By Samantha Pak
Northwest Asian Weekly

“The Case of the Missing Servant”
By Tarquin Hall
Simon & Schuster, 2010

As the founder and managing director of Most Private Investigators Ltd. in Delhi, Vish Puri makes a living by screening and investigating prospective marriage partners.

But the portly, “self-confessed master of disguise” did not receive the 1999 Super Sleuth plaque from the World Federation of Detectives by following unfaithful fiancés and digging up bad financial reports. He won the title by taking on cases that appear unsolvable or do not seem to need solving.

In “Servant,” Puri is presented with the latter when an honest public litigator from Jaipur is accused of murdering his maidservant. The local police have no doubt about the man’s guilt, but Puri digs deeper to find the truth. Read the full story

By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

“Mao’s Last Dancer,” directed by Bruce Beresford, tells the true story of Cunxin Li, a Chinese ballet star who comes to Houston, Texas in 1981 as an exchange student  studying at the Houston Ballet. Li (played by Chi Cao, a dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet) steps off the plane to a welcoming committee lead by the Houston Ballet’s choreographer, Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood).

Read the full story

By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

“Tales from Earthsea” is the first feature film directed by Goro Miyazaki, son of master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The film had a tough time making it to American screens. First, the father disagreed with the son over the film’s animation techniques. Eventually, they stopped speaking to each other during its production. Then, the film’s USA distribution got held up due to copyright issues.

Read the full story

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

Director Jessica Oreck opens her made-in-Japan documentary, “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo,” with two Japanese insect hunters in a wooded area.

Over the course of the film, we see them several times, kicking trees to knock beetles to the ground, waving butterfly nets in the air, and explaining how to defeat angry hornets using their plastic specimen boxes as clubs.

Oreck, an animal keeper and docent at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, wants to study the Japanese fascination with insects, both as mythic and physical creatures. In her film, she’s determined — and rightly so — to emphasize images and ideas, not individuals.

Therefore, we don’t learn the hunters’ names. The movie’s end credits only distinguish two people from the film — the narrator, Haruku Shinozaki, and Dr. Takeshi Yoro, a professor emeritus at Tokyo University and famous philosopher. Yoro lectures on the deeper meanings of insect devotion. Read the full story

By Samantha Pak
Northwest Asian Weekly

“Yasmin’s Hammer”
Written by Ann Malaspina, Illustrated by Doug Chayka
Lee & Low Books, Inc., 2010

Most children take their education for granted and would rather be anywhere but at school.

For a young Bangladeshi girl named Yasmin, however, going to school is all she wants to do. Unfortunately, getting an education is not an option for her.

Although her father drives customers in his rented rickshaw around Dhaka and her mother cleans wealthy people’s homes, Yasmin’s family needs her and her sister, Mita, to help support the family. Read the full story

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

The first three minutes of “Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl” contain more blood than you will see in any other movie this year. Actually, it probably contains more blood than what is inside your body. In the first three minutes, you see the flash of two long blades. Then blood spurts, streams, sprays, and spews.

If you are the kind of person who enjoys blood doing all of those things over and over for 84 minutes, buy a ticket to this film. If you’re starting to recoil from this description of the film, stay away.

The film nominally tells the story of schoolboy Jyugon Mizushima (Takumi Saitô, who distractingly appears to be wearing light pink lipstick throughout the film). Popular, although shy in class, he attracts the attention of Keiko (Eri Otoguro), the daughter of a vice principal. Keiko’s rival for Jyugon’s affections, Monami (Yukie Kawamura), arrives as an exchange student. Read the full story

By Samantha Pak
Northwest Asian Weekly

“Soliloquy in Tibet”
By Anne Park
Aventine Press, 2010
Read the full story

By Samantha Pak
Northwest Asian Weekly

“Love, Unexpectedly”
By Susan Fox
Kensington Publishing Corp., 2010

As the second oldest of four sisters at age 31, Kat Fallon can’t help but feel a little jealous of her younger sister Merilee’s upcoming nuptials.

With a less-than-stellar relationship history and a family constantly pointing out this fact, Kat asks her Indian neighbor and best friend Naveen Bharani to go with her. She hopes that her family will finally approve of the man she is “dating.”

Nav, however, has been in love with Kat since they met two years ago and sees the invitation as a chance to take their relationship to the next level.

He disguises himself as a different person on each leg of the train ride from Montreal to Vancouver, pretending to be a sexy stranger Kat meets on her trip. The two friends begin an affair with the understanding that what happens on the train will never be discussed. Read the full story

Each year during the Seattle International Film Festival, we send out a team of intrepid film reviewers who are ready and willing to spend hours watching movies in order to help our readers pick out the ones that may interest them the most. This is what they’ve come up with: Read the full story

Each year during the Seattle International Film Festival, we send out a team of intrepid film reviewers who are ready and willing to spend hours and hours watching movies in order to help our readers pick out the ones that may interest them the most. This is what they’ve come up with: Read the full story

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

Ji-woon Kim’s “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” is set in the 1930s, with a criminal boss giving a dangerous assignment to a hired gun. If you’ve watched a fair number of movies, you might get the feeling that you’ve seen this before. Read the full story

By Samantha Pak
Northwest Asian Weekly

“Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter”
By Adeline Yen Mah
Dell Laurel-Leaf, 1999

In every child’s life, there is a time when they feel unwanted. Whether they’re in deep trouble or a new baby has joined the family, these feelings of not being wanted usually pass quickly.

This is not the case for Adeline Yen Mah.

In “Chinese Cinderella,” which chronicles the first 14 years of her life, Mah has no doubts that she is seen as nothing more than a burden and a nuisance in her family’s life. Her mother died giving birth to her. Mah is blamed and considered bad luck as a result. Read the full story