Everybody Loves the Sunshine

... but you don't see much of it in the future when the sun has almost burnt out, the planet earth is an ice-land (like Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back) and a crack team of scientists, engineers and other specialists are sent to jump-start the sun in a spaceship with a gigantic shield like a big golden mushroom cap. Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later) unfolds an outerspace journey with his latest Sunshine, which reveals more about the human psyche in crisis than it does about astronomy or physics. It was fascinating to follow the international cast aboard Icarus 2 through the first 3/4 of the film as they negotiated decision-making processes, personality conflicts, and hormonal outbursts all in the context of a mission to save the future of humanity. Of course the Japanese captain of the mission is the first to sacrifice himself to save his crew. And Tmonkey noted a major point of disbelief in the movie (I mean, besides to basic premise, of course): character played by British-Chinese Benedict Wong makes a calculation error that precipitates catastrophic consequences to the mission. OK an Asian mathematician would never make an error. Point taken. This was only one of several unbelievable plot points, but in a way it didn't matter. What was interesting was tracking the tenuous balance between the two sides of human nature: rational and irrational. Who is going to sacrifice himself in order to save the crew/mission/earth? Who has self-serving motives? And how well are they disguised? Many parts of the film are beautifully contemplative, reminiscent of Solaris (the Soderbergh, haven't seen the Tarkovsky - yet). That is, of course, until Icarus 2 meets its predecessor Icarus 1 -- a mission that had disappeared or been lost for mysterious reasons.

The last chunk of the film entirely abandons its musings on human nature and just goes for pure cheap shock & horror. The lone survivor of Icarus 1, the deranged and awfully sun-burnt captain, sneaks on board Icarus 2 and tries to destroy the ship before it fulfills its mission. Doe-eyed Cillian Murphy blossoms into a man of action and successfully kills the insane zombie and re-starts the sun with a big old nuke, allowing just a little more sunlight to reach the earth, prolonging the future of humanity ever-so-slightly. All-in-all, a fun summer sci-fi thriller with a sardonic balance between optimism and disgust for the human race.

SPF: Unfolding

Kristoffer Diaz is back in town! My fellow Fellow at New Dramatists, Kris is just back from spending a year in purgatory (aka Cleveland) doing all sorts of shady things, hanging out in strip clubs, befriending meth-heads, and teaching theater to young audiences. He invited me out on Sunday to see a play at the Summer Play Festival, where his own Welcome to Arroyo's played a couple summers ago.

I didn't know anything about Joy Tomasko's play Unfold Me, but I was surprised find out my friend Lindsay Firman was directing it. It was a mysterious play caught somewhere between everyday reality and heightened magical realism. A woman who works in a laundromat and her boyfriend, who handles used clothing donations at a charity are a couple. The woman is diagnosed with cancer, and the news sends both reeling apart from each other. The boyfriend tries to strike a deal with a mysterious and sexy blond, who turns out to be Death personified; while the woman is befriended by a friendly guy in a hoodie, who turns out to be the human form of her cancer. What happens next is not interesting as the basic premise of anthropomorphizing Death and Disease. There's some elusive and questionable romance that blossoms between boyfriend and Death when he tries to make a deal for Death to take him instead of laundromat girl. And there is a strange bonding over morning coffee between laundromat girl and Disease when boyfriend doesn't show up at the appointed time. In the end, the burgeoning exploration of our attitudes towards death and disease falls short and is reduced to very predictable human interactions.

no, not that kind of mime

If you never studied theater history, particularly the brief history of theater in the U.S., you might think that the San Francisco Mime Troupe consists of a bunch of guys in skin-tight rainbow-colored bodysuits acting their way out of invisible boxes. But as they declare on the side of their truck, "no, not that kind of mime." The legacies that were born and grew out of the physical stylized form of commedia dell'arte from the Italian Renaissance include many different schools and genres of performance, but they usually have some roots in physical story-telling and the grotesque/satire. The SF troupe, founded in 1959, is one of the oldest companies in the U.S. today, and their work has come to be considered a staple in the landscape of popular (as in, of the people, political) theater tradition here.

My best friend from high school, Lisa, has been with the company for a few years now, so this year, on a birthday trip out west, I caught their latest show MAKING A KILLING. After spending the morning at the beautiful new-ish Asian Art Museum and grabbing tacos at La Taqueria (that boasted "the best tacos in the world" -- a very bold statement I would say) we headed to Dolores Park and joined some friends on a nice patch of blanket. Tmonkey pretty much immediately succumbed to a food coma, but his shins made for a nice back rest.

I should say here that I am not a huge fan of this kind of theater. "This kind" meaning those with an overt and unabashed political agenda. And also those that fall into a certain kind of tongue-in-cheek musical-theater genre. But this show was probably the most watchable ones by the troupe in recent years. This year's show was set against the backdrop of the Iraq war. The main players are Dick Cheney, played with a lot of despicable fun by Ed Holmes, a jaded army news reporter and his younger, idealistic photographer sidekick (and lover), and Condi Rice. The topics covered: integrity (or lack thereof) in reporting on the Iraq War, the unleashed greed of politicians, and lesser known facts of how "dirty" bombs during Desert Storm have left a generation of innocent people with cancer. Add that to the litany of how f*ed up this country's government is.

Well they were preaching to the converted, as I suspect most of their shows do, touring up and down California all summer. The crowd is appreciative of the politics and the goofy humor. I particularly liked the repetition of Dick Cheney keeling over dead, to be resuscitated by a remote control pocketed by Condi. Oh and the big gay kiss finale was cute. But a deeper impact could surely be had were they to tour to more politically conservative parts of the country. I'd love to see what would happen if they drove up to a stadium in Texas and set up their stage.

In-Between Days

Remind you of The Cure song?

This new film ending its short fun at the IFC, which apparently the saving grace of the Sundance Film Festival this year, was written and directed by So Yong Kim. A simple, hands-off story without much dialogue (and what there is is mostly in Korean -- and subtitled in English), this feels-like-documentary follows the story of Aimie, an adolescent Korean F.O.B. in an unnamed (but clearly freezing-nipples cold) city in North America, as she negotiates school, an ambiguous love relationship, and an estranged mother. The stark, gravelly film was almost painful to watch, it was so well (as in subtly) acted. Jiseon Kim as Aimie is remarkably watchable -- to see her caught between Korean and Korean-American, child and adulthood, and all the gradations in between. I wasn't convinced about the use of sporadic voiceover (Aimie's imaginary letter to her father who left both wife and daughter), but nevertheless, it was an achingly beautiful portrayal of what it's like to be an immigrant.

Bobby Silverman, my nemesis, Where has our youth gone?

I've been out of touch.

I suppose changing my e-mail address every 3 years doesn't help. Despite my best efforts to inform my friends and enemies of the best ways to communicate with me, inevitably, a few people slip through the cracks. So when my dear friend Patrick McCaffrey (the irresistible, the ever-loved) sent me an e-mail saying:

Dear Friends/Colleagues,
I'm sorry if I have been out of touch in the past few months and I hope you are all well. As you know, I am the last person to send (or appreciate) mass emails, but I have decided to make an exception.

I'm involved in a show that I'm very proud of and I hope you are able to make it. The evening is the brainchild of my good friend Robert Saietta from the International WOW theatre company and we have been working on it for over a year.

It is an extraordinary piece of theatre. I hope you can make it.
The first beer is on me.

I almost screamed. Patrick, was alive, still in NY, and doing a show? With my former arch-nemesis Bob Saietta/Silverman?? And why hadn't I already received a gazillion e-mails from Bob?! I bought a ticket on-line immediately and looked forward to the show all week.

It was at the Brick, their annual summer festival, which this year was dubbed The Pretentious Festival. Bob's show was called Yudkowski Returns! (The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Dr. Eliezer Yudkowski). At this point I should maybe talk about why Bob was my long-time nemesis.

I met him a long long time ago, as the high school mate of a then-boyfriend. We ended up doing a gazillion plays together, much to my dismay, and I even survived my worst nightmare come true -- to be living with Bob in a foreign country. Why, you ask, why such a violent reaction against another human being? Well, because Bob embodied the exact opposite of me in every way. Whatever I was, he was diametrically the opposite, in my mind. I like to think of myself as clean, graceful, independent. Bob... well, he was sloppy. He spilled a full cup of coffee in the rehearsal room at EVERY REHEARSAL WITHOUT FAIL. He was inappropriate. He sometimes exposed himself during physical improvisations. Many times he would resort to 3rd grade tactics of grossing out the girls. He talked to himself. He was asthmatic, but he rolled his own cigarettes and tried to smoke them. For about 5 or 6 or 7 years I couldn't stand him. Like, literally.

But a funny thing happens I guess, when you know someone and their work for a long time. With some time and distance between us now, I have a great fondness for Bob -- call it nostalgia, call it delusion -- but I see all the things he has that I lack. He is paranoid, yes, but he is sweet. He has a twisted and delightful sense of humor. There is something about Bob, his seeming help/haplessness (maybe related to his Upper West Side Jewishness) that inspires a gush of compassion and love.

So, Bob's new play had much in common with many of his other plays; protagonists trapped or somehow in self-imposed seclusion, apart from the rest of the world. In this case, we begin in a kind of horrifying self-help or motivational instruction event -- a charming assistant introduces the entrance of (cue the cheesy music...) Doctor Yudkowski, played by Patrick, who exudes all the charisma and appeal that Tom Cruise should have had in Magnolia. The Doctor is here to help us, to enlighten us. He asks us what troubles us -- and we name our fears: career, money, fear of insects. He invokes our deeper fears: War. Disease. Death. What if we ended the war in Iraq? Wouldn't there be another war to take its place? What if we could end the AIDS epidemic? Wouldn't there be another more powerful and devastating disease to take over our world? We need a solution to end all our fears, one answer to all of our problems, and that answer is: THE SINGULARITY. The idea that all of our concerns will soon be answered by artificial intelligence that is so much more superior and intelligent than its creator. (I learned later that his is actually a real "school" of thought, a kind of anti-religion for technology worshippers. I also learn that Yudowski -- with a "y" -- is also a real person.) So here is Dr. Yudowski, holed up in his room in Brooklyn, which he shares with his lovely assistant - girlfriend, actively seeking out the answer to all of our life's problems.

Meanwhile, all this fascinating techno-philosophy is interspersed with self-conscious scenes from a relationship. The disintegrating romance between Dr. Y and his assistant/girlfriend are portrayed in snaps of their mundane conversations about ordering Chinese food and paying the rent -- and in the end, escalating to a fight after which they watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dr. Y enacts and re-enacts his break-up over and over again. If you expect love to be a wild passionate fiery affair, will you be able to recognize it when it appears as calm and comfortable? Dr. Y voices the root of his troubled mind at the beginning of the play: he believes in the world's ability, even humanity's ability to change. But he's not so sure about his own ability to change. So he stays in his room and ponders singularity and replays the scene of his girlfriend walking out on him, over and over. And we begin to wonder... this singularity which is supposed to save all of humanity -- is it perhaps the terrifying truth that we are in fact already embedded in a singularity as individuals? We trap ourselves in our little boxes, and any attempt to share that space with anyone else is a mere charade?

The show had some rhythmic clunkiness, though clocking in at an hour, and with free warm beer. It's supposed to have another run at the end of July -- I'll def be there to glean more wisdom from Dr. Y.

Gangsters, Cattle-thieves, Cyborgs & Poo

Last year I think I saw most of the films in the New York Asian Film Festival -- which screened Anthology and Imaginasian. This year, with fancier venues (IFC & JS) the selection of films seem a bit less titillating. Nevertheless, I've gone out to support my brothers and represent and enjoy some serious air-conditioning and blood-splattering, feces-flinging violence. From the Korean-heavy assortment of films, we chose a handful that ranged from ganster-thriller-martial arts-mystery to animated masterpiece about shit. Here's a brief rundown:

City of Violence (Jjakpae): a rather confusing mishmash of genres spanning the cheesy 80's coming-of-age, kung-fu action and detective-buddy flick. There was always a wink to the audience as five childhood friends are wracked by the sudden and violent murder of one of the group. Two of them (one of them a cop from Seoul) track down the murderer -- who turns out to be one of their gang. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry (we mostly laughed) but the fight sequences, including battles against break-dancing hipsters, baseball teams, a hundred Korean BBQ chefs armed with machetes, and four taikwando fighters dressed all in white were pretty thrilling and cringe-inducing.


Dynamite Warrior (Kon Fai Bin) from the producers and stunt coordinator of the famed Ong Bak, promised to be a goofy, over-the-top action comedy, and it did not disappoint. An entirely ridiculous padthai western set in the age of the industrial revolution, a wealthy greedy nincompoop lord with a scarred upper lip is trying to sell outrageously priced tractors to the farmers of Siam. This is of course facilitated by his secret band of thieves (led by a very hungry brute who stoops to cannibalism) who terrorize the land, stealing cattle from unsuspecting herders. Jone Bang Fai, the fireball bandit, also terrorizes the cattle herders with crazy huge phallic rockets, but his two-fold mission is to return the cattle to the farmers, and to hunt down the powerful wizard and cattle herder Sing who he believes to have murdered his parents. The story twists and turns from there -- there's an evil boil-ridden Black Wizard whose virgin daughter's menstrual blood is the key to disarm Sing, there are relentless fight sequences where Jone Bang Fai twirls in the air kneeing his opponents in every possible variation you can imagine and then some, there are murders, fires, monks, spirit possessions, sacrifice, and young love. Totally fun and unabashedly cheesy.

Saturday, we almost didn't make it out alive from the evening's Korean double-bill. I'm a Cyborg but that's OK which turned out to be one of the most charming, sweet, palatable love stories in recent cinema history. Featuring the mega-popstar Rain, the story is set in a sanatorium chock-full of endearing psychos and mentally disturbed patients. Our protagonist is a girl who discovers in late adolescence that she is actually a man-killing cyborg whose mission is to kill the hospital staff in order to escape and return her grandmother's dentures to her (who had also been carted away years ago, for believing herself to be a mouse and only eating radishes). Rain is a fellow-patient hospitalized for kleptomania (triggered by having been abandoned by his mother as a child) who falls in love with our adorable killer-cyborg and musters all his creative powers in order to save her from starvation (cyborgs do not eat human food). Though the story meandered at times, and should have ended soon after the reunion with Grandma and successful rice-megatron implant, the polished aesthetic and unbearable cuteness of the film never veered into the nose-bleed saccharine. I'd highly recommend this movie for all urban hipsters-couple/dates.

And finally: Ryo had convinced me that I had to see Aachi & Ssipak, an animated film 8 years in the making, set in the future when the earth has exhausted all of its natural resources, and had turned to human feces as an energy source. She knows me well -- indeed, on paper, this sounded right up my (scatalogically obsessed) alley. The government rewards its most prolific poopers with addictive Juicybars, which have caused a mutant race of orphaned Juicybar-addicts to emerge. Against this landscape, this entirely ridiculous film follows the story of two brainless hoodlums and one hoochie-mama and how they make it big with shit. Kind of. Honestly, story mattered very little in this non-stop action movie -- the violence was so over the top and incessant, it hardly gave pause for anything to land. A blatant satire of contemporary culture and neck-deep in references to American movies (Robocop, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, Armageddon, Easy Rider) and American idiocy (Paris Hilton), this exhausting movie couldn't quite maintain its levity despite the inane subject matter and extreme velocity. Tmonkey & I fell asleep periodically throughout the movie, and felt totally spent afterwards.

Still it was a fun week for the movie addict in me. Props to the Subway guys esp Grady who introduces each film with such joyful effervescence you can't help but get excited. You rock the fuchsia suit!