The manic Malaysian romp SELL OUT! kicks off the New York Asian Film Festival on July 1 at Lincoln Center
SELL OUT! ($e11.0u7!) (Yoshimasa Ishibashi, 2011)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, July 1, $13, 6:00, and Monday, July 4, $13, 3:30
Series runs July 1-14, ten-film pass $99
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinemanews.com
www.amokfilms.com
Yeo Joon Han’s Sell Out! is precisely the kind of movie the New York Asian Film Festival has become justly celebrated for. A madcap mash-up of Airplane! and Network, the Malaysian absurdist romp is a riotously funny, bitingly sarcastic, and hysterically cynical spoof of reality television, corporate greed, independent cinema, romantic musical comedies, love and death, and whatever else falls in its path. Rafflesia Pong (Jerrica Lai), host of a low-rated arts program (and named for the Southeast Asian parasitic flowering plant that Swedish scientist Eric Georg Mjöberg wrote in 1928 had “a penetrating smell more repulsive than any buffalo carcass in an advanced stage of decomposition”), gets all in a tizzy after her FONY bosses (Kee Thuan Chye and Lim Teik Long, a sort of bizarre version of Muppet opera lovers Statler and Waldorf crossed with the Duke brothers from Trading Places) threaten to replace her program with a reality show featuring a rather vain rising star. Meanwhile, Eric Tan (Peter Davis) has designed a long-lasting soy machine that has so angered the CEO duo — they’re furious there’s no device to make it break down the day after the warranty expires — that they send him to an exorcist to have the dreamer half of him removed from his body, leaving only the practical side. Characters occasionally break out into song as Rafflesia contemplates just how far she will go to keep herself on television. And watch out for the word “but,” not one of Lim Teik Long’s favorites; “Don’t but me. I hate people who but me,” he shouts over and over again at unsuspecting underlings. Winner of the NETPAC Award at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and the Young Cinema Award for Alternative Vision at the Venice Film Festival, Sell Out! is an absolute blast, a manic movie that skewers everything in sight, including the filmmaker himself; in the first scene, Rafflesia is interviewing a director named Yeo Joon Han who tears apart indie cinema when not giving abrupt one-word answers. Sell Out! kicks off the 2011 New York Asian Film Festival on July 1 at 6:00, with Yeo and Davis attending; it will also screen July 4 at 3:30. Keep watching twi-ny for more reviews from our favorite festival of the year.
“Breaking the Waves: The Films of Zero Chou,” the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ month-long tribute to Taiwan’s only openly lesbian filmmaker, Zero Chou, concludes June 30 at 6:30 with the intimate and deeply personal Corner’s.. Named Best Documentary at the 2002 Taipei Film Festival, Corner’s centers on a gay bar in Taipei where closeted homosexuals come to be free, revealing a side of themselves they are forced to hide in the outside world. Chou focuses on such characters as Simon, a financial manager who turns into the elegant Sophia, and a man known as the Empress, who hosts a major gay party at a five-star hotel, as she explores the hopes and dreams of a group of people who just want their own little piece of happiness. Chou takes her camera inside a public rest room as one gay man describes what goes on inside; she also occasionally cuts to a naked lesbian couple in the midst of heated erotic passion. The sixty-minute work is narrated by Chou’s longtime partner, photographer and producer Liu Hoho, who recites poetic text in French that poignantly relates to the difficulties of being gay in Taiwanese society but avoids becoming pedantic or overtly political. Like many of her fiction films and other documentaries, Corner’s celebrates the repressed gay subculture of Taiwan, showing the good with the bad but filled with an infectious spirit and love of life.
The city of Baltimore has not exactly been depicted kindly in film and on television, with such series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood focusing on the rash of drugs and violence that have devastated the community, while native son John Waters has shown its wackier side in such films as Polyester and Hairspray. Born and raised in a suburb just inside the Baltimore city line, writer-director Matt Porterfield (Hamilton) has taken a different view in his second feature film, Putty Hill. When financing for his coming-of-age drama Metal Gods fell through, he decided to keep the cast and crew together and instead shoot a cinéma verité story about the after-effects of a young man’s drug overdose on a tight-knit community inspired by the one he grew up in. Not much is revealed about Cory as his funeral nears and life goes on, with his younger brother, Cody (Cody Ray), playing paintball with Cory’s friends; his uncle, Spike (Charles Sauers), tattooing customers in his apartment; and Spike’s daughter, Jenny (Sky Ferreira), returning to her hometown for the first time in several years and hanging out with her old friends like nothing much has changed. Working off a five-page treatment with only one line of scripted dialogue, Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier capture people just going on living, taking Cory’s death in stride; Porterfield interviews much of the cast, who share their thoughts and feelings in relatively unemotional ways. Shot on a minuscule budget in only twelve days, Putty Hill uses natural sound and light, nonprofessional actors, and real locations, enhancing its documentary-like feel, maintaining its understated narrative and avoiding any bombastic or sudden, big revelations. It’s a softly moving film, a tender tale about daily life in a contemporary American working-class neighborhood. Producer Steve Holmgren will participate in a Q&A at IndieScreen following the June 24 screening at 8:00, while editor Marc Vives will be on hand after the 6:00 show on June 25 to talk about the film.