A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Saving Face.Alice Wu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saving Face.Alice Wu. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2004)

Joan Chen and Michelle Krusiec in Saving Face

Cast: Michelle Krusiec, Joan Chen, Lynn Chen, Jin Wang, Guang Lan Koh, Jessica Hecht, Ato Essandoh, David Shih, Brian Yang, Nathanel Geng, Mao Zhao, Louyong Wong, Clare Sum. Screenplay: Alice Wu. Cinematography: Harlan Bosmajian. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Susan Graef, Sabine Hoffman. Music: Anton Sanko. 

Alice Wu's Saving Face is a pleasant mixture of family drama and romantic comedy that never quite gets the two genres to work together and doesn't break any new ground for either of them. It plays on the usual themes of stories about immigrant families adjusting to American life, particularly clashes between tradition and change, old and young, queer and heteronormative. Only the fine performances of its cast really hold the movie together. 

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