Asian American Showcase
A collection of eight film or video shorts, most of them film-school projects. Greg Pak’s Fighting Grandpa is a cut above the rest, a compact but emotionally complex portrait of a Korean immigrant family whose harsh, selfish, and elusive patriarch put his wife through hardship and barely tolerated his children. Ronald Eltenal’s A Good Lie is a slick, clever, but unnecessarily convoluted joke about a hit man haunted by the ghost of one of his victims–watch for references to John Woo action flicks and Hong Kong ghost comedies. In his Yellow Fever, Raymond Yeung captures the pathos of a young, gay Londoner who eventually chooses a fellow Asian for a lover. Richard Kim’s Kung Pao Chicken is a cute, slight, almost wry fable about the invention of the diagram showing how to use chopsticks. In The Ballad of Papaya Unguinea, Matias Aguilar flashes through images of cultural icons, from Douglas MacArthur to Muhammad Ali, while a voice-over delivers a funky but barely comprehensible rap on colonialism and Filipino culture. In Carl Lee’s Secret Museum, cryptic narration accompanies lingering and hypnotic images of fetuses, skulls, and skeletons. On the same program, Ted Vadakan’s Untitled and Carolynne Hew’s Swell. (TS) (4:00)
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SUNDAY, APRIL 11
Some Divine Wind
