1124 Chan Is Missing

[domino harvey]

Chan is Missing



A mystery man, a murder, and a wad of missing cash—in his wryly offbeat breakthrough, Wayne Wang updates the ingredients of classic film noir for the streets of contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown. When their business partner disappears with the money they had planned to use for a cab license, driver Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) scour the city’s back alleys, waterfronts, and Chinese restaurants to track him down. But what begins as a search for a missing man gradually turns into a far deeper and more elusive investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Chinese American identity. The first feature by an Asian American filmmaker to play widely and get mainstream critical appreciation, Chan Is Missing is a continuously fresh and surprising landmark of indie invention that playfully flips decades of cinematic stereotypes on their heads.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• High-definition digital master, approved by director Wayne Wang, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Is Chan Still Missing?, a making-of documentary directed by Debbie Lum
• New conversations between Wang and critic Hua Hsu and Wang and filmmaker Ang Lee
• Conversation between Wang and film programmer Dennis Lim
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  PLUS: An essay by critic Oliver Wang

[domino harvey]

My write up from the 80s List Project

Chan is Missing (Wayne Wang 1982) Sloppy, often amateurish microbudget indie following two Chinese-American cab drivers as they search in quasi-noir fashion for their missing business partner. The film is pieced together from obvious ad-libbed dialog, the film's construction is a mess, scenes happening days apart were clearly filmed back to back in various locales (the main characters forget to change their clothes), and yet, despite all these pretty significant issues, I found myself kinda charmed by the many moments of documentary-like insight into the people populating Chinatown. Arguments about flags, parades, internal strifes amongst differing factions of Chinese-Americans, there is so much here that we rarely get to see in American films, it's a shame it wasn't integrated better into a more satisfying final result. It's a scrappy dog of a picture, but I found myself rooting for it to be better than it was.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

For anyone with the sell sheet, who's the licensor for this? Strand seems to have all the other rights (even the version on the Criterion Channel is from them), so I'm wondering if they're sublicensing to Criterion now, or if physical rights were licensed separately.

I'll be curious how this handles the subtitles, since every video release I've seen (including the version streaming on the Criterion Channel) subtitles the Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue, even though Wang has said more than once that this wasn't his intention and it wasn't done on the 35mm prints.

[DeprongMori]

I'll be curious how this handles the subtitles, since every video release I've seen (including the version streaming on the Criterion Channel) subtitles the Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue, even though Wang has said more than once that this wasn't his intention and it wasn't done on the 35mm prints.

This bullet point from the description (New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) says to me that they will be subtitling the Cantonese and Mandarin, though I expect the subs will be optional.

[colinr0380]

domino's write up makes it seem that Wayne Wang's later paired films Smoke and Blue In The Face did much the same thing with their meandering Paul Auster-penned conversations, just with Harvey Keitel and Madonna in there!

[beamish14]

For anyone with the sell sheet, who's the licensor for this? Strand seems to have all the other rights (even the version on the Criterion Channel is from them), so I'm wondering if they're sublicensing to Criterion now, or if physical rights were licensed separately.

I'll be curious how this handles the subtitles, since every video release I've seen (including the version streaming on the Criterion Channel) subtitles the Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue, even though Wang has said more than once that this wasn't his intention and it wasn't done on the 35mm prints.

Correct. Interestingly, the published screenplay does include translations.

I adore this film and have long hoped that it would finally enter the collection. Such a key work of American cinema, and I love how it’s a road movie, existential work, and ethnographic examination of San Francisco’s Chinese-American community.

Wang is unique in that many of his films have fraternal “twins” with other works in his catalog, either because of source material (Princess of Nebraska/A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the collaborative process employed (the aforementioned Smoke/Blue in the Face) or structure. Chan is very close to Life is Cheap…but Toilet Paper is Expensive in that they’re both about absurd, ultimately aimless searches

[CriterionPhreak]

The "I feel myself disappearing" sub-genre in the Criterion Collection seems to be ever-growing, adding to existing titles like Blow-up, L'avventura, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and, in a way, Mulholland Dr.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I've been reading Jun Okuda's Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements and it contains a fascinating recounting of the film's genesis that I hadn't seen before (and which, to judge from Google at least, hasn't been much discussed elsewhere). A rough cut titled Fire Over Water screened at the 1981 Asian American International Film Festival in NYC and it was pretty much a completely different film. Wang described it at the time as "a kind of informal deconstruction of Soviet-style montage theory" and the festival program said it was divided into four parts: the first in still images, the second introducing movement, the third "a synthesis of parts one and two," and a fourth that "explores the relationship between images, ideas, and sounds" and contained most of the actual plot. The audience response was apparently very negative (according to Wang, some actually though it was "racist") and he completely overhauled it into Chan Is Missing. Okuda also writes that the Fire Over Water cut no longer exists, so all we have to go on are contemporary documentation and recollections of those who saw it in 1981. Hopefully the Criterion extras will shine some more light on all of this.

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[DarkImbecile]

New Yorker interview with Wang:

Wang submitted “Chan Is Missing” to a local film festival but was told that it had failed to make the cut. When he retrieved the reels, he realized that the festival judges hadn’t even bothered to watch the movie. His expectations were low when he submitted it to the 1982 New Directors/New Films Festival, in New York. Not only was it accepted but an unexpected, glowing review by Vincent Canby in the Times meant that there were soon lines around the corner at Wang’s screenings.

There’s also some interesting thoughts in there on his absorption into the studio system and his experiences on mainstream features

[beamish14]

New Yorker interview with Wang:

Wang submitted “Chan Is Missing” to a local film festival but was told that it had failed to make the cut. When he retrieved the reels, he realized that the festival judges hadn’t even bothered to watch the movie. His expectations were low when he submitted it to the 1982 New Directors/New Films Festival, in New York. Not only was it accepted but an unexpected, glowing review by Vincent Canby in the Times meant that there were soon lines around the corner at Wang’s screenings.

There’s also some interesting thoughts in there on his absorption into the studio system and his experiences on mainstream features

Thank you for that. When I saw him present a new 35mm print of Chan some years back, he said something to the effect that he tried to do one film for himself after each studio endeavor, but that for the rest of his career, he wanted to work independently. There is a fairly comprehensive retrospective of his work at the Hammer this fall, with his preferred cuts of Chinese Box, Life is Cheap…but Toilet Paper is Expensive and Anywhere but Here being screened. He seems to have personally put up the money to make some of these new versions

[yoloswegmaster]

Here's something that I found interesting. The master used for this release is from a older HD master but a couple months after the disc was released, a 4K restoration was being toured in theaters and the IFC Center had the following restoration note:

New York premiere of the film’s brand new 40th anniversary 4K restoration, overseen by writer/director Wayne Wang in collaboration with the Criterion Collection and Strand Releasing

It's definitely strange that Criterion would choose to use a old master when they had performed a new restoration that winds up on tour a few months later. I wonder if Strand or Wayne Wang himself asked them to not use it for whatever reason.