Sandra Oh

Dancing at the Blue Iguana
$9.98
The movie was OK. The plot was a little lame, but what can you do with a bunch of emotionally distraught strippers, other than a horror flick. Beware that there is ample gratuitous nudity to go around (it is a movie about strippers set largely at a strip club. I bought the movie because I had heard about how Darryl Hannah and the other actresses had worked so hard to learn how to perform exotic dances and was curious to see how accurate this information was. I have always thought Darryl Hannah has portrayed some very sexy women in quite a few of her previous roles. In this one she plays an extraordinarily dumb blonde, and she does that quite well, but her dancing wasn't anything special. She definitely had been working out as evidenced by virually no body fat to be seen anywhere. This made her look too anorexic. Jennifer Tilley usually plays the dumb role, but in "Dancing" she played the self centered "[...]", and she over acted. Shiela Kelley and Sandra Oh provided reasonable performances and their dancing looked more professional than Darryl Hannah's or Jennifer Tilley's dancing. If you want to actually see quality exotic dancing (of which the name implies)performed by a woman with the stereotypical female physique, then you have to rely on Charlotte Ayanna and the brief appearance of Kristin Bauer. Charlotte plays a young woman of relative intelligence(of who's age is questioned when she auditions for the job at the Blue Iguanna to ensure that she is of age) and is somewhat naive due to her youth. She connects up with and then later gets physically abused by a friend (regular customer) of Darryl Hannahs. Everything said, Charlotte's acting was ok, but let's face it, she has a voluptuous body and knows how to use it. Kristin Bauer is hired to dance at the Blue Iguana late in the movie, because one of the dancer's gets killed and one gets fired. This was probably the best decision made by the casting director. Kristin plays a seasoned dancer and when she first shows up on screen, you think she has a snobbish, stuck-up attitude with the the other regular dancers. A little later you discover that she has a serious drug problem when Darryl walks in on her shooting up heroin between her toes. At that point, you realize that she was very stoned when she first appeared. In her brief, appearance she proves to be friendly and the best thing is that she has a killer body and dances like she made a living stripping before she started acting. The price of the movie was worth seeing her dance.

Finally, if you would like to see Kristin Bauer and Charlotte Ayanna, two very sexy beautiful women, strip, this is the movie for you. Otherwise, I would wait until I was bored and maybe spend the 90 minutes or so killin time watching this movie.

Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs! (Boynton on Board)
$6.95
I borrowed this book from the library because my daughter loves Sandra Boynton's books. However, this book makes judgments on what is good (painting neatly) and bad (painting messily), and who is cute and who is not cute. I don't think such labels are appropriate to teach to young children. Being messy is not always bad. It can be a valuable learning experience. And you certainly don't need to teach children to judge people (or dinosaurs) by their looks.

Double Happiness
$9.99
THIS IS AN INCRDEBILE FEATURE SHOWCASING SANDRA OH'S TALENTS.I ESPECIALLY LIKED IT WHEN SHE WAS ASKED IF SHE COULD DO AN ACCENT.(NOT REALIZING THAT THEY WANTED TO HER TO DO A TRADITIONAL CHINESE ACCENT)MY FAVORITE PART OF THIS FILM IS WHENSHE TELLS HER DATE(DR. MING) TO "STOP THE CAR. NOW GO!!" SONIC YOUTH SONG SUGAR KANE KICKS IN LEAVING CHILLS UP MY SPINE.NOT THE KIND OF MOVIE I WATCH VERY OFTEN,
BUT I LOVED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SP

Last Night
$14.98
I saw this when it originally came out; I think actually it was at a film festival. I was thinking that it was originally commissioned as part of a project called "2000 Seen By..." in which a whole bunch of directors around the world made films about the end of the millenium, but I don't see any info on that. I think it must have premiered in Chicago at the same time as some of that series which I saw, thus the confusion in my mind after 11 years. At any rate, it has a "millenial" feel even if the exact date isn't mentioned, and I liked it then and even more on this viewing.

It's not just the end of the world as we know it, it's the end of the world period, but we (mostly) still feel fine. Or at least...resigned and OK about it. Director-writer Don McKellar plays Patrick Wheeler, a successful architect who lives alone in a high-rise in Toronto, and at the beginning of the film he's going to a "Christmas" dinner with his family, who he's been somewhat estranged from it seems; after that he plans to return home to await the end, which will occur at midnight. As I said, the date isn't given, but it might be around Christmas-time, though it's warm and the sun is bright in the sky throughout the night. Presumably the sun is about to go supernova and burn the planet up - certainly the only logical explanation for a warm, bright and green Toronto in the winter!

Patrick soon runs across Sandra (Sandra Oh), trying to get back to her husband to be with him at the end. Her car has been wrecked by vandals and she lives on the other side of town; public transportation and cabs are nonexistant at this point. Patrick doesn't really want to help her at first, quite selfishly (but understandably if you think about it) wanting his end to be what he had designed - but through events and his own deeper selflessness he becomes involved in trying to help her through most of the rest of the film. We also drop in on Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) who is trying to satisfy as many sexual fantasies as he can before the end; Duncan (David Cronenberg), a gas company manager who is personally calling all of his customers to with them farewell; a mother and daughter (Arsin���e Khanjian and Chandra Muszka) sitting desolately on an abandoned streetcar, and a few other disparate characters, most of whom in the end wind up having connections to each other that weren't at first apparent.

Canadian cinema fans will no doubt recognize a lot of people involved in the film - with the Cronenberg connection and Khanjian (Atom Egoyan's wife and principle collaborator), Oh and Sarah Polley (as Patrick's sister) among others it has the feeling of a "Canada's greatest hits" cast, but I think that's entirely appropriate - the film as a whole takes a very different approach to the looming catastrophe than something like ARMAGEDDON, released the same year. I don't know how conscious McKellar was of this, but the film strikes me in some ways as a rebuke to the notion that we have to approach the end - of life or of the world - with anger, violence, madness - or with the notion that we can save ourselves no matter what the scientists tell us. Although plenty of fear and negative emotions and violence exist in the film, we're also constantly reminded that many Torontians are approaching the end with grace and dignity, and somehow in this film that actually seems logical and realistic. I could be reading too much into it I suppose, but through the various coincidences and the spectacularly wonderful - yet wholly predictable, if you really divine what the film is reaching for - ending, we see people searching for, and often finding, hope and forgiveness and love in the face of the end. Certainly a very different sort of "armageddon" than the ones we typically see in the multiplexes.

The film wouldn't have worked at all if not for the two leads; at first I wasn't crazy about Patrick, who seems a little too snobbish and bitchy to be quite believable at the end of the world - but eventually both through the revelation of his past and McKellar's general underplaying he becomes more compelling. Oh is terrific, and for once her long, sad face is utterly appropriate; in the finale she is absolutely radiant when at last she finds the strength to smile and to feel something other than loss, if only for the last second.

Although some of the secondary characters seem like they could have/should have been fleshed out a bit more to me (Sarah Polley's in particular) and there's a bit of a rushed quality, overall this is a beautiful and sensitive and warmly humanistic film, a low-key corrective to the notion that we have to approach "the end" kicking and screaming, something that's all too rare in the context of it's subject matter - and in general. Nice soundtrack choices as well.