Delivery Man Blues: 'Take Out' at the Quad

Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou's [Take Out] opens this week at the [Quad](http://www.quadcinemas.com), and it will have you questioning your delivery choices all over again. The film combines a verité style and subject and, as in Ramin Bahrani's critical darling [Man Push Cart](http://noruzfilms.com/films/mpc.html), merges it with a fairy-tale logic. We follow Ming Ding (Charles Jang), a New York delivery man through an atypical day as he struggles to make double his daily tips to pay off his debt to the smugglers that brought him into the country. Like Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) in Push Cart, illegal immigrant Ming Ding has a titanic helping of bad luck thrown at him that Baker and Tsou gussy up to look like how real-life problems a delivery guy might encounter if he were having a truly shitty day.

Take Out is less emotionally honest as Man Push Cart, acknowledging the artifice in Ahmad's story's with rough but painstakingly calculated and sometimes quietly beautiful camera angles. Take Out makes almost every bit of dialogue feel like commentary on "the immigrant experience," especially when Ming Ding says that he's had it rougher than the other illegal immigrants in the restaurant. Considering that Charles Jang is a Korean-American and that two of his other three co-stars are Malaysian and Singaporean, Take Out tries too hard to make their verité style both authentic AND truthful.