SFIAAFF shorts rock the house with "Wonton Destruction"

03.10 - Posted by Editor

SFIAAFF shorts rock the house with "Wonton Destruction"

3.10.2000 -- by Greg Pak   The 18th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival lived large last night with a sold-out screening of "Won Ton Destruction," a program of seven loopy, trippy, funny, and wildly cinematic short films. Ang Lee and Ed Burns go home -- these kid wanna play with Tsui Hark and Robert Rodriguez.   SFIAFF synopsis of "Won Ton Destruction"   Post your comments on the Message Boards!       Georgia Lee's "Bloom" (6 minutes) opened the show with the story of a girl forced by her mother into a Miss Chinatown-style beauty contest, complete with fan and ribbon dancing. Our heroine rebels, dressing in the boy's warrior costume and fantasizing about hacking her competitors to pieces (and this is the tamest film of the bunch).     Asked if her film was autobigraphical, Lee said that the answer depended on whether her mother was in the audience (parent absent, the answer was yes).     Matthew Abaya's 11 minute film "Embrace Madness" begins with an agreeably creepy flair as a woman in a red-lit room types poetry (heard in voiceover) while a silhoutted neighbor in a blue-tinted room watches her from across the street. A nice segue of VO and POV from the woman to the man piques the interest, but the film kicks into high gear with the appearance of a HK cinema-style vampire who chases our heroes through the rest of the film.     Manic filmmaker Abaya tossed packets of goodies to audience members during the Q&A (in the cheap seats, alas, this writer never discerned the contents).     Asked what his film was about, Abaya said he was interested in using horror as a vehicle to talk about other things such as identity. A mixed race filmmaker, Abaya said that the "cross mixing of blood of vampires sucking each other is a reference to the strangeness of being mixed race in America."     William Do's "Dead Time" (19 minutes), inspired by the filmmaker's recurring dreams, tells the story of a dead man whose soul deals with paperwork in a bureaucratic purgatory while his decomposing but still-animate corpse consumes pornography, snorts coke, and picks at his peeling skin.     Asked if his actor was using real drugs, Do admitted "they were actually Altoids."     Homeboy Kevin Sun's Bay Area produced film "Shrivelly Lives"(9 minutes) closed the program (and garnered the most raucous reaction from the audience, a good 20 percent of which seemed to have worked on the film).    Sun's film depicts a dork's fantasy of playing the suave hero to a young woman in crisis in the park. The film plays something like a spoof of the "gentle urban fable" subgenre of student shorts, with gleeful embrace of such oft seen tropes as Shy Guy Picking Up Woman's Dropped Handkerchief (who carries a handkerchief anymore, anyway?) and Shy Guy Enters Fantasy Sequence in Which He's Cool.     But Sun takes each goofball moment to new levels with hilarious stagey performances (the filmmaker seems to have cast amateurs and friends to good effect (look for experimental filmmaker Steve Yamane as the Evil Doctor)) and loving, over-the-top manipulation of cinematic conventions.     I particularly dug the slo-mo pull-back from the person kneeling over the body of a fallen comrade while shouting "NOOOOOOO!" And there's an instant of cinematic comic genius when Sun cuts from an actor running in slo mo to the climatic shot of the actor pretending to run in slo mo. Funny, funny, funny.     The baffling title of the film is apparently a play on "Chivalry Lives" (with "Lives" as a noun).     The "Wonton Destruction" shorts had their problems -- some were longer than they had to be; many had their fair share of technical raggedness and none featured emotionally compelling dramatic performances. But these films all score big by being so darn cinematic. Shot largely MOS (without sync sound recording), these movies move. Visual rather than verbal storytelling ruled the night.     Other films in the program included "The End of the World," a spectacular animated short from Taiwan about the day the freakish hulk who powers the city by pedaling an exercise bike stops working; "Chopsticks," a Singaporean short in which a Tai Chi fighting mother intervenes in the chopstick duel between her husband and son; and "Cover Girl: A Gift from God," a documentary about a Caucasian blonde from Indiana who's become a Vietnamese-American pop idol.     The SFIAAFF continues thoughout the week at the Kabuki Theaters. Visit the website at http://naatanet.org/festival/2000/index.html or call 415-255-4299 for more information.     Back to top