Pursuit of the Pants Suit

The American justice system ran its course today when a DC Superior Court judge rewarded Roy Pearson absolutely nothing after he sued Custom Dry Cleaners, a small mom and pop shop in his neighborhood, for $54 million.

Judge Bartnoff's straightforward ruling temporarily marks the end of a bizarre odyssey in which a dispute over a pair of pants had ruptured relations between a Korean-owned drycleaners and a long-term customer, administrative law judge Roy Pearson, who has left an extensive paper trail in other courts around the area.

Pearson claims that in May 2005 he brought in a pair of expensive red and blue pinstriped trousers to Custom Dry Cleaners to be altered. The owners temporarily misplaced the pair of pants, and asked for Pearson to come back the next day. Eventually the owners located the pants, but Pearson says they instead returned a pair of cuffed gray slacks, the likes of which he had never seen before. The owner, Soo Chung, insists these were the pair Pearson initially brought in due to the matching inseam measurements. Pearson asked the drycleaners to reimburse him the cost of the entire suit, $1,150, which Soo Chung testified in court was unheard of for a $10.50 alteration, especially considering those pants were definitely the ones he brought in. So Pearson pressed on, eventually delivering a letter to the store announcing his intention to sue for $50,000. From there things just took a turn for the worse, with Pearson escalating his demands, and the Chungs raising their settlement offer from $3,000 to $4,000 to eventually $12,000 just to rid of the man and get on with their lives.

But by then Pearson was dogged in his pursuits, eventually bringing a lawsuit of $65 million against the Chungs. It was only a week before the case went to trial that he changed his claim to reflect the fact that the owners failed to live up to their promise of "Satisfaction Guaranteed", according to a sign they posted inside their store and amended the figure to $54 million.

These gray pants, which were admitted into evidence in court, have been everywhere these past couple weeks--from the defense attorney's office, to the DC Superior Courtroom to its final resting place for now, draped across a wire hanger at an afternoon press conference outside the drycleaners today. Maybe they should be auctioned off somewhere, they've become so closely associated with this ridiculous trial. Maybe the funds can be donated to the Chungs' legal defense fund.

I rode a cab back from today's press conference with a freelance reporter from Sweden. That has how far this story has spread.

Although Pearson has been ordered to pay all court costs associated with the trial--filing fees and small things like that--the court has yet to decide whether Pearson would be required to pay all of the Chungs' legal fees, which falls somewhere in the $100,000 range.

Even the defense attorneys expressed doubt that the Chungs would recoup all their costs in this scenario, only because of Pearson's shaky financial status and lack of assets to his name. It's terrible the Chungs may never collect their rightful amount from this debacle, though Pearson does not deserve to be reappointed to the bench, a job which once paid him over $100,000 a year. A panel review to renew his term to another 10 years has currently been suspended.

Reflections on Va Tech

It's been over two weeks since the Virginia Tech massacre and as swiftly as the media swooped in from all sides to cover this story, they just as quickly retreated. Being a part of this clan I'm guilty of this as well. When this story first broke, the Cho family was at the center of the maelstrom, as reporters circled their townhouse in Centreville, Va., hoping to snag one soundbite or key detail from neighbors, the postman, the UPS guy, anyone who had come into any contact with the family. I can't even imagine what it was like down in Blacksburg. But from reading reporters' accounts or seeing the slew of cameras on television, it is no wonder students eventually held signs saying "Media not welcome here" on their dorm buildings or actively voiced their disdain for reporters to their faces. Now, the furor seems to have subsided, at least until Gov. Kaine's investigation panel begins its review next week, in which the gunman's parents and sister may be asked to cooperate. Whether they will actually come forward is another issue. I don't believe they can exactly be forced to testify, since it's not a court of law, but an independent commission.

Even among the Korean community the initial frenzy over the gunman being Korean has cooled. When the news first broke, my jaw dropped to the floor. Not only did I think no Korean American with said background could be capable of undertaking a killing of such mass proportion, I couldn't fathom what his family--his parents, sister, relatives--would be undergoing. Reports of suicide, of hospitalization due to shock--none of these rumors surprised me, nor will they, should they ever come true. I listened to Korean callers expressing their sorrow over Korean talk radio, read the government of South Korea's statement of condolence to the American public, skimmed various editorials by native Koreans lamenting the fact that Seung-Hui Cho was one of their own. And the Korean American community's own aggressive response to such statements of "guilt" or "shame" opened my eyes to the immense cultural divide between immigrants and those they raised here in America.

Not really until I stepped foot in a Korean service at a Korean church in Vienna did I understand the gravity of Seung-Hui's association with the Korean community itself. I'm not a religious person, nor a regular churchgoer, but I was reporting a story about the Korean church community's response to the shootings. These were all strangers, people I've never met before, but observing a bunch of Koreans worship in one place, many of them emotional and teary-eyed--these people who could be my parents, or my parents' friends, or my relatives, or my grandparents--I felt a sense of kinship. Among any culture such a bond is probably common. But even without any incessant chatter of the shootings in the reception hall, or on the lips of churchmembers as they filed into their chairs, I could feel the weight on the community's conscience-- the incredulity, the disbelief, that a Korean could have committed such an atrocity.

As one woman I interviewed later put it so succinctly, Koreans feel a connection to the gunman because he was Korean. It doesn't matter if he answered in English to his parents everytime they spoke Korean to him, or if he listened to Collective Soul and Guns'n'Roses as opposed to Korean pop (ok, not many of us do anyhow), or if he favored hamburgers over bulgogi. He could have spite his culture any which way he chose, assuming he did, yet he didn't have a choice when he was born Korean. None of us did. His parents brought him here when he was 8, presumably to provide a better life and education for him and his sister. Reports say that he was made fun of in class, both for his deep voice and also for his silence. He was always a loner, a misfit, someone who had trouble fitting in, as even his sister acknowledged in a statement she released through the family lawyer. Apparently he was unpopular with the girls, although his foolhardy attempts to get their attention (covert photos with his cellphone under his desk, reports of stalking) only led him into more trouble. But I wonder, did he have even one friend? One buddy? One partner in crime (for lack of a better expression)whom he could engage in mischief with? One teacher he saw as mentor? I mean, it seems nobody knows ANYTHING about this guy or they're just not willing to come forward and talk about it if they do.

Sometimes I wonder, is the media's portrayal of this guy as a creepy loner from the get-go just encouraging exaggerated reports of his solitude in school? Can high schoolers, and college students, really be relied on to portray a 100 percent accurate picture of one classmate whom they will thusly associate with the murder of their peers? Not to defend Cho or anything, but it seems rather hard to believe that one person could be so incredibly lonely, and left alone, during his adolescence. Even his grandfather told the British media he believed his grandson was "autistic" growing up. The only positive thing I've heard to date about Seung-Hui was from a former member of his mother's church, who recalled him being "responsive" when spoken to, and capable of smiling. Somehow I want to believe that there was an iota of happiness in this person's life, somewhere down the line, otherwise all we have to dissect and learn from here, is a demon with a black heart. And where does that lead us?

I was intially assigned to "scope out" Centreville territory, the town where Cho grew up, for any recollections from storeowners etc. on the family. I came up short. Turns out the parents were immensely private, nomads when it came to employment. They were probably able to blend in as well as they did because they were in the heart of one of the most Korean-populated towns in the country. That and also in America, people don't ask many questions if you're an immigrant. They tend to leave you alone. Ironic then that such a quiet family's privacy could be shattered one morning and life as they knew it suddenly changed. I've skulked around their neighborhood, hoping one of the parents might return to their home to collect their belongings, their car, anything. But I wonder, if I ever did meet them face to face, what would I possibly say? To me, these individuals are not just "the gunman's parents", but Korean people whose grief is a deep abyss. But while not tomorrow, or the next day, or even next month, or possibly next year, I do feel that at some point the parents might want to speak about their son: who he was, who he was becoming. It's asking them to let go of a vast storage of reserve and a fiercely guarded privacy. It's asking them to step outside of themselves. It's practically asking them to channel another culture. But how else can we learn, so we can accept, so we can move on, if ever.

Review: Memories of Murder (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2003)

Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder (2003) deals with a gruesome subject matter: the rapes and murders of 10 young women in a small Korean town in the late 1980's, a crime rendered more unfathomable for the fact that the killer never was caught. The true-life spree that paralyzed an isolated countryside village inspired a stage play in the mid-90's, which Bong eventually adapted into his film version.

In his film Bong concentrates on the detectives at the heart of the case, who struggle with the elusive nature of the killer and his bizarre, disturbing tactics. Thrown for a loop by seemingly suspicious characters in the village, including a mentally challenged village idiot-type and a family man with a fetish for porn, the main detective (played by Song Kang-ho) transfers his growing frustrations onto these innocent folk, often coercing them into confessions for crimes they didn't commit, or sending his sidekick to drop-kick them into submission. He's a cop who acts on gut and instinct first, and worries about tying the loose ends together later, if at all.

It's not until a detective from Seoul (whose smooth style and detached persona contrasts with the provincial detectives he's teamed up with) is dispatched to the case that some real clues start emerging: the killer's soft hands, his penchant for striking in the rain, his preying on girls who wear red. The Seoul cop (played by Kim Sang-kyung) mostly distances himself from the crass interrogation and buffoonery exhibited by his parters: he does his own thing, conducts his own research such as visting a local school where some schoolgirls hold potential clues, and thinks, thinks, thinks. His quiet determination is contained, but his frustrations are palpable in the drawn puffs of his cigarrette.

As the murders continue and the body count rises, the main village detective (Song's character) knows he's no longer in (his own) Kansas: dealing with some village thug or pea-brained criminal whom he can manipulate and brutalize into confession. There's a sadistic killer on the loose who can only be caught with clinical precision and forensic science, if even those prove reliable. After one particularly gruesome discovery of yet another body, he turns to Seoul man and quietly asks, "Do you see this kind of thing in Seoul?" or something to that extent, as if pleading with him to proffer that such psychotics can exist. "Never", his partner stammers.

Bong draws on the times of the era, including the occasional air raid sirens that wail through the village, or the clashes between the military and its villagers, to provide some context. The rice paddies and deep fields provide some gorgeous scenery, and the well-timed, drums-heavy soundtrack mimics the rush of adrenaline the cops feel as they intimate the killer has struck once again.

It's the end that may not bring real satisfaction, or closure. We all know how events played out in real life, so I don't think I'm giving away anything by revealing that the detectives are unsuccessful in their attempts to nab the killer. Bong illustrates the breaking point of each detective like only a skilled professional can. At the end of their rope, physically and mentally spent from their investigation, they throw their weight behind a single piece of DNA evidence which must be sent to America to be analyzed (since the technology didn't exist in Korea then). With their prime suspect, a myterious, baby-faced man whose radio call-in requests oddly coincide with the night of each murder, identified, questioned, and all but accused, it's this single sheet of paper from the United States that can deliver not only the final answer to the investigation, but their sanity as well.

Bong's portrayal of two men who must plumb the depths of their souls and turn the world as they know it inside out to solve one of Korea's most notorious serial crime sprees is riveting. By the end you feel the film has become more than just about the hunt for a killer. It's these grown men--defeated, overwhelmed and unable to even recogize themselves any longer--who have become the victims.

SFIAAFF 2007

Nine of us DC’ers traveled to the West Coast last weekend to attend the 25th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

The festival this year offered a bounty (100+ films) of narrative features, shorts programs, documentaries, panel discussions and of course, the opportunity to meet the industry’s latest directors and actors, as well as up-and-coming and emerging voices in Asian American cinema.

Luckily there were enough of us in our group to catch simultaneous screenings over the course of the weekend although that sometimes meant seeing three, even four films in a row. By the end of the day, high on film, we stumbled out of the theater and into the night, but even then, our nights would be long from over.

Most screenings were followed by Q&A sessions with the film’s cast and crew. The brutal tale of Asian gang life, Baby, drew nearly 20 cast members from Los Angeles, who stood in the front of the theater at movie's end to sustained applause.

Justin Lin’s opening night film, Finishing the Game, a hilarious mockumentary set in the 1970’s about the casting search for the perfect “Bruce Lee”, brought out the likes of actors such as Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Dustin Nguyen, and former rapper MC Hammer on stage at the historic, ornate Castro Theater.

The shorts programs, broken down by various themes, produced some excellent pieces and meditations on the state of our current society, including the tensions brewing as a result of the war in Iraq, or the lives of street mural painters in India.

The SF festival attracts many of the who's who in Asian American cinema today, and this year was no exception. Filmmaker Eric Byler was on hand to introduce his latest work, Tre, an absorbing character drama set in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains which also just picked up this year’s Special Jury Award. Quirky documentarian Grace Lee ventured into L.A.'s zombie subculture in her newest film American Zombie.

Gene Rhee’s Trouble with Romance weaved together both lighthearted and intimate vignettes involving love’s lost and lonely over the course of a night in a Los Angeles hotel.

Other films that we watched included Na Kamalei: Men of Hula (winner of the Audience Doc Favorite), Shanghai Kiss, The American Pastime (Audience Narrative Favorite winner), Owl and the Sparrow, and the highly-touted Asian-Canadian film, the minimalist indie flick In Between Days.

Our screeners also praised the Hong Sang-soo retrospective, which showcased all works of the contemporary Korean filmmaker (Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Woman is the Future of Man) known for his dissection of relationships between the sexes.

For many of us it was a rather sleepless four nights, due to the substantial after-partying and subsequent 4 am diner visits that wrapped each day. The lavish opening night reception was held at the spacious Asian Art Museum, spread out across multiple floors in the gallery’s high-ceilinged halls. The drink flowed generously, as promised, thanks to tailored drink stations set up around the museum. Who knew lychee and vodka would make such an incredible combination? And what would a trip to San Francisco be without its famous dim sum? Even the St. Patrick's Day Parade that snarled downtown traffic could not get in the way between us and our dim sum fix on Saturday morning.

It was easy to be a little--ok, fine, very--starstruck at the festival, what with the likes of Survivor winner Yul Kwon serving as MC during opening night, and Jacqueline Kim, of Charlotte Sometimes fame, sitting on the jury panel.

Back home now, and with the SF festival having just wrapped yesterday in San Jose, we’re extremely excited to be soon considering our own programming lineup for our festival now less than seventh months away.

We only hope we'll soon be bringing some of these works, and more, to a theater near you.

'Host' director Bong Joon-ho

March 1, Washington--For someone whose career is built around movies, it's no surprise Korean director Bong Joon-ho's first impression of the Lincoln Memorial evokes memories of Tim Burton.

"The size of it was impressive but at the same time it reminded me of the last scene of 'Planet of the Apes'," he said, referring to the movie's end when a monument to Ape General Thade has replaced Lincoln's throne.

Bong's first visit to Washington D.C. is full of these discovery moments, he says, as he strolls down Pennsylvania Avenue, for a prime view of the White House.

"It's a bit surreal having seen it so many times, but just in the backdrop of news," he says of the president’s residence, while pausing to snap a photo with his digital camera.

The 41-year-old director is in DC on this particular day as part of a multi-city U.S. tour to promote his latest film “The Host”, which became the number-one grossing film of all time in Korea following its release last summer.

The director is an unassuming guy in person, dressed casually in a dark-colored canvas jacket and black tennis shoes when we first meet. Of medium to average height, he wears glasses, and sports a wavy crop of hair.

Were it not for the shiny black SUV he had stepped out of at the corner of Pennsylvania and 17th, accompanied by several reps from his agency, and his translator, who is crucial to our exchange, he would appear to be any other tourist from Korea.

The Seoul native, who counts Jonathan Demme and Korean director Kim Ki Young as some of his favorite directors, knew he wanted to be a filmmaker since the end of junior high school. His first two films, the quirky but dark Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), and Memories of a Murder (2003), a thriller based on a true story of a serial killer in 1980’s rural Korea, were both received with critical acclaim, the latter even picking up the Best Picture, Director and Actor prizes at Korea’s 2003 Grand Bell Awards.

The Host, a $12 million dollar production, is Bong’s first big-budget movie. Its central premise is of a monster from the Han River who terrorizes the people of Seoul, its special effects delivered by a company in San Francisco. The movie sold just under 13 million tickets upon its release, outstripping Korea’s best-selling movie up to that point, The King and the Clown.

In a Hollywood ending to the movie’s wave of popularity with audiences, Universal Studios has even bought the remakes to The Host.

The Yonsei grad describes this latest development as a “weird feeling”, and has some strong thoughts about the film industry.

“If you look at Hollywood, there’s no doubt it’s the leading industry in film, but they do lots of remakes of classics, of foreign movies. They’re hitting the limit with sequels so they’re going to prequels. I wonder, where are they going to go after that?”

I ask the big fan of Japanese manga and French cinema what the last good movie he saw in theaters was.

“Borat”, he says, deadpan, before breaking into a grin.

But maybe there’s some underlying truth there. After all, just as that movie about a fictional Kazakhstani journalist exposes some fundamental truths about everyday Americans, “The Host” has often been referred to as a very political film, with some critics even proclaiming it anti-American.

"It's within the tradition of monster sci-fi genre to have political commentary, a type of satire," he says. "In a way (the central characters) are fighting two monsters--the actual creature and the system that is ignoring them."

For ideas, he says he picks up inspiration for his films from snippets of conversation he overhears between people, or by witnessing their everyday behavior.

Maybe it’s the cues he finds in unexpected places that cause him to habitually saunter away when he’s finished answering a question during our interview, as I’m left scribbling away on my notepad. He has a habit of wandering, observing the action from a distance, as when he checks out other tourists, or aims his camera at the snipers keeping watch from the roof of the White House.

A directorial, or personal habit? Who knows. Or maybe he was just bored.

It’s clear anyhow that Bong doesn’t always need to be the center of attention, though his entourage wastes not a moment’s second whipping out umbrellas to cover our heads when the dark sky finally opens and the raindrops descend.

Is sudden fame something he’s embraced?

"Rather than being famous, I'm waiting for the cinematic awakening where I can write a script quickly, easily," he says, with a grin. "I'm waiting for that day."

His outlook of the future of Korean cinema is hopeful, but cautionary. “I hope it doesn’t go the way of the Hong Kong film industry—which had a huge renaissance and died away,” he said.

“I think we need to keep striving for the new—the new idea, new emotion, styles, new ways of telling the narrative,” he continues. “It’s risky, but domestic audiences need to support it by watching the unfamiliar or to say, ‘there’s something cool in this’.

The sky growing darker by the minute, Bong has to hurry back to his waiting car, which will deliver him to the airport, en route to Chicago, the next stop on his U.S. tour.

But not without these parting words does he take off: “We need to keep striving for the new, the inventive. If you’re not, you’ll find the industry in a crisis.”

And with that, his entourage all piled in, the vehicle zooms off, in the direction of the monuments of the nation’s capital, on this drizzly night.

Namesake's DC Debut

"Hurry up, I want to get a good seat," a young South Asian woman urged her lagging companion as she crossed New York Avenue in order to reach the entrance to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in downtown DC. "I'm so excited to see this film."

The excitement was palpable in the air long before the lights dimmed and the opening credits to Mira Nair's latest film flashed across the screen in NMWA's auditorium. More than 200 people, mostly young professionals of South Asian descent, gathered on a brisk Wednesday night to catch Nair's long-awaited adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's celebrated 2004 coming of age novel, The Namesake.

Nair's trademark techinques--evocative cinematography, eclectic soundtrack, and unique casting--all appear in her latest work, a poignant, and often humorous, account of the lives of an immigrant Bengali couple whose American-born son struggles to realize his cultural identity.

Actor Kal Penn (Van Wilder, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) takes a decidedly more serious turn here as an actor in his portrayal of Gogol Ganguli, the Ivy League-bred young man who seeks to shed the unusual birth-given name of his infancy, and in the process, his father's own complex and significant past.

Gogol chooses, post-college, to hide his Caucasian girlfriend from his parents, not visit home very often, even spend one birthday weekend lounging at his girlfriend's WASP-y parents’ vacation home without so much as a thought to phone home.

Life-changing events force Gogol to reexamine his own identity, however, and embark upon new paths as the themes of loss, discovery and naturally the immigrant experience recur throughout the film.

For Monsoon Wedding, Nair's colorful 2001 film about a large family in India preparing for a young woman's nuptials, Nair (pronounced Nye-air) largely drew upon members in her own family to shape the film's central characters. In deciding to make the film version of The Namesake, Nair was also inspired by personal events in her own life, when she picked up the book shortly following the sudden and tragic loss of her mother-in-law to medical malpractice.

“It felt like Jhumpa had understood exactly what I had been going through," she told a rapt audience following the screening. A short nine months later, her crew began filming. In order to focus on her project, Nair even turned down an offer to direct the latest Harry Potter installment.

“My mantra is if we don’t tell our own stories, no one else will tell them­," she later told me over the phone. “I’m very much a lover of original screenplays, but if a novel really gets me, I’m there.”

Despite battling the flu, Nair indulged the audience at the screening with nearly a half-hour of questions and answers ("When I walked into the theater, I was so energized!" she said later), candidly explaining her directorial choices, including why she chose to omit large chunks of the book (it does, after all, span 30 years and two continents).

She also divulged some juicy production trivia (the actress who plays immigrant Ashima is actually a major Bollywood babe back in India, the infant who plays baby Sonia is Jhumpa Lahiri's actual daughter) and professed her love for the aesthetic ("I'm a visualist," she asserted.)

Nair hones the camera frequently in on trees, I thought, perhaps because Boston is just a leafy city. Then I discovered she's an avid gardener.

In person, the director is as colorful and vibrant as her films, with a deep, rich voice that evokes multiple continents. Her own background as a Delhi native, then later a Harvard undergrad, provided a crucial foundation to the film, she said, whether depicting a funeral ceremony on the banks of the Ganges or the harsh, bleak winters of New England.

The film is indeed an amalgamation of South Asian and American cultures, taking us to Calcutta, Boston, New York and at times, back to India. The film can be funny, though some inevitable clashing of cultures scenes come across as a bit heavy-handed, if not predictable. It also took some time getting used to watching Kal Penn in a serious role, and not just the hilarious pot-loving collegiate he plays--no, owns-- in Harold and Kumar. But I know that's not fair...

Nonetheless, The Namesake is also quiet and serene in parts, such as when a single, wordless glance exchanged between young newleyweds in itself channels potency and sensuality.

“The ellipses…that is the core of the film,” Nair said.

The Namesake will be released in theaters nationwide March 9.

Introductions

Hi, welcome to my blog. This is where I'll be posting anything related to the upcoming DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, including both special and affiliated screenings on the side, director appearances in town, film news and gossip, travels to other festivals, and any other random notes and observations that I deem blogworthy. Please feel free, as always, to leave comments. Thanks for reading, stopping by, clicking...you get the drift.