Charlotte Sometimes (2002)

My netflix queue has 166 movies in it today. They love me because I pay my monthly bill and turn over maybe 4 per month. This one won the Audience award at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for 2 Independent Spirit Awards (for actress Jacqueline Kim and for the ensemble). Sometimes I take notes when I watch the awards show or read the nominees, sometimes I put movies in my queue on the laptop while I'm watching and then have to trust my reasons months later. This is a quiet little movie with good performances, moody music, some sex, and nice LA-area locations (Glendale and Los Feliz, I think). There's a scene where the 4 main characters are posing for a picture and one of them says, "Look Asian!" which is funny anyway, but also because the surnames of those cast members are Korean (Kim), Chinese (Eugenia Yuan), Japanese (Michael Idemoto), and Anglo (Matt Westmore). Writer/director Eric Byler is Chinese-American, and won the Special Jury Award at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival for the so-called sequel to this, Tre (2006) ("so-called" because there isn't one shared cast member). I have to admit that I didn't figure out who Charlotte was until 75 of the 85 minutes had passed. I wasn't giving it my full attention, I guess (now you will guess much faster than I did). I was also distracted by the Spanish subtitles. I had been trying to turn on closed captions, and selected "Spanish subtitles." On this DVD there is no turning back once you go Español. And there are no closed captions. When they are saying, "Come on," the translation is "Vamanos."