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revdorothyl at 07:33pm on 14/07/2005 under movie reviews
revdorothyl at 07:33pm on 14/07/2005 under movie reviewsA friend in London sent me the following e-mail earlier this afternoon (evening for her):
"Giles aka Anthony Head was the Master of Ceremonies this evening at a mass poetry reading in Trafalgar Square in respect for the dead, injured and bereaved."
I'm in the ambivalent position of wishing I could have been there, but hating the reason for the gathering (the fact that so many people are dead, injured, and bereaved).
On a less ambivalent note, I must highly recommend the movie I saw this afternoon: "Saving Face".
The main character is Wilhelmina (universally called "Wil"), a beautiful young Chinese-American doctor in New York City who regularly makes the pilgrimage back to her family's Chinese immigrant community center in Flushing so that her 48-year-old widowed mother (played by a still stunning-looking Joan Chen) can go through the motions of fixing her up with some nice young Chinese man. Just as it looks like Wil may have met the girl of her dreams and have some hope of a personal/dating life, Wil's grandparents find out that her MOM is pregnant out of wedlock and kick her out of their house.
Rather than risk the karmic penalties for a Chinese daughter who refuses to house her own mother, Wil allows her mother to move in with her (the grandfather won't let her mother come back to Flushing until she either gets married -- preferably to the baby's father, whom she refuses to name -- or provides conclusive proof of immaculate conception). Pretty soon, the mother and daughter roles are reversed, as Wil tries desperately to set her mom up with every 50-ish single Chinese man that she or her friends and co-workers can scrounge up. Meanwhile, Wil's own romance with her girlfriend Viv is suffering from the competing claims of depressed pregnant mother at home and Wil's residency duties at the hospital.
This is a delightful romantic comedy/drama, in English and Chinese (subtitled in English, as the characters switch back and forth between the two languages, sometimes within the same sentence), as both Wil and her mother have to decide if "saving face" for their family in front of the censorious matriarchs of their Chinese-American community is really worth giving up the chance to spend the rest of their lives with the person they truly love. Watch for an unexpected homage to "The Graduate" late in the film, and stay through the closing credits for at least the first few minutes, as they are interspersed with follow-up scenes to the movie that you won't want to miss.
"Giles aka Anthony Head was the Master of Ceremonies this evening at a mass poetry reading in Trafalgar Square in respect for the dead, injured and bereaved."
I'm in the ambivalent position of wishing I could have been there, but hating the reason for the gathering (the fact that so many people are dead, injured, and bereaved).
On a less ambivalent note, I must highly recommend the movie I saw this afternoon: "Saving Face".
The main character is Wilhelmina (universally called "Wil"), a beautiful young Chinese-American doctor in New York City who regularly makes the pilgrimage back to her family's Chinese immigrant community center in Flushing so that her 48-year-old widowed mother (played by a still stunning-looking Joan Chen) can go through the motions of fixing her up with some nice young Chinese man. Just as it looks like Wil may have met the girl of her dreams and have some hope of a personal/dating life, Wil's grandparents find out that her MOM is pregnant out of wedlock and kick her out of their house.
Rather than risk the karmic penalties for a Chinese daughter who refuses to house her own mother, Wil allows her mother to move in with her (the grandfather won't let her mother come back to Flushing until she either gets married -- preferably to the baby's father, whom she refuses to name -- or provides conclusive proof of immaculate conception). Pretty soon, the mother and daughter roles are reversed, as Wil tries desperately to set her mom up with every 50-ish single Chinese man that she or her friends and co-workers can scrounge up. Meanwhile, Wil's own romance with her girlfriend Viv is suffering from the competing claims of depressed pregnant mother at home and Wil's residency duties at the hospital.
This is a delightful romantic comedy/drama, in English and Chinese (subtitled in English, as the characters switch back and forth between the two languages, sometimes within the same sentence), as both Wil and her mother have to decide if "saving face" for their family in front of the censorious matriarchs of their Chinese-American community is really worth giving up the chance to spend the rest of their lives with the person they truly love. Watch for an unexpected homage to "The Graduate" late in the film, and stay through the closing credits for at least the first few minutes, as they are interspersed with follow-up scenes to the movie that you won't want to miss.
(no subject)