What a nothing of a movie.
As I make clear in the review I wrote about Kurt Vincent’s The Lost Arcade, which is up at The Playlist, this isn’t a “bad” film by any real stretch of the means, though it is “bad” in the sense that it isn’t about much of anything. At the very least, it isn’t about much of anything enough. It’s about lots of things, and in less than eighty minutes, it’s unable to flesh out any of its ideas or tell any of its subjects’ stories to the point where we have an anchor in the film, and thus we have no real way of deriving a single, meaningful message from it. As an overview of the history of Chinatown Fair, it does the job, but that’s about it, and even that angle feels shortchanged.
A Constant Visual Feast 