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SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

penciler 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.

lovemichaella Then there's youngest daughter Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee ), a high school anarchist engaged in an escalating war of pranks and romance with Simon, the boy next door (Sebastian Stan ). This has got to stop, warns big sister Sam after Katie bombs Simon's locker, to which she breezily replies "He loves me". Which really means they both love each other, but that is there own way of showing it. Then after they finally talk to each other they start to have a real romance relation ship.Then there's youngest daughter Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee ), a high school anarchist engaged in an escalating war of pranks and romance with Simon, the boy next door (Sebastian Stan ). This has got to stop, warns big sister Sam after Katie bombs Simon's locker, to which she breezily replies "He loves me". Which really means they both love each other, but that is there own way of showing it. Then after they finally talk to each other they start to have a real romance relation ship.

scottym-8 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.

vkubach I saw Georgia Lee's "Red Doors" at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and was really moved by this film.I connected with the experience of being a part of a family that is in transition -- what seems to have once been a tight-knit family unit is now diverging into different directions. The parents are getting older...the children are entering into adulthood...and basically the dynamics have changed, and they are having to relearn how to be a family in their new lives.There's emotion, there's humor, there's rawness and sincerity, there's good writing, acting, and music, and a window into a Chinese-American family -- what's not to love?!And I can't wait to see what Georgia Lee does next.