Ning Hao’s NO MAN’S LAND is finally making its North American premiere, at the NYAFF
NO MAN’S LAND (WESTERN SUNSHINE) (Ning Hao, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Tuesday, July 1, 9:15
Festival continues through July 10
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinema.com
Finally getting its North American premiere after being banned in its home country of China, Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land is a violently beautiful black comedy that takes on modernization and commercialization with tongue firmly and riotously rooted deep in cheek. Xu Zhen stars as Pan Xiao, a young hotshot lawyer, if he does say so himself, who gets a vicious falcon poacher (Duo Bujie) off for killing a cop. The poacher promises to wire Pan his fee, but the lawyer instead demands collateral in the form of the red car the poacher bought for his dead wife. Pan then sets out for home, riding across the Gobi desert in Xinjiang in northwest China, but things don’t go too well for him, as he keeps getting involved with strange, dangerous, ever-more-surreal men and women, from a pair of truck drivers transporting hay (Wang Shuangbao and Sun Jianmin) to an extortionist gas station owner (Yan Xinming) and his back-room prostitute (Yu Nan) to another falcon poacher (Huang Bo) who can’t avoid getting the crap beaten out of him time and time again. But Pan keeps trying to persevere, believing he is better than everyone around him, but it takes him quite a while to learn his lesson, if he ever really does.
NO MAN’S LAND pays homage to such genre films as BLOOD SIMPLE, THE ROAD WARRIOR, and RED ROCK WEST
Gorgeously photographed in a desert palette by Du Jie and featuring a noirish neo-spaghetti Eastern score by Nathan Wang, No Man’s Land is a thoroughly entertaining genre picture that pays tribute to such forebears as the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, George Miller’s The Road Warrior, John Dahl’s Red Rock West, and the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaborations. Hao (Crazy Racer, Mongolian Ping Pong) is in firm control of his wacky tale, which is lovingly paced even as the craziness reaches major proportions. Xu (Lost in Thailand) and Duo (Mountain Patrol: Kekexili) manage to gain sympathy for their characters despite all outward appearances, making for an engaging and unusual kind of odd couple. No Man’s Land is a helluva lot of fun, exactly the kind of film we’ve come to expect from the New York Asian Film Festival, where it will be screening July 1 at 9:15 at the Walter Reade Theater. The thirteenth annual NYAFF continues through July 10 with some five dozen films, including Park Joong-hoon’s Top Star, Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s R100, and Matt Chow’s Chickensss before leading into the two-week Japan Cuts series at Japan Society.
Special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on such sci-fi classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, made his feature directorial debut with the environmentally prescient Silent Running. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, one of four men stationed on the space terrarium Valley Forge, which is charged with protecting forests that can no longer grow on Earth. While it’s just another assignment for John Keenan (Cliff Potts), Marty Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Andy Wolf (Jesse Vint), it’s become an obsession for Lowell, who sleeps under a “Conservation Pledge” on the wall next to his bed and only eats food from his massive garden. But when the captain of the Berkshire (voiced by Joseph Campanella) informs them that the forests must be destroyed and they are to return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, fighting to protect what he has helped create. Soon he is alone on the Valley Forge, tending to the forest with drones Huey (Cheryl Sparks) and Dewey (Mark Persons), as Louie (Steven Brown) is no longer with them. At first Lowell thinks he is in his own private paradise, but extreme loneliness awaits him, along with some other shocks. Written by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), the low-budget Silent Running is a deserving cult classic, a worthy influence on such films and television shows as WALL-E, Moon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Red Dwarf. Emerging from the late-1960s Flower Power movement, the film’s ecological theme is boosted by environmentally friendly folk songs sung by Joan Baez, with overly melodramatic music by Peter Schickele. Dern gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Lowell, going from calm and meditative to distressed and angry in a heartbeat, and his paternal relationship with Huey and Dewey is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A film that could only be made in the 1970s, with bright, bold colors and cheesy futuristic sets, Silent Running is screening June 28 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!
The seven-decade legacy of one of America’s most important and influential journalists is celebrated in David L. Lewis’s illuminating documentary, The Pleasures of Being / Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff. The too-short, sometimes scattershot eighty-five-minute film reveals Hentoff to be much more than just a columnist and a critic; Lewis, in his debut feature film, shows Hentoff, who turned eighty-nine earlier this month, to be a fascinating character who speaks his mind, a fierce defender of the First Amendment, a crucial participant in the spread of jazz in the mid-twentieth century (including as a record producer), and an outspoken libertarian who is adamantly antiabortion. “When he came to a room, nobody said, ‘Oh, here’s the critic,’” saxophonist and composer Phil Woods explains. “They said, ‘Here’s a friend of the music.’ It’s a whole different thing. He was part of the family.” Lewis speaks extensively with the Boston-born Hentoff, a bent-over man with thick, silvery-gray hair, beard, and mustache who types with two fingers in his extremely messy and crowded home office, as well as Hentoff’s wife, Margot; cultural critic Stanley Crouch; former Village Voice editor Karen Durbin; First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams; recently deceased poet and activist Amiri Baraka; jazz historians Dan Morgenstern and John Gennari; and even Voice editor Tony Ortega, who fired Hentoff in 2009. Hentoff discusses his childhood, his start in journalism, his personal and professional relationships with such figures as Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, and Malcolm X, and his steadfast defense of civil liberties.
Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the 1970 acid Western El Topo, literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.)
