Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | movies
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August 31, 2009

The poster for the original Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in 1969I'm a big fan of Ang Lee, the Taiwan-born director of such terrific films as "The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Ice Storm," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain." He glides effortlessly between cultures, putting Chinese values to celluloid in one movie and reflecting America in the next. He also switches genres easily, from comedy to period pieces to drama to action. He's had one certifiable dud in my opinion: his take on "The Hulk." Now, I think there are two. Erin and I were sadly disappointed when we went to see "Taking Woodstock," Lee's take on the 1969 music festival that stands today as an iconic milestone of the rock era and baby boom generation. It's a nostalgic look back at Woodstock, the rock festival held between Aug. 15-17, 1969 in upstate New York. It's become iconic of the era because of the 1970 hit documentary film "Woodstock" and Joni Mitchell's song of the same name (which was a #11 hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and a lesser hit version by Mathews Southern Comfort). The song enshrined the number of people who flocked to the three-day concert: "half a million strong," probably taken from early news reports, but the turnout was probably closer to 300,000. Still an impressive number of attendees for what came to define the rock generation's tribalist instincts. Michael Lang from the original Woodstock festival Michael Lang riding his motorcycle around the original festival, captured in the "Woodstock" DVD. Mamie Gummer as Tisha, Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg in director Ang Lee Jonathan Groff playing Michael Lang in Ang Lee's fictionalized Woodstock weekend, along with Mamie Gummer as Tisha and Demetri Martin as Elliott Teichberg. In Lee's misty-eyed look back at 40 years ago, all the surfaces are polished just right. In an early scene, the black-and-white TV in young Elliott Teichberg's parents' rundown motel in White Lake, a hamlet in the town of Bethel, New York, shows the July 20, 1969 Apollo moon landing, just a few weeks before the big rock show. The characters have the right hair, the right clothes, even the right hats (check out the mysterious and pointless character Tisha, and the woman who's captured in Woodstock documentary footage with the real Michael Lang). The cars, of course, are spot-on from that model year and before, right down to the hippie-decorated VW vans. Lee even includes several signature shots from the Woodstock doc, with his fictionalized spin. As Jake rides with a motorcycle cop through the traffic jam to get to the concert site, they pass a group of nuns who are being filmed by "Woodstock" director Michael Wadleigh's crew and one nun flashes a peace sign. Later, Elliott walks past a row of porta-potties where a film crew is interviewing the guy who's cleaning them out. He also spends some time sliding in the mud, another re-creation of a classic scene from the concert. These touchstone scenes from the original movie are fun to catch in the context of Lee's movie. What's completely missing from "Taking Woodstock" is an understanding of and appreciation for -- hell, even baldfaced nostalgia for -- the music that drew the hundreds of thousands to the festival in the first place.
August 8, 2009

The Minority Militant blog posted this (R-rated) trailer for the new Jeremy Piven comedy about car salesmen, "The Goods: Live Hard Sell Hard." Towards the end of the trailer are two segments showing an Asian character played by Ken Jeong. In the first scene, which we've seen in the G-rated TV version of the trailer, he opens a bank bag a customer paid him for a car, and his face gets covered in the blue dye they put in stolen money. Ha ha, make fun of the short Asian dude who can't catch a clue. I can live with that, though it makes me squirm a bit. In the second scene, which ends the R-rated version of the trailer, Piven's character, an uber-salesman, is motivating the sales force (which includes Jeong's character) by citing Pearl Harbor. "The Japs... flying in low and fast," he says. "We are the Americans, and they are the enemy." Huh? Is this about the art of war applied to the art of sales? Or is it about Japanese cars vs. American cars? "Pearl Harbor. Never again! Pearl Harbor. Never again!," Piven screams and gets the others to yell along, even the Asian guy. But one of the older Caucasian guys starts eyeing the Asian guy and then shouts, "Let's get him!" A free for all ensues, and all the salesmen kick and pummel the Asian guy.
January 23, 2009

The British film "Slumdog Millionaire," a rags-to-riches story about an orphaned child in Mumbai, India, has been nominated for ten Academy Awards. On the eve of its release today in India, the British independent film "Slumdog Millionaire" was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. It's already won four Golden Globes: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Score. The movie's up for all of those categories at the Oscars, and may well win some if not all of them, and then some. We saw the film just last weekend and I was stunned by its power and eloquence, and for me, its sheer entertainment value in spite of the grimness of the life it portrays. It deserves its kudos. If you haven't heard of it, it's the story of a two orphaned brothers from the slums of Bombay -- now Mumbai -- and their relationship as they survive their childhood and grow into their destinies. One, Jamal, played as an adult by the boyish Dev Patel, falls in love with an orphaned girl, Latika (luminously played as an adult by Freida Pinto). Poster for "Slumdog Millionaire"Jamal's devotion to Latika, even though they're repeatedly separated, sometimes for years, and his dedication to finding her again, is the film's narrative thread. But "Slumdog"'s visual leitmotif is the chaotic and tragic backdrop of modern Indian life. The story follows the characters from childhood through their teen years and into adulthood, in and out of the utter poverty that pervades the teeming slums. It's structured as a series of flashbacks with Jamal, who's been arrested for suspicion of cheating after winning 10 million rupees on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," explaining to a detective how he came to know all the answers he was asked on the show. His life experiences coincidentally gave him the knowledge and prepared him to reach the next day's final question, for a possible payoff of 20 million rupees. Almost immediately, viewers are taken on a breathless tour of the shantytown as a group of kids are chased by police, the camera moving as if the audience is one of the fleeing kids, looking for the next escape route. Then the view shifts to the cops' perspective, or others in the alleys, even a sleeping dog who's not the slightest bit fazed by all the commotion. The colors, the clatter and closed-in settings convey claustrophia ... and incredible excitement. The movie opens up visually and feels pastoral only when the brothers get out of town atop a train and live like hobos, then spend some time scamming tourists at the Taj Mahal, and in one striking scene where the grownup Jamal meets up with his brother Salim (played by Madhur Mittal), now a low-level gangster, in a skyscraper construction site high above where their shantytown had been located. Modern Mumbai's financial wealth has paved over the poverty and pushed the poor elsewhere.
December 9, 2008

Actor Keanu Reeves, who is half-Asian, will play a samurai in an upcoming move, 47 Ronin.The Hollywood news source Variety reported yesterday that Keanu Reeves, everyone's favorite hapa actor (his father is Hawai'ian-Chinese) is going to play the lead role in a samurai epic, "47 Ronin." The 47 Ronin is the celebrated 18th century story from Japanese history, of a group of masterless samurai who avenged the death of their feudal lord, or daimyo, after a year of planning and then committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, to maintain their warrior code of honor, or bushido. The story's been told a lot in Japanese movies, in variations of the title "Chushingura." The most recent remake in Japan was "47 Ronin" ("Shijushichinin no shikaku") in 1994, written and directed by Kon Ichikawa. It's cool to think that Hollywood is going to tell this story, with the the spectacle of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the star power of Reeves. Keanu Reeves played Siddhartha in the 1993 film Little Buddha.But it makes me wonder about the choice of Reeves. Yeah, he knows martial arts (and proved it in the Matrix movies), and he's part Asian. But he's not Japanese. And, hellooo, he doesn't look very Asian. When "Memoirs of a Geisha" was produced with Chinese women in the lead roles, it bothered some in the Japanese American community, including me. (It also caused a stir in China, where the women were criticized for playing Japanese roles.) Could it really have been so hard to find qualified Japanese actresses (which was the filmmakers' excuse)? I definitely get that Reeves brings a big name-brand to the samurai film so he's important. But his one previous role playing an Asian was downright surreal, and it makes me apprehensive about how this one will go.
June 21, 2008

Growing up, I didn't think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it's amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans -- almost always as "bad guys." Seeing these movies today, you could tell they're not ethnic actors, and could almost see the smudges from the makeup smeared over their faces and hands. It wasn't any more sophisticated than the blackface makeup white actors wore to play African American roles in silent movies or the early talkies, wide-eyed, shiny black visages like masks, singing about "mammy." You don't see that any more, at least, not with blacks and Latinos. Hollywood also has a long and tiresome tradition of "yellowface" -- having Caucasian actors portray ethnic Asian roles. And, unfortunately, you can still see that on the big screen today. The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies. Even the great Katharine Hepburn, one of my favorite actresses, put on yellowface, to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie "Dragon Seed."
June 9, 2008

Clint and Spike are having a spat. (from Gawker.com) File this under "you're too sensitive" if you want, but I think people of color notice these types of media mistakes because they reflect, deep-down, America's lack of evolution on the diversity front. From Gawker a few days ago: an MSNBC reporter described Spike Lee as "uppity" because of his back-and-forth spat with Clint Eastwood over the lack of African American soldiers represented on his two films about the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." When Lee's criticism, which he made when he was at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was published, Eastwood responded that Lee should "shut his face." I linked to the Gawker story in my Facebook page, and this morning I got an IM from a friend in New York, Peter V, who said he didn't get what the fuss was about. "Forgive my ignorance - but is 'uppity' a racial slur? I missed that one," he said. I thought about it, because I had immediately linked to the Gawker piece, but upon reflection, he was right "uppity" in itself is not an offensive word. It's the historical context that I was responding to. "In itself, no," I replied. "But someone in the national media should know the loaded nature of using the word when referring to a black man.... She may not have meant anything by it, but shame on her. It has hundreds of years of hate and hangings behind it..." As I explained in a follow-up email, the parallel, for me, is that I grew up hearing the phrase "sneaky Japs" -- all my life, from other kids in school, on the playground, at work (back in the day, when workplaces were less enlightened) and elsewhere, from all ages.
April 13, 2008

I missed this NPR report a couple of weeks ago, about the impact of the character Long Duk Dong from the 1980s hit movie, "16 Candles." I had heard a promo for the report while driving but got home before it came on. I finally went back to check it out and it's worth hearing. The link to the report is at the top of the page; the text on the page is the report's transcript. Be sure to check out the extra interview clip with Gedde Watanabe, the Japanese American actor who played "the Donger" -- he doesn't really have a clue, unfortunately. And check out the comic that's included, "Donger and Me."
October 5, 2006

muckeyrooney-mryunioshiAudrey Hepburn, one of the great, classic actresses of Hollywood of the '50s and '60s, may have died in 1993, but she's alive and well in American pop culture. Her name, and the 1961 film with which her face is most associated, "Breakfast at Tiffany's," came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and coincidentally, a TV series' plot later that week involved three women dressed as Hepburn's character from "Tiffany's," Holly Golightly, robbing a bank with her trademark sunglasses hiding their identity. This week, The Gap began airing a pretty cool TV commercial that takes a Hepburn dance sequence from her 1957 musical co-starring Fred Astaire, "Funny Face," and sets her moves to AC-DC's "Back in Black." The commercial is pushing the retailer's new line of skinny black pants. Hepburn's character, a Greenwich Village beatnik who becomes a Paris model, is wearing hip skinny black pants in the dance scene.