Ping Pong Playa: Jessica Yu

Plot:
Christopher C-dub lives at home, works a dead-end job, and squirms in the shadow of his older brother, Michael, a doctor and ping pong champion. Due to injury, Michael can not compete in the competition upon which his family's livehood is dependent. Christopher C-dub prevails.


Starring: Jimmy Tsai, Roger Fan, Shelley Malil, Jim Lau, CiCi Lau

Screenwriter: Jimmy Tsai, Jessica Yu


Commentary:


If you enjoy seeing people involved in sports events
If you like good dancing, music that is fun and right on the mark
If you enjoy seemingly wild youth exploding across a screen
in quasi comic book gestures

if you like to see high energy films with
speedy dialogue and
good acting
if you enjoy being introduced to a new/old sport
with unusual training and
to an immigrant culture that is striving to make it in this country of entrepreneurs
if you want to sit back and enjoy a film
to the very last moment, the last drop of footage
I recommend
Ping Pong.


I enjoyed it
I loved it
But maybe the world isn't ready to embrace ping pong.

That is the point of the film. Let us play. Let us be watched and appreciated. And the film succeeds. I am now a spectator convert, a happy one.


See Ping Pong and take the children

release date:
September 5, 2008

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
RT Vine:Witches Brew

Frozeen River: Courtney Hunt

frozen River

is a film that was heavily promoted by the Lincoln Center film festival over the span of two series of film premiers.

It tells a compelling story and it is conveyed in a low level, inexpensive, no nonsense presentation that indicates that the story is in itself so strong that the other myriad efforts that high profile films strive to effect are irrelevant

For me the music, the scenery, the photography, the turns and twists in a story rather than a lineal line of plot revelation is important. I am looking for not just the enticement of a plot but for how it is conveyed. Some say that this is a story about simple people and thus it can get away with a simple low cost production.

But the Coen brother's "no time for old men" is about simple people with a simple plot but it is a high cost brilliant film. I am waiting for the time when women can address their wonderful ideas for film with the same money backing them and the same excellence in production to merit recognition even by men who are used to more than just a strong story about one important and entertaining subject after another.

see the film
decide for yourself

Frozen River is a good story and maybe for you that is enough

Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
RT Vine:Witches Brew

Frozen River: Nancy Keefe Rhodes Interviews Director Courtney Hunt

Nancy Keefe Rhodes spoke by phone with filmmaker Courtney Hunt about her new movie, Frozen River. The drama touches on undocumented immigration at the Canadian border, the Mowhawk Nation, and a cross-cultural friendship between two women.

Nancy Keefe Rhodes has been a film journalist with Women`s Voices Radio/WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM, Stylus Magazine and FilmSlashMagazine.com. She is also a member of the Women Film Critics Circle.

Here is that conversation.

CLICK TO LISTEN TO INTERVIEW HERE

Tropic Thunder

TROPIC THUNDER: Saving the best for first pseudo-trailers, a really scary and hairy Tom Cruise, Jack Black's semi-deranged doper, and a cutthroat jungle drug cartel headed by a homicidal twelve year old child soldier.

CLICK TO READ REVIEW HERE

Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express, a mixed bag of assorted fruits and nuts, with doper loons on the lam waiting to inhale.


CLICK TO READ REVIEW HERE