Perhaps I'm too cynical. Every scene was crafted for maximum sentimental value, to the point of no return. But the woman next to me was sobbing by the end, so its formula works on the less jaded. Don't pity the director, though. Miramax's cityscape opened the movie, so Alejandro Agresti has secured distribution.
Two nights ago, caught Better Luck Tomorrow, a pseudo-satire about the high-achieving model minority world of Chinese-Americans in suburbia. The characters were amusing, and some resembled people I've known in look and attitude. At times the movie is realistic, at times absurd--a push towards the outer boundaries of satire (thin George Saunders in fiction) would have been more entertaining and effective. There are traces of it...in the complete lack of adults, in the zombie-like acting of Karin Anna Cheung and John Cho (sometimes wooden acting in an indie movie can be excused as a stylistic device), and the basketball team and academic decathlon plotlines. Having grown up in that world, I can't help feeling that some context was missing, and if director Justin Lin was striving to point out the dangers of that environment, that he failed to show us all the pressures that could drive kids with such bright futures to random crime and violence. It's (or, if I was to be more personal, it was) more than suburban ennui.
Can't wait for Le Cercle Rouge.
USAGE NOTE: According to Kingsley Amis, "Speakers of English understandably feel that a noun, or modifier-plus-noun, will take a maximum of one article or possessive or other handle and shy away from saying anything like 'Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent' or 'Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange' or 'A.N. Other's He Fell Among Thieves.' ...To behave properly you have to write, for instance, 'Graham Greene's thriller, The Confidential Agent' and 'Anthony Burgess's fantasy of the future, A Clockwork Orange' and 'Kafka's novel [or whatever it is] The Castle.'"
Thus, "the Wachowski brother's movie, The Matrix: Reloaded." The Matrix franchise is such a part of the zeitgeist that this is an oft-encountered American usage problem. How can any writer survive without Garner's Dictionary of Modern Usage by their keyboard? Or, as Garner might write: [read Garner's classical reference, A Dictionary of Modern Usage]. Now available in portable form factor.
Posted by eugene at May 23, 2003 5:07 PM