Growing up in the Midwest I never had much exposure to Chinese food, authentic or otherwise. Their may have been a Chinese restaurant in Cedar Rapids but I don’t remember us ever going. In contrast I do remember at least a half dozens different trips to Godfather’s Pizza which involved me gagging on cheese. While my mother would attempt the occasional Chinese dish, she simply didn’t have access to very many quality ingredients, making those meals some of my least anticipated so even once we moved to Wisconsin I rarely, if ever, attempted to seek out any Asian cousine. But once I headed up to the University of Minnesota my world would drastically change.

Take Out is a surprisingly simple film, yet powerfully compelling. It opens with two thugs barging into an overcrowded apartment, searching for Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an illegal immigrant who borrowed money from a loan shark to finance his journey to the United States. But Ming has fallen behind on his payments and the loan shark has sent a very clear message, “I need $800 tonight or your debt doubles!” And just in case that isn’t clear enough the thugs leave a calling card courtesy of a hammer to his back.

Ming quickly sets out to call in the few financial favors he has, and even after that he is still $200 short, with only a single days works as a delivery boy for a local Chinese restaurant as his only chance at scratching out enough in tips. Luckily for Ming it has started to rain, leaving him with a few extra delivery chances while his colleague has promised to bow out for the day, giving Ming a legitimate chance to break even, provided that he works his ass off.

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And the blockbuster season begins not with a bang, but a crappy X-Men film. Huzzah!

As for those of you brave souls who want to try something besides this week’s must see movie, there are some interesting films being released, though my favorite is easily Michael Caine’s latest, Is Anybody There? Far darker and morbid then I imagined, the film opens with a boy tape recording the sounds of a man dying and then continually listening to it, the film is not the old man bonding with young boy film that it is being marketed as. Besides the off kilter storyline, be sure to pay attention for the outstanding cinematography. Great use of negative space and using depth of field, it is truly one of the more artistically shot films of the year. As an extra added bonus, their is a guillotine scene that is worth the price of admission!

As for DVD releases, the big name is clearly the Criterion release of Benjamin Button, which I’m sure will be a fabulous disc from one of the premiere specialty DVD companies working right now. But outside of that release there isn’t a whole hell of a lot coming out, but I do have my eye on a small French supernatural thriller, Écoute le temps. Focusing on a woman (Émilie Dequenne) who’s mother was recently murdered, she returns to her home and begins to discover that their may b a connection to her mother’s murder and past events that occurred in the home. The trailer doesn’t give much away, but I’m all for seeing a French ghost story, especially after the overload of Asian ghost stories these past few years.

As always trailers are after the break!

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