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Reviews
Straight Plan for the Gay Man (2004)
One of the few good Comedy Shows that pokes fun at the rediculousness of stereotypes
There are few comedy shows or comedians brave enough to poke fun at the ridiculousness of stereotyping. Most of the time, people are content to just adhere to laughing at well posted jokes about "the way people really act" etc. I was really surprised by this show, and I valued it not only for lampooning what life as a stereotypical "straight guy" is like, but also lampooning "Queer eye" and the whole sense that gay guys and straight guys are really so different such that either side needs the others' advice. Whether it was joking about straight fashion's heavy use of "layers" or the straight male's willingness to turn anything into a competition, I personally felt that because the show was designed to lampoon another show that enforced stereotypes, that it could only be funny by breaking down those stereotypes.
By the end of its small 3 episode run, it did its job, and I'd say it was great to see the hosts take on and poke fun at things which may be true to some extent, but they remind us of how overblown those truths can be. After all, when's the last time you really competed with another guy by ordering more condiments on your hot dog.... not that that's gay or anything.
Ping Pong Playa (2007)
An enjoyable light comedy with a light dose of Asian American awareness
I came into the movie not expecting a whole lot from it as a comedy, and to be honest it didn't wow me, but I wasn't as disappointed as I thought I would be.
Is this film funny? Yes it can be at times. Does it have observational humor about Asian Americans? Yes it definitely does. However, it rarely goes beyond that, and where the film certainly had the chance to paint a more striking image of the realities of being Asian American, it chooses to stay unapologetically light. That isn't to say that it's off the mark with its observations: the film just chooses to paint a more lighthearted and less realistic picture. Think of Happy Gilmore but with ping pong, and a modern Asian American perspective.
The film follows the life of a 20 something Chinese-American basketball player, or "playa", or "balla" if you prefer, named Christopher "C-Dub" Wang. The character is one of a growing number of Asians who talk in a slur of Ebonics and hip-hop. Call them AZNs if you want, but they've grown significantly in some parts of the country as Asians seem to look to the Hip-Hop culture to give definition to their "AZN pride" and stand as a contrast from the passive stereotypes that are held about traditional Asian/Chinese culture. The film opens in a typical fashion as we meet Chris on a basketball court... playing 8-10 year olds. It becomes rapidly obvious that he is one of so many washouts who always dream of hitting it big, going pro, or starting some hot business scheme. He's silly, oblivious, and so vitriolic about others keeping the "Chinese man" down that I initially thought that he was meant to be portrayed as "uppity". His character is somewhat relatable, but at times he just seems too much in his own world and too much a caricature for his own good.
The plot moves itself pretty swiftly along as you learn that his entire family is supremely dedicated to playing ping pong. His father was a ping pong champ, his mother teaches ping pong at the local Chinese culture center, and his brother is a reigning champion who fits clearly into the role of the "good son". Eventually, a fateful car accident puts Chris' mother and brother out of commission as Chris then is assigned to be the resident ping pong teacher at the culture center. As you can probably guess, if you've ever seen The Mighty Ducks, Cool Runnings, Dodgeball or any other comedy sport movie worth its salt, Chris will eventually get sucked into playing by his lovable loser students, by his affections for the resident love interest, and by the arrogant/racist crooning of the big shot white-guy player in town. We all know what happens from here: cut to the big tournament where Chris has everyone rooting for him, his self respect, success, and the honor of his family resting on the paddle that is tightly clenched in his hand. He has to beat the arrogant big shot, win the tournament, gain the affection of his love interest, and find his true path in life as the new bad-boy of Ping Pong.
As you can tell, the film is basically a paint by numbers affair, but it's made with its own style and outlook that twists things just right enough to remain entertaining. Chris is such a caricature of that lost generation who was told they could do anything, but never found out they couldn't. He blames his "genetic deficiency" of being a shorter Asian guy for being bad at basketball, and yet his nostrils flare at the mere presumption that some white dude wants to put his people down. This kind of gets resolved, but for me it made the first half of the film embarrassing to watch. However, I suppose that's the point. We're supposed to feel bad for Chris, and recognize that he is a loser. In the end, it's not a triumph, but a relief that he decides to go forward in life and succeed at what he's truly good at.
The film is competently told and decently shot, and as for the Asian American nature of the film, it's played more for laughs than seriousness. It disappoints me that the director, Jessica Yu, didn't decide to really go more in depth into the current affairs of Asian American culture. The most astute thing that was said in this film was by resident love interest as she confesses that she hates being stereotyped as a sexually alluring exotic feminine object by westerners, and that's basically all the hard hitting insight you get. But really, the film decides to use the Asian American theme as more of a backdrop, and a setup for silly caricatures and funny laughs. It's all done in a lighthearted manner, and clearly by someone who's tuned in enough to know how to poke fun without being degrading.
All in all, I think it was enjoyable enough, but if you're looking for a tense drama about the nature of the Asian American Diaspora, maybe you'd better look elsewhere.
One last thing I wanted to note. About Chris' "Ebonics" speech: it was way too over the top for my tastes. The guy uses so much outdated slang, words like "sheezy", or "mammy jammy" (seriously "mammy jammy"? who says that past 1994?). The whole thing makes Chris aka. C-dubb look like he's some kind of pathetic black guy wannabe who got his accent and lingo from repeatedly watching fresh prince of Bela air. In the end, I think it's more just that the writers probably didn't do enough research because as much as I'm not into the AZN thing, I give them a bit more credit in terms of their awareness of hip-hop than "mammy jammy".
Invincible (2001)
A film that had some potential if taken seriously
Caught this movie on TV, and I honestly didn't even finish it. I don't need to know the ending to the film to give an accurate review mostly because the plot doesn't matter and it's clear that watching more would only sour my opinion more on it.
So here's basically the breakdown: The acting's terribly ham-fisted at times.
The fight scenes could have been worse but show pretensions clearly beyond the budget.
The storyline, while vaguely interesting, is executed in such a way that hurts the teeth just to look at it.
Almost everything in the film has obvious pretensions towards being a much better film than it was ever capable of being.
What is good about this film is that there certainly was some potential to be a decent television Sci-Fi movie if handled properly. The high concept is just interesting enough to drive the plot along, but it was honestly fleshed out in the worse way possible, making it a simplistic tale about angels and demons, love and hate. Rather than either making the plot less mystical, or adjusting the tone of the movie to be more of a drama, the film tries so hard to approach films that far surpass it (Scenes directly echoed crouching tiger, the Matrix, and I'm sure many other films).
Rather than taking the action into the realm of minimalism, the film decides to use special effects that only serve to further exclaim how little money this film was made for. They use the kind of effects that stand out so blatantly as "effects". They are obviously fake, some might be interesting to look at, but it's clear that they have no basis in reality. Good effects make unrealistic situations seem plausible, whereas these are like watching a low quality comic come to life. Even the film effects scream out to be noticed so loud that they prove to be neither interesting, nor original.
I can say, however, that the art and set direction are actually not bad. This seems to be the only part of the film that understands its low budget nature, and the set department/DOP seems to adopt the philosophy of any good low budget film, which is to use as many ready-made locations as possible, and to keep the overall look less cluttered and more clean. I only wish that the rest of the film were thinking in such a way.
Final Fantasy VI (1994)
To get you to identify with characters only a few pixels tall and with only a few expressions is truly a monumental achievement.
This is quite simply one of the best RPGs I've ever played. From the main story, to the game-play, everything shines in FF6, but what everyone remembers really about FF6 is the incredible "acting", evocative scenes, and endearing characters.
In my opinion, the characters make this game entirely. I don't think there's a gamer out there who has played this and doesn't remember Edgar and Sabin's coin toss, or Locke's freeing of Celes (an obvious knockoff of the Luke/Leia scene in Starwars ep 4), or the Opera House. The Opera House... such a throwaway component to the game's overall plot, even still not as significant to the characters themselves. But, I must say, what a beautifully staged scene, what wonderful directing, and what a memorable theme. The midi-composed opera theme was so rough and harsh, and yet still its beautiful melodic quality came out even in that form. I hear that theme and I still get chills.
And this is essentially a metaphor for what is so great about final fantasy 6. Looking back, it was a medium with so many limitations, such a small constrained box to work in. It was a media that was about to be turned around and revolutionized by full motion videos and three dimensional character models. It had all the limitations of space and size, with characters only a few dozen pixels tall, and music that could only blurt out in synthesized tones. The last game of that generation had all these limitations, and yet it possessed a core that was irrepressibly beautiful. Whether it was the character arcs or the individual stories, the acting, the character interaction, the game sucked you in and made you care for these little guys.
This doesn't really read like a review, but I would have to admit that it isn't. It's not a review, it's more of a nostalgic love-letter to a game that ended an era by taking things to the basics. In the end, what a good dramatic RPG, Film, or Book wants to do is get you to feel real emotion, and to identify with the characters and scenes it presents. So this is what I would say to someone who hasn't played ff6: Even though its storyline is certainly not the most complex in the world, even though the graphics are decades old, even though there's no voice acting, even though there is no full orchestral score, even though all these things may be true, you will still fall in love with all of the main characters in it and you'll be surprised you did.
Fainaru fantajî sebun adobento chirudoren (2005)
Fanservice and Pretty Visuals don't comprise a good movie.
To me every second of Advent Children oozed with gigantic neon signs pointing out how much the creators had well rendered the beloved characters of the original video game series. The visuals only serve to enhance this feeling of terrible pop-out ooh ahh look-how-awesome-we-are-please-love-this-film-to-death grotesque hug-fest that the movie becomes.
I won't put any spoilers, nor will I mention the story because it's fairly inconsequential next to the flashy effects, amazing cgi, and blatant fan-boy pleasuring. Don't get me wrong, I love great visuals and amazing cgi, but the era of displaying amazing cgi just to show your technical prowess has long been over. We know you're some awesome animators who can make such impossible, visually pleasing, feats of death-defying heroism seem easy. We get it. You don't need to have a gigantic wall-to-wall action sequence that shows this anymore.
It's this crazy love-fest nature that screams out for me to rate this film low because, although it very well could have been an insightful and interesting plot-line that did something new with the ff7 characters while providing that needed fan-service, it just degenerates into what I see as a gigantic masturbation session. The fans get off because of these great slam-bang visuals that feature their beloved characters once again. And the animators get off because the fans now lovingly adore the movie they made, that I'm sure they feel is superior due to how chock full of those aforementioned slam-bang visuals it has.
As someone who's never played ff7, but heard of it's godlike status all too often, I do not feel any more compelled to play the game now than I did before. A great movie should have done that, like the LOTR movies did for me. And anyway, I always personally loved ff6 as a great unsung hero of the series.
FLCL (2000)
Amazing anime for those willing to lose themselves
FLCL is perhaps one of the most fun, shallow, insane, and at the same time most personally affecting pieces of video/film/media that I have ever come across. I place it next to Evangelion as a sort of companion viewing, and in many ways FLCL stands as a sort of shadowy brother to Evangelion. Or perhaps that is to say that FLCL is the bright explosive, overly indulgent brother to Evangelion's shadowy brooding psychoanalytic quality.
I place them together because FLCL is, in many respects, a counterpoint to Evangelion's glum self-contemplative demeanor. Where Evangelion says you have to think and look deeper and mine the depths of the truth of depression and unhappiness, FLCL reminds us that sometimes it's best to not think and not look deeper. Sometimes the best philosophy is to not have a philosophy, and perhaps in order to grow and understand ourselves, sometimes we just have to let the moment take us where it goes. Sometimes it's just best to enjoy life.
At any rate, that was a bit of a background. I note FLCL's pairing with Evangelion to point out that in many ways it does have as much depth and meaning as Evangelion, though FLCL has it in a much more visceral manner. To those who hate FLCL because of it's randomness and arbitrary nature, I say, LOOK HARDER. To those that love FLCL for those reasons, I say that you should still look harder.
The first time I saw an episode of FLCL, I will always remember how much I disliked its insane random humor, its crazy shifting artistic styles, its needless obviously Freudian and sexual imagery. It was all so damn arbitrary, I thought. In many ways it resembled so much of what I hated about the silly crazy and random nature of Anime. It just didn't make a lick of sense to me, and it seemed to be playing to a crowd just for its own sake. I immediately wrote it off as a piece of garbage that I would only watch just to marvel at how insane it is.
The next time i saw FLCL, I was completely disarmed. The plot centers around a single character, Naota, and this young boy's impressions and attempts to act mature amongst a world populated entirely by adults who act blatantly childish to a fault. In many ways, this is the key idea within the insanity that is FLCL. Here is this child, trapped in that awkward stage between adulthood and childhood, and he wants to assume this persona of being the adult amongst a chaotic world populated by aliens, robots, overly sexed parents, overly sexed teenagers, and a girl named Haruko who seems to appear out of thin air only make things worse. Not to mention that he has to reconcile his persona's dislike of this Haruko with his uneasy attraction to her, all the while dodging massive explosions and hoping that his brain doesn't get turned into mush, as robot after robot seems to enjoy just popping straight out of it.
For all the insane art direction, and the wonderful visuals, what I just mentioned above is the real reason FLCL has such a special place for me. The art direction and the insane effects, the non-logical world, all just serve to perfectly execute what is essentially a story about growing up. The art and direction serve to embody FLCL's philosophy on the most core levels. It's a story about those times when we see and feel and want things that seem to make no sense, things that are embarrassing, things that are hard to get. It's a story about how those times teach us to go for it, embrace the feeling and go where it takes you, no matter the cost.
So now, Whenever I mention FLCL to someone, if I ever do, they always respond cheerfully by uttering those immortal syllables "fooly coolly", as if to show that they know what I'm talking about. And because of that, I acknowledge there will always be two types of people who love FLCL.
There are those people who love it for the craziness and the artwork, and the insane story (or lack thereof), though they don't quite know why. And that's fine, I enjoy that, and it's great to put yourself on that kind of level of just raw enjoyment. Then there are the people who love it because it tells them a story that they already knew but couldn't express. There are the people who love FLCL because they did have to be Naota at some point. They did have to make Naota's decision, or they still are. For those people, myself included, FLCL will always have another meaning. It reminds me of those times, and takes me back to those decisions I made, and it comforts me. It tells me that there is someone else out there who knows the same things and has been in the same places I have. That's really the only thing one can ask for in a great piece of art.