let's start a kickstarter to hire him a graphic designer.

sheeeit.

sorry, her

a filmmaker conspiring with her subject to prank a dude isn't a documentary either.

it's something you'd see on american television.

good point- I didn't pay close attention on the first viewing

Maybe I'm being dense, but what part of the trailer indicates that this is a prank?

I was on the bus today and there was a young, good-looking asian guy sitting near me. The bus went past an attractive blonde white woman jogging in yoga pants. It was funny watching his head follow her all the way as the bus went past her (I also shamelessly ogled her, of course).

Wander:

the filmmaker thinks her identity is not only relevant enough to be in her film but _in her trailer_ , and then the last shot of the trailer pretty clearly spells it out as a jack ass style stunt.

there is a difference between reality TV and documentary.

To me the white guy was portrayed rather compassionately, all things considered. The trailer suggests that their relationship is much more complicated than our preconceptions will allow, apparently. The fact that the man is a socially retarded clown and the woman expresses her dignity by gutting him publicly does not make this a jackass style stunt.

To be fair, the filmmaker's identity IS important in this because of the language barrier (plus, you know, the filmmaker's identity is what every documentary is really about, maaaaan).

This looks like C+ filmmaking with A- source material, which should put it firmly in the "watchable" category.

I'm down with the Whale on this one; unless there was some serious collusion on the part of the filmmaker in arranging this marriage, what we see is pretty much what you'd expect from such an arrangement.

I just watched most of it. This is a fairly chicken-shit target to pick by someone who dislikes 'yellow fever' guys. I think that given her disposition, the filmmaker should have followed several couples like this, and from a greater distance.

However- I don't think that the two Chinese women conspire to prank him. They team up on him a bit.
The filmmaker is about half as critical of the wife as she is the husband. I think she's more skeptical of him, including how he thinks about his wife.

Look through that same skeptical lens at practically all other relationships and you will see plenty of intimacy problems, calculations and symbiosis-at-best.
The man is weird for sure, he's got a handful of old catalogs of mail-order brides from the pre-internet days, and like 1000 files on his computer.
However- what percentage of people these days don't browse for a special friend in basically this same way? Most people have a type, too.

In the long view, I don't think that mail order bride guys are especially blameworthy in any way; pathetic, maybe, inauthentic maybe-- but worse than other run-of-the-mill shit? I dunno.

As soon as the filmmaker realized how bound up in the story she was, she should have gone all the way with it and asked herself the same questions that she asked the two of them. As it is, she turns into the mirror with the camera for a few seconds at best.

That scorched earth policy delivered with flat affect is classic.

I'll take Pre-Historic Insults for 00 please, Alex.

....not that the Chinese lady is creepy in any way, right?

Yeah, I was surprised too. It was really sweet in a way. I'm glad they made it work, somehow.