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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 western tourists along the river, as well as one of those teenagers’ parents–a peasant couple forced to relocate as the waters rise. This is not about a construction project, but about the millions of people who have been or will be moved because of the dam.

Chang attended the screening and answered questions after it. Among other answers, he told us how the people in his film are doing now.

You have one more chance to see Up the Yangtze at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Thursday, 8:55, at the Pacific Film Archive. But don’t despair if you miss it; its theatrical run opens June 13.

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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 through it’s initial days as a light of racial equality (or near-equality) at a time of slavery through war, reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the devastation of crack cocaine until the neighborhood’s destruction by Hurricane Katrina.

You can still catch it Wednesday at 9:00 at the Kabuki.

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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 point in the past (my guess would be the 19^th century), Shadows in the Palace concerns itself with a murder meant to look like a suicide, and a nurse determined to get to the bottom of the entire mess (which, naturally, is far more complicated than it first appears). It does an excellent job giving us the sense of a very foreign place and time, and that’s it’s leading advantage. But the extremely complex story is almost impossible to follow with any real detail. For instance, I’m not entirely sure if there’s a supernatural element to it.

That’s forgivable. Far more troubling are the many scenes of extremely gruesome torture. Only twice before in my adult life have I been forced too look away from the screen, and no other movie made me look away more than once. You need a strong stomach for this one.

If you still want to see Shadows in the Palace, it screens at the Kabuki on Thursday at 7:45.

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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 and co-founding Wired Magazine.

This summary skips a lot.

He began by pointing out his outsider status, then hit us with an interesting statistic. More people see movies in airplanes than in theaters.

The point was that people watch movies in all sorts of places, and that the experience of watching them is diversifying. “For a long time, there were two screens: Movies and TV.” Now they’re diverging, becoming less distinguished, but they’re also getting more complicated. TV screens and computer screens are getting larger, but people are also watching movies, “much to my surprise,” on handheld devices. Screens are going to continue to get smaller, fitting on your eyeglasses, and larger, covering buildings.

Will people continue to go to movie theaters? Kelly felt that commercial theaters will remain one technological step ahead of home theaters, with 3D being the next big thing. He also pointed out other reasons. In “places like India, people go to theaters because they have air conditioning.” (Later, in the Q&A session, he acknowledged the communal experience as another draw.)

Running times will also get more elastic as distribution options open up. He mentioned Youtube, which caused an outburst in very short movies, and TV series like Lost as a very long-form film. He saw home video as making longer films possible. “When you can go back and look at what you want, the 100-hour film is possible.”

Writers, he pointed out, use the same tools whether professional or amateur, and he sees cinema going in that direction, predicting HD video on cell phones in a few years. He acknowledged, however, that pros will probably always have better equipment.

He talked a bit about getting paid for your work in a world where “Anything that can be copied will be copied.” Arguing that “Wherever attention flows, money will follow,” he offered some ways that artists can make money when their work is a free download, including immediacy (you get it quicker if you buy it), authenticity (you can be sure you’re getting the original), and embodiment (you download the recording for free, but you pay to see the concert).

He pointed out that the Web, thought an impractical dream over 5,000 days ago, has changed our lives utterly. New technologies will do the same thing.

During the Q&A, someone asked about the future of film–not as an art or a business but as a physical medium. He felt it was dying at “I say good riddance to film. I’m so happy that [everything is going] digital.”

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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 rebuilding on a luxury hotel. He stays at a much plainer hotel, and falls in love with the woman running the place. She’s moderately charming, he isn’t, and everything moves like a tortoise on downers. Any real statements about these two people as individuals or post-traumatic stress disorder in general never get through.

If you’re feeling masochistic, you can catch Wonderful Town at the Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday at 8:45, or catch the planned theatrical release.

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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, and forces you to think about how you’d respond should disaster severely limit your life. It’s also devastatingly, hysterically funny.

Writer/director Bård Breien addresses a subject that we’re not supposed to laugh at: the disabled and the fully-abled people who care for them. A mostly wheelchair-bound support group, led by an incompetent yet self-righteous social worker, come to the home of a potential new member. But Geirr, boiling with rage since a car accident paralyzed him from the waist down, doesn’t want to join. When he finds it impossible to ignore the group, he sets out to disrupt the entire process.

You still have one more chance to see The Art of Negative Thinking. It screens Thursday, May 8, at 8:15, at the Clay.

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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 that only one member of the audience was able to ask a question.

A few highlights:

Muller asked Towne when he realized he had arrived. He pinpointed his uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde. He had already written screenplays for Roger Corman, and some TV, but one scene from that 1967 hit was the first time something he wrote ended up on screen as he had written it. “Screenwriting is an act of prophecy. You’re guessing. When it turns out [as you imagined], you get a sense of confidence.”

He digressed from a question to bring up Greystoke, which he called “the best script I ever wrote, although that wasn’t the script that was shot.” He called it the “biggest professional regret of my life,” and gave the credit to his dog. He promised to get back to it and discuss it in more detail, but never did.

Of course Muller asked about the three films from the mid-1970s for which he’s best known: The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo. Towne told us that the Detail script bounced around Hollywood for quite some time, much praised but unsold, and how that frustration led to Chinatown, then Shampoo. “I found myself in ’72 with three scripts I had written that weren’t being made. I thought my [professional] life was over.” Eventually, he’d win three Oscar nominations and one Oscar for those scripts.

About the directors of those films: Hal Ashby (Detail, Shampoo) was a “great watcher. All he needed was truth on film. He was an editor.” Roman Polanski, on the other hand, “was the most gifted director I’ve worked with. He was an impossible little shit.”

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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 movie. But it’s funny, and sweet. I’d give it a B.

You can still catch it Monday at 9:30 at the Kabuki, and Tuesday at 3:45 and Thursday at 5:45 at the Clay.

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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 never get another chance to see that movie.

For us in the press, films getting a commercial release are called “Hold Review” films–at least that’s what they’re called on the list of them we get in our press kits. The idea is that, while we’re allowed to mention them in our coverage of the festival, and publish short, one-paragraph reviews, we’re supposed to hold our full reviews (if we write them) until the films are out in regular theaters. As I write this, I have nine reviews on hold from the Asian American and San Francisco International festivals.

I generally recommend that people avoid these “Hold Review” films at festivals, and concentrate on pictures they won’t get another chance to see. Of course, I understand the temptation to be among the first to see a heavily promoted movie, and there’s the event factor of seeing it with the director present for Q&A after the screening. Although I saw several of SFIFF’s Hold Review films before the festival, Standard Operating Procedure is the only one I’ve seen at the festival itself–so far.

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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 his leg as he introduced the film. I wasn’t able to stay for the Q&A afterward.

Stranded tells a story many of us have already heard, about the 1972 airplane crash that inspired the best-selling book and Hollywood movie Alive. The plane, carrying a Uruguayan rugby team and their friends and family, crashed into a glacier high in the Andes. The survivors endure extreme cold, hunger, an avalanche, the deaths of loved ones, and the necessity of eating those loved ones’ corpses. Finally, two of them make a stunning trek across the mountains to find help. Only 16 out of the 45 people on the plane survived the crash and 72-day ordeal.

Combining interviews with the survivors (all 16 are still alive), re-enacted sequences, and some photography from the actual events, Arijon recreates the harrowing experience with dramatic intensity. Despite the cannibalism, these young men don’t drop into Lord of the Flies savagery. They cooperate, help each other, and work for the common good.

Unfortunately, unless it gets picked up by an American distributor, you have no more chances to see Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed on the mountains.

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