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Tuesday evening I caught Up the Yangtze, a documentary by Canadian director Yung Chang.
China’s Three Gorges Dam, still under construction, may be the largest hydroelectric project ever attempted, and Chang’s film takes an unusual but effective approach to examining the project’s repercussions. He focuses his camera on two teenagers working a cruise ship that takes [...]

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I just caught Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. It’s a basic, PBS-style documentary without anything truly creative or exciting technically or artistically. But the subject matter–an integrated New Orleans neighborhood which might have been the largest community of free Blacks in the pre-Civil War south. It follows the neighborhood [...]

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Having missed it in theaters, I took home a press screener DVD of Shadows in the Palace and watched it last night with my wife. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I can’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t want to sit through it again.
A mystery set in the Korean royal court at some [...]

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Now I can get to Kevin Kelly’s State of Cinema Address. Kelly isn’t a movie person. He’s a technology geek, and he writes about technology. Since I also write about technology (it pays better than Bayflicks–but then, so does flipping burgers), I found this talk especially interesting. Kelly is best known for founding The Well [...]

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Wonderful Town has nothing to do with the 1953 Broadway musical of the same name, although a few songs would liven it up. Allegedly, this Thai drama examines the long-term psychological aftereffects of the devastating 2004 tsunami. The story concerns a young architect who comes to a small coastal town on a job involving the [...]

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I started this afternoon with State of Kevin Kelly’s State of Cinema Address, but I’ll tell you about that later.
Right now I want to talk about The Art of Negative Thinking, a Norwegian comedy/drama that’s just surpassed Forbidden Lie$ as the best film I’ve seen at the festival. The picture is brutal, terrifying, [...]

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I spend much of Saturday afternoon and evening with screenwriter Robert Towne and several hundred of his fans. Towne won this year’s Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting.
After clips from films he’d written (and in some cases directed), Towne sat down with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir foundation. Their talk went on so long [...]

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I just saw Orz Boyz, a Taiwanese comedy about young boys with a lively fantasy life that helps them (and hinders them) in dealing with their harsh realities. Very disjointed, and occasionally difficult to follow in ways that I suspect have more to do with my ignorance of Taiwanese culture than actual problems with the [...]

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There are two kinds of movies at film festivals–those that have been picked up by an American distributor, and those that haven’t (there’s also a gray area: films that distributors are negotiating over). The difference is important when you’re deciding what to see. If a film doesn’t have an American distributor, chances are you will [...]

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After Time to Die, I grabbed a quick bite and went to see Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed on the mountains–my fifth documentary of the week.
Once again, the director was there in person. But instead of bringing his star and cinematographer, Gonzalo Arijon brought his very young daughter, who shyly hung onto [...]

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