LUCkY GRANDMA
***
Director: Sasie Sealy
Screenwriters: Sasie Sealy and Angela Cheng
Principal cast:
Tsai Chin
Hsaio-Yuan Ha
Michael Tow
Woody Fu
Yan Xi
Wai Ching Hu
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 87 mins.
Australian release date: 8 October 2020.
Sasie Sealy’s debut feature Lucky Grandma is a treat! It stars the octogenarian veteran Chinese/English actress Tsai Chin as a chain-smoking, perpetually grumpy, thoroughly independent woman, who’s been recently widowed and finds that she is rapidly running out of money but is reluctant to move in with her loving son, daughter-in-law and high-spirited young grandson David (Mason Yam). Throw in a bag of missing money and a couple of rival Triad gangs, and Sealy and her co-writer Angela Cheng set the scene for a fascinating, off-beat story about survival and retaining dignity in old age in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown.
When Grandma consults fortune teller Lei Lei (Wai Ching Ho), she is told she is about to enter a lucky period, so she withdraws the last of her money and, along with fellow gamblers from the Chinese community, catches a private bus to a casino on an Indian reservation. There, she gets lucky alright, but not in the way in which she intended. As a result, Grandma suddenly needs protection from Triad gangsters, so she hires Big Pong (Hsaio-Yuan Ha) from a rival gang to be her body-guard. The drama that ensues embroils the old woman in a gang-war that threatens to involve her family and which brings her into contact with Sister Fong (Yang Xi), the ‘snakehead’ of one of the gangs, who will stop at nothing to get hold of Grandma’s loot.
Chin’s career is vast and she’s done it all: theatre, cabaret, movies, television series, recorded hit songs and albums, written a best-selling autobiography, directed plays and taught drama, although Australian audiences may know her best as Auntie Lindo in Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club. Her first big break came in 1959 when she won the leading role in The World of Suzie Wong, which ran for three years in London’s West End. Since then she’s hardly been out of work: she played the daughter of Christopher Lee’s evil villain Fu Manchu in five films, appeared in two Bond movies - From Russia With Love and Casino Royale - and even found time to earn a Master’s Degree in Drama at Tuft’s University. In 1995, when she was 62, she moved from the UK to LA, where she was not as widely-known as she was in England, and successfully carried on with her film, theatre and television work. Last year, at the age of 86, she made two films, this one and the Dreamwork’s animation Abominable, so it doesn’t look as though retirement is on her agenda. She’s a remarkable woman and she captures Grandma, with all her faults and perspicacity, to a T.
Sealy successfully pulls off this dark comedy about the complexities of aging, the fragility of immigrant life in NYC and the formation of an unlikely relationship between a hulking man of few words and an acerbic octogenarian, in what is accurately described in the press-kit as ‘a love letter to Chinatown’. Lucky Grandma is an entertaining, humorous and whacky film which depicts clearly that we should not assume that the right to remain independent diminishes as one gets older and that you should always ‘respect your elders’. Simultaneously, the engaging plot also teaches us that, often, the riches you seek are under your nose the whole time.
Screenwriters: Sasie Sealy and Angela Cheng
Principal cast:
Tsai Chin
Hsaio-Yuan Ha
Michael Tow
Woody Fu
Yan Xi
Wai Ching Hu
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 87 mins.
Australian release date: 8 October 2020.
Sasie Sealy’s debut feature Lucky Grandma is a treat! It stars the octogenarian veteran Chinese/English actress Tsai Chin as a chain-smoking, perpetually grumpy, thoroughly independent woman, who’s been recently widowed and finds that she is rapidly running out of money but is reluctant to move in with her loving son, daughter-in-law and high-spirited young grandson David (Mason Yam). Throw in a bag of missing money and a couple of rival Triad gangs, and Sealy and her co-writer Angela Cheng set the scene for a fascinating, off-beat story about survival and retaining dignity in old age in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown.
When Grandma consults fortune teller Lei Lei (Wai Ching Ho), she is told she is about to enter a lucky period, so she withdraws the last of her money and, along with fellow gamblers from the Chinese community, catches a private bus to a casino on an Indian reservation. There, she gets lucky alright, but not in the way in which she intended. As a result, Grandma suddenly needs protection from Triad gangsters, so she hires Big Pong (Hsaio-Yuan Ha) from a rival gang to be her body-guard. The drama that ensues embroils the old woman in a gang-war that threatens to involve her family and which brings her into contact with Sister Fong (Yang Xi), the ‘snakehead’ of one of the gangs, who will stop at nothing to get hold of Grandma’s loot.
Chin’s career is vast and she’s done it all: theatre, cabaret, movies, television series, recorded hit songs and albums, written a best-selling autobiography, directed plays and taught drama, although Australian audiences may know her best as Auntie Lindo in Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club. Her first big break came in 1959 when she won the leading role in The World of Suzie Wong, which ran for three years in London’s West End. Since then she’s hardly been out of work: she played the daughter of Christopher Lee’s evil villain Fu Manchu in five films, appeared in two Bond movies - From Russia With Love and Casino Royale - and even found time to earn a Master’s Degree in Drama at Tuft’s University. In 1995, when she was 62, she moved from the UK to LA, where she was not as widely-known as she was in England, and successfully carried on with her film, theatre and television work. Last year, at the age of 86, she made two films, this one and the Dreamwork’s animation Abominable, so it doesn’t look as though retirement is on her agenda. She’s a remarkable woman and she captures Grandma, with all her faults and perspicacity, to a T.
Sealy successfully pulls off this dark comedy about the complexities of aging, the fragility of immigrant life in NYC and the formation of an unlikely relationship between a hulking man of few words and an acerbic octogenarian, in what is accurately described in the press-kit as ‘a love letter to Chinatown’. Lucky Grandma is an entertaining, humorous and whacky film which depicts clearly that we should not assume that the right to remain independent diminishes as one gets older and that you should always ‘respect your elders’. Simultaneously, the engaging plot also teaches us that, often, the riches you seek are under your nose the whole time.