Background: First off, I should say that this is not a typo, and I am not actually reviewing the Cassavetes film The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie. Though that would be great and all, it goes against the idiom of The Depths. This, however, is a documentary about fortune cookies. I love fortune cookies, and I love obscure puns, so this movie has a hook in me from the start. Documentaries about unusual subjects have always fascinated me. Men Who Swim is a perfect example. The fortune cookie is about as unusual as a topic can get. At a mere 75 minutes, it seems like it might have been a little bit too unusual a subject, perhaps.
This is the first feature length documentary from director Derek Shimoda. He's previously worked in the film industry on small, independent movies. He's been featured in a number of film festivals though, including Sundance. The website for the movie is littered with wreaths of various film festivals, though distressingly, only one pull-quote from a critic. Even more distressingly, the critic is from Variety.
Plot: As expected, this is a movie about fortune cookies. First thing, however, the lottery. It starts with a story about a Powerball drawing with over 100 winners. Every one of them chose the same numbers for the same drawing. The implication is that they used fortune cookies and the lucky numbers that appear at the bottom. This revelation, however, is left for the final scene. After that, it dives straight into the history and invention of the fortune cookie. Turns out, who actually made the first fortune cookie is hotly contested. There are three candidate. First is David (or Davis) Jung from L.A. He owned the Hong Kong Noodle Company, a longtime manufacturer of the cookies. Next was Japanese immigrant Seiichi Kito. This theory is put forth by Ripley's Believe It Or Not, but not too many people put a lot of stock into it. The third possible inventor is Hakoto Hagiwara, another Japanese immigrant who moved to San Francisco. This all takes place in the early 1900s.
The provenance of the fortune cookie is so hotly contested, that in the '70s, they held a mock trial called "The Court Of Historical Review" to decide once and for all. The trial takes place in San Francisco and Hakoto Hagiwara, the one who lived in SF wins. The advocate for David Jung from L.A. still seems surprising angry about the whole situation. You may notice that I said Hagiwara was Japanese and not Chinese like we associate with the cookie these days. Turns out the fortune cookie is based on a Japanese cooke called senbei. It has a similar shape and ingredients, though is slightly different and has no fortune inside. The Japanese immigrants of the time sold the cookies to the Chinese restaurants that were becoming more and more popular with the locals and thus it became known as a Chinese thing.
The movie then goes on to describe the differences between how the cookies were made when they were first invented and how they're made today. They used to be made one at a time by hand, now they have machines that pump out millions of the things every day. Most interesting is the talks with the people who actually write the fortunes. Though you may expect them to be taken from ancient chinese texts, one writer they tracked down isn't even Chinese or spiritual. There's also a whole lot of garbage and stories that are really only tangential to the cookie, but those really aren't important. Thankfully, the section about adding "In Bed" to the ends of fortunes is kept mercifully short.
I don't need to tell you that the movie also features scenes of the various interviewees cracking open the cookies and reading the fortunes.
Why Was It Forgotten? There is certainly a good documentary to be made about the history, manufacturing and current state of the fortune cookie, but this is definitively not it. To start, the section about the history of the fortune cookie has a serious problem with setups. It featured many interviews with descendants of the supposed inventors of the fortune cookie. However, none of those supposed inventors are introduced first. So the great grandson of Hakoto Hagiwara would talk about his family's history with the fortune cookie, but without the background of who Hakoto Hagiwara is, it's both hard to follow and hard to care about.
Another major problem is that it takes a lot of time, even during the short run time of the movie, telling stories that are only vaguely related to fortune cookies. The movie spends equal time on the history of the Japanese senbei cookies as it does with the background of the fortune cookie. Far less interesting is an extended section about an art show where the artists make pieces based on fortunes.
What Went Right? Some of the interviews are actually really interesting. As previously mentioned, the section with the people who write the fortunes was really neat. Also, some of the more famous interviewees provide much deeper insight than others. These include Martin Yan of the old cooking show Yan Can Cook and Philip Chiang, founder of the P.F. Chang's chain of restaurants. There's a lot of interesting ideas in this movie, but they are really poorly executed.
Verdict: I once got a fortune that said "You like chinese food"… In bed! Ha!
Score: 25%
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