Red Doors

I watched this film tonight with a packed house at Pt. Washington library. One of the actresses and the assistant director were there to answer questions after the movie. People kept coming into the theater room after the movie had been running for a half-hour or more, and the room was filled with not just the usual in-town audience but many friends of the film who had traveled 20 or 30 miles to be able to see the film screened.

I think every father has problems adjusting to how their daughter(s) lives change as they grow up. My own father's favorite picture of me was taken in my freshman year of high school when I still wore glasses(!) and hadn't yet changed into the young woman that disagreed with many of his plans for her.

I was very pleased by the character development of the sisters and the father, they found ways to make changes in their lives even when the changes were difficult.

I liked the film very much, and most of the audience did too! Congratulations to Georgia Lee and the cast and crew for this great family film!

It was so nice to see a movie that was not the standard crap that so often comes out of Hollywood. This film was very funny and very moving.

Coming from a family with 3 daughters and a father who often was left in a daze by the constant chaos around him, I really felt a connection with this movie.

The cast was awesome and really delivered great performances. The story was credible, entertaining, and filled with humor at just the right times. This is without a doubt a film I would go to see again in a heart beat.

I would definitely recommend it!

The story of a Chinese-American family experiencing transition. The father retires, the three daughters make changes in their lives, and the entire family begins to discover their true selves and what truly matters - family and love.

Some of the descriptions call this family bizarrely dysfunctional - but really there is nothing outlandish or extremely unusual going on. Just people finding their way.

The dinner scenes made me wish I was there - so much yummy food prepared lovingly by a caring mother. People from large families that eat together in a traditional way might take it for granted. But those of us whose families never sat and ate together, long for that kind of togetherness (and home-cooked food).

I really appreciated the slow, deliberate, and organic way this movie unfolds. The film is nearly plot less in the best way possible; it is a movie about people simply existing within their world, and writer/director Georgia Lee wisely eschews the temptation to up the ante or artificially increase the dramatic conflict beyond what is absolutely necessary. There are no villains here, just people trying to exist and navigate their way through their relationships with one another.

Everyone in this film -- from the three sisters (Jacqueline Kim, Elaine Kao, and Kathy Shao-Lin Lee) to the depressed father (Tzi Ma) to even the high school prankster (Sebastian Stan) and the overbearing mother (Freda Foh Shen) -- are fully fleshed out characters who transcend their respective "types" (aloof father, overbearing mother, responsible older sister, etc.) Only Sam Wong's distracted fiancé (Jayce Bartok) comes close to caricature, but his quiet interactions with Sam are always believable and never forced. The script is delicately and subtly written, and Lee manages to find a gentle humor in even the more potentially dark situations.

It's nice to see such a quiet and subtly realized movie today, when even smaller character dramas have a tendency to resort to melodrama or artificially "quirky" characters to make their impact. This film definitely feels like Ang Lee at his "Ice Storm" and "Brokeback Mountain" best, but it has a lightness of touch that Lee himself hasn't had since "The Wedding Banquet" over a decade ago.

This is both a film and a filmmaker that deserve to be discovered.

After viewing this, I was surprised to see on the DVD box that it had won some glowing blurbs and prizes at various festivals.

The script was OK, the situations potentially involving. But the unfocused, often amateurish, performances and occasional jarring attempts at comedy repeatedly broke the reality and brought to mind that old maxim, "There are no bad actors, only bad directors." The performances were mainly incoherent, unnatural. Director Georgia Lee seemed unable to help her actors communicate any steady undercurrent of withheld feelings, in a story that was largely about such. Key characters, mostly men, passed across the screen as unknowable entities.

I watched Red Doors convinced that most of the leads were capable of much better work, even though I'd only seen one, Tzi Ma, in anything else. Glowingly beautiful Mia Riverton, playing an actress, was hammy and false, killing any chemistry in her romantic scenes.

Secondary characters were worse. As the oldest Wong sister, Sam, Jacqueline Kim had the largest part and gave the most coherent, recognizably human performance. But the acting of the men playing her love interests was awful. Her old crush, a whispery-voiced high-school music teacher--an intended dreamboat--was wretchedly portrayed by a kid with suspiciously plucked eyebrows who looked about half her age and didn't sing well.

Extra points off for being set in and around New York City, ostensibly, yet establishing no NYC ambiance or locales.

So directing movies, it turns out, is like conducting a symphony, or performing rap, or brain surgery--it only takes one bad practitioner to prove that skill makes a difference.