The final line-up for the New York Asian Film Festival (June 20 - July 6) is up and we’ll have the schedule, advance ticket sales, and full write-ups ready for you at the main NYAFF site by this Monday, June 9. In the meantime, Subway members are picking their favorite films from this year’s line-up and the lazy jerks are actually writing about them, and first up is the mysterious Marc on the multi-flavored Indonesian flick KALA that’s a creepy conspiracy-noir-horror-alternate-history- cop movie-political-thriller:
Everyone says that watching a lot of movies makes you jaded about formulaic titles, and I tend to agree. Particularly if you “work” with movies—is that what we do?—and, like most film festival programmers, you find yourself watching a lot of films that you weren’t particularly drawn to in the first place. So when something comes along that you weren’t expecting to be any good, or at least not very unique, and blows you completely out of your socks with its originality, its audacious combining of genres, and sheer out-of-left-field-ballsiness, you tend to fall in love with it.
KALA was the movie that did that for me during this year’s festival planning. It’s not even a perfect film—the acting is uneven, it’s slow in spots, the special effects are creaky, and the ending is a bit too odd and unexpected—but it’s completely mesmerizing nevertheless. A film noir fused with a horror movie, with postapocalyptic science fiction elements thrown in here and there, it feels like a classic American studio genre picture as seen in a carnival funhouse mirror, like it’s come from an alternate universe that seems the same as ours, but turns out to be totally different the more you look at it.
The Thai western TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER had a similar effect on me when I first saw it, and I think the two films are cousins in spirit, in how they reflect back a traditional American or Western genre with uniquely Asian elements woven into it. In
KALA, you’ve got the classic setup of a 50’s Hollywood noir—the cop, the detective, the femme fatale—but you also have a death-god and strange curses! And every time the film turns another dark corner (and there are many of them in
KALA), you feel as if you’ve moved from one multiplex cinema to another, or changed channels on a very late-night TV binge, yet it all ties together in the end…sort of.
We were worried about programming KALA since Southeast Asian movies don’t have the kind of built-in fanbase in NYC that the Korean, Hong Kong and Japanese titles do, simply because the industry there is much smaller, and so few of them ever even make it over here. It’s also a movie that defies easy description and which, on paper, seems a lot less interesting than it really is. But I encourage you to give it a chance if you are willing to sit and give it time to draw you in and cast the same spell on you that it did me. It’s not a long film—only about 100 minutes—and we guarantee that, by the end, even if you didn’t love it, you’ll be able to say that you’d never seen anything like it. - MW
The full write-up for KALA and the trailer are here.
