In a speech delivered from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the President announced:

I’m directing the State Department to accelerate our ability to process visas by 40 percent in China and in Brazil this year.

The White House has also expressed hopes that 80% of non-immigrant visa applicants could be interviewed within three weeks of getting their application. According to China Daily:

Charles Bennett, minister counselor for consular affairs of the US embassy in Beijing, told China Daily earlier that 50 more American staff members will be deployed to the embassy and US consulates in China this year.

In addition, more interview windows and buildings will be built and the embassy is considering allowing people to arrange an interview date as early as two days after he applied, he said.

But don’t be fooled. Despite the bilateral enthusiasm surrounding these new initiates, the push to expedite visas for Chinese nationals has less to do with improving Sino-US relations than one thing: cold hard cash.

According to the China Tourism Academy, 70 million Chinese traveled overseas last year and spent a total of $69 billion abroad, making them the third largest overseas spenders after Germans and Americans. 2012 could see those figures increase to 78.4 million and $80 billion, respectively. That’s a lot of money. Indeed, Chinese tourists are already making their presence felt in England, Spain, Japan and South Korea, and the Obama administration is eager to get a bigger piece of that pie.

Continue reading at Project Pengyou.

“You’ve hurt me. Do you know I’ve already folded three, four hundred stars for you? My friend tried to introduce me to some guy but I refused. I didn’t realize it before but I like you. I like only you. Will you be my boyfriend? I cannot just be a normal friend to you anymore. Either accept me or I will leave.”

This was the first time to my knowledge I had ever hurt a girl, and it was an experience I was not quite ready to take responsibility for. The Chinese place great emphasis on grand gestures and confessions. To many girls, you are not officially in a relationship until you make the ultimate confession and ask her formally, “I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?” It doesn’t matter if you’ve already had sex, or if you’ve never said a word to each other. The act of confessing, the grand, sweeping scale of expressing your feelings which have been so deeply bottled up, is the only way to consolidate a relationship.

To an American this idea might appear inimical; talk is cheap, actions are real. When you pay attention to a girl, when you ask for her phone number, when you take her out to dinner—this is how Americans say “I like you.” Conversely, when someone only calls when they’re drunk, when they only hit you up for sex, when they haven’t introduced you to the rest of their friends; these actions also clearly delineate the nature of your relationship.

To most Westerners there is no need to be so painstakingly clear cut about things that are plainly obvious. There are no brazen, under the stars, confessions. Even the use of this word “confess” seemed antiquated, dramatic, and old-fashioned when I first heard my Chinese friends use it to describe how their relationships began. “We were just friends, but one day he confessed himself to me. After that we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

What is it about the act of confessing that allows Chinese people to mentally enter into a relationship, at times willfully ignorant and absent of any significant action or contact? My temporary American roommate skyped with a Chinese girl eight times. After their first real life meeting they had sex in our apartment shower while a mutual friend waited in the living room.

My roommate had told her many times in the heat of the moment that he liked her. Then one day in Sanlitun, while they were walking together on the street, he answered a phone call from another girl. This other girl was just a friend, and he was simply having a normal conversation with her, but the way he ignored his companion must have carried some weight. The present girl became angry and began to scream. “I thought you loved me!” She proceeded to chase and berate him as he, mortified, walk off to the nearest subway station.

This poor girl is not crazy and my roommate is not a horrible person; they are just both victims of a cultural misunderstanding. Could something like this happen in America? Probably. But my wager is that one would be hard pressed to find an American girl that didn’t fully comprehend the nature and extent of her relationship with a guy, purely based on their past actions together.

Culturally rooted misunderstandings often cause scenes like this. When one party expects much more than the other party is willing to give it often leads to heartbreak and anguish. There are many things men like. I like Italian food, I like beer, I like movies. When I say I like a girl, it usually means I would like to have sex with her. It sometimes means I would like to date her, and it even more rarely means “I love you!” In China, this “like” is not so casual. It is a big thing to “like” someone. When you say “like” in China, you better be ready to live with the consequences.

There is a word in Chinese called 乱说 (luàn shuō), the literal translation is “chaos talk,” but it generally means to make irresponsible remarks. To a foreigner this can be quite a dangerous and sensitive issue as we are not always fully aware what kind of talking is irresponsible. Americans talk about a lot of things. We are sarcastic, we lie, and we are insincere. We put on many faces to many different people depending on the social situation and the way we want to present ourselves. Americans are naturally attuned and groomed from an early age to filter out this bullshit. We sometimes take it for granted that others can do the same.

In China, not so. There is very little sarcasm in the average Chinese conversation. There is very little subtext or misunderstanding. Chinese is blunt, straightforward, and to the point. Perhaps this is why the candid and direct “I like you” confession is that much more important to a Chinese relationship.

As a kid I had to learn many of these linguistic and cultural differences the hard way. I was always the butt of jokes and taunts when I first moved to America because I had no sense in determining when peers were pulling a fast one on me and when they were being sincere.

“Is our bus late?” I would ask my neighbor while waiting after school the first day.

“No, it only comes on Fridays, you should walk home,” he replied.

I believed him and began to walk home, only to realize halfway down the street that the rest of my friends were laughing at me.

As Americans we grow up organically learning these subtle jokes and quips in the schoolyard. As a culture we are hypersensitive to falsehoods and insincerity. Perhaps this is why Americans value action over words. Perhaps conversely, this is why Chinese place as much emphasis on words as on action. To say something in Chinese is to mean it. There is little innuendo, pretense, or sarcasm. People say what is in their hearts and they stick to it. If you don’t, you are just a bad person or a liar. I find this way of communicating at times both refreshing and frustrating.

When I casually told my friend that I liked talking to her, I had no idea that my words would eventually break her heart when I could no longer live up to those expectations. When a person chooses to endear themselves to someone, it is at that same moment that one also chooses to hurt them. If you cannot continue to live up to the expectations you create, you will ultimately let someone down.

Perhaps I am partially to blame for making irresponsible remarks and being insensitive. I have been on the other side of this as well. When I thought I had made it obvious that I was into someone, they simply brushed it off because a heartfelt confession never left my lips. Things aren’t codified unless you express them in words. Feelings, emotions, actions; they are all just dust waiting to be caught in a beautiful slew of passionate poetry and long-winded platitudes.

In America, what we say is just filler in anticipation for what we will one day do. In China, what you do is largely a pretext for what you will one day confess.

Corolla has a point. A book entitled Generation Me written by psychology professor Jean Twenge does a far better job of elucidating this trend and understanding it’s manifestations than Corolla’s crass bullying, but his attack and extrapolation that the Occupy Movement is simply about young people “throwing shit at another person’s car” is pervasively misguided.

The conservative breakdown of the Occupy Movement uses a simple formula to discredit protesters and follows a single trajectory, “If you do not have a job and you are not financially secure, it is your own fault. Do not blame others for your own shortcomings.” What this argument fails to grasp is that there are systemic issues at play that go far beyond a single person’s or single group’s shortcomings.

Take for example this graph from The Atlantic. In it you can see some stark statistics about the rate of unemployment in Eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain. Both these countries are facing unemployment levels hovering near 20%. In Spain nearly 50% of youth under 25 are unemployed. In case Adam Corolla wasn’t aware, tens of thousands of people took part in Occupy Madrid protests in Puerta del Sol Square over the past weeks. This is NOT just an American movement.

So does that mean that nearly half of Spain’s youth are self-entitled monsters who don’t want to work and would rather scream and whine than get a job? As much as I hate self-entitled rich kids, I cannot bring myself to believe that every other Spanish person is simply not competitive or not good enough to survive. In fact it is categorically untrue as I have met many young Spanish people, fleeing the economic turmoil in their homeland, who have found productive and financially secure employment in Beijing.

These kinds of generalizations are dangerous because they follow the same logic that dehumanizes minorities as being uneducated criminals who have only themselves to blame for their economic woes. It’s based on crude stereotypes that may apply to some, but are utterly irreconcilable with reality.

One point I will cede to Mr. Corolla is that capitalism is the “best system” we have, but it is far from fair. And when free markets require regulation, there needs to be someone there to correct its failures. What the Occupy Movement is fighting for is a level playing field, not equality of results. Let the wealthy CEOs have their Bentleys, but don’t let them gamble with the rest of America (and the world’s) money and then bail them out when they go belly up.

Few articles have riled me up as much as this one, which exemplifies the misguided conventional thinking regarding China. It is a microcosm of the wishful thinking that permeates the global community at the moment. Here are a few reasons why Paul Kane is wrong.

Geo-political
Taiwan is an old, old ally of the United States, with strong political and cultural ties. Taiwan sends a significant portion of its youth to be educated in the United States. To “ditch” them, as Kane suggests so casually, would severely damage U.S. credibility in Asia. Our other allies—Thailand, Japan, Korea—could not help but wonder that if they would be next. The U.S. is already witnessing a careful realignment of Asia as China flexes its muscles and other countries seek to balance China’s power. To ditch Taiwan would be to irrevocably damage U.S. standing internationally. We would be giving a sovereign, democratically elected government up to an autocratic totalitarian state. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Kane makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that writing off Taiwan “could pressure Beijing to end its political and economic support for pariah states” like Iran or North Korea. China’s firmly stated position is that domestic affairs are domestic affairs, and that no country has the right to interfere in another country’s internal affairs. As far as China is concerned, Taiwan is rogue province, not a country. That means that Taiwan is an internal affair, and not subject to international pressure. To them, the U.S. selling arms to Taiwan is like China giving missiles to Texas.

Ditching Taiwan would merely be an affirmation of China’s position that the international community has no right to interfere in other countries’ affairs. That would give them even more cover to deny, obfuscate, and stonewall on aid to Iran and North Korea. This is a position that they have held since the joint communique that opened China, and one that they have firmly held to since in vetoing intervention in Sudan, Syria, and other countries.

Economic
Let’s start with a few basic numbers. The U.S. debt is approximately 15 trillion dollars. Kane points out that China holds 1.14 trillion of U.S. debt. Guess who holds more than that? We do. As in, the Federal Reserve. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Reserve Banks hold about 1.6 trillion dollars of U.S. debt. In essence, the government is paying itself to loan itself money. Sound screwy? Absolutely. While the normally fringe Ron Paul is crazy about a lot of things, one of the best ideas I’ve heard from him is to have the U.S. government forgive itself its own loans. So, in essence, we could reduce the deficit by more than that without having to throw anyone to the lions.

In addition, Europe holds more in U.S. treasuries, and Japan almost as much.

What’s more, if you adjust for inflation, the yield for 5- and 7-year treasures is negative. In essence, people are paying the U.S. to hold their money for them. If you want to talk about balance sheets, think about that. By having China purchase more U.S. debt, they would essentially be transferring their wealth to our balance sheets.

Thirdly, while much has been made about the supposed “power” that China yields over the United States due to its large holdings of U.S. bonds, that power is shaky at best. While some make comments about how disastrous it could be if China suddenly dumped all their treasuries on the market at once, that fails to account for how much damage that would cause to China’s balance sheet as well. Already, due to a sinking dollar and rising RMB, the real value of China’s dollar holdings have been dropping. So why does China continue to buy treasuries? Because there is nowhere else even remotely safe to park that much money.

Fourthly, Kane describes Taiwan’s growing economic ties with China and states that “the island’s absorption into mainland China is inevitable.” If economic ties meant that absorption was inevitable, Canada would be the 51st state. Taiwan is socially, politically, and economically distinct from mainland China. While integration is possible, it is in no way “inevitable.”

Military
Kane makes a point of talking about the power of the hard-line militarists, and argues that removing Taiwan as a wedge issue would reduce their power and influence. While he is indeed correct in estimating the influence of Taiwan, he misses the larger picture. Taiwan is a proxy issue where China sees its military interests most directly opposed with the U.S. However, the Chinese military sees all of Asia and the Pacific as its rightful sphere of influence. A withdrawal from Taiwan would merely shift the conflict centers to Korea, Japan, and Thailand in the east, and Pakistan and India in the west. There is absolutely no evidence to support the assumption that a concession on Taiwan would reduce Chinese military spending.

China is building a stealth fighter and an aircraft carrier. Taiwan is less than 100 miles away from China at the narrowest point. You do not need an aircraft carrier to militarily dominate Taiwan from the mainland. Nor do you need the world’s largest submarine fleet with ICMBs capable of reaching the West Coast. These projects would proceed unabated even if the U.S. were to abrogate its defense treaty with Taiwan because the goal is not Taiwan—it is to match U.S. capabilities.

Kane calls the U.S. Navy “China’s greatest military asset” because it helps keep the sea lane safe for shipping, a description that is hardly in keeping with the military expenditures I’ve pointed out above. Rather, China recognizes that the U.S. Navy is one of America’s greatest assets, and they want to be able to match it. Hence the enormous submarine fleet.

For me, the clincher to Kane’s ignorance on China is his statement that Taiwan is China’s “unspoken” top priority. For any veteran China watcher, that claim is absurd. China’s emphasis on Taiwan is broadly proclaimed and widely disseminated.

America’s national debt is a long-term problem, not a short-term problem. But betraying Taiwan will do little to help the national debt, and will only destabilize America’s position in the years to come.

Ten years ago, I knew nothing of politics. I knew nothing of the struggle for power and the insatiable human lust for domination and violence. But I knew, from the faces of my teachers, that the world had shifted; that there was no going back to September 10.

In the last decade, regardless of what politicians say in their memorial speeches, Americans have lived in the shadow of 9/11. The heightened awareness—some might say fear—of terrorism led to a new government department, two intractable wars, and an ongoing Islamophobia. Words like “international terrorism,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” and “suicide bomber” are now common parlance. Only the death of Osama bin Laden offered some scant comfort to anxious Americans.

The world, too, has awakened to the threat of terrorism. The 2004 train bombings in Madrid, the 2005 bombings in London, the 2010 subway bombings in Moscow, and the 2011 bombings in Mumbai, to name a few, prove definitively that terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism, is a war waged on a global scale. Al-Qaeda’s vision of a pan-Islamic state knows no boundaries.

The unwelcome realization that a few nihilistic sociopaths with nothing more than a wild imagination and some illicit funding can perpetrate violence anywhere and to anyone is the real lesson of 9/11. No one is safe from their derangement.

—

Aftermath from one of the three Fuzhou bombs.

But there are places in the world where it is still September 10. China is one of them. Though there have been terrorist attacks in China, most recently in Hotan and Kashgar in July which left 18 and 22 dead, respectively, there has not been a major event in a major city—there has been no 9/11. Most of these sporadic attacks have occured in Xinjiang, at the hands of the Uighur minority, and are ethnically or religiously motivated. However, 2011 also gave us the Fuzhou, Jiangxi bombings in May which killed three people and was perpetrated by a Han man with a grudge against the government.

But despite these disturbing events, awareness of terrorism remains low. This is predominantly due to the government’s belief that boots on the ground is a valid solution to any problem. The more dangerous the situation, the more soldiers dispatched. But this a reactionary measure, not a preventative one.

In addition, government censorship of news about the attacks and the official line that China is a harmonious nation dampens public awareness of potential threats. In the long run, this false sense of security could prove dangerous. Vigilant citizens are a powerful tool against terrorism, but how do you look out for suspicious activity when you don’t expect there to be any?

Indeed, many Chinese cheered when the twin towers came down, believing it to be just reward for American arrogance. (Of course, those same people probably felt scandalized when Sharon Stone made a similar argument after the Sichuan earthquake.) This way of thinking is predicated on three false assumptions: that China is not arrogant; that something akin to 9/11 could never occur in China; and that terrorist groups, being the enemy of China’s enemy, is somehow China’s friend. I wonder if those same people would cheer today.

The government is also careful to craft its enemies. This strategy works well to consolidate power by promoting nationalism and deflect blame from themselves. Japan and America are perennial targets but the government is loathe to air any of its own dirty laundry. Compare the angry condemnations by the government when Japanese leaders visit the Yasukuni Shrine, or when American presidents meet with the Dalai Lama with the media blackout or strict directives following the Sichuan earthquake and the Wenzhou train collision. It’s less a double standard than parallel universes.

This tactic extends to domestic problems as well. Tibetan unrest is stirred up by the Dalai Lama, Xinjiang uprisings are fomented by Rebiya Kadeer; nothing is the result of unjust government policies, corruption, or ethnic favoritism. The two latest attacks in July were tenuously linked to the shadowy East Turkestan Islamist Movement (ETIM), which has claimed responsibility for attacks in the past. But ETIM could have ties to Al-Qaeda and Pakistan, which has close relations with China and which, as America well knows, has no qualms about playing both sides. But last week, a group called the Turkistan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for the attacks in July. Experts are unsure if this group is an offshoot of ETIM or ETIM operating under another name.

There are no easy answers in the fight against global terrorism, no straight-forward cause and effect. Blaming someone does not make them guilty. Paying someone does not buy their support. But it is easier to invade a country than to reform an outdated foreign policy, easier to lash outward than to face your own demons.

A country cannot truly face terrorism if it does not truly face itself. This applies as much to America as it does to China. The Chinese government chooses to live in a world of black-and-white because it is easier than living in one of unappetizing shades of gray. They filter bad news like a flight attendant who doesn’t point out the emergency exits for fear of scaring the passengers. This unrealistic approach to reality can only harm the Chinese people.

It has been ten years. It is time we realize that terrorism is not just the enemy of America, or of developed nations, but the enemy of anyone who would seek to effect change through peace and negotiation. 9/11 was not a declaration of war against America—it was a declaration of war against the world, against tolerance and against pluralism.

However, we also need to realize that terrorism feeds on the angry, disenfranchised, abused, and neglected people in the world. If we decline to accommodate their basic needs, refuse to understand their hopes, and reject their attempts at negotiation, they will turn to violence, not because they seek it, but because we have given them no other alternative.

For a country like China—so large, so populous, so varied, and with growing unrest and a large Muslim population—to not take the threat of terrorism seriously, is nothing short of masochistic. It has been ten years. It’s time to wake up.

Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14834042
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2011/08/20118514622587173.html

There is a battle raging in Hollywood, and it’s getting ugly. The explosive growth of the Netflix customer base, which now has more than 24 million subscribers (more than any individual cable channel), has seen the Los Gatos, CA based company morph, in last ten years, from an under-the-radar DVD rental service into the distributor of movies online.

Netflix’s rise has come at Hollywood’s expense as cable and other traditional distribution windows have refused to buy titles that have hit Netflix, claiming that Netflix’s online on-demand streaming platform robs the cable companies of the ability to sell ads for the same content. In addition to a loss in licensing revenue from cable companies, Netflix has contributed to the decline in DVD sales across the board, as customers opt to rent and stream instead of own and buy. Essentially, Netflix’s model encourages customers to avoid more profitable viewing options for cheaper, online streaming content.

Continue reading at Penn-Olson.

Like its contemporaries Tree of Life and Melancholia, Another Earth (written and directed by Mike Cahill) deploys astronomical imagery in order to provoke what the Catholic Church used to call the “fear of the Lord” but which now goes by the slightly more mundane “wonder and awe”:  the sense that the celestial body which dominates your gaze, in its implacable ambiguity, is either passing judgment on the drama of your life or an omnipresent reminder of how insignificant that drama is in the face of eternity. The film does this from the outset, presenting low-res telescopic footage of Jupiter that is nonetheless hypnotic, as Rhoda (Brit Marling, also co-writer) — her narration hypnotic in its own right — describes how she became entranced by looking up into space, enough to make it her life’s work.

That entrancement kicks off the film as Rhoda, distracted while driving by the appearance of the titular planet in the night sky, crashes into and kills the wife and son of composer John Burroughs (William Mapother). Four years later, the former MIT-bound student turned ex-con janitor emerges from prison and is on a path to put her life back together — a path that leads to John’s doorstep. She spends time with him under the guise of being a house cleaner, something he’s in desperate need of, as his tragic loss has left him a bitter shell of a man. And so Rhoda proceeds to get close to the man whose life she ruined (he’s unaware of who she really is), not entirely sure if she’s trying to make amends or assuage her own guilt. And the second Earth hangs up in the sky, a reminder that perhaps there’s another Rhoda who didn’t make the mistakes that she did — and there just happens to be a contest for a chance to visit that planet…

Trying to get too specific about genre classification only leads to narrow-minded arguments about definitions rather than addressing the heart of the work, so I’ll tread lightly here: the power of science fiction does not lie in outlandish settings or chrome-plated visuals. What matters in science fiction–in good science fiction–is using concepts at the frontiers of human understanding as a way to rattle the assumptions we make about everyday experience so that we can view our society and ourselves in a different light. The science is a means to an end, a signpost towards catharsis and enlightenment.

Herein lies in the problem with Another Earth: it seems like it should be kindred spirits with something like the two Solaris films, with its stretches of introspection and its planet-sized reflection of human-sized loss and guilt. And yet that reflection is ultimately shallow. Cahill and Marling are in love with their concept, and the scenes that are on point with that concept resonate with power, such as when Rhoda and her family watch a broadcast of SETI attempting to make first contact with the other Earth. But this power is a power of surfaces, and the trappings of science are used to provide easy visual metaphor for a story that would struggle in a more mundane mold. The visual vocabulary of space and the planets is meant to give weight to the human drama, which asks us to read it in terms of the trajectory of human orbits and cosmic coincidences; an instrumental performance by Mapother’s character recalls what astronomers once called the “music of the spheres”.

But those are all merely curlicues on a simple melodrama about penance and guilt and heartbreak, about a woman longing to undo the mistakes of the past while the night sky makes her inner demons literal. The concept is enticing but the execution wanting: Rhoda and John’s trajectories are clearly marked but rather than plumb their psychological depths, they are content to stagnate in the mechanical repetition of emotional beats — a process which may reflect the doubling motif of the film but is ultimately frustrating. And amidst its grand conceptual machinery there are elements which ultimately ring false, as when magical minority Purdeep (Kumar Pallana), Rhoda’s janitorial colleague, is offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the film in order to show Rhoda the path to True Wisdom.

Yet it’s difficult to fault these filmmakers too strongly for missteps that seem borne from an excess of ambition. Though its concepts and images are put into service as crutches for flawed melodrama, those images still have power. Perhaps out there is another Earth where this film is a masterwork. (Talking about regrets, perhaps there’s also another Earth where that joke landed properly…)

The Stateside debut of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive (adapted by Hossein Amini from the James Sallis novel) is obsessed with the directionality of time. In a city like Los Angeles that’s built more for automobiles than for people, a slick driver with a fast car is an aspirational avatar that provides the promise of freedom, of escape from the shackles of a stationary past. But that promise is an illusory high-speed mirage, one that Refn dissects amidst a flurry of car chases and brutal acts of violence. Like a samurai film, Drive proceeds for long stretches of reflective calm before exploding with pent-up, embattled fury, its bloody and passionate moments crystallized and suspended in time. And like a samurai film (or a medieval Norse saga, or the films noir that are this movie’s forebears), there is no force fast enough to elude the binds of past sins and inevitable vengeance.

The anonymous Driver played by Ryan Gosling tries to master time; he works as a stunt driver for the movies, where a split second is the difference between getting the shot and getting sent to the hospital. He’s also being groomed by his conniving garage-owner boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) for the racing circuit. On top of all that, he’s a getaway driver for any criminal that can pay his fee and abide by his razor-precise timetable.

Of course, that mastery is challenged when a woman comes into the picture: Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young waitress who lives down the hall from the Driver. He quickly forms a rapport with her and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos), new connections in his life — but those connections have connections of their own. Viewed through Refn’s lens, Los Angeles is a small city, and an act of violence compels the Driver to perform a good deed (however tarnished it might be) that only plunges him deeper into an inextricable web of treachery and brutality where neither his ironclad rules nor his wheelman skills seem like enough to save him.

The entire film is tainted with a sense of inevitability, where the characters all seem fated to die, and their struggle is merely to reach their appointed hour rather than meet their end as a random casualty, faceless and forgotten. So many of them, from Shannon to Irene to Albert Brooks’s dagger-smiling crime boss Bernie, tell stories of how they met one of the other characters, an ironic recognition of beginnings even as we can see the approaching ends. Those ends are captured in an aestheticized brutality in the mold of Hong Kong-style heroic bloodshed — but leeched of as much heroism as possible, edging towards the the revulsion of the abbatoir.

Throughout, Gosling glides through the film as a paragon of that bloodshed, capable of terrible violence but staying curiously detached, evoking those demons through the subtlety of a single line or gesture. It’s not that he’s sleepwalking through the story (though Cliff Martinez’s ethereal score has the effect of transforming Los Angeles into a hellbent dreamscape), but there’s the eerie sense that the world has no place for him unless he makes one. Refn helps find that place through his use of slow motion, which accentuates certain moments and lets the rest of the world fall away.

And yet we must return to normal speed and to the ticking clock, where the Driver and all those connected to him have to live with irrevocable consequences. Much is made of the inevitability of human nature; witness the scorpion imagery associated with Gosling’s character, as if to announce to everyone that they should have expected what lies within. And the telling moment is a quiet one, as he watches television with Benicio and asks the kid how he knows the shark character they’re watching isn’t the hero. He receives a reply with just the right note of condescension: “Does he look like a good guy to you?”

(This year’s Los Angeles Film Festival may have drawn to a close, but I have a steady backlog of entries to work through…)

At times, Mamitas (the feature debut of writer-director Nicholas Ozeki) doesn’t know what it wants to be: parts of it are teenage romance replete with sizzling repartee, before it segues into family drama about questions of personal identity, and there are hints throughout of an analytical, ethnographic lens, only half-deployed. But this kind of instability feels right for the piece, a coming-of-age story following Jordin Juarez  (E.J. Bonilla), a delinquent high school kid growing up in East Los Angeles. When we’re first introduced to him, he seems to tread a familiar path: a brash, self-styled ladies’ man rebelling against both parental and scholastic authority. But Ozeki takes time to peel back those layers, and when Jordin runs into Felipa (Veronica Diaz), a studious and cynical transplant from New York, the first hints of the depth of this character piece begin to emerge.

(Disclosure: I am socially acquainted with some of the people involved in this production. I also offered notes on an early draft of the script, though I’m unaware if they fell on anyone’s ears.)

(Oh, and an aside: While Felipa wears specs as a signifier of her “dowdy egghead” status, as a glasses partisan I have to give the film points for showing — despite Dorothy Parker — that passes can be made at those that wear them.)

There is a driving force to the plot — Jordin finds a memento that puts him on the path of investigating his enigmatic mother, who died in childbirth — but Mamitas is leisurely in getting there, preferring to slowly build on Jordin’s dynamic with Felipa and his relationship with his ailing grandfather Ramon (Pedro Armendariz, Jr.). At times this looseness seems unpolished but otherwise feels organic; the core conflict doesn’t dominate everything because at that age, everything feels like a core conflict. Events don’t proceed in a clean arc; sometimes things are forgotten, or you give up and try again later. Considering its focus on the large yet mostly cinematically-invisible Latino culture in Los Angeles, the novelistic, observational approach works.

But this film is not a sociological document; it leans on emotion rather than analysis, and while there is an air of authority helped along by the unobtrusive camera work, the film knows its heart is in the classic Bildungsroman. A boy becomes a man, and there is revelation, heartbreak, and struggle intimately intertwined with that journey. While there may be third-act problems where the film struggles to find its ending, we’re nonetheless buoyed along by the work of not only the able supporting cast (Joaquim de Almeida sketches the outsized personality and troubled history of his Professor Viera in but a handful of scenes), but especially in the rapport between Bonilla and Diaz. At its highest points their interplay feels like an ethereal Hollywood archetype distilled into a unique cultural container. When the film doesn’t know what to do with them, it suffers, but those moments are mercifully sparse.

(This review is crossposted as part of The House Next Door’s coverage of the 2011 LA Film Fest.)

Though it wasn’t the official close to the Los Angeles Film Festival, the live musical production of The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman is perhaps the best reflection of its ethos. It’s a Los Angeles story that reflects on the city’s cinematic legacy, a clash between the unstoppable force of Hollywood and the immovable object of art cinema, and a display of interdisciplinary virtuosity that’s ultimately a love letter to the power of the movies.

Seduction was originally a radio production commissioned for Swedish public radio and produced by the Los Angeles-based rock duo Sparks as their 22nd album. The musical’s transition from radio to stage—and hopefully to the screen—came about as a series of happy Hollywood accidents. Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers who make up Sparks, were introduced to Canadian surrealist director Guy Maddin when they revealed in an interview that he was one of their favorite directors; the interviewer just happened to be a close friend of Maddin’s. Meanwhile, the genesis of the live production came when the organizers of the Los Angeles Film Festival saw that the band was following the festival’s Twitter account.

At an open-air performance of the musical at Ford Amphitheatre, Maddin takes the stage with the Mael brothers and the rest of the cast. The director reads from his screenplay as we watch the action unfold in front of us and a series of sketches, storyboards, classic movie posters, concept collages, and script snippets are projected onto a giant screen behind them. It’s a technique that evokes Maddin’s films, with the barrage of film clips and text and stills flying by at synaptic speed while performers amble in front of obviously artificial projections. With it, Maddin conjures up a clash between the real and the unreal.

The style perfectly suits the narrative: Following his 1956 Cannes “Best Poetic Humor” win for Smiles of a Summer Night, Ingmar Bergman (Peter Franzen) enters a Stockholm movie theater to watch a blockbuster from Hollywood and finds himself transported to that place—or perhaps it’s more of a sensibility. There he’s given the hard sell by a smarmy Studio Chief (Russell Mael) to come and make big-budget Hollywood movies; Bergman also embarks on a phantasmagoric tour of the city led by an enigmatic Limo Driver (Ron Mael). Franzen dominates the stage as Bergman, gruff and imperious in his grey sweater and black beret, an intellectual as icy as the Scandinavian snowscape he calls home. He’s a lone genius with critical cachet, meaning that in Hollywood’s eyes he’s ripe for the picking. The Chief uses every trick in his arsenal to tempt Bergman, from money to busty blondes to “crews that can read your mind and work all night.”

One of the highlights comes as Bergman is given a tour of the studio commissary; there the Chief tries to sell the Swede on Hollywood’s special brand of artistic expression fused with extravagant consumption. Backed by a chorus of laughing executives and an off-kilter polka melody, he points out the pantheon of émigré auteurs that made the Hollywood leap: Among them are Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock (the Chief points out the example of “The Man Who Knew Too Much done twice, in Hollywood done twice as nice!”).

Of course, the whole thing is a Faustian bargain that begins to unravel even as soon as Bergman considers it; at the heart of the drama is an existential crisis straight out of one of the man’s films. Sparks’s rock stylings transform a director-actress squabble into a clash of apocalyptic fury, and Bergman’s situation explodes into a dramatic and delirious escape attempt from his gilded prison; he reflects on the irony that he’s “now an actor in a bad big-budget Hollywood action film.” By the time Bergman crumples on the Santa Monica pier calling out for rescue from a God he’s not sure exists, Maddin and Sparks make a convincing argument that the subsequent film—which will undoubtedly screen at a future Los Angeles Film Festival—will be an intensely fascinating product from a group of offbeat talents. It’s a collaboration the real Bergman would have smiled upon.