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6 Degrees Entertainment

'Watching TV With The Red Chinese'
(Keong Sim, James Chen, Gillian Jacobs, Ryan O'Nan, Leonardo Nam, et al / Blu-ray / NR / (2012) 2021 / MVD Video)

Overview: A trio of Chinese exchange students, Tzu (James Chen, The Walking Dead), Wa (Keong Sim, Dead To Me) and Chen (Leonardo Nam, The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift) arrive in New York City in 1980, eager for what America has to offer.

They make friends including a literature teacher named Dexter (Ryan O'Nan, Queen of the South) and his girlfriend Suzanne (Gillian Jacobs, Community).

But as they try to adjust to the New York City atmosphere, they become disillusioned with America, eventually buying a firearm for self-defense in this critically acclaimed film directed by Shimon Dotan based on the novel by Luke Whisnant.

Blu-ray Verdict: For those not in the know, 'Watching TV With The Red Chinese' is based on a Luke Whisnant young-adult novel that co-writer/director Shimon Dotan (Diamond Dogs), but, sadly, seems to have fed into a blender!

The film begins in garbled flickers of animation giving way to live-action footage, a portentous voiceover (“Everywhere there’s meaning, order, shared knowledge”), a doctor’s interview, and home-video clips.

The timeline jitters out of order, dropping viewers into a scenario it takes far longer than necessary to discover is straightforward and self-seriously soap operatic.

Ryan O’Nan stars as a New York-dwelling English teacher who befriends three Chinese exchange students who move into his building in 1980. One of them, Leonardo Nam, becomes romantically entangled with O’Nan’s flaky ex, Gillian Jacobs, while also growing increasingly paranoid and unstable after a mugging.

Would-be documentarian Michael Esper films the foreign trio’s experience while spouting phrases like “It is my lifelong aesthetic mission to purge cinema of its decadent narrative element.”

It’s hard to say whether the story’s Summer Of Sam-lite urban-hothouse setup (here, John Lennon’s assassination serves as a pivotal point) would work on its own; Dotan’s initial indulgent fragmentation certainly doesn’t add anything except confusion, and from the occasional use of black and white to Esper’s quoting of Marshall McLuhan, it’s often wincingly pretentious.

The film has a talented cast—Nam and Jacobs have shown off their comedic gifts in, respectively, The Perfect Score and Community, but their roles here aren’t guided by personalities, just the needs of the plot.

Jacobs’ character in particular comes across as a series of irrational impulses, as she sleeps with, then breaks things off with different guys seemingly just to steer the film toward its tragic conclusion.

In essence, simply put, 'Watching TV With The Red Chinese' is a film about how being dipped into a chaotic moment in American history affects three naïve foreigners hoping to experience life in the U.S. while remaining separate from it.

It’s especially frustrating, then, that the film depicts so little interaction between the Chinese men and the pop media that’s supposed to provide them with a cultural bridge.

No time is spent on actually watching TV—instead, characters rant about it (“TV has corrupted them, ruined their minds!”) in the same way they monologue about Charles Bukowski and The Beatles.

It’s as though they know this is too small a production to afford the rights to these entities’ work, so they’re determined to suck the joy out of them in some other way.

FYI: Many of the film's crew played small parts in the film. Nat Osborn, the film's composer, played Michael, Dexter's student. Sameer Butt, the producer for the film, played the blind man, and Netaya Anbar, the film's co-writer, co-producer, and editor, had an uncredited cameo as a woman in the police station! [AW] This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Feature of an Original Theatrical Trailer.

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