Canada 150 Special Edition: Thank You Sandra Oh

Sandra Oh
From the poster for the film Catfight (2016)


Thank you Sandra Oh for your multicultural/artist's presence at the Parliament Hill Canada 150 Celebration. But you don't even live in Canada so I don't know how you got onto that stage.

Thank you Sandra, for giving us such wonderful films, the only one which anyone might remembers being Under the Tuscan Sun where she played a lesbian (thank you for giving Canadians the chance to say: "Oh yes she's Canadian!"). This was surely a career move since her Grey's Anatomy role was leaving her stuck on television as someone who acts in a night-time soap opera.

And her entrance into the film world was in an "Indie" playing the daughter of Chinese immigrants whom she leaves for a white boyfriend (no matter that Oh herself is Korean but the Chinese screen writer couldn't find a suitable Chinese-Canadian actress to play her autobiographical character, I guess).

Oh's back again with another film. This time a "fight club" for housewives, and with at Turkish American as director (although he was born in Taylorsville, North Carolina).

Says Onur Tukel about his flm Catfight - starring Oh:

I wrote [a script ] in 2013 called Catfight. It was about women in their twenties fighting over a guy.

[...]

When I reread my original script, I hated it. I didn’t want to make a movie about young women fighting over a guy. The culture has shifted. I wanted to make something more relevant. I rewrote the script with more experienced actresses in mind, fighting over something radically different than a guy.[Source]

And more:

...a rivalry is revived, old wounds are torn open, and a Manhattan stairwell becomes home to a woman-on-woman brawl the likes of which are seldom seen outside of martial-arts epics. And now the gloves are off. Over the course of five years and three bloody, bone-crushing rounds, Catfight's formidable adversaries will lose everything they cherish, and rail furiously as their fortunes are subject to wild reversals.

"The culture has shifted." Says Tukel. "I wanted to make something more relevant."

Yes. Women bashing each other up in a movie which even men would walk out on.