AmericaneseDespite 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.
posted by G at 6:40 PM |