PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 9/08/06)

From the opening frames of Red Doors, it's clear we are witness to a family transitioning from the sensibilities of old-world immigrant parents to that of their more Americanized offspring. When a lucky family heirloom from China breaks and mother (Elaine Kao) panics, her daughter tells her to chill out because they can easily pick up an identical piece of kitsch in Chinatown.

We are on familiar ground here, with this theme explored through varying cultural lenses in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Brothers McMullen and The Godfather Part II. Like those films, Red Doors uses the American evolution as a colorful backdrop to set the family against as larger events unfold.

Ed Wong, played ably by Tzi Ma, is on the brink of a post-retirement meltdown. He is engrossed in transferring his family's old VHS home movies to DVD and stares endlessly at his three little girls, immortalized as children - but he can't relate to them, fully grown in the next room. In the 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans, old video footage of the family gave insight into how a dysfunctional family came to be. Here the video footage, which is actual footage from Lee's childhood home videos, does little other than reveal the girls were all adorable little dancers and their father preferred them that way.

Ma, who portrayed the stone-faced General in the Coen brothers' comedy The Lady Killers, once again plays his role largely silent. As the despondent Ed, Ma says more with a few facial expressions & twitches than most performers could hope to with a three-page monologue.

His melancholy leads to so many half-baked attempts to off himself, his kids barely notice when he stands with his head in a noose or tries to fricassee himself by dropping a portable phone in his bathtub. This has its comedic charms at first, but it's disturbing later on when he vanishes, leaving an ominous note on his computer regarding disappearing into nothingness. Neither his children nor his wife stop to think for a moment that he may have finally succeeded. Rather they sit at the dinner table, casually wondering what might have made him run off.

Though his disappearance is the most interesting plot point, it lays in the background as the film focuses on the three girls as they toil through their love lives — each a cliché romantic comedy.

In her first feature, director Lee, an acclaimed short-film director and one-time apprentice of Martin Scorsese, has fallen into the trap of making four short films, editing them together and calling them a feature. Just as we see snippets of unrelated old home video footage, these storylines seem to exist in a vacuum, leaving us with a series of snapshots of a group of people in individual crises rather than as a montage of stories that interrelate to one another.

The film's closing frame is of Ma, looking through a window, watching his family view his old home videos in their living room. This frame within a frame within a frame leaves us looking at the main characters looking at themselves but no better off for it.

— Scott Warren