movie, with gags like His Nibs didn't like the intertitles of the movie, so he cut them out and shouts out what's happening himself (which, being a silent movie, shows up as intertitles with a picture of him cranking the projector). Or one real falls out of his projection booth and down the street, so he has to have an intermission while he chases it down. Pretty cool.

And that was the night with Chic Sale. Pretty fun, and I think I'll be back to the Saturday night movies in Niles many times.

Jason falls into a Vortex and sees "Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonsters"

It's been a while since I've been to the Vortex Room, and it was nice to come back. A comfortable place where you can have a few drinks and watch some "classic" movies.

Like, for example, "Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster" (1965). The planned trip to Mars is too dangerous for a human being, so the government creates a sort of artificial cyborg with a robot brain to fly the mission--alone. They pass him off as a human astronaut, and the doubts about his lack of backstory are quickly dismissed as "he's shy". Unfortunately, he doesn't even leave earth's orbit before he's shot down by Princess Marcuzan and Doctor Nadir, evil alien monsters traveling to earth with an army to capture "breeding stock". That's fortunate, because instead of having to shoot a space movie, now they can shoot it in Puerto Rico. And it makes the spacemen kidnapping bikini-clad babes actually integral to the plot. Everyone wins! But more specifically, Frankenstein wins.

I didn't stick around for "Godzilla vs. Monster Zero", because I had to catch the BART home. But I'm sure that would've been fun, too.

Jason discovers that the Primitive Screwheads have Korean copycats!

http://www.wtam.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104673&article=3465855

I guess since Sam Raimi didn't sue the Primitive Screwheads, they probably shouldn't bother getting worked up over this. Still, weird. They even chose "Evil Dead" for the basis of their show.

But the real question is, do they have their fans posting pictures of their bloody underwear on the Internet?

Jason reveals his own economic stimulus package

Tee hee, "stimulus package"....

So I was eating lunch in our work cafeteria the other day. One of my co-workers, in her change, got on of the new $5 bills, and we were all looking at it. We were all duly impressed by the big purple 5, and then one of my co-workers blurted out, "maybe they changed it to make it prettier so more people would want it". And I immediately said, "No, if they wanted me to desire more money, they wouldn't just make the 5 purple, they put dirty pictures on it!"

And that got me thinking....

The current ~$600 per taxpayer economic stimulus is pretty silly (and I say that armed with one quarter of high school economics). First off, for the vast majority of taxpayers $600 is not a lifestyle-changer. Second, isn't this the sort of free-money handouts that fiscal conservatives are supposed to decry? And finally, it feels wrong to spend our way to prosperity.

To stimulate the economy, you don't want to convince people to spend more (especially when they can't afford it. I can't help but believe behavior like that is responsible for our current predicament). You want to convince people to work harder/smarter/better/more to earn more money. That's where a limited edition of highly-prized pornographic images on legal tender comes in.

Now, it would do no good to make pornographic $5. Most people already have plenty of $5's or $20's they could take to the bank and exchange for $5's. We need a denomination that requires significant but reasonable effort to obtain. Also, bowing to our over-protective instincts, a denomination that children are not likely to see. Furthermore, it should be something with a high enough cash value that people aren't likely to hoard them--the opportunity cost of removing that cash value from your wealth should be higher than the value of looking at dirty pictures. And that's why I propose the pornographic $100 bill. Added bonus--it has not yet been redesigned, but is the next in line. Get on it, Larry Flynt!

Arguments could be made for other denominations (maybe $100 is too low, or even too high), but I think as the highest denomination that I've actually seen in circulation, it's a pretty reasonable choice. I suppose similar logic could also be applied to poorly performing currency. I can't help but think that the $1 coin would've been more popular if Sacajawea took off her top (note, same logic doesn't apply to the Presidential $1 coin series).

The point of all this is...I'd make a crappy leader. But I do wonder how many votes I could get if I ran for President and the entirety of my platform was "I'd replace the current pictures on our money with pictures of naked ladies!"

Jason watches "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"

Aka, Judd Apatow and his cronies make a lazy, intermittently funny movie.

First, I must thank my friend Karen for taking me to this press screening (it opens April 18).

As for my review, that was it, in the first line. I guess I could summarize the plot--guy gets dumped by his famous actress girlfriend, goes to Hawaii to forget her, by coincidence she shows up there. They meander through a movie with cameos from Judd Apatow regulars--Bill Hader, Johah Hill, Paul Rudd, etc.--all playing the part of "conspicuous cameo from a friend of Judd Apatow". As I said, I laughed at bits. There really are a lot of good jokes, they're just hung on such a lazy, lazy story. And I should say that the audience seemed to laugh a lot more than I did.

Now what I really want to write about--penises (penes? What's the plural? Cocks.) Something has happened to mainstream film while I was off watching art house and festival films. I first noticed it in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". Apparently to mainstream American audiences, the sight of a penis is hilarious. A naked lady can be presented either erotically or comically in mainstream American film, but apparently a naked man can only be comedy. And it's getting worse. At least in "Walk Hard" there was some comedy in the penis being uncomfortably close to John C. Reilly's face. Here the comedy is just a naked man standing in his living room. Neither the penis nor any other part of the man is doing anything funny, but this was the biggest laugh of the movie. I think "Idiocracy" got it slightly wrong. The most popular movie 1000 years from now won't be "Ass" (2 hours of a guy's ass, sometimes it farts), it'll be "Cock".

I can't believe that after going to three film festivals back-to-back-to-back, this is the movie that eases me back into mainstream cinema.

Jason goes to Asianfest--the real closing night

Now it's all really over for another year.

First up was a hilarious documentary "Killing of a Chinese Cookie". Did you know fortune cookies aren't Chinese, they're American? In fact, there's debate over where they actually started--Los Angeles or San Francisco--and even what immigrant nationality started them--Chinese or Japanese (there's even a theory that they became associated with Chinese restaurants when all the Japanese Americans were put in camps during WWII). This documentary doesn't really take a stand on that issue. But it is fun, funny, and a weird look at a quintessentially (Asian) American bit of pop culture. It's a fantastic documentary and I had a great time with it...in bed!

Then it was off to Indonesia for "Three Days to Forever", a meandering road movie about kissing cousins. Ambar's sister is getting married. She (Ambar) misses her flight. Luckily her cousin Suf is driving across the country to the wedding, because he has to deliver the traditional set of antique family dishes (on which the bride serves her first meal for her new husband). So Ambar catches a ride with him. Between innumerable wrong turns and cigarettes (most of the tobacco is of the "wacky" variety) they explore the Indonesian countryside, religion (they're Muslim in a predominantly Muslim country, but they do visit a Catholic shrine), growing up, and sex. That last one's the most controversial part. But mostly it wanders through lush Indonesian countryside. And the views (of the countryside, and of Ambar) are quite beautiful.

So from Indonesia I wandered over to Thailand. For most people, if they think of Thai cinema at all they might think of Tony Jaa's fight-heavy but story-poor flicks. But to festival audiences Thai cinema is Wisit Sasanatieng. His first two offerings, "Tears of the Black Tiger" (known as the first pad-thai western) and "Citizen Dog" were hilarious candy-colored visual flights of fantastic imagination. In his third movie, "The Unseeable" he calms down the colors quite a bit and uses an earth-toned yellow-green palette to tell a surprisingly and elegant horror movie. He's working firmly in genre here (he did before, with a western and musical romantic comedy, but here he's more interested in paying homage to the genre than putting the genre through a kaleidoscope), and that genre is a ghost story. Nualjan is a young pregnant woman who's traveling to Bangkok to find her husband. Along the way, she takes work as a maid in an old rundown mansion. Legend has it the mansion used to be grand, and a beautiful woman and her dashing husband lorded over the place. Now the madame is still there, but no mention of what happened to the master. Nualjan takes up residence in the servants quarters with Choy, a very superstitious and talkative servant. She's bossed around by the stern and severe manager. And the mysterious madame is there in the house, but Nualjan isn't allowed to see her. Strange things happen, and the story of the many ghosts on the grounds slowly unfolds, with a very effective surprise ending. Sasanatieng shows mastery of yet a third genre, and although I haven't seen anything else that interests me in Thai cinema, if he's the only filmmaking voice Thailand has to offer it's still pretty damn impressive.

Continuing my pan-Asian tour, I travel to Shanghai (and back in time to the 30's) for "Blood Brothers". A stylish Shanghai gangster noir that pays homage to the genre while adding a solid voice to it, "Blood Brothers" is the story of three simple rural friends. Kang is the tough one, Xiao Hu is his weaker brother, and Fung is their best friend--practically a brother--who actually enjoys their simple country life. But Kang has bigger plans--go to Shanghai, become a waiter at a fancy club, and make their fortune. Fung is hesitant, but wouldn't break up the team. When they get there and fall in with crime/film/nightclub boss Hong, their friendship/brotherhood is put to a harder test. They pull together and despite the blood on their hands things are actually looking good...until the beautiful showgirl gets in the way. It relies a lot on cliches, and it could be argued it doesn't necessarily add anything to the genre. But it does pull through with loads of style, and the standard elements come through as homage more than cliche (at least to me. I talked to some audience members who disagreed).

And finally, back to America, specifically New York in the year 2000 (think dot-com bust) for "Pretty to Think So". Here's something I don't think I've ever seen on screen before--a love triangle between an Indian-American woman, a Korean-American man, and a Chinese-American man. Hannah Shah just got laid off as an investment banker and is unemployed in Manhattan. On a night drinking and commiserating with her (still employed) investment banker friend, she meets Jiwon Kim. He's a successful corporate lawyer, unaffected by the dot-bomb, and they start dating. But then she runs into Alex Yuen. He was her childhood friend, back when her family were the only Indians in New York's Chinatown. He had an abusive father and a gambling problem, and ran away when he was little. Now he's a youth minister and attending gambling anonymous meetings (and trying to avoid the free shuttles to Atlantic City). To complicate matters futher Alex is Jiwon's client (renegotiating the lease on their building). There's even some violence as Alex can't escape his difficult path, although the violence seems somewhat out of place in this movie. All in all, it's an interesting look at the time and place and fears associated with the dot-com bust and with growing up, love, and escaping your path. A fine end to the festival. Here's a pic of producer Balaji Srinivasan:


And that's how Asianfest 2008 ends.