REVIEW: Turning Red [2022]

Don’t hold back. For anyone. Thirteen-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang) has always been the perfect child. She respects her parents (Sandra Oh‘s Ming and Orion Lee‘s Jin), helps work the family temple (a tourist destination in Toronto, Ontario), and makes sure to keep her grades impeccable (while also enjoying a litany of extra-curriculars to pad out that inevitable college resumé). And this is how she wants it. Or, at least, it’s how she’s wanted it. She looks up to her mother and is cognizant of the strain that’s kept her grandmother…

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The 91st Oscars recap through tweets …

What a wild ride this Oscars season has been. After so much recent talk about inclusivity and a changing of the guard, it was bound to happen that we’d receive an awkward period of flux. There’s the young crowd cheering a Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter to the franchise’s first Best Picture nominee and the older sect feeling warm and gooey about a story pretending to talk about racism despite really just glossing over the struggle to say most racists are simply misunderstood until sharing a bucket of KFC with the…

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REVIEW: Bao [2018]

Watching the first half of Domee Shi‘s Bao with a quizzical expression is par for the course. How could you not react that way with this story of a Chinese-Canadian woman who begins to treat a hand-made dumpling like it is her child? It’s one thing to gasp and laugh when the tiny piece of food begins to wail as she attempts to take a bite, but another to witness as it sprout arms and legs before moving through the motions of adolescence. By the time “he” turns into a…

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