Ways To Be Happy

Quick take: Of Time and the City

2009-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

Last year I heard Terence Davies narrating Distant Voices, Still Lives at PFA. It was an autobiographical film to start with, and he took it the extra step and just talked over it, explaining the references and telling additional anecdotes. His latest film, Of Time and the City, is just like that. He's dispensed with the art of using "fictional" characters, and actors, and sets, and just about anything new. He just talks over old found footage and borrowed music.

Terence Davies is an old codger. He's also a genius, and Of Time and the City is a deeply moving film. It's about Liverpool in the mid-20th century, as well as aging, generations, urban planning, England, life, death, and countless other things. Somehow it made me pine for my own youth and remember things I'd forgotten for years (well, they were things about England). A deep and gorgeous movie.

Way To Be Happy No. 15

2009-06-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Rediscover a food from your youth.

I first had this bread on family vacations at Sea Ranch when I was in college, or even before. Wonderful, chewy, perfect for toast. After I moved to Northern California, for some reason I didn't like it for a long time. Now it's my favorite sandwich bread.

Way To Be Happy No. 14

2009-06-25T22:37:00.001-07:00

Wait until tomorrow.

Way To Be Happy No. 13

2009-06-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Think of a place where you felt safe. Probably a place with lots of positive associations and few negative ones. Go there in your mind. What does it look like? What does it sound like? How does it smell? What's it like in the morning? At night?

Just place yourself there and remember the details. Or invent them, if you're that kind of person. Let that place calm you.

Way To Be Happy No. 12

2009-06-22T17:52:00.000-07:00

Stop complaining. (Thanks for the ancient link, Jessica!)

Frameline

2009-06-20T22:12:00.000-07:00

Since I completely skipped blogging about SFIFF, I'm going to write something about the two films we've seen so far at Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT film festival. Today we saw The Butch Factor and Dare.

First of all, neither one is a film per se. They're both on digital video (unless I'm really missing something), but there's a lot of great work being done on video these days, so that's no strike against them. I did notice that the audio on Dare was sometimes hard to understand in the Castro Theatre because it was compressed way beyond normal theatrical sound.

I'm surprised no documentary before (that I knew of) had specifically tackled the topic that director Christopher Hines covers so thoroughly in The Butch Factor. The 87-minute feature explores gay men's complicated relationship with masculinity. The core segments of the film, and the freshest material here, are profiles of several gay men who play traditionally masculine roles: rugby player, construction worker, rodeo bull rider, and so on. Candid interviews about real people's lives often make for the best documentary material, and that's certainly true in The Butch Factor. We learn about the confusion these men felt while growing up and their sometimes painful experiences with living in the closet, as well as the camaraderie they feel just from hanging out with the guys.

Hines is a pro, and to paint a complete picture, he includes a few gay men with different approaches to masculinity. Along the way, the movie makes the point that sometimes the effeminate gay men are the toughest because they had to become that way.

The movie was exhaustively researched, with interviews of a wide variety of men all over the U.S. That's both its strength and its weakness. For me as a journalist, watching The Butch Factor sometimes felt like sifting through a cornucopia of great interviews and angles for a feature story. I felt the urge to edit and to hone the focus of the film. There are topics that are covered more than once when they don't really need to be.

Hines does give us breadcrumbs, though: Those are the little details that keep us interested through the film. The subjects are likable and there's enough humor in the movie to at least lighten up the expansive subject matter. Nevertheless, the movie felt longer than 87 minutes. In fairness, I should add that the seats in the Victoria Theatre (otherwise wonderfully restored) get uncomfortable pretty quick.

The Butch Factor is a comprehensive look at an important subject, to be enjoyed in the comfort of your living room -- or, as one person in the audience suggested, in every high school in America.

Dare is a wonderful expansion of a short that showed at Frameline four years ago. It's about a high school actress and her unpopular friend, the A/V guy, who follow their attraction to the Big Man On Campus, Johnny Drake, to an uncomfortable destination. The writing is nuanced, the direction is assured, and the performances by a stunning cast (Emmy Rossum, Zach Gilford of "Friday Night Lights," Alan Cumming, and Sandra Bernhard, among others) are superb. We got to see Gilford stretch a bit from his FNL role as sensitive underdog Matt Saracen, though he gets back on more familiar ground as Dare digs deeper into Johnny's character. Gilford was at the screening along with Rossum, director Adam Salky and writer David Brind for a lively Q&A afterward. Brind was the only gay person among them; it's nice to see another successful gay-straight film team.

Way To Be Happy No. 11

2009-06-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, having a good cry. This ought to do it.

Way To Be Happy No. 10

2009-06-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Take the time to catch up with an old friend.

Way To Be Happy No. 9

2009-06-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

Watch something surprising.

Way To Be Happy No. 8

2009-06-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

Stop worrying about that thing. You know, the one you can't do anything about now.

Way To Be Happy No. 7

2009-06-04T21:58:00.000-07:00

Be ethical.

Way To Be Happy No. 6

2009-06-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Try hard, finish what you can, and forgive yourself about the rest.

Way To Be Happy No. 5

2009-06-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

Appreciate your hunger, if you know it will be satisfied.

Way To Be Happy No. 4

2009-06-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

Listen to your friend's funny story.

Way To Be Happy No. 3

2009-05-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

Do something that makes you lose track of time.

Way To Be Happy No. 2

2009-05-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

Collaborate with other people for a good cause.

Way To Be Happy No. 1

2009-05-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

How can I help people through this blog? We all want to be happy, and we all know ways to do it. There's always research into this, too. Here's one of my own ideas.

If you are an envious person, remember that you have your life and other people have theirs, and your true needs are unique. To be happy, you have to discover your own needs and try to fulfill them. What other people have is irrelevant to you.

If you aren't an envious person, be thankful for that!

Sodagreen in LA?

2009-04-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

If this slightly dodgy report is to be believed, Los Angeles is about to be liberated from its dark, Sodagreen-less history.

Reviews: SFIAAFF 2009

2009-03-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

I kept it low-key this year at SFIAAFF, but saw eight programs, stayed well the whole time, and didn't take any time off work. Though '09 lacked the roundhouse punches of some earlier years, every program was rewarding in some way.

Tokyo Sonata
Like Bright Future, the one other Kiyoshi Kurosawa film I've seen, Tokyo Sonata felt futuristic. It's hard to say exactly why. It might be his very slight exaggerations of real-life phenomena, which suggest the way things might be if things got just a little more the way they are. He's clearly addressing a growing (downward) trend in the Japanese economy when he shows his salaryman protagonist getting laid off and joining other men in suits hanging around in the park. The general grimness of his family's buttoned-up life is searing for the first two-thirds of the film or so. (The lead actor has an amazing face that's like something out of a German Expressionist film.) The story then takes an unexpected turn that, while rewarding for a while, later weighs down the movie. But there are enough indelible images in Tokyo Sonata to make it a rewarding experience for anyone worried about where life may take them these days.

The Love of Siam
It's wonderful to see a film, from any country, that has at its heart a love story between two young men that's realistic and not primarily sexual. Whenever Tong and Mew are together, The Love of Siam crackles with drama and sweet electricity. The problem is, those scenes seem to add up to less than 45 minutes of a 158-minute film. This epic is overstuffed with the struggles of a fledgling pop band and a drawn-out story about a missing girl that only feels believable in one or two scenes. Though these narratives are interrelated, The Love of Siam is really three movies, one of which is a lot better than the other two.

Children of Invention
Tze Chun's hotly anticipated followup to his short Windowbreaker has a lot going for it: a rare suburban realism, stunning HD videography, and strong performances. It's a technically impressive film perfectly timed to our current financial nightmare. Why, then, was it slightly disappointing? I think it was a lack of mystery. A single mother in the Boston area gets into hot water over her involvement in a Ponzi scheme, and her children suffer the consequences. The grim premise pays off with some suspenseful and heartbreaking scenes. But once we're introduced to the characters, most of the insights offered by Children of Invention are unsurprising. A subplot about the boy's plan to make money selling inventions is cute but nver goes deep enough. The densely packed Windowbreaker felt as if it had raised 11 tantalizing questions in 11 minutes. Maybe it's fitting that a movie about a single mother trying to put her family's life back together maintains a laser focus on its central crisis, but Children of Invention might have been better if it had wondered and wandered a little more.

Family Portraits
The eight shorts in this program about family relations ranged from utterly simple (on the surface) to supersaturated and grim/fantastical. It was the two extremes that most interested me. What would it be like if your family tried to recreate a vacation photo taken 35 years ago? And what if yours were an Asian immigrant family, in which the parents had come to America long ago with high hopes for themselves and their children and ended up with a multiracial family, in today's vastly different Asian America? Those are just a couple of the questions raised by Julia Kim Smith's Grand Teton (view it here), one of the simplest films I've ever seen: four minutes, one angle, five or six people, some music. On the other hand, Wanda & Miles tells us about the troubled relationship between a young woman and her mother through reminiscences, animation, and a strange little dollhouse.

Fruit Fly
The premiere of H.P. Mendoza's Fruit Fly recalled the first screening of Colma: The Musical at SFIAAFF 2006. In a packed house -- the much larger Castro Theatre, this time -- the atmosphere was festive and the reception enthusiastic. In place of balloons, there was the director's LED T-shirt, its multicolored graphic equalizer visible throughout the house. Fruit Fly is a lighter film than Colma, gently poking fun at various aspects of (largely) gay life in San Francisco or any big city. Viewers looking for another classic dramatic arc will be disappointed, but Fruit Fly is a very entertaining 94 minutes. The Drosophila of the title is Bethesda, a straight young woman attracted to gay men. On a quest to find her birth mother, she moves to San Francisco and is surrounded by a cast of artistic and romantic searchers. As in Colma, the songs are catchy, the dialog is clever, and lead actress L.A. Renigen is wonderful. Rich Wong's cinematography is even better this time out, and there's the added attraction of Mark Del Lima's pulsating animation.

Lust, Caution
I wouldn't have gone out -- let alone crossed the bay -- to see Ang Lee's darkest movie again if not for the prospect of seeing the man himself for the first time. Yet I got so much more out of the movie this time that I'm almost embarrassed I didn't return earlier. This is a very complex film. Both the second viewing and Lee's fascinating insights confirmed that. What brings the young female spy and the sadistic middle-aged collaborator together is more than lust and cunning. Last time, I called this a black hole of a film. This time I saw a flower blooming in the middle of it -- a giant carrion flower, the kind that smells like rotting flesh.

High Noon
Festival Assistant Director Vicci Ho said that in Hong Kong, this "is likely to become the film that defines a generation." The story, with hoary elements like the drug spiral and the friend in a coma, hews more closely to a previous generation. But visually, director Heiward Mak and her team seem to invent a revolutionary new style every minute or so. Shots are defocused, overexposed, saturated, handheld, animated, spinning ... and all stunningly well composed.

Treeless Mountain
As with Children of Invention, I was sold on this one by the director's previous work, in this case So Yong Kim's cabin-fever masterpiece In Between Days. Also like Children of Invention, Kim's latest revolves around two adorable children forced to fend for themselves. But whereas I thought Tze Chun's film could have been just a little more compelling, I felt like Treeless Mountain ran into a wall about a third of the way through. It basically has a binary structure, throwing the kids into an urban setting first and then, much later, a very different rural one. But what could have been a powerfully simple 60-minute film instead is stretched to nearly 90, and it sags in the middle. A grueling existence can make for a great film, as In Between Days demonstrated, if it has something like that film's molten sexual tension. And Treeless Mountain has its charms, such as Kim's familiar ultra-close-ups, but without a powerful driving force, they trickle in a bit at a time.

SFIAAFF preview: Fruit Fly

2009-03-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Fruit Fly
Sunday, March 15
6:15 p.m.
Castro Theatre
94 minutes
SFIAAFF 2009

H.P. Mendoza is one of those rare musicians who can compose catchy tunes seemingly in bulk. After his scrappy Colma: The Musical, directed by Richard Wong, which achieved an amazing national theatrical run, the hits keep on coming in Fruit Fly. It's Mendoza's directorial debut, which he also wrote, while Wong contributed the superb cinematography. This musical is about a kind of person most of us have known but few have understood: The straight woman who likes to hang out with gay men. The movie explores its protagonist and the people around her from multiple angles, skewering some well-known urban types, but Mendoza's rapier-like wit also has a forgiving side. Mendoza and Wong do more with their shoestring budgets than most Hollywood teams do with millions.

SFIAAFF preview: Family Portraits

2009-03-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

Family Portraits
Sunday, March 15
3:45 p.m.
Sundance Kabuki Cinema
96 minutes
SFIAAFF 2009

It's easy to overlook shorts programs, but they're often the most rewarding experiences you can have at a festival. Shorts are where you'll usually get your first chance to see young, fresh talents showing off their skills and vision before moving on to feature films. Case in point: Windowbreaker, at SFIAAFF 2007, which clued me in to Tze Chun in advance of his Children of Invention, coming this year. And sometimes you catch a fleeting glimpse of a unique perspective that never really reappears. It took me a while to remember the full title of Preservation of the Song, which I saw at Frameline in the mid-1990s, but I've never forgotten its raw honesty and emotional complexity.

You also never know what you're going to get with a shorts program, both in quality and character, but if one thing leads you in, another may send you out of the theater with a lasting memory. What got me interested in Family Portraits was the brief description of Julia Kim Smith's Grand Teton: "The impulse to reconstruct a 35-year-old photograph brings generations together, creating a family portrait before our eyes." That lit up several parts of my brain, all or none of which may end up satisfied with the actual 4-minute video, but it's worth taking a chance. Festivals are the time to do it!

SFIAAFF preview: Children of Invention

2009-03-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

Children of Invention
Saturday, March 14
7:00 p.m.
Sundance Kabuki Cinema
88 minutes

Tze Chun's short film Windowbreaker made a big impression on me at SFIAAFF 2007 and has stuck with me ever since. It was daring enough that Chun took on a real narrative (though an elliptical one) in a film only 11 minutes long. But what he created was more complex and evocative than many feature-length movies. Set in a lower-middle-class suburb in the Northeast, Windowbreaker told the story of a single mother, her two kids, and the dilemma of whether to buy an home alarm system amid a rash of neighborhood break-ins. It hinted at a whole world of private heartache and struggle, leaving the details deep in mystery. Two whispered lines of dialog between the children took it over the top for me. I think Chun mentioned during the Q&A that day that he was working on a feature-length movie about those characters, and I've been looking forward to it ever since. Children of Invention premiered at Sundance and continues its festival run at SFIAAFF.

How To Be Emo: Panthers Edition

2009-02-27T21:27:00.000-08:00

"Friday Night Lights" is getting squeasy. All these intense relationship scenes and ultra close-ups. It's like "In Between Days: The Series." Do I like that? Uh, sure. Maybe tonight just isn't the night for it.

Quick take: Junebug

2009-02-25T21:49:00.000-08:00

Since I saw Junebug a few weeks ago, I've found myself recommending it to several people but having a hard time putting into words what I loved about the film.

At its heart, it's a movie about the meeting of two cultures. Newlyweds from Chicago travel to North Carolina to talk to an outsider artist about selling his work. They stay with the husband's family in the home where he grew up. Junebug stands out by being brutally realistic about both country folk and educated urbanites without ridiculing either group. During the visit, the husband's brother and sister-in-law (Amy Adams, infectious in a breakout role) are expecting a baby. But to me, the movie is about the Chicago couple and the different ways each of them straddles the urban and rural worlds. The writing is exceptional. So is the cinematography, which takes weird and original angles on simple settings such as a breakfast nook. The look is perfect for a movie that doesn't try too hard to be unique but isn't quite like anything else.

SFIAAFF Preview: The Love of Siam

2009-02-23T20:39:00.000-08:00

The Love of Siam
Saturday, March 14
2:15 p.m.
Castro Theatre
158 minutes

When I know I'm going to see a movie -- or will see it if I possibly can -- I stop reading about it. I want as many surprises as possible. And when expat and ex-Festival staffer Chris Schulz wrote several hundred words about The Love of Siam in his wonderful blog about living in Krungthep (Bangkok), I knew I wanted to see it. But Chris is a thoughtful person, and thoughtfully, he left all his spoilers until the end.

Chris tells us Love of Siam is a movie about the reality of being gay and young, as opposed to young and gay. And apparently it was a breakthrough film for the Thai film industry and generated a huge following and a lot of controversy.

Even at "just" 158 minutes (not the 200-minute director's cut Chris saw), this movie sounds like it has the kind of "bigness" that makes it memorable long after the house lights come up. I'm really looking forward to it.