First Rowena, one of my former students and recent collaborator on this weird short film we hurriedly shot last week, came over to look at the footage and discuss editing.
This proved so exhausting that we went over to the UC film library and checked some things out– I was mainly looking for some Vietnamese movies to get into the visual mood for my spur-of-the-moment trip to Ho Chi Minh City this weekend (thanks to insane discount tickets through LastMinuteTravel). The only Vietnamese directors I’ve really watched are Anh Hung Tran and 
Unfortunately The Scent of Green Papaya on Laserdisc, and a bunch of other non-Vietnam DVDs I’ve been wanting to watch. But our Laserdisc player over at Flat GB is on the fritz (incredible enough that we HAVE a Laserdisc player), so I just ended up having my own disparate but awesome double-feature of
Dog Day Afternoon and J.S.A.
It was especially strange to see Dog Day Afternoon at long last, since I had already seen and loved Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory a few winters ago at the SF Moma. In this project, Huyghe has real-life bank robber John Wojtowicz (played by Al Pacino in the movie) re-enact (and effectively “re-tell”) that long afternoon on a sound-stage in Paris modeled after the actual Brooklyn bank… Truth is stranger than fiction, every crime is a Rashomon story waiting to be told, etc. etc. but it really works.
And J.S.A. is pre-Old Boy Park Chan-wook just waiting to bust out. Elegant plotting and that sense of inevitability that always draws me in like a sucker. Hey, it worked for Oedipus Rex right? Watch out for awkward English dialogue, however.
It’s always the umbrella.
The title of this print from 1912 is “The American Girl in Japan.” I found it on eBay a few hours ago, and after some deliberation decided I had to buy it. 11 USD is a small price to pay for another addition to my (unintentional but growing) collection of white-woman-in-Asia iconography. How adorably “problematic”.
Yes, yes, I’ve finally written a piece about my love/hate affair with “Lost in Translation”, particularly the frustrations of living in its shadow as a white girl in urban Asia. It appears in the premiere issue of “The Fanzine”, a sharp new web-magazine founded by awesome Casey McKinney (and my lifelong buddy Michael Kai Louie– but why aren’t you on the contributors page, Mike?)
