Shanghai Showdown (9/25/2011)

I spent much of Saturday once again streaming films courtesy of Netflix, and I wanted to say a few words about one of them.  Shanghai Kiss,” (2007) stars 30-something Ken Leung and 16-year old Hayden Panettiere.  It's an on-again, off-again romance incorporating inter-racial, inter-generational, and inter-cultural comedy, confusion and conflict.  Leung plays Liam Liu, an unemployed L.A. actor with the additional disadvantage of being Asian.  Forced to use public transportation because his car has been impounded for unpaid parking tickets, he meets Addie, an enthusiastically extroverted high-school student who attempts to draw him out of his funk by singing her heart out to him on the bus.  For a moment, the film feels like it might turn into a musical.  Fortunately, it doesn't.  The narrative resumes and the relationship shows signs of blossoming.  Then, unexpectedly, but just in time for those members of the audience uncomfortable with an adult romancing a 16-year old, Liam inherits his family house in Shanghai, which requires him to travel there to dispose of the property.  Having felt himself a stranger in a strange America for most of his life, Liam decides to align himself with his Chinese ancestry and a woman he meets in Shanghai.  In other words, he decides to stay. Long story short, intermixed with just the recommended dose of friends with benefits on both sides of the planet, he realizes (spoiler alert but no big surprise) that he is no more at home in Shanghai than he was in Los Angeles.  This epiphany induces him to give away his family home to his beautiful but disadvantaged Chinese mistress and to return to America with an entirely different perspective than when he left.

There are wonderful moments in the film that feel so real and raw, which makes it particularly irksome when others crop up that seem forced and false.  One example that straddles the two extremes is a scene with James Hong as Liam’s dad just shy of 90 minutes into the film.  This wonderful actor, who has made well over 300 appearances on TV (including the classic “Seinfeld” Chinese restaurant episode) and in films (e.g., the eye maker in “Blade Runner”), embodies a lifetime of loss in just a few gestures.  A deteriorating alcoholic, he ineptly attempts to hide a bottle under his pillow after his son awakens him.  His initial embarrassment gives way to sadness after being handed a letter that he wrote to his wife decades ago.  But then, as they begin to talk, he jokingly characterized his son's  job at Starbucks as “working for the man,” an expression that hasn’t been used in more than 30 years.  The line was probably written as an attempt to portray a man out of step with reality and/or a mind atrophied through the ravages of alcohol.  But Hong otherwise seems quite lucid, and when he adds that the hippies down the street talk like that all the time, the confusion just doesn't ring true—at least it didn't to me.  That said, overall, I liked the film and give it three out of five stars.