#6
Post
by knives » Fri Mar 25, 2016 5:16 pm
I'm posting this here given it has become basically the catch all Baker thread. Anyways, given how amazing Starlet was, thanks Dom, I had to see if he struck lightning elsewhere and his sophomore feature Take Out was the easiest to access. It's a fascinating contrast since a lot of the charm of the later film is present here, but unrefined and unsure. Baker adds on this ticking time clock of a plot which weighs with an insecurity that the more organic plotting of Starlet shows he matured on. The characters are also a little flat as if he wasn't sure how to keep the neo-realist attitude with more exterior characters. Ming, the lead here, is a very insular person who only occasionally gets to just relax allowing for his personality to come out. Additionally the aesthetic isn't the greatest. For the most part the film is composed of beautiful long shots, but, connecting to the earlier complaint, whenever we get into a dialogue scene he shifts into this over edited mess which only hurts what are otherwise the best scenes of the movie. This is merely a pet peeve, but this is shot on lowfi DV which is just a look I can't stand. As far as these things go its exceptionally well delivered, but I'm not a fan of the look.
All of this probably makes this sound like a bad movie, but they are problems which are very easy to forgive especially since they're born out of simple insecurity and are balanced out by some very daring moves which are very successful. Baker's showing himself to be the best cinematic cataloger of California I've seen (I say California more for the attitude shown which could easily be in LA's Chinatown, but I believe takes place in New York's) taking characters that are extras in the normal American dialogue and giving them their 90 minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if some people don't realize the film takes place in the states since for most of the runtime Baker only shows the Chinese immigrant world of Ming spoken in Mandarin. Even the extras for most of the scenes are Chinese. Only for deliveries is english or spanish spoken and usually not for long. Ming seems to not know any of either of these languages which makes these characters seem unusually foreign. It's a great disassociating effect that I don't think I've seen in American film before. The best thing is how casually Baker does all of this as if all of the little nervous normalizing attempts I mentioned before are the cost of quiet observation for most of the movie. It's not a great movie, but I all the same couldn't recommend it any higher.