Yellow

This movie seems as though it were cobbled together from several (not particularly good) shorts. It tries to do several things at once, and ends up failing at all of them.

The movie follows a group of friends on the night of their high school graduation. It's not a new topic, and the treatment here isn't particularly original. The main innovation, it seems, is that the kids are all Asian-American, but that doesn't seem to matter much to the movie. There's a bit of reflection on Asian-American identity, and stereotypes about Asians, but not much, really. So ok, it's a movie about a bunch of friends, on the eve of a great change in their lives, having some wacky adventures. The main drive of the action is an attempt to recover $1,500 stolen from the Sin's father's grocery store. The problem is that Sin has zero interest in this project, and most of his friends don't seem terribly interested in it either. But they dutifully go around trying to get money, and then try some grander adventures - the whole thing seems half-hearted at best. In what is perhaps an attempt to compensate for this lack of real story, the movie tries to explore some other topics - Sin's relationship with his girlfriend, the blossoming relationship between two of his friends, the struggle of another friend to be more of a lady... but it becomes terribly scattered in the process, and sort of falls apart. The abrupt shift to first person narration in the last few minutes of the movie seems like a pathetic attempt to deliver some kind of telos, and it fails utterly.

One of the biggest problems is that the main character, Sin, is totally unsympathetic. He basically sulks and throws temper tantrums throughout the entire movie. You like him less and less as them movie progresses. The characters that you do have sympathy for, and want to know more about, are stubbornly stuck in the background and unexplored. But then again, the acting is mostly mediocre anyhow, so maybe it's better that way.

The dialogue is weak and often verging on bizarre in its total improbability. At moments, the intonation is practically Shakespearean, which would be interesting if it didn't seem accidental. The themes that resurface don't go anywhere. Some scenes are quite funny, but totally disconnected from the rest of the movie. Aaaah! This movie sucks!