Pali Road (2016)
With Michelle Chen, Sun Kang, Jackson Rathbone, and Henry Ian Cusick. Directed by Jonathan Lim. Written by Doc Pedrolie and Victoria Arch.
Lily is a young physician doing her residency at a hospital on Oahu. Her boyfriend Neil is a very nice teacher who wants to marry her; her ex-boyfriend Mitch is a slimy doctor she works for, who also seems to want to marry her. When Lily wakes up in the hospital after a bad car accident, she’s shocked to learn that she’s married to Mitch, she has a six-year-old son, and Neil doesn’t exist. Her parents, her best friend, and Mitch are supportive and understanding as she recovers from the crash, but they have no memory of Neil. According to everyone around her, this life in this enormous house with this family is the life she’s been living, but who’s Neil? Lily begins to doubt her own memories, and to question her sanity as real-world evidence of her relationship with Neil eludes her.
It’s a pretty good idea for a story, and the relationships established between the principal characters in early scenes makes it easy to root for Neil and to despise Mitch, whose every utterance sounds insincere and disingenuous. Mitch is that guy you knew in school who had all the teachers and parents fooled into thinking he was a golden boy, but whom none of the kids could stand because he was such a fraud. You almost don’t care how things work out in this film, as long as Mitch doesn’t end up with Lily.
A promising first act is followed by a slog of a second act, and most of it is the fault of director Jonathan Lim. The pacing is awful, the dialog is slow and drawn out, and the tension is cheapened by an overly dramatic, unnecessary score. Edits and visual effects are strange and distracting, and everything just takes too long to get where it’s going. Lily experiences some genuinely intriguing stuff as she struggles to find some connection between her memory and her reality, and the story elements are suspenseful enough without manipulative camera work, cheap effects, and an unexplainable police officer who, without any explanation, does things no officer except some stock character from a 1950s B-movie would ever do.
I hate to say this, because I would love it if everyone would see Pali Road and help it make tons of money so more films would be produced in my home state, but while the resolution is thoughtful and somewhat satisfying, the pivot on which it turns is so cheap that I never considered it as a possibility. That’s right: the explanation is predictable to the point of unpredictability, because who would think they could get away with it?
See it anyway, because Michelle Chen’s acting is pretty good, because the Hawaii scenery is exactly what you’d expect and then not exactly what you’d expect, and because it’s fun to see what Lily has to go through. Just go in with low expectations and comfortable shoes.
4 out of 10.
Pali Road opens in theaters (including the Kahala theater in Honolulu) on Friday, April 29.
Pali Road is also the closing night film of the 2016 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), tonight, Thursday, April 28.
Microsynopsis: The Huang family goes to the bank together so Evan can open his first bank account, but the process is slowed when Evan can’t decide whether to use his American or Chinese name. In an effort to convince Evan that names don’t really matter, Jessica and Louis share stories of how they chose their American names and how they chose each of the boys’ names.
Bad: I think it’s about time we put a moratorium on projectile vomiting for comedic effect. 
Symptoms: When Ken is visited by a stand-up comic he knows from college (Jeff Ross), he’s persuaded to give stand-up a try at an open mic. He gets off to a rocky start, but he finds a groove, connects with his audience, and is presented with a chance to attempt the next step. Dave has his sights set on a new, violent video game, but when his parents refuse to buy it for him, his grandfather challenges him to a push-ups contest with the game as a prize. The Welltopia gang deals with some bullying by the HMO’s surgeons, who’ve claimed the lunchroom table normally occupied by Damona, Clark, and Julie.
Prognosis: I can’t back this up with anything substantial, but I have a good feeling Dr. Ken will be back for a second season. Although its reviews have been a mixed bag (here and elsewhere), it’s definitely attracted some goodwill and hit a few strong notes, not unlike Ken’s performance at the open mic. Friday night TV tends to lean safe and harmless, which Dr. Ken certainly does, yet it is doing so with a few elements pretty much unheard of just a few years ago. Add its status as a normalization of Asian American representation in a still-underrepresented space, and the balance tilts in favor of another season for Ken, Allison, Molly, and Dave. Here’s hoping.
Symptoms: At Allison’s urging, Ken joins a Korean men’s civic group, but rather than community service, the club is dedicated to doing “absolutely nothing” with a no-telling-wives rule. Molly enlists Dave’s tutelage in attracting a nerdy boy at school. Pat’s living in his office because his wife got everything in the divorce settlement, but he’s got his eye on Clark’s building, much to Clark’s chagrin.
Prognosis: I watched a few other sitcoms on broadcast TV this past week: The Real O’Neals (a repeat of the series premiere, which I had not seen), Modern Family, Last Man Standing, and of course, Fresh off the Boat (a repeat), just to see (again) how Dr. Ken compares. I know it’s a small sample, but I’d put Dr. Ken right in the middle: it seems to be a fair-to-middling show, with a lot more upside than the two shows it beats (Last Man Standing is just north of awful, and Modern Family for some reason has never hooked me). Everything in the Dr. Ken‘s foundation is solid: good characters, strong acting, and nice chemistry. It just needs some writing that’s worthy of it: writing that’s creative and not lazy, thoughtful and not wacky, physical but not stupid, and relatable but not plain. “Harmless” and “safe” might have a higher success rate on an episode-by-episode basis, but the ceiling is waist-high, which is a waste of the excellent talent assembled here.
Symptoms: Dave asks Ken a question about sex, prompting a need for “the sex talk,” but Ken wusses out, and the task falls unintentionally to Julie, who gets a few things wrong. Molly convinces Allison that Allison’s wardrobe is beginning to date her, leading to Molly’s picking some new clothes out for her mother. Clark is stressed out because he’s sure he’s about to be dumped.
Prognosis: I continue to be encouraged by more character development, but there’s still too much of an effort to include all the characers in the stories. This seems unnecessary and unwise.
