Lost in the Labyrinths of the Mind: Backrooms

Chiwetel Ejiofor in Kane Parson's Backrooms. (Photo: A24 Pictures.)

Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is some very clever filmmaking. The elevator pitch could’ve been “Skinamarink, but cinematic.”

Reductio ad Absurdum—Omniscient Reader

Lee Min-ho (center) as Yoo Joonghyuk in Omniscient Reader: The Prophet. (All accompanying photos are stills from the movie's trailer.)

No film adaptation can replicate a story entirely, and some tradeoffs have to be made. Adaptation screenwriters need to seek out what they believe to be the core themes and plotline of the story and find a way to mesh them with cinematic grammar, maybe sprinkling in some Easter eggs if they can. But what if that story is really freaking long and has multiple core themes? What if it’s currently being serialized into another medium so successfully that the latter is considered equally as canonical as the original?

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (Jeonjijeong dokja sijeom / 2025, aka Omniscient Reader: The Prophet) is based on the best-selling Korean serialized webnovel of all time, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (2018–2020), by the married duo singNsong. The main story has 551 chapters (you read that right), with a handful of one-shot side stories and an ongoing sequel which, as of this writing, has added another 358 chapters. The main story was later revised and released on paper in 20 volumes. Charles Dickens could never. ORV is also currently being adapted into what’s called a webtoon, basically a manga that imitates the scroll of a website rather than the turning of pages.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Just a Few More Interesting Short Films

My coverage of short films has fallen off a bit lately, but I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones. Here are eight more since my last roundup that I think are worth talking about, listed in the order in which I saw them.

The poster for Drew Marquardt's Act of War.

American Drew Marquardt’s Act of War (2022) is the perfect no-budget student film. On the morning of 9/11, an accountant (David Theune) working at the World Trade Center’s insurance company discovers a loophole that can help them avoid bankruptcy due to payouts: if the attacks are declared an act of war, then military conflict voids the policy. For most of the 8-minute runtime he debates with an in-house lawyer (Johnny Ray Meeks) in a bare office with only a desk, two chairs, and a phone, first about whether to get their Washington lobbyist (Richardson Cisneros-Jones) to act on this information, then about who should call him. The moral weaseling and self-justifications are compellingly scripted and enthralling to watch. Ultimately, they decide to do it, the call is made, and we hear George W. Bush use the key phrase in his televised address to the nation. An opening title card elevates the proceedings: “This really happened.”

Good Education: Whisper of the Heart

Studio Ghibli’s 1995 Whisper of the Heart (Mimi o Sumaseba / 耳をすませば) is one of those films about nothing in particular that end up being incredibly moving. The major directorial effort by Kondō Yoshifumi before his sudden early death, adapted by Miyazaki Hayao from the one-volume manga by Hiiragi Aoi, Whisper portrays the free-range childhood – vanishingly rare today outside of a major metropolitan area with ubiquitous public transport (such as Tokyo) – of outspoken fourteen-year-old girl Shizuku (Honna Yōko). Like most other Studio Ghibli entries, it’s a fantasy, but mostly because it’s such an ideal childhood.

Narcissism Disguised As Altruism

I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.

Off the Shelf: Life Is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans: House

The cast of House. From left: Omar Epps, Olivia Wilde, Robert Sean Leonard, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Jennifer Morrison, Peter Jacobson. (Photo: Joe Viles/NBC.)

I despise prestige television. Art relies on limitations, and narrative is an architecture. Thirteen hours of a single story deprives you of both, and “fleshing out” each character’s backstory is just exploring so many blind alleys. No, give me episodic television anytime.

There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth: An Impossibly Small Object (2017)

Director and cast member David Verbeek in An Impossibly Small Object.

An Impossibly Small Object (2017), Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek’s second feature set in Taiwan and third feature set in the Far-Eastern Sinosphere, is two stories thinly interconnected: a grade school friendship between a girl and a boy just as it’s ending, and a Dutch photographer (Verbeek) torn between homesickness and wanderlust. The first tale is an atmospheric work of magical realism reminiscent of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, albeit with more dynamic camerawork; the second tale is little more than subtitled mumblecore. But an enigmatic third act, though brief, manages to transmute unanswered questions into mysterious ambiguities.

Softening the Blow: Hotel by the River (Gangbyeon Hotel / 강변 호텔 2018)

Kim Min-hee in Hotel by the River / 강변 호텔 (2018).

Hotel cafés, like airport restaurants and long-haul trains, are a magical place. People from all walks of life gather there for a few brief moments before setting off again to who knows where. These places allow for serendipitous encounters that can sometimes be life-altering, and that often reveal how people’s lives rhyme. That’s the vibe going into writer-director Hong Sang-soo’s Hotel by the River (Gangbyeon Hotel / 강변 호텔 2018), set entirely at and near a small hotel by the Han River over a day and change in the dead of winter, when everything is covered in snow. And since this is Hong, we viewers are also meeting the characters serendipitously, with no introduction or exposition.

Anything Is Possible Once the Sun Goes Down: Au Revoir Taipei (Yi Ye Taibei / 一頁台北 2010)

Chun-Yao Yao in Au Revoir Taipei (Yi Ye Taibei / 一頁台北 2010).

Writer-director Arvin Chen’s feature debut, Au Revoir Taipei (Yi Ye Taibei / 一頁台北, 2010) – the Mandarin title is a pun on “one night in Taipei” – is a whimsical and slightly farcical romantic comedy that I believe could only have been made in Taiwan, and it’s on YouTube. The key to its tonal success lies in the characterization. It’s my favorite Taiwan film.

In Taiwan, we have this thing we do in social situations: we play dumb instead of taking the initiative, lest we propose something that someone doesn’t want to do, but would go along with anyway just to be polite. The film captures this idea perfectly, which is why it’s one of the few contemporary films to nail a natural-sounding Taiwanese Mandarin. In fact, almost the entire film features characters who don’t know each other very well sharing a scene, and playing dumb describes most of the dialogue.

Silver Screen Time Machine: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Tosa Kazunari in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020).

Somehow, Kato doesn’t freak out.

The essence of time travel is narrative. Like the unread pages of a good book, the future has already happened; it just hasn’t yet happened to you. The metaphor applies doubly to filmmaking, which usually takes a narrative and shoots it out of order. Continuity must be maintained, and character and emotional arcs made convincing. If they aren’t, paradoxes manifest, the cinematic world collapses, and viewers branch off from the storyworld prematurely, each into their own individual lifeworlds.

2020’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (ドロステのはてで僕ら “We at the End of the Droste”), director-cinematographer-editor Yamaguchi Junta’s feature debut, realizes this metaphor in the most direct way. Beyond is shot to look like it was done in a single take, using just one phone, tripod, boom mic, the world’s longest power cord, and lots and lots of stopwatches. To give you a sense of its flavor, it was inspired by One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな! “Don’t Stop the Camera!”), Ueda Shinichiro’s 2017 smash hit about a group of people tasked with making a one-shot microbudget zombie film. There are cuts in Beyond – of course there are cuts; it’s a time travel film – but to keep up the illusion, the requisite plot complications have to develop organically from the situation the characters find themselves in, and from who they are as characters, as people. Writer Ueda Makoto does a hell of a job in just 70 minutes.

Getting Gerried by Nature: Gerry

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in Gerry (2002).

This review contains major spoilers for Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002).

In 2002, Gus Van Sant followed his aggressively mediocre Finding Forrester (2000) with the aggressively experimental Gerry (2002). It doesn’t have opening titles, and for most of its 103 minutes the only two people we see are Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who both play guys named Gerry. (I’m going to use the actors’ names to avoid confusion.) There’s even a running joke about how the name “Gerry” gets turned into a vague, all-purpose word. (Affleck, Damon, and Van Sant co-wrote as well as co-editing.) A few examples: “I crow’s-nested up here to scout-about the ravine ’cause I thought maybe you gerried the rendezvous”; “We could have just bailed early, you know. There were so many gerrys along the way”; “And then we gerried off to the animal tracks.” The first 20 minutes are just long takes of Matt and Casey driving and then walking in the California semi-desert with minimal dialogue.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Some (More) Interesting Short Films

A scene from Ottó Foky’s Scenes with Beans (1976).

It’s been a year and a half since my last shorts roundup, and the pandemic is still ongoing; the only difference is that people are starting to not care anymore. I wonder if it has something to do with how the internet has diminished our attention spans and memories. In any case, here in chronological order of premiere date are the shorts I watched that engaged me enough to want to finish them and write about them. If I don’t provide a link, I saw it on MUBI.

One of the Best Music Videos Ever Made – All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault): The Short Film (2021)

Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien in All Too Well: The Short Film (2021), directed by Taylor Swift.

That’s right – despite its name, All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault): The Short Film (2021) belongs squarely in the genre of the music video. But that the level of craftsmanship and resources on display is on par with that of short films just serves to emphasize the significance of its achievement. In this sense, it’s a perfect synecdoche of Taylor Swift, the song’s singer and co-writer, and the music video’s writer-director and one of its actors.

Panem et Circenses: Town Bloody Hall

 Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer in Town Bloody Hall (1979).

Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall (1979) is an unauthorized record of a public “Debate on Women’s Liberation” held in Manhattan in 1971. I say unauthorized because the venue prohibited filming, but the filmmakers came anyway at the behest of Norman Mailer, moderator and author of the anti-feminist essay “The Positive Sex,” which served as the excuse for the event. Four prominent feminists take the stage with him, and the audience is a Who’s Who of the New York literati. You can read here about the fascinating background of the event and the film’s production history.

The Cinematic Grammar of Prophecy – Dune: Part One

Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in Dune (2021).

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One, co-written with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, has many shortcomings. But it succeeds nevertheless because it gets the most important thing right: the mood. Namely, the mood of prophesied destiny. And it’s hard to imagine a more fitting adaptation.

Great Feats of Recitation: Cosmopolis (2012)

Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis (2012).

Fresh off filming the final Twilight film (2012), Robert Pattinson jumped straight into portraying yet another nearly affectless, pale leading man with stylish hair in Cosmopolis (2012), adapted by director David Cronenberg from the Don DeLillo novel. Rarely have I encountered a film with such single-minded focus: everything here, from production design to camera angles to score, is in service to the dialogue. As it should be.

Stabbed in the Heart: The Twilight Saga (2008-2012)

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008).

I confess: I too used to shit freely on Twilight (2008). What started changing my mind is the excellent work of its two leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in their work after Twilight, though never again together after their breakup. This, and not my internalized misogyny against media embraced by teenage girls, is the angle from which I have approached these films, based on the four novels by Stephenie Meyer. And they're fascinating.

Naturalism in Space: Stowaway

Shamier Anderson, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, and Toni Collette in Stowaway (2021).

“To Build a Fire,” Jack London’s most anthologized short story, follows a guy in the Yukon trying furiously to build a fire ahead of an oncoming blizzard. Each time he tries, something goes wrong. On the surface, the plot of Stowaway, written by director Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison, seems similar. Plotwise, all you really need to know is that it’s set on an unstoppable resource-limited spaceship, and it’s called Stowaway. Over the nearly two-hour running time, only one thing goes right, and it’s not enough.

Love and Its Discontents: The Park (2016)

Naomie Vogt-Roby and Maxime Bachellerie in Damien Manivel’s The Park (Le parc, 2016).

Damien Manivel’s The Park (Le parc, 2016), co-written with cinematographer Isabel Pagliai, starts off nice and easy, but it quickly turns bonkers in the best way possible.

Naomie (Naomie Vogt-Roby, just 15 when she made the film) meets a boy (Maxime Bachellerie) at a large woodsy park on a first date. She’s short and sensible; he’s lanky and shy. The two teenagers sit together awkwardly, converse awkwardly, walk around awkwardly, and before you know it are kissing in a secluded spot. I’ve just praised another film for its naturalistic romance, but here the romance succeeds precisely because it’s so overdetermined. The transformation of two clumsy teenage strangers into a mutually attracted couple is a kind of magic that’s almost impossible to replicate onscreen, so the film doesn’t even try. Each scene is a vignette – they walk around, they look at squirrels, they discuss their families, she does a handstand – that, combined in the right order as they are here, sketch the development of a romance. But in true cinematic fashion, how we get from one vignette to another is hidden in the editing (by William Laboury), left as an exercise for the viewer, and whatever we can come up with is infinitely more convincing than what could have been put on the screen.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Some Interesting Short Films

James Baldwin in Terence Dixon’s Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970).

It’s been a year now since the pandemic officially began, and from the rate of vaccination it looks like it’ll be another year yet before it’s under control. Taiwan, from where I’m writing, wasn’t hit as hard, but we still had our moments, and in any case the fragmentation of time and attention span seems to be one of those things that are in the air (or the zeitgeist). For this reason, and others – I finally got my PhD in English – I saw vastly fewer films these 366 days than the last 365, despite being recently added to Rotten Tomatoes; and I saw more short films than I’ve seen in the previous years combined. The coronavirus death tally has also impressed upon me the fleetingness of life and the value of time, so I declined to finish films that didn’t engage me (“engage” is of course different from “entertain”). From the short films I did finish, here are those I think most noteworthy, in chronological order of premiere date, with one exception that I will explain below. If I don’t provide a YouTube link, I saw it on MUBI.