Tag: movies

Why Searching is as important as Crazy Rich Asians

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw the preview for Searching when I went to go see Crazy Rich Asians, and my first thought was how it was the blatant obligatory targeted preview because it was the only preview displaying an Asian face, in John Cho.  But upon watching the preview itself, Searching seemed like a pretty intriguing plot, about a dad whose daughter goes missing, and how he has little other than combing through her social media outlets to hope to find out any information, only to discover just how little he knows about his own kid.

Needless to say, I was interested, so I made a point to go see it; even if the flick wasn’t that great, it would still be supporting films created by minorities, as the credits are overwhelmingly names that don’t look like an episode of a CW show, and not just confined to the CGI section.  Because, it’s important to me that Asian and other minority-created media actually cracks into the grossly whitewashed Hollywhite, and it’s going to take way more support than just the fad of going to see Crazy Rich Asians is going to accomplish.

However, it turns out that Searching is a very well done film, and I have a lot of admiration for the acting and the creative execution of the entire film itself, from the perspective of the myriad of phone and tablet and computer screens that saturate the vast majority of all of our lives today.  The plot is linear and pretty basic, but it’s a good example of how execution and creativity can take basic and make it compelling and engrossing.  At no point did I correctly predict any reveals or major plot points, but very much went ohhhhhh and came to realization of several hints sprinkled throughout the rest of the story.

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Photos: Dragon*Con 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: this is unposted content from 2018’s Dragon*Con.  I actually sat on these photos for nearly two full years, because as my post-2018 Dragon*Con post alluded to, I had kind of a forgettable time, and I skipped out in 2019 to zero regrets, and had no plan on going to 2020, even if coronavirus weren’t a thing.

It wasn’t until I began to chronologically catch up to Dragon*Con 2018 did I realize that I never touched the RAW photos, and I broke my posting stride just to make sure that these didn’t slip through the cracks and never get posted.

Looking back at these photos, the sheer fact that there are only 60 photos should be sign enough of just how unenthused my heart was going into this convention.  I used to want to shoot hundreds of pictures, but a combination of my inability to enjoy the con, not really seeing things that make me want to shoot, and I guess being at the wrong places at the wrong time to not see the things I wanted to see, leads to a really small photo count.

But it’s the ones with friends that matter the most, and ultimately I’m okay if there’s more of those photos than of people I don’t necessarily know.

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Batista will be in for a rude awakening

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know Dave is on this little high of thinking he’s a something big shot because he’s a former WWE champion and that he played Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, but I don’t think he realizes that he doesn’t have as much clout as he thinks he does.  But thinking that anyone is going to join him much less care, by threatening to walk away from the franchise if Marvel-Disney doesn’t reinstate director James Gunn after firing him for inappropriate tweets from a lifetime ago, he’s going to be in for a very rude awakening at the results that will ensue.

I’m sure he got the impression that the actors could make a difference, after Chris Pratt’s earnest attempt to pen an open letter and get all the stars of the franchise to sign off on it, but in spite of his experience in the public eye as a public wrestler, he’s still relatively green when it comes to the world of Hollywood, which at the very core of it, gives zero fucks about any human being, cares only about money, and fully understands that absolutely anyone is expendable and replaceable.

Furthermore, I’m sure ol’ Dave thought that the cast and crew of Guardians were tight as knots when he made his declaration of wanting to opt out of future Guardians films if they didn’t bring back James Gunn, but the reality is that Gunn or not, the franchise is going to continue, and ain’t nobody from the righteous and current-hotness Chris Pratt all the way to James’s own brother Sean, who has been a bit part in the both films so far would be willing to walk away on solely principle from the money, prestige and exposure that a Marvel Studios film provides to all those involved.

Frankly, Dave Bautista has a tremendous amount to learn about way Hollywood works, and as much as admire his determination to stick to his guns, it’s simply not the best idea for a guy that barely has a handful of films worth mentioning under his belt to be trying to make such waves in an industry where the ensemble cast around him is most certainly not as willing to join the cause. 

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The sociological entertainment of Crazy Rich Asians

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As someone who agrees that Hollywood is whiter than a Republican national fundraiser, I knew it was something of a social obligation that I should go out and watch Crazy Rich Asians.  I never read the book, nor did I have any inkling of an idea of what the plot was about going into it, but I still figured it would be a good idea to support any progression for Asians in a white-dominated industry, if we want to have any modicum of a chance of earning any respect up in this motherfucker.

The movie itself was fine.  Fairly predictable and extremely formulaic, but refreshing in the simple sense that every face didn’t look like Finn Wittrock or Balakey Lively.  Constance Wu carries the film brilliantly, and it’s super gratifying to hear her speak in her actual voice and not as over-the-top tiger mom from Fresh Off the Boat.  I didn’t even realize it was her until seeing her name in the credits although I thought she looked familiar, but Michelle Yeoh’s presence as a cunningly savage rich Asian mom is like an anime where you can feel an aura emanating from her whenever she comes on screen.

It kind of goes without saying that I rolled my eyes at the casting of some hafu named “Henry Golding” as the male lead of the flim, when surely it most certainly could have been cast to an actual Chinese or other Asian guy that didn’t look like a cross between Lawrence from Westworld and a young Ralph Macchio.  But seeing as how this film was being released in white Hollywood (oxymoron?), there had to be some compromise to make sure white power had some degree of a tether to their oppressive natures.  But it’s okay, because as bland and useless of a character Nick Young was, the film had no intention of being carried by him in the first place.

There’s one character in the film whose storyline carries almost zero correlation with the main plot at all, and could presumably not been needed at all whatsoever.  I’m going to assume it’s vastly different in the book and has more of a connection, but for the film’s sake, I’m going to assume it was included probably solely because the actress involved in it is somewhat known, extremely pretty, and needs to have requisite screen time in order to justify her casting.

As for the rest of the film, it had some fun characters and was moderately enjoyable, even with the obnoxious people in the theater, to where I couldn’t decide which was worse between the incessant commentary in Mandarin from the girls next to me, or the incessant commentary from the stereotypical black women who felt the need to very loudly opinionate on everything.

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Thoughts on Solo: A Star Wars Story

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*SPOILER FREE* If there’s any more indication to how I felt about Solo: A Star Wars Story, is the fact that it’s been just a day since I watched it, and I’ve already forgotten that I’d seen it.

This isn’t to say that it was a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, it’s hardly a film that’s remotely memorable in any real fashion.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being bad and ten being excellent, I would rate Solo at a 5, for average, solid mediocrity.  It was far from the excessively fatalistic and pessimistic expectations of the film that the cesspool of the internet and the cancers of social media would lead people to believe, but it was nowhere near the level of quality that was Rogue One, the other Star Wars Story film.  I would still rank it above Episodes 1-3 of the canonical storyline; although that doesn’t say that much, it at least shows that it’s still better than other films and therefore not the worst movie in the history of film.

It’s just not a particularly memorable film that has any sticking power in my opinion.  One of the only sentiments of the film prior to its release that I agree with, is that I questioned the necessity of a standalone Han Solo film in the first place.  I don’t disagree that it’s in all likelihood a money grab, trying to cash in on the familiarity of existing intellectual properties, but after Rogue One, I had hoped that future Star Wars Stories films would be similar, in the sense that they would be widely original characters and storylines independent from the reset of the main canon plot, while existing in the same universe.  But instead, two editions in, and we’re getting an origin story that kind of floats almost independently in the timeline of the canon, that would require some creative shoe-horning in order to make fit adequately in the stream of the story, because they’ve used primary characters.

To me, this implies that there will be a future necessity for Luke and Leia, since the childhoods of either would probably be way too boring to sustain their own films, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about a film about Boba Fett, to which I’ll never understand the mass astonishment for a character that really had a total of maybe 7-14 minutes of total screen time within the original trilogy, to have such a devout following, not to mention that his origins were already somewhat explored in the abysmal episodes 1-3.

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The DeVanzo Shift in an actual MLB game

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A guilty pleasure of mine is the film, Artie Lange’s Beer League.  It’s more or less a love letter to all things New Jersey, featuring Artie Lange and a bunch of small time New Jersey losers who enjoy beer league softball in their town while going through the motions of their own mundane lives.  It’s by no means good, but to someone who appreciates sophomoric humor, rec league softball, and one of the random things that Ralph Macchio actually performs in, the flick still holds a place in my well as a go-to for a cheap and reliable laugh.

One of the things in the film that I make references to almost regularly is The DeVanzo Shift, a defensive strategy employed by one of the antagonist teams, designed to feast on the fact that Artie Lange is completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere but the left side of the field, so the Manganelli Fitness team blatantly positions all fielders on the left, leaving the right side completely open.  Naturally, being the underachiever he is, Artie still hits the ball into the teeth of the defense and is easily rendered out.

Throughout the last decade or so, Major League Baseball has gone in the direction of teams employing radical shifts, in order to capitalize on the tendency of more and more hitters to pull the ball more than anything else, because pulling = power, power = homers, and homers = $$$.  It’s become laughably commonplace these days that every team’s left-handed power bats will see shifts where either a second baseman or a shortstop will position themselves pretty much in shallow right field, and be pitched in manners that will try to get them to hit it directly into the shifts.

Regardless, any team that shifts will almost always still have a guy or two position on the opposite side of the field, in the event that a hitter will drop a bunt to counter the shift, or some fluke of a swing slaps a ball to the opposite side of the field.  After all, these are paid professionals who are supposedly the best in the world at baseball and should be able to read a defense and react accordingly to how the opposition is trying to play them.  So shifts are not uncommon in the big leagues, but it’s like we’d ever see a real DeVanzo Shift in the majors.

That is, until Joey Gallo started playing baseball for the Texas Rangers.  Apparently the book is pretty short and concise on Gallo: strikes out a ton, and if he makes contact with the ball, he’s pulling it.  And the Houston Astros have clearly gotten the message, and have basically deployed the DeVanzo Shift, in Major League Baseball.  The Astros positioned nearly every single fielder on the right side of the field, save for left fielder Marwin Gonzalez, who was the sole left-side safety net in the event that Gallo hit anything remotely to the left.  Needless to say, the Astros were very confident that they were going to get Joey Gallo to hit a ball to the right side of the field.

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Danny’s watch list, winter-spring 2018

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Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot more television instead of burning every single evening playing League of Legends.  I still enjoy the game, but I’m not going to pretend like my interest in the game is nearly what it was a year or three ago; it’s kind of like how my baseball mania peaked and tempered back down a happy medium, to where I wanted to pursue other interests instead of letting myself get so completely absorbed in it.  I don’t follow professional play anymore, and I don’t even bother reading patch notes, and have gotten blindsided by some new in-game mechanics here and there, but I just don’t care. 

I could easily write more about why I’ve grown distant to the game, but that would be long enough to be another post for another time.

Television, has kind of filled the space in my free time that was so fervently accounted for by playing League.  Every now and then, I feel like I’m falling behind the ever-growing libraries of content being produced at a breakneck pace, and sometimes I just want to sit back and watch something and not be so interactively vested in my entertainment.  Sometimes it’s just nice to have stories told to you, without having to exert any more effort than pulling the tab on my recliner to sit back and enjoy television on my projection screen.

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