Magical family tale
will delight
Twelve-year old Mindy Ho is fed up with the financial and romantic problems her hard-working single mother is suffering, so she's determined to change things.
The precocious girl uses ancient Chinese Taoist magic and its promise of supernatural solutions to eliminate these problems. But Mindy is not the most experienced sorcerer, and her spell-casting goes off course, causing trouble for many in her Vancouver Chinese neighborhood: An aging security guard suddenly loses his job; the butcher wins the lottery that she hoped her mother would win; and Mom must now deal with an unexpected suitor.
"Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity" Screens at 7 p.m. tomorrow at Signature Dole Cannery and 1:30 p.m. Sunday at Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts. Tickets are $8; free to festival Ohana members. Call 528-4433.
"Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity," by filmmaker Mina Shum, is an engaging slice-of-life film about a small community's hopes and dreams (some shattered), tradition, family values and the wonder of a child's determination. There are also poignant and amusing conflicts between cultural tradition and modern existence. The use of desire to try to control our destinies is dealt with humorously, warmly and compassionately.
Mindy (Valerie Tian) is tired of seeing Kin, her mom (Sandra Oh), work double time as a cook at the local dim sum restaurant and as a bogus psychic healer-by-phone. So Mindy sets out to make changes the only way a child with no money or power can: She finds all the potions and books on Taoist charms at the local Lotto and fortune-telling mart, setting in motion a plan for her mom to win the $250,000 lottery jackpot and fall in love at the same time.
But Mindy's magic concoctions don't achieve their desired results. So, thanks to a fortuneteller, she resorts to more serious schemes. But even these are botched efforts, except for the good fortune for a neighborhood butcher (Ric Young) and terrible luck for an aging security guard (Chang Tseng). When Mindy sets out to find mom a mate in the form of Alvin (Russell Yuen), a co-worker of Kin's who has long admired her from afar, the love potion he takes, well, goes a bit wrong.
This comic melodrama smoothy marries humor with the nature of fortune, romance and culture. It starts off like a family film but makes an abrupt change, focusing on such serious issues as work layoff, the trials of single parenthood, family breakups, father and son relationships, even suicide.
Shum interweaves the multiple plot strands coherently around the central story of little Mindy's wayward attempts to solve her family problems, but the serious issues aren't explored deeply enough to feel much for the characters.
"Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity" poses the question, Do you believe in magic? Most audiences will answer with a resounding "Yes!"
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