Thursday, June 15, 2006
Americanese

Despite being a film nut, I've unfortunately let most of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) pass me by... poverty sucks like that.

However, yesterday, I did manage to see Americanese last night, the adaptation of Shawn Wong's novel American Knees - a story about the intersections of love, romance, relationships, and race in the context of the Asian American community. I first encountered the novel way back in 1999 as a part of an Asian American literature class at U-Dub - Shawn (an English professor at the UW) even came in and led an entire class-long discussion about the book. I got my copy autographed, haha.

Anyways, Roger Ebert wrote an excellent review of Americanese right here. I definitely recommend reading it.

My own brief thoughts:

  • This is not a film for sleepy people. It starts pretty slow, and Byler is definitely interested in telling the story with a lot of long camera shots and (uncomfortable) silences. Of course, since the core theme of the movie is broken relationships / breaking up, I'd much rather have scenes of well-filmed awkward silences than scenes of well-filmed awkward dialogue.

  • It takes awhile to warm up to Raymond (Chris Tashima) and Aurora (Allison Sie)'s respective characters and their relationship. The chemistry they have isn't really apparent until midway through the movie.

  • In contrast, the supporting cast were perfect fits for their roles: Kelly Hu as Brenda, Aurora's CCB friend who hates Asian men and only dates white guys; Michael Paul Chan as Jimmy, Raymond's talkative & over the top friend; and an outstanding performance by Sab Shimono as Raymond's father, who is lovably eccentric and still pines for his past away wife.

  • The post movie cast interviews were good.

    Someone asked a question about funding and Byler revealed the entire budget came from the Asian American community (he joked, "Who else would want to see a film about a bunch of Asian Americans?"). Byler also talked about the huge disparity that Hollywood has created in the Asian American acting community - they were so flooded with hundreds of applications for the roles of the women in the film, that shutdown casting calls in one week. In contrast, it took over 3 weeks to get just 30 inquiries from men for the lead role of Raymond.

    Chris Tajima, asked about playing Raymond, joked that after over 25+ years as an actor, it literally is a "once in a life time role because it had a love scene". Byler and him also joked what a relief it was for the actors in the movie to playing roles that didn't require a "bad accent" or "kicking someone in the stomach". Ouch.

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Comments:
i still havent even seen the other Byler film Charlotte Sometimes yet...

no ones psyched about Justin Lins FAST AND THE FURIOUSER 3!?
 
sarah- Joan Chen played a good crazy woman. She was straight up psycho! haha.

dks- heh heh... you know, I was actually thinking about seeing it...
 
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in?scrip?tion (n-skrip-shun)n.
1. The act or an instance of inscribing.
2. Something, such as the wording on a coin, medal, monument, or seal, that is inscribed.
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4. The usually informal dedication of an artistic work.
5. Jeremiah 31:33

the facts.
name. Gar AKA "that Chinese guy" "Sleepy.McSleeping"
ethnicity/nationality. Chinese/American, 4th gen.
location. Sea-Town, WA, USA Kawanishi, JAPAN
occupation. less-cynical poor grad student
age. younger than you think, older than you know

 



 

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