The NYAFF Is Almost Here!

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The New York Asian Film Festival starts next week, and I've got my tickets for exactly two shows; predictably the new films by Park Chan-Wook and Takashi Miike, which I spoke about previously (here).

If you haven't check out their schedule, click on here and do so; besides my limited participation there are bunches of other interesting sounding films screening.

And you can read up a little more on a few select titles from the festival in this article in the NY Times, where Dave Kehr says of Park Chan-Wook's I'm A Cyborg But That's OK:

"... A self-conscious cuteness is also at the base of Park Chanwook’s “I’m a Cyborg but That’s O.K.,” this Korean director’s first film since “Lady Vengeance.” Mr. Park has put his revenge trilogy behind him (“Oldboy,” “Lady Vengeance,” “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”), and is starting on a new path with this wildly experimental, unclassifiable film.

Executed with Mr. Park’s usual attention to the tiniest details of visual style, it is a sort of “David and Lisa” story in which a suicidal young woman (Lim Su-jeong) whose ability to communicate with the vending machines she believes to be her fellow beings leads her to a mental institution. There she meets and, after much effort, opens herself up to a no-less-disturbed young man, a skinny kleptomaniac (the hugely successful pop singer Rain).

The actors are attractive, the rainbow colors abound, the other inmates reveal their lovable eccentricities, a magnificent score by Mr. Park’s regular composer, Jo Yeong-wook, swells in surround sound, and yet the film is no endearing fable of nonconformism like “King of Hearts” or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but something ambivalent and disquieting. Happiness, Mr. Park suggests, is only another way of filtering out reality — insanity with a smile — but no less essential for that."

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