Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Once upon a time (1982) Cantonese-American Wayne Wang made a very low-budget, black-and-white movie in San Francisco's Chinatown that delighted the audience for independent films and fresh voices. Wang went on to film good adaptations of two major works of Chinese-American literature, Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989) and The Joy Luck Club (1993) and some quirky low-budget movies (Dim Sum, Smoke). A bigger-budget set against the turnover of Hong Kong to the PRC, "Chinese Box" (1997) with Li Gong and Jeremy Irons was not IMO very good. I did not see the 2003 "Maid/Made in New York" starring JenLo, Ralph Fiennes, and Miranda Richardson, which received very bad reviews and word of mouth, and had not heard anything from/about Wayne Wang in recent years.

Having squirmed and yawned through Wang's (2007) "Princess of Nebraska," which just came out on DVD, I have concluded that somewhere along the way, Wang forgot how to make movies. Although not panning quite as vertiginously as "Rachel Getting Married," most of "The Princess of Nebraska" has the same hand-held camera work by someone with a very unsteady hand and amateurish framing of home movies/videos (unlike that of the similarly very low budget "Colma: The Musical" by Richard Wong).

The opening of the Oakland Airport, an escalator, BART (would that one could go directly from the Oakland Airport onto the BART trains!), and San Francisco's Market Street near the Powell BART station is dull and unsteady enough to induce nausea. Worse still, without the technical challenge of movement, later in the movie is a very lengthy segment in a private karaoke room. The image framing is sub-amateurish and the singing is karaoke at its worst. Even more than from the post-rehearsal dinner in "Rachel Getting Married," I wanted to flee the room.

The party final scene with strange music is almost as insufferable. In between are some OK scenes of fairly oblique conversation between the title character, Sasha (Li Ling), who is a "princess" only in her arrogance, not from being in a royal bloodline. Sasha left Beijing four months earlier to go to school in Nebraska. She is pregnant by a Peking Opera student named Yang, who seems to be a male hustler. And she is a purposeless thief (that is, she does not even keep what she steals).

A Chinese-speaking, tall, balding Anglo Boshen (Brian Danforth) houses Sasha, who seems to have had an affair with Yang in Beijing before he was expelled by the PRC government, attempts to convince her not to have an abortion, but accompanies her to the abortion clinic after a night in which Sasha may have been paid for sex with a middle-aged black man, under the auspices of and unnamed Chinatown hostess  (Pamelyn Chee) in the already mentioned hideous karaoke upstairs room. (The hostess stopped to talk to Sasha who was sitting on concrete steps just north of the Stockton tunnel through which she has been shown walking and walking and walking.)

A white woman at the abortion clinic discusses various options, and there is no indication what Sasha decides.

The movie is set against globalization mobility but says nothing I can discern about globalization, female autonomy, pleasure, responsibility, or anything else. It is completely lacking in plot, woodenly acted, and visually ugly. Rather too much of it shows what Sasha films on her cell phone, often photographing her own hands.

©2009, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age