Chasing Chan

REVIEW: AU REVOIR TAIPEI

2010-05-03T12:34:00.001-07:00

Arvin Chen's Au Revoir Taipei just opened up the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (after having been the closing film for the SFIAAFF)[1]. It's part of what I think is a fascinating trend of Asian American directors traveling overseas to Asia to make films. This is a theme I touched on in an essay for the 2008 ACV fest catalog which was also mirrored in my interview with Wayne Wang from the same catalog. Also, my colleagues over at Asia Pacific Arts have a fantastic conversation on the very same topic, pegged to Arvin's film.

I have to admit; this film had gotten such rave reviews from its SFIAAFF appearance that I went in with slightly inflated expectations and I didn't think its execution quite lived up. In terms of what I liked: ambitious script that was, overall, well-executed. As a friend stated it well - there's a lot going on in the film between its romantic elements and the crime caper that's mixed in yet Chen makes it all seem kind of effortlessly integrated. That's not for nothing, especially given how hacked together other film fest flicks can feel. Chen has a particular aesthetic mode that I thought was well-conveyed here, especially as someone who has spent time in Taipei and could appreciate the unique kind of urban spaces and lighting that accompanies Taipei after dark. I liked the two main leads as well but the supporting cast are really where the movie gels best so props for the acting and casting.

My two disappointments: 1) The caper plot was being set-up very early in the film and unfolded in predictable fashion. There was almost no narrative tension because you already knew what was going to happen before it happened. That's not to say there wasn't genuine enjoyment in watching it unfold but that's more about the strengths of the script and acting than the actual storytelling. 2) This isn't unique to this film at all but the two leads are imbalanced. On the one hand, you have a female lead who is completely endearing to the audience and you can easily understand why he-would-be-into-her. The other way? Makes no sense at all. The male lead is awkward, indecisive, not terribly social (at first at least) and basically lacks her liveliness and decisiveness. In what universe would she be interested in a guy like that? (Probably the same universe that says Diane Keaton would ever be into Woody Allen or Catherine Keener in Steve Carrell). I kept thinking, "this makes no sense; she could do a lot better" and that's not a good reaction to have when watching a romantic comedy. I don't think it was a shortcoming in the acting; it was just a poorly conceived character who needed to be given more to do than just mope and mutter. (He can make good noodles so I guess that's a plus).

This all said though, I was really pleasantly surprised by the film and my only hope is that this wave of Asian Am directors creating all this interesting and well-executed films overseas will be able to find a way to translate that success back in the States because frankly, the overall quality of Asian American film (shot in America) continues to suffer through the current doldrums of the indie film industry. The kind of creativity and execution now being seen abroad would be most welcome back home too.

[1] Disclosure: As a reminder, I should note that I was on the LAAPFF screening committee this year.

REVIEW: DIRTY HANDS: THE ART AND CRIMES OF DAVID CHOE

2010-05-01T16:41:00.001-07:00

I first saw Dirty Hands about a year ago, when I wrote it up for the 2009 SFIAAFF catalog. It has since gotten a small, platform release, beginning this weekend.

Choe first hit my radar via a friend of mine who also grew up around Choe and his work in the South Bay. I then followed his exploits, now and then, via Giant Robot Magazine and the internet; it's safe to say that Choe has a substantial cult following that's only grown through the years. Dirty Hands does, in my opinion, a strong job of tracing that growth and evolution of that career, including its attendant difficulties and challenges. All this is made possible by filmmaker Harry Kim who purportedly assembled the footage for this documentary from eight years of following Kim around, documenting both his professional and personal life.

That perspective is both the doc's strength and weakness. In reference to the latter, the film lacks what a critical distance; it can feel too hagiographic in some moments, downright intrusive in others. Yet, it's that intimacy which also makes the film fascinating. There is, for example, way too much time devoted to Choe's personal life. It's never explained why the viewer should really care about Choe's relationship problems and these parts of the doc drag early and often. At the same time, these scenes also puncture the veil of "the artist" and allow us to see Choe in moments which can be uncomfortable, even offensive, yet rarely fail to fascinate when taken as a whole. This is an imperfect documentary of an imperfect man and in that sense, they seem perfectly fit for one another.

RIP LONI DING

2010-03-01T08:17:00.001-08:00

R.I.P. Loni Ding

Damn, first Gina Hotta, now Loni?

I can't even try to guess how many documentarians Loni trained at Berkeley during her many years there; it's safe to say however that she's been one of the giants in the field, a pioneer in every sense of the word.

I first met Loni in the '90s and what first struck me was how brusque her attitude was. She was a real "I don't give a shit/I suffer no fools" force of nature with her work and politics and could care less about being diplomatic or playing someone else's game. In that sense, Loni really carried over from the era of the Asian American Movement without ever feeling like she had to compromise in order to adjust with the changing political times. She was hardly lost in the past but rather, she had her lane and ran it like few other filmmakers I can think of. But her, Bob Nakamura, Renee Tajima, Christine Choy, and Curtis Choy (among others) literally helped forge a nascent Asian American identity and community through their work.

She will be sorely missed but I trust that her legacy is eternal.

More on her work here.

THE PITFALLS OF ASIAN AMERICAN INDIE FILM (REMIXED)

2010-03-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

Since late last fall, Joel Quizon, myself and a couple of others have been serving on the feature film screening committee for the upcoming Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival. Both of us our veterans of these screening teams - this is my first year working with Visual Communications but I put in my time with NAATA/CAAM up north while Joel's been a stalwart for VC a few years going too.

I can only assume Joel drew upon this experience when he laid out his "How To Avoid the Pitfalls of Asian American Indie Movies" guide recently. These were so good I wanted to expand on a few of them based on my own experience (read: gripes).

JQ: 1. Try to avoid the following words in your title: Jade, Yellow, Dragon, Red, “Scent” of anything or anywhere “Home”, Jasmine, Rice, Masala, (or really anything related to Asian cuisine like Dim Sum, Sushi or Adobo)

incredible

JQ: 2. When depicting family life, try your best to refrain from depicting parents as domineering, traditional, heavy accented, always in the kitchen, playing mahjong, gardening, doing Tai Chi, or gossiping.

even Nazis have nuance

JQ: 3. When casting a boyfriend for the female character, think twice about casting a white guy (no offence at all really and you may very well want to reflect how society has finally embraced interracial couples). At the very least, consider occasionally depicting Asian men as the virile, non-emasculated beings that they are. Your dad will thank you.

JQ: 4. When choosing an occupation or course study for the main character, try vocations other than: writer, filmmaker, actor, or martial arts instructor

JQ: 5. For the main character, opt for injecting well written dialogue instead of distant, silent posturing. Communicative characters communicate a lot to the audience.

JQ: 6. For the film score, please avoid using a koto, a gong, a mouth harp and your friend who can play guitar but can only play nondescript noodling.

JQ: 7. I know you have an Aunt who has a nice big pad down in Diamond Bar or Oceanside, but when choosing a location, try a little variety. Also avoid your friend’s restaurant and when shooting a scene that calls for some serious introspection try NOT using a rooftop (This goes for romantic dinner scenes too. As we all know it is far too cold and windy up on roof tops to be having a candle lit dinner and having a mariachi band there gets

8. When making a documentary film, it is not always necessary to have the filmmaker on camera. Unless you are Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, it can be a hindrance especially when making a film about lepers from Malaysia, unless you yourself is a leper from Malaysia, then that would be fine.

9. If you think making a documentary about going back to the motherland and hanging out with your family and rediscovering your roots sounds like a great idea…it’s not. Not anymore at least. Not unless you have an entirely different spin on it, like you’re Lou Diamond Phillips or a leper originally from Malaysia.

JQ: 10. Finally, watch lots of movies. Good movies. See early Wayne Wang and Gregg Araki films. Analyze Better Luck Tomorrow with as much fervor as you would Reservoir Dogs. Watch the first films of Spike Lee, John Singleton, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant and Allison Anders. Watch John Ford’s Stagecoach and Chang-dong Lee’s Oasis over and over again. Binge on 70’s American cinema and films of Japanese masters. Seek out films from by Lino Brocka, Pen-ek Ratanaruang or Hirokazu Koreeda. Go to film festivals even though your film is not in it. But don’t get overwhelmed by these films because you can make something good too.

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Boyz N the Hood

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MY BAY AREA PEOPLES

2009-11-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

AUSTIN'S AAFF COMING UP SOON!

2009-10-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

More info here.

HARIMAYA BRIDGE INTERVIEW

2009-10-22T19:51:00.000-07:00

Watermelon Sushi World: Aaron Woolfolk And Danny Glover's Big Adventure In Japan

SAN DIEGO'S FILM FESTIVAL KICKS OFF THIS WEEK

2009-10-12T21:52:00.001-07:00

Wow, it's been 10 years already? I remember going to the first one!

INTERVIEW WITH SFIAAFF'S CHI-HUI YANG

2009-10-05T01:15:00.000-07:00

Interviews: DIASPORA BY THE BAY: SFIAAF--Interview With Festival Director Chi-hui Yang

A cool interview by Twitch w/ Chi-Hui Yang, longtime festival director of the SFIAAFF. It's hard to believe (for me), but Chi-Hui's been doing this for...what? 10 years now? He's always been a great friend and very thoughtful programmer, with a much more generous spirit and ability to see the "big picture" than my judgmental, grouchy self (translation: there's a lot of films I hated that he's liked, ha!)

12 YEARS LATER...

2009-10-04T16:30:00.001-07:00

(We should all age so well as these six)

REVIEW: SHOPPING FOR FANGS

2009-10-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent (Updated version is for purchase only right now)

There's a new, updated version of Shopping for Fangs (SFF) coming out next week, with DVD commentary. That's partially prompts a review that should have appeared about 11 years ago...

I first saw Shopping for Fangs when it was part of the "Class of '97" quartet which debuted at the SFIAAFF in 1997. It was the debut feature for both Quentin Lee (Ethan Mao, The People I've Slept With) and Justin Lin (Fast and Furious, Finishing the Game).

It was also, of the four Class of '97 films, the most deliberately off-beat, with the two main characters dealing with lycanthropy and amnesia (respectively), interspersed with Mexican stand-offs, bible study jokes, touch football, Ranch 99 shopping malls and some good wigs. It also stars a young John Cho in his first major role, playing a lovelorn 20-something who spends a lot of quality time in a Taiwanese cafe. (You'll also spot Lela Lee, aka "Angry Little Girl" playing the sister of Radmar Jao's character, Phil).

If I have one, outstanding impression of SFF, it's how it takes one of the most common of Asian American film themes - identity - and cleverly riffs on it but without ever coming back to hang-wringing about race/ethnicity. Indeed, there's very little "sociological content" in SFF which, especially in 1997, was fairly striking (Sunsets was another example of this). Especially given Justin Lin's later films, in particular Better Luck Tomorrow, you could already see the ways in which he and Quentin really set out to make a very different kind of AA narrative, one that deliberately stepped around the traditions of the past. Parents don't exist. With one key exception, family/immigrant history doesn't exist. Instead, as convoluted as the dual plots were (and I don't mean that in a critical way; the storylines were meant to be deliberately outrageous) SFF was intensely character driven.

By way of summation, there's basically three parallel storylines: Phil, who thinks he might be turning into a werewolf; Katherine, who is having amnesiac blackouts and is married to an emotionally crippled a--hole; Clarance, who is getting over a broken heart and has befriended the enigmatic, Brigette Lin-inspired Trinh. There are bits of interweaving that happens, some small, and the major one is with Trinh, who ends up crossing into Katherine's life when she discovers her purse and phone. (The film is very post-Pulp Fiction though still linear).

All three plots are driven by journeys of discovery but each is fraught with danger. Phil wants to be more assertive (and masculine) but he fears that as a possible lycanthrope, he may be unleashing too much of his inner desire. Katherine is trying to figure out what's happening during her blackouts and why she's being contacted by Trinh.. Clarence wants to quit moping and open his heart again but he's worried about being hurt again.

In trying to think of how to properly this film formally, the two thoughts that keep coming to mind are that, 1) it's laudably ambitious but 2) the sum is less than its parts. The latter is hardly something unique in cinema - one could say that most films that aren't perfect are less than the sum of their parts, but in my mind, SFF just has a lot of parts going on that don't quite gel in the way they aspire to. Having just caught the last half of the film at the ID Film Festival this past weekend, what really resonated was that this was a good, smart script in terms of all it was trying to do but where it ends up more listless is in the execution.

To be sure, some parts are done great (Phil's interest in a co-worker who turns out to be a Bible thumper is deliciously, painfully funny), some of it so-so (much as I'm a fan of John Cho, as Clarence, there just isn't much to invest in), some of it rather flat (Katherine's storyline is woefully underdeveloped, especially her marital relationship). You get where the film wants to take you, especially once you get to the end and its big twist, but the ride's choppy along the way.

I used to screen this film semi-regularly for my students at Cal and they tended to have mixed reactions to it; it was an interesting way to get them to start talking about contemporary AA cinema but I don't think it went over as well as, say, Eat a Bowl of Tea and these days, I'd probably be inclined to show them Better Luck Tomorrow instead. That said, I still think the film is incredibly important for helping mark a particular moment in AA film where you start to see hints of the future already on their way.

BTW, Quentin and Justin both talk about the film for Justin's special "Class of 1997" revisit post on youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily.com.

RETURN TO THE CLASS OF 97

2009-10-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

Damn, I don't know how I slept on this (since it's already three days in) but the ID Film Festival at L.A.'s JANM has been rescreening all the Class of 1997 films.

If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, start here and then read this great, great post on Justin Lin's Youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily site which contains testimonials from all the filmmakers involved in that fateful year.

If you're in LA, there's a free roundtable with ALL the filmmakers tonight at 9:30pm, following the closing night screening of Shopping For Fangs.

BTW: I just realized Eric Nakamura has a cool set of posts related to his and Michael Aki's (formerly Idemoto) film, Sunsets.

WINNERS FROM THE DC FEST

2009-10-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

2009 dc apa film festival winners (link: angry asian man)

DC FILM FESTIVAL: LAUNCH!

2009-09-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

10th Annual DC APA Film Festival

TAD NAKAMURA'S NEW WEBSITE

2009-09-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Tadash Nakamura, Director/Editor

MANAA MEDIA SCHOLARSHIP

2009-09-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

apply to manaa's 2009 media scholarship -- angry asian man

PROMO FOR THE HAWAIIAN FF

2009-09-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

HIFF 2009 PSA from HIFF on Vimeo.

PHILLY PREVIEW PARTY

2009-09-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

STARTING SIX GUEST LISTS

2009-09-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

Why should I have all the fun? I invited some valued friends and colleagues to submit their own suggestions for the starting six Asian American films you need to see.

Renee Tajima-Peña is one of the finest documentarians out there, having been responsible for everything from Who Killed Vincent Chin? (along with Christine Choi) and My America. She's also training the next generation as a Community Studies professor at UCSC. She wants you to know, "oh, I hate canons but if forced," she suggests these "oldies but goodies."

Renee Tajima-Peña's Starting Six (Plus 2)

1) Dragon Painter (WIlliam Worthington, 1919)
2) Chan is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982)
3) AKA Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako, 1995)
4) Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, 2002)
5) Fall of the I-Hotel (Curtis Choy, 1985)
6) Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue (Curtis Choy, 1976)
+1) History and Memory (Rea Tajiri, 1991)
+2) Whose Going To Pay For These Donuts, Anyway? (Janice Tanaka, 1992)

Brian Hu is the managing editor for the finest Asian/Asian American arts and culture publication I know, Asia Pacific Arts. The web-magazine has extensive coverage on Asian American cinema, including yearly "best of" lists of their favorite flick picks.

Here's what he had to preface with: "A starting six should make no excuses. There should be no qualifications like "good for an Asian American film" or "we should support it because it's by an Asian American." A starting six shouldn't engage the viewer with theory. Rather, it should directly engage the viewer as any film should: via the senses, as spectacle, as sheer bodily pleasure. They should first and foremost move us into wanting to explore more."

Brian Hu's Starting Six

1. History and Memory (Rea Tajiri, 1991)
An Asian American film can look like this. History and Memory is a documentary about the images a Japanese American mother can no longer recall, and the images her daughter has created so a generation will not forget. Rea Tajiri's visuals, culled from Hollywood clips, home video footage, and self-performance, are fragmented and unruly, just as our memories are. History and Memory is one of the highest artistic achievements by an Asian American in any medium. and is available on DVD for the educational market from Women Make Movies. See also: Chan is Missing (1982)

2. The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993)
An Asian American film can taste like this. You can practically tell this story of generational conflict through Ang Lee's depiction of food: what people eat for what occasions, where people eat, who eats with whom, who cooks for whom, etc. Of course, there's more to The Wedding Banquet than the cooking, but for Asian Americans, what evokes the affection and anxieties of home better than food? Taste also: Catfish in Black Bean Sauce (1999), Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989)

3. Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991)
An Asian American film can touch like this. One of my favorite sex scenes in Asian American cinema is between an Indian American woman from Uganda and an African American man from Mississippi. In the film, much is made about the interracial romance ("Is she Mexican?" some ask), but in the scene in question, they are just two shimmering shades of naked brown, locked in passion. Having Denzel Washington helps too. Experience also: Charlotte Sometimes (2002)

4. aka Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako, 1995) and Refugee (Spencer Nakasako, 2004)
An Asian American film can smell like this. Sure, I'm using smell a little conceptually here, as scent is perhaps the hardest sense for cinema to evoke. But there's certainly an olfactory tactility in Spencer Nakasako's work: a cinema that is genuinely moved by the stenches of everyday life -- the grime of the Tenderloin projects, the sweaty bodies of Cambodian Americans unaccustomed to the heat of their fathers' homeland. Asian American cinema should not -- in fact must not -- simply harvest the gentle potpourri of upper-middle class suburbia. Smell also: the sweat and dank of the tropics and the dumpsters of Santa Ana in Journey from the Fall (2006)

5. Colma: the Musical (Richard Wong, 2006)
An Asian American film can sound like this. In fact, it can sing! For his catchy lyrics and catchier tunes, H.P. Mendoza should be a national treasure. Colma: the Musical isn't the resurrection of a classical American genre, but is its much-needed low-fi awakening. Richard Wong's direction complements Mendoza's explosive charm well, and no scene better breaks down their collaboration than the split-screen, long-take nerd-out, Christmas-light fantasy "Crash the Party." Hear also: Fruit Fly (2009)

6. The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
I prefer Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000), but I couldn't resist the appropriateness of the title of his Best Picture-nominated breakout hit. Love him or hate him, Shyamalan is, along with Michael Bay, Hollywood's only pure stylist -- though unlike Bay, Shyamalan consistently applies his mad genius long takes, odd framings, and sound design for the sake of character development and emotional arousal. But the "sixth sense" I'm speaking of here is the ability to appreciate that even films not explicitly about Asian Americans can still be representative "Asian American cinema." It's the ability to see race when nobody else does, but without insisting on it. It's the ability to hear impassioned, though sometimes inadvertent, alternative voices embedded beneath the dominant clatter. In other words, it's the ability to see the living that the mainstream doesn't even know is alive.

Also: anything by Gregg Araki (The Living End), Jon Moritsugu (Terminal USA), Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal), Ang Lee (The Ice Storm), Wayne Wang (Last Holiday), James Wong (Final Destination), Jay Chandrasekhar (Beerfest), Tarsem Singh (The Fall), Karyn Kusama (Girlfight), and Justin Lin (Fast & Furious)

I got to know Valerie Soe back in the '90s, probably through NAATA and definitely strengthened by having her come, several times, as a guest lecturer to my AA film class at UC Berkeley to talk about experimental AA works. That's not just her field of expertise as a professor at SF State; that's also her mark as a filmmaker too. (Small world coincidences: I found out, years later, that my wife was a research assistant for Valerie's Picturing Oriental Girls short from 1992).

Valerie Soe's Starting Six

First Person Plural, Deann Borshay, 2000
An emotional look at a Korean adoptee’s search for her family and her identity, with some surprising conclusions. One of many excellent Asian American personal documentaries (see also New Year Baby; AKA Don Bonus; Refugee)

The Debut, Gene Cajayon, 2000
A charming little family drama set in the heart of Pilipino-America, this flick celebrates the Pin@y cultural movement of the 1990s, with break-dance battles, kulintang, turntablism, girl groups, tinikling, cha-chas, lumpia, car culture, and basketball--all in one night at a debutante party.

Imelda, Ramona Diaz, 2004
An amazing documentary portrait of Imelda Marcos, featuring a lengthy interview with the main subject herself as she laments the ugliness of the weapon of her would-be assassin, describes her elaborately embroidered wardrobe which blinded several overworked seamstresses, and otherwise fails to understand why the world and the Pilipino people have turned against her.

The Motel, Michael Kang, 2005
An unsentimental, completely unconventional coming-of-age story about a misanthropic Chinese American kid and his dysfunctional family running a fleabag motel on an interstate on the East Coast. Bunny hand puppets will never be the same—

Never Forever, Gina Kim, 2006
Vera Farmiga, David Lee McInnes, and Ha Jung-Woo make up a love triangle in this intriguing look at the conflict between passion and duty. Notable for featuring not one but two extremely hot and desirable Korean American men.

Colma: The Musical, Richard Wong & HP Mendoza, 2006
Exhilirating cinematography, engaging performances, great tunes, and poignant coming-of-age stories invigorate this neat little flick set in the drab Bay Area suburb of Colma, where fog and cemeteries define the landscape.

Phil Yu is THE Angry Asian Man; act like you knew. There's no voice on the internet more trusted than bringing you the latest news of note to the API community and he's been a major force in helping get the word on an all things AA cinema related.

Phil Yu's Starting Six

Flower Drum Song, Henry Koster, 1961
I agonized over what to include in this last spot. Yet again, I had to go with a movie that is arguably not even an Asian American film, but a relatively conventional, cookie-cutter Hollywood studio production, chock full of cheesy Chinese moments to roll your eyes at. It will also blow your mind. If we're talking about films as a jumping off point, this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is a particularly intriguing artifact to examine (and, I'll admit, enjoy) nearly fifty years after its release.

Chan Is Missing, Wayne Wang, 1982
By a lot of measures, this is the film that started it all. Wayne Wang's landmark Chinatown narrative was an announcement: modern Asian American independent cinema was here, and would not be ignored. Nearly three decades later, it's rather amazing how this film still holds up.

Who Killed Vincent Chin, Renee Tajima and Christine Choy, 1989
This film changed my life. Like a lot of young, college-aged Asian Americans, watching this documentary was a profound moment in the politicization of my identity. It's not readily available, but to me, it's required viewing. Seek it out and watch it if and when the opportunity arises.

Better Luck Tomorrow, Justin Lin, 2002
This has to be on this list, right? Justin Lin's solo debut feature roared out of Sundance like a deafening wake-up call, giving us something unlike anything we'd ever seen, and ushering in a new era for Asian American independent cinema. Few films have replicated the impact of this film, but it provided us with a unique model as the Little Asian American Indie That Could.

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, Danny Leiner, 2004
I know, I'm cheating. This film is neither written nor directed by Asian Americans. It also probably doesn't need to be on this list, since it's fairly recent and was widely distributed. But it does feature two of our guys in the title roles. And as unremarkably crass and low-brow as this stoner comedy is, I'm going to put it out there that this unlikely movie is actually one of the most significant, revolutionary films for Asian American representation in the last decade. Come on, Asian American film scholars. I know you won't admit to it, but in your heart, you're with me.

Saving Face, Alice Wu, 2005
Marvelously written with some wonderful performances -- particularly from Joan Chen as Michelle Krusiec's illegitimately knocked up mom -- Alice Wu's charming, highly entertaining romantic comedy is simply a near-perfect example of a post-BLT independent Asian American film done right.

Honorable mentions: aka Don Bonus, Refugee, The Motel, Enter the Dragon

WASHINGTON D.C. FILM FEST NEEDS VOLUNTEERS

2009-09-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

call for volunteers: 10th annual dc apa film festival -- angry asian man

SFIAFF ENTRY SEASON BEGINS

2009-09-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

CAAM's annual film festival (aka the best in America) taking entries now!

A RESPONSE TO "HOLLYWOOD AND ASIANS: WHY PROTESTS ALONE WON'T CHANGE ANYTHING"

2009-09-02T13:26:00.001-07:00

Angry Asian Man reported on a post by Philip Chung as to why protesting against anti-Asian scenes or characters in Hollywood films won't make a difference without market clout. To quote, "until Asian Americans as a whole are willing to put down our money to support the work of our Asian American filmmakers—nothing will change. We can protest all we want, but real change will not happen until Hollywood knows we are an economic force that can make a difference in their bottom line."

He goes into some detail in his analysis, including comparisons between the African American, Latino American and Asian American filmgoing audiences. He also acknowledges that part of the problem with Asian Americans supporting Asian American film is because:

"a lot of Asian American films suck. And I agree with that. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm and support when you keep getting bombarded with these emails about how you have to support such and such film to show Hollywood that we have box office clout and you go to the theater and wind up watching one crappy movie after another."

The one point I was waiting to hear Philip make - what, in my opinion, is the fundamental point - never came, much to my surprise. That is: the main reason why "Asian Americans as a whole" don't support Asian American film is because "Asian Americans as a whole" do not exist.

What I'm saying here should not come as some big revelation; the basics of the idea have been around for decades and the logic is rather intuitive.[2]

Asian Americans are a diverse conglomeration of very different ethnic groups - each with their own linguistic, cultural, religious, and political histories/traditions. Especially since Asian America is still a majority foreign-born population and overwhelmingly a 1st and 2nd generation immigrant community, our differences are far more numerous than our similarities.

The term "Asian American" is useful as a political identity and as a symbol of solidarity (or desire for such). It's a convenient fiction but one that also comes with some inconvenient truths, not the least of which is that it is unreasonable to expect that such a diverse community is going to unite around common causes, least of all cultural products.

In this regard, you really can't compare Asian Americans to African Americans who have an entirely different history, culturally and politically, that has contributed to their consumer clout. You can't compare Asian Americans to Latino Americans - the latter may also be pan-ethnic but there's no equivalent of Spanish language and Catholicism in the greater Asian American community to act as points of commonality. We also lack the demographic clout of both other groups given their larger population numbers.

Most importantly: there are still rampant examples of anti-Black and anti-Latino imagery in Hollywood. However viable "Black Hollywood" may be that has not suddenly made mainstream Hollywood politically enlightened when it comes to how Black men and women are portrayed. What is different - at best - are the shades of racism. You probably would not have seen a comedic scene where a White man is beating up a Black man, yelling "Kunta Kinte." But that doesn't mean there aren't more subtle forms of anti-Black racism being played for laughs elsewhere; it's just less unbelievably blatant than what we saw with The Goods. (The Angry Black Woman blog makes this same basic point too).

That's certainly a reflection of the different kind of political power African Americans can wield in this respect relative to Asian Americans. It also reflects the consumer demographic clout being spoken about too. But my point is that even with that, it doesn't prevent/insulate. These images have currency that exceed the level of political or economic will that could be brought to bear to prevent/attack them. Let that sober you up for a moment.

***

On another point: the lack of Asian American support for Asian American cinema is problematic for reasons that don't need to be rehashed but I think it's misdirected to argue that "we're not doing enough to support" without first trying to tackle this question: what is "our" motivation to support?

Why would Korean Americans care if a new film, directed by a Vietnamese American filmmaker, comes out? Will anyone besides Taiwanese Americans (and Dawson's Creek fans) flock to go see Formosa Betrayed?[3] And what about South Asian American cinema - a far far bigger genre than most (who are not South Asian) are even aware about? I never see people urging me to go see the latest Indian American comedy but I do get those emails when it's an East Asian American director. What does that say about "us"?

This is not even about political allegiances, it's about asking a more basic question that's been kicked around for years (and no one can answer for good reason): what kind of Asian American stories are going to have mass appeal across the AA spectrum? I can't imagine what the equivalent to an Asian American Tyler Perry would be since his films, whether you like them or not, could be said to be tapping into a critical mass of desire for certain images and characters that is big enough to be commercial viable. I don't know what the Asian American equivalent would be since it'd have to be pan-ethnic and pan-generational.

That's why I respectfully disagree with Philip's assertion that, "Nothing will change, if our community won’t step up and show Hollywood the green." There is no "community" that is meaningful here, at least not in the way Philip is trying to speak to. Suggesting that we aren't doing enough to support "our own" films makes large assumptions regarding the nature of a collective AA identity and community.

In essence, I'm questioning the underlying logic as to "why AAs don't go see AA films." It's not because of the quality of those films (though poorly made AA films don't help the cause). It's not because producers aren't doing enough to market. It's not because audiences are cheap/lazy/ignorant bastards. It's because there's no such thing as an "Asian American film" that could possibly speak to more than a fraction of AAs.

The best you could ask for, at least for the time being, is a film that happens to include Asian American filmmakers and/or actors but whose themes are more - and I seriously hate this word, but it gets batted around enough - "universal." The problem here, for me, is that "universal" is shorthand for "White" or, at best, "a Will Smith film." So to make a "successful" Asian American film in terms of box office would likely mean making a film that isn't actually distinguishable as "Asian American" except by its casting or staffing. Once you get to that point, you're walking a fine line where Asian American involvement can go from "incidental" to "irrelevant" and thus, "disposable" which puts us back at square one.

This is all getting off-tpic though; I think if things are going to change in terms of our images in mass media and Hollywood in particular, it will have to happen through other means than pushing for AA to unite as a consumer bloc.

***

First of all, there is one group that is far smaller than Asian Americans yet wields tremendous influence in Hollywood - Jewish Americans. Is there still anti-Semitism in Hollywood? Absolutely. But in terms of shades of difference, the kind of anti-Semitism that does exist is far more coded, on average, than the blatant forms of anti-Asian racism you see. That's for at least two reasons: 1) Jewish American political organizing has given them a great deal of clout to make their protests heard faster and taken more seriously than those of other groups. 2) As some of you may have heard, there's, uh, a lot of Jews in Hollywood, at every level in the industry. There's many reasons for this, not the least of which is that the entertainment industry was an avenue open to Jewish immigrants and their children at a time where anti-Semitism kept them out of other, traditional routes to upward mobility. That aside, what you have is a vertical integration of Jewish Americans in Hollywood from writers up to directors up to studio heads. A really terrible, anti-Jewish joke is going to have to make it past, in most cases, a lot of Jewish American eyes - and signatures - to get green-lit into production.

Asian Americans have made great strides to become better represented in Hollywood but we're just not at the same level and I think the fact that we're also not as well politically organized (for all the same reasons I laid out above), also limits the influence of individual AAs placed in the Hollywood structure.

This speaks to my second point: I think many people in Hollywood understand, on some basic level, you don't try to play up anti-Semitism for laughs (unless you happen to also be Jewish...see Sasha Baron Cohen in Borat for example) unless you really feel like having your bosses, JDL and Jewish American politicians come after your ass. (Despite this, you can still find plenty of examples of anti-Semitism in Hollywood...which goes back to my earlier point that these images have currency no matter what kind of influence you can hope to wield elsewhere).

I don't think there is a similar culture of avoiding anti-Asian humor in Hollywood. I think Asians are still easy, fair game by writers who have not gotten it into their head that, "this will get me into trouble." THAT is the real change that would need to happen - a shift in the culture of those working in the industry to stop and contemplate possible repercussions. Would an Asian American consumer bloc help with that? Absolutely. But so would greater involvement by Asian Americans in the industry itself. And so would greater Asian American political clout as we have seen through grass roots movements to protest those images we find offensive.

Philip's post was trying to say, "protests aren't enough," and while I agree with him to a certain extent, I feel like his post is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If NOT for protests, then you have very little public awareness. And the less public awareness you have, the less likely it will be that you will affect change within the minds of writers, directors, studio heads, etc. who generate or green light bad characters and scenes to begin with.

Yes, we can speak with our green but that shouldn't minimize how effective, in many ways, public protests have been in changing the culture of Hollywood. It may be that folks are slow to listen but that alone isn't reason to stop hollerin'.

***

Notes:

[1] The irony is that in the comments section, someone was urging people to go out and support a new AA film which personally, I thought was terrible when I screened it for the SFIAAFF. Given that the film hasn't actually come out for release, I thought it was unfair to put it on blast but I just feel depressed that there's such a push to get people to see it. Then again, if it comes out and makes gobs of money, even if I think it's a bad film, it still could be said to be doing some good.

[2] It would be apropos to mention the two main texts dealing with these issues: Yen Le Espiritu's work on Asian American panethnicity or Lisa Lowe's seminal essay, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity and Multiplicity."

[3] Based on the previews of that film, I'm really tempted to call it Taipei-ssippi Burning but again, it's probably best to suspend judgement until it comes out.

PHILLY'S 2ND ANNUAL ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL LINEUP

2009-08-28T00:35:00.000-07:00

philadelphia asian american film festival: official lineup (credit: Angry Asian Man)

CHASING CHAN'S STARTING SIX

2009-08-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

Coming out of our recent conversation on how best to support Asian American cinema, there are a few things ordinary people can do, especially those living outside cities like SF, LA or NY.

The first is to push your local public library or university library to purchase Asian American movies for their collection. This was extremely hard to do 10 years ago, namely because there was little distribution available for those movies. Nowadays though, many films - both older and contemporary - are available on DVD or VHS. People should push their local institutions to take advantage of that and stock up on Asian American films.

The other, even easier thing you can do is throw a local screening party for you and your friends. Despite the growth in Asian American films gaining distribution, it's still a challenge to be able to see many movies in your local cineplex or even art house theaters. However, many films can be rented through mainstream sources (alas, not all) and that opens up opportunities - never available in a previous era - to experience the diversity of the Asian American filmmaking tradition.

As a resource, here's a list of six films that I'd recommend to any newcomer to Asian American cinema. Some caveats: 1) This is not meant to be a definitive list, especially given that there's been many films I haven't seen, especially in the years since I left the Bay Area and *sniff* my time with CAAM/NAATA behind. Just to give you an idea of how deep the catalog runs, check this out - and that is missing dozens of films. However, these six are films that I think belong to whatever you might call an "Asian American film canon" and thus, are useful places to begin (just not end). 2) It's weighted more to feature films than documentaries namely because, frankly, I feel like more work is needed to bring up feature filmmaking to where documentaries have been over the last 20 years. 3) The list has a heavy bent towards East Asian American, male filmmakers. That is partially a product of long-standing structural privileges that have created more opportunities for Chinese and Japanese American - and male - filmmakers compared to others (and let's just be frank here - it's not as if those CA and JA filmmakers are what you'd call "privileged" in general). From what I've been seeing in the last 10 years though, things are going to change very, very dramatically, especially with far more women directors out there and a slew of Korean, Filipino, South Asian and Southeast Asian filmmakers on the rise as well. All these qualifiers aside, here's my six picks:

1. (List is in chronological order)

Chan Is Missing, dir. Wayne Wang, 1982.

Technically, not the first Asian American feature film but the first one to gain any national recognition, plus distribution, and in my opinion, flat-out the best Asian American feature film ever made. Which is great, in terms of how brilliant this film is, but also kind of sad that no AA film has ever managed to better it in the 27 years since its release. Hence the raison d'etre of this site. In any case, the film is a profound allegory about the search for Asian American identity but manages not to be didactic about it. Fantastic characters throughout and excellent acting by Wood Moy and Marc Hayashi.

2.

Eat a Bowl of Tea, dir. Wayne Wang, 1989.

I didn't want to have more than one-film-per-director, but it's hard to not include this film for one important reason: for people who complain there are no films about intra-Asian American romance, well, here you go. Of course, this adaptation of Louis Chu's novel is also very much a family melodrama/generation gap film, with a risque - and hilarious - twist on how the pressures of family and community can weigh down one's sex life. As such, it actually fills in a "one of the best" in a few key categories: family melodrama (believe me, you'd much rather watch this than, say, Joy Luck Club), comedy, generation gap, etc. There are, of course, other films that have touched on this - I'm thinking especially of Alice Wu's Saving Face and before that, Mina Shum's Double Happiness - but in terms of quality of execution, Tea still takes this one. The film can seem a little cartoonish at times and the generation gap angle gets overplayed but it is entertaining and has surprisingly more historical depth to it than you might assume.

Also: nice casting (at least on the eyes) with Russell Wong and Cora Miao as the ill-fated couple while Victor Wong does the grumpy old dude bit quite well as Wong's father.

3.
Terminal U.S.A., dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1993.

By the good graces of the Almighty, this film is finally available on DVD. I have to admit - I'm including this on this list purely for the most selfish reason; it's just one of my favorite Asian American films of all time, namely because it's a brilliant, viciously executed anti-Asian American film. Note, it's not that the film is anti-Asian American. It's anti-Asian American film, which is to say that Moritsugu serves up a biting satire of Asian American family melodramas with enough improper sex, drugs and violence to scar more timid minds. I'd actually recommend you watch this film last, partially because it'd make an awfully good midnight movie, partially because you can get a sense of what Moritsugu is responding to in terms of the cliche themes of so many AA films, past, present and no doubt, future.

4.

AKA Don Bonus, dir. Spencer Nakasako, 1995.

Asian American documentaries have been the heart of Asian American filmmaking but because of the economics of docs, they are also the hardest films to find outside of institutional settings (libraries, film festivals, etc.) Luckily, Spencer Nakasako's trio of documentaries focused on Bay Area South-East Asian youth IS more widely avail. AKA Don Bonus was the first of these, a stark diary film about a year in the life of Sokly Ny, aka Don Bonus, a Cambodian teenager from the Tenderloin who is struggling with living in the S.F. housing projects, trying to finish high school, and dealing with his unstable family life. A powerful and remarkable film.

4.

Better Luck Tomorrow, dir. Justin Lin, 2002.

This is rather obvious choice, I suppose, given that it's the most high-profile AA film of its generation. Besides great admiration for the director and actors, the main reason I'm including BLT is that it's a useful starting point for a Gen X/Y perspective on AA feature filmmaking. I mean, all respect due to Chan Is Missing but it's not an easy a film to connect with anyone under the age of 30. While I don't think BLT is a perfect film, it does have a way of getting conversations started and that's as important as anything, especially for the purposes of this list.

It's also one of the first Asian American features that really doesn't deal with any of the obvious themes that the previous generations have hammered home - no generation gap/family melodramatics, no "where do I fit in?" assimilationist existentialism, and while race and racism enter the picture, it's the AZN characters who do the pistol-whipping. In other words, it's like a film you'd normally see with non-Asian actors except that it's an all-Asian cast. That alone is rather refreshing and groundbreaking in its own way.

5 & 6.

Cavite, dir. Neill Dela Llana & Ian Gamazon, 2005

In Between Days, dir. So Yong Kim, 2006

I'm pairing these two together because they both represent some of the most interesting - and arguably transformative - films of the last decade. By this I mean, they, as much as anything else I can think of, signify the shifting narratives - and geographies - of Asian American filmmaking.

Cavite takes place almost exclusively in the Philippines and there's nothing particularly "Asian American," let alone "Filipino American" about the story; it just happens to be an intensely arresting thriller about a prodigal Filipino American son who returns to the P.I. for his father's funeral and is promptly roped into what may or may not be a diabolical plot by terrorists. No doubt, the fact that the film takes place outside the U.S. raises the basic question of, "well, is it Asian American still?" and I don't think it's an inappropriate question. I do think, however, this is where things are headed and AA cinema is going to adapt to it one way or another.

Likewise, with In Between Days, here's one of the few films dealing with an Asian immigrant yet the film's quiet, subtle touches don't beat you over the head with the "assimilation" stick, even if Aimie's "fitting in" is hinted at during parts of the film. More importantly than that though, just as Cavite situates its character within a more global setting, In Between Days, like Wayne Wang's similar (but less successful) Princess of Nebraska, takes a realistic approach to a generation of immigrants who exist more fluidly with a transnational identity. I think we're going to see more portrayals like this and it will be a welcome - and meaningful - break from tradition.

Wish list + Honorable Mentions:

Who Killed Vincent Chin?, dir. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima, 1989.

This would have made the list, easily, except it's not readily available. This Academy Award nominated documentary explores the complex web of race, class and masculinity that lay behind the infamous 1982 murder of Detroit's Vincent Chin at the hands of two White autoworkers. The conventional wisdom has been that Chin was the victim of racial confusion - the autoworkers thought he was Japanese at a time where anti-Japan sentiment was at its height in Detroit. However, as the documentary tries to disentangle, the reasons for Chin's death are more complicated. The footage of Ron Ebens, one of Chin's two murderers, is both sad and chilling. The film is available for rental but only at institutional prices ($95). Check your local college library first.

Yuri Kochiyama: Portrait of Courage, dir. Rea Tajiri, 1994.

Yuri Kochiyama might very well be one of the most important Asian Americans many Americans have never heard of - a Civil Rights pioneer for four decades and also a powerful force in uniting the oft-contentious chasm between Asian Americans and African Americans. This documentary by Rea Tajiri gives Yuri's exceptional life and contributions some much needed focus and exposure. Again, it's only available for institutional rental/purchase...hopefully it will be able to reach a broader audience soon. Meanwhile, check your local libraries.

Mississippi Masala, dir. Mira Nair, 1992.

I generally am not a big fan of films about interracial relationships only because they tend to be incredibly ham-fisted and cliche-ridden but Mississippi Masala, despite some predictable, "you're going out with...HIM?!?!?!" scenes, still holds up as being more compelling than most, not to mention a rather ahead-of-its-time film focusing on the South Asian diaspora - in the U.S. South, no less. Plus, you get a hot, young Denzel. What more you want?

Double Happiness, dir. Mina Shum, 1995.

Yes, this is a pretty cookie cut family melodrama/generation gap film in many ways, and yes, it has two eye-rolling characters - the mega-conservative dad and the goofy white boyfriend - but straight up, Sandra Oh makes this film watchable every scene she's in.

Charlotte Sometimes, dir. Eric Byler, 2003.

A well-executed, well-acted indie DV film about four intersecting lovers in Silverlake. Some might find it a bit too slow - and possibly contrived - but I liked the pacing and especially liked watching Jacqueline Kim and Michael Idemoto awkwardly dance around each other.

Fall of the I-Hotel, dir. Curtis Choy, 2005.

Along with Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Choy's labor of love is considered one of the definitive Asian American documentaries and even though it focuses on events from the 1970s, its power and resonance has yet to fade. I still am deeply moved every time I watch this film which says something about the power of the story behind it - the eviction of elderly Filipino manongs from a residence hotel in the old S.F. Little Manila - but much credit also goes to Choy who does a masterful job of pulling together footage from his own filming and found material. Plus, a beautiful passage featuring the late Al Robles. It's not available for rent but you can buy it and in my opinion, it's worth every dollar.

Coming Up:

I plan to solicit other Starting Sixes from a few colleagues and friends BUT I also want YOUR input. What is your Starting Six? You don't need to annotate (unless you want to). Send your suggestions to: oliverwang AT gmail.com

Thanks!

(Also check out AsianAmericanFilm.com's three different Top 5 lists from folks like Peter Feng and Greg Pak. They mix in shorts (whereas I'm asking for all feature-length films) but their tastes also run more unconventional than the list I put together so it's good for contrast. But like the razor wars, they got five and we got six! ;)

REVIEW: TERMINAL USA

2009-08-23T20:03:00.001-07:00

Buy | Rent

This had been one of the Holy Grail of Asian American movies in terms of how difficult it was to come by a copy; now, finally, it's on DVD.

I first saw this when I was a TA for an Asian American film class taught by Alvin Lu and he screened this as one of the first films 1) because it's a great film and 2) it scares off students. Seriously, I think our enrollment fell by 20% after screening this because it's bizarre and gory but also, in my opinion, completely brilliant.

Moritsugu, along with Gregg Araki, made a reputation for themselves in the early 1990s as "bad boy" filmmakers working in a post-punk tradition. Both were also subject to some criticism within the Asian American community because, though they were AA, their early films had no AA cast or themes. Moritsugu, whether influenced by that criticism or not, fired off Terminal U.S.A, the most bitingly funny and over-the-top satires of Asian American family melodramas created - and keep in mind, this film came out before the wave of family melodramas began to crest with Joy Luck Club and it has (unfortunately) gone relatively unabated through present.

The film is big on theatrics, gore, and generally bizarreness as we watch a nuclear Japanese American family (starring Moritsugu himself) implode in the most outrageous ways. including, in no particular order, IV drug use, bathroom blow jobs, gay sex phone lines, drugs, guns, and the most improper use of a hobby horse, ever. I can't even sum it up properly.

One of these days, I'll get around to writing a more proper review but seriously, you need to see this. (Unbelievably, the film was originally produced by and screened on PBS.)

PREVIEW: THE PEOPLE I'VE SLEPT WITH

2009-08-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

The People I've Slept With Trailer from People Pictures on Vimeo.

The People I've Slept With

This is Quentin Lee's new film - a rather interesting departure from this melodramatic last flick, "Ethan Mao" and returning more to the quirky, comedic ground he and Justin Lin established 12 years ago with "Shopping For Fangs." The premise is "Mama Mia" minus the ABBA songs - a woman with multiple sex partners gets pregnant but doesn't know who the dad is. On the surface, that probably doesn't sound groundbreaking but let's just be blunt: when's the last time you saw a good Asian Am rom-com? Actually, when's the last time you saw ANY Asian Am rom-com? Exactly.

Let's also put this out there - there's not exactly a massive catalog of AA films focused on a sexually self-possessed (but not self-destructive) woman as the protagonist, let alone one where the majority of her lovers (at least based on the trailer) seem to be Asian American too (listen! A thousand indignant AA male voices go silent...mine included). Interestingly - but not surprisingly - I think AA queer filmmakers have been way ahead of the curve on this one but on the hetero-tip, the examples are far sparser. Eat a Bowl of Tea comes to mind but that's very much male-centric. (One of my favorite AA films of the '00s, In Between Days sort of fits in here but it's not really a film about sexuality, though it includes aspects of it).

Suffice to say, TPISW seems poised to break some new, interesting and frankly, long overdue ground. I'm down for it but I do have to ask - a Black Gay best friend? Is that like a Token Two-Fer?

INTERVIEW: ALEX TSE

2009-07-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Preface: I met Alex Tse at the VC Film Festival this year; I had followed his career off and on since the days when he wrote the script for Sucker Free City and as it turns out, Alex knew my music writing thanks to his connection with Bay Area hip-hop groups. I've always been fascinated by the process and business of screenwriting and Alex was gracious enough to meet me in Long Beach to talk about his work and career thus far.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared in UCLA's Asia Pacific Arts Magazine)

INTERVIEW: JOHN CHO

2009-07-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

Preface: I was really happy to be able to do this; I knew John as a classmate from UC Berkeley - *15 years ago* - and I've taken a lot of pleasure in seeing his career accelerate over that time. I finally had the opportunity to interview him and at the risk of sounding immodest, I thought it was a great conversation, especially with his candor about issues of acting, media and race.

THE INTERVIEW (there are two parts) (originally appeared in UCLA's Asia Pacific Arts Magazine)

LAAPFF 2009

2009-05-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

Oops, late pass (esp. since I forgot to post up about the SFIAAFF) but the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is still going on through this Thursday.

REVIEW: BABY (2009)

2009-03-01T00:45:00.001-08:00

Buy | Rent

I first saw this at the 2007 SFIAAFF and I was really struck by it at the time. The gangster genre is, of course, nothing new to Asian cinema but I couldn't recall an Asian American film that managed to pull one off very well. My first impression of Baby was that Juwan Chung had delivered a stylistically compelling and intriguing film about a young Asian American gang banger growing up in Southern California.

I think one of the most interesting things about Baby is how the Asian American gang he's involved in seems inherently pan-Asian but this is never something that becomes central plot-wise; the fact that the gang is made up of different Asian ethnicities is made to seem perfectly natural. Whether this is realistic or not, I can't say but it seem like a detail that was meaningful, especially for a film set in the polyglot that is L.A.

As a first-time feature director, Chung has some good instincts around filming drama. This film depends quite a deal on suspense and tension and Chung creates the atmosphere he's looking for in most scenes. He's also got decent chops in the action arena too; there's a shoot-out towards the end that has the kinetic force of a Cowboy Bebop episode (and I could have sworn borrowed from one).

However, I think one of the most notable shortcomings of the film has been how derivative its plotlines are from other films in the gangster canon. To compare it to the Asian Boyz N The Hood is fairly accurate - there's a lot in Baby that will make you feel as if you've seen it before and you probably have. Provided, as a genre film, it depends on certain conventions, but on more than several occasions, I wish Baby could have transcended some of the more obvious cliches.

This is especially relevant in terms of the main romantic female lead (Sammy), who is one of the least developed characters in the whole film and basically feels like a prop piece. In a film already so heavy with testosterone, you just wish the sole female character wasn't so marginal. As she's envisioned, Sammy contributes very little to the film as a whole and that's a shame.

Overall, I think Baby is worth seeing (and it's in select theaters right now) but to me, it's another triumph of style and technique over the basics of storytelling and character. This is one of my never-ending rants but I feel that as technological access has made professionally production quality more easily achieved, no editing suite or HD camera is going to teach someone the basics of how to tell a story well or cleverly, nor coax better performances out of the actors. Baby is hardly unique in its shortcomings and that's precisely the problem.

A SONG FOR OURSELVES PREMIER

2009-02-24T23:15:00.000-08:00

Back in 1997, I had the distinct honor of working on a reunion concert for A Grain of Sand, arguably the first self-identified Asian American musical group, a folk trio that originally formed in the early 1970s between Nobuko Miyamoto, William "Charlie" Chin and Chris Iijima.

A Grain of Sand were important beyond just their historical stature - having come out of the Asian American Movement of the late 1960s, the group were tackling any number of critical - and complex - social and racial issues through their music at a time where Asian Americans were still largely invisible in popular media and culture.

All three members went on to continue their careers in the arts and music, especially Chris Iijima who put another album in 1982 with Chin called Back to Back (he was also a law professor outside of his musical life).

Sadly, Chris passed away a little over three years ago, on 12/31/05. A new documentary by Tad Nakamura pays tribute to his life and legacy and it will be premiered in Los Angeles this upcoming Saturday night. I've seen the film and it was wonderful - extremely well-made and powerful in its message and the history is covers.

Accompanying the film will be appearances by Nobuko and Charlie, as well as performances by the Blue Scholars, Kiwi and Bambu. You can find more info on the film here.

Also, DJ Phatrick, formerly DJ for Native Gunz (now hosting the weekly Devil's PIe party), has put together a mixtape in honor of the film's premier: A Song For Ourselves Mixtape which features songs from all of the above artists noted in this post.

Here's one of my favorite songs by Chris, from Back to Back called "Asian Song."

Chris Iijima: Asian Song
From Back to Back (East/West World Records, 1982)

Bonus: Robert Ito wrote up a nice profile of Tad Nakamura for the LA Times on the day of the premier.

FEATURE: ASIAN AMERICAN CINEMA'S "NEW" GLOBAL SCOPE

2008-07-08T09:38:00.001-07:00

Preface: This feature was written for the Asian Cinevision 2008 Cinevue catalog and I tackled what I saw as two growing, parallel trends in Asian American cinema, namely 1) the emergence of what you might call "new immigrant" stories that have a markedly different relationship to ethnic identity compared to previous generations and 2) more and more Asian American filmmakers traveling to Asia to make their films. I tackle this with a historical awareness that both trends have important antecedents but also try to discuss what's different now and where this all may be headed.

THE FEATURE (originally appeared in Asian Cinevision's Cinevue).

From Far to Near: Asian American Cinema Expands

In Ron Morales’ new feature, SANTA MESA (2008), Hector, a 12-year old from New Jersey, is tragically orphaned and sent to live with his grandmother in a shantytown on the outskirts of Manila. She speaks little English; he speaks no Tagalog. Not surprisingly, for Hector, his first days in the Philippines are marked by displacement, bewilderment and uncertainty.

For much of the history of Asian American filmmaking, those sensations of alienation were typically reserved for immigrants coming from Asia, not to it. Dozens of features have dealt with the identity struggles of immigrants navigating American society. In recent years, two different—but linked—counter-trends have emerged however. One is what we see in SANTA MESA—Asian American filmmakers like New York-based Morales, exploring stories set in Asia. The other are new Asian immigrant narratives, captured poignantly in both Wayne Wang’s new THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA (2008) and So-Yong Kim’s IN BETWEEN DAYS (2006), where young migrants seem more at home, even away from home, than previous generations who struggled with dual-identities and confused loyalties.

What links these two trends is the shrinking distance between nations and societies. Call it globalism, transnationalism or whatever else but the forces of information age economics, expanding electronic media and travel infrastructure have made borders more porous, relocations more temporary. Especially for upwardly mobile Asians and Asian Americans alike, the line between migrancy and tourism has blurred considerably and filmmakers are exploring these changing perspectives and realities with new narratives. As Dennis Lim wrote in the New York Times in 2006, these films “test the basic assumptions of what constitutes an American film,” while at the same time, laying claim to, “the utopian notion that all of world cinema is up for grabs.”

Whether this trend is “new” is all relative. Even in the 1980s, filmmakers were already playing with prescient ideas around dislocation and transnationalism. Peter Wang’s celebrated A GREAT WALL (1986) followed a Chinese American family’s visit to Beijing with a subtle, humorous eye towards the similarities and differences in cultural sensibilities. Likewise, Wayne Wang’s oft-spoken about, rarely seen LIFE IS CHEAP...BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE (1989) followed a San Francisco native trying to navigate Hong Kong’s back alleys while toting a mob boss’ MacGuffin.

These early exceptions aside though, throughout the 1980s and 90s, the predominant themes leaned more towards immigrants adjusting to America as a “new home,” and all the drama (and hilarity) that ensues. These stories elided well with “generation gap” melodramas where older, immigrant parents clashed with their Americanized children. That core conflict became resonant for practically every Asian American ethnic community, including Chinese American (JOY LUCK CLUB,1993), Filipino American (THE DEBUT, 2000), Vietnamese American (CATFISH IN BLACK BEAN SAUCE, 1999) and South Asian American (ABCD, 1999).

Particularly in the post-1965 era of Asian American immigration, these stories made good sense: coming to America often became a permanent condition. As such, learning to “become Asian American” often meant negotiating different identities and practices, especially between generations. Certainly, those challenges continue to be true for thousands of families, especially among refugee populations whose decisions to relocate to America are driven less by choice and more by necessity.

At the same time, much has also changed in recent decades. Even for those settled in the U.S., the modern mediascape has transformed people’s ability to stay in touch with “home.” News and entertainment can be readily accessed by something as basic as a cell phone, music and film cross continents at satellite speed and the growth of diasporic ethnic communities around the world maintain “local” ties even thousands of miles away. Moreover, whereas the older model confronting Asian Americans was often cast between total assimilation and cultural nationalism, the more contemporary view accepts far greater amalgamation as different cultural and political influences shade over into one another. As well, an increasing number of Asians live transnationally transient lifestyles, shuttling between Asian and American cities because of school, family, or work.

Some of these differences are brilliantly embodied in two young female characters from recent films—Jiseon Kim’s Aimie from IN BETWEEN DAYS’ and THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA’s Sasha, played by Ling Li. Both teens are relatively new immigrants to America and both deal with familiar feelings of alienation...but not by their surroundings. For example, the titular “princess,”, Sasha floats around Bay Area, seeking support for her unexpected pregnancy, yet she’s also manages to stay in contact with friends around the world via her incessant text messaging and cell phone videos.

Notably, Sasha switches between Mandarin and English easily, almost unconsciously, as if multilingualism was the social norm (and in some American enclaves, it may as well be). She may have a host of personal problems—beyond just her unwanted pregnancy - but figuring out “what it means to be Asian American” is not a question that haunts her. Sasha’s existential battles have little to do with nationality or even geography; one could just as easily imagine her in Singapore or Stuttgart, Cebu or Sao Paolo, dealing with the same dilemmas.

Taking a different tack, is Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker’s TAKE OUT (2004, AAIFF04), an almost verité-like chronicling of the day-in-the-life of a working class Chinese delivery person. On a grander scale, a spate of recent films such as Ham Tran’s powerful epic, JOURNEY FROM THE FALL (2006) and Tim Bui’s GREEN DRAGON (2002) chronicle the immense upheaval visited upon Southeast Asian survivors from the Vietnam conflict. They remind us that globalism’s hand has not just created free market movement but also millions of unwitting migrants too.

These crossings have gone in the other direction as well. Just as more Asian American films are paying attention to the changing face of immigration, it is Asian American directors who are entering migrant channels as well, taking themselves over to Asia. Tran and Tim’s brother Tony Bui have been part of this wave as well as American-born or raised filmmakers making films in Asia. Again, this is not a wholly “new” phenomenon but it has gathered steam over the last decade. Bui’s award-winning THREE SEASONS (1999) was an early example, as was Joan Chen’s impressive directorial debut, XIU XIU (1998).

In more recent years, there’s been a flurry of cross-national productions, including Stephane Gauger’s OWL AND THE SPARROW (2007), shot in Vietnam; Kern Konwiser and David Ren’s romantic melodrama SHANGHAI KISS (2007), shot in L.A. and Shanghai; Fatimah Tobing’s vignette about AIDS and motherhood in Jakarta in CHANTS OF LOTUS (2007); and Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon’s psychological thriller, CAVITE (2005), which, like Morales’ SANTA MESA, largely takes place in the back streets and slums of Manila. On a practical level, the lower cost of production overseas is a compelling factor but more importantly, filmmakers have taken the opportunity to explore new storylines specific to their location, whether it’s the intertwining of religion and terrorism in CAVITE or the folkloric ghost stories circulating in Romeo Candido’s ANG PANAMA (2006).

One of the most interesting films along these lines has been first-time filmmaker Johnny Kwok’s b-boy drama, ALWAYS BE BOYZ (2008). Drawing on dozens of stories lived within the volatile b-boy community in South Korea, the film highlights tensions that go beyond just the dance competitions these young men find themselves in. Compulsory military service, mainstream cultural ignorance of their art, and socio-racial relations weave their way through the film; those used to American urban dance/b-boy films would not necessarily immediately recognize any of these themes (read: this is not “Step It Up 3: Seoul 4 Real”). There’s also a rich serendipity at play—Kwok traveling to South Korea to make a film about youth who follow an art form that itself was transplanted from America.

There is every sign that more and more Asian American directors are following suit: Alice Wu (SAVING FACE) is prepping production to go to China to shoot an adaptation of Rachel DeWoskin’s book Foreign Babes in Beijing, Karen Lin (PERFECTION) is working on Love Tour, to be set and shot in Taiwan, and Wayne Wang has plans to produce half a dozen films set in various Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul.

None of this blindly celebrates some brave new world of unfettered transnationalism. Even if the lines between Asian and Asian American cinema continue to blur, it is rarely lost upon the filmmakers that this is happening within complex flows of money, power and politics that often force human movement rather than merely facilitating it.

Either way, Asian American features have crossed a threshold towards global stories that will undoubtedly become a deeper part of our community filmmaking. It seems richly appropriate that, as the world becomes perceptibly closer, it is helping the landscape of Asian American cinema to expand.

Oliver Wang is an assistant professor of sociology at California State Univ, Long Beach and writes on popular culture and society for NPR, the LA Times, LA Weekly and Vibe. His writing on Asian American cinema is available at chasingchan.com.

INTERVIEW: WAYNE WANG

2008-07-08T09:32:00.001-07:00

Preface: I was asked by Asian Cinvevision to interview Wayne Wang for this year's catalog and naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. This was my first time speaking with him and while most of our conversation revolved around his two new films, Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Princess of Nebraska, I also asked him about the state of Asian American cinema, its transnational implications and his own aspirations to make a gangster flick.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared in Asian Cinevision's Cinevue).

Interview with Wayne Wang

For the last fifteen years, fans of filmmaker Wayne Wang have wondered when he would “return” to Asian American film. The most influential Asian American filmmaker of the 1980s, with movies such CHAN IS MISSING (1982) and DIM SUM (1985), Wang successfully adapted Amy Tan’s JOY LUCK CLUB in 1993. After that, he took a serendipitous route through Hollywood, directing everything from his celebrated, indie film SMOKE (1995), to the edgy digital video flick, THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (2001), to the Jennifer Lopez-lead romantic comedy, MAID IN MANHATTAN (2002).

With this year’s pairing of A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS and THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA, Wang returns with not one, but two films centered on a new generation of Asian American immigrants. Both are adapted from Oakland author Yiyun Li’s short stories and Wang began his interview with CineVue describing their shared affinity for the “new” Chinese immigrant.

Oliver Wang: How did you first discover Yiyun Li’s writing?

Wayne Wang: [Center for Asian American Media director] Stephen Gong came up to me and said, “There’s this Chinese woman writer who teaches at Mills, and you should look into her short stories.” That same afternoon, Michael Ray, the All-Story magazine editor, also said, “Hey, there’s a really good Chinese writer that’s in the Bay Area, and we’re going to publish some of her stuff.” So I went out and got the book, read through everything, and really liked “Thousand Years.”

OW: What about her stories spoke to you?

WW: I’d been off that Asian American theme for a while. When I was thinking about coming back, I kept thinking, “What has changed?” In both coasts, the biggest change has been the new immigrants from China. And you also begin to see literature from writers in China, like Ha Jin and Yiyun Li and they’re many others. So that’s one.

Two, I really like Yiyun’s writing because everything is in the periphery. Nothing is directly hitting you in the face. Yiyun’s stuff is about human nature, how they cope with it, the residual effect. They’re not sentimental...which is what my kind of aesthetic is, too. I was particularly interested in “Thousand Years” because it also dealt with a whole immigration population, a whole other language. And I was also very intrigued with the father, who was involved and hurt by the Cultural Revolution, and the daughter who was on the fringe of it but also affected.

OW: What struck me about both films is that these are stories about Asians living in America, but their struggles and challenges are not around “Asian American identity”, or where do they “fit in” in the social fabric.

WW: It’s not that the Chinese American material doesn’t exist. I think part of it for me is that I’m an immigrant myself, even though I’m very American. But still there’s something about my own roots growing up in Hong Kong, being Chinese—“What is my relationship to China?”—that really intrigues me about that particular area. The world has flattened out, and it’s very global now.

OW: And that changes their relationship to this idea of American and how they’re meant to negotiate it.

WW: Absolutely. That also has to do more with that newer generation like PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA because the way they grew up, with the internet and the computer and being able to travel more, they’re really into that mind set.

OW: You reflect on technology’s role in PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA the use of the cell phone and its camera. How deliberate was that, building that into the movie?

WW: It’s very deliberate, particularly since I met Ling, who plays Sasha. She has three phones; they’re all decorated differently. And one of the phones got shut off by her mother because she racked up, like, $750 of texting. And she’s constantly doing phone texting, talking to her friends, and also shooting little things—like her own hand. When we saw that it was working well as we started shooting that stuff, we just kept building into it more.

OW: Whose idea was it to bring in Yiyun Li to help with the adaptation for THOUSAND YEARS?

WW: I felt that it was a very specific voice. And I felt that she was really smart and really interested in writing a screenplay. So I just gave her final draft. And I didn’t say very much to her, and I said the things that I liked about the story, and she just wrote the draft. And then we worked on it together. I like working with novelists and making them into screenplays.

OW: PRINCESS, on other hand, was adapted by Michael Ray from Li’s story and he seemed to have a free hand to roam with it.

WW: I told Yiyun, with PRINCESS, “I’m going to get Michael to work on it, and we’re going to improvise a lot.” So a lot of it was on the spot. We made things up...like play jazz music, which I really enjoy. She personally ended up liking PRINCESS better than THOUSAND YEARS. That’s very interesting. She felt that I brought more into PRINCESS than was in the short story, whereas THOUSAND YEARS was pretty much a very faithful rendition. But when she saw PRINCESS, I could see that she was really surprised by it all the time.

OW: I should backpedal—you began with the intention of making THOUSAND YEARS but ended up making two different films. How did that happen?

WW: First of all, PRAYERS is so classic. I wanted to do something that breaks away from that, something that’s freer, more like a jazz riff in my mind. And I felt like I was dealing with two generations, and there’s a new generation that I was seeing and meeting...that was so different. I went to CAAM and said, “Hey, what if just do something really fast, really down and dirty, no permissions, no professional actors, we just find interesting people, find the girl, and just go and do something?” But the main thing was that I really felt like following the three generations, and doing the two films about two different women. One is still caught up in the Old China, so to speak, even though she’s been in America for ten years. And this one that has no baggage, no burdens, no history, no morality, so to speak, that I find really interesting also.

OW: With both of these stories, and this goes to your career as a whole, you often times seem to center really interesting, complex women at the center of your narratives. I’m wondering where that comes from and what’s your interest in doing that.

WW: I don’t know. [Laughs] I think I fell into it in the beginning only because I started doing DIM SUM, because Laureen Chew was a good friend of mine was very intrigued by the relationship with her mother. I fell into it. Then JOY LUCK CLUB came along, and it’s just a wonderful book. And then after that, I was basically stereotyped...as much as I ran away from it, I some how kept being drawn back into it. So women is still very much part of my subject matter. People have criticized me for being anti-Asian men. I said I’d love to do a male book….

OW: I find that accusation ridiculous if you consider the body of work. CHAN IS MISSING and EAT A BOWL OF TEA are very much male-centered films. But go back a moment—are you suggesting that you’ve done so many women-centered films because you have an easier time getting green-lit to do them?

WW: Probably. Because of the success of JOY LUCK CLUB, for me to say, “Well, I’m doing something about a Chinese woman,” tends to be a little easier for them to understand what it is. If I said I was going to do a gangster film with guys, they would say, “Why don’t we get John Woo?” So no matter what I do, I’m boxed in a little bit. But the other part is that...you know, I like women. I feel very close to them. I just find them, in a way, more interesting. My wife says I may have been a woman in my last lifetime. So who knows?

OW: What was it like coming to a film of this size/scope after your string of more commercially-targeted films—MAID IN MANHATTAN, BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE, LAST HOLIDAY.

WW: I learned a lot with all those films. Let me give you one example, something like WINN DIXIE. When we previewed the film, we cut and re-cut...the last thing the studio wants is what they call a pacing pass. They cut out anything that has a moment where the character takes a breath or is thinking. Just to keep the movie moving along. And I really missed those things. I felt like with THOUSAND YEARS I wanted to have a very different language, especially in terms of timing. I wanted characters to breathe.

OW: In other words, a very different kind of film from what a commercial studio would expect.

WW: Today, to make a movie about an old man is almost impossible, especially if you don’t have a star. Let alone that it’s Chinese, and that it’s subtitled. So you’ve got to understand these problems. Originally there was also half the money coming from China. China dropped out in the last minute because of the couple of lines. For example, the line that he says, “Communism is not bad, but it fell into the wrong hands.” So half of our financing went away. This movie is really difficult to get made. It will probably never get made again, especially in the context of America. But I consciously made those choices to say, “Work really down and dirty, work cheaply, work with a lot of integrity, and try to make these movies.” And that’s what they are.

OW: With you, with other American directors like Steven Soderberg, or even a younger filmmaker like Justin Lin, there seems to be a back-and-forth pattern with your more commercial films being used as springboards to make more independent films. Is that deliberate?

WW: I realize through my career that if I just did the independent films, I probably wouldn’t be able to support my career and keep doing the independent films. I needed the bigger films. I needed—as much as I hated doing it in a way, but MAID IN MANHATTAN was a huge hit and gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of other things. I don’t know. It’s tricky, that process.

OW: As a filmmaker, does this come as burden that you’re forced to bear that “Why aren’t you making more Asian American films?”

WW: Well, it is a burden. In the beginning, I felt like I couldn’t get off of that track because of that burden. But after JOY LUCK CLUB, I just felt that I had to get away because everything I was getting was related to Chinese or China or whatever. I had to get off. I exhausted, so to speak, my stories and my interest. Now it’s still kind of a burden, but I don’t mind it. I feel like I know this material. I know it really well, both about, let’s say, Chinese American versus new immigrants in America. I think that it’s so much more complex now, too. For example, Ha Jin’s new book, A Free Life, I was very fascinated by. So I’m trying to do an adaptation of that. The focus I tend to be on right now is immigrants, and particularly immigrants from China. I just feel like that’s where the world is at these days, too.

OW: Not just that but there’s also a spate of reverse migration, you could say, where Asian American filmmakers are going to Asia to make feature films. You did this back in the ‘80s with LIFE IS CHEAP...BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE—you see this as a possible new trend?

WW: I think so. I’m very much in support of that, too. I’m very interested in maybe putting a package together, let’s say six films, where I may do one and produce the other ones with different varying budgets from different parts of Asia—whether it’s Filipino, Malay, Singapore, Thai, Hong Kong, obviously—and make really interesting movies that will also hopefully be more accessible to a world market, not just a limited market. I’m really intrigued by that and challenged by that.

OW: You mentioned earlier, an interest in doing a gangster film. Have you considered doing a straight up genre film?

WW: Yes. I’ve always been talking about that and still trying to find a way to do it. I keep telling my agent, “Just get me a genre film of some kind.” I could do it. But it’s hard. Right now, I was talking to [PRINCESS’ cinematographer] Rich Wong, who was very much working with me creatively as a co-director credit, who [directed] COLMA: THE MUSICAL. I said, “We should do a gangster musical that’s really violent with Chinese guys.” I’m serious.

FRESH FROM VC

2008-05-06T23:21:00.001-07:00

For the first time, ever, I've attended the annual Visual Communications Film Festival in L.A., the largest Asian American film fest of its kind in Southern California. This year, I wasn't able to attend the SFIAAFF for the first time in over 10 years so I'm glad I finally made arrangements (read: find a babysitter) to at least get out to part of the VC fest (alas, I won't be able to see more than 2-3 films this year).

I went to go see Santa Mesa, by New Jersey filmmaker Ron Morales. (Interestingly, if IMDB is correct, Morales has a long background in working on films as a crew member but this is his first directorial work). In general, I resist saying too much negative about any film that is still seeking distribution so I'll keep this brief:

I found Santa Mesa to be beautifully shot by Yaron Orbach and the setting - a fascinating slum built around a rail station outside of Manila - was incredible. However, the strengths of the production values weren't equally matched by the storytelling. In terms of basic narrative, character development and script, the dynamics rarely cohered even though you could see what the filmmakers were trying for. I'll leave it at that - if the film gets distribution, I'll expound at that point.

Two separate thoughts:

1) In the last 5-7 years, I've seen a real leap forward in the production/technical values of Asian American cinema. I surmise this is the product of both 1) a generation of API filmmakers who've gotten more professional training, a very hopeful sign for the future, and 2) improvements in technology - both in terms of access and capability - that is empowering younger filmmakers to make better looking/sounding films without the exorbitant cost that might have been the case a generation ago.

However, what has yet to develop as quickly has been storytelling skills. The latter, I think, is far more difficult to master and, to be sure, it's hardly an API-specific challenge (just look at mainstream cinema). What I find interesting is how the ideas have gotten much more ambitious - Santa Mesa, for example, tries to do a lot with its characters and their relationships in ways that I don't think you would have seen 10 years ago. But ambition aside, execution is still uneven, especially in scripts. Like I said, I don't think that's unique to API filmmaking but it has been a historical challenge that, in my opinion, has yet to be transcended en masse.

2) I'm really intrigued by what seems to be a small wave of Filipino American directors going to the Philippines to make their movies. Apart from Santa Mesa, the excellent Cavite comes to mind and I know filmmakers like Romeo Candido and Gene Cajayon are actively working in the P.I. too. I know part of it is practical - the cost of filmmaking is much more affordable out there compared to in the States but obviously, there's a kind of transnational storytelling that's part of it too. I'm very intrigued to see how this will play out over time and how Filipino American stories will develop in that midst. Will we see more international storylines, such as in Santa Mesa?

REVIEW: HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY (2008)

2008-04-26T18:38:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent

When Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle debuted in 2004, it was a milestone of sorts - a mainstream, gross-out, stoner comedy with two Asian American men cast as leads. Sure, the humor was juvenile and unapologetically male, there was everything from naked breasts to literal bathroom humor, and a dream sequence featuring an anthropomorphalized bag of weed. Do The Right Thing this was not.

But it did represent an achivement of sorts, symbolically to be sure, but also commercially. The movie had enough of a cult following to warrant a sequel (not to mention revitalize Neal Patrick Harris' career, a remarkable feat on its own), thus suggesting that - hey, Asian American leads won't kill your film. I hope the producers of 21 are pondering this.

The film's sequel, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is an achievement of a kind too, proof that Asian Americans have made it far enough into the Hollywood machine that they can make perfectly mediocre mainstream fare as much as the next folks. Woo hoo, the promised land!

In all seriousness, it's not like anyone was expecting something approaching genius. I was hoping for "adequately funny," something on the level, at best, of a 40 Year Old Virgin or even Superbad (and yeah, there's a huge difference in the quality of funny between those two flicks).

The laugh-o-meter here was somewhere closer to, oh, Walk Hard, which is to say: not that funny. John Cho and Kal Penn are fun enough to watch at times but there's little new creative soil for either to plow. The funniest single scene was probably when Cho shows up in the library stacks, goth-ed out. It lasted all of a few seconds and he didn't even speak but just the sight of him in masscara was good enough. Penn had fewer moments here than in the previous film - the giant bag of weed returned (anatomically correct no less) but that joke really only works once. And while we're keeping score on this kind of thing: too much Rob Cordury, just a touch too much Neil Patrick Harris, and not enough Chris Meloni. And oh yeah, either too much or not enough pubic shots, depending on your taste.

So, in the end, it was "meh" but the thing is...I didn't feel like, "oh crap, we blew our chance!" And maybe that says something more than the film, on its own, can say...that the fact that an Asian American-lead comedy can be mediocre seems ordinary and harmless rather than a hand-wringing disaster. Of course, it helps that the film also is already in the black after the first weekend, earning a very respectable $14M (the original only made $18M total in theaters). Even if the flick has earned middling reviews, the monetary gains won't hurt Kal Penn or John Cho's future chances and may help open that golden door for other Asian American actors and filmmakers to walk through.

Let me end by throwing this question out: the sexual politics in this film are not particularly glowing - not to anyone's surprise of course - but I wonder how many of the men, so huffy puffy at Falling From Grace are going to raise any issues with this flick? (Yeah, I just went there).

Let me also add: why does it mean when a writing and directing team of all White men can make a more commercially successful franchise lead by Asian American men than most Asian American filmmakers? I'm not asking this rhetorically - I'm seriously curious how this happens.

PLANET B-BOY

2008-04-04T23:25:00.001-07:00

Go see this movie.

Just goes to show...for all the gains Asian Americans have made in feature filmmaking, our documentary skills kind of rock harder.

Saying.

FALLING FROM GRACE

2008-03-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

needing more than luck?

Even though I've enjoyed this weekend, hanging out with my daughter while my wife takes a much needed/earned vacation, I'm a little sad I'm not up in San Francisco for this year's Asian American film festival. This is the first time in 11 years that I won't be attending and it is, by far, one of my all-time favorite events.

That said, part of me is glad I'm not there because I feel out of the Asian American film loop at the moment and I think being at the fest would just remind me of how disconnected I am right now. It's not for lack of interest but lack of time. I certainly want to get back into the mix, not the least of which is so I can update this site.

In terms of a late pass, I recently became aware of the mini-controversy over Fay Ann Lee's new feature film, Falling For Grace, a romantic comedy/Cinderella story (you can see the trailer at the link before). I say "mini" because, though the internet has a tendency to inflate things beyond their actual size, this film has mapped onto so few people's radar, I don't think you can really call it a major dust-up.

The main sides are represented by the Fighting 44s on one side and Reappropriate's Jenn Fang on the other. The main crux of it turns around (drum roll): Asian female/White male interracial romance. Call it Asian American gender relations catnip.

CONTINUE READING...

In Falling For Grace, Grace Yang, an upwardly mobile Chinese American investment banker[1] is mistaken (by White people, natch) for the scion of the Shanghai Tang family, ends up meeting a very eligible (White) bachelor (modeled on JFK, Jr. no less) and hilarity and romance ensue. Presumably.

The Fighting 44s, self-appointed defenders of Asian American masculinity, not surprisingly, crap all over the film on premise alone: "More brainwashing material for Asian girls to chew on."

Their stance doesn't surprise me since it springs from the the same kind of reactionary, masculine politics that certain Asian American men have carried as cross, shield and sword since the 1960s. I'm sympathetic to parts of it - namely the critique of how absent Asian men are in popular American media - but the ways in which it's oft-used to bludgeon Asian American women (and curiously, feminists) seems self-defeating at best and retro-grade patriarchal at worst.

I'm more surprised at Fang's decision to support the film despite the fact that she - like mostly everyone - hadn't actually seen the film yet[2]. I usually find her analyses to be nano-blade sharp, with plenty of nuance and insight to go around, but here, she stakes her defense on a curious argument:

" it occurs to me that if we are to begin challenging the perception that Asian Americans consume like Whites (thus undermining efforts to create Asian American-oriented media), we need to demonstrate a willingness to support Asian American-created art and film. So, I hope that regardless of how you feel about the AF/WM coupling in this film, you will take the time to see this movie (and give it a chance to speak for itself), and thus help support the overall cause of funding more Asian American-produced independent media."This too is based on a very old set of politics, one that I find similarly outdated and though nowhere near as noxious as the belief that a portrayal of interracial romance is an automatic sign of "selling out," I'm no less exasperated with the implied ethnic/racial obligation that comes with it.

This is something I discussed, along with my friend and colleague Hua Hsu, back in 2003 when Better Luck Tomorrow came out and there was that massive grassroots push to get Asian Americans out to see the film. But BLT was hardly the first or last film to make this pitch and I've always been skeptical of the underlying logic.

In essence, it seems to suggest that whether the film is good or bad, people should see it as a way to empower the director and producers and presumably, if this takes off like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it will be one more step in the empowerment of Asian Americans to take control of our own media images. Distill it down from there and what you basically get is, "support it because it's Asian American" and that seems like a remarkably reductive logic - no less so than arguing that one should support Obama simply because he's Black and thus, might help reform failing federal civil rights legislation[3].

But shelf the ideological problems for moment and consider a few pragmatic ones:

Demographically, Asian Americans rarely have wielded the kind of clout to - alone - make any film project "successful." That's why - as Justin Lin has said in many interviews - Hollywood studios rarely even bother to break AAs down into a separate viewer bloc; we're usually lumped in with Whites. The most successful Asian American films of the last 26 years - from Chan Is Missing to Joy Luck Club to Better Luck Tomorrow - have always depended on the patronage of non-Asian viewers in order to ensure that success. I'm not claiming AA viewers make no difference at all; by filling seats, we're adding to the overall box office totals, but it's hardly the case that, as a demographic bloc, our support is really the one that matters most[4]. The mainstream success of practically any Asian American film I can think of depends on attracting a large number of non-AA viewers.

Second, even in the case where you have a "success," the fruits it bears are questionable. Wayne Wang's early career is particularly instructive here. With the exception of the uniformly brilliant Chan Is Missing, Wang's next three American[5] films were all family melodramas: Dim Sum, Eat a Bowl of Tea and of course, The Joy Luck Club. Wang's success - both critically and commercially - with those films, I would suggest, played an important role in how future Asian American features would get greenlit/funded[6]. I don't think it's a coincidence that throughout the remainder of the 1990s and well into this decade, most of more prominent Asian American features you saw follow were also family melodramas (at least in part, if not wholly), from Mina Shum's Double Happiness to Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet to Chris Chan Lee's Yellow to Gene Cajayon's The Debut to Alice Wu's Saving Face. There are many, many more one could name and personally, if I never see one more Asian American family melodrama come down the pipeline, it will be too soon (but that's an essay for another time).

Third, if we look to other examples, it's not very auspicious. My Big Fat Greek Wedding earned over $100,000,000 - far more successful and profitable than any comparable Asian American feature but I haven't seen that translate into a sea-change in Greek American representations (not that I follow them that closely though) and while it's likely helped Nia Vardalos to get more of her scripts noticed, she's far from some Greco American Spielberg (or even Spike Lee).

Again, it goes back to the consumer demographic. Tyler Perry has become a major force as a director and writer because his films consistently make money off of a viewer base that actually wields clout: African Americans. Likewise, I don't think we're far away from seeing a new generation of Latino American filmmakers come up in a big way. But Greek Americans won't make or break a film, let alone fuel a community media movement. Asian Americans may be larger in numbers but certainly, it's a disjointed community and even with 100% support (which won't exist anyway), we're talking...5-7%? That's good enough for phone companies to call my house, confusing my JA wife by trying to sell her long distance service in Mandarin. But that's not going to attract much interest by Sonyfoxwaltwarnerviaelectric to see after our needs for diverse representation.

I do agree that as more Asian American filmmakers, producers and movie execs rise in stature and influence, this could have some positive benefits for the community though, once again, the past reveals some uneven results. Wang, for example, was able to parlay the success of Joy Luck Club into a healthy career for himself but notably, up until this year, with his two new films based on the short stories of Oakland's Yiyun Li, he stopped making films dealing with explicit "Asian American content" for nearly 15 years (J.Lo romantic comedy though? Check!) I don't begrudge Wang that - by the time he made Smoke, Wang had made four significant Asian American films already so and creatively, I could see why he'd want to move onto something different.

Better Luck Tomorrow gave Justin Lin's career an immeasurable push, allowing him to direct two Hollywood flicks and he was able to parlay that back into his recent Asian American comedic feature, Finishing the Game. And, as he has noted, it was only because he was helming the movie that allowed him to cast Sung Kang in FF3, giving the movie some added "color" and an interesting Asian American anti-hero. However, the film has been rightfully criticized for having fairly limited portrayals of Asian women. One step forward, one step back?

My point is that we certainly need more Asian Americans in positions of media power but the road to greater diversity in our representations is likely to be fraught with bumps and dips along the way. And so this brings me back to the crux of my long-winded polemic:

You need to first start with a "good" film. That's obviously subjective but what I sense in Fang's argument is that the film's formal merits - narrative, acting, production design, etc. - are secondary. She asks: "how will we get funding for quality storylines if we won't even demonstrate our interest in films with Asians in front of and behind-the-scenes?" One of the commenters of her blog adds: "Until Asians become part of the mainstream film making, we should not be so critical of their work."

This may be classic cart vs. horse but shouldn't the more important question first be: does the actor or filmmaker deserve our interest to begin with? I'm not talking about Falling For Grace or the people who worked on it - I just mean any film. I can't see how blind support - absent any sense of quality control, let alone critical evaluation - is a helpful, progressive strategy.

My sister-in-law, who is Asian American, is a working actress and as supportive as I am for her and her career, that doesn't mean I automatically would cosign on any project she does, independent of considering its content or qualities (as I would with any project). Case in point: she was Fook Mi in Austin Powers: Goldmember, ok? I admit, when that movie pops up on television, I have that moment of, "oh cool, it's Di!" when she first shows up but that's then followed by, "man, I know this is Austin Powers and what not but the Japanese schoolgirl twins feel kind of icky to me." If I'm not about to cut the godmother of my daughter that degree of blind slack, I'm sure as hell not about to rally the community around any film project without some level of evaluation (let alone one with a weak trailer and middling reviews)[7].

The last point I want to make here is that if you look at the increase in the quantity of Asian American feature filmmaking, it is remarkable. I was on the film festival committee for the S.F. Int'l Asian American Film Festival from 2000 through 2006 and just in that time alone, the number of AA feature films has increased exponentially - so much so that in any given year - especially now - the number of feature film submissions to the festival is staggering.

Let me be very blunt in saying this: the vast majority of those submitted films are flat-out terrible[8]. We're talking bad enough to invoke a mercy rule during evaluation screenings. Do these films have well-meaning - even likable - Asian Americans directing/producing/acting in them? Absolutely.

Does this mean they are deserving of our support? Absolutely, positively not.

And this is telling: if a community-based media organization - whose entire raison d'etre is to support independent Asian American filmmaking - decides to pass on dozens of these projects, why would we ever expect "the community," as a whole, to get behind them?[9]

To me, there are so many opportunities to support Asian American films that if one happens to take an L -whether because it deserves to and just happens to be unlucky - it's not as if there won't be another one following behind it in a few weeks/months time. Personally, I'm left dizzy trying to keep up with what Angry Asian Man reports on in terms of new films. True, many of them still need distribution and that's still the golden threshold to cross. But again, not every AA film deserves distribution, at least based on the idea that it being AA is some how "good enough."

Ten years ago, seeing any kind of AA film in theaters was remarkable. These days, even though it isn't quotidian, it's hardly unusual either.

In other words, there's a lot out there to see.

Choose wisely. [10]

Notes:

AIWA

terrible

Life is Cheap...But Toilet Paper Is Expensive

SF Chron

Falling For Grace

In Between Days

Baby

Shanghai Kiss

Ken Leung

new

films

Finishing the Game

Undoing

Americanese

eight

I'M STILL HERE...NO, REALLY

2008-01-25T01:24:00.001-08:00

As you've likely noticed, my posting has been terrible but that's the nature of things given my time restraints. Rest assured, I still have plans (big plans!) for this site once, uh, I find some time to spend with it.

In the meantime, good 'ol Angry Asian Man is holding it down for the rest of us.

--o.w.

THE FUTURE OF ASIAN AMERICAN CINEMA...

2007-08-19T20:53:00.001-07:00

(ok, not really but I'll still go see this)

OUR MISSION

2007-07-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

In 2001, I was asked to write a short essay about Wayne Wang's CHAN IS MISSING and in it, I make the following statement:

"As a teacher, film festival junkie and general consumer of culture, I’ve sat through more Asian American shorts and features than I care to remember and practically all of them are forced to measure themselves besides Wang’s inaugural achievement. Most fail.

Six years later and I still believe in that sentiment. CHAN IS MISSING remains the finest Asian American feature narrative ever made and the fact that it is also the first should give us some pause.

Documentary work by Asian American filmmakers continues to get better; it has long been our community's strong point and the younger generation that have followed in the footsteps of Arthur Dong, Steven Okazaki, Loni Ding, Spencer Nakasako and Renee Tajima (just to name a few) have not disappointed. Likewise, those lucky enough to see shorts programs by Asian American filmmakers get to see some incredibly promising examples of up-and-coming talent.

But narrative features have been a different story. I've often wondered why, as we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of CHAN, it hasn't been knocked off its perch yet. Certainly, CHAN is an excellent piece of filmmaking - creative, daring, thoughtful and entertaining - but its long reign is also reflective of how challenging it's been to create good Asian American narratives with interesting characters, intelligent scripts, compelling storytelling, etc.

This isn't to say that the last quarter century has been bereft of talent besides Wayne Wang. Filmmakers from Justin Lin to Romeo Candido, Alice Wu to Ian Gomazon, Grace Lee to Greg Pak, Eric Byler to Jon Moritsugu - just to name a few - have turned out exceptional work...

...but...

...none of it has managed to dislodge the singular achievement of CHAN. True, the production quality gets better, the look slicker, the treatments more ambitious but somehow, the basics of visual storytelling and scripting haven't gelled in such a way to raise the proverbial bar. There have been many good movies, a handful of great movies, but it still hasn't been enough.

I created Chasing Chan as both a love letter to Asian American cinema as well as a forum for critique and engagement. I love Asian American filmmaking as a creative form, for its potential, for its imagination. But at the same time, I find myself, time and time again, wanting more from it, expecting something beyond qualifiers such as "that's wasn't bad for an Asian American film" (and let's be honest: we've all said that at some point).

The site catalogs most of the interviews, reviews and features I've written on Asian American film over the years and will fold in new pieces as they come out. I, by no means, am suggesting that I am a definitive expert on the subject or that I contain a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of the topic. There are far, far more capable Asian American film scholars and writers than I.

However, even though my body of cultural criticism is typically associated with music, Asian American film is something I've spent a great deal of time thinking and musing about and given the general paucity of information on Asian American cinema out there (aside from the sites I link in the sidebar), I wanted to collect what I have done and make it available as well as use the site to push some of my own thinking and encourage engagement (both my own and that of the readers') with the ever-growing body of Asian American filmmaking out there. Hopefully, I can be candid and forthright, as well as insightful and enjoyable, in tackling this broad creative practice.

My hope is to build this into a site that will prove to be both informative and provocative as Asian American filmmaking matures past its quarter century mark. After all, the grand desire is not in documenting the chase after CHAN, but in finding the work that might yet overtake it.

Oliver Wang
July 2007
Los Angeles

INTERVIEW: JUSTIN LIN (CINEVUE)

2007-07-16T00:48:00.000-07:00

Preface: Seems like I end up interviewing Justin every five years: I did it in 1997, on my then-radio show in Berkeley, I had another set of interviews in 2002, around Better Luck Tomorrow and ACV asked me to interview him for their program for the 2007 N.Y. Int'l Asian American Film Festival.

A lot had changed since our last conversation, to say the least...namely $175,000,000 in global gross for the two studio films Justin had worked on since BLT. Yet, I found him to still be refreshingly down to earth, candid and self-aware (to the point of being a little self-conscious). It's always a pleasure to talk with him about his work as well as the general state of Asian American cinema.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared in Asian Cinevision's Cinevue).

My first interview with Justin Lin was in 1997, when he and Quentin Lee were promoting their debut feature film, SHOPPING FOR FANGS. Along with Rea Tajiri (STRAWBERRY FIELDS, HISTORY AND MEMORY), the three chatted about the state of Asian American filmmaking in a cramped studio at KALXFM in Berkeley, CA. At one point I asked if they, as independent filmmakers, would ever consider doing a studio film. Justin replied, half-joking, half-serious: “If I had the chance to make MIGHTY DUCKS 6, I would make the best MIGHTY DUCKS 6 I can.”

When Justin and I sat down in a Silverlake café a decade later, two unlikely things had happened in the intervening years. 1) The Mighty Ducks, now called the Anaheim Ducks, had just won the Stanley Cup a few weeks prior and 2) Justin had indeed directed a sports film for Disney: the boxing flick, ANNAPOLIS, in 2004.

The success of Justin Lin has come as a surprise, not least of all to Justin himself. Since the release of 2003’s BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, he has become the premier Asian American filmmaker, balancing both major studio films (ANNAPOLIS, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT) and independent features, such as this year’s FINISHING THE GAME. Ten years ago, he was still in film school, editing documentaries for the Japanese American National Museum. Five years ago, he was carrying six-figure debt and living off oatmeal dinners. Today, his last three films have collectively made nearly $175,000,000. That dramatic turnaround is how we opened our conversation.

ACV: It occurred to me that it’s been five years since our last interview—not since BETTER LUCK TOMORROW. At the time, doors were starting to open for you and you had certain ideas and ideals about what you wanted to see happen. How close have your vision and your reality coincided?

JL: Having been through film school, you do sit around and you talk a lot. Now that I’ve lived it, I realize...unless you actually get in these (board)rooms, everything is assumption and speculation. I’ve been to enough film festivals and it’s always funny when you talk in speculation like “Oh, would you go do a studio movie?” as if you go to Sundance, everything’s (waiting for you) over there. It’s not, it doesn’t work that way.

ACV: You made BETTER LUCK TOMORROW in 2002, promoted it through 2003, then started ANNAPOLIS in 2004. How dramatic a shift was it going between those two films?

JL: Oh, it was very different because, you know, studio films are market-driven, they’re marketing-driven. You’re talking about (brand)…and my first studio movie was with Disney and you talk about branding…logic doesn’t play in branding, it doesn’t. And these are things that I didn’t understand. I mean, I understood the general idea of what a studio film is, but when you’re fighting branding, that’s a whole other thing… It wasn’t even called ANNAPOLIS when I signed up, it was called THE BRIGADE and it was a boxing movie and somehow the trailer ended up having exploding battleships and stuff.

ACV: You probably didn’t have to make the same compromises with your indie films.

JL: I would say at the end of the day it’s the same thing, two hours of someone’s time projected on screen, but at the same time, it’s completely different, and it’s different agendas of why these films were made. And for me it’s always been trying to find that sweet spot where, in my life I’ve never been creative without worrying about how am I going to pay rent next month, and I wanted to hopefully put myself in a position where I can be creative without thinking “Oh my God, how am I going to…” But it is a totally different way of filmmaking, it’s packaging, and I think as a young filmmaker going into that world, you don’t have a lot of leverage except the fact that you can fight the fight and you try to pick the right situation, the right people, but even then, you’re not going to be perfect.

ACV: Did it feel overwhelming at all?

JL: No, more frustrating at times. Honestly, it was pretty amazing to walk on set that first day and that first day, I remember, was the big “academy scene.” It was like a thousand extras, and you realize (for) lunch, “I’m going to spend the whole budget of BETTER LUCK TOMORROW.” So, it is, in that sense, I was more in awe but having come from the indie world, that’s nothing. I think when you’re somehow trying to trick the police into staying a little longer so you can get your car shots, that’s pressure.

ACV: You had great critical buzz coming out of BETTER LUCK TOMORROW but ANNAPOLIS was more or less savaged by the critics. How was that experience?

JL: When I signed up for it, there was something that really attracted me to it and I wanted to make a Disney kind of sports movie, but... I know as an independent filmmaker, when you come out of nowhere and (critics) support you, they expect you to continue and make this unique voice. But I didn’t want that (expectation) to be my deciding factor. So I knew that going in, and I’ve seen that those films aren’t well reviewed as a whole. But it is hard, you’re a human being and it got personal, at times it did feel like an ambush and I didn’t realize that my name was going to be the thing. When you read reviews about movies like ANNAPOLIS usually they’ll just say “the movie sucks” whatever, but I was amazed at how much of the focus was on me.

I learned a lot about accountability, because at the end of the day … if you hate the movie, I’m accountable. I don’t care if I had to put certain scenes in it …because that was the mandate of the brand, it’s still on me. I don’t work for Disney, I made that movie, I got the title as director, so everything that came and people want to bash me, it’s on me. I will take full accountability. But, I have to say, I feel that some of it was the situation of going from an edgy movie into a studio movie. And (ANNAPOLIS) wasn’t an edgy studio film, it was a very Disney sports movie.

ACV: Maybe this goes back to the MIGHTY DUCKS 6 joke from our 1997 interview but, in saying that you wanted to work on a Disney sports film, what is it about that genre that appealed to you?

JL: I felt like it grabbed me, it was like a fairy tale for guys. It was really about this working class kid who saw something and thought “Oh, if I go across the river, that’s my dream.” So it was actually my most personal movie. Because (with) BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, I was very removed, even the style is very removed in a way, and that was more of an observational piece because I’m not those kids. I didn’t grow up like those kids.

ACV: Let’s briefly talk about THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT, a.k.a. FF3. Did that come your way before or after ANNAPOLIS?

JL: Well, I’ll tell you why it came. ANNAPOLIS was getting all this buzz before it came out. When we finished it, the buzz was really hot. I was shooting in London and (Universal) tracked me down, and I turned (FF3) down, I didn’t want to do it because I read the script. Stacy Snider, the head of the studio, said, “You’re rejecting me for a summer movie? Why?” and I felt like it was an opportune time for me to say, “This is exactly how I feel.”

In the original script, first of all, it’s offensive, it’s dated and I had a lot of issues with it and she’s like, “Well, what would you do differently?” and I said, “Well, (in) Japan, you don’t draft temples and Buddhas and girls in kimonos and shit, it’s more post-modern than that.” I had all these ideas, and to her credit, she thought about it, she’s like “Well, then you’re the guy to take us there.” I remember I went home and thought “I don’t know” and then I remember, when I thought about it, it’s funny, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars but this is what tipped it over for me: I thought “Fuck it, I want to create a coolass Asian American male character that ten-year-old Justin would be like, Oh, that’s cool”—and that became the deciding factor for me.

The weekend I finally decided to do it, I was up in Seattle with my (then) girlfriend and she’s laughing at me because she said “Remember when we saw the first FF at the AMC Santa Monica and we both walked out going, “What the fuck, the Asian guys, what the fuck was that?” I was actually teaching a class in Asian American Studies and there were these kids doing a documentary about the rice rockets and I remember I was like, “Wow, that would be an amazing movie. This is a perfect environment to organically put Asian Americans in.” And what happens? They become like the gangsters. So, in a way, it was kind of cool too…in six or seven years’ time, to go back and at least to infuse, however you want to put it…there was an Asian American touch in this third one.

ACV: You’re talking especially about Han, the character played by Sung Kang. He was not in the original script?

JL: No. You can nitpick all you want, but that character has somehow resonated with certain people. We have been going to all these festivals, me, Sung and Roger (Fan). You see businesswomen running up to Sung, hugging him. You see little kids in Barstow, running up to him.

I was in Barcelona in February, I was doing the short for Sundance, and I went to the Picasso Museum and there was this field trip, Spanish junior high kids were walking by, and this kid walked up to me and he (motions like he’s steering a car) and is like “FAST AND THE FURIOUS?” I’m like, how does he know?

ACV: Yeah, it’s not like you’re in the film.

JL: And he couldn’t even speak English and he recognized me in Barcelona, this Spanish kid, not even an American kid, Spanish kid. So that’s the reach of that movie.

ACV: Speaking of issues of race, representation, and Asian America—let’s talk about FINISHING THE GAME. One of the things that I liked most about the film was how self-aware and affectionate it was to the experiences of Asian American actors. At times, it almost felt like a love letter to Asian Americans in Hollywood.

JL: Oh yeah, very much. I feel like that idea has been with me for a while but it felt like it was the right time for it to come out. We had just wrapped FAST AND THE FURIOUS and I just felt like that energy, I had to somehow articulate it. And having come from where we came from, which is very much film school, Asian American Studies and the film festivals, I felt like it was appropriate.

ACV: Did you always want to make this an independent film or did you think about shopping it to studios?

JL: I could have gotten a big budget and it could have been a kung fu movie right now. That’s what they wanted to make it into you know.

ACV: Which, to me, would really miss the point of the film.

JL: Yeah. The set-up is funny enough that they want to make it like KUNG-FU HUSTLE. They keep saying that, they want all these crazy…you can just see them salivating. And for me to pull back, you know as a business (decision), it’s not a good move, but I don’t give a shit.

ACV: This is sort of your first comedy you’ve worked on. I mean there were comedic elements to SHOPPING FOR FANGS but you’ve done three dramas in a row and this is the first comedy. What was it like doing a comedy for a change? A lot of people say it’s easier to write drama than comedy.

JL: Oh, comedy’s tough, because also comedy is very moody in screenings. It’s happened to me where I’ll watch a movie and maybe I’m having a bad day, like NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. I went to the Tastemakers screening at MTV and I remember I saw it and I came out and I was like, “this is fucking stupid.” And I really thought that and then a year later I saw it on TV and I was laughing non-stop. For it to shift–it’s so subjective and it is really tough. Drama, I think with filmmakers, there’s always this joke that if you want to take the easy road then you find something historic then you make the drama and you kill something, you know that’s always been the joke in film school. But with comedy you’re leaving yourself totally naked and that’s why, talk about being scared, that is the hardest thing. The thing that I loved about it is what comedy does come out of drama. There’s a lot we have to say but we don’t even have to openly say it and I feel that I’ve kind of grown with Roger and Sung and everybody now, these are things that we’ve experienced together too so to be able to bring that all, and to work on the subtext and everything, that was definitely a treat. It’s really more of a testament to them because I wanted the movie to have its own life and stylistically this is actually a harder movie to shoot than THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, design-wise.

ACV: You got to get the 70s hair right…

JL: But even in the camera movements, a lot of times to really get a sense of authenticity or sincerity you don’t want to over cut so the actors have to hit those beats.

ACV: How long have you had this basic idea for the film?

JL: Since I was 12. Remember KTLA, they had the Kung Fu Theatre? That’s how I grew up, but they never shot the real Bruce Lee they had Bruce Li? So I got introduced to Bruce Li and all that. As a kid you’re like “Whoa” with the Flying Guillotine and all that, you’re like “That is awesome.” But then I remember when I first saw ENTER THE DRAGON, that’s when you’re like, “This is another level, who is this guy?” That’s when VCRs were coming out, when I was introduced to it, and you went to CHINESE CONNECTION you watched that like “Wow.” Then you watched GAME OF DEATH and as a kid I was confused. I was like, “Who is this other guy walking around?” because I didn’t understand the concept of a body double.

ACV: But you knew it wasn’t him—that was clear.

JL: Yeah. Then through the years I found out the back stories of it but I was always fascinated by who that guy was and how he got the job. So it has been with me for a while. I even had ideas of making this movie in other forms than a documentary form.

ACV: Why a documentary format? You had said you played around with other kinds of styles of how you could have done it.

JL: I was making all these documentaries at the museum, that’s actually what I did before BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, I was making all these pieces and I was editing Nathan Adolfson’s doc (PASSING THROUGH), so I was editing a lot of docs. I really love documentaries but I realized it wasn’t for me. Documentary is always about using quantity and trying to find those spots and trying to go with those moments and then try to find quality. Narrative is totally different, you’re working differently. I’ve always loved the style of documentary so it was kind of the best of both worlds and also it gives it just enough of the sense of the whole self-reflexive elements to … not wink at the audience but get a sense that this is something that it might be in the seventies but it’s exactly the same. We’re still doing the same shit, nothing has changed.

ACV: I’m curious, and this sort of goes back to what I was saying before about the film being a kind of love letter, not just to contemporary Asian Americans in Hollywood but really historically, too. When George Takei shows up, it’s just genius in that respect.

JL: I remember my parents doing that mom n’ pop fish n’ chips (shop) and so we never had dinner until 10 pm, on school nights even. And I remember on KTLA, 11 pm, Star Trek comes on and you’re like, “Man, this guy’s got to get laid.” You just want to see him get laid, you know? You know Captain Kirk is fucking everyone and even Spock gets action. I think there’s one episode where he almost gets some.

ACV: One of the other films that really came to mind in watching this was Robert Townsend’s HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE—obviously thematically they’re really similar and also just the time periods. And both films are riffing on 70s films because Townsend’s dialoguiing with a lot of the blaxploitation that came out in the 70s and 80s. Was that much of an inspiration, or an influence, in terms of thinking of how to put yours together?

JL: I saw it so long ago, it might be subconsciously, I can’t totally say no. I remember seeing that, I remember when HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE came out I was like, “What are short ends?” I wasn’t in film school yet, I didn’t know what that meant but that was a big deal because he had made all the films. It’s always been an inspiration for me as a film maker but I think the 70s there’s something really–I love that period. And obviously this had to take place in the 70s and it gives it that look and that feel and I think it adds a lot more to the discourse.

ACV: What is it about the 70s that you like so much?

JL: For me, it’s interesting, because the 70s for me was in Taiwan so my 70s is always through media and stuff like that. I remember in Taiwan, my family would get together, because Taiwanese TV back then was only three hours a night and I remember we would get together and watch Dance Fever and that’s 70s to me. But having grown up here in the 80s I—I don’t know if it’s true or not—I always romanticize the 70s as that time that almost broke but then it didn’t. It went to the 80s and then the corporations took over and now we’re at this really weird post-modern (stage) where everything is being controlled. So the 70s for me is a sense of real liberation and being able to try anything you want and that’s a personal thing, I don’t know if it’s true or not.

ACV: It sounds like you’re nostalgic about this era that you never actually lived through but you have this idea of what it was like. In fact, more on a technical side, how did you pick the person who was basically responsible for the art direction and the personal styling, as well as the music?

JL: That’s Brian Tyler, he’s awesome. The fact is when you go and make Asian American movies, especially the ones that I want to make, and to have control, you go back to no-budget territory and FINISHING THE GAME is so connected to THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS you wouldn’t believe. Doing a period 70s movie for (our) budget is impossible. But because of my relationships, I was able to get the film for free pretty much, the camera from Panavision because I shoot all my studio movies Panavision so they gave me the camera for free. Universal would literally take me into pre-sets, load them, drive them to our set, leave them for us and we’d make them into our sets. I had guys at Universal calling—prop and wardrobe, getting all that for free. This is a labor of love and these are the connections you have, this is the reality of Asian American films.

One of the things I wanted to make sure of was, I wanted also to provide opportunities in this movie. Here’s what’s so great: I made really good friends with a lot my crew in the studio world to the point where they’re like “I don’t even need to get paid, if you shoot something, call me, I’m there for you” and I appreciate that but at the same time, I felt like this is a journey where we want to give opportunity to people. Like Greg Louie is this young guy who did cutting stuff for us and he’s a great editor. I just feel like, he just needs the opportunity, he has the talent. So instead of hiring other people, I gave the job to him. And Candi Guterres, who’s a very good production designer. Even down to the PAs. We would go to get students and stuff because those were the things that I never had. And to be honest, what fucking pisses me off, and this still happens—a lot of Asian Americans, when they make films, they’ll fucking pay the white crew and they won’t pay (the Asian Americans), they use the community guilt. They’ll pay the Asian American less or no money and they fucking hire white crews and pay them. Fuck that! This is a favored nation all the way across.

ACV: How difficult was it to be able to get that aesthetic down right to be as historically accurate-were those things that really mattered in terms of those things, making sure that the sense of the 70s was communicated as accurately as possible?

JL: Candi did an amazing job. That’s one of the things about that movie was, even if we had no money, I didn’t want the feeling of “Let’s mock the 70s!” If you watch the movie, hopefully, you get a sense of the characters that live in that environment, that exist in that environment. We’re not trying to make it more than it is, even though the 70s was very loud and had certain things. It was a fine balance and on a very shoestring budget she did an unbelievable job, I thought.

ACV: It’s true, especially with the 70s, that line between parody is so easy to cross over because there’s something about the 70s itself that is self-parodic.

JL: And I think that also that would be a disservice to the issues we’re trying to, even if we’re dealing with humor. Ultimately you want to feel like those characters did live in that time or else if you wink at the audience, you lose everything you’re trying to accomplish.

ACV: Now how did you cast for this film? Obviously you used, a lot of the people you’ve worked with in the past show up in there but in terms of everyone else who played a role in that?

JL: We did extensive casting and again, Brad Gilmore is this other young casting director, and really great guy and he found us. And you’re really only as strong as your weakest performance, right, and he did an amazing job of filling everything down to Breeze Loo’s parents and all these little roles.

ACV: Was Dustin Nguyen someone you had in mind for the role that he played? Or is that something that happened during the casting process?

JL: It happened during the pre-production of it. I didn’t know him and I found out later he was always trying to meet up but we just never crossed paths. Again, it was one of those instances and I won’t go into specifics but when I made that decision to go with the best people for the roles, he was the best for that role. And he’s also one of the best human beings I’ve ever met. It’s good to know that you can make friends while working sometimes.

ACV: It’s funny because when I think, or anyone thinks of Dustin Nguyen, at least anyone who knows his history, thinks 21 Jump Street. So when his character has that cop show, was that deliberate or just coincidence that his character and the actor playing him have that history? Sounds like it was a coincidence actually.

JL: In that case it was more of a coincidence. Obviously he was, when I was looking at the names, you’re like “Well, he would be perfect.” At certain points I thought, “Is it too obvious?” But it was far removed enough that I felt that it worked.

ACV: It’s been a while since I’ve seen him in a film. To me he really was the pathos, the heart of it. For a comedy he was the one who had some sort of emotional tragedy.

JL: He got it. I’m so glad that he’s in it.

ACV: We’ve been talking about Sung Kang throughout. Of all the actors, especially those that you worked with on BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, his career has really blossomed the most in terms of he’s gotten the most high profile work since then. A friend of mine recently told me about WAR, that new movie with Jet Li that he plays a role in as well. What drew you to work with Sung to begin with? Did you know him previous to BETTER LUCK TOMORROW?

JL: I didn’t know him. Actually for that role of Han, we were looking and there weren’t that many that had kind of attitude. It’s funny, he came last, at the very end. He came in and I remember I was like “Whoa, this is the guy.” But he had this crazy manager that was like “No! You have to get the lead only because it’s a no-budget movie!” I was like “You want to play Ben?!?” So he actually came in for Ben because his manager was like “You’re not going to get paid, so you got to be the lead!” Which makes no sense. And he did an amazing job as Ben but he was obviously Han.

ACV: This is a whole film about Asian American actors–male actors–out on audition and even though it’s a parody of that process, I imagine a lot of the jokes hit home.

JL: Oh yeah, there’s times on there where it was like, I could feel the pain and it’s almost like therapy for all of us.

ACV: Because they’re sort of playing the role they’re actually forced to do in real life, right? To audition for stuff?

JL: Oh man, if you talk to the actors, it is so funny how before BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, those guys hated each other because they didn’t know each other. All they knew from each other was that they would go into these rooms and they were all there. It took a while, it was awesome to see them all grow and they were like “You know what? We shouldn’t act like enemies, because we should go in there and be who we are.” It was amazing for people to see them grow and to be a part of that. Now, when we travel everywhere, we’re like a family and that means a lot.

ACV: So your films have had very interesting, very compelling Asian male characters. If I may say, I don’t think that same can be said for the female characters that you have done, and I’m wondering, do you find it harder to write female characters?

JL: Look, you’re driven by ideas and this is also a town that when you’re good at doing something, they don’t want you to do anything else. Believe me I’ve actually been looking, and it’s hard to get into these rooms to do movies with lead female characters because after BETTER LUCK TOMORROW I was like the ‘male’ guy. I would also go talk and people would accuse me of “Why didn’t you have Asian American females?” and I’d be like, “Well that movie is not about Asian American females, what do you want me to do?” That movie is a very specific Asian American male perspective. I can only try and serve the idea. I have a couple projects and I feel like it’s going to be up to me, if I feel like I’m compelled enough I’m going to have to go indie again to prove that I can make a movie with female characters.

ACV: Is that what you want to do, that sort of female-centric?

JL: Of course. But if you look at Hollywood as a whole, there’s not a lot of female movies. So I feel like I get it, hopefully we can have this conversation 5 or 10 years from now and my works will show it. Because I’m only as good as the body of work.

ACV: Speaking of which, the obvious comparison to your balance of studio films and independent films would be Wayne Wang. Have you interacted with him much?

JL: I actually got a call from Wayne Wang a few months ago and he’s like, “Let’s have dinner,” so I flew up to San Francisco and we had dinner and we just talked but it struck me and I actually got kind of emotional. We weren’t talking about the film business but he’s the only other guy who can understand a little of what we go through. [?]

ACV: I’m really curious because I was actually going to ask you later on in terms of using Wayne Wang as this model of comparison, but what did you guys talk about during that conversation?

JL: It wasn’t really about any—because he had wanted to do an indie no-budget and I’m always up for it so we were just going to hang out it wasn’t really anything concrete or anything. It was an amazing call because I watched his stuff when I was in film school and when I was in college and to be able to just hang out. We went to this hole-in-the-wall and had Chinese food. It was nothing really verbal but you just got the sense that when we talked about oh, studio this and that there are a lot of things unsaid and you just get it.

ACV: I want to close with bringing this back not just to FINISHING THE GAME but the same conversation we’ve had the last two times we’ve talked, in the different eras. I think your film comes out of a really interesting time in American history. Let’s just start by talking about Bruce Lee, you said at other interviews, you said at the CAAM Festival that growing up he was kind of this double-edged sword because on the one hand his presence and his physicality crushed some stereotypes but also created this whole other set of stereotypes so there’s this whole duality that you’re stuck with. Not to make too bad of a pun here but I think of the battle in the hall of mirrors when you smash one mirror but you still have another fourteen that you’re framed in. In the end do you see him as more of a positive source or does it end up balancing, a sort of wash, what he contributed in that sense?

JL: I think it’s totally positive. As long as he was doing what he loved and he was passionate. If you want to be Long Duc Dong, go be the best Long Duc Dong. There’s going to be consequences, obviously, to what you do but it also should drive me if I have a problem with that then I should go and create other representation in the media. Ultimately it’s not about censorship, it’s not about let’s not do this, let’s do this; it’s about being free to do whatever we want, and then people can judge. I think that’s so important. Obviously I have personal feelings when I see someone doing some buck-toothed joke and I’m like, that’s fucking bullshit, but at the same time if that person is Asian American and they really want to do it I actually want to support them fully as an artist. Because if I have a problem with that then I should go and create something. It’s like the Han (character) in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, personally, that means a lot to me. We all have different values and systems but I think ultimately it’s about quantity, if we can have all these different points of view, perspectives, if all these filmmakers can go out and make movies—cause what’s our cinema right now? It’s still in its infancy, there’s not that much point of view. Ultimately I just want to support everybody. Whatever you want to do, go fucking do it. That’s the idea.

ACV: The Asian American film community has grown insanely much bigger than ten years ago when it was amazing to have four films, now we have sixteen and no one blinks an eye. Do you still pay a lot of attention to a lot of other Asian American films? You do the festival circuit: do you get a lot of opportunity to see them?

JL: I try to, it’s hard.

ACV: It’s hard, there is a lot to see.

JL: There’s a lot. I hate to say this but ultimately it’s going to come down to branding. When we did BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, the grassroots campaign, it’s such a mouthful when we’re saying, “Look, it’s not about supporting this movie because you’re Asian and we’re Asian, it’s about taking that five minutes to look at the trailer, look at the reviews and judge it.” Right away people think you’re telling me to support it because you’re Asian and that gets so cluttered. I think it becomes the boy who cried wolf syndrome. No one likes to be like, “I’m supposed to support you because we look the same?” It has to come down to some sort of quality control.

Still, it’s an exciting time now. Sometimes when you get too close, when you get in these rooms and you really learn how the business is done, you see how sometimes the discourse out there is kind of off. Because everybody has that agenda. I guess just as an Asian American film viewer I just want to see more stuff like (Richard Wong’s) COLMA: THE MUSICAL.

ACV: I was reading the O.C. Register and saw that you were able to retire your parents. I’m very curious, when you first expressed an interest in going into filmmaking were they supportive of that?

JL: Yeah. I mean I wanted to go the NBA so….

ACV: They’re like “Any alternative…”

JL: They’re fucking crazy and goofy. I love them because whatever I wanted to do, they never said no. They’ve always said go for it as long as you work hard and love what you do. And that’s something that they instilled in me. I really appreciate that. That’s a crazy thing to say, “I want to go to film school”--I didn’t even know what that meant. It’s good to be able, after twenty-six years, to shut them down, take care of them. Say whatever you want about FAST AND THE FURIOUS, I was able to retire (them) before I was thirty-five. They worked every day, except for Thanksgiving, for twenty-six years.

ACV: What’s the horizon?

JL: Because of the independent stuff I’m doing I have to somehow pay the bills. Somehow I started doing commercials and now I’ve become the car guy, it’s the funniest thing. These last two weeks, like, Cadillac is launching the new CTS and they want me to do the whole campaign, Honda is doing the Accord they want me to do—and I just find it funny because I’m not into cars at all.

ACV: I got to ask this because we’re in L.A. and you’re doing two car commercials: what do you drive?

JL: Oh, I have a (Infiniti) G35. I sold my truck, my Ford Ranger, to finish BETTER LUCK TOMORROW. I was so lucky because Quentin, who’s such a good friend, gave me his old Honda to drive ‘cause I had no car. Finally when I was able to almost get out of debt I was like man, I grew up driving Pontiacs and crap cars, Buicks, so Roger Fan was like, “You got to!” And so I got the G35 and it’s so awesome because when you do THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS…they totally pimped out my ride, I have these rims, they look pretty cool. I didn’t know how cool they were but when I go to a gas station kids will be like staring at my rims.

FEATURE: THE CLASS OF 1997

2007-03-01T21:47:00.000-08:00

Preface: I wrote this essay for the 2007 SFIAFF Program. I was very thankful and honored that CAAM allowed me to write it...I was a little late in sending them the idea but as it turned out, they had planned to write something about the 10 year anniversary of the famed Class of '97.

The essay itself lays out what made that year so significant but to add a personal note that doesn't appear there: 1997 wasn't my first SFIAAFF but it came during the same semester I took the Asian American Film/Video course at UC Berkeley (taught by Spencer Nakasako) and it was one of the first years that I practically lived at the Kabuki during that week (or so it felt).

It was, to be sure, an amazing time to be witness to what was happening within Asian American cinema and as cliche as it sounds, that sense of change was in the air everywhere you went during that week. In hindsight, it doesn't seem any less momentous - '97 was a crucial watershed. The fact that it came 15 years after Chan Is Missing is a coincidence but a significant one at that especially since the next important year would be five years later, in 2002, when Better Luck Tomorrow and Charlotte Sometimes screened (amongst others).

THE FEATURE (originally appeared in the 2007 SFIAFF Catalog).

Class of 1997: 10 Years Later

Six filmmakers, four narrative features, one year. The Class of 1997 comprised Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s SHOPPING FOR FANGS, Rea Tajiri’s STRAWBERRY FIELDS, Michael Idemoto and Eric Nakamura’s SUNSETS and Chris Chan Lee’s YELLOW. The arrival of this quartet in time for the ’97 SFIAAFF may have just been coincidence, but looking at the long-term evolution of Asian American independent filmmaking, it’s as if a critical mass had been waiting to coalesce.

The mid-’90s were a transitional time for Asian American narrative cinema. The most influential director of the ‘80s, Wayne Wang, had moved away from Asian American themes following 1993’s JOY LUCK CLUB. There were several new filmmakers filling in the gap, notably Canada’s Mina Shum (DOUBLE HAPPINESS, 1994) and the late Kayo Hatta (PICTURE BRIDE, 1995) but much of the Class of 1997 was comprised of an even younger, emergent generation. Lee, Lin and Lee all came almost directly out of major film schools. Cousins Idemoto and Nakamura were amateur, first-time filmmakers. Even the cohort’s “senior” member, acclaimed experimental/documentary director Tajiri, was still in her thirties.

More importantly, their films suggested that Asian American cinema was at a key thematic crossroads. Though STRAWBERRY FIELDS and YELLOW ostensibly dealt with familiar topics around the traumas of the past and family tensions of the present, they were a leap forward in artistic style and storytelling. Likewise, though SHOPPING FOR FANGS was a film about identity starring an all-Asian American cast, race and ethnicity were barely present in favor of more humorous and existential explorations of self. Following a trio of youth whiling away their summer, SUNSETS had virtually no Asian American themes whatsoever, but its depictions of suburban/rural ennui had a more universal appeal. Collectively, the four films marked a moment where the older traditions of Asian American filmmaking were being shed to make room for new, exciting and imaginative ideas, styles and stories.

Symbolic import aside, the 1997 SFIAAFF also helped plant the seeds for future groundbreaking projects. It was at this Festival where Justin Lin first met YELLOW star Jason Tobin, whom he later cast in a scene-stealing role for BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2002). Likewise, aspiring filmmaker Eric Byler and writer Jeff Liu met actress Jacqueline Kim at the Festival and the three drove back to Los Angeles, brainstorming what would eventually become Byler’s debut, CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES (2002), a film that also starred SUNSETS’ Michael Idemoto. The Festival also saw John Cho star in both YELLOW and SHOPPING FOR FANGS; he’s since become one of the most prolific Asian American actors in Hollywood.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of how the Class of ’97 signaled a momentous change is how unextraordinary it’s become for the SFIAAFF to host any number of Asian American narrative features (this year boasts 12 in competition). Over the last decade, there’s been a blossoming of dozens of up-and-coming directors including Alice Wu (SAVING FACE), Tanuj Chopra (PUNCHING AT THE SUN), Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana (CAVITE), and So Yong Kim (IN BETWEEN DAYS). Never before has the Asian American cinescape been so broad or diverse.

Yet despite that expanding scope, the most powerful moments are often the smallest. My favorite memory from the 1997 SFIAAFF came at the back of the theater during the sold-out world premiere of SUNSETS. As the credits began to roll, Idemoto and Nakamura, standing behind the seat rows, hugged one another, yelling “we did it, we did it!” It was a personal moment that went unnoticed by most of the audience still staring forward but in a sense, the two were celebrating for all of us. The labor and challenges of making the if lm were, of course, theirs, but in contributing to such an important, watershed moment, the pride and exhilaration for their accomplishment
was ours as well.

—Oliver Wang

Oliver Wang served on the SFIAAFF Screening Committee from 2000 through 2005. He is
currently a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and cultural critic living in Los Angeles.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

• Michel Idemoto both directed and starred in the ensemble feature O.B.I.T.S. (1998) and was the lead in Eric Byler’s CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES (2002).

• Chris Chan Lee has directed television in Asia, and produced several films in the U.S. His second feature, UNDOING (2006), screens in this year’s Festival.

• Quentin Lee runs the production company Margin Films, and directed both DRIFT (2000) and ETHAN MAO (2004).

• Justin Lin has directed BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2002), ANNAPOLIS (2006), and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT (2006). His latest fi lm, FINISHING THE GAME
(2007), screens on Opening Night at this year’s Festival.

• Eric Nakamura continues to run Giant Robot Magazine as well as its related publishing and retail ventures.

• Rea Tajiri continues to practice and teach filmmaking at schools such as UCLA, NYU, Columbia and CalArts.

PHOTO BY PAMELA GENTILE: FRONT (L–R) JUSTIN LIN, REA TAJIRI, QUENTIN LEE
BACK (L–R) CHRIS CHAN LEE, ERIC NAKAMURA, MICHAEL IDEMOTO

REVIEW: HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004)

2004-07-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent

Preface: A generation ago, the debate around whether this film qualifies as "Asian American" would probably have been far fiercer but despite the fact that Danny Leiner is White, it's hard to argue that a film starring not one but two Asian American male leads deserves some place in the Asian American pantheon (at least ahead of Come See the Paradise!) This film actually gets better with each new watching even though you its juvenile sexism is just that - but this is a surprisingly subtle and rather subversive take on masculinity and race that isn't politically perfect by any means but certainly is more than "just" a stoner film with two Asian dudes at the helm.

THE REVIEW (originally published on Popmatters.com).

See also: Harold and Kumar website.

REVIEW: EAT A BOWL OF TEA (1989)

2004-03-18T22:15:00.000-08:00

Buy | Rent

Preface: Fitting somewhere between a romantic comedy and historical drama, I originally had thought of Eat a Bowl of Tea as being more or less fluff but I later realized it was much more sophisticated and well-executed than I originally gave it credit for. As I mention my original 2003 review of the DVD, it's also been a favorite of my students, not the least of which is because it's one of the rare Asian American films of the pre-'97 era that really dealt with with Asian American sex and romance. Personally, of Wang's Asian American quadrology, it probably isn't as poignant as Dim Sum but in terms of personal enjoyment, it comes in after Chan Is Missing.

THE REVIEW (originally published on Popmatters.com).

REVIEW: THE DEBUT (2001)

2003-10-07T00:34:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent | Book

Preface: I have great admiration and affection for director Gene Cajayon. More so than even most Asian American films, The Debut was a true labor of love (emphasis on labor) and I know how hard he struggled to bring this film to light. That said, I've also always been candid with some of my critiques of the film. The two most important, in my opinion, are very much interrelated. Firstly, the film is more or less a Filipino take on the familiar family melodrama model that so many Asian American films have followed and while one cannot fault any community their desire to tell their own version of that story, when cast against the wider backdrop of Asian American cinema, the film can feel formulaic without necessarily even meaning too.

Related to that is the "kitchen sink" effect, which means that this film - like many others - feels like it was burdened by the need to represent as much about "the community" as possible and as such, becomes overladen in scenes or other signifiers that, after a while, can feel trite or obligatory.

I think almost all "first" Asian American films for specific communities will inevitably feel this pressure and I don't envy any filmmaker (especially those seeking funding from said communities) having to deal with the many layers of expectations put upon them in trying to balance their vision with a sense of responsibility they may feel to the very people they're hoping to craft these stories for. The hope is that by the time you get to the next project, that pressure has been more or less lifted and you can really start telling the stories you want to tell...uncompromised by a sense of duty or obligation.

THE REVIEW (originally appeared on Popmatters.com).

See also: The Debut website.

INTERVIEW: ERIC BYLER

2003-05-08T00:35:00.000-07:00

Preface: I originally interviewed Byler for NAATA/CAAM but had enough left-over material that I also pitched parts of it to Popmatters.com. Alas, the original NAATA interview is no longer available - I'll try retrieving it from my own archives at some point though this Popmatters interview covers most of the same bases.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared on Popmatters.com).

REVIEW: CHARLOTTE SOMETIMES (2003)

2003-05-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent

Preface: I confess - the first time I watched this film, my initial reaction was, "wtf?" and I was a little annoyed at how Byler deliberately withheld information from the audience that would have made the narrative easier to access. But the next day, I was still haunted by the film and I realized that I had missed the point. As my review indicated, Byler evokes a powerful mood with this film and though the narrative might not be spelled out for the viewer, it succeeds very well in leaving a lasting impression on the viewer. Five years later, I now think of the film as one of the strongest debuts of any Asian American director and it, along with Better Luck Tomorrow, is an intriguing template for the post-'97 Asian American film in terms of new ways of handling the politics of identity.

THE REVIEW (originally appeared on Popmatters.com).

See also: An interview with Eric Byler (originally for Popmmaters.com).

Charlotte Sometimes website.

REVIEW: BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2003) (POPMATTERS.COM)

2003-04-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent

Preface: This was a joint review written by myself and Hua Hsu and really arose out of the year-long conversations that accompanied the fast rise of BLT, the community campaign around it and just the general "moment" it heralded. It's not a conventional review - it's a back-and-forth conversation between Hua and I. For the more conventional review, see my original AsianAvenue.com piece.

THE REVIEW (originally appeared in Popmatters.com).

See also: Better Luck Tomorrow review for AsianAvenue.com.

REVIEW: BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2003) (ASIANAVENUE.COM)

2003-03-01T00:31:00.000-08:00

Buy | Rent

Preface: This review was originally written for AsianAvenue.com but no longer exists on their site. As you can see with both this and the Popmatters review (see below), there's much more ambivalence about the film now that it actually came out and I think that's a fair bargain. Most of my critiques of the film existed when I first saw it but I was more invested in helping promote its wider release first before pointing out where I felt it fell short.

See also: Better Luck Tomorrow review for Popmatters.com.

THE REVIEW (in full after jump).

Tomorrow Arrives Today

By Oliver Wang

Within Asian American cinema, there’ve been films labeled “important” films, but the label usually hides the fact that they’re not very good. There have been “important” Asian American films that help the community articulate its silenced issues or gain ground in Hollywood, but to be brutally honest, many – if not most – have suffered formally. In other words, they lack basic cinematic qualities such as interesting writing, compelling acting, efficient editing, etc.

I’ve heard people remark, “oh, it was pretty good for an Asian American film”, which is about as damning with faint praise as you can get. At the same time, I understand the feeling. There are many decent films from our community – Lin’s first effort Shopping For Fangs or Mina Shum’s Double Happiness were both good movies, just to name two from the last ten years. But in terms of unequivocally great films, that list is far, far shorter. Chan Is Missing still occupies the top slot, which is sadly ironic since that film ushered in the era of Asian American features but no one since has been able to top Wang’s brilliant mesh of quirky, genre-twisting narrative, true-to-life characters and provocative social commentary.

Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow is the first film in this long, lonely hiatus that’s generated enough hype to represent a potential sea-change. Sundance patrons, including Roger Ebert, loved it. MTV Films signed it. The buzz is deafening and much of it is well-earned., There’s never been an Asian American film like it. This tale of overachievers turned amateur criminals takes every image of Asian American teens we’ve ever seen, pushes it over, and then gleefully stomps on whatever’s left. It probably sounds antiquated and academic to talk about positive or negative“media images” in 2003, but after two decades of generation gap and immigrant story films, it’s genuinely refreshing to watch a movie that doesn’t feel like an Asian American Studies lesson. Instead, BLT profiles a train wreck of masculinity issues that Asian American men struggle with: self-image, aggression, sexuality, privilege.

All of this makes Better Luck Tomorrow a compelling film, an important film but I’ve struggled to determine whether or not BLT is a great film – by Asian American or anyone’s standards. In all honesty, the film suffers from many of the formal qualities I noted earlier. In the film festival version I saw (which is slightly different than the theatrical release), the storytelling felt sluggish and uneven, in need of tighter, snappier editing. I thought some of the acting was superb, especially Jason Tobin as Virgil, a hyperactive firecracker that Tobin plays with an impressive blend of abandon and vulnerability. On the other hand, Parry Shen plays Ben, the lead protagonist, but he can’t generate the kind of charisma his character needs to earn our empathy. Likewise, I felt like Karin Anna Cheung’s role as Stephanie Vandergosh – the lead and lone female in this mostly male brigade – was wasted as her character was thinly written and more a placeholder than genuine person.

Of course, as many have noted, if BLT aspires to be a rollicking teens-gone-bad film, who really cares about the pacing or character arc? The thing is though, I don’t think BLT is meant to be the yellow-ized version of Larry Clark’s Bully or Roger Avary’s Rules of Attraction. It aspires to be a thinking person’s film. Lin does a marvelous job of leaving us feeling complicit for enjoying the spiraling rampage that unfolds before us. The film’s embrace of amorality isn’t flaunted as an act of pride but is meant to genuinely provoke debate and dialogue. Some argue that because BLT doesn’t deal in any of the usual “Asian American issues”, i.e. identity politics, parental-child conflict, etc. it’s actually a color-blind/race-less film but that’s far from the truth. That Lin wrote the film with an all-Asian cast in mind is not just charity for hard-luck actors but a deliberate attempt to rattle popular perceptions of Asian American personalities.

I’m left to say that BLT is a film well worth watching – which I plan to again and I encourage everyone to do the same. This is an unprecedented opportunity for Asian American film to step forward into the mainstream. Moreover, it forces everyone – Asian American or otherwise – to reconsider what we know of one another and ourselves and that’s an achievement in itself. In saying this, I don’t ignore the movie’s flaws and I don’t think this, or any film for that matter, is worthy of uncritical support. Better Luck Tomorrow is, however, a film deserving of intelligent and judicious support. Indeed, this is a movie that surely expects nothing less.

INTERVIEW: DARRELL HAMAMOTO

2003-02-22T22:41:00.000-08:00

Preface: I interviewed Professor Darrell Hamamoto right around the time when news about his Asian American porn film, Yellowcaust and the related documentary, Masters of the Pillow was starting to make its rounds. I've never actually reviewed the film - mostly because, at the time, I wrote up the description for it in the SFIAFF catalog and couldn't subsequently review it at the time. One of these days, I'll get around to it.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared on AsianAvenue.com)

INTERVIEW: JUSTIN LIN (MOTHER JONES)

2002-09-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

Preface: This was the last of my three Better Luck Tomorrow-related interviews with Justin Lin in 2002.

THE INTERVIEW (originally appeared in Mother Jones).

INTERVIEW: JUSTIN LIN (ASIANAVENUE.COM)

2002-02-28T23:54:00.000-08:00

Preface: This two-part interview originally was conducted for AsianAvenue.com but has since been "lost" on the site. I'm reprinting it, in full, after the jump. Both were done following the big Sundance debacle but Part 2 was conducted right after MTV Films announced that they were picking up the film for distribution.

THE INTERVIEW.

Buzzworthy: An Interview with Director Justin Lin

Justin Lin went into the famed Sundance Film Festival a relative unknown and came out as one of the most talked about filmmakers there. No less than Roger Ebert – the most recognized film critic in the country, if not the world – has written about him and his new film, Better Luck Tomorrow and Lin has gone from being known mostly just in Asian American circles to potentially becoming the next indie film chosen one.

Lin’s previous film, 1997’s Shopping For Fangs (directed by Quentin Lee) was a critical hit among Asian American film festival patrons, but distribution woes hampered its wider release. For his new Better Luck Tomorrow- a story about a group of well-to-do Asian American students who descend into crime and murder – Lee took a major risk in cleaning out his life savings and maxing out his credit cards – not to mention enlisting the funding aid of (MC) Hammer - to pay for this independent feature.

While at Sundance though, a storm of controversy brewed as some viewers – unhappy at the movie’s dark edge and subject matter, attacked Lin for both misrepresenting Asian Americans as well as encouraging youth violence. To his defense came no less than two of the most visible film critics in the country: the NY Times’ Elvis Mitchell and Roger Ebert – the latter of whom used his January 18th column in the Chicago Sun-Times to write about Lin’s film and the need to support it over politically correct paranoia. AsianAvenue.Com spoke with Justin right after he got back from his whirlwind Sundance adventure.

Oliver Wang: I just have to open this by asking – MC Hammer helped fund the film? How did that come about?

Justin Lin: I ran into him in Vegas and we started talking and got to know each other. It was amazing – it’s almost like he was an angel. I called him, he asked “how much do you need” and boom boom, he wired the money within minutes. He never even signed any paperwork and I’m still trying to get his money back but I can’t get a hold of him. He saved the movie.

O: Getting to Sundance - it sounds like things got out of control. I heard that at two different screenings, people literally got into shouting matches in either attacking or defending Better Luck Tomorrow.

J: It’s amazing, if you were in that room, people were so pumped up. It was amazing having two of the top critics in the country [defend the film]. Usually critics just watch movies but they felt so passionate that they had to stand up and voice their opinions. After the Ebert thing, within five minutes, it was going down Main Street, it was buzzing all over the place. It was definitely a Sundance moment.

O: Did you anticipate this kind of passionate response to your film?

J: The whole point of [the film] was to stir things up a little bit, stay true to the characters and to deal with this issue [of youth violence]. This film should open up questions, should be something that you don’t walk out, five minutes and forget about it. You should think about, hopefully, a day or two and you talk to people about it. It’s all about discourse.

O: As one of the few Asian American directors let in the door – so to say – at Sundance, how did you feel about this swirl of publicity?

J; The great thing we found out is that, you go to Sundance, the Asian American contingent is quite small. But this was pretty much one of the biggest buzz films there and it was incredible. As an Asian American filmmaker, I feel like we kind of crossed a threshold. The first thing out of their mouths wasn’t, “oh this was a great Asian American [film]”. People really related to it, our actors walking down the street, just getting stopped signing autographs, taking pictures. People just went across the color lines. They see it for a couple of minutes and they forget [it’s an Asian Ameican film] and people can relate to it, it has universal appeal.

O: That’s funny you should say “universal appeal” since the movie touches on a taboo subject these days, which is youth violence, made all the more risky in the movie world post-Columbine. What made you want to make a movie about Asian American kids going bad?

J: When we read the paper, all of us, every other week, we see something about youth violence and it’s appalling and disturbing and that’s how I feel when I read it. But at the same time, when you read it, you also get a sense you can relate to their anger and that’s what kind of intrigued me. You read about it but people don’t really talk about it and when they do talk about it, it’s never in inclusive terms - it’s very close to us yet everyone distances themselves from it.

O: From what I understand, part of the problem that some had with the film was that they felt like the images of the Asian American youth were very negative…

J: [interrupts] I don’t think it’s negative at all. As a filmmaker, you try to make the best film, you try to stay true to what you’re trying to do. The problem is that every time you see Asian faces on screen, they’re usually there for an “Asian” reason. It’s usually there because they’re a kung fu master, a doctor, a tourist but they’re always on screen for the reason of being Asian or Asian American. And as a filmmaker I don’t think we should have standards different from other filmmakers. It’s not about being negative or positive, it’s about being true to what you’re trying to do.

O: How did it feel to be criticized for making a film – and I’m quoting from one of your Sundance detractor –that’s “amoral for Asian Americans”?

J: I’m Asian American – f--- man, I’ve done more Asian American projects than anybody. Go back to my short films and documentaries. I’m probably more sensitive to these issues than definitely him – he wasn’t even Asian American!

O: He wasn’t even Asian American?

J: No, he was Caucasian. I can’t speak for all Asian Americans, but the ones who were there…there is a certain level of pride when see characters on screen. These characters, they live in this environment, they don’t have to explain why their teenagers in suburbia – they exist. That’s what the struggle is that we go through as Asian Americans. You exist and you live here but at the same time, but you don’t want to have to explain every little reason why you’re doing this and doing that.

A few days after our initial conversation with Justin Lin, it was leaked to the press that "Better Luck Tomorrow" was picked up by MTV. As reported by the Hollywood trade magazine Variety, "In the first-ever acquisition of an Asian-American film from Sundance, Paramount-based MTV Films has ponied up just under $1 million for North
American distribution rights." AsianAvenue.Com caught up with Justin who was amused that the story leaked but was quick to note that the figures quoted by Variety are inaccurate (because the deal isn’t officially public yet, he couldn’t tell AsianAvenue.Com the exact figures involved). This led into a larger discussion about the challenges of marketing and distributing an Asian American film to a wide, non-ethnic specific audience. Here now, Part 2 of our conversation with Better Luck Tomorrow’s Justin Lin.

Oliver Wang: I know you can’t cite exact figures, but this MTV deal must still be fairly big, no?

Justin Lin: They’re putting a lot of muscle behind this, it’s pretty amazing. It was incredible man, they really loved the film and the buzz was getting so big at Sundance that there were three different companies vying for it and within one hour they decided to [acquire the film]. Plus they already signed me up for my next film. It’s amazing, I [was] worrying about my rent when I left Sundance because I put everything I had into this film.

O: Let me be candid – MTV doesn’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to cutting edge film, though Election was fairly well received. Are you confident that they’ll have what it takes to get this film out in the way it should be?

J: I have faith in MTV. They were definitely one of the studios that was vying for the film that did not demand a re-cut or even discuss possibly changing the ending. If they’re taking up this film, they’re guaranteeing some investment in this film, I think the worst case scenario is still going to be very positive.

O: Were they at all concerned with how to market a film with an all-Asian American cast?

J: The first meeting we went into, they didn’t even talk about the Asian American demographics and that’s a compliment in itself. I was the one who brought it up – "look, there is a community that is starving for Asian American films" and they were ready to bid for this film without even considering.

O: Were all your potential backers as open?

J: You know, I met with Asian American investors and they’re telling me to change these characters to Caucasians. That definitely surprised me. That’s the struggle of being an Asian American. I can’t totally fault them – they were trying to be good business people and they have their own opinions but at the same, I wish they would have some more faith. That was one of most unpleasant experiences on this whole journey.

O: This film will probably hit the theatres towards the end of the year. Between now and then though, Better Luck Tomorrow will be screening for at least three different Asian American film festivals. You’re now in a position where you wouldn’t necessarily have to do that for publicity’s sake but I suspect the festival circuit is still very important to you.

J: We’re educating Hollywood – they don’t really know the existence of Asian American film festivals and I feel like it’s important that it play at festivals. If you neglect [them] it’s not right. Visual Communications was a big part in being able to help [the film] so I felt like it has to play in the community. The great thing is that we can do that and it can still cross over.

O: Speaking on that, it’s clearly been very difficult for most Asian American films to cross over with the exception of something like Joy Luck Club which Better Luck Tomorrow is clearly nothing alike. When you distributed Shopping For Fangs, it didn’t do as well as anyone would have wanted. Do you think things have changed enough now?

J: I did learn a lot from Shopping for Fangs about distribution. I don’t think things have gotten easier, but at the same time I think there’s been this growth in Asian American cinema. It’s also about the right match and helping the distributors learn that there might be a crossover. But the thing is, it’s up to us to do it. You don’t sit there and wait for the studios to figure it out – you got out there and do it. This is an issue that goes beyond the Asian American community, but I think it’s especially pertinent to the Asian American community.

O: What’s interesting about your film is that your characters are all Asian American, but they don’t spend the film being self-conscious about it in the way that most Asian American films seem forced to be. Shopping for Fangs was much the same way. Why haven’t there been more Asian American films like these where ethnic identity is NOT the sole focus?

J: It is so hard to actually get a film, to raise the money to make a film that a lot of times only certain films of Asian American content get the funding. I also think it’s a maturity with Asian Ameican cinema. I was talking to a filmmaker – he made one of the early Asian American films – and he literally thought they were going to go bankrupt, and if they were going to go do that, they were going to put as many messages as they could into that film. I can’t speak for [all Asian American filmmakers] but when you have the opportunity to speak, you’re eager to get that message across. We’re at a point now where we don’t need to do it because it’s already been very well done. It exists, people know about it. For us, I think it’s time to move on.

PROFILE: BETTER LUCK TOMORROW

2002-02-27T23:39:00.000-08:00

Preface: I produced this piece for KQED's Pacific Time program back before Better Luck Tomorrow screened at the SFIAFF in 2002 but after the whole Sundance debacle. The piece includes interviews with director Justin Lin and actor Roger Fan.

THE PROFILE (originally aired on KQED's Pacific Time).

REVIEW: CHAN IS MISSING

2001-07-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

Buy | Rent | Book

Preface: This was originally written for the 2001 catalog for the New York Asian American Int'l Film Festival sponsored by Asian Cinevision. It was also reprinted for my AsianAvenue.com column. I have made minor edits to it for republishing here (the bulk of this essay is just as I originally wrote it in 2001). Given the mission of the site, expect that this will not be the last word on Chan ever written.

THE REVIEW (in full after jump).

Early into Wayne Wang’s CHAN IS MISSING, gumshoe detective Jo (Wood Moy) and his sidekick Steve (Marc Hayashi) wander into a Manilatown senior center in search of their wayward colleague, Chan Hung. The movie takes a brief pause here as Wang shoots old manongs dancing to the Mexican bolero, “Sabor a Mi.” One shot lingers on an elderly man staring at the camera, collapsing the third wall with his steady gaze. The entire scenes only consumes a minute or so and then Jo and Steve are back on Chan’s trail, but the beauty of the moment lingers on.

I never had a chance to see CHAN IS MISSING when it hit the theatres – in 1982 I would have been all of ten, living in a white, San Diego suburb, without a glimmer of an Asian American consciousness. Instead, I was introduced to the movie a dozen years later, the way most of my younger peers become familiar with it – through a film class where CHAN IS MISSING sits on top of a tiny canon of “important” Asian American works. From the very onset, we’re taught that the movie is significant because, as Jessica Hagedorn puts it, “it was a first”. The first Asian American feature narrative to gain mainstream accolades, the first to get wider distribution, the first to launch Wayne Wang’s own storied career.

But CHAN IS MISSING always meant more to me than just for its pioneering status. As a teacher, film festival junkie and general consumer of culture, I’ve sat through more Asian American shorts and features than I care to remember and practically all of them are forced to measure themselves besides Wang’s inaugural achievement. Most fail.

It’s not that there haven’t been other insightful, innovative or entertaining Asian American film works made over the last two decades, but few have mastered the secrets of subtlety that Wang brings to CHAN IS MISSING. Part of the problem lies in the nature of the subject – any film that attempts to answer the difficult questions of “who are we?” and “what does it mean to be an Asian American?” walks a dangerous path into didacticism.

However well-intentioned, many of the attempts that followed CHAN IS MISSING these past 20 years have either resulted in anemic, feel-good tales that celebrate multiculturalism without tackling the complexities of race and ethnicity seriously, or they reproduce the same narrow, troubled politics of cultural nationalism that have proven untenable as the community grows more diverse and disparate. What both sides lack is a politics and aesthetics of nuance.

This is precisely where CHAN IS MISSING has triumphed all these years. The film is ostensibly set up as a mystery, but the clues to solving it aren’t revealed in the main story arc but in the tangents. In one key scene set against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, Jo and Steve argue, Jo insisting that he understands Chan Hung’s difficulties in trying to assimilate as a Chinese immigrant into American society. Steve angrily retorts this is all old hat and yells at Jo, “this identity shit was ten years ago, fuck this identity shit…why are you tripping so hard off of this?” With this brief scene Wang manages to simultaneously summarize and predict 30 years worth of Asian American cultural politics yet absent of any heavy-handed brow-beating or liberal humanist hang-wringing.

It’s these many small touches that give CHAN IS MISSING its soul. It’s Peter Wang, dressed down in his Samurai Night Live t-shirt, singing “Fly Me to the Moon”; it’s the paranoid piano score that stalks Jo around Chinatown; it’s the overeager attorney who only speaks in legalese; it’s the faces of people at a bus stop. The film is filled with these seemingly random asides that become the heart of the movie

Chan is missing yet Chan is everywhere here. He’s a part of all the characters, a presence that infuses all the scenes. In the end, Jo remarks that this mystery goes unresolved as he shows us a picture of a hidden Chan Hung, silhouetted in the shadows. That we never find Chan nudges us to realize that he’s never meant to be found - he is, of course, an extended metaphor – a representation of Asian America as a complex, contradictory figure, impossible to pin down or stereotype. As such, to say “Chan is missing” isn’t a statement but a cipher, an open-ended riddle about our struggle to understand ourselves, our identities. But Wang never forces us to recognize this – it’s our conclusion to arrive at and what ultimately makes CHAN IS MISSING such a powerful film is how it understands and articulates that it’s not the final answer that matters, but our journey to find it.

FEATURE: SEARCHING FOR THE ASIAN AMERICAN ROMANCE

1999-03-01T00:39:00.000-08:00

Preface: This was originally written for the SF Bay Guardian ahead of the 1999 SFIAAFF and it tackled a theme that I continue to be interested by: whither the Asian American romance? Post-Yellow or Charlotte Sometimes, the issue probably doesn't seem as important now as it did at other points in the 1990s though I doubt it's a non-issue either even in a day and age where a show like Lost can feature an Asian couple being romantic and sexual with one another. (I should note: I wrote this piece before I ever saw Eat a Bowl of Tea, otherwise I would have definitely mentioned it.)

This topic is still something I want to write more about in the future, especially from a more scholarly point of view but regardless, it remains one of the favorite things I've ever written on Asian American film. Unfortunately, the SFBG's version no longer exists but I've reprinted the entire piece below, after the jump.

THE FEATURE.

Love Look Away

by Oliver Wang

In Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1962 musical/film, *The Flower Drum Song*, a young Chinese American, Wang Ta, is faced with the unenviable dilemma of choosing his wife-to-be. His father wants him to accept an arranged marriage with the demure but clever Mei Li. However, his aunt has other ideas, suggesting, "let them fall in love. That is the American way." And so Wang Ta awkwardly does, and by the end he has fallen for Mei Li - "on his own" so to say - and a double wedding of kisses, hugs and smiles brings the movie to a predictable, pat ending.

Whatever problems - and there are many - that we might have with Rodgers and Hammerstein's representation of 1950s Chinatown society, *The Flower Drum Song* is remarkable as one of the few cinematic examples where Asian Americans experience the basic pleasure of romantic love. However dramatically overwrought and ubiquitous "romance" has become in the American movie industry,it is notably missing from the 30-odd years of Asian American film making

Economic and political priorities during the 1970s/80s era of Asian American documentaries didn't include a focus on romantic love. Likewise, when family melodramas emerged in the 80s and 90s, the focus tended to be on *dys*functional relationships between Asian Americans (Wayne Wang's *Joy Luck Club* for example). Where romantic love did exist was usually reserved for interracial relationships (Mira Nair's "Mississippi Masala", Mina Shum's *Double Happiness*), presumably as a way for Asian Americans (usually women) to shed the stigma of being the Orientalized Other and/or rebel against the static conservatism of their immigrant parents. Whatever the case, even as Asian American cinema expanded its horizons, *intra*-racial love was rarely part of the plan.

Explaining this dearth is complex, drawing on a collision of psychological, sociological, political and economic reasons that are understandable, but don't necessarily alleviate the alienation that some Asian Americans feel. Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña (*Who Killed Vincent Chin?*), shares, "I'd always felt cheated of Asian American romance - even as a kid. I don't remember seeing an Asian American couple kiss on screen until Michael Uno's *The Wash*. What a relief when I saw it. I was almost wondering how I'd been conceived."

This is not to desperately advocate for a "yellowized" version of *You Got Mail* in order to fulfill some primal need for romantic representation. It'd be naive to think that Asian Americans can't manage to fall in love on their own without cinematic illustration. Yet ,there is something disturbing about the relative absence of images that reflect and validate the ways that Asian Americans experience love with one another. The new market for black middle-class romance (*Love Jones*, *How Stella Got Her Groove Back*) suggests that some African American audiences are interested in seeming themselves outside of the typical, ghetto movie. For many Asian Americans though, we've grown up wondering why our own stories of love and loss never seemed captured on celluloid.

Interestingly enough, this topic of love, Asian American style, comes to an unintended fore in this year's SFIAAFF. Through a collection of shorts and features, the Festival offers some interesting points of departure for further diversifying - and complicating - the topic of Asian American romance. The most explicit example is *Ways of Dating*, a program featuring six short films/videos that deal with the trials and tribulations of Asian American relationships.

What stands out in many of the program's movies is how "natural" many of the relationships seem. The weight of identity politics initially hangs over Raymond Leung's *Yellow Fever*, especially as a gay, Chinese Englishman confronts his own Anglo-philia. However, as he opens up to the advances of his attractive Taiwanese neighbor, our protagonist emancipates himself from his internalized racism, allowing him to reciprocate his neighbor's affections without feeling overly self-conscious about being into "sticky rice" (i.e. queer Asian/Asian pairings).

More telling are the pair of video shorts produced by UC Berkeley undergraduates: Wendy Shih-Wen Lin's *It's Not My Fault* and Aram Collier/Debbie Lim's *One April Morning*. In these two movies, Asian American couples are portrayed without a hint of racial self-consciousness - relationships so normal they're almost pedestrian. Importantly though, the couples never seem encumbered by a suffocating identity politics. Whatever problems they experience aren't linked to social sources of dysfunction, but are instead couched in the mundane, everyday conflicts of miscommunication, personality differences, or just bad luck.

What all of these films end up imagining is a world where Asian Americans fall in and out of love without always having to do so in reaction to mainstream (read: white) America. While this may divert from the original intent of Asian American film to explicitly confront white racism, there is something refreshing about giving these characters the agency to explore Asian American love that is freed from social implications. Like other recent SFIAAFF selections, notably Chris Chan Lee's *Yellow* (1997) and Tajima-Peña's *My America* (1998), simply watching Asian Americans flirt, get infatuated and exchange affection takes on radical sets of meaning considering how infrequently we see these basic human experiences reflected on screen.

Beyond the explicit portrayl of Asian American romance though is also a deepening appreciation of the myriad forms love can appear in. Especially in acknowledging the Asian immigrant experience, Western ideals of love, sex and passion hold little meaning for families fighting for survivial. However, a potential place of compromise could lie with Greg Pak's mini-documentary *Fighting Grandpa*. In it, Pak tries to explore the relationship between his Korean immigrant grandparents by combing through old home movies and interviews with his relatives. Pak is motivated to find evidence of whether "[grandpa] really loved [grandma], he just didn't know how to show it." In the process, Pak shows how his grandparents' marriage suffered through wartime separation and immigrant struggle as well as the familiar themes of Asian patriarchy and cultural dispassion.

Not surprisingly, the surface picture that Pak initially finds, corroborated by his relatives, is that his grandparents had a strained relationship, absent of affection and meaningful communication. Yet, underneath this impersonal exterior, Pak finds subtle hints of a deeper love, what he describes as a "tenderness there that I could only get a glimpse of." However buried the evidence is, it relieves some of Pak's anxiety and he ends the film not with a definitive answer, but a quiet set of unspoken questions over what Asian American love can entail.

If the Festival's other films aspire to the important goal of portraying our ways of romance, *Fighting Grandpa* urges us to go beyond just on-screen kisses and love-making to explore the issue of Asian American love. The tenderness Pak finds between his grandparents may not conform to a standard of red roses and wine, but even the whisper of love he uncovers is intensely validating all the same. These selections from the SFIAAFF may not represent a blossoming of the Asian American romance, but within them, we can find the potential seeds of catharsis that promise to release Asian American love onto the screen.

THE AUTHOR

1982-03-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

When it comes to cinema, I am first, and foremost, an enthusiast. I mean that as someone who loves film as a both form of art and entertainment but also as a powerful medium through which identities, anxieties and imaginations are created and projected, literally and figuratively. I wouldn't be so passionate about film (Asian American or otherwise) without both these basic loves for the craft and its potential.

My first exposure to Asian American cinema came through NAATA, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (since renamed CAAM - The Center for Asian American Media) and their annual SFIAAFF (San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival). I don't remember exactly when I went to my first SFIAAFF (only that it would have been in the early 1990s) but that was an initial glimpse.

My more formal introduction came in the spring of 1997 when, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I took Asian American Film and Video with instructor and filmmaker Spencer Nakasako. In addition to practically camping out at the SFIAAFF in 1996 and 1997, this was a baptism of sorts, a heady, thrilling leap into a history and community that I hadn't known much about before but one that I was eager to take part in.

I ended up assisting the teaching of the film course in the next year, when instructor and writer Alvin Lu took over from Spencer. Eventually, I became the primary course instructor for the Berkeley course, teaching it over half a dozen times during the academic year and summer session. It is, by far, one of the classes I've enjoyed teaching the most, both because the material is dear to me as well as a class that my students also become invested in as well. It also gave me access to a deep and diverse library of Asian American shorts and features, narratives and documentaries that I might not otherwise have seen as a conventional viewer.

Concurrent with this, I began writing on Asian American film by 1998, previewing the Festival for Asian Week (yeah, that Asian Week) and the SF Bay Guardian in 1999 and 2000. In the fall of 2000, I was asked to join the Festival Screening Committee and for the next six years, served on the committee, mostly evaluating feature length submissions. In the years since, I continue to write for the SFIAFF catalog and review films - something I couldn't do as directly during my committee years given the potential conflict of interest.

Freed from that burden of impartiality, I created Chasing Chan as a way to engage and evaluate the arcs that Asian American cinema has taken, with the eventual intention of molding this site and its contents into a book-length project.

At current, I am a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and live in Los Angeles with my wife and daughter. You can find more information here.