{"id":960,"date":"2008-06-24T21:18:31","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T02:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/24\/takeout-general-tsos-chicken-meets-24-the-first-and-only-time-i-may-be-quoted-in-a-movie-ad\/"},"modified":"2008-07-01T16:52:43","modified_gmt":"2008-07-01T21:52:43","slug":"takeout-general-tsos-chicken-meets-24-the-first-and-only-time-i-may-be-quoted-in-a-movie-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/24\/takeout-general-tsos-chicken-meets-24-the-first-and-only-time-i-may-be-quoted-in-a-movie-ad\/","title":{"rendered":"Take Out: “General Tso’s Chicken Meets 24”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Takeout,<\/a><\/p>\n

I was flipping through Time Out New York yesterday when I saw this ad for Take Out, a feature film about a Chinese delivery man, and was amused that it quotes me: “General Tso’s chicken meets 24 — Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times.”<\/p>\n

This may be the first and only time I will ever be quoted in a delivery ad.<\/p>\n

All the more so because the film is actually reviewed by The New York Times by Nathan Lee<\/a> (no relation, as far as I am aware, to me).<\/p>\n

I wrote both a newspaper article<\/a> and a blog post<\/a> about the film, which is not a documentary but a fictional film. The differences between the two are instructive in how blogging differs from deadtree reporting.<\/p>\n

The newspaper article, headlined “Film Spotlights City Life Often Overlooked,” starts out:<\/p>\n

The directors of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Take Out,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a feature film about a Chinese deliveryman who must pay off his debt to immigrant-smugglers, do not claim that their movie is based on a true story. But it has more than a passing resemblance to a documentary, so much so that after a screening, one of the audience members asked where the man was now, and whether he was doing all right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whereas the blog post<\/a> is called “This Chinese Deliveryman Works at Google” and it begins:<\/p>\n

The new film \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Take Out,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a> about a Chinese deliveryman struggling to pay off his debt, is not a documentary. Really. Even though its gritty style makes it look like one.<\/p>\n

After a<\/em> screening, after<\/em> the credits rolled, one audience member even asked: Where was the deliveryman now, and was he doing O.K.?<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop laughing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Sean Baker, one of the co-directors of the film, which opens at Quad Cinema on Friday<\/a>. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We were in hysterics.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, the man on screen is doing fine. He is a Korean-American actor named Charles Jang who learned to speak fluent Mandarin from a year of study in Taiwan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The film is startlingly realistic as so much of it filmed in real places. (That’s what happens when you have a $3,500 budget).<\/p>\n

Indy films are really hard to get out there. The fact it’s in distribution at all is impressive. Here is the film’s theater box office receipts<\/a> from Box Office Mojo. It brought in $10,505 in its opening weekend, which made it 72 nationwide. That’s about 1,000 people who saw the film, which actually, given its subject matter and a single screen isn’t bad. It dropped by half<\/a> in its second weekend, but then expanded to three screens and was back up by weekend three. Cross fingers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was flipping through Time Out New York yesterday when I saw this ad for Take Out, a feature film about a Chinese delivery man, and was amused that it quotes me: “General Tso’s chicken meets 24 — Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times.” This may be the first and only time I will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-food"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2pydS-fu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}