Watch Chan Is Missing For Free

Simply Perfect

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

People are voting emotionally.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Here is a film like a Zen koan. Made for $20,000.00 dollars, it is obvious that the director Wayne Wang chose to focus on thematic content rather than be overly concerned about production values. This is a thoughtful and amusing story about a couple of cabbies who fork over $4,000.00 in cash to Chan Hung to go into business for themselves, and then spend the rest of the film looking for him. The more they search for him, the more we find ourselves entering upon a kaleidoscopic journey through the Chinese American community. We find everyone we meet reflecting Chan in some form or fashion without encountering Chan himself.The whole affair moves like a mystery of some kind. Wood May plays the older cabbie Jo and Marc Hayashi plays Steve. You could almost say they are a cinema verite' version of Charlie Chan and his number one son. But then we would be missing the point. After all, Chan is missing. What we have in his place is a vacuum filled with meditations about assimilation and the best things that the American and Chinese cultures have to offer each other. We see all this in terms of the unusual characters that are presented to us.Once again there is a Film Noir feel to this piece as Jo and Steve move about Chinatown talking to Chinese locals who may know Chan or have seen him. CHAN IS MISSING proved to be both a critical and commercial success, especially considering its low budget beginnings. Jo and Steve piece together clues that tantalize and lead to dead ends, seem to be getting nearer to Chan and possibly flirting with foul play or real danger of some kind to themselves or their missing business associate. People call in the middle of the night and Chan's wife seeks an audience with them. But despite all this, the air of mystery surrounding Chan's disappearance never seems to completely dissipate.The upshot reveals the Chinese and Chinese American people in that space that Chan has left for Jo and Steve to explore. There is no real guile to this, just a chain of interesting encounters that fans out visually across the spectrum that is the Chinese American people. The more Jo and Steve focus on Chan, the more our point of view expands to include more than just Chan and any stereotypical impressions we might have about Asian people garnered from the movies and television. The people we meet in CHAN IS MISSING seem realer than that. That is the triumph of CHAN IS MISSING. We go looking for him and find all his people holding up a mirror to us.Finally viewing the Chinese and Chinese American people without preconceived notions and finding them peering back at us without any masks we marvel with Jo and Steve. Could it be that Chan is nowhere to be found? Should we find Chan at this point would it add anything more to our discovery?One of the things I'll never forget is when Jo and Steve meet with Chan's daughter as she returns to them their money. She tosses off a line to them that makes her seem like a Chinese American trying to sound like a Caucasian American attempting to talk like an African American. These scene said worlds about assimilation in a diverse American society and was a novel experience of insight.

If you expect a movie to tell a story, to develop characters, to have actions, and their motivations, look elsewhere. If you're content to listen to bits of conversation between people you haven't been introduced to, who don't like each other much, who can't figure out what their lives are about, try this movie.Near the end of the film, the guy who's been looking for the missing person all film says, not only he doesn't know what happened to him, he doesn't know who he is.At one point the searcher and his partner receive a few thousand dollars that, we presume, somehow came from the missing person. We don't know why the money arrives, nor why the guy doesn't show up.If you want a missing person who just stays missing, whom no one seems to know much, look here for it.Or, if this is all you want, why see a movie? There's plenty similar "just life" going on everywhere, just as pointless.

This film is an excellent example of film-making, even though it was apparently made on a shoestring AFI grant. It shows what you don't need -- high production values and special effects -- and what you do need (good writing/direction). In fact, I think it holds its own with all the great films of the past century.This film works on several levels. At the most surface point, it is an amusing sendup of the old Charlie Chan mystery films. Going a little further down it portrays discrimination against Chinese-Americans without showing anyone who is NOT Chinese-American.But let's go a little deeper. At one point, a character pulls out a snapshot of himself and the titular character; he can't really see Chan, whose image is obscured, but he can see himself. The point is, that's about all any of us CAN do -- we can't know others, so the best we can do, if we really try, is to know ourselves. Finally, Chan is missing, and -- spoiler here, spoiler here, watch out, watch out -- Chan STAYS missing. To me, this a a powerful demonstration of the true, sad fact that often what we most want we cannot find -- and sometimes the person we desperately want to see again is exactly the one we will not.

This early Wayne Wang feature is made on a small budget and reflects it in many ways, both good and bad. It is totally original. The beginning is completely captivating as we follow the two cabbies' search for the missing Chan. But, the pacing and cinema verite style both become clumsy and tedious before we're halfway through. The cabbies are fun to watch, and there is an interesting twist in the end to reward those who can stay awake that long. I'd recommend his next movie, Dim Sum, much higher than Chan is Missing. Both provide marvelous views of Chinese San Francisco.