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1735 Km (2005)

Romantic comedy follows two strangers across Vietnam

BY LAWRENCE SUMULONG

When Kay Nguyen '07 came back to campus after taking a year off, she had gained a new appreciation of what Grinnell meant to her. Of course, she had also gained credentials as the screenwriter and assistant director of a feature film.

A year after her return, after journeying multiple times along a route up and down Vietnam through five major cities from Hanoi to Saigon and back, Nguyen finally has a chance to show off the fruits of her labor.

Her cinematic brainchild 1735 Km has its U.S. premier on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Harris Cinema. Ngugen will speak at a reception in the Harris lobby at 7:00.

Nguyen signed on with the film when she was approached by a fledgling production company, Ky Dong Productions, looking for aspiring young artists interested in making films.

The company had discovered her through film reviews she had written for English and Vietnamese publications. They asked her to write a screenplay, and she accepted.

According to Nguyen, 1735 Km is a romantic comedy following the scenic journey of two strangers, a male and a female, stranded together and penniless in the northern city of Hanoi, desperate to find their way home to the southern city of Saigon. The film's title refers to the distance the two characters traverse.

For the first-time screenwriter, the working process was an artistic journey, but also one that led to realizations about the commercial aspect of film.

"Film is a very funny product of this century," said Nguyen. "It's the very mix between money and art ... you have to make money to make films. And sometimes as you go along, the executive producer gets to say a lot and they usually control the artistic things."

"Basically, the whole [cinematic] production is a very unglamorous process and it takes a lot of hard work and not just ... expressing your own artistic ideas," she said. "I was very lucky to have the director tutor me in writing and also the politics of the whole thing."

Nguyen found surprising links between her yearlong adventure and her time in an Iowa classroom.

"You have to take a step back in order to appreciate something ... and so I took a year off and while I was working I constantly found that all of the skills, the way of thinking, even the pleasure of working was actually determined, largely, by the Grinnell experience," she said. "Anyone who passed the Grinnell ordeal ... [is] equipped with something very precious."

TV-based flick doesn't bring reviewer "serenity"

Serenity (2005)

Movie has sappy dialogue, but will please Firefly fans

What do you get when you cross a country-western movie and a sci-fi flick? Well, actually, you get something like Star Wars. But this isn't Star Wars. This is Serenity, the Tinseltown version of Joss Whedon's "Firefly," a short-lived TV series that developed a small cult following before being cancelled in its first season.

Serenity takes place approximately 500 years in the future. Earth is long abandoned, but never fear: Humanity thrives in terraformed planets. These planets are all part of the Alliance, your standard, tyrannical "government gone amok." The Alliance's oppressive rule doesn't quite extend to the planets on the outer rims, and they once fought a war for independence from the Alliance. Unlike in Star Wars, the rebel scum lost. From this is spawned the Millennium Falcon ... no wait, I mean the Serenity, and its stalwart crew full of wise-asses, led by the intrepid captain Malcom "Mal" Reynolds (Nathan Fillion-don't worry, I've never heard of him either).

Apparently, everybody's a comedian in the future. The dialogue gets pretty damn laughable in a way only a movie based directly on a TV show could manage. You know, the kind of sappy "She's torn up plenty, but she'll fly true" talk which no doubt pleased the hell out of "Firefly" loyalists but amused the hell out of me. The crew shines when they talk amongst themselves. It's amusing enough, though overdone seeing as nearly everybody onboard gets in a zinger or two.

What didn't amuse the hell out of me was the glaring anachronism. This is the future, right? They've got super-fast spaceships with laser cannons and all that jazz. So why the hell is the crew walking about with pistols and pump-action shotguns? One of them even uses a bow and arrow, fer chrissakes!

Eventually, after puttering around the planets for a while dodging super-crazy cannibalistic humans called Reavers and Alliance attempts to recapture experimental psychic girl named River (who is played by Summer Glau and looks like that girl from The Ring), the crew discovers a terrible secret that the Alliance had buried, setting up the climactic final battle in which the low budget of this flick truly shines. The special effects aren't terrible, mind you, but they do look about 10 years old.

Serenity is a decent enough picture as long as you don't mind having all these loose ends from the TV show never fully explained or clichŽd dialogue straight out of the box.

-Kevin Marcou

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