Tom Gorai
Occupation
Filmmaker
Outsourced Review
Very Good
The offshoring of U.S. jobs remains a hot topic in the news... and now it's a hot topic in the movies, too. (At least four projects called Outsourced have been produced in the last three years alone!)
Everyman Josh Hamilton carries this premise handily: His game of computer Solitaire is interrupted by his boss, who's telling him the customer service call center he manages is being shipped overseas, to India. If Todd (Hamilton) wants to keep his job, he'll fly over there and train the new folks, getting their time-per-call numbers down to something more profitable.
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American Pastime Review
By Don Willmott
Good
Stumbling upon American Pastime soon after watching Ken Burns' epic World War II documentary The War was a happy coincidence. Burns does a great job telling the relatively unknown story of the Japanese-American internment camps, and this movie is a nicely detailed, albeit hokey, fictionalization of one family's experience in such a camp. Burns, who also produced a massive documentary on baseball, would certainly appreciate the film's pivotal baseball subplot.When war breaks out, the Nomura family is enjoying a happy middle-class life in 1940s L.A. All that changes when the internment order arrives, and soon Mom (Judi Ongg), Dad (Masatoshi Nakamura), older brother Lane (Leonardo Nam), and younger brother Lyle (Aaron Yoo) find themselves in a drafty barracks in the middle of a desert somewhere in the American west. While most everyone tries to adapt with dignity, the volatile Lyle, who has been robbed not only of his baseball scholarship but also his beloved jazz music, simmers with rage. He's even more outraged when he learns that Lane has volunteered to fight with the 442nd division, the famous all Japanese-American unit that went on to glory in European fighting. Why would Lane want to fight for the same army that has machine guns trained on him day and night in the camp?
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