The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Just saw this film at the 2006 Pacific Rim Film Festival in Santa Cruz, CA, which at this writing has a couple more days to run. Its easily the most captivating offering so far, and structurally one of the most creative.

Filmmaker/director/writer/animator Anne Marie Miller, a great-granddaughter of the subject Long Tack Sam, used her abundant skills and industry contacts to craft a deeply moving portrait of her once-famous vagabond Chinese ancestor, his Austrian wife, and their three children. It shows a family who made the bulk of their living from an international vaudeville circuit, but who were kept on the move as much by international events spanning both World Wars as by their own pleasure in traveling the world. One of the fascinating relics of their lives seems to be a tendency in their descendants to continue to spread far and wide. Indeed, its this mostly-unknown treasure trove of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and old acquaintances in multiple countries who ultimately provide as much material in collective form as the various museums and associations of magicians Miller also consults.

Long Tack Sam and his magical-acrobatic revue are just one example of entertainers who were very famous in their day, but who somehow have fallen through the cracks of history, even within their own family. Like the estimated 90% of all silent films lost to time and decay, what remains is the more interesting for the glimpse it provides into the early and middle last century. And Sam's story is yet another grand edition to the immigrant history of the U.S. and Canada.

The only negative to all this is the fact no studio has picked this film up for distribution. Its a crime its not on DVD, and a worse one that its not been shown on PBS, nor, apparently, is PBS interested, according to the filmmaker. What the thinking is behind that decision is simply beyond me. Considering that PBS found the peculiar, disturbing, and emotionally distant documentary on the "art" of Henry Darger worth airing at least once, their lack of interest in "The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam" is puzzling.

Bottom line: keep an eye on your local film festival circuit, if you're lucky enough to live where one is held. This is a movie worth seeking out.

Almost a documentary, this is a very well made biography of director Ann Marie Fleming's great grand-father. As a view into a period it enlightens so many disparate historical events; it seems Sam was an global perambulator, sometimes skirting and sometimes being involved in many geopolitical happenings, but always in pursuit of his work and his loves.

The format mix of film, interviews, comic book cutouts and animation holds interest over the hour and a half of run time. We get a strong sense of who this man was, and are only left to wonder why we didn't know more about him already.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is as engaging as watching 90 minutes of disjointed Super-8 home movies of people you've never met, except with none of the cute kids or humor that might redeem the home movies. Consider it The Blair Witch Project without a story and with no acting.

The story relates the filmmaker's progress in documenting the life of her distant grandfather who was a famous vaudeville magician and acrobat. The angle is that, while Long Tack Sam traveled in the same circuit at other vaudeville artists who are globally known, he is unknown - totally forgotten. The filmmaker attempts to flesh out the man and to explore why he is forgotten.

Having seen the movie, I understand why he is forgotten. His story, at least as related in the movie, is wholly unengaging, and the film does him no favors by droning endlessly trying to make him interesting, when in fact, he is totally undistinguishable from the hundreds of other two-bit performers scraping together a living in the early 1900s. There is no filmed footage of his act; so we are meant to appreciate his performance through animation.

The film is painfully uninteresting to watch. I screened it among a film society audience of highly forgiving film lovers, and I believe it was the first film shown in our forum to have had audience members leave, continuously throughout the movie.

One positive note: the film uses a cute technique of animating still photos, but even that novelty wore off after about 5 minutes of it.

I recommend the movie as a non-narcotic solution if you are suffering from insomnia.

This pretentious film focuses entirely on the director for all but the first thirty minutes of the film. According to this documentary, we should all be so lucky to have an ancestor as famous as Long Tack Sam. But this would be only to bask in his glory, not to celebrate his life.

In the film, we learn very little about Long Tack Sam's life and we don't see many photos of him. The film is all about Ms. Flemming's experience as she makes the documentary and is overly redundant when delivering this information. In the end I was bored and disappointed.

This is two hours I want back so I can spend it watching a real documentary on someone who actually had a magical life.

This film is one hell of a sumptuous visual feast. The animated photographs are wondrous, seeming to bring Long Tack Sam and kin back to life. The multiple "origin" comics are lush with color. Both merge seamlessly with candid interviews and found(?) footage. I cannot rhapsodize enough about the aesthetics and style. Kudos to Ann Marie Fleming for this biographical masterpiece on her great-grandfather.

The storyline is equally compelling. The scenic shifts from place to place, country to country, allow Fleming to uncover new facts about the acrobat/ magician's life, and cleverly parallel Sam's own perigrinations. Globetrotters, par excellance, the travels of Sam and Fleming provide effective narrative ballast, and in particular, Fleming's adept narration carefully focuses our attention, so that we feel privy to the historical events Sam lived through during the early and mid 20th century.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is in every sense a celebration of an almost forgotten man, who perhaps until now, never got his proper due. And it pays homage not just to the remarkable Sam, but to other members of his family as well (especially his daughter Mina, Fleming's grandmother). With its grea t style and storytelling, this is a film to be seen again and again.