• View Past Issues
• Authors
• About the Magazine
• Contact Asia Pacific Arts
• Support Us
• RSS Feeds
• Podcasts

Best of 2008: Ten Best Film Moments

By Clifford Hilo

Many films are best remembered as single images, sounds, or performances. APA's Clifford Hilo recounts some such moments from Asian/American films viewed in 2008.

Moments and more moments, these are the things that I take away from movies and hope to hold onto as keepsakes of memory. These are some of my fondest memories that I pull from my emptied pockets, and while I brush away the lint and loose change, I share with you the best of my best list for 2008.

The Opening of Eyes in Tokyo Gore Police: I abhor that nasty genre of gore films. There is nothing more smugly pornographic and cheap than its costumed squirm-and-scream aesthetic. But it was a film like Tokyo Gore Police that I had actually peeked through the cracks of my resolutely clamped fingers and seen the ugly, video light of beautiful carnival disfigurement. There is something of Edgar Ulmer or early Herzog that nestles within the heart of Tokyo Gore, and it possesses its own ability to sluice through inane, debased rubble and find precious humor deep within.

Mahjong in Lust, Caution: No one has excelled at duplicating that sound of tinkling ivory clapboard than Ang Lee in Lust, Caution. The busy hands thrown over a crowded mess of tiles colliding and organizing into prim walls of assurance and grace. It is in the ferocious editing of this sequence, of getting in so much at once, of making a few pairs of hands look like a thousand, that Ang Lee is much more than acting and heartbreak.

Stations of the Cross in Eight Diagram Pole Fighter: It opens like a John Ford and splashes tragedy over the screen like a tipped-over paint can. The opening is so deliberately nasty and exceptionally stylized in its killing of so many men -- each tableau struck is another relentless image picked from engravings of the biblical stations of the cross. Lau Kar-Leung makes penitence and fury into a remarkable prelude to the most remarkable of kung-fu films.

3-way with weed in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: Is it in poor taste for me to gesture to the unadulterated, gonzo joy of this film? Is it because the writing of this perverse movie has the wafting scent of marijuana smoke wrapped around every syllable; is it that each situation indulges the deranged sexual humor of Robert Crumb's own hatch-marked squiggles, or is it that the divergent story unravels like the swerving, random peeling of an orange or a film by Hong Song-Soo that makes me ga-ga in appreciation of this film? I won't even describe the moment I refer to, but know simply that the lurid saint Charlie Chaplin would certainly twitter his mustache and tap his rattan cane at so much laughter.

Father and Son Fighting in Ozu's Passing Fancy: I would doubt your sincerity, your will for emotions, your ethics of living, and the uncertain beating of your heart if you could not find yourself sniffling just a bit when watching this exchange between a father and a son in Ozu's Passing Fancy. Ozu frustrates immensely in his melodrama, letting us glimpse an eruption of that sacred paternal love that abandons but for a second the image of a filial Aeneas bearing the weight of his father. A child comes to blows with his father, his childish fists no bigger than small apples, those weak punches a substitute for the loss of faith in the world at large. Only wax figures wouldn't be compelled to tears.

A Key That Dreams of the Possibility of a Door, My Blueberry Nights: There is still the hope of poetry in cinema because of Blueberry Nights. Why? Because Wong Kar-wai is supremely that poet who aligns himself with classical Japanese poetry or William Carlos Williams -- very few can manage the flowing simplicity of an image as an idea, a word that functions in its processes rather than within its stillness. A word in the context of poetry never finds itself uneluctably frozen, but always find its natural rhythm and cadence in the act of its utterance. A nervous woman paces with her ankles bent in anticipation, a balancing act that shifts the weight from heel-to-toe. W.H. Auden could be speaking of My Blueberry Nights:  "Poetry makes nothing happen...it survives in the valley of its saying...a way of happening."

Quentin Tarantino in Sukiyaki Western Django: Tarantino pays lip service to the great Takashi Miike in Sukiyaki Western. In the weird introduction to this weirder film, Tarantino plays an outlying bandit who dispatches a couple of Japanese sukiyaki cowboys against the splayed faux-technicolor backdrop of mountains and a sunset. Miike makes his title literal when Tarantino cracks an egg and mixes it with the roiling beef broth of a sukiyaki hot pot -- Tarantino yodels with delight as the camera leaps and plunges from a diving board into a microscopic exploration of noodles strands, Japanese mushrooms, and tofu cubes. A delicious mixture of east and west.

The last songs in Cape No. 7: I had been baffled as to why Cape No. 7 could be such a raucous crowd-pleaser in Taiwan. There were so many things that I had found irritating about the film up until about the very last ten minutes, which is where I suddenly discovered why Cape could have such a large resonance -- it's a musical. When that motley Cinderella group begins to play onstage, you feel the excitement and rush of great pop music suddenly registering in your nervous system, you feel like traipsing down the aisles and clapping along in rhythm in the darkness of the theater. I don't even understand Chinese, but Cape has that fluency of energy to make me feel as though I could daringly sing Karaoke in some small Taipei hotspot while snacking on some cuttlefish jerky and Taiwan beer. While I won't do just that, I am anxiously waiting for my very own Christmas copy of the Cape No. 7 soundtrack.

Car Chase in A Flower in Hell: Brian Hu wrote about this moment, "Jaw-dropping final half-hour culminating in an expressionistic mud-bath of greed and deception worthy of Clouzot." Brian is too right.  Like a scene excerpted from Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery, this punctuation to the film was the pure excitement of chase. And the glamour of a woman murdered, her elegant dress ware clung to with black swamp water and reaching desperate hands -- these are reminders that action melodrama hardly belonged solely to the west.

Leaving the film 100: This is my Roger Ebert entry, where I wax philosophical about movies being more than movies, where they become reflective surfaces through which we can ponder the condition of our lives. Thinking back, there was no significant moment that struck me about Chris Martinez's 100. I didn't feel the power of any great emotions surging through me, I wasn't reduced to a mess of tears. But after I left the screening, it was as if the feeling of the world around me had changed. There was a sense of levity to all things -- to sunlight, to footsteps, to my own thoughts. I walked along, and the film still trailed after.  

Back to APA's Best of 2008 issue

Date Posted: 1/2/2009