The Farewell

Year 14, Day 8 - 1/8/22 - Movie #4,009

BEFORE: Well, I was going to go straight from "Shang-Chi" to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" via Michelle Yeoh, but then I saw an opportunity to squeeze two more films in before that - I'm going to get there by Monday, for sure, but I'd also like to get a couple films that are hard to link to off the list. I can't quite explain how the list sort of speaks to me sometimes, or maybe it's just that I'll notice a connection I didn't see before, then I have to decide if I want to adjust my plan. This makes me wonder how many other connections are there that I've missed out on - it's an imperfect system, for sure, but by another measure, it's succeeded three times in a row now, and I'm trying to go for four, and I don't want to complain about success.

I spent some time this week going through the cast lists of documentaries, it's a section of my list that I manage to make some progress on each year, only to then struggle with, again and again.  If I'm going to do another doc block (and/or Summer Concert series) this year, I have to lay the groundwork for it now, and it's not easy, because so many docs don't have updated cast lists on the IMDB, so I have to do some guesswork and additional research.  Still, I've already put together one solid chain one of seven docs, another of six, and a chain of four, I just haven't been able to link them all together.  Like with horror films and romances, I may just need to add more to make one big chain.  Or maybe I keep them as separate smaller chains, and just drop in and out of them, mixing them with fiction films, I don't know.  At the end of January I'll take another look and see what's possible. 

Recent documentaries have been made about the creators of Sesame Street, Rick James, Rita Moreno, Robert Stigwood, Jacques Cousteau, Julia Child, Bob Ross, Kenny G, Pete Buttigieg, Alanis Morisette, Dean Martin, Charlie Chaplin, Anthony Bourdain, Kurt Vonnegut, the Sparks Brothers, and the Velvet Underground.  Then there are ones from a few years ago about Betty White, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Amazing Jonathan, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Elaine Stritch, Gordon Lightfoot, David Lynch, Keith Haring, Mike Nichols and Pentatonix.  Somewhere in there is a chain that ties them all together, but I just haven't found it yet, partially due to those incomplete cast lists.  What I'd like to avoid, for sure, is having to pre-watch these docs with the sound off, just to see who's in them, that's double the workload.  

I've also got a crisis of deciding which of these are movies and which count as TV shows - I learned about "Jagged", "Mr. Saturday Night" and "Listening to Kenny G" when I worked at the DocFest a couple months ago, but those docs have since become part of HBO's "Music Box" series - so, are they now movies or TV show episodes?  I'm not sure.  They've got separate listings on HBO Max, but they're part of the series on cable, so the line is really blurry.  Maybe if I can link to them, they're movies, but if I can't, they're TV shows?  I don't know.  That documentary on Woodstock '99 was part of "Music Box" and I didn't count that one, but that was because the subject matter really disgusted me.  The struggle continues. 

Awkwafina carries over from "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings". 

THE PLOT: A Chinese family discovers their grandmother only has a short while left to live and decide to keep her in the dark, scheduling a wedding to gather before she dies. 

AFTER: I'm sort of early for another holiday, Chinese (Lunar) New Year. That's not until February 1, when the Year of the Tiger begins - but I'm going to be busy then, starting my romance chain, so I'm going to sort of celebrate it, in film, this week. It's coming, and this is sort of the best I can manage. 

The general rule is, if I'm going to mess around with my list, change things up at the last second, it's so much better to do that early in the year - I can't alter the list in November or December once I've found my path to the end. But it's January, so who cares?  Plenty of time to recover as long as I keep that February 1 benchmark in my sights.  And I'm housebound, no place to go even if I could go somewhere, so I can do a double here and there and not screw anything up, I'm in charge of the list, not the other way around. So here's a film I've been trying to get to since 2019, when they were still sending out Academy screeners, and even though I don't have access to those any more, I'm still using it as one of my guides for the selection process.  Yes, I know it sounds weird, since this film is on a shelf somewhere in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that qualifies it for my viewing - every film that was Oscar-eligible is kind of eating away at me now, it bothers me on some level that there are still 10 films from the 2017-2019 qualification seasons that I haven't been able to work in.  Still, there's a bit of good news, if I watch those 10 films, that list is cleared.  And the bad news, there are another 91 films streaming on the Academy's site right now, and I've only got plans to watch TWO of them this month.

But let me just deal with them one at a time, that's all I can really do. Linking to this one today is something of a minor miracle, can I just be happy about that?  It's available on AmazonPrime, but the availability was never the problem, it was finding an intro and an outro for a film with a mostly Chinese cast.  And not Chinese-Americans either, real Chinese actors from China - and thus I run up against this old problem once again, that of Hollywood's practice of Americanizing Chinese names, putting their first names (family names) last and their last names (given names) first. WHY THE HELL can't we work this out in any way, shape or form?  Because we're Americans, that's why, we think the whole world needs to conform to OUR standards, which is why we're still not using the metric system, because we're too stupid to change our ways to a system that's much easier in the end.  I don't think we should adopt the family name first thing, but we should at least find a way to work Chinese names into our system without breaking the system, it would be the respectable thing to do.  If an actor's name is Xiang Li, THAT'S HER NAME, in THAT order.  But in order to appear in a Hollywood film, she has to do that as Li Xiang, that's not fair, and it's possibly racist, too. But if I try to list her as Xiang Li, which is how she's known in her culture, suddenly I'm the bad guy for making things more confusing, it's not right. 

Whatever somebody calls themself, that's their name, it's not that difficult - we list David Bowie by that name in IMDB, Wikipedia and everywhere else, even though he was born David Jones.  We don't list him as "David Jones who now calls himself David Bowie", because everybody learned his name as David Bowie, and they made an adjustment.  We can ALL make that same adjustment for Chinese people, and then we'd only have to learn their names once, and not twice, and we won't have to hear the story EVERY TIME about how Chinese names work differently, just find a damn solution.  OK, rant over, for now. 

For once, I don't really hate Awkwafina here, she's a little easier to take when she's in a charming (?) little drama about dealing with the eventual death of one's grandmother.  She still makes that "concerned" face a little too often, but since her character here is very concerned about her grandmother, it works. This is maybe a complicated subject - if you know that a family member is sick and likely to die soon, should you tell them? I don't know the answer - would you want to know how much time you have left?  Would you act differently, spend your money differently, see some old friends and say goodbye, or just keep living your life as it is?  Maybe we're all better off not knowing, because the doctors COULD be wrong. 

So, extra points for being thought-provoking, but still, a point off for casting Awkwafina, and all that comes with that. Still, she's maybe perfectly cast as somebody who bridges both cultures, but can't seem to get her act together at the age of 30. A typical American slacker, but her Chinese half feels very guilty about being that. Seems about right. The larger ethical question concerns the family's "solution" to the problem of how to get everybody in the family together again to say goodbye to Nai Nai, they create a fake wedding for Billi's cousin, and this allows them to throw a big party, with lots of great food, dancing, karaoke, and party games.  Yet all the while the main characters are coming to terms with their impending grief, and some find keeping up the charade more difficult than others do. Billi certainly struggles with it, and the family has marked her as the one most likely to crack and spill the beans, and maybe that's the extra incentive she needs to keep up the lie.  instead she decides to use whatever time is left wisely, to do those morning tai chi exercises with her grandmother and such. 

This is based on a true story (or as it says in the credits, "based on an actual lie") about the family of the director, Lulu Wang. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, and the family did get together to have a fake party, but I don't want to print any spoilers here about the fate of the real Nai Nai.  The real grandmother's sister plays the fake grandmother's sister in the movie, so there is some real blurring between fiction and non-fiction here. The director also played piano on the soundtrack, and Awkwfina's character can play the piano, so I'm thinking that the movie comes pretty close to the real story.  

It's sweet, it's heartbreaking, it's difficult to watch at times, and it's (mostly?) true, so I'm glad I was able to work it in. It's also about how a family's dynamic and their relationships with each other change over time as people age, and so it's particularly relevant to me right now, since my parents moved into an assisted living facility before Thanksgiving. And it's about how you can't go back to the way things were, with the old houses and the old neighborhoods and some of the people gone.  Mostly this just made we want to go to the Chinese buffet on Long Island, every time the family gets together they're eating, and it all looks delicious.  

Also starring Tzi Ma (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Diana Lin, Zhao Shu-zhen, Lu Hong, Jiang Yongbo, Chen Han, Aoi Mizuhara, Zhang Jing, Li Xiang, Yang Xuejian, Jim Liu, X Mayo, Lin Hong, Becca Khalil, Liu Hongli, Zhang Shimin, Liu Jinhang, Lin Xi, Shi Lichen, Li Dong, Qin Puxia, Wang Ruiqi, Ye Ye, Xiao Shouchang, Zhao Yonghua, Jiang Zuohai, Ines Laimins, Gil Perez-Abraham. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 whole crabs