You are currently browsing all entries tagged with 'film'

‘Sunset Stories’ Stories: Interviewing the Sung Kang

  • May 10, 2012 9:37 am

I can’t believe I’ve known Sung Kang for over a decade. And neither can I believe that we have worked together multiple times and have not inflicted grievous bodily harm unto each other. I jest, I mean I think we’re both pretty laid back and calm and we must have a lot of common ground after all these years.

I met Sung while working on Better Luck Tomorrow, I remember that after his audition, there was no question in any of our minds, he was Han – little did he know that he would be HAN for over a decade. What I sparked onto with Sung was how his personality is really different from the brooding, silent types that he portrays on screen. In person, he’s really lighthearted, goofy and love to laugh. Our conversations usually centered around how we both loved and hated what we did (acting and filmmaking) and just wanted to somehow capture those moments of what we love the most and make a career out of it – all on our own terms (kind of a pipe dream, I know). Our paths continued to cross over the years and we always discussed working on a project together, but things never really got off the ground. I (co-)wrote Sunset Stories with Sung Kang in mind. I remember him telling me that he wanted to do something different. The character of JP in Sunset Stories is an East LA musician who is on the verge of big life changes. Should he cash in his dreams and start a family and be resigned to be a wedding singer? I knew that both Sung and I had talked about trading in the dream for reality, so I knew even if this character was far from him, he could identify with that central question.  Read more...

The ‘Chinglish’ Journal: A New Chapter

  • April 24, 2012 12:00 pm

On January 29, 2012, CHINGLISH played its last performance on Broadway. Towards the end of 2011, I’d been encouraged as the annual “Top Ten Best in Theatre” lists came out from different publications and we made about a half-dozen of them. TIME Magazine even named CHINGLISH the Best American Play of the year. Our producers put up a new poster in Schubert Alley, at the heart of Times Square.

Still, we didn’t sell enough tickets each week to keep from losing money, so they eventually had to close the show. We ended up lasting about three months – a respectable run, though we certainly would’ve liked to have run longer. Although I’ve learned from my experiences that however long a show a runs, you always feel it should’ve run longer.

Should we have cast a big movie star in the play? In retrospect, that would probably have helped us sell tickets and stay open. Nevertheless, I appreciate that our producers loved this show enough to gamble on going into the cutthroat commercial market of Broadway without one. I’m proud they were brave enough to buck that trend.  Read more...

‘Sunset Stories’ Stories: Writing What You Know

  • April 22, 2012 2:28 pm

So it’s been a few weeks since my last Sunset Stories entry – and I realized I needed to take a much needed break from the film even though it’s “completed” the rush to prepare for the next stage – festivals and hopefully some distribution. It’s been emotionally and physically draining. All I want to do is veg out in front of the television and/or play Mass Effect 3 all day, but really all that amounts to is more guilt and more work.

For this entry I wanted to address a question we got at every Q&A we’ve had so far. Where did the story come from? I know a lot of friends have actually asked the question in many forms. They’re confused about what the film is about – really about. Is it a comedy? Dark? Romantic? The synopsis can only give you so much, so I’m going to try to answer that question as best as I can. It’s an equally easy and hard question to answer. We don’t have a trailer for the film partly because we couldn’t afford to make one (that’s true folks, not kidding) and partly because we couldn’t seem to distill the story and tone of the film into two minutes and some change. We didn’t want to mislead or confuse people and potential distributors and wanted them to discover the film in the theater. Wrong or right, I get a lot of question for clarity so here goes…  Read more...

Au revoir Kodak! Bonjour Digital!

  • April 18, 2012 12:01 am

(Once the tool of my existence)

When Kodak filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, it was a definite signal to the end of an era—the era of 35mm & 16mm filmmaking. As an independent filmmaker, I have to admit that I have little nostalgia for 35mm or 16mm filmmaking. I was lucky enough to be part of the generation who started making films on celluloid and have pretty much “upgraded” to digital filmmaking. Nevertheless, that process has been an invaluable and forever memorable experience. Filmmaking has “evolutionized”.

 Read more...

Bonjour Monsieur Lazhar!

  • April 11, 2012 12:02 am

An Algerian immigrant teacher, the titular Monsieur Lazhar, shows up in a classroom of 12-year-olds to replace their homeroom teacher who recently committed suicide witnessed by a fellow classmate. Invited by a friend to an advance screening, I unexpectedly discovered this French Canadian drama well deserved of its Oscar nomination and accolades. The film subtly and deftly explores the ironic hyperbole that an older immigrant can very well relate to and teach the younger generation with a recent traumatic past.

 Read more...

April Fool’s Day

  • April 1, 2012 1:58 pm

If you’re in the mood for a horror movie today, try the original April Fool’s Day which is a decent slasher movie with some cool twists and surprises plus a fair dose of humor. It’s one of these interesting little slasher movies on the tail end of that 80s horror craze before the Scream wave. Seriously if there is a horror movie for every holiday, today it is April Fool’s Day. And it’s not an April’s Fool’s joke!

‘Sunset Stories’ Stories: When Micro-Budgets Attack!

  • March 19, 2012 1:38 am

After our initial screening/world premiere of SUNSET STORIES at SXSW, the nerves had gone away and I was able to enjoy the following screenings and Q&A’s. I was glad to see that the audiences were understanding and enjoying the film at both the narrative level and the larger concepts we were playing with – especially in terms of the diversity in casting. People were not really used to these images and representations and found the experience unique.

This past week, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival also took place. There were many great films there but two in particular, I AM A GHOST by H.P. Mendoza and YES, WE’RE OPEN by Richard Wong, are great examples of amazing micro-budget filmmaking. Both are true Asian American films, but take it a step further with their use of genre and content. I AM A GHOST is a horror film while YES, WE’RE OPEN is a daring romantic comedy with two AA leads! As I’ve blogged before, these are the ways micro-budget must be used to help elevate Asian American films to the foreground. And again, this is the case of AA filmmakers taking matters into their own hands and telling their own stories without compromise.

 Read more...

Around the Horn: Dream Movies Edition

  • February 20, 2012 4:52 pm

Most of my fellow Offenders work in the film biz (or at least are very interested in film). I’m always curious about those works that have influenced my peers, but in this case, instead of asking the Offenders what your favorite movie is, I’d like to ask what “pre-existing” movie you wish you could’ve made so…What movie do you wish you had directed, written, produced or acted in?

This isn’t necessarily the same as choosing your favorite movie because what might be your favorite might not necessarily be the film you wish you had made or been a part of.

To illustrate—since I’m mainly a writer, if I had to choose one movie I wish I had written it would be the 1981 historical epic Reds (directed by Warren Beatty and written by Beatty & Trevor Griffiths—with uncredited script work by Elaine May and others). I love Reds, but it’s definitely not my favorite movie nor is it even my favorite Warren Beatty movie (that would be Shampoo).  Read more...

‘Sunset Stories’ Stories: The Beginning

  • February 1, 2012 1:02 pm

Please welcome Ernesto to our YOMYOMF family. Actually as writer/producer on BETTER LUCK TOMORROW, Ernesto’s been a part of the fam for a long time, but he joins us in an official capacity to blog about his new film SUNSET STORIES, which will have its just-announced World Premiere at SXSW in March and is executive produced by our own Justin Lin (with Sung Kang starring) and the first feature to go out under our YOMYOMF Films banner. Ernesto will be sharing his journey with the film on a regular basis.

It took a lot of convincing for me to write this journal about the making of SUNSET STORIES (formerly COOLER), a micro-budget film shot nearly one and a half years ago. People who know me, know first hand how quiet, insular and private I am, and writing something like this amounts to pulling teeth – with a very, very rusty pair of pliers. Slowly. One at a time. With the molars breaking to pieces and you have to dig them out of blood soaked gumflesh…okay, you get the picture, it’s painful. Well, I finally gave in, so here goes.

With this journal, I’m going to trace the making of SUNSET STORIES and follow our journey to our World Premiere screening at SXSW in March. It’s been a long hard road, with a lot of twists, turns and dead-ends – seriously, as I write this, we’re still scrambling to finish and STILL begging for favors because of our limited budget – but fighting ‘til the end. If you’re reading this, odds are you too are thinking about making a film. I write this for you. Maybe you can avoid the many pitfalls we suffered through or maybe I’ll convince you to go back to grad school for industrial design, trade school for nursing and x-ray tech, or, of course, culinary school. Trust me, I’ve got a drawer full of half finished applications at home. But like many of you, I’m a glutton for punishment and no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise, film and writing is where my heart is.  Read more...

The Flowers of War

  • January 24, 2012 5:48 pm

When I was visiting my family for Chinese New Year in Vancouver, I got to watch The Flowers of War by Zhang Yimou on a (most likely) pirated DVD that my father had. The screener I saw was incredibly dark and high contrast. It also was two seconds out-of-sync during the last hour of the movie. On top of that, the cover said the movie was 97 minutes but it turned out two be 2 and a half hours. I was actually dreading to watch the movie as I have heard mixed things about it. My friend at the Golden Globes said it was essentially a Chinese propaganda film. A Chinese friend laughed at how ridiculous one of the plot points was (I will eventually have to talk about it so SPOILER ALERT ahead).

 Read more...

How to Survive Lunar New Year if You’re an Asian American Criminal

  • January 22, 2012 8:58 pm

Dear Asian American Criminal:

Let me start off by saying that I don’t condone your criminal lifestyle—the murdering, the thieving, the embezzling, the assaulting and all the other illegal, awful things you do. But I know you are loyal readers of this blog because…well, just look at the shit we write about. And as loyal readers, I feel an obligation to return that loyalty to you and I can’t think of a better occasion to do that than on this Lunar New Year holiday. So let me just give you this one piece of valuable advice if you plan on committing your heinous crimes on this day of all days:

Don’t do it in Chinatown!

It doesn’t matter if you commit your crimes in Chinatown on the other 364 days of the year, this is the one day you must avoid it because I guarantee that you will get caught. Why? Because if Hollywood movies and TV shows have taught us anything, it’s that white cops are always busting Asian criminals in Chinatown while the new year’s celebrations are taking place.  Read more...

Killer Chink

  • January 11, 2012 8:33 pm

Serial Killer Charles Ng

After I first met Koji Steven Sakai at a CAPE event in 2007, we started developing a couple of projects together along with my longtime collaborator and film school buddy Stanley Yung. And the very first one we started developing was a drama about a self-hating Asian American man. That feeling or complex that I wanted to confront and explore—self-hatred—is really in all of us, particularly in a North American society primarily driven by identity politics. Especially for a visible ethnic minority, how many of us are confronted with the feeling of discomfort, competitiveness or even hate when we see someone else of the same skin color in an all white environment?

I cannot remember more clearly what my mom said to me when she came home one day after dropping my little sister off to school in Montreal.

“I saw this Chinese lady at school and I asked her if she was Chinese,” said my mom. “And she said, ‘I’m CANADIAN!’”  Read more...