San Francisco Asian American Film Festival Reviews at ASIAN WEEK
At Asian Week, you’ll find several San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) reviews.
Annabelle A. Udo, for instance, calls Michael Kang’s West 32nd (top photo) a "deftly written, detective-style film about an ambitious lawyer (played by John Cho, who can be seen elsewhere at the festival in Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) whose intention is to free a teenager charged with murder but ends up rolling deep with a posse of ‘gangstas in training’ in Manhattan’s Koreatown."
Philip W. Chung begins his review of Never Forever (above), explaining "many Asian Americans can identify with being the only island in a sea of Caucasian faces." In Gina Kim’s drama, however, the opposite is true: Vera Farmiga plays a young wife who does her best to fit into her Korean-American husband’s family, to the point of paying a Korean man (Jung-Woo Ha) to impregnate her (the husband, played by David L. McInnis, is sterile).
According to Chung, the talented Farmiga, probably best known for The Departed, is the film’s "secret weapon," as the actress "pitches her performance just right and makes [us] believe a woman would make such choices."
West 32nd is this year’s SFIAAFF Centerpiece Presentation. It will be screened on Sunday, March 16, at 6 p.m. at the Castro Theatre. Filmmaker Michael Kang and John Cho are expected to attend the screening.
Never Forever will screen on Sunday, March 16, at 7:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. The film will open in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on April 11. Filmmaker Gina Kim is expected to attend the screening.
The SFIAAFF runs until March 23.
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Vera Farmiga is one of the best actresses around. She didn’t have much to do in The Departed, but she was much better than everyone else in that film.
Vera Farmiga was outstanding in Down to the Bone (I think that’s the name of the movie). She won an award for that.