Introducing…The Tyeeies!

Scorsese is up for another Oscar, same with Hilary Swank and Leonardo DiCaprio. zzzzz.. wha!? Oh excuse me, must have dozed off there for a moment. There weren't many surprises in the recent Academy Award nominations. But these days, surprises are hard to come by. If you leave out the thornier questions of quality and awards at all, some of the best film experiences you can have are the ones in which you have no expectations.
You haven't read any reviews, you haven't seen any trailers, you haven't watched clips on Entertainment Tonight or been inundated with countless ads.

Many films will never be the belle of the ball on Oscar night, but they still deserve a little recognition. This being the season of awards ceremonies -- the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Razzies -- perhaps we can add one more contender to the pack, the Tyeeies. Breaking away from the Hollywood formula of best actor, best adapted screenplay, etcetera., these awards will reward those odd little details that stay with you long after the film itself has ended -- those little surprises that add up to the joy of cinema.

Best Use of Foreign Food in a Foreign Film
 
Sometimes the best thing about foreign films is the foreign food, whether it's drinking Gazpacho in Pedro Almodavar's films, eating sweet buns in Shaolin Soccer, or, in the case of Infernal Affairs (Wu Jian Dao 2002) drinking bottled green tea. Food often plays an incidental role in the plot itself, but it the crucial little details that add up to the experience of another time and place.

Never underestimate the importance of the edible, it will give you an entire new sense of the ordinary details of the character's lives, making them more genuine, taking you inside their world, into the gut of the story. The award for this category must go to the Korean film Old Boy (2003), which gives new meaning to the notion of fresh food. The story starts when Oh Dae-Su is kidnapped on his daughter's third birthday and imprisoned for 15 years in a hotel room. Why? Good question. When he is finally released, after transforming himself into a perfect instrument of revenge, he has five days to discover the reason. After 15 years of eating dumplings, something a little more lively is called for, so he heads to the sushi bar to down some squiggling squid. When Old Boy captured the Grand Prix at Cannes, director Chan-wook Park thanked the squid for their hard work, along with the rest of the cast and crew. This film is not for the faint of heart, but God love the Koreans, they make films quite like no other country, full of unbelievable violence tempered by an odd and occasional sentimental sweetness. It's a taste sensation.

The runner up is Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong gang buster currently being remade by Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Walhberg. Infernal is full of foody bits like Andy Lau gesturing at a fellow police officer to give him a drink by making the universal tippling motion, or the sequence where he arrives at the police station and is offered a cup of coffee by his fellow policemen, which signals his acceptance into their ranks. Whether it's the mafia boss eating his take-out dinner in the police station, or the heart stopping scene where the dueling moles, one cop, one robber, try to undo each other, while drinking copious amounts of green tea, Infernal Affairs makes you wish you were there rather than here. Part of that has to do with food. I'm not quite sure why, but like Mr. Proust was heard to say, "Give me a goddamn madeleine before I shoot your ass off," or something like that.

Best Underwater Sex Scene

Not since Tarzan and His Mate (1934) which helped bring in the Hayes code, has there been a more swimmingly swell sex scene than the one in Renegade. French actor Victor Cassel, and Juliette Lewis play a game of underwater catch and snatch, and other assorted watersports. Based on the comic book by French artist Moebius, the film's original title was Blueberry, but that wasn't macho enough for North American audiences, I guess.

This hallucinogenic western isn't a great film, but it is a hoot in boots. The story begins when Mike S. Blueberry arrives in town as a greenhorn and promptly gets embroiled with a major baddie played by perpetual baddie, Michael Madsen. After a shoot out that kills his girlfriend, and leaves him close to death, little Blueberry is taken in by the Chiracahua tribe and taught the ways of the shaman. He must confront his own inner demons and battle the bad guy in typical Western way. The plot, for the most part, is entirely nonsensical; there are cowboys, Indians, lots of mystical journeys and the ingesting of many mysterous and magical potions, but it makes the old west look astonishingly beautiful. The scenery must be seen. Victor Cassel does a fine rendition of someone on a very weird trip; his eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth open and drooling. Director Jan Kounen spent a long time researching Shamanism and the Shipibo-Conibos culture before making the film and some of his research, which formed the basis for a subsequent documentary, rubs off on this very French version of Le Wild West.

Best Use of Serious Cuteness
 
McDull, Prince de la Bun was recently awarded best film of the year by the Hong Kong Film critics, beating out arthouse favorites like Wong Kar Wai and chop socky hero Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle. McDull is an interesting amalgam of cute, funny animals and geopolitical shifts. While you may not get all of it, the story is full of pathos and the ache of longing for something that has passed. The best thing is that sense of familiarity mixed with complete lack of recognition. I didn't get half the jokes, even while entire families sitting around me were gutting themselves, and I still liked it. I liked the fact that I didn't really get it.  I liked the sense of fumbling for meaning. I liked the loss of bearing and being on unfamiliar ground. It reminded me of being at the Vaneast Cinema in the mid-1980s and seeing Pixote, The Brothers Quay, and other assorted stuff that knocked me sideways and left me disoriented for days afterward.

Best Use of One Location

Director Jim McKay's Everyday People takes place in a fictional Brooklyn restaurant during its final 24 hours before it is bought up by a giant corporation to make way for a Hard Rock Cafe and a Banana Republic. The ideas about race relations are a little shop worn, and the acting ranges from the strong to the plain awkward, but any film that is set in one location is something that I like. And the restaurant of the film, Raskin's, makes a star turn. From the breakfast shift to the late night drinkers, the film follows an ensemble of different characters from the front of the house to the dish pit. The one thing it gets right is that sense of how a work place becomes home for the motley crew of everyday people who populate it. McKay shot the film in a restaurant that had just closed down the previous year, and very consciously chose this location.

"I felt like a workplace made sense,” McKay has said, “because I think that in this country, for some people, the only place where they really do interact with people of different races and class oftentimes is in the workplace. In many ways it's just as much a film about work as it's a film about family." Restaurant culture has done a bit of a star turn with New Yorker stories about working in the kitchen (Bill Buford's New Yorker profile of Mario Batali really should become a film) along with Anthony Bourdain's oeuvre. A friend of mine who is a chef was recently at a club when Bourdain was in town on his publicity tour; they locked eyes across the room and Bourdain made his way over and said "You're a cook aren't you?" "How can you tell?" asked my friend.

"By the dead look in your eye," answered Bourdain.

Runner up in this category is Assault on Precinct 13: John Carpenter's original, not the remake.

Best Film in Which Nothing Much Happens (for a really long time)

Millennium Mambo is not a new film, but we'll make an exception here at The Tyee since director Hou Hsiao-Hsien is regarded as being up there with the big boys, Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, et al. Millennium Mambo, likes its title implies, is set in 2001 and concerns the story of a party girl who smokes and drinks and gets sniffed by her boyfriend. At first glance the film is seemingly as vacant and vacuous as its heroine Vicky, but then again maybe that's the point.

Runner up is The Missing, in which a granny loses her grandson in a park and spends the rest of the film searching for him. Not much happens, but it's the way in which not much happens that's the important thing. Director Lee Kang-sheng, who started out as an actor working with another director famous for nothing happening Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye Dragon Inn) emulates the master well. Much like real life, you'll be left wondering, what was that about anyway? If you have an answer, let me know.

Upcoming B.C. film fests

You won't find many genuine film surprises in movie theatres, but thanks to the advent of DVD, you can still watch them. Here's a big shout out to Black Dog Video (3451 Cambie Street), which just stocked their shelves with Wong Kar Wai's 2046, the French slasher flick Haute Tension, and Haneke's The Time of the Wolf.

Your other hunting ground is film festivals so haul your liberal guilt down to the 14th World Community Film Festival, February 11-13, 2005 at Langara College. And then over to the Island to The Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival February 4 – 13, 2005. The Victoria film festival's tag line is "Give Hollywood a miss!" Hollywood has lots of misses, misters too, all looking to become stars, but in this increasingly interesting festival, the films aren't interested in fame. Well, other than the opening film, Jimmywork, in which a very Canadian con-man pretends to be a big time American film producer, and then tries to kidnap a warehouse full of beer.

If this sounds like a “Trailer Park”episode come to horrible life, you're not far wrong. Simon Sauve’s film is a sort of documentary about Jimmy Weber (watch the trailer here) but whether Sauvé himself will be indicted for making Jimmy do the bad things he does remains to be seen, but as Sauvé said in a recent interview: "Jimmy was lazy, I had to encourage him." The film screened at the Toronto Film Festival this fall and had audiences wondering whether what they were watching was real or not. Go yourself and judge. You may be in for a surprise.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films on Fridays for The Tyee.