Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu / *****

I didn’t realize that Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown had won the National Book Award until after I finished it, but really, it didn’t come as a surprise – when a book this sharp and clever comes along, grappling with ideas about parenting and Asian stereotypes and media, it shouldn’t be a shock to find it acclaimed and awarded. But really, winning that award might give the impression that Interior Chinatown is one of those Big Serious Important Novels, and that couldn’t be further from the truth – no, the book is fun, funny, clever, and entertaining, even as it’s handling some very big ideas and doing so with grace and care.

In the broadest terms, Interior Chinatown takes the form of a screenplay – specifically, a script for the cop show Black and White, a show on which our protagonist, Willis Wu, currently works as an extra. One day, Willis thinks, one day he’ll be the biggest role “someone like him” can be – he’ll be Kung Fu Guy. But right now, he’s just Generic Asian Male, working his way through bit parts and cameo roles in this Chinatown-set police procedural.

It doesn’t take long, though, for Interior Chinatown’s structure to reveal that it’s far more playful and less restricted than that screenplay format might lead you to think. Fourth wall breaks, meta commentary about TV tropes and cliches, the framing of Willis’s life as flashbacks and formula stories – author Charles Yu throws it all into the mix, twisting and mixing the expectations in playful, clever ways that allow him to explore his big ideas in a thoughtful manner while never letting the book become heavy or grim. Indeed, a lot of the book is genuinely funny, as when Willis’s commentary on the tension between the show’s leads gets more pointed, or as he deconstructs the expectations he deals with around the story.

But with that being said, Yu’s choice to use the script format isn’t a coincidence or a gimmick. By framing his tale of Willis’s life through screenwriting, Yu can explore the history of Asian representation through the ages, focusing on the common archetypes that we’ve all seen so many times and deconstructing them in ways that are simultaneously subversive, funny, and heartbreaking. It’s no coincidence that Willis identifies himself entirely in nameless archetypal roles, nor that he finds his meaning in whichever role he’s placed into. And how that plays into societal norms as a larger whole is something the book wrestles with too, as the screenplay veers in and out of Black and White and into the life of Willis and even his parents.

As Interior Chinatown continues, it gets more and more ambitious in its goals, turning its moral complexities and questions from subtext into text. And in a lesser book, that might be the kiss of death, but Yu’s book is already so meta in so many ways that it works, with even the characters commenting on the nature of the shifts in the writing and the conversations. But the book doesn’t just get more ambitious in the way it talks about stereotyping, media tropes, or American reactions to Asian men – it steps beyond that, dealing with Willis’s own fears about his place in the world, about the way that history has played minorities against each other, about the way he’s struggled to define himself in a way that’s not his parents and not a predefined role.

For all of that – for all of some very raw emotion, for all of some heartbreaking moments, for all of some dialogue that crackles with anger and frustration and resignation – Interior Chinatown never feels less than entertaining, clever, and smart. Yu’s writing is funny without detracting from his ideas, his structure is rigid while also allowing him the ability to show off his craft, his characterization is so much more than you’d expect from the limitations of a script – the list goes on. There’s a lot to think about from Interior Chinatown, and the way it handles its themes is graceful, intelligent, but brutally honest – and yet, it all goes down smoothly and easily, wrapping its ideas in the spoonful of sugar that is its style and craft.

In other words, that National Book Award? Interior Chinatown deserves it not just because it’s an Important Literary Book; it deserves it because of how it plays with the form of a book, using that form to help underline its lessons, all while never losing the playful gleam that draws you in. It’s a great book on any level I can come up with, and I can’t recommend it enough.

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Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind / **** ½

If you were to ask me what the best period for American film was, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it wasn’t the 1970s, a period where a slew of factors gave us some of the most personal – and most interesting – films of all time. From big-budget pictures like The Godfather to personal stories like Mean Streets, from the revolutionary Easy Rider to the predecessor of the modern blockbuster Jaws, the 1970s was a time of incredible growth and change for the film industry, and there are no shortage of films from the decade that can be held up among the greatest films of all time.

Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tells the story of that decade, explaining just what led to an era in film so dominated by directors who were given free reign to make their own unique pictures, and what happened by the 1980s that brought that to a close. Beginning with Bonnie and Clyde and ending with Heaven’s Gate (more or less), Biskind’s book covers so much ground, and so many careers, that it would be easy for the book to fall into chaos. After all, Biskind isn’t just telling the story of a slew of directors – Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Paul Schrader, Terrence Malick, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, just to hit the main focuses – but of the studio system of the time, key figures in the decade (Jack Nicholson, Robert Evans, Robert Towne, etc.), and even politics and other key social moments. In other words, there’s a lot going on, and even in a dense read like this, it would be easy to lose track of the story.

But Biskind’s organized, careful approach pays off incredibly well here, with each chapter primarily focusing on a single figure, even as the book proceeds year by year through the decade and beyond. Biskind’s clearly done his research (more on that in a moment), and the book is peppered with anecdotes, quotes, data, stories, and details that bring not only the era to life, but each of these figures, many of whom loom larger than life in the minds of many cinephiles. Biskind is obviously deeply influenced and reverential of many of these films, but he’s also not blind to how so many of these figures changed along the way, and how many of the same things that made them great filmmakers also led to the destruction of the New Hollywood they were building.

That means, of course, that many of these portraits are less than flattering, bringing us back to Biskind’s research. It’s worth noting that many of the figures in this book have accused Biskind of distorting their words, and many of them have come out angrily against the book in general. Is that because of their horrible behavior on display, or because Biskind exaggerated for dramatic effect, or some combination of the two? Hard to say. It’s fairly obvious when Biskind interjects his own opinions into the book – his personal takes on certain movies and people arise unexpectedly, and take away from some of the more objective-feeling portions of the story – and the clear arc of the book is clear from the prologue, as he explains that what happened in the 1970s was both an explosion of creativity but also brought about its own end in its excesses and lack of self-control.

For all of the doubts and opinions, there’s little denying that film fans will find Biskind’s book compulsively readable, from its behind the scenes stories of so many iconic films to its unflinching portraits of towering talents. It humanizes them, and it may tear down their image, but it also doesn’t ever take away from an incredible period in cinema where creativity, originality, and personal voices came through in remarkable ways, leading to some of the greatest films of all time. As a portrait of an essential era in cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a must-read, looking behind the curtain at all the pieces that had to come together to make it all happen – and the same pieces that would probably attempt to keep it from ever happening again.

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Quickies: Murder Party / Who Framed Roger Rabbit / Three Identical Strangers

Jeremy Saulnier’s debut feature Murder Party has a great premise – a lonely man finds an invitation to a Halloween “murder party” and shows up, only to find that they meant the title quite literally – and the idea of of the man behind Blue Ruin and Green Room doing a comedic take on art students is undeniably intriguing. It’s a shame, then, that the results are so much more of a drag than you’d expect from that first sentence. Saulnier’s other films demonstrate ably his incredible talent for character-driven stories of violence, showing not only an ability to wring tension out of casual acts of cruelty, but of making the characters themselves complex enough to invest us. Murder Party doesn’t really have any of that interest in characters, though, instead setting up its cast as parodies of self-involved, pretentious art students more concerned with making a statement than of ever thinking about anyone other than themselves. And while there are some fun gags in there, they’re not really enough to sustain even the short length of the movie. Every time Saulnier flexes his violence muscles, the film obviously picks up, but even then, the absolute lack of concern we have for any of these characters means that it’s more about the weirdness and black comedy on display, not really caring how it all turns out. Murder Party feels less like a debut feature and more like an ambitious student film, and on that level, it’s an interesting watch; however, on its own terms, it’s hard to recommend. Rating: **

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Whenever you revisit a film you remember loving after a long time, there’s always the worry that it won’t hold up. That’s maybe doubly true for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film whose appeal was always inextricably linked with the technical achievement that it was – a blending of animation and live action that was unthinkable at the time, but now effortlessly easy thanks to computers. But Roger Rabbit still is a marvel to behold, somehow conveying the effort involved in making this world tactile and plausible, and giving the viewer a feel of care and detail-oriented work that infuses the film and makes it feel all the more plausible. From moving shadows to perfectly time sink splashes, Roger Rabbit still feels vibrant and somehow undated on a technical level, still immersing you in this fascinating alternate Los Angeles where cartoons and people live side by side. The story itself is fine enough – it occurred to me how much the movie really is a blending of cartoons and Chinatown, which even extends as far as the production design, which gives you both a 1940’s feel and yet feels somehow polished and plasticky like cartoons – and, yes, there are times when the attempt to be both L.A. noir and live-action cartoon blend in weird ways, such as the late film musical number. (In terms of that blending, though, I’ll still argue that Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom is a remarkably chilling villain who fits both aspects perfectly, especially in a late film moment that’s just as creepy as you remember it being – a fact attested to by my two children, who’d never seen the film before.) But really, what makes Roger Rabbit work is the craft behind it, building a world that still doesn’t feel much like anything else you’ve ever seen. When Eddie is in a cartoon nightclub, or a small shoe is whimpering for its life, or you see the camera move out of the animated cartoon and onto the “set,” the film still surprises and feels like something wholly unique and magical, and that can’t really be replaced, even if the movie is uneven at times. Rating: **** ½

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Three Identical Strangers is one of those documentaries, like 2016’s Tickled, where the best way to see it is knowing as little as possible – a fact that makes it a little hard to review. I’ll keep spoilers for the story to a minimum; suffice to say, though, if you want to go in as cold as possible, just know that it’s a fascinating, strange story, and one that raises complicated, interesting moral questions while nicely sorting out a very complicated saga. That saga begins (all of this is in the first ten minutes of the film) when Bobby Shafran arrives for his first day at college, only to find everyone recognizing him and excited to see him – oh, and calling him Eddy. This leads him to searching out Eddy and discovering that they might be identical twins separated at birth, only to have a third brother then emerge after a newspaper account of their reunion. What follows is the story of these brothers coming back together, and for any fan of psychology, some interesting ideas about the differences between nature and nurture in terms of making us who we are. But the question of how three identical triplets were separated at birth ultimately takes the film into an unexpected direction, one that dives into complex moral ground and realizations of just why the brothers ended up where they were. It’s a completely bizarre and surprisingly disturbing story on many levels, but director Tim Wardle lets it unfold with expert pacing and control, doling out his revelations carefully and calmly, and never letting us lose track of the brothers that give the film its emotional core. Three Identical Strangers is one of those documentaries whose craft is basically adequate, but mainly of note for the story it tells and how well its told. Add to that the way that some of the central questions of the film end up being entirely unanswerable (for clear reasons), and it’s easy to admit that the film has some issues here and there. But when the story is this compelling, and the ideas being toyed with this rich, it’s impossible not to come away thinking about it for a long time afterward. Rating: ****

IMDb: Murder Party | Who Framed Roger Rabbit | Three Identical Strangers

The Girl with Ghost Eyes, by M.H. Boroson / ****

There’s something exciting about reading a book that draws on traditions you’re unfamiliar with, and that goes double when you’re dealing with supernatural forces and old folklore. Telling a story about feuding gangs with supernatural trappings set in the 1800’s is a good hook, but M.H. Boroson’s The Girl with the Ghost Eyes goes further by diving into Chinese folklore, spiritual warfare, and ancient traditions, telling a story that doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve read. And though the book’s writing isn’t the best, the propulsive story, fascinating cosmology, and great characters all make for a great read well worth your time.

Trying to explain the plot is difficult; there’s a lot going on here, even before you dive into the complexity of the cultural traditions being explored. Suffice to say that it’s the story of Xian Li-lin, the only child of a prominent Daoshi exorcist (a man who seems constantly disappointed at the fact that he’s left with only a female child behind). Li-lin is not only in training to succeed her father, however; she has yin eyes, which allow her to see the spirit world around her. Li-lin finds herself being used as part of a plot to get to her father, but the question is, why? Is it a power play by a rival tong? A threat from a malevolent entity? Or something far greater and more dangerous?

The Girl with Ghost Eyes follows Li-lin as she dives into the spirit realm, fights dangerous bodyguards, grapples with ancient incantations, and tries her best to save her father and understand what’s going on. In many ways, it’s pure noir; from the shadowy alleyways of Chinatown to the numerous characters on all sides of the moral spectrum, from the dangerous world of Chinese tongs to a struggle for power, M.H. Boroson plays it all with a heavy (and well-used) glaze of noir toppings.

But in the end, The Girl with Ghost Eyes is most memorable and exciting for the richness of the culture it evokes, and the astonishing visions we get along the way. Back alley marketplaces of demons and spirits. Midnight parades of unimaginable beings. Dark spells carved into skin. Passports that assist in moving beyond the ghost realm. Ancient incantations based on conceptions of death far outside of the Western mentality. An emphasis on saving face, on honor, on gender roles, on ancestry. The Girl with Ghost Eyes doesn’t just slap on a few ethnic ideas and assume that’s good; instead, it immerses you in its well-researched and understood world, bringing it to life on every page, every social interaction, every question of motivation. From the necessary spells to the conflicts between rivals, from family histories to job titles, Boroson brings the era to life phenomenally, giving us a way to experience a mythology and heritage far outside what most of us ever get to.

The Girl with Ghost Eyes isn’t flawless at all; the writing, while never bad at all, often feels functional at best, and occasionally can get a bit too heavy into “telling” instead of “showing”. And yes, that complicated plot sometimes gets to be a bit too much; there are times where it feels like the book isn’t just this one story, but every other idea Boroson had thrown into the background. By and large, though, the book works, keeping you completely hooked into its compelling world and incredibly fleshed out mythology, and investing you in the fate of a young woman who’s desperate to prove herself in the face of every obstacle. It’s a compelling, fascinating story, one whose world and characters are so good that it overcomes the small, forgivable flaws along the way. Here’s hoping there’s more books in this world to come, and a lot more of Li-lin’s story for me to enjoy.

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