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Insider / Outsider: An Interview with Wayne Wang.
The director Wayne Wang, in his own words, is an “insider/outsider” — responsible for Hollywood hits such as Maid in Manhattan (2002), critically-acclaimed independent films Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995 collaborations with Paul Auster), and pioneering Asian American films such as Chan Is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985).
Such a varied filmography demonstrates how Wang defies expectations, particularly in regard to his career arc. Good thing for cinephiles, then, that — unlike other good Asian sons — he went against his parents’ wishes for him to become a doctor. After receiving his MFA in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Wang returned to Hong Kong and started directing a popular TV soap opera, “Below the Lion Rock”. “The Hong Kong media was blowing up at the time,” says Wang, and his Hong Kong career seemed set — but he ended up returning to the United States instead.
During the interview, Wang also talked about running, painting, how the film version of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day fell through (”He was worried that I would get too close to the truth about his family, was what he told me”), abortion counselors, YouTube (”The Princess of Nebraska is too experimental, too open-ended, to show in theaters”), Chinese gangsters, specific plot points [sorry, can't post them because of possible spoilers!], his optioning of the film rights to Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and cleared up the rumor about a forthcoming Adam Sandler - Zhang Ziyi “movie” Good Cook, Loves Music which he’s supposedly directing (”I don’t know how it ended up on my IMDb page. It’s not happening.”).
His two latest films, a return to his independent film-making roots, both based on short stories by the Oakland-based writer Yiyun Li. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (winner of four prizes at the San Sebastian Film Festival, including Golden Shell for Best Film), is in general release in theaters this month; The Princess of Nebraska will be released on YouTube’s Screening Room in October.
The interview took place in San Francisco.
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The Saga of Wayne Wang.
I don’t know who wrote the introductory press release for director Wayne Wang, but I really like this sentence:
“Wang’s career has been a saga encompassing the American filmmaking experience: immigrant beginnings, rapid education and acculturation, immersion in ethnic politics, pioneering of the low-budget DIY ethic, Hollywood success and now a renewed return to roots.”
That sounds just about perfect. One can think of a number of Hollywood directors — Steven Soderbergh, maybe — who have oscillated wildly between big-budget crowd-pleasers and looser, more experimental films. Wang’s career is one that similarly includes entire casts of non-professional actors on one hand, and Susan Sarandon, Jeremy Irons and Queen Latifah on the other.
A beginner can approach Wang’s career arc from either direction and perhaps be genuinely surprised: “He directed this?” It’s a seemingly wobbly trajectory that includes the ensemble drama Smoke (and its companion film Blue in the Face), the magisterial Chan Is Missing, from 1982 (an indie film well before Soderbergh’s own debut indie sex, lies and videotape came out in 1989), and a more recent slew of films that may have been dismissed as Hollywood lint. Less generous folks, not including myself, would see this as an unfortunate decline. For many others, J-Lo and Ralph Fiennes headlining your movie is just about as successful as you can get.
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Accents.
The discussion on accents in the comments section of my last post ages ago reminded me of an interview I conducted a little while back with a community activist based in South San Francisco. She had asked me about my relatives, and where I was from, and I responded in Tagalog. She said (also in Tagalog), “It’s a good thing that you’re not forgetting how to speak the language. Some people here have only recently arrived, and they say they don’t know how to speak Tagalog anymore.”
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It’s Steve, and It’s Not Steve.
The other week I asked a series of rhetorical questions, all related to the life of an Overseas Filipino Worker, about Arnel Pineda, the new lead singer for Journey. Of course, Pineda’s no ordinary OFW, unlike those almost 60,000 Filipino overseas performing artists. (The salary of a lead singer, one supposes, allows you to distance yourself, as far away as possible, from that life of homesickness and drudgery.) And my questions, in retrospect, were perhaps too negative: I’m tickled by the possibility that the other band members have, say, now developed a taste for lumpia. Or something like that.
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Unfunny.
Esther Ku is a stand-up comedian on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why exactly her act is so spectacularly unfunny. (Gentle Reader, you may take my word for it, but it’s best if you make up your own mind and watch her act on YouTube yourself.)
Look: I think we should be supportive of having more Asians on television (or anywhere in the public sphere, really), but it doesn’t mean we should give mediocrity a free pass.
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“The Man Can Sing Anything.”
There are eleven million Filipinos working overseas, a million of which left the Philippines in 2007, and Arnel Pineda is one of them.
I’m sure you readers have already heard about Arnel Pineda, the new Philippine-born lead singer for the American band Journey: his hardscrabble life as a homeless twelve-year old with that burning talent; the videos of his cover band discovered on YouTube by Neal Schon, the Journey guitarist, looking for a new vocalist; maybe even the fantastic tale of how he got his visa. (If not, be edified: run off to YouTube and watch a CBS News Sunday Morning feature on the band from May.)
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Cool Stupid.
Me [right after watching Wanted]: It was stupid.
My friend Laurel: Yeah, but it was cool stupid.
Some of my friends think I’m something of a movie snob, and honestly, I’m not, but people still think my first reaction to the summer movie season is usually running for cover. On the contrary: I happily succumb to its adolescent delights every single year. This summer’s lineup, in particular, is shaping up to be a darn fine one, what with lots of stuff being blow’d up and unchecked CGI abuse everywhere.
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Tongues Like Parrots
The next time you’re on a cruise ship — or in a small nightclub in Las Vegas, a hotel lounge in Singapore, an amusement park in Cologne — that band doing the Norah Jones and Led Zeppelin covers will very likely be from the Philippines. (Almost 60,000 Filipinos are employed worldwide in nightclubs, cruise ships, and hotel lounges as Overseas Performing Artists.)
A Filipino guitarist told me a nugget of unbelievable truth one time, trying to explain to me why Filipinos were apparently such great performers. “Filipinos are the only people,” he said with all seriousness, “with tongues like parrots.” But his answer wasn’t prompted by the fact that it was his fourth shot of gin before it was even noontime.
He was one of the many artists I’ve interviewed extensively over the past two years who looked at me as if I had asked a stupid question — “Why do you think Filipinos are hired as singers and musicians all over the world?” — and gave me variations on the exact same answer: Filipinos can imitate any sound.
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Grand Theft Auto IV and the American Dream (Part Two)
But back to the delights of Grand Theft Auto IV. If immigrant disappointment is quintessentially American, then so is the notion of immigrant criminality. How else does one explain the grip that cultural artifacts like The Sopranos, or The Godfather, or Scarface, or Carlito’s Way, or Gangs of New York, has on the public, their power to somehow persuade people to embrace these American monsters as one of their own? Continue reading…
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Grand Theft Auto IV and the American Dream (Part One).
Niko Bellic is pissed. His cousin Roman hasn’t exactly been telling him the truth about America: the sports cars, the penthouse, and the women which he mentioned in his letters are nothing but a beat-up cab, a roach-infested walkup in Brighton Beach, and tattered centerfolds tacked to the wall around a stained sofa bed. So much for his fantasies of America. Continue reading…