On day four I checked out the much anticipated and sold out (for two screenings straight) American Teen. It was worth the wait. A documentary about the lives of seniors about to graduate from a high school in Warsaw, Indiana, it comes off at first like a far less insipid version of The Hills, and while it never really loses that aesthetic, it becomes very moving very quickly. By the end you care more about these students than all of the MTV reality casts combined.
Confession of Pain is the latest from the directing team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak who did a little film in 2002 called Infernal Affairs (which became The Departed for us Yanks). While their new film doesn't quite have the cool factor of Affairs, it still retains that film's heady mix of crime thriller and Shakespearean tragedy. The amazing Tony Leung Chiu Wai turns in another magnificent performance (seriously, did you see him in Lust, Caution?) as the best friend of a down-and-out ex-cop (House of Flying Daggers' Takeshi Kaneshiro). To tell more, honestly, would be to ruin one of the film's early, shocking surprises.
So, instead, I'm going to talk about the overall mood, much of which can be credited to Andrew Lau and Lai Yiu Fai's cinematography and the haunting score by Chan Kwong Wing. The feel is more Chinese noir than the near-Serpico vibe one gets from Affairs or the Godfather vibe of Johnny To's Triad Election. It's not the film I would use to introduce a newbie to Asian crime cinema, but if you've already got the bug, this won't disappoint.
On day five came the most depressing film of the fest so far. I.O.U.S.A. is the latest from Wordplay director Patrick Creadon. This is not nearly as pleasant a romp. Maybe it's because instead of focusing on America's obsession with crossword puzzles, it focuses on how absolutely screwed we are because of the national debt. Think of it as Maxed Out for the government.
The doc does a good job of laying out a very complex problem, focusing on four types of debt: Federal debt (not as bad as you think, only a $250 billion or so deficit), savings debt (we basically don't save anymore because we're encouraged to spend), trade deficit (arguably the scariest, and I'll tell you why in a minute) and, most importantly according to U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, a leadership debt.
The trade deficit is scary because when a country like, say, China owns a lot of our wealth, they can, if they really want to, cash out. Now, why would anyone do that? Well, the film gives an excellent example. Back during the Suez Canal crisis, we really wanted Britain and France to back off because the USSR (remember them?) was about to take Egypt's side against them. Britain and France said no. We said, "Okay, remember all those British pounds we've invested in? We'd like to sell those, please." Britain and France folded to our demands within a week. We had it in our power to basically destroy the British pound (today, not so much).
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