Unseen scenes
Is the language of film universal?

By Johnny Ray Huston

PERHAPS IT'S UNAVOIDABLE . An obscure top-10 list can't help coming across as a film-nerd activity. I stand convicted, but here's the unfortunate truth: a list of movies commercially released in the United States in 2002 would be missing most of the best new movies I've seen in the past 12 months. The sheer number of new releases that open in San Francisco on any given Friday would seem to indicate that any great new movie is assured of a commercial run in what Kino International's Gary Palmucci calls "the number-two market in the country" for foreign and small-scale independent films. Thanks to this job, I've had the festival experiences to know that isn't the case.

The folks I talked to at distribution companies seem both optimistic and skeptical about the current film market. "The increasing upmarket trend for independent film further marginalizes smaller films and foreign films, but on the other hand, it opens some doors," says Wendy Lidell of Wellspring, which has a Fassbinder retrospective, the Fassbinder-influenced Madame Sata, and Claire Denis's uncharacteristically light (meaning enjoyable) Friday Night slated for a 2003 U.S. release. Palmucci, though buoyant over The Piano Teacher's relatively large box-office performance for Kino, is droll about the "as low as you can go" numbers a recent South Korean release generated. Apparently, the language of (art) film in the United States is still Eurocentric; Palmucci notes how long it took for the Hong Kong film market to cross over. "Can we see, down the line, someone like Takashi Miike be recognized as a motherlode?" he asks. At the moment that's a financially risky question.

I've attempted to construct a meaningful – or at least annotated – list of the best unreleased films from 2002, hoping the descriptions below spark interest from people who buy movies, and people who buy tickets to movies. Unless otherwise indicated, the titles below – as far I know – currently lack a U.S. distributor.

Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) "Joe" Weerasethakul might be the most innovative director working today; unfortunately, his second feature proves that a major award at Cannes – the Un Certain Regard prize – doesn't guarantee a U.S. theatrical release. The uniquely sensual Blissfully Yours turns a trip to the movies into a daylong picnic in the jungle; reel time becomes real time, a minivacation becomes a metaphor for troubled immigration, and hundreds of half-painted Bugs Bunny figurines double as symbols of capitalist oppression. Did I mention that the credit sequence appears at the midway point, during a car trip that travels from society into nature? Cofounder of a collective called Kick the Machine, Weerasethakul – who studied film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago – is forging independence within Thailand's restrictive studio system, but his vision, idiosyncratically comic and acutely political, has global resonance. Keep an eye out for the DVD of his quasi-documentary debut, Mysterious Object at Noon (due in January from Plexifilm), and prepare for a gay sensibility to surface in next year's Tropical Malady.

Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, USA) This is a return to (de)form(ity) for Don Coscarelli, the man who brought you the Tall Man and the flying spiked orb of the Phantasm series. Traces of Phantasm are present in Bubba Ho-Tep's tale of a centuries-old mummy dispatching residents of an old-folks home: one scene, set to heavy metal, pits the movie's hero against a winged cockroach that's huge even by Deep South (where the movie's set) standards. More important, Coscarelli one-ups Sam Raimi in the outrageousness department, casting Raimi's pre-Tobey McGuire leading man Bruce Campbell as an elderly Elvis (it was an imitator who died on the toilet, see) and Ossie Davis as JFK. (Davis's monologue explaining his remarkably un-Kennedyesque appearance provides one of the funniest moments.) Bubba Ho-Tep is too good and too weird to go straight to cable; though slow in sections, it actually becomes poignant, particularly when Elvis and a wheelchair-bound JFK team up for a climactic battle against the title beast. Forget About Schmidt and Cocoon, this is a vital movie about planned obsolescence, and the cleverest statement on the subject since Pulp's "Help the Aged" (also see "The Psychotronica 10," page 45).

Far Away (André Téchiné, France/Spain) Five years ago André Téchiné was a reliable art-house fixture. The success of his philosophically complex coming-of-age tale Wild Reeds enabled the U.S. release of perhaps his finest film to date, My Favorite Season, which proved that he's capable of revealing the emotion beneath Catherine Deneuve's iconic hauteur, rather than merely goofing off its surfaces. But Téchiné misstepped with Alice and Martin (released here in 2000); lacking names or a marketable gay focus, his follow-up, Far Away – a first venture into digital video – has yet to be picked up for distribution. That's a shame, because Far Away's ambitious multistrand narrative succeeds where Alice and Martin failed. This might be the handsomest digivid feature to date. Téchiné's recent screenplay for Benoît Graffin's Beach Café skillfully adapts a Mohammed Mrabet novella; in Far Away, Téchiné views Mrabet's translator Paul Bowles as just another flawed character within a Morocco-set story about national and personal borders.

Ichi the Killer (Takashi Miike, Japan) Three or four of Takashi Miike's twisted visions have gotten limited U.S. distribution since Audition dismembered the suspense genre only to inject new life into it last year. That's quite a few more exports than other equally worthy Japan-based contemporaries have managed, but then for each Miike movie that reaches our shores, there are three or four that don't. Ichi the Killer is the foremost omission, and the same quality responsible for its notoriety – a glam gang-fashion(ed) ultraviolence that makes A Clockwork Orange's bloody pulp seem juiceless – has probably kept it from receiving a commercial-run passport. One of Ichi's killers exhales cigarette smoke from facial fissures, and even Fakir Musafar might faint at Miike's hook-and-cook tortures. But beyond the abundant plasma geysers (Miike's version of Liberace's dancing waters) this is a comedy about masculinity featuring two unforgettable antiheroes.

Failan (Song Hae-Sung, South Korea) While Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven wins critics' polls for its reworking of Douglas Sirk, Song Hae-Sung's modern response to Haynes's secondary melodrama reference point – Max Ophüls – has been lucky to receive one or two festival slots. Failan is essentially a contemporary version of Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, substituting a failed gangster (shades of early Wong Kar-wai) for Louis Jourdan's debauched pianist. The result doesn't merely combine other films though: Song's signature crane shots overlook dismal urban zones many miles from Sirk's (and Haynes's) suburbia and Ophüls's Vienna. A better title might be Videotape from an Unknown Woman, and the video contains the fragile peak of Cecilia Cheung's performance, which outdoes Letter's Joan Fontaine in the heartbreak department. Economic and sexual exploitation, themes at the fore of current South Korean cinema, are present here; Song may allow sentiment to seep into and ultimately define his politics, but so does his brutal directorial peer Kim Ki-Duk.

Ken Park (Larry Clark and Edward Lachman, USA) Larry Clark isn't doing himself any favors in getting Ken Park shown – and I'm not talking about the film's MPAA-defying erasure of restrictive, archaic art-porn divides. In the U.K., the movie's explicit approach to family portraiture was set for distribution by Metro Tartan, until Clark punched the company's owner in the face and broke his nose for asserting that the United States deserved the attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001 (see also "Known Pleasures, Night Skies," page 40). Whatever one thinks about Clark's unfortunate patriotic fervor – or his past film work, for that matter – Ken Park deserves a theatrical home. Though codirected by Edward Lachman, this is Clark's truest autobiographical movie – drawn from his diaries and journals – and the closest he's come to translating his photographic power to the screen. After the noir New York density of Kids, the humid Floridian malevolence of Bully, and the sterile, style-damaged Seattle-meets-L.A. interiors of Teenage Caveman, Clark's region-by-region survey of American atmospheres reaches Visalia, Calif., and discovers tenderness during its stay.

America So Beautiful (Babak Shokrian, USA) Here's a film both Larry Clark and Metro Tartan owner Hamish McAlpine should see. Set in Los Angeles circa 1979, America So Beautiful's exposure of anti-Arab sentiment in the United States is all too current (if for some reason you need proof, take one look at the array of graffiti poisoning certain spots in the Mission District). First-time director Babak Shokrian is a bold storyteller and stylist – the audacity of early Scorsese springs to mind – and his considerable ambitions don't distort his observations. Like Whit Stillman, Shokrian uses disco to interrogate American (im)moral codes and alleged freedoms, but his viewpoint isn't so blasé. A genre-spanning popular music soundtrack pops the dreams of Shokrian's characters – "Don't Fear the Reaper" hasn't sounded this creepy since 1978's Halloween.

Harmful Insect (Akihiko Shiota, Japan) If the ghost-girl figure that has dominated so many recent Japan-set horror movies – Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance, Hideo Nakata's Ring and Dark Water – was still alive and fighting, she might be the protagonist of Akihiko Shiota's third film. Harmful Insect is an exhilarating exercise in pure cinema, and that doesn't mean that it's long (it clocks in at 92 minutes), portentous (its energy, if not "realistically" teenage, is undeniably explosive), or an emotional dead zone (using a screenplay of few words, Shiota potently visualizes spontaneous joy and soul-deflating twists of fate). The awesome soundtrack is an example of budget limitation resulting in technical inventions; violent everyday mechanical noise gives way to the most unique filmic deployment of rock music I've ever encountered.

Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, Thailand) Once upon a time there was a kinetic, outlandishly colorful – colors that Pierre et Gilles would consider gauche, colors that call for new words to be invented – gangster spaghetti-western melodrama from Thailand named Fah talai jone. Then a company called Miramax bought the gangster spaghetti-western melodrama, with the cockeyed idea that it might match Sony's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon box-office success. Miramax retitled it Tears of the Black Tiger and ... let it sit in the vaults for one year, then another, with no release date in sight. Time goes on, the rain grows harder, and yet Rampoey (Stella Malucchi) still waits patiently at her gazebo, parasol in hand, for an audience of admirers to appear.

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan) Only one recent film biz nonevent is more frustrating than Tears of the Black Tiger's current hostage status: Pulse's fate at the hands of Dimension Films. The standout – not to mention most commercial – film to date by this era's genius named Kurosawa lost its chance at a U.S. release when it was optioned for Wes Craven to remake. Now the Craven version – pun intended – after a brief spell of hope (Kirsten Dunst was signed on for the lead) looks like it might be better off unmade (Dunst has dropped out, Dimension wants script changes). Anyone who fell under the spell of Gore Verbinski's Hollywood Ring remake should go to eBay and buy a video version of Pulse, a shadow painting that adds mournful depth to Ring's techno-horror deaths. This horror movie won't merely scare you, it will make you contemplate the current state, and future fate, of humankind – a truly frightening proposition.

 Johnny Ray Huston's other top 10

1. Aaliyah in Queen of the Damned (Michael Rymer, USA) – beyond Maria Montez and Jack Smith's most delirious cobra jewel dreams

2. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, USA/France)

3. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France)

4. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, U.K./France/Germany/Poland/Netherlands) (opens Jan. 3)

5. Storytelling (Todd Solondz, USA)

6. Jose Rodriguez's "3 Anonymous Films" at S.F. Cinematheque in February

7. Biggie and Tupac (Nick Broomfield, U.K.)

8. 8 Women (François Ozon, France)

9. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, USA)

10. The Cockettes (Bill Weber and David Weissman, USA)