Direction: Kate Tsang
Country: USA
Marvelous and the Black Hole marks the feature debut from writer-director Kate Tsang, who had difficulty wrangling the material amassed and finding a way through it. Loosely based on her teenage years, the film depicts an atypical friendship between an angsty Chinese American teen, Sammy (Miya Cech), and a cranky magician woman, Margot (Rhea Perlman), who becomes her mentor.
In spots, the friendship between these two multi-generational characters brings the coming-of-age dark comedy Harold and Maude to mind, even if massively undarkened and smaller in interest. Here, death is replaced with magic, but Tsang’s move, being thin in dialogue while sputtering out cacophonous doses of anger and insurgent mood, feels secondhand, disguising elementarily formulaic tactics behind an apparent forthright posture.
I cannot say it's not well-intentioned and kind in nature, I just wasn’t particularly stricken by its attempting spells, which felt more conventional than magical. Both execution and performances never cut above most buddy movies, and the results, far from groundbreaking, leave you stuck on the cusp of an outburst of teen’s exasperation, which, by the way, is the film’s weakest spot.
