qui tacet consentire videtur

The romance between Jay and Xiaoyu (Kwai Lunmei) in ‘Secret/不能说的秘密’ is so perfect… it really is a simple love straight out of Jay’s 简单爱, or pretty much any of his early songs. And this MV by SY-sempai is set to my favorite piece from the OST. But my heart goes out to Qingyi’s (Alice Tseng) disappointment, and the sorrow behind her forced smile - it must be so painful to pine from afar, but even more so to keep that longing… secret (LOL). Even though she appears in the MV of Jay’s new 我不配, there’s nothing unworthy about her - I think she’s prettier than the lead actress. But I guess not everyone can have a happy ending.

I rushed out of the office during lunchtime (missing yet another incredible AEI three-course lunch) to take the Metro down to the Library of Congress to attend UC Santa Barbara prof. Kim Suk-young’s presentation on “Kim Jong-il and North Korean films”. It was ridiculously hot and I had decided to wear my suit, which was a bad idea. The Metro was screwy and I was in such a rush that I went into the wrong building and had to get through security all over again. Eventually I found my way to her talk.

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Nothing is more precious than freedom.

Yesterday I went to see the NYC premiere of Journey from the Fall with one of my surrogate-mothers on campus and other members of the Vietnamese Students Association, and after the film ended I knew that the long list of film festival awards was well justified. The film tells the story of one family’s journey from the fall of Saigon in 1975. When we were in the ImaginAsian cinema I was looking at the table of posters outside the theatre when I noticed several boxes of tissues available - It’s not possible to watch the film without crying a river. Perhaps seeing it was therapeutic for me since I’ve been holding back tears for a while now. Here are some thoughts on the film.

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Joseph Stiglitz’s Committee on Global Thought organized a private screening of the film Bamako on campus tonight, and I had the opportunity to attend. I had heard so much about the film on the World Bank’s Private Sector Development blog, as well as through Socially Conscious NYC, and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Even though I had invited several friends to come along, I ended up watching it alone, as usual. There were some 20-30 people in the auditorium. Here are some thoughts about the film.

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I attended a screening and discussion of Soviet-era animation at the Harriman Institute at SIPA. They screened several animated shorts from the DVD, and the one I found most interesting was ‘interplanetary revolution’, where vampiric capitalists/imperialists/fascists escape the earth in little spaceships and are chased by Soviet space-proles spreading the revolution across the solar system while the Internationale plays in the background. It dates from 1924, but the beginning of the black & white clip declares that it was ‘likely to occur in 1929′ - perhaps another failed five-year plan. Another clip called ‘forward, march, time’ from the 70s was harder to interpret… I wonder if the animators had put in little easter eggs in their work, like how they painstakingly copied the little details of capitalist life in America, like coca-cola advertisements, camel cigars and model-T fords… did they live vicariously this way, escaping the communist world through their work? These are primary source documents with an authenticity that things like Red Star and Anastasia can never have. I’m looking forward to seeing ‘Hammer & Tickle‘, another documentary on Soviet-era cartoons and jokes. I had hoped more of my friends on campus would be interested in seeing these artifacts of totalitarianism, and try to know what it was like to live in a world without freedom, but none of them came with me. Anyone interested in civil liberties would want to see what the end of the road to serfdom looks like.

I attend a lot of Asian groups events (just now I had kimbap for dinner with a Korean Christian campus group). On Friday evening I met a lot of students from Beida, Tsinghua, Fudan, Shanghai Jiaotong etc who were in town for the China Future Leadership Project, and discovered just how difficult it is to communicate when their English and my Mandarin are both subpar. On Saturday I went for a Chinese students event (one of the graduate student groups, mostly Mainland students and recent immigrants with their families) celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival. Lots of little Chinese kids running around the classrooms while the adults had karaoke and mahjong. Ko (my burmese friend) and I went for their screening of the film 夜宴 (English title: The Banquet) in a lecture theater. Not entirely kosher as I could tell it was from an RMVB… but I will probably watch it again in a proper cinema with the rest once it premieres in the states, simply to test whether or not I can follow the dialogue without subtitles.

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I can’t wait to see the film adaptation of one of my favorites:

It’s just the trailer but I’m already a little disappointed. Hagu-chan is supposed to be so much cuter, they should’ve got her seiyuu to act. And the scene about seeing for the first time the precise moment that someone falls in love seems a little less poignant than I thought it should be. It’s my favorite part so they had better get it right. I’m also not sure how well it would work as a film when there is so much less time to develop the characters - the slow-paced anime series had absolutely no plot and each episode was just a slice of their lives.