Wednesday, June 24, 2009

YELLOW: AMERICAN DREAM, CHINESE AMBITION (USA; to be released)

D: Troy Antonio
W: Tony Murphy



This comes via the film's producer-writer Tony Murphy, who's also a member of the Hong Kong Movie Database.

Sez he:

What you see doesn't fully convey what we really want to do which is create a Chinese Sopranos meets The Wire as a one hour dramatic cable series. Here's a bit about a few of the characters.

We have a female Prada wearing "snakehead" who was a former prostitute that took over the very business which enslaved her. She constantly berates her poor husband because of his low sperm count. There's the Liu Brothers, loyal, Lexapro poppin hitmen who love videogames and argue about the merits of hip hop and pop culture and combat their depression by killing. We have the weed-smokin' underage girl loving Ming the Credit Card King, the 2nd in command because of his ability to generate revenue via credit card fraud, counterfeiting, hacking, etc. yet covets Genghis' position as the dragonhead; however he's more Pineapple Express than gangster. And finally, Genghis who must fight to hold his unruly bunch of gangsters together, come to terms with having a gay brother, and appease the uncles while maintaining a semblance of peace as he plots to become the next Uncle 7 of Chinatown.

The gangsters are the nexus into the world of Chinatown and how the rest of its inhabitants live and struggle to assimilate into American culture. This is just a little taste of some of the characters but not everyone will be bad. I don't want to give it all away just yet.
35mm. Nice. Looks solid. But that name's gotta change. It says too much, with too many words; kills the mystery before anyone parks their ass in a theatre seat. I'm thinking "Yellow" would be perfect on it's own. Any poster for this film is bound to have Asian faces on it, so an automatic connection would be made, meaning at least a couple of different things to different people (a perfect hook!), with a likewise automatic allusion to the film's "race" issues.

Or maybe something like this:

YELLOW
The American Dream

Just with better fonts than Blogger allows, of course.