Orphan Mei-Mei (Zhu Lin) thinks she’s found the opportunity of a lifetime when she travels to Sydney for a concert with the children’s choir from her orphanage. For Mei-Mei, Australia is more than just a foreign country that offers a chance to see something new and learn a little about the wider world. It’s also the home of her long-time sponsor, Dean Randall (Guy Pearce). Though Mei-Mei and Dean have never met, they’ve exchanged dozens of postcards and letters over the course of a decade. Mei-Mei writes to Mr. Randall and tells him that she’s eager to see him while visiting from China.

But Mr. Randall doesn’t write back. Mei-Mei and her schoolmates arrive in Sydney, excited by the sights of the exotic city. Despite the joy of traveling with the children, Mei-Mei is eager to find Mr. Randall even if Miss Chen (Elaine Jin) expressly forbids her from leaving the hotel to find him. The 16-year-old girl’s journey to find her sponsor—and the truth about him—will forever alter the lives of the pair. By contrasting the postcards that Dean Randall wrote Mei-Mei with his actual life, we come to see something about how we construct ourselves in text and how powerfully we dream to be something other than ourselves. While director Pauline Chan’s 33 Postcards is predictable at times, it’s still a worthwhile movie and great coming-of-age tale.

Right now, it’s just a disgruntled din, but by the end of the weekend, one assumes it will be an outright Trek geek uproar. Fans of the famed Gene Roddenberry space opera have already expressed a degree of difficulty with J. J. Abrams’ update/ reimagining/ commercialization of their beloved ‘60s sci-fi staple, and with the money mandated sequel, Into Darkness, ready to invade theaters this week, the problems are only going to multiply. You see, the filmmaker has decided to tread on some very sacred ground, soil so cinematically adored that to mess with it at all requires all kinds of reprimands and repercussions. If you haven’t already guessed by the title, let this SPOILER WARNING be your final caveat. You see, Abrams has decided to do a literal second helping of motion picture Star Trek, taking on that most heralded of holy grails, Khan.

Alternative titles: Nymphos From Space; Women Are From Mars, Men Are Stuck Here on Earth Wondering What the Hell Is Going On 

POSITIVES:

Starts with a bang (unexplained for the rest of the movie).

Multiple plotlines involving alien nymphos, ex-cons, wee bonny lads, forbidden love, sophisticated models, drunken Scotsmen, killer robots and MUCH MUCH MORE.

Devil girl looks like illicit offspring of Darth Vader and Mr. Spock. And she does that raised-eyebrow thing that kills me.

There’s an age old maxim that goes a little something like this: “you can pick your friends…you can’t pick your family” - and while that sentiment is indeed accurate, it’s still a bit specious. As a matter of fact, you can make a conscious decision to leave your legally linked biological others, and the only repercussion may be an innate sense of sadness (unless you really, really hate them) and the occasional odd look from those who don’t understand such distance. There’s also the instance where you “run out for cigarettes” and recreate a new communal brood out of the remnants of such an unexpected “break-up.” We ‘step’ through life like this all the time. So, in truth, you can pick your family—not in the literal sense (unless you have some sort of cosmic control on procreation)—but in the more flawed, figurative sense.

At first, it seemed like a fluke. No actor from “overseas” was going to displace the American thesp as the leading cinematic staple in films. After all, we had Bogart and Cagney, Nicholson and Newman. But slowly, over time, the English have retaken their colonial territory, if only in the Cineplex sense. It began back when a certain Sir Lawrence introduced the Bard and his bad boy, Hamlet, to unsuspecting ‘40s audiences. Throughout the rest of the century, the UK produced one amazing male actor after another (though the ladies found their fortunes earlier—more on that next time). By the time the ‘80s rolled around, there was even a bit of a backlash among American performers, arguing that, every year it seemed, another English newcomer was walking away with the praise (and prizes).