Month: July 2005

In this entry: random film crews storming the city, a storming Asian American activist storming around a movie, and Bastile Day tourists storming a food fair. It was also storming pretty hard: torrential downpours cleared the air.

Sunday we saw two sessions at the 28th Asian American International Film Festival: the 72 Hour Shootout, and “What is Wrong with Frank Chin?”

The Shootout is a contest where teams have to produce a 6 minute film in 72 hours based on a secret theme, which this year was “AKA”, i.e. “Also Known As”. The winner was “Mister Kiss” by Team Kiko, which was a Blade Runner-esque film where a filipino bounty hunter also known as Mister Kiss has to hunt down and deactivate female androids by kissing them. The second place film was “A.K.A. 084 94 ####”, where the subject exposes her identities by reciting all of her numerical stats (stuff like the social security number and her taiwanese ID card number are bleeped out). The third place film was “Zappka aka The Space Rocker”, which was a parody of old Flash Gordon films. I liked them. We saw 15 of them in all, so after a while, some of them kind of blended together, though.

The feature “What is Wrong with Frank Chin?” genuinely humanizes someone who has been perceived as an opinionated and uncompromising radical orthodox Asian American that likes to disparage Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. He is an unsung founder of modern Asian American literature, Asian American theater and the Japanese internment reparations movement. I won’t give away the ending, but much of what drives Chin according to the movie is his personal seeking of his own family identity. Recommended.

Sunday was the Bastile Day festival in NYC, and the food was out in full force on E 60th St. We had a baguette with duck sausage cold cuts and truffle butter, 2 crepes, an eclair and an lemon tart. When the fair closed, we picked up some free pate baguettes and merguez sausage. Yum, yum, yum.

All through the day, I was SMSing MJ who was in town and we just couldn’t get it together. She had dinner with her bro, and after the fete, took a nap and slept through her bar get together. Sorry, and next time we’ll be more organized.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” – pretty good movie. Weird. The movie critics are correct though – Johnny Depp as Willie Wonka felt like he was channeling Michael Jackson. But, interesting movie. That British kid playing “Charlie”- he’s very talented. I could see him in a Harry Potter movie, or other Brit thing.

I’m convinced that the Academy should consider a “Dramedy” category, since some tv shows are just not convincing straight comedies. I mean, yeah, “Desperate Housewives” has funny moments, and so it probably deserves the best comedy Emmy nomination. But, it has a lot of angsty and serious moments – ex., Rex passes away and Bree, the grieving wife, weeps in her immaculate dining room. That was NOT a comedic scene in any way (and Marcia Cross, playing Bree, deserves the Emmy). “Desperate Housewives” is also not comparable to either “Will & Grace” or “Everybody Loves Raymond” (which says something about the state of modern sitcoms). I felt that way back when the Emmy people nominated “Ally McBeal” – I never quite felt comfortable calling it a comedy, because its very first episode and overall themes were about the dilemmas of Ally (which weren’t always funny). Dramedies cover both dramatic and comedic elements – shows that are too light to be dramas, but too angsty to be comedies. Not that I’m expecting the “Best Dramedy” category anytime soon, but I’d like to propose it.

Seeing Lee Iacocca doing the car commercials again – very odd. Like the 1980’s are back.

Enjoy the humidity…

Finally finished jury duty on Friday after 7 days!!!! OK, now I can say that the case was about an auto accident — actually three auto accidents each separated by several years — and we had the task of figuring out how much injury the plaintiff sustained in the second accident, separating that from what was sustained from the first and third accidents. It’s probably one of the hardest things a jury could be asked to do.

I have to say that being on the real thing as a juror really opens your eyes on what is really good and really bad lawyering. The defense sweeped on all 7 of the jury questions, with only one juror holding out for the plaintiffs. I never really thought that a closing statement could really make such a difference, but I was shown to be wrong when the defense addressed all of the questions that the jury had in their mind about missing pieces of evidence and totally trashed the plaintiff’s attorney. I wish I could get a transcript — it was brillant.

The plaintiff’s closing was wasted, because he spent all of his time attacking the experts instead of connecting the back problems the plaintiff had to the accident we were asked to examine. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t call the surgeon to the stand in his main case. He badgered the defendant, a kindly old man in his 80’s. To top it all off, he asked for $1.3 million. The best he could do was say that the defense attorney was young, did procedural tricks to keep things away from the jury, and didn’t know the law of evidence. I doubt that the defense was ignorant, because he had a copy of New York’s tome on evidence, Prince, Richardson on Evidence, on the table, and the plaintiffs didn’t.

Quite frankly, for me it was all over when the plaintiff walked off of the stand to show her scars to the jury, and she was able to twist left and right without her cane.

I didn’t know, and I didn’t try to find out until after the trial was over, but the plaintiff’s attorney went to a certain downtown law school in Chicago, and the defense attorney was a 1998 graduate of a certain law school that the writers of this blog are well acquainted with. Goes to show…