No Zhang Zi-yi here: The poster for 'My Blueberry Nights' What's wrong with these people?

The question has lingered for some weeks now in the organic popcorned air of the nation's art houses, rather like Wong Kar-Wai’s own trademark cigarette-smoke curlicues, ever since the director’s My Blueberry Nights finally opened stateside, almost a year after premiering at Cannes.

Indeed what's with these interchangeable sloe-eyed zombies—Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, and (symptomatic cameo alert!) Chan "Cat Power" Marshall—slinking around strangely inert urban backdrops, apparently motivated by nothing so much as the will to power of their own extravagant cheekbones? What's with Jude Law, meant here to evince some sort of alternative soulful masculinity, regarding his unrequited's postcards from the road less as texts than textiles? And what, for that matter, about that road trip, the doughnut-hole in a pastry-soft plot, or the stutter-step slow-mo takes of nothing much in particular, or the sound that often trails the lips, in the service of characters who speak almost exclusively in ellipses?

What's wrong, of course, is that this is a Wong Kar-Wai flick, filled with the inspired Wong Kar-Wai flourishes—random-access memory, cuisine and couture as coitus—that have made Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love, 2046, et al. probably the most admired and altogether geisty cinematic corpus since the end of the cold war. If, as most every responsible reviewer has concluded, Blueberry trades in the sensuous sublimity of those films for an air of profound silliness, it's not really a matter of the craftsman becoming a hack. No, upon some reflection, it's obvious what ruins the latest Wong Kar-Wai movie, so superficially like all the others: The swoony knuckleheads on the screen are white, and speaking English.

Which is to say, what's wrong with me? Why do Asian matinee idols doing narratively inexplicable things for my fetishist–aesthete's delight scream “genius” when Caucasians doing the same barrel head-first over the cliff of camp?

Natalie Portman, with awful blonde wig and indeterminate drawl, gamely chews up the set as card-shark vamp Leslie, but her remarkably corporeal performance—all coquettish flirts, petite curves, and impossibly symmetrical features —only underscores how rice-paper thin her character, and really all the characters here, turn out to be. Zhang Ziyi—Portman's Chinese doppelganger, if you think about it—had to resort to all the same stunts in 2046, but her role somehow felt both brilliant and fully-formed. In the same film, Su Li, played by the veteran vixen Gong Li, smoldered with unresolved mystery; Blueberry's similarly named Sue Lynn, played by the similarly fiery Rachel Weisz, devolves into flat tramp without a cause.

Impossibly symmetrical: Portman in ridiculous wig, with Jones Then, of course, there's Wong's male muse Tony Leung, with his sublimated longing and impassive stoicism. Jude Law's rendition of the same comes off vaguely constipated.

Some observers, in registering the letdown of My Blueberry Nights, have explicitly disclaimed anything lost in translation; "The disappointment here," explains the Village Voice's Michelle Orange, "doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese." Far be it for me to deny anyone their critical aphorisms, but Orange's universalist—or rather, Hollywoodist—take strikes me as a bit of liberal naïveté. I'm not one for linguistic determinism, but perhaps the reading of subtitles potentiates the suspension of disbelief necessary to appreciate an auteur as dreamily insouciant to plot and pacing as Wong. Then again, I have a pretty complete working understanding of Mandarin, and even I never found Happy Together or In the Mood for Love anywhere near as maddening as Blueberry.

The source of Wong Kar-Wai's American failure might better be glimpsed in a stray passage from the New York Times review of the Cannes cut. "And the characters," wrote A.O. Scott, "are correspondingly relaxed, even in their moments of distress. Whereas their Asian counterparts in other Wong Kar-wai movies — Gong Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung — show emotion through masks of mystery and reserve, Ms. Jones and her co-stars invite and promise easy empathy."

Scott, of course, gets it completely wrong and exactly right; the characters in My Blueberry Nights are in fact pure mystery and reserve, which is precisely why the movie seems so underbaked and faintly ridiculous to American audiences. Why this wasn't the reaction to Wong's earlier work gets into all sort of nasty unmentionables—Oriental exoticism and unknowability, the "natural" blankness and indiscernability of the Asian face—but I don't really mean to suggest any insidious bigotry on the part of his Western fan base, least of all myself.

Still, it's a thought worth pondering, and one that (almost) makes My Blueberry Nights worth watching: Like Korean horror or Japanese anime or Chinese wuxia, is it possible that Wong Kar-Wai's international ascendance reveals, above all else, a silent longing for the inscrutable—Hong Kong neon, femme fatales bound in cheongsams—in a shrinking world all too obvious with meaning? If so, are we still allowed to watch?

Steven Colbert Breaks Down Race Barriers: He exemplifies SWPL #14, while I show off #35 Got an ethnic or sexual identity? If so, then according to the Internet, you probably like stuff. Ever since Stuff White People Like became an overnight sensation, bloggers from all across the identity spectrum have been eager to put in their own two cents about, well, what stuff their people like. Any trendspotter now knows that when a few other people of the same race or sexual orientation like things, a website is the next inevitable phase. Just in case you don’t know how, for instance, your young Jewish adult friend might feel about you inviting her to a game of ultimate frisbee (LOVES it), or are in the mood for some awkward stereotype-based humor, here’s a roundup of some more stuff people like:

• For the temple youth group crowd, there’s Stuff Young Jewish Adults Like: (surprisingly?) similar to white people. Likes include Ironic Jewish Themed t-shirts, Isla Fisher, NPR, Taking Christ’s name in vain. My guess? The name of the blog is too unhip to have been written by a real “young Jewish Adult.” But I sort of want to own that T-shirt.

• Stuff Black People Like is currently under construction and is operating in the meantime in blog form. Visitors to the site can learn about how much Black people love talent shows, Black Jesus, using the word “conversate,” “yo mama” jokes, and revolution, or they can participate in the ongoing discussion about what it means to be “Blaucasian.”

• If you are educated, Black, and feel that Stuff Black People Like does not represent your interests, you might find a cozy pigeon hole over at Stuff Educated Black People Like. This group digs wine and cheese affairs, Oprah, mega churches, jazz, fraternities and sororities, advanced degrees, poetry slams, CNN, and moving to Atlanta.

• Time to take it over to the Asian crowd with Stuff Asian People Like! I’ve got to say, this list reminds me of a lot of non-Asian people I know. According to the site, Asians are heavy into Dance Dance Revolution, higher education, house hunting, cutting in line, nagging, fortune cookies, eye enlargement, white girls, white guys, and peace signs.

SNbL #15 - The "Grocer's Apostrophe": Nobody likes faulty punctuation • If you are of South Asian descent and hate DDR, you are in luck! Thanks to Stuff Desis/Brown People Like, you can finally have a forum to discuss you love of Niagra Falls, chai, Desi-White couples, staring, masters degrees, bargain hunting, friends, and cricket.

• For the LGBTQ crowd, don’t fret: you’ve got a site too! Stuff Queer People Like is the place to share your love of having emotionally unstable childhood best friends, finding excuses to wear short shorts, reading Queer subtext into things that are not actually Queer, and my personal favorite, off color humor as told by awkward white women.

The good news is that the trend seems to have run its course. Introducing the meme-ending Stuff Nobody Likes. Because no matter who you are, you definitely hate herpes, the G train, pedophiles, comic strips that don’t know when to quit, and “e-Mail ~~ FWDs!!!!!!!!!!111!!!”.

Happy Jewish Family?: could be!Think it's cute to call someone a "Member of the Tribe"? Sure, it turns "otherness" into exclusivity, but it's also a misnomer. In fact, it can be downright destructive. Case in point: When I worked as a docent at the Museum of Tolerance (MOT again, OMG!), I repeatedly found myself arguing whether or not Jews are a "bloodline" with tourists from Arkansas, Utah, Austria...you name it.

"Actually," I'd interject, as yet another vocal visitor explained to his or her compatriots that Jews were a race, "Judaism is not a race. It's a religion. You know, like Christianity, or Sikhism."

And without fail, I'd find myself in the midst of a totally futile debate about race, bloodlines, and tribes.

"It's a bloodline," my interlocutor would almost always declare, not hearing a word I'd said. "They're a tribe. A race."

Explaining the differences between race, ethnicity, religion, and culture was lost on these particular visitors. What wasn't lost on me, though, was the problematic nature of a seemingly harmless nickname. The Tribe. It made my skin crawl, because it misrepresented us so enormously.

The concept of a Jewish bloodline was actually exploited and manipulated by the Nazis, who went to great lengths to define Jews first and foremost as an impure, genetically inferior race.

The truth, as Douglas Rushkoff explained it, is that "Jews are not a tribe but an amalgamation of tribes around a single premise: that human beings have a role." Get it? Jews originated as a bunch of people from different tribes who came together around a set of ideas. It's why people can convert to Judaism, but can't convert to "Asianness" or "Blackness." I can go from Jewish to Sikh, like my pal Gurudhan Khalsa did, but I'll never be Latina.

So the next time someone asks you if you're a "MOT," tell them "No, but I'm Jewish."

Stand-Up Comedian Beth Lapides put Al Brooks to shame looking for Jewish comedy in a Muslim World. After you read the piece, go here to listen to Lapides's unorthodox (and we mean that in a strictly secular way) shtick If you never quite got the metaphysical connection between yoga and Judaism, like myself, it's worth at least a hit or downward dog or whatever.