Categotry Archives: General

i am so late on this. but there are many films to see starting this thursday. if any of the following strikes you with interest, let me know as i love film buddies!

Friday, April 27, 10:45pm, Kabuki

Black Sheep

Forget mad cow disease—it’s Mary’s little lambs you need to worry about! With a little creature and makeup assistance from Peter Jackson’s formidable Weta workshop, debut director Jonathan King has crafted a witty and delightfully gory tale delineating the havoc that ensues when genetically engineered sheep are introduced onto a family farm.

Saturday, April 28, 4:30pm, Kabuki

Hana

A movie about a samurai from the director of After Life and Nobody Knows. Filled with Kore-eda’s characteristic moments of quiet beauty, this tale of a hapless samurai seeking vengeance but finding acceptance is a celebration of pacifism and a tribute to Japanese cinema history.

Sunday, April 29, 12:30pm, Castro

Opera Jawa

“In a pig’s liver, one can see an entire life.” This porcine prediction, made by a sage street singer at the beginning of masterful Indonesian director Garin Nugroho’s gorgeous, otherworldly epic, establishes an appropriately superstitious and magical tone for the fateful narrative about to unfold. Updating an ancient Sanskrit love triangle among spoiled royals—reimagined here as married pottery artisans Siti and Setio and village fat cat Ludiro—Nugroho has fashioned an all-singing, all-dancing morality play that pits cultural tradition and marital fidelity against radical uprising and erotic freedom.

Sunday, April 29, 2:30pm, Kabuki

After This Our Exile

Set in Malaysia in the 1990s, Hong Kong director Patrick Tam’s first feature in 15 years showcases superstar Aaron Kwok as a father whose complex relationship with his son tests the familial and cultural ties that bind.

Sunday, April 29, 4:45pm, Kabuki

All in this Tea

This absorbing documentary follows adventurer and world-renowned tea importer David Lee Hoffman as he travels through China in pursuit of the best handcrafted teas. After seeing this film, you’ll never drink a cup of tea the same way again.

Sunday, April 29, 6pm, Kabuki

The Heavenly Kings

Three friends, each with a different background in the Hong Kong entertainment industry, decide almost on a whim to form a boy band. Realizing that none of them can really sing, they enlist the help of another friend who at least has released an album in Taiwan. Walking away from a sour record deal, the band, now called Alive, surreptitiously releases a song on the Internet, then complain to the press that the catchy tune has been pirated and uploaded illegally, generating a wave of publicity that turns the song into a major hit. The trappings of success—music videos, commercial sponsorship, tours—quickly follow, but in the best rock ’n’ roll tradition, the road to success is paved with self-destruction.

Monday, April 30, 9:45pm, Kabuki

Fay Grim

Remember Henry Fool? In Hal Hartley’s sequel of sorts to his 1997 opus, titular heroine Fay Grim embarks on a quest to discover the “unbelievable truth” about that fool Fool, with whom she had a son years ago. As an implacably devoted wife and mother, the unsinkable Grim (delightfully played by Parker Posey, channeling Louise Lasser in the venerable ’70s faux-soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), with an overflowing bag of groceries clutched to her chest, finds herself enmeshed in an ever-tightening web of clues, crimes and international espionage that take her from the kitchen table to the Bosporus Straits via the top hotels and boudoirs of Paris.

Wednesday, May 2, 9:15pm, PFA

Congorama

Blood diamonds, world expos, electric cars, long-lost fathers and emus. Such is the stuff of the unlikely world of surefire crowd-pleaser Congorama. Michel, an underachieving inventor trading on the name of his famous and ailing father, leads a life of unremitting frustration. So when said father reveals to Michel that he is not Belgian, but is instead an adopted Canadian, Michel finally uses one of his well-intentioned yet ultimately pointless inventions as cover for a quest to find his biological family. Ostensibly trying to sell cable deicers to the government of Québec, Michel lights in the rural hamlet of Saint-Cécile, where a series of chance encounters will change his fortunes forever.

Wednesday, May 2, 9:45pm, Kabuki

Paprika

This sci-fi anime mind trip centers on research psychotherapist Atsuko Chiba. She uses an experimental technology called the DC Mini, which allows her to enter her patient’s dreams and synchronize with their unconscious in order to better understand their neuroses. Once in the patient’s dream state, Chiba takes on the ass-kicking persona of a “dream detective” named Paprika. While the DC Mini appears to offer limitless psychotherapeutic potential, its misuse may have devastating psychological effects. When a DC Mini goes missing, uncanny events and a search for the Mini ensue, leading to a struggle over the very fabric of reality. This thrilling adventure represents the culmination of one of the most highly anticipated collaborations to take place in the Japanese film industry.

Sunday, May 6, 9pm, Kabuki

Amour-legende

They say no man is an island, yet Oshima, the protagonist of amour-LEGENDE, means “big island” in Japanese. In this stylish puzzler, Oshima journeys to a remote island, arrives suffering from memory loss, finds himself with a different young woman than the one he started out with and begins to question his own existence, island or no. A married man caught in an affair, Oshima has fled the high-rises of Taipei with his paramour, May, to vacation at Snow Mountain, “somewhere in South America,” hoping things will return to normal when they get home. But a series of misadventures as mundane as getting locked out of a rental car and as strange as dodging a prairie full of suicidal squirrels leaves him unconscious and unremembering, waking up on a sand dune next to a polyglot young woman named Coco. Accepting her offer to help find May, he heads with her toward Snow Mountain, along the way hearing ominous stories about that destination’s effect on couples who think they have a future together.

Monday, May 7, 8pm, Castro

Brand Upon the Brain!

A companion piece of sorts to the exceptional silent installation-feature Cowards Bend the Knee, the semiautobiographical Brand upon the Brain! mines the rich territories of director Guy Maddin’s youth and spins them into a delirious fantasy of familial discontent. At the edge of the sea stands a lighthouse, once the location of an orphanage. There, some years ago, lived Guy and Sis, a brother and sister under the constant observation of their mother yet entirely ignored by their father, an ingenious inventor. When Wendy Hale, amateur harpist and half of twin detective team the Lightbulb Kids, arrives to investigate a mysterious regenerative nectar harvested from the orphans, things grow ever more complicated. A love triangle becomes a quadrangle when Wendy masquerades as her brother Chance and goes in search of clues.

Tuesday, May 8, 1:30pm, Kabuki

Cold Prey

In this spectacularly scary slasher film from Norway, five snowboarders encounter a masked murderer in an abandoned ski lodge. Fans of last year’s surprise hit The Descent will thrill to the icy chills in this cleverly written and directed horror flick.

Thursday, May 10, 8:45pm, Kabuki

Aria

An eccentric and gently humorous road movie through beautiful seaside Hokkaido in which a taciturn widower, accompanied by a puppeteer’s apprentice and a mysterious young woman, looks for a piano and a beach beloved by his late wife.

i became a second cousin this morning sometime around 7:30am. i like to consider myself an aunt and not a second cousin though, which i think works out all right since i have a pretty close group of cousins. this pseudo-aunt business will stand me in good stead until i become a real aunt to my brother’s kid in october.

anyway, i’m hereby welcoming to the family, isabella rose, who was born april 22 at 6 pounds and 19 inches long. she’s hopefully out of the toaster she was put in to stay warm now even and happily enjoying her first day of life.

it is april 20th and it’s fast approaching 4:20 PM. i work in a high school and the library is completely empty. apparently the place to smoke is in the gully that runs along the school; they call it ‘the garden’. the things i know about these punks–not good.

i’m learning how to catalogue things this week. i’ve been given the ‘sears list of subject headings’. fun! i like looking up all the little subject headings to apply. admittedly, i like it after doing it for 3 hours total. i can’t imagine i would like doing it forever. though presumably eventually i could memorize the sears list.

…i’ve really got nothing to say.

there was a dead rat in the cat fool bowl in our garage last night. a hint that they want better rations? i dunno, it wasn’t eaten at all–not even gnawed on. poor little bugger.

p.s. in ‘hot fuzz’ (which i went to see this morning) they say, “by the power of gray skull!” not once, but twice. i nearly peed myself laughing. those he-man references get me every time, every goddamn time.

if, say, you were creating an art wall of bugs for kids (2-5) and you had to come up with a creative name that was better than “bug wall” what would you call it? please respond.

i went to santa barbara this weekend and spent 11 hours in the library researching the library. the rest of the time i spent on the couch with nuala and garren eating three kinds of meat in one meal. that’s a lot of meat.

i also finished reading nick hornby’s the polysyllabic spree, my new favorite book. there’s a sequel called something about housecleaning which i totally just ordered from amazon. i’ve never read anything by hornby until now (though i did just read about a boy 2 days ago) but TPS is a collection of essays about buying books and reading books. man, i love books…about books.

one of my favorite parts is when hornby quotes this book by gabriel zaid that he just read, so many books: “‘the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.’ that’s me! and you, probably! that’s us! ‘thousands of unread books’! ‘truly cultured’!”

ha ha ha! i like that he affirms one of my main purposes in life–owning lots and lots of books that i don’t read and will probably never read. thank you, nick hornby (and gabriel zaid), thank you.

seriously, respond on the bug front. i need suggestions for my brother’s girlfriend and i’ve got nothing.

sunshine, food, friends.

this is how i spent my easter saturday.

p.s.:

this entry is about snot. just in case you were thinking of reading it, i warn you well in advance. you can’t claim ignorance now, friends.

after approximately 10 days of varying levels of violent and apathetic illness, i dragged myself to the doctor today. only to learn that i have double ear infections. when later questioned by my mom on the phone, she asked if this meant two in the same ear or one in each. you might think 2 in the same ear is impossible, but no, i’ve had that before. this time it’s more forthright, being one in each ear, and one only marginally worse than the other. how did this come about? well, first i had the flu. then i had a viral throat infection. throughout, i had a cold. a massive quantity of snot appears to exist in my head. i have not yet determined how this is possible, but i am vastly curious. as is the kleenex industry with an eye to profits since i’ve gone thru 3 boxes in a week. and now i have ear infections linked to a sinus infection. stupid snot.

in an attempt to catalog my woes to nuala earlier today, i compared blowing my nose to someone shoving an ice pick repeatedly in my right ear while punching me in the jaw. my left ear has gone round the bend and is basically incommunicado at this point. meaning, if you sit next to me at a dinner party don’t expect me to hear anything you say if you’re on my left.

at a dinner party last night where adam and erin brought together their two respective families to meet and exalt in the coming child, (at olde spaghetti factory), my mom sat on my left. more fool her. but even i–with my snot, my lack of hearing, and my general malaise–could sniff out the awkwardness of that first family gathering.

i am now watching the scifi channel show, eureka. which is weird and confusing and, so far, pretty enjoyable.