more dumb movie reviews

Yesterday I dropped by the documentary film festival outpost office in a hotel near the theater to drop something off. “Oh thanks, yes, that’s great,” the girl said, “and, um, we were wondering if you’d like to translate for some of our directors, for the Q & A sessions. We’ve heard that one of the guys we had translating is not very good and we need to replace him.” I’d actually been mouthing translations for director commentary at the films that I’d seen (what is known here as an “occupational disease 職業病 zhiye bing,” when your occupation becomes an illness that intrudes upon the living of your life, e.g. Chinese teachers who can’t stop correcting people’s Chinese—I find that many of my friends have occuapational diseases), so I looked down the list she had and agreed to do a few on Wednesday and Thursday. Last night, the mosquitoes that have been disturbing my sleep for a while now turned into film directors; I did my best to translate for them while smacking them to death. This morning I woke up with my heart racing, thinking, “How the hell am I going to get everything done within a week and a half?” I looked at my calendar and, sure enough, it said, “Start freaking out about leaving today.” Right on schedule.

So what have I been doing to mitigate the freak out? Well, I’ve been watching movies at the documentary film festival. Yesterday they showed five of the six or seven works of Artavaszd Pelechian (Пелешян) that are out there to be shown. That’s an Armenian director I’ve never heard of who the German filmmaker, commentator, and festival judge I talked to at the opening says is the best thing since bratwurst. The German guy, whose English is completely fine but cadenced like someone who is just learning to use a stick shift, gave a little introduction at the screening which the translator completely fumbled (I wonder if this is the boy I’ll be replacing), explaining that although normal people like me have no idea who this Pelechian guy is, smart people like Godard and Coppola think he’s the best thing since bratwurst. I thought the films were pretty cool (especially one about farmers that showed lots of scenes of sheep in various stages of being herded, led, and carried by horse across a river, and one about various aircraft exploding) but I think I still need someone to explain to me why he’s so completely amazing. I’ll try to find the German guy again and ask him. In the meantime the thing I liked most aside from the sheep and explosions was that someone on the production crew had a last name of something like Mbrktian (Мбрктян). One must have a mouth of rubber to regard this name and not to think of a tongue tied in bows, plastic refrigerator letters in a heap, making a Cyrillic that is not there from the Cyrillic that it. [Hey, Garlic Bud, you out there? This entire paragraph is a big fat hint to give a little lecture on Pelechian and on Armenian names. In case you hadn’t noticed.]

I’ve seen one film so far that kind of raised my ire. The director is a young Taiwanese-American guy, and the movie is about Taiwan. He does things like film a lot of white-man and Taiwanese-woman couples and say things like, “Look at this fat guy. How did he ever end up with her? Is it just about power?” Or go into Taipei 101 and say, “What do you see when you walk in here? A huge mall. You can come all the way to Asia to go to the tallest building in the world, and you walk right into America.” If you’ve been reading this little thing, my “thesis” (as Tai-ke Joe calls it), for a little while, like since October, you probably know that I have some thoughts on topics such as white men and Taiwanese women (and on gender/national relations in Taiwan in general), and on Taipei 101 (and the fact that it and the whole area around it were specifically planned to look like America)--see e.g. Blahgstein 2004a, 2004b, and 2004c. So my reaction to this film may once again be part of my occupational disease. But the way this guy sits on one side on his own identity as Asian to criticize white people, and then changes buttocks to sit on his own identity as American to criticize Taiwanese, and the way both of these critques seem to be based in observations gained from walking around with a camera while having a cold rather than, say, talking to people or doing a little research, aroused a tad of antipathy in me—a tad of antipathy meaning I was watching the movie thinking, “You self-pitying little shit.” When I left the theater, my friend Tony, who I’d run into there, started chatting to the director’s girlfriend, who’s a Taiwanese filmmaker and performance artist he’s known for a long time. The director was standing next to her having a beer. Someone came up to him and started discussing the film, and actually said some nice things about it, and relatively detailed nice things at that, and he responded, “This is about the third beer I’ve had, so I probably won’t remember anything you said.” And I thought, “You self-pitying, self-enamored little shit.”

Anyway, it turns out that this guy who is all upset about white guys dating Taiwanese girls and who voice-overs commentaries like, “Look at this guy, he’s trying to fit it—he’s got the Taiwanese haircut, the clothes. He doesn’t stand out at all,” while panning in on a tall blond guy having an animated conversation with a Taiwanese woman, this Taiwanese-American director defending Taiwan from the Americans, does not speak Chinese. When I saw his name on the list of people still in need of a translator, I told the organizers I didn’t want to do it, because I was so annoyed by the movie. But then the slapstick aspect of “and then this white girl comes out and starts translating” for this particular movie got the better of me, and after giggling a bit with the organizers, I put down my name for that session.