Movie night: THE FAREWELL

Three thoughts about THE FAREWELL, coming up...



* There's a bittersweet pain these days to watching certain movies from the before times. I'm not talking about MCU movies or anything blockbusterish -- I'm talking about films like this one, that don't invent new worlds but take a close look at one small corner of reality. To see people living life together, arguing, celebrating, being passive aggressive, even drinking in close proximity to each other ... to experience that for real is something I miss dearly. And it makes a movie like this a bit more intense for me than it might've been before the pandemic.

* A lot of the coverage of the film, when it came out, was about having Asian representation in the movies -- both onscreen and behind the camera. This is very specifically a Chinese-American movie; the whole plot, inasmuch as there is one, hinges on very specific cultural difference between the two countries. Yet this is also a profoundly human (and utterly lovely) piece about the way we are with our families that is recognizable to anybody who has actually lived in a family -- the conflicts, the lies we use to grease those conflicts, the love that underlies our frustrations with each other. So beautiful.

* Alex Weston's score is memorable and beautiful. 

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