Zen Noir

At the Moondance Festival in Boulder, CO. the small Chataqua community house was packed to the rafters as the movie that won the Sand Castle award for "best feature film" played. The questions people ask is how did he set the orange on fire (and there were lots of oranges) and where did he get the idea to make a farce about a comical noir detective using ancient Chinese Buddhist humor? And at the same time, he raises existential questions (not answering every one of them for us) to leave us with a movie koan to watch over and over again. It was the easiest meditation I sat through (yes you had to sit for 71 minutes) but the pythonesque humor gets you through it...theater that lives on and on. Kim Chan fans should try to stay until the end of the credits, if they want to see him having fun, too. Beautiful imagery, fine performances.

The summary was the comment our 7 years old son launched after watching the movie. Yup, he managed to concentrate through it. Maybe he was fascinated because the people in the movie sit on the same kind of cushions that can be found from our living room. He has also visited our city zendo in Helsinki and knows his family members are into this stuff.

This is a piece of art that made me laugh and cry. Laugh because of the obvious bad jokes that surface while these two "genres" clash; and cry because of emotional discharge caused by explaining the essence of an orange. If you know the tradition - just watch it. If you do not enjoy sitting still and watching the blank wall - you might find this movie challenging.

I went to this movie with great hopes. Knowing it was written by a zen student, I too a zen student looked forward. I was not disappointed. Some cliché and old myths run by, yet the creativity and NOIR style of the film was excellent. It was very funny as well. My concern is that the film may best be appreciated by those in the know on zen only. But I have recommended this film to every 'spiritual' person I know. Dealing with the notion of death and change is not an easy thing, but this film deals with these issues in an amusing, enjoyable, yet penetratingly deep fashion. The inclusion of Kim Chan is a stroke of genius. He's great as the old zen master.

"Zen Noir" is overall an enjoyable film with a decent storyline, but it has many amateurish elements that weaken the production significantly.

The story involves a nameless detective investigating a possible murder at a Buddhist temple, only to find his perspective on life challenged and transformed as he learns more about the situation. It's a simple concept that presents a pretty broad illustration of some Buddhist tenets, but the detective's character arc is engaging and strong enough to carry the story. I did not find the film's treatment of Buddhism too esoteric, as it concentrates mostly on the detective's perspective and growth.

The writing is mostly clever but has uneven parts. Despite the film's overall dedication to witty and unexpected dialogue, it includes moments like a sophomoric "laypeople are people who can get laid" joke. The comedic aspects in general feel very forced and weak, consisting of silly and predictable gags or very awkward slapstick. The director clearly didn't know how to make slapstick acting visually funny but insisted on trying a few times anyway, disrupting the film's otherwise thoughtful flow.

The detective and the monks are adequate actors, but the woman playing Jane proved very dull and tedious. It felt as if she was cast primarily to pad out the film by speaking very, very slowly as if she was bored with the script. The biggest problem with Jane is that we're supposed to care about her character, but she doesn't have any particular appeal or even interesting qualities.

The film is only 70 minutes, though, so if the concept of a hard-boiled detective investigating at a Buddhist temple sounds entertaining or amusing, you can probably get some enjoyment from Zen Noir. Honestly, if this film had been cut down to a mere 45 minutes, it would probably have contained all its necessary and most engaging elements.

The pre-credits opening scene of Marc Rosenbush's 2004 film "Zen Noir" shows an undershirt-wearing, unshaven, classic film noir detective gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror and saying in voice-over, "The morning fog clung to the city like the scent of desperation on an aging drag queen. Why do I talk this way?" Marc had me at the title of his film, but these first lines clinched the deal.

I stumbled upon the title of this movie in a list of Zen-related films on the IMDb. Never having heard of it before, I looked it up, and immediately set about getting myself a copy of it. "What is not to like," thought I, "about a movie that combines a love of film noir with Zen?" The answer to that koan, as it turns out, is very Zen in itself: Nothing.

Still in voice-over, our nameless detective describes how he got involved in his latest case: "I'd been up all night and had just hit the feathers when the phone went off like Easter Sunday in my skull. A guy with an accent -- Japanese maybe -- said to haul ass to the temple, 'cause someone is about to die. 'What temple,' I said, 'and who the hell are you?' but he'd already hung up. Three synagogues later it occurred to me that there aren't a lot of Chinese Jews, so I wound up here -- barely conscious, half asleep, and with a murder to solve." Cut to a Zen monk banging on a gong to call the monks to practice. The monks arrive, and sit there meditating. The first monk suddenly utters a kind of grunt and falls over, dead. The other monks at first just keep meditating, and then two of them look quizically at each other, like "What now?" Then the detective barges in wearing a trenchcoat and pointing a gun at everybody. "Nobody move," he says. Nobody was moving before. Then he says, "OK, who's in charge here?" and the two monks who looked at each other earlier turn and point to him. "My kinda movie," thought I.

Low-budget without looking it, this guy's first (and so far only) movie is a delight. Not Academy Award material, but a lot of fun, especially for a group of seekers watching it together and passing around the tofu popcorn while chuckling. Funny, and even with a spiritual lesson or two to teach, because it proposes a truly excellent koan.

Spiritual seekers are all detectives, eating an orange and trying to solve the mystery of their own inevitable murder at the hands of life. The koan posed by this film's Zen Master is, "You gonna freak out, or eat orange?" If you can find it, I suspect you'd really like this film. If nothing else, it's full of great one-liners you can chuckle over with friends like yourself who might like this sorta thing. Don't bogart the tofu.