During our first visit to Tokyo in summer 1988, Kristin and I were sitting with a friend in a park. I remarked that for library research I’d like a scanner that could run over the surface of a book and store the text or print it out somehow. Our Japanese friend Komatsu Hiroshi said brightly, “I know where they sell that.”

He took us to Akihabara, and in one store a bored salesgirl stood at a table routinely running a handset over Japanese text. The gadget spit out a strip of characters, like a cash-register sales receipt. I didn’t buy one, largely because it was doubtful that I could ever get replacement print cartridges, but ever since then, Akihabara has stood as my emblem of geek paradise. There, the future is on sale today, and everybody becomes an otaku.

So what a pleasure to get Mark Schiling’s report on the neighborhood, and its relation to the anime on view in the Tokyo Film Festival. I haven’t been back in several years, but this article makes me want to book a flight tomorrow.

David here:

A correspondent asks: Why am I spending so much time at the Vancouver Film Festival watching Asian movies?

Well, I have dabbled in other regions. Most recently, I enjoyed Eugène Greene’s short Signs, a metronome-and-protractor movie that nonetheless harbors a sharp sting of emotion. More straightforwardly entertaining was Aki Kaurismaki’s Lights in the Dusk. You’ve seen the story’s premise before, both in film noir (femme fatale dooms hero) and in other Kaurismaki films (loser comes stubbornly back for more trouble, and gets it). But it’s as usual filmed in a laconic, Bressonian way, and we get another Kaurismaki protagonist who is blank-faced, obstinate, more than a bit thick, and, despite everything, quixotic.

Still, Asian films have come first for me, as for many others here. Why? The evidence is clear: Since the 1980s, movies from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Mainland China, South Korea, and more recently Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines have offered an almost unrivaled range of accomplishment. (Want names? Tsui Hark, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Kitano Takeshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Jia Zhang-ke, and on and on.) The energy hasn’t flagged, and Vancouver has been in the forefront of supporting this tidal wave of talent. Tony Rayns’ brilliant programming has set an international standard, and the festival’s Dragons and Tigers competition for first features have brought many young filmmakers to world attention.

So herewith some more outstanding Asian revelations from my final Vancouver days:

Hana: Kore-eda keeps surprising us; each film is quite different from the one before. In a downtrodden neighborhood of Edo (the old name for Tokyo), people live in mud and dung, struggling to get by. Some of the loyal 47 ronin wait impatiently to avenge their executed lord, while a young man hangs around trying to find his father’s killer. But the fact that the youth is a fairly inept warrior tips you off to the essentially comic vision underlying this warm movie. Add in a bully who isn’t actually a bad guy and a gallery of low-life neighborhood types, who pass the time rehearsing a play that unwittingly satirizes the samurai ethos. The result is a film that probes the righteousness of vengeance with tact and vulgar humor. Everybody I know wanted to see this again, right away.

My Scary Girl (Korea): The Trouble with Harry meets The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. Dae-Woo has never had a date, but he decides to start with his cute neighbor. He doesn’t know that she’s a Woman with a Past, not to mention a fairly worrisome Present and an ominous Future. Romantic comedy shifts to black comedy, and bowling pins mix with lopped-off fingers. It’s a crowd-pleaser, and Hollywood will probably rush to remake it. But will an American director have the guts to keep the very logical but not wholly happy ending?

I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone: Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has provocative ideas and burnished imagery, but sometimes I’ve thought he’s too clever by half. This movie, his first in his native Malaysia, won me over because it seems to play to all his strengths. Four people intersect around, under, and on a mattress, with an extra character as a kind of comatose sentinel. Tsai’s gorgeous imagery isn’t just pretty for its own sake. Like Tati, he can design compositions which are actually funny, and his long takes give us time to probe the textures and crannies of staircases, a building site, and ordinary streets. The film’s last shot is alone worth the price of admission.

No Mercy for the Rude (Korea): This time the hitman is a mute (or is he?) vowing to kill only the really bad people, and hoping to accumulate enough pay to afford an operation on his “short tongue.” He falls in with a street kid and a hooker, and as the seriocimic plot unfolds we get the very Asian insistence that childhood innocence can be recovered even in the midst of carnage. The film indulges in some flights of fancy—a hitman’s picnic, a hitman who’s a ballet dancer—before coming to its satisfying end in, of all places, a bullring.

Faceless Things: Warnings about gay sadomasochism to the contrary, this doesn’t offer much you can’t see in Warhol or Waters. What it does provide is three shots. The first, nearly 45 minutes long, provides virtually a one-act play about a motel tryst between a businessman and his teenage lover. The second shot shifts us to an anonymous sexual encounter that is admittedly fairly off-putting, but handled with the mix of casual framing and off-kilter suspense we find in, again, Warhol. The very last shot is very brief and puts the other two into a new context. Director Kim Kyong-Mook is only in his early twenties, but his ambition and daring make him a filmmaker to watch.

My last night has come all too soon. So just to make sure that the Europeans are still at work, I’ll check on the French cop movie Le Petit Lieutenant. I’ll end with another Dragons and Tigers entry, the Taiwanese movie Do Over.

Maybe a Chinese dinner afterward. Film isn’t the only thing that Asians do well.

David from Vancouver:

Why doesn’t Hollywood just outsource its genres to Asia? Keep making The Da Vinci Code and Capote, the presold blockbusters and the prestige indies, but leave the rest to people who know what they’re doing. Give the urban action movie to Johnnie To, Kitano Takeshi, and others who haven’t forgotten the furious intensity of White Heat or the ominous solemnity of The Godfather. Let the Koreans and the Japanese take over romantic comedy and the weepies. And as for horror–well, Hollywood’s remake machine acknowledges that more or less everybody does horror better than America.

Maybe people are finally getting it. The most celebrated director in the US has to get his career back on track with The Departed, the first Hollywood remake of a Hong Kong film (Infernal Affairs). Although Scorsese evidently claims he never saw the original (must be the only film he hasn’t seen), the point is clear. With the exception of smarty-pants B films (Torque, Running Scared, Crank), which are all good dirty fun, Hollywood genres have been severely blandified. Asian filmmakers, from India to Malaysia, have understood our genres better than we have, and they have given them a new visceral force and emotional edge.

Two cases in point from yesterday’s Vancouver Film Festival. Nishikawa Miwa’s Sway centers on two brothers, both involved in a mysterious death in a picturesque gorge. But how did it happen, and what effect will it have on the men? The film moves suspensefully from investigation to confession to trial and punishment, but at every step each character’s motives are questioned. Superbly plotted, Sway creates an unforgettable character in the apparently cheerful gas-station attendant Minoru, a man who harbors unexpected depths of anger and self-abasement. No American movie would have dared to give him such a rich array of contradictory traits, and right up to the last shot we are left to question what he did, and what he will do next. Classic Hollywood directors understood that genres could be tools for probing personality (Ford in My Darling Clementine, Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings, Hitchcock in practically anything). Nishikawa’s thriller is on that path as well.

Or take Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, the monster movie that has jammed eager audiences into three screenings in Vancouver. It is, as Tony Rayns mentioned in his introduction to yesterday’s matinee, one of the most popular movies in the world right now. It achieves its strength from its sheer mastery of genre storytelling. Dysfunctional family–> monster attacks–> family fights back: No surprise at this level of plotting, but Bong displays his sure knowledge of classical construction throughout. We get a trim four-part structure, and everything that will pay off at the climax is carefully planted in the opening scenes. Pointed criticism of American indifference to people overseas and sly pokes at Korean bureacracy are smoothly integrated into the action.

Bong makes clever use of props as motifs (watch out for those beer cans), and characters are at once funny and sympathetic. The alternation of humor, even gross bits, and shock is finely timed. On top of all these pleasures we get a remarkable monster, endowed with an athletic grace and fluency far from the lumbering Godzilla. Most important, Bong dares to make us grieve. Without giving too much away: contrast his film’s climax with the end of Spielberg’s (admittedly, pretty good) War of the Worlds, in which even those whining children are allowed to survive. The Host deserves all the praise it’s earned, and it marks another landmark in Korean cinema.

It’s an odd experience to watch Sway and The Host with hundreds of people sitting in breathless attention–no cellphone buzzes, no chatter, just the power of compelling storytelling. Just as spellbinding, though in a different register, was Ho Yuhang’s Rain Dogs. A coming-of-age story about a young man’s difficult relations with his family in rural Malaysia, it was exquisitely filmed, in a sort of Bresson-meets-Hou style. Lyrical landscapes and details of village life are punctuated by bursts of violence, and Ho’s elliptical approach to storytelling (delaying information about what is actually going on in people’s minds) is no less engrossing than genre work. We get a psychology-based uncertainty akin to that in Sway, but without the mystery plot to pull us through.

Rain Dogs joins an international tradition, that of Satayajit Ray and the Neorealists and “art cinema” more generally, but it’s been rethought in very local terms. In all, it’s another, equally valid, approach to storytelling. Interestingly, Ho (admirer of The Asphalt Jungle, Jim Thompson, and Robert Aldrich) says that his next project will be a crime movie. Maybe Scorsese will remake it.

David here:

Screening over 300 films across 16 days, the Vancouver International Film Festival is a banquet for movie lovers. I’m here for about half of the event.

Gorgeous weather, a lovely city (mountains + water = hard to beat), and cheerful, hospitable people have already made this a lot of fun. Arriving in the afternoon, and fortified by a quick Japanese meal (soba; more on this later), I went off to several hours of moviegoing and socializing.

The festival is particularly strong in Asian cinema, programmed by the indefatigible Tony Rayns; the festival also gives the “Dragons and Tigers” prize to young Asian filmmakers. It was while serving on that jury last year that I came to fall in love with this festival. There are over 40 Asian programs this time, including Ann Hui’s My Postmodern Aunt (starring Chow Yun-fat), Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana (his last film was the very touching Nobody Knows). A special treat is Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, already a cult monster movie that has Hollywood studios fighting for the remake rights.

Vancouver is also very strong in Canadian cinema, as well as documentary, experimental, and international work. Like all great festivals, it’s actually several festivals in one: No way you could see everything you want to see. It was so exciting last year that I determined to return and try to see even more new films.

Festivals are important to us film lovers, because you want to keep up with creative work being done all over the world. Living in the US makes it hard, because so many wonderful films–sometimes masterpieces–don’t get released theatrically. Marketing a film in a country as large as the US requires massive amounts of money, and many interesting films just won’t attract a big enough audience to pay back costs. Also, I’m afraid that some Americans are narrowing their tastes in movies, so that they won’t give a “foreign film” or a “little movie” a chance. Festivals exist to do just that.

So I’m happy to report that my first day yielded real riches. Yokohama Mary is a documentary about a mysterious bag lady who walks the streets, sleeps in the corridor of an office building, eats at Burger King, and paints her face a blinding white. Urban legends have grown up about her. Was she a celebrated prostitute? A woman grieving for her lover? She has become an icon of the city, inspiring novels, books of photographs, and a play. But now she’s disappeared. The filmmakers assemble a rich array of documents, including surveillance-camera footage, and they interview people in the neighborhood to try to understand how she lived and why she vanished. Mary’s life is a capsule history of the seedy side of postwar Japan, and the film is at once gripping and poignant, with a wonderful ending in which the filmmakers find out her fate.

Walking on the Wild Side is a picture of contemporary China that couldn’t be more unflattering. Three young day laborers drink, molest schoolgirls, and generally raise hell before they set out on a path of petty crime. These are the most unlikable protagonists I’ve seen in a long time, but the movie, shot on low-def video, is fascinating in taking us behind China’s economic miracle.

Back to Japan for my final movie of the day, the thoroughly peculiar Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast-Food Grifters. Directed by Oishii Mamoru, best known for his animated Ghost in the Shell, it invents its own urban legend, that of spectral figures who haunt fast-food restaurants. Oishii traces the history of postwar Japan through the changes from soba shops to burger joints, visited by a series of ghostly figures out of mythology and pop culture. The animation, mixed with documentary footage and still photos, is unlike anything I’ve seen before, at once photo-realistic and curiously flat, with soft edges and abrupt, spasmodic action. Again: No way you’ll see this at the Multiplex.

Today promises to be no less exciting. It starts with a panel discussion with Bong Joon-ho about The Host and includes, I hope, a Brazilian film, Kore-ed’s Hana, and more Asian shorts. Will post again soon.

For more about the festival, and the films I’ve mentioned, check here: www.viff.org