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A sampling of movies playing during the first week of the Silk Screen festival, devoted to Asian and Asian-American movies.
A stop for a cake and the universal quest for the best, closest parking spot are the dramatic dominoes that set a series of life-changing choices and encounters into motion.
This black comedy, with dramatic veins, stars Chang Chen as a weary Taipei worker who just wants to stop and pick up a cake to share with his wife.
When he scores a dessert but finds his car blocked in, he meets an elderly woman who mistakes him for her long-gone son, a one-handed barber, a tailor who harbored grand dreams, a prostitute in the grip of her pimp and assorted gangsters.
"Parking" is sort of like an Asian, R-rated version of "After Hours" or the children's book "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." With a fractured time line, "Parking" takes detours and turning points and makes for an unexpected and vividly photographed trip.
R in nature. In Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese with English subtitles.
Jimmy (Hiroshi Watanabe) is the man who came to dinner. And breakfast and lunch and bunking in the basement with his 10-year-old American nephew.
He is a 40-year-old divorced Japanese man whose sister coddles him and finds him amusing. Her stern, slightly older husband does not -- at all. Their son lives in a self-sufficient, brainy bubble and tolerates his uncle, even when he forgets him on Halloween night.
As Jimmy pursues women, takes a college class, barely holds down a part-time job and wreaks havoc, he walks a fine line between court jester and village idiot. He leaves a trail of destruction -- and rebirth -- in his wake in this film from director and co-writer Dave Boyle.
Just when you're ready to reach through the screen and throttle Jimmy, you realize he is a catalyst for change. And for gentle comedy, with and without a Japanese accent.
In English and Japanese, with some subtitles. Not rated but PG-13 in nature.
It's no wonder that Sammer (Jeremy Allen White) likes to escape into others' lives, via their purloined videos. His existence is pretty grim: a dad who disappeared, a brother in lock-up and a foster mother losing her sight.
Sammer is a 13-year-old Brooklynite who, with his young pals, steals tourists' video cameras and the occasional laptop. They pawn the electronics for cash but Sammer keeps the footage that provides a window in the owners' lives and the sort of vicarious vacations that are out of reach.
"The Speed of Life," which loops together the relationships among the core characters, is all about sight and the shadow of what's missing. Its overarching theme is about fractured father-and-son relationships.
The connections here are a little too coincidental and the characters either a little too savvy for their age or aggressively quirky but "Speed" makes excellent use of the videos, lost and found.
Not rated but contains scenes of brief violence.
Nobuko (Maki Sakai), whose stage name is Nonko, is a 36-year-old divorcee and failed actress living back home with her parents in the Japanese countryside. Her credits include such movies as "Babe Battles Ninja" and "Sexy Gamble," so you know she wasn't on the festival or awards circuit.
Other than drinking, smoking, riding her bicycle and moping about, she doesn't do much. When a young man with big dreams -- to see the world -- arrives hoping to set up a booth at a festival, she and her parents (a homemaker and a Shinto priest) sort of adopt him.
The needy Nobuko and the naive visitor, Masaru (Gen Hoshino), cannot stay suspended in amber forever and when frustrations eventually boil over, the movie jumps the rails. Until then, her world-weariness plays off his sunniness well, and the film's view of pastoral life, dashed dreams and tangled family dynamics seemed new.
But then it resorted to an age-old response to disappointment and anger ... and lost me.
R in nature for partial nudity and sex. In Japanese with English subtitles.
