Canoeman Mau, The Other Great Helmsman
Papa Mau: The Way Finder
Review by Ed Rampell

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is a continental U.S. showcase based in Long Beach, California focusing on features, documentaries and shorts from Asia and zooming in on films from the Pacific islands. Hawaiian director Na’alehu Anthony’s Papa Mau: The Way Finder literally traverses two of the three Pacific Island regions that compose Oceania: Polynesia and Micronesia (the third is Melanesia). Anthony’s camera and archival footage carries us aboard the Hōkūle’a, an ancient-style Polynesian voyaging canoe, from Hawaii to Tahiti and eventually to Satawal atoll in the Caroline Islands, now part of what is called the Federated States of Micronesia.

Rather remarkably, starting in 1976 Hōkūle’a (translated as “the Glad Star”) made these seafaring odysseys of Homeric proportions minus the use of modern technology: Compasses, radio transmissions, GPS, engines, even maps per se, etc. Instead, Hōkūle’a relied solely on the age old, way finding techniques, navigating by following the stars, winds, ocean swells, birds and the like, using dead reckoning and more. As Nainoa Thompson of the Polynesian Voyaging Society has explained elsewhere, a major motivation for this Hawaiian was to debunk the racist myth that the pre-contact Islanders were not intelligent enough in order to chart their courses across the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean. Rather than separating the isles, Nainoa argued that the Pacific was a great highway that linked the scattered islands, and that ancient Islanders had the wisdom and knowledge to be able to cross the seas. This theory was in sharp contrast to the notion advanced by Thor Heyerdahl, whose Kon Tiki raft was helplessly blown and floated across the Pacific from Peru until it crash landed on the reef of an atoll in French Polynesia in 1947.

The problem faced by Nainoa, artist Herb Kane (who rendered superb images of centuries’ old Hawaiian vessels) and their PVS comrades was: How to put theory into practice? By the 1970s, their ancestors’ traditional technique of way finding had been lost to the Westernized Hawaiians. Even if, using Kane’s designs, they were able to recreate a seaworthy canoe, how would they be able to cross the seas in it? The Hawaiians turned to Micronesian Mau Piailug, a way finder who had been steeped in the Carolinian traditions at far flung Satawal, which was less Westernized than the Aloha State.

The People’s Republic of China had its Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman of the Chinese Revolution, and Oceania has its Canoeman Mau, the Other Great Helmsman. Mau came to Hawaii, became the Hōkūle’a’s navigator, and although the Micronesian was completely unfamiliar with the waters between Hawaii and Tahiti, he successfully charted the canoe’s course and after a month or so successfully sailed the approximately 2,100 miles between the two Polynesian Islands, following the stars, et al, powered by the winds, breeze and a deep desire to preserve and spread important cultural practices.

Hōkūle’a’s success helped spur a cultural revival and ethnic pride, a Pacific Renaissance in the world’s last region still dominated by colonialism. Nevertheless, infighting on the canoe during the 30-plus day voyage disturbed Mau, who surreptitiously left the voyagers after they safely arrived at Tahiti and returned to Satawal (mostly, presumably, via jet), leaving the Hawaiians to fend for themselves for the long return trip home with his tape recorded voice instructions.

Over the years Mau was wooed back to Hawaii, and moved by a desire to perpetuate his vanishing seagoing knowledge, rejoined the Hōkūle’a – but this time, not as its helmsman, rather as a teacher training and imparting to Nainoa, et al, his navigational genius so others could become and continue the master navigator legacy.

I arrived in Tahiti about three months after Hōkūle’a’s first voyage there, and although I’ve never had the luck, honor and privilege to sail aboard this venerable vessel, in the late 1980s I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the canoe’s return voyage from what – until that point – had been its most epic voyage throughout the Polynesian triangle, taking it all the way to Aotearoa/New Zealand, thousands of miles away from Hawaii.

Now, Hawaiians have been turned by the vicissitudes of a cruel history into an oppressed, landless minority in their own ancestral homeland, and are often what the French call “les miserables,” full of suffering. But I never saw masses of Hawaiians so happy as when Hōkūle’a proudly sailed into Kaneohe Bay at Oahu, and thousands of Hawaiians joyfully participated in the reenactment of ancient customs and traditions. The then-Hawaiian Gov. John Waihee declared: “In my bones, I am screaming I’m proud to be Hawaiian!” I believe it was at this joyous homecoming where I had the great luck to meet Mau himself, as well as crewman Eni Hunkin (who became American Samoa’s Congressman), and I subsequently interviewed the then youthful Nainoa (OMG, he has grey hair now in this documentary!), became pals with another Hōkūle’a crew member, Donna Wendt (whom I’d share another epic voyage with on the Aranui, from Tahiti to the Marquesas – but that also is another story), etc.

So this doc had profound personal meaning for me and this Paliku production (with support from the stellar Honolulu-based Pacific Islanders in Communications, as well as the State government’s Office of Hawaiian Affairs) should be experienced by anyone interested in sailing, Oceania, cultural rebirth, etc. – and in karma. The doc follows what could be called the further adventures of the Hōkūle’a, its subsequent voyages since I left Hawaii, and reveals the fate of Mau. In what could be called cultural turn about fair play, the Hawaiians whom Mau taught to be master navigators return the favor in a very moving, meaningful way, that your spoiler adverse critic will not reveal here. Find out for yourself.

And find out, as this doc reveals, why the sweetest thing in all the world is to chart your own course and to paddle your own canoe. BRAVO!

For more info see:
www.papamau.com/
http://asianfilmfestla.org/2012/
http://laapff.festpro.com/films/genre/native_peoples

MEMORIALS
A list of suggested war movies for Memorial Day 2012
By M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead

Although I never served in the military—and, like Samuel Johnson, think of myself meanly for it—I enjoy war movies of all kinds, from the jingoistic to the pacifistic, whether I agree with their politics or not. But for Memorial Day war movie viewing, it seems appropriate to recommend some films that emphasize the terrible human toll of war. Here are a few suggestions:

Revolutionary War: 
1776 (1972)

For some reason there haven’t been too many movies made about the American Revolution, and fewer still are any good. 1776 isn’t a war movie, it’s a musical about the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence. I include it here because, about midpoint, a young soldier played by Stephen Nathan beautifully sings a heartbreaking ballad called “Momma Look Sharp” which reminds us of the cost, in young men, of what these old men were arguing about.

Civil War: 
Glory (1989)

Directed by Edward Zwick, this story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a union regiment of freed slaves, has terrifying battle sequences, magnificent acting by Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington and Matthew Broderick, among others, and a tragic ending that somehow doesn’t belie the title.

World War One: 
Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

In this version of Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 novel, adapted and directed by the author, Timothy Bottoms plays an American casualty who has lost his arms, legs and face in battle, but who still has all his mental faculties. It’s a horrifying story, yet it’s leavened, in the soldier’s flashbacks and fantasies, by a lot of weird humor and some fine acting, especially by Jason Robards as the narrator’s father.

World War Two: 
Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Taken in its entirety, Stephen Spielberg’s epic may have been slightly overrated at the time of its release; the script is bland and clichéd in stretches. Yet the first twenty minutes or so—the D-Day sequence—is as viscerally grueling a depiction of the hell of battle as any I can remember.

Korea: 
Battle Circus (1953)

This too-little-known film doesn’t appear to have made it to DVD yet, but it’s worth seeking out on VHS. Humphrey Bogart plays a surgeon with a M*A*S*H unit who falls for nurse June Allyson. The romance plays out against a low-key depiction of the struggle to save young men from becoming memorial day honorees.

Vietnam: 
Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

Burt Lancaster is in top form in this tight, unsentimental drama about the very early days of the conflict. Directed by Ted Post, the film is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but it deserves to be.

Grenada: 
Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

OK, this one isn’t very convincing or solemn, but this corny ‘80s rouser has an amusing performance by Clint Eastwood (who also directed) as a tough Marine sergeant.

Gulf War: 
Three Kings (1991)

David O. Russell’s excellent, jaundiced tale of a gang of American soldiers hoping to steal a cache of Saddam Hussein’s gold includes a superb scene in which George Clooney explains what bullets actually do to human bodies to a younger soldier. It should be required viewing, both for schoolboys and politicians.

Afghanistan: 
Restrepo (2010)

You won’t soon forget this documentary, by Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington, made mostly while they were embedded with an infantry platoon in the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. It’s a powerful look inside this interminable—and for most of us in the US, invisible—war.

M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.

Battleship
Stars Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker
Directed by Peter Berg

GO: Big loud summer fun! Why all the naysayers? Even Rihanna does OK. Who cares if it’s ridiculous. Great action, decent aliens.

7½ of 10 on the Movie Fraction Rating System™

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The Dictator
Stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris
Directed by Larry Charles

NO: Ridiculously bad. After success of Borat two strikes for Cohen. What is Ben Kingsley doing in this mess? Only Anna Faris fares well.

5 of 10 on the Movie Fraction Rating System™

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Don’t Miss!
Review: The Five Year Engagement

Battleship
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

Watch all Two Jews On Film reviews on Jabcat.

The Dictator
Review by Two Jews On Film
“Tearing Apart Their Marriage One Film At A Time”

Watch all Two Jews On Film reviews on Jabcat.

Girl In Progress
Stars Eva Mendes, Cierra Ramirez
Directed by Patricia Riggen

NO: Attractive leads Mendes/Ramirez sunk by self-conscious script device – daughter using coming-of-age tale to fashion her own life.

6 of 10 on the Movie Fraction Rating System™

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Don’t Miss!
Review: Friends With Kids

VIVA LA SLOB
Tiny Furniture
Review by Allison Lyzenga/My Film Habit
My Rating: 4 Stars

Photos & Images Trailer

It’s kinda unnerving to come into contact with a really confident person. So many people these days seem to be compensating for all kinds of insecurities—even the most beautiful and successful people out there. So, when I encounter someone who is just putting herself out there so un-self-consciously, I find it totally fascinating. Lena Dunham is far from perfect. She’s a little dumpy, doesn’t pay particular attention to personal grooming, and the only characters she seems to play are exaggerated versions of her own personality. But, she knows all these things already, and none of it seems to bother her a bit. Confidence has always been the most attractive personality trait anyway, and Lena Dunham has plenty of that.

Dunham’s character in this story, Aura, is a fresh graduate with a totally useless liberal arts degree. There’s not much in this world that a degree in Film Theory is going to prepare you for. But, she doesn’t seem to be too worried about having nothing to do with her life, though, because she can always crash back at the family home with mom and little sister. And, she seems fairy certain that something good will come along—both in terms of a career, and romantic prospects. I can’t tell whether the source of this confidence is a sort of bright-eyed naivety or just a devil-may-care attitude. This character lives in Manhattan, so that seems to indicate a certain level of awareness of the world. But, then again, she has lived a pretty sheltered life in an astronomically huge loft apartment with her mother who is a very successful working artist. Her mom has made a fortune taking photos of tiny furniture. That kind of life doesn’t really breed a realistic view of the world. So, it’s still a mystery.

I liked this movie a lot. It’s totally different from anything else out there these days. Lena Dunham is one funny actress. And, she plays these slobby characters so well. Her characters are totally unapologetic for how they look, the wealth they were raised with, and for their total laziness. It’s an interesting way to call attention to this new attitude that young adults seem to have. In the past, these little brats would be vilified, and made out to be the clear antagonist in a story. But, I think that making them the protagonists almost calls attention to the phenomenon a little better. We’re left having to root for such flawed people, and that doesn’t always feel so good. I’ve heard that Dunham’s character in the new TV series Girls is very similar to her character in this movie, but I haven’t seen that yet, so I can’t confirm whether that’s accurate yet. You’ll have to let me know. But, if any of this stuff interests you at all, you’ll definitely want to check out this movie.

SHADOW PLAYFUL
Dark Shadows
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead

As Barnabas Collins in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp comports himself like a Gothic popinjay. He carries himself proudly erect, and speaks with orotund, self-dramatizing verbosity and sweeping gesture, whether anyone else is around to hear him or not. The performance is a near-tour de force of comic, cosmically wounded dignity.

Being a vampire, he must occasionally feast on the blood of the living, but he does so reluctantly, first offering his victims polite regrets. His great wish, other than to be reunited with his lost love Josette, is to restore his family’s Maine fish cannery. He’s a bit of a pussycat, as undead revenants go.

It’s hard to say to whom this Dark Shadows is being marketed. The film is a parody, a pretty broad one, of the Gothic-horror soap opera (ABC, 1966-1971) on which it’s based. Created by Dan Curtis and writer Art Wallace, the show began as tempestuous bosom-heaving romance, perhaps in the vein of Barbara Cartland, but faced with sinking ratings, the writers began to experiment with ghosts and other supernatural elements about six months in, and eventually they threw a Hail Mary in the form of Barnabas, a forlorn vampire played by an obscure Canadian stage actor named Jonathan Frid.

He was a hit, and so the show threw caution to the wind—witches, werewolves and any other gruesome menace became fair game. Two movies spin-offs, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971) were produced, along with dozens of tie-in novels, comic books, toys, puzzles, etc. I was too much of a wussy, at six or seven, to watch the show for more than a few wide-eyed minutes during its original run, but I got hooked on it in junior high, when it ran in syndication. Even by soap standards, it seemed to have a high incidence of blown lines, crew members caught on camera, actors struggling not to crack up, but somehow this didn’t defeat the show’s spooky yet oddly bracing atmosphere.

The Burton film’s script, credited to Seth Grahame-Smith ofAbraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, takes scraps of plot from the old show and stitches them together, but there’s almost no serious attempt at spookiness. A friend of mine said that the ads make the movie look like a sketch from The Carol Burnett Show.

Many fans of the original series are likely to be disappointed—if not outraged—by such an approach, while non-fans and younger viewers are unlikely to be too interested in a comedic version of an old TV show that they may never have heard of in the first place. Overall, the film seems poised to be vaporized by The Avengers’ second weekend like a vampire by a ray of sunlight.

A small pity if so, because while Dark Shadows is hardly high art, it’s sort of an endearing trifle. As always with Burton, it’s a beautiful movie to look at, with a whimsical, Edward-Gorey-ish look (the production designer is Rick Heinrichs) and a ridiculously attractive cast.

My friend’s take on the movie’s attitude was about right—it plays like a string of Carol Burnett sketches, with a bit more polish to the jokes and a lot more polish to the production. The target of the parody isn’t Gothic melodrama but ‘70s kitsch culture, with the 18th-Century sensibilities of the resurrected Barnabas bounced off of hippies and television and lava lamps and fast food signage and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” (of which Barnabas approves—unsurprisingly, since as played by Depp he most certainly speaks of the Pompatus of Love).

Depp is a hoot, but he isn’t alone. The high-ticket cast is fine form: Michelle Pfeiffer in Joan Bennett’s old role of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Chloe Moretz as wild child Carolyn Stoddard, the waiflike Australian Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Jackie Earle Haley as drunken handyman Willie Loomis, and the always-excellent Helena Bonham Carter as the shady shrink Dr. Hoffman. Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee turn up in guest roles.

The movie is close to stolen, however, by the French actress Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, the witch who cursed Barnabas with vampirism when he didn’t return her love, and who’s still around in the 20th Century, running a rival fish cannery and looking intolerably chic. Green (she played Vesper Lynd in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale) makes Angelique’s spite a lively aphrodisiac; she has a crazy-eyed smile that’s both alluring and terrifying, and her skin’s tendency, in moments of stress, to crack like the shell of a hard-boiled egg is rather elegant, too.

Burton and Grahame-Smith probably try to touch too many bases from the series—the movie is cluttered, and it goes on at least twenty minutes too long. But overall, it’s a goofy pleasure. Like the old show, it’s an enjoyable waste of time. Unlike the old show, it can be experienced in one sitting, and its laughs are intentional.

M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.

The Dark Shadows Are Not Too Dark
Dark Shadows
By Amber Fiorse

My brother and I had been looking forward to Dark Shadows for a while.  Since neither of us are old enough to have seen the original soap opera from the 70′s, we were just pulled in by the Burton/Depp duo, as well as the entertaining “someone from the past is in the present day and doesn’t know about cars, roads, television, etc.” story line.  I love that from Hocus Pocus and it was enjoyable in this movie as well.  I also adore Michelle Pfeiffer, harkening back from her days as Catwoman in Batman Returns.  That was actually the first movie I ever owned, which I obtained at a silent auction in 7th grade.  Although it scared me a little, Tim Burton’s Gotham City will always be Gotham to me.

Dark Shadows was enjoyable, and despite having 4 kids at home, I never even checked my phone to see how much time was left.  In my opinion, there were several plots and genres happening within this movie, which kept this audience member entertained, yet also confused for a great deal of the movie.  From the previews, I thought it was going to be primarily a comedy, yet while watching it I felt it was somewhat in that category, but was also a romance, somewhat of a horror, and a drama.

One of the most confusing aspects of the movie was the rules on the supernatural.  Let me tell you about just a touch of the confusion:  this movie contains a vampire, a witch, a werewolf, several ghosts, and humans, some of which can see ghosts and some cannot.  But apparently, vampires cannot kill witches, werewolves cannot kill witches, some ghosts can defeat a witch, a witch doesn’t die, a vampire doesn’t die, a witch can set an entire factory on fire by looking at it, but has to kill people one by one.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Throughout so much of the movie, I felt like I needed a flow chart as to who was the most powerful and what special abilities they possessed.

Again, my astute filmmaking brother suggested that since Tim Burton and Johnny Depp wanted to make this movie based on a beloved, yet somewhat obscure soap opera, they/the studio/the Hollywood powers-that-be decided to make it at this moment in time, in order to ride the coattails of the vampire phenomenon.  Personally, I have totally avoided that craze until now.  I have not seen or read any of The Twilight saga, but while watching this movie, I felt that if I knew a little more about the rules of vampires, some of the plots in Dark Shadows would have been easier to understand.

With all that being said, this movie was fun.  In a lot of ways, I felt that it encompassed what we need as moviegoers a great deal of the time, which is a simple escape.  For a little under two hours, I was enthralled by Tim Burton’s Collinsport and Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins.  It was a lovely way to start Mother’s Day weekend, and to rejuvenate me to come home to put my precious little ones to bed and appreciate my family.  Like Barnabas says, “Blood is thicker than water.”