I know this movie has been out for a while but I just got around to seeing it yesterday and had to pitch in my two cents. The movie was highly recommended by a good friend of mine who is a big-time movie buff so I went in this expecting it to be a pretty big deal… but it didn’t quite deliver.
First off, I do think it was cool that Clint Eastwood tried to develop a movie around the conflicts in a Hmong community. It’s a pretty bold move for Eastwood to lend his star power to shed light on Hmong gang violence. But aside from the A for effort, the movie was pretty much a bust in my opinion. Would it really kill Hollywood to tell a story where a Hmong person was the one to resolve the conflict? Instead we get a snarling, macho, white guy (Walt Kowalski/Eastwood) who saves the Hmong women and children from their own kind. Likewise, it irked me that a huge part of the plot was about Eastwood teaching Thao, the teenage Hmong boy, what it means to be a man. According to the movie, a real man drowns his conversations in a stream of curses, totes a big gun, and works in construction. I know that Eastwood is supposed to play a very grumpy and abrasive character but it’s so overdone. Likewise, the interactions between Walt and Thao/his sister Sue (played by Bee Vang and Ahney Her) were awkward and unnatural. Even after they become friends and Walt comes over to have a barbecue at their house, he continues to call them gooks and somehow it’s supposed to be endearing… yeah, that doesn’t usually do it for me. Although it’s always good to have more Asian faces on the big screen, I’m still going to be critical of their acting abilities. True, they weren’t working with the best script but Vang and Her’s performances, to be honest, weren’t all that hot. But hey, if nothing else, at least this movie has helped a few more people pronounce Hmong correctly (that silent “h” is a trickster).
Agree or disagree? Leave me a comment and let me know :)
If you squint hard enough, you may be able to make them out!
Some food for thought: So all the “evil” men in this movie just so happen to be indigenous men of color who can’t communicate in any comprehensible language and unfairly ride oliphaunts that crush and destroy all the “good men” of Middle Earth, who just so happen to be entirely composed of white men?? What up with that, Peter Jackson? No men of Rohan and Gondor happen to be men of color? Now that Aragorn’s king, he better check in on diversifying those ranks of his. Sure, he’s got hobbits, elves, dwarves, and wizards as friends, but c’mon, you couldn’t find any other minority man? Or even WOMAN? Talk about a lack of diversity.
And man, Gandalf: you’re such a white supremacist.
(Yeah. This is how I spent my winter break. 12+ hours of Extended Edition footage on a wide-screen HD TV: glorious. Despite how racist Lord of the Rings may be, however, I still love it. Epic fight scenes! Go Frodo!)
I actually sketched this comic idea several months ago for the 12.3 issue of hardboiled, but it was left out due to space constraints. The topic is hardboiled’s unique (albeit questionably successful) ways of getting our paper out to readers on the Berkeley campus – all three scenarios actually happened.
While at a breakfast buffet during a recent family vacation in Cancun, my mom warily poked her fork at an odd-looking item on her plate and asked,
Mom: What is this?
Me: Oh, that’s a tamale.
Mom: Ta-Maui?
Me: Tamale.
Mom: Tamaui?
Me: No no no. It’s Ta. Mah. Li.
Mom: Ohh… tamale.
Dad: [looking up] Somali?
While the mispronunciation of words is nothing foreign to anybody who has attempted to learn a second language, my parents have certainly opened my ears to the wonders of pronunciation (or rather, mispronunciation). Most of the time, their slip-ups are mere phonetic intricacies, such as when they ask me how to set up a webcam with “Skypee” or mention that “cola bears” live in Australia—in these cases, I can easily recognize what they are saying and correct them promptly. But in the not-so-fortunate scenario, complete letters or syllables are dropped, and the resulting audible becomes a test in Scrabble. While we were in Cancun, my parents kept talking about an “o-bee-dian” souvenir that they wanted—it took me a long time before I finally figured out they wanted an obsidian statue. When my dad asked for a “car-uh-sun”, how could I know he wanted a Caprisun drink?
What intrigues me is that my parents’ mispronunciations don’t seem to be accent-related; my dad speaks seemingly perfect English, while my mom has a slight accent but is fluent in the language. But since they do speak solely Mandarin at home, my guess is that their reduced exposure to speaking English partly affects their ability to recognize the correct pronunciations of new words. I’m just glad my parents rarely encounter French words, with their silent ninja letters and all. They would certainly commit a verbal faux pas while trying to pronounce “faux pas”.
Because I am a huge fan of making lists, I definitely drew up a long list of things to do this break knowing fully well that I’ll only accomplish a fraction of it. At the top of the list were to become a little more cultured by doing more leisurely reading and watching classic films. What does this have to do with dragons and catfish? Ok, I’ll cut to the chase.
DRAGONS.
So my little sister convinced me to watch her entire box set of Bette Davis movies that she got for Christmas. While I reallyyyy recommend watching “Now, Voyager,” I can’t quite say the same for “The Letter.” Watching “The Letter,” I died a little inside for the following reasons.
1) It’s set in Singapore but the only Asians are plantation workers and murderers
2) The antagonist is a stereotypical Chinese dragon lady (get this) played by a white woman (it’s hilarious when she attempts to speak Malay though)
3) Lines such as when the American waiter says to the plantation owner: “It’s such a shame that sugar doesn’t grow in civilized regions.”
4) The Asian man with the most lines is a greedy, immoral, obsequious, and effeminate secretary
As you’ve guessed, my verdict for this thriller is that it’s not only racist but it just sucks overall.
CATFISH.
To start off my reading list, I picked up this memoir by Andrew X. Pham called Catfish and Mandala. It is fucking good. (This is coming from a girl who hardly swears). It’s artistic, maybe a little self-deprecating at times, but very honest. It’s a travelogue of his adventures throughout Mexico, the US, Japan, and Korea– on a bike. As in bicycle, not motorbike. Pham bikes 4,000 miles on a search to find his roots and cope with the death of a family member. Interspersed in his accounts are narratives about life as a Vietnamese American and his soap-opera worthy family history. It’s descriptive without being boring and poignant but never cheesy. My main point in two words: READ IT.
This trailer looks like it could be really awesome or super lame.
I was always pretty lukewarm about the X-Men movie series, considering how crappy the first and last movies were, but admittedly they have made me care a little bit more about Wolverine’s story as disinteresting it was to me as a eight-year-old growing up on the cartoons.
But two more things to make this movie posibbly worth watching in the theaters:
1. GAMBIT. Maybe it’s the aero-dynamic cards or his really awesome Southern accent, either way, Remy LeBeau is FINALLY making his way into the X-Men movies. While his superpowers look super cool, I can’t stop looking at his greasy HAIR. What the freak? We’ll see if had just skipped showering for that day or if he just has really oily follicles.
2. Daniel Henney! Two pluses: He’s (half)Asian, and he’s SUPER good looking. That addresses, not just the lack of Asian Americans in Hollywood, but the lack of attractive Asian American males in big name movies. No more nerds and computer geek to represent us! To be honest, I feel a little lukewarm about it since it seems like he was chosen purely because of his looks (I mean, from what I saw in the Korean drama in My Lovely Kim Sam Soon, it seems like the most he can do is smile dashingly). BUT we’ll see how it goes *crosses fingers*.
Alright hardboiled kids, May 1st, finals week, we’re going to check this out! Who’s with me? :D
author: admin category: new issue! tags: date: December 29th, 2008
Issue 12.3!
Sorry for the delay, but I also wanted to announce that the website is now updated with Issue 12.3! Here is the list of topics!
1. say my name! by jinhua zhang
2. deep experiences in north korea by alice tse
3. korean adoptions by jack wang
4. pieces of peace by tawny tsang
5. threat to the thai temple temptation by lucy yu
6. enter, the president of the world by melani sutedja
7. why the fuss? by annie cho
8. negotiating the third space by yining chou
9. princess of nebraska review by katherine bai
10. asam course recommendations by annie kim noguchi
11. just nice guys? by elaine chen and alice tse
12. disproof and disparities by jennifer ng
