SDAFF DAY 3: REBEL WITH A CAUSE; DOES IT MATTER?

If there were one film that you have to see and must see at this year’s SDAFF, that movie would be THE REBEL. I mean it folks, this Vietnamese achievement, starring Johnny Nguyen and Dustin Nguyen, and directed by Charlie Nguyen (Johnny’s brother) is the most spellbinding and mind-numbing martial arts stylized genre buster done in years. Not since ONG BAK have I had that tingly sensation inside that makes me want to stand up in the middle of the theater and yell, “This film rocks man.” We’re talking wild thing, you really move me.

There will be those critics that will want to label this film as the Vietnamese ONG BAK, but that would do THE REBEL a great injustice. On many levels, THE REBEL is superior, the story, the plot and the acting. Dustin’s Nguyen performance as the villain trying to suppress the insurgent’s goal of ultimately booting the French out of Vietnam is so engaging, that it is no wonder he was cast alongside A-list actress Cate Blanchard in last year’s award winning Indie LITTLE FISH.

Dustin has to be one of the best villains in any martial arts film in ages. This man is an actor, and his performance elevates the film into a must see instant classic and the sad thing about it all, is that no one has ever seen it fit to cast Dustin in any martial arts stylized film. He’s a legitimate martial artist, a true thespian and one of the humblest dudes you’ll ever meet.

Johnny Nguyen’s debut as the lead portraying an agent out to destroy the rebels, his psyche filled with the turmoil of all the ugliness that the French inflicted upon Vietnam, is outstanding. Furthermore, his martial arts abilities are wicked and he should truly be considered as one of today’s top martial arts stars. He’s got the look, the acting, the action skills and the pizzazz to really go far. Under the right circumstance, Johnny could surpass the awe-inspiring heights of Jet Li and do so with more cool than James Coburn.

If you missed THE REBEL yesterday, the film will be shown again October 16th at 6:00 pm.

The one film I really wanted to see yesterday was NANKING, which the Japanese are calling what happened at Nanking an incident, as compared to what it really was, a massacre. The world knows six million Jews were slaughtered during World War II, but the world seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that the Japanese needlessly and horrifically slaughtered 12 million Chinese during the same war. I tried to get tickets last Wednesday, but it was already sold out, the only film at the festival to instantly sell out.

An interesting back-story of the screening is that Nancy Lo, founder and head of the Association for Preserving Historical Accuracy of Foreign Invasion in China (APHAFIC), purchased 230 tickets.

Lo shares, “We asked school teachers if they wanted to have their students come see the movie, an opportunity to educate the young people about the real history. Some high school teachers don’t teach this in history, so we give the tickets to about 130 school students.

“Civilians get killed in war, we all know that, but the human rights issues are how they die, babies, women, the elderly; what I do and with this film NANKING, we can speak for them.”

I also caught HEAVEN IS TOO FAR AWAY, a collection of shorts that was as freaky as it was intriguing. One short that caught my attention was MU, a fable based on an age-old Japanese story about a traditional Japanese tattoo artist, grittily portrayed by Yutaka Takeuchi.

The beauty of shorts is that you can take “nothing” and make it something (if you watch MU, you’ll know what I am hinting at). The opening is pretty freaky because it looks like we are watching the life or death of Seiji (Takeuchi) through a tear in either a paper wall or perhaps a fleshy hole in a body left by a removed tattoo. As Seiji drifts through his nebulous existence, like Seiji, we are precariously attempting to demystify where he is and what the heck is wrong with him.

Another film that really struck me on a personal level was DARK MATTER, which stars Academy Award Winner Meryl Streep and Ye Liu, based on a story about how a Chinese Communist student, Gang Lu, could not handle American culture and how to deal with his American Professors at the University of Iowa, leading to dire consequences.

I attended graduate school at National Taiwan University in 1979, studying entomology. Keep in mind that back then, America had just broken relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan), so it was a bad time to me an American. The professors at the school tried to railroad me and prevent me from graduating claiming that my research was all wrong (even though as I was doing my research, the whole department was impressed).

The sad thing about DARK MATTER and what Gang Lu went through is that it is not an uncommon problem for graduate students in most universities in the United States. After the screening, producer Janet Yang recognized the difficulty of distributing the film due to the recent shootings at Virginia Tech.

“We are trying to show the film on campuses,” she tells, “use the film as an educational tool to make people aware of how these things can happen.”

A member of the audience was a friend of Lu’s at the University of Iowa and saw the real tragedy unfold. He praised Yang for an accurate depiction of the key events and lauded her for the way they were trying to handle distribution and use the film was positive purposes.