Festival Explores Facets of Asian Life

The Visual Communications Film Fest 2002: The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival opens tonight at the Directors Guild with a gala premiere of Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a tale of high school overachievers gone wrong. In addition to screenings at the Directors Guild, the festival will run through May 23 at the David Henry Hwang Theater in the Union Center for the Arts and the Japan America Theater, both in Little Tokyo.

Bertha Bay-Sa Pan makes a formidable feature debut with “Face” (DGA, Friday at 7:30 p.m.), which reveals the toll on Asians who must maintain “face” at all costs in this triple portrait of three generations of women. Bai Ling plays Kim, who grows up in Queens in the ‘70s, chafing at the restraints of her loving but traditional mother (Kieu Chinh) and winds up forced into a marriage with a rich playboy who gets her drunk and pregnant. Eventually fleeing from her husband to Hong Kong, where she becomes a banker, Kim returns home many years later to confront the teenage daughter (Kristy Wu) who has never known her and who is preoccupied with a new romance with a sensitive young African American (Treach). Pan elicits beautiful performances from the actresses playing the three women.

Yaguchi Shinobu’s “Water Boys” (DGA, Friday at 9:30 p.m.) is a giddy comedy about a high school swim team that gets a new coach (“Shall We Dance?” instructor Naoto Takanaka) who announces, to the boys’ dismay, that she’s turning the team into a synchronized swimming troupe. What comes next is consistently amusing, and the film is a zany delight.

Several outstanding documentaries have dealt with the fate of original Hawaiians and their culture as well as with the ecology of the 50th state. Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe’s “Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place” (David Henry Hwang Theater, Monday at 7 p.m.) also deals with these issues, but their focus is on gays.

This thoughtful documentary makes clear that the old Hawaiian culture was all-accepting and that gays even had a special status as healers. The fate of gays when Hawaii fell under U.S. rule and domination becomes symbolic for all Hawaiians in this rueful but hopeful look at the past. (213) 680-4462.

*

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen showcase presents tonight at 7:30 Marlo Poras’ “Mai’s America,” which charts the experiences of a vivacious 16-year-old Vietnamese exchange student. She is highly articulate in English, has come to America for her senior year of high school and hopes to continue on to college.

In Hanoi, Mai says she wants to see the “America of all the movies I grew up with” but instead experiences slices of life that many Americans do not encounter. First, she lands in a small, rural Mississippi town with a working-class family who are polite but increasingly distant. Then, after six months, she finds a much better situation with a young black couple.

At school she is fortunate to have a progressive-thinking history teacher and is delighted when two of the most popular girls in school befriend her, only to discover they’re a pair of airheads. Mai does make friends and comes into contact with other Vietnamese, but her life becomes increasingly grueling. As one young Detroit Vietnamese emigre tells her, “Life in America is really harder than in Vietnam.” This sensitive, observant documentary proves bittersweet in the fullest sense of the word. Playing with “Mai’s America” is Chris Strother’s evocative 10-minute “Candy Money,” in which Strother follows her 12-year-old cousin Jeremy and his best pal, A.J., as they spend a summer day in rural Arkansas earning money for some convenience store treats.

This weekend, the Cinematheque will present The Lovecraft Quartet: A Tribute to Stuart Gordon, with a double feature each evening. After each bill, director Gordon will discuss the films with the audience. “Re-Animator” (1985), the first of Gordon’s adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, opens the series Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Egyptian. When it was first released, it was the funniest Grand Guignol horror picture to come along in ages. Winner of a special critics’ prize at Cannes, it was clear it could become a classic of the genre like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and enjoy a long life as a cult film.

“You haven’t done this on people?” medical student Bruce Abbott asks of his new roommate, Jeffrey Combs, who’s shot up Abbott’s dead cat with a mysterious phosphorescent chartreuse substance that has turned the poor creature into a rampaging attack cat. But Combs, a fresh transfer from a Zurich medical school--never mind why he departed--is a genius teetering on madness and determined to conquer brain death. The only trouble is that the dead, animal or human, are brought back to life as zombies and Combs’ experiments lurch out of control. Adapted by Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris from a 1922 Lovecraft story, it’s a real throat-grabber that holds on tight from first frame to last. “Re-Animator” will be followed by “From Beyond” (1986). Combs and Barbara Crampton, who starred in both films, will appear with Gordon.

The series concludes Saturday starting with the 6:30 p.m. Los Angeles premiere of the brand-new “Dagon,” which the Cinematheque describes as a “fish-zombie spectacular,” followed by the 1995 “Castle Freak,” which re-teamed Combs and Crampton as a couple who have inherited a haunted Italian castle. (323) 466-FILM.

*

“Janice Beard,” a relentlessly tedious comedy, opens Friday at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills. Eileen Walsh makes her feature debut in the title role as the waiflike but determinedly cheerful and fantasizing office temp. She wants to earn enough money to afford a cure for the agoraphobia that has gripped her mother since she saw her husband drop dead as she gave birth to her daughter. This irrepressible heroine innocently becomes entangled in industrial espionage. Walsh is tiresome, as is everything about this artificial and under-inspired film. (310) 474-6869.

*

The Laemmle Theaters’ weekend series Erotic Tales, composed of three vignettes from different directors, continues at the Sunset 5 on Friday and Saturday at midnight and Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. Nicolas Roeg’s “Hotel Paradise” is a sexy fable in which a champagne-sodden woman (Theresa Russell) awakes in a sybaritic hotel suite wearing only a bridal veil, one hand handcuffed to the bedstead--and a man (Vincent D’Onofrio) she does not recognize asleep under the bedclothes. Dutch director Jos Stelling’s sly and suggestive “The Waiting Room” finds a good-looking man of about 40 (Gene Bervoets) who, while waiting for his plump wife (Annet Malherbe) to find coffee, crudely leers at various women in a crowded railway waiting room. They are all offended until a stunning, leggy goddess returns his smile, with amusing consequences.

Susan Streitfeld brings a sunny light touch to the erotic yet sweet “The Summer of My Deflowering,” in which a lovely young woman (Beth Riesgraf), who has been keeping a video diary since childhood, decides she wants to wrap it up with a record of her loss of virginity. She has located a motel called Paradise, which has a Garden of Eden suite. She recruits the perfect man (Martin Henderson), who is under the impression he’s helping her complete a school project. Needless to say, she discovers that a matter-of-fact approach about sex may not be the most effective. Streitfeld’s story is slender, but she has a sure sense of behavioral comedy and a winning way with actors. (323) 848-3500.

This second program in the Erotic Tales series screens May 25-27 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741; June 1-2 at the Playhouse 7, Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; June 8-9 at the Fallbrook 7, West Hills, (818) 340-8710.