mqff is upon us! prepare for queer cinema!

The Melbourne Queer Film Festival starts next week, and as always I'm super excited! I missed out on the Festival last year (because China), and I'm really looking forward to this year's festival.

I volunteer every year, which is something I recommend for anyone who is in to films, is in to queer films, or wants to support their queer community. It's a great festival, everyone is always really lovely and there's a great feeling around it.

Also, this year, there are vegan lollies available for sale! Which is pretty awesome, please feel free to thank your local vegan for the idea (me) and everyone at MQFF who let me suggest it and then just Did It. I love when people accomodate dietary requirements, I hope there's no gluten in the lollies hmm. And there's an app for iPhone and Android, and most of the movies screen at ACMI which as you know (Melbourne) is one of the best cinemas and spaces ever.

Here is my short list, in screening order:

When Hainan Meets Teochew (当海南遇上潮州) (Saturday 16 March, 16:00)

When Hainan Meets Teochew tells a unique story about love between a butch and a femme woman. The two meet in the most unusual circumstances (involving a falling bra), become enemies in the most unpredictable situation and become friends in the most unforgettable manner. Just as they gradually develop feelings for each other, Hainan’s ex-girlfriend appears and puts their relationship under the most challenging test. The ensuing love triangle results in much misunderstanding and hilarity. What will become of Hainan and Teochew’s romance, and who is the owner of the falling bra?

 

Oz Docs (Monday 18 March, 18:00)

This is a series of Australian documentaries, including 'The La La Road' on Chinese lesbians, and the Aquaporko Documentary, featuring a whole lot of awesome, fat, queer ladies of my acquaintance.

Cockpit (Thursday 21 March, 18:30)

Mrs. Doubtfire meets Tootsie, meets Some Like it Hot - 10,000m up, in this over-the-top comedy of mistaken identities from Sweden. After losing his job as an airline pilot when his company downsizes, Valle is thrown out by his materialistic wife, who takes the kids with her and immediately begins a new relationship with a wealthy elderly man. After countless knock backs by airlines, he hears that Silver airlines are looking for a female captain. In desperation, and with little in the way of a plan, Valle dons a pair of high heels, borrows his staunchly feminist and queer friendly sister’s identity and transforms himself into attractive Maria and wins himself a pilot’s job. The plan begins to unravel when his lesbian airline colleague Cecilia starts to fall for him/her, and a narrowly averted plane crash, lands Maria all over the news.

Queens! Destiny of Dance (Friday 22 March, 20:30)

Guru Amma presides over a community of hijras (male to female transgenders) inside a huge palace, with love and severity in equal measure. The apple of her eye is the talented Mukta who is the best dancer among them and also the potential next leader of the community. Mukta adores Guru Amma with all her heart, to the point of worshipping her. One day, a beautiful young girl turns up at their door without any explanation. Awed by her beauty, Amma takes the mysterious girl under her wings and names her Nandini.

Soon, Nandini becomes the centre of attraction for the other hijras and for Amma as well, thereby sidelining Mukta. Mukta’s jealousy soon turns to paranoia about Nandini, and Mukta leaves the community after threatening Amma. But Mukta soon realises that she will never be taken back into her house or the community. Determined to set things right, Mukta returns to Amma and the community, but behaves kindly towards Nandini this time around, until enough is enough and events unfold leading to a shocking climax.

True to the essence of Bollywood films, Queens! is chock full of colourful characters, and fantastic dance scenes.

Strange Frame: Love and Sax (Saturday 23 March, 14:00)

The first lesbian, science fiction, rock ‘n’ roll animated film is here! Hold on tight as we head off into the 29th Century.

200 years after the human race has left a decimated Earth behind, life on Ganymede, one of Saturn’s moons, is a world of space pirates, indentured slaves and genetic mutations. Parker, a saxophonist, meets a gutsy singer, Naia, who’s a ‘debt slave’, and the two quickly fall in love and form a band. Gaining cult notoriety, the band catches the eye of the authorities, and Naia is recaptured. As Parker begins a desperate search for her love, Naia is repackaged by ‘the man’ as a generic rock star and achieves immense fame. Will Naia be saved before her soul is forever destroyed?

(quotes are from the mqff programme)

I always keep my short list short, because I burn out fast during festivals, but others I wouldn't mind seeing eventually are:
Gayby
My Best Day
The Mermaids
Speechless (无言)

azn aus lady things i'm giving money to

I came across two awesome looking short movies starring Asian Australian ladies that are currently looking for funding. I'm planning to donate to both of them as soon as I find my credit card, and I think they sound super interesting. I don't know any of the people involved in this (though if they want to say hi, they should definitely do so!).

Blood for the Devil's Daughters sees three Asian vampires resurrected and threatening Melbourne's Chinatown. The vampires will allegedly mix Asian "vampire" themes with Western ones - like hopping ghosts, fox spirits, and flying heads, and will be battled by two ladies of Asian heritage. The fundraising for this movie ends December 1.

Hit Girls is an action girl assassin comedy. It's set in Sydney and looks amazing and I want it and it aims to help to fill a space in Australia where we're multicultural but our media is all white. And I want it. Their fundraising ends November 13.

movie review: tai chi hero / 太极2

My short review on twitter immediately after seeing Tai Chi Hero:

[text of tweet: love flying machines & kung fu machines; sideeye at sudden & unexpected sideline of ladies; enjoyed the humour.]

The longer review (some spoilers):

Tai Chi Hero follows immediately on from Tai Chi 0, and has been released in China (and in Australia) with only a month between. It's easy to view them as one long movie, but it's easy to see where the original rumours of a trilogy would have come from. It's a duology with an epic story to tell, and just not enough time.

In Tai Chi 0, Yang Lu Chan ("the freak") comes to Chen Village to learn the Chen family style of Kung Fu. Lu Chan has been born with a natural advantage, the "Three Blossoms Horn" which both gives him awesome powers and is slowly killing him, hence his need to learn the more even Chen family style. The problem is that Chen family style is only taught to members of the Chen family, and Lu Chan is desperate enough to try anything to learn this style.

Tai Chi 0 features lots of fun action, videogame style sequencing and introductions, and lots of elements that I loved (including great machines and action sequences), as well as some awesome characters such as Yu Niang, who is not only the village apothecary but also completely stone fierce; brother Tofu; and the overly dramatic Fang Zijing, a family member with the wrong name who has never been allowed to learn the Chen family style.

In Tai Chi Hero, we are introduced to the remaining characters, some who have been given elevated importance in the trailer and some who weren't really introduced at all. The Inventor and the Silent Wife turn up, and I really hope that the Silent Wife's parts were originally there but later cut because otherwise what we have is a mysterious sidelining of the ladies, after they were all so awesome in the previous instalment. Yu Niang, who was so amazing in Tai Chi 0, and becomes Lu Chan's teacher in this instalment, is later resigned to standing on the sidelines as Lu Chan battles to prove that they are truly from the Chen family. This is obviously done for story purposes - it is, after all, the story of how Lu Chan becomes one with the yin and yang and with himself, therefore it must be he who demonstrates the style for the story - but Yu Niang, as daughter of the Chen Grandmaster, is surely the more logical demonstrator here? And the Silent Wife has so much potential, does some excellent kung fu, and then runs around looking sad and being threatened with torture. As this follows on from British agent Claire Heathrow's death in Tai Chi 0, which motivates Fang Zijing to become Truly Evil, it is unfortunate.

The switches between English and Mandarin are fun but sadly lacking. Mandy Lieu, as Claire Heathrow, is great in Mandarin but not so much in English. Peter Stormare turns up as another agent of the British East India Company and chews the scenery in both English and Mandarin. Eddie Peng (as Fang Zijing) is dramatic in English and unsympathetic in Mandarin.

It's not all criticisms. In fact, it's barely any criticisms, really, I criticise because I care. Tai Chi Hero continues to be a great (if heavy-handed) look at the impact of Western influence and modernisation in China at the turn of the century, and how that conflicted and contrasted with the desire to keep things as they are, for whatever reason and by whatever means necessary. It's a look at government corruption and the interpretation of history. I loved big brother, the inventor, who wanted to revolutionise China and his family by taking western machinery and ideas and developing it to take advantage of their best assets - in the Chen family's case, by making their kung fu even better. The revelation of his kung fu-aiding machine vest was probably the greatest moment of the film for me, a commentary on modernisation and adaptability and family and tradition and being Chinese in a five minute sequence. 

I really loved the moment when we found out why the movies are called Tai Chi X; and every moment featuring the Prince.

This instalment also continued with the humour and self-reflection, and I'm sorry to tell you that the translations didn't manage to capture all of the humour in the dialogue, so if you thought it was funny and you don't speak Mandarin, let me assure you that it was actually (intentionally) even more hilarious.

I loved it, I will definitely own this one, and I hope this new-ish trend of Chinese kung-fu steampunk movies continues. I just wish all of them had awesome ladies, is that too much to ask?

Other reviews: Margaret and David review Tai Chi 0 and Margaret interviews Kuo-Fu Chen and Tony Leung Ka-Fai*; Ay-Leen the Peacemaker reviews Tai Chi 0 at Tor; James Marsh at Twitch Films reviews Tai Chi Hero; an article on how it's a return to more traditional WuXia and it's a box office success for doing so (Zh).

*David and Margaret are Australia's favourite movie reviewers. Margaret's earrings have a Facebook page and my favourite Facebook page ever is called "When David Stratton from At the Movies gets shirty about handheld cameras." I love them. A lot.

reviews and commentary on tomorrow when the war began

The Tomorrow, When the War Began movie came out earlier in the month. I ranted about it a few months ago, in preparation, and have been reading some reviews and commentary and things, in lieu of actually subjecting myself to this. For your reading (dis)pleasure:

Opinion in the Age: Unsettling echoes of yesterday, when the yellow peril hysteria began:

As the Longford silent demonstrates, Australia has a long tradition of xenophobic fears of being swamped by Asia, whether by Indonesian armed forces or, in more recent years, by boatloads of refugees from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Even though it could not have been predicted by the filmmakers, it's hard to ignore the fact Tomorrow has been released directly following an election campaign in which one of the parties' main slogans was Stop the Boats, aimed squarely at Asian refugees.

On LJ, butterscotch711 reviews it in more of a movie-style (less social justice style).

This SMH article had me keyboard mashing: The fight for Australia:

But the political and cultural landscape is now very different. Since the book was first published, we've had the Bali bombings, terrorist arrests and Australian troops have served in East Timor, Iraq and now Afghanistan, where 18 soldiers have died. Could Tomorrow, When the War Began escalate from a piece of entertainment to a political touchstone?

And this article was okay: Invasion of the Asians is fiction, not a fact:

When I complained about this to a journalist friend, he said, quite sensibly, that I should not get too anxious about the invader issue in the movie. The film is pure escapism and they needed a credible candidate for invasion. The alternative, he suggested ironically, was New Zealand.

But that's the point. Apparently, we think Asian invasion is credible.

tomorrow, when the war began and the myth of the imminent invasion

So, the remake of Red Dawn, where USAmericans beat up Chinese Communists, has been delayed indefinitely. I'm totally cool with that.

A movie project that has not been delayed is the Tomorrow, When the War Began movie. It comes out later this year in Australia. I had thought that maybe I would have to explain for ages and ages my issues with this movie, but then I found an article to explain it for me:

“If I named a country, it wouldn’t be that book; it would be something else entirely. What the book and the movie are about is these eight teenagers and what happens to them when their country is invaded, not who’s doing it or why. The ethnicity just makes common sense. If anyone is going to invade Australia, it’s not going to be Europe, and it’s not going to be Africa. It won’t be Antarctica or New Zealand. It’s going to be someone in Asia. It’s the logical thing. It’s common sense enough for an audience to say ‘ok, that’s who it would be’” he explained.

Okay, wait, here is my explanation: as much as I loved this series for giving me a young Asian-Australian who wasn't 'exotic,' who was just struggling with stuff and living his life and having romantic teenage entanglements with people who weren't Asian, I hated this series for giving me an agressor who fed into the Australian zeitgeist of imminent invasion by the yellow hordes to the North.

This idea that permeates this country, imminent invasion by the hordes to the North, is not new and it's not yet gone; Prolonged Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety: The Persistence of Narratives of Asian Invasion within Multicultural Australia is a paper that looks at just this idea. It's a good read, and highlights basically everything I dislike about the genre (including his use of racial stereotypes, and his erasing of Indigenous Australians with White (settler) Australians), and this series in particular;

The popular reception of Marsden’s invasion narrative signifies the historical continuity of Australian invasion anxiety within changing cultural contexts.

Shouldn't we be past this by now? Can't we be past this? I've had to deal with this for so long, and this idea is a key element of the undertones of xenophobia so many of us have to put up with (regularly or irregularly), and it's so frustrating that it's the basis of this Australian classic that doesn't even have the excuse of being written during Federation or whatever. It was the big text when I was a teenager, when I was trying to figure out what it meant to be Australian and Chinese and all the rest of it.

If you think this is an over-reaction, that people don't seriously believe this stuff - well, check out the comments on any online Australian paper when there's an article on immigration, any country in Asia, or border crossings. Or sometimes crime involving people of Asian descent. It's awesome reading.

At least we always had the ambiguity, in the book, teeny tiny though it was.

And now we get the whole freaking movie.

hua mulan; or, on passing the bechdel test with only two women

Hey, so, maybe you're familiar with The Ballad of Hua Mulan. There have been many movie versions (good chance you've seen the Disney movie), but there was one that came out last year, starring Wei Zhao, that was pretty awesome.



Mulan is so fierce, she is one of my favourite women ever, though there is a lot of debate over whether or not she ever existed which I don't really want to get in to. But she ran off to war in her father's place, and she became a general, and she was fierce and awesome and I love her.



In the 2009 movie, she was particularly fierce. The movie spends so little time fretting about her hiding her identity and debating whether she'll go to war - the movie opens, she does it, and she moves on. It's all about her, her journey and her awesomeness and I have always considered her one of the greatest role models for women to come out of Chinese history/literature.



Anyway, in a movie about a woman who lives her life as a man in order to go away to war and fight, where the movie emphasises that bringing a woman in to the camp is death (just to highlight that there aren't going to be any other female characters hanging around), and that is all actiony and stuff, it still passes the Bechdel test. Yes, that's right, in a movie where there are only two female characters at all, they still have a conversation that is not about a man.¹

And there's another version being considered (uh, in 3D). So maybe, I dunno, if a movie with only two women and lots of swords can pass the Bechdel test, maybe more movies could do so? OR SOMETHING.


¹SPOILER SPOILER there may be some debate about this, given the end point of the conversation is Hua Mulan promising the princess that she can marry Wentai, but the ACTUAL point of the conversation is what can these two women do in order to bring peace to their warring factions, so I will defend this as not a conversation about a guy, it's a conversation about politics and warfare. END SPOILER