The White Man Saves the Day Again?
December 31, 2008
Clint Eastwood in ‘Gran Torino’
Hollywood has a tradition of producing films where the heroic Caucasian protagonist saves the helpless people of color. Think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai — not only do the white characters act as the saviors, but the minorities are also usually just supporting characters who exist solely to help the main character achieve his goal. Read more
A Look Back at 2008
December 26, 2008
As another year draws to a close, it’s time to look back and see if any progress has been made by Asian Americans in Hollywood or if it’s the same Auld Lang Syne. Because I did a fairly comprehensive piece on Asian American representation in prime-time television a few months back, I will be focusing solely on narrative feature films here. Read more
Do Asian Remakes Have to Suck?
December 13, 2008
When the Korean film My Sassy Girl became one of the biggest comedy hits in all of Asia, Hollywood took notice and soon 20th Century Fox Pictures proudly announced it would be making the big budget American version. Starring up-and-coming hottie Elisha Cuthbert (24, The Girl Next Door), the American remake was released in August. Read more
The ‘Lost’ Sessue Hayakawa Found
November 30, 2008
The name of Sessue Hayakawa may be unfamiliar to most movie-goers today, but at the height of his fame from the mid-1910s to the late 1920s, the Japanese issei actor was as well known to audiences as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. Read more
S.F. South Asian Film Festival This Weekend
November 13, 2008
Here are some highlights from this weekend’s 3rd I: San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival — every one of these is worth watching.
Kissing Cousins (2008, USA)
Romantic comedies are one of the most difficult genres to pull off. Not only do you have to be funny, but you also have to create a chemistry between your leads that feels effortless. Only Cary Grant and Katherine Read more
Jon Lawrence Rivera Joins ‘The Joy Luck Club’
October 31, 2008
Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club might be the most iconic work of fiction in the Asian American literary canon. The story of four Chinese American women and their mothers, it quickly became a bestseller and led to the hit 1993 film. Read more
‘Ashes of Time Redux’
October 17, 2008
Wong Kar Wai reimagines his 1994 film
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked that American lives have no second acts, but in recent years, it’s become clear that American filmmakers do. Whether it’s Francis Ford Coppola adding extra scenes to Apocalypse Now or Steven Spielberg digitally removing guns from the FBI agents’ hands in E.T., directors have increasingly been reworking past films with mixed results. Read more
The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
October 3, 2008
Olaf de Fleur, the director and writer of The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, describes the film as a “visionmentary”: a film that mashes together elements of both fiction and documentary.
After meeting the real-life Raquela Rios, a transsexual or “ladyboy,” on the streets of Cebu City in the Philippines, de Fleur decided to shoot a documentary about Raquela and her dream to find a rich and Read more
The Kids Are All Right: The teen stars of ‘Be Like Water’
September 19, 2008
W.C. Fields famously advised actors to never to work with animals or children. But perhaps Fields didn’t dislike kids; he was just afraid of being upstaged by their natural charm.
Watching three of the young stars of East West Players’ production of Dan Kwong’s new play Be Like Water, one can see the validity of Fields’ fear. During an interview in the lobby of East West Players’ theater in Read more
Sukiyaki Western Django
September 10, 2008
A Western Heads East
There may be no director working on the world cinema stage today as interesting as Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. Granted his work isn’t for everyone. In films like Audition and Ichi The Killer, Miike pushes his vision to the extreme, almost challenging the audience to be offended. It’s no wonder that two of his biggest Read more
Where are the Asian American Sports Movies?
September 5, 2008
Watching Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu’s narrative feature debut Ping Pong Playa reminded me how much I love sports movies. In Yu’s film, Jimmy Tsai plays C-Dub, a suburban Chinese American slacker who dreams of being a basketball player but finds himself thrust against his will into the world of ping pong. Read more
A ‘Fish’ That Should be Thrown Back Into the Water
August 22, 2008
Young Chinese girl comes to America with dreams of a better life, but her dream quickly turns into a nightmare when she’s forced to work in a “massage parlor” against her will. Her only hope of salvation is for a gallant American man to rescue her.
This is a scenario we’ve seen played out countless times in American film (including the upcoming Shanghai Hotel) and TV (any random Chinatown-themed episodes of shows like Law & Order) and writer/director David Kaplan’s new film Year of the Fish doesn’t diverge far from this formula. Read more