After mentioning the wonderful Joe Morton in my DVD picks this week (for his stint in American Gangster), I started thinking about one of his early roles -- the lead in John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet. (One I listed in my Sayles primer last year.) It's a great film, even in its cheesiness, but there's nothing quite like this absolutely terrible trailer, which you can check out above.

I wonder what Sayles thought when he saw that, because while it's endlessly amusing now, it's pretty embarrassing for such a solid film. Sporting tacky review quotes like: "It's Cheers goes to Harlem"and "it's E.T. rides the underground railroad," the trailer is just terrible and says pretty much nothing about the film. However, you can enjoy bits of Morton's alien, as glimpses of a very young Fisher Stevens, and both Sayles and David Strathairn as creepy aliens. And to think -- one day he'd bring down the world with Cyberdyne.

In a recent article for Cinematical, I wrote: "Too often, Asian-American actors are relegated to bit parts (the food delivery guy, gangster #3, mysterious prostitute) simply because of their race." Historically, there's another reason why Asian-American actors have not been cast in leading roles, even when the role is that of an Asian or Asian-American character: the "yellow face" factor, in which a non-Asian actor is cast as an Asian.

Playwright/actor David Henry Hwang has written a play with that title, which was inspired by the controversy that arose in the early 1990s when non-Asian actor Jonathan Pryce was cast as a Eurasian character in the original stage production of Miss Saigon. (Hwang's play opens shortly off-Broadway in New York.) Robert B. Ito wrote a biting article on the subject in Bright Lights Film Journal that gave historical context.

Philip W. Chung commented on the phenomenon last week in AsianWeek: "Often, these 'yellow face' performances [by non-Asian actors] both reinforced and embodied all the negative stereotypes -- funny accent, slanted eyes, buck teeth, and enough 'Orientalism' to send the yellow fever meter through the roof." Chung compiled a list of 25 "yellow face" film performances "that have arguably had the most impact on our cultural landscape." Last week's article counted down from #25 to #11.

Chung starts off his list with a recent example -- Christopher Walken in Balls of Fury -- and then stretches back to Richard Barthelmess in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919), which he says formed a "template for Hollywood's take on Asian men ... unrealistically noble, feminine and utterly asexual." Chung takes a fascinating skip through the decades and points out "yellow face" performances by Fisher Stevens (#20), Eddie Murphy (#18) and Peter Lorre (#13).

AsianWeek's Top 10 will be counted down this week. Who do you think should be included on the list?

Sundance had its first bidding war of the festival over the documentary Crazy Love, and Magnolia Pictures emerged triumphant. This is considered the first distribution deal to emerge from the festival -- a few earlier deals occurred before Sundance technically began. Magnolia purchased the North American rights to the documentary on Saturday for a mid-six-figure sum. Other companies involved in the bidding war included Netflix and ThinkFilm.

Crazy Love premiered at Sundance on Friday night, although industry pre-screenings supposedly occurred beforehand in New York and Los Angeles. The documentary was directed by Dan Klores and co-produced by Klores and actor/filmmaker Fisher Stevens. It's about Linda Riss and Burt Pugach and their tumultuous (to the point of incredulity) relationship. James Rocchi described Crazy Love as a "horrible, clammy, grim and pathetic tale of co-dependent madness," which actually makes me more interested in the film. I'm weird that way. But how successful are pathetic tales at the box office? At least three distribution companies seemed to think that audiences would love to exercise their voyeuristic tendencies with this twistedly romantic story. Magnolia hasn't yet announced a timeline for release.

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where, contrary to what everyone and their mother -- including my own mother -- warned me before I came here, it's nice, sunny and not that cold. Yet.

Part of the fun of Sundance is trying to play prophet and figure out which movies are going to end up becoming the Next Big Indie. Last year, the one movie I truly loved was 'Little Miss Sunshine,' and we all know what ended up happening with that one. So far this year, everyone's asking each other, "What have you heard?" "What's supposed to be good?" and there isn't anything close to a consensus. But we'll do our best to figure it out.

To that end, I saw three films on Friday, the first full day of the festival: 'The Savages,' 'Snow Angels' and 'Rocket Science.' The one I liked best was 'The Savages,' which despite the title is not about a couple who gets stranded in the wilderness and turns to cannibalism to survive. Nope, it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as John and Wendy Savage (get it?), dysfunctional siblings who are forced to take care of their estranged father (Philip Bosco) when he develops dementia. Specifically, he starts writing vulgar words on the bathroom wall using, instead of ink, his ... uh, well, it's a word that rhymes with "grit."

The success of Charlie's Angels seemed to send the film industry into a flurry of television remakes. There's Miami Vice, Starsky & Hutch, and the upcoming CHiPs. They provide a little bit of nostalgia for the older folks, and action for the younger folks, even though some take themselves a bit too seriously, like a certain Crockett and Tubbs. However, this latest batch of remake news has nothing to do with television, and seemingly nothing to do with common sense either.

According to Moviehole, Short Circuit is on its way to a remake. You remember the little guy in that picture, right? This run-of-the-mill robot gets zapped with juice and magically becomes intelligent, with emotions and a personality. It had Steve Guttenberg before he liked kids a little too much on Veronica Mars, Ally Sheedy after her Breakfast Club makeover, and Fisher Stevens before he became an insane hacker working for The Man.

What I think I fear more than anything is that the film would take the Miami Vice route. I can see it now -- instead of a quirky little robot, Number 6 would be a saucy cyborg who gets zapped, grows a heart, and gives birth to Janey 6, a woman fighting to live her life as a robot while she falls for some attractive man who helps her. Then again, there is also talk of some of the original people being involved, so maybe there's nothing more ridiculous than a movie set in 2007, with an 80's robot and a bunch of actors who were popular twenty years ago.