Today’s Pet Peeve: Movies and television shows depicting a couple of twentysomethings with minimum wage service industry jobs sharing an apartment whose rent alone should realistically exceed their combined gross income.
Well, I finally went and saw Pitch Perfect 2 in the theaters, and I’m a bit sad to say that I was disappointed in it.
Whaaat but the first one was soo good!
That was my expectation too, and I think with that huge success beforehand, this moviebit off more than it could chew. In this sequel, there are new characters, a new conflict for the Bellas to face, and shiny new numbers onstage. Everything that worked in the first movie, had its dial turned Up to Eleven in this one. So what went wrong?
Going into the movie, I heard from friends that the movie went overboard with the sexist and racist jokes, which surprised me given that the first movie had its fair share of that kind of humor as well. When I finally go to see the movie, I saw as well as felt what they meant.
Both films feature commentators, John Smith (John Michael Higgens) and Gail Abernathy-McKinnon (Elizabeth Banks), and it’s pretty clear that their roles in the film is basically provide outlandish comments ranging from mildly offensive to stunningly offensive. In the first movie, it’s pretty clear that neither of them are supposed to be likable, especially John. I discussed this with my boyfriend, and we agreed that his sexist comments from are meant for people (who can critically watch a movie) to laugh, have a double-take, and realize that “hey, what he said is actually wrong though” instead of taking the joke at face-value.
In the second movie, I feel like the balance with minority degrading jokes was severely mismanaged. This film introduced Florencia "Flo" Fuentes, a new Bella who came from Guatemala. As far as I understand, she would be the third ethnic minority in the film (the first two being Cynthia-Rose and Lily), but all of the racist jokes seemed to be unleashed with her being in the film. In the first movie, Lily’s character trait was “weird” and “outlandish” while Cynthia-Rose was mostly the source of everyone’s speculation and lesbian jokes (which is a another problem, and someone without my biases would be better qualified to criticize on), but their ethnic identities were never the source of the joke.
That was not the case with Flo, as almost every single line from her was a quip about how her former life outside the US (assuming she’d been in Guatemala all that time) was awful, several immigrant jokes were made, as well as jokes about the quality of life for poor Central Americans. Her ethnic identity was the source for all the jokes, there was not much else to her character otherwise.
My other problem was with how the movie tried to balance the narrative between Beca and Emily, the new girl. Both movies are heavily supported by an ensemble cast. Every Bella has a role in the movie, to certain extents (even Jessica and Ashley’s lines lampshade how they’re just filler characters of sorts)., but the first movie keeps its focus on Beca, we know right away we should be rooting for her as the protagonist.
In the second movie, that attention is split between Beca and Emily, but in a way that seems like the movie doesn’t know who to pay attention to. The narrative is divided between Emily fitting in as the New Girl and as the Legacy, and Beca at her internship and finding her “voice.”
I have to say, it’s probably possible that a movie have more than one protagonist, but there’s still one person that the whole focus is going to be on, and in Pitch Perfect 2, there wasn’t a clear focus. Emily as a character seemed entirely flat, and her busting out her original song during the Riff-Off was the most cringeworthy thing.
Seriously, no one cares about the damn Flashlight.
Fundamentally, that was the problem. I really didn’t care about Emily. The movie tries to make you get there, but there’s no build-up to it. For many of the old characters, who they were as characters was something established in the first movie. Even the subplot of Bumper and Fat Amy getting together made sense in the second movie, because by this point we know, and we care.
After all this though, that doesn’t stop the Bellas’ rendition of Beyonce’s Girls any less awesome.
I had that question asked me by a crew member during Legally Blonde. "Would you still do this acting thing, even if you know that you wouldn’t make money?” she asked me at the time. It sounded like she knew the answer already, and was incredulous to actually hear me say yes. And I did.
Later I found out that she talked to my mother about it, how she thought it was a waste that I, for all my “talents,” I would not choose to use them on something more profitable, such as economics.
My mom later told me of the conversation they had together, and she explained that most Chinese international students take their experiences in the United States to go back to China and work to be wealthy. The crew member said that with my pretty features, bilingual skills, and considerable success in the Western world, going back to work in East Asia (namely, China and Taiwan) would be so lucrative for me.
And yet I still would rather do something that makes me happy, instead of something that would make me rich. Because no one does theatre to be rich (and if you do, be ready to face a lot of frustration and disappointment).
My response to them both times were (translated), “I would rather be able to look at myself, be honest, and know that I enjoy every second of what I’m doing, than go to work and wish I was doing something else.”
For the last day of Theatre 619 (Acting for the Camera), we spent the entire class talking about how to prepare to act as a career, things to watch out for, and what we would have to do to prepare for the life ahead of us.
Everyone had a near anxiety attack of some kind, at least three people were laughing (in a horrified way) about how they were having heart palpitations, and I certainly know I shut down several times in class. We all know it’s not an easy path we choose -- we do this because not because we want to make money, or become famous.
We want to tell stories.
We want to change the world (and maybe the human condition) to be better.
We want to empathize with people, we want to have different experiences, we want the chance to be someone other than who we are.
We want to escape. We want to help someone escape.
My mom said she asked the crew member why she did theatre, and she responded (translated), “To learn a skill!”
Not that I can fault her -- theatre does introduce interpersonal skills, time and task management, patience, and communication. But what I love most about it is how it makes family out of strangers, how it makes people more resilient, and how it can change lives.
Last night was the Department of Theatre and Drama’s Senior Barcrawl (2015), and it was the most fun I had in my three years of being in the department. I think the reason I do theatre can be best summed up in the post I made after the crawl:
So in my previous post, I mentioned that I was cast as Enid Hoopes in University Theatre’s production of Legally Blonde: The Musical.
Now this came as a gigantic surprise to me because of three things.
1. the original Enid was played by a white woman (Natalie Joy Johnson)
2. I was told that I was cast because the director was stuck on who to cast, and then was given my headshot with a very not so subtle “How about her?” and decided on me
3. Enid is a very loud, brassy type person, and I’m just...not (until I feel comfortable)
So this Enid Hoopes, circa MTV’s recording of the original cast:
And this is me as Enid, in the same scene (The Harvard Variations):
(excuse my vulgar pose, but I just had really sweet boots and I needed them in the picture)
I really enjoyed the costumes for Enid -- very comfortable, and similar to what I would wear on a daily basis. But the most interesting thing about playing Enid was considering what motivated her as a character throughout the musical.
Her first couple of lines in “The Harvard Variations” were “I did the Peace corps overseas inoculating refugees in family clinics that I built myself from mud and trees...” leading to her declaration that “this country’s out of whack and only womyn have the guts to go and take it back. We’ll make the government come clean, and get more people voting green, and really stick it to the phallocentric war machine!”
(”I love your top. It is so fatigue-chic!”)
To me, Enid was very much a person still thinking of feminism in terms of first-wave feminism. If I were a white woman, it would very much be white feminism, but since I wasn’t, I could add more dimension to how I thought as Enid. I didn’t want to play her as the straight trope of “militant, feminist, lesbian” (even though that was how I described her in a nutshell), because playing stereotypes just makes me very uncomfortable.
I think the important part was to figure out why I did everything. As Enid, I believed in hard work, and that building success against all odds was the biggest achievement possible. Her bravado came from her own accomplishments and ambitions, as she sang about them in “The Harvard Variations” (there’s a reason that Padamadan, Schultz, and Hoopes are the three students in that song singing “Harvard’s the perfect place for me!”). With that reasoning, it made sense to me why she would respond to Callahan the way she did in “Blood in the Water” (“What, you think I wouldn’t defend him, just ‘cause he’s a typical man?”), and then slowly change after the Harvard party scene.
I wish I could spend more time talking about the headcanons I had for Enid. I also wish I could have found out what the other cast members had as backstories for their characters (especially Elle and Emmett and Vivienne and Warner and...), since there were some hilarious ones (Aaron Schultz overcompensating for his micropenis, according to his actor).
But there was a general consensus among the cast members that I talked to that, the play would be so much more complex and interesting if there was a higher number of people of color. To be honest, the cast was pretty diverse in that way (could be more), and it was amazing by the time we were putting on the final performance.
I think this sort of proves to me that, if a character’s ethnicity isn’t explicity stated or plot-important, there really is no reason to cast by ethnicity. I don’t need to be so worried about being limited by being Taiwanese-American, instead of being white-American.
Can I just say, this is my first time in a show where I’m not a part of the ensemble?
Not to say that the ensemble for this show doesn’t have fun, but there’s still something so gratifying about finally being a named character in a production.
And what a production it has been. This show began its rehearsal process around March 9th, and finally closed on May 3rd. About a week was spent teching the show in the performance space, and four days were given to the audience to experience the production.
This is also my last show as an undergraduate at UW-Madison.
I remember on the first day of rehearsals, the whole cast, designers, and management team sitting in a (dank) room of Vilas basement. There were so many names, I wondered if I could remember them all. There were faces and names I knew, but didn’t have a chance to get acquainted with before then.
Today we all departed as family members.
I don’t think, in a million years, would I have expected being cast as Enid Hoopes. I don’t know what the director saw in me, whatever that potential was, but she saw it, and gave me the opportunity. As much shit as I give her for a lot of the (inefficient) decisions that happened during the show, I am eternally grateful for her decision to cast me as Enid.
Scott, the music director, and his wife Kitt. Oh my God, Kitt. During our first few sing-throughs, I was so excited I would bob and move along to the music as we sang. One, it helps me keep time, two I was just excited to be a part of a show that I had watched on youtube obsessively (ten times at least) over summer. And at one point, Kitt approached me and said something along how much she enjoyed watching me, and how I had so much energy.
Having dealt with almost ten years of self-esteem issues regarding my ability to perform, that was like rainfall over dried land.
And that rain never stopped falling. Not only because of what Kitt said, it was because of every rehearsal I was called, I walked away with something I knew I could improve on. More things I could try, as an actor, and as the character.
My favorite moment during this whole process was when we were rehearsing the staging for Chutney’s trial, the actress (Isabel) used a different version of her usual heavy Boston (?) accent. Before then, she used a rather nasal, heavy version of the accent, and one night, she used another version that sounded higher pitched.
And very comical.
I remember the director asking her why, and I think she said that it was because the normal accent was hard on her soft palate, and she wanted to save her voice. It made sense, and I think the director just went with it.
Unfortunately, none of us could keep our shit.
I know there was a lot of snickering, snorting, and suppressed-to-the-point-of-shaking laughter. I know I exchanged glances with the court stenographer (played by Jamie Herb) several times, and had to work our faces into a very forced smile just so we wouldn’t laugh.
I forget who (might’ve been Scott), but someone just called for us to hold. We did. And then we were told to just laugh it out.
And we did.
Everyone could not keep it together. People were howling. People were clutching their stomachs. Everyone was laughing so much, so hard, there was just so much euphoria in the room, it made the taxing day just less tense.
Cross-ethnicity casting and Asian presence in acting
I think I’ve pin-pointed down why the statement “it’s racist to cast a Korean person as a Japanese person!” irritates me.
There are plenty of problematic things about Asians and Asian identity within the acting world, the Western acting world, in particular. Hollywood is pretty racist (still glaring at 47 Ronin), though it isn’t exclusive to Asians. And when I say Asian, I mean East and South Asian. Even then, South Asians (Laotians, Filipinxs, Thai...) get the shortest end of the stick, to the point where it’s only a really worn down nub, and not a stick.
I digress. I think there should be some liberties that can be taken with cross-ethnicity casting, at least, at this point of where we are (in general, anyways *handwaves*).
I’m too lazy to dig up pictures to do this article, but throughout film history, in cases that aren’t racist, you’ll find films where white people get cast as random races that just fit because of what they look like. The handful of things I can think of are like Stanley Tucci playing that one German scientist in Captain America, white American actors being cast as English (of various time periods), Australian, or white...
the point is, they’re coded by directors as looking that nationality by virtue of their generic (as fuck) whiteness (even though white isn’t majority in a lot of those nations now WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM). And as unfortunate as it sounds, a handful of minutes a director gets with an actor means that they’re going to make very very quick judgments on race based on what they see. Which is really not enough time to consider whether casting someone who could look [insert race] but isn’t [insert race] is a good idea or not. The average audience who watched the show isn’t going to care much either.
Which brings me to another point: If we cast characters strictly according to their race, then you’ve just fucking put me out of a job, thanks.
I’m probably just salty from the fact that the only Taiwanese characters on US television right now are those in Fresh Off the Boat, and even then Constance Wu is (I would say) stuck playing the immigrant mother.
There are, of course, opportunities where the character’s race isn’t explicitly mentioned in a script, and I could take those jobs. But that would depend on whether I fit the director’s vision of who that character looks like or not. And in this industry, that’s a large gamble that no amount of hard work can get around.
There’s also the issues of colorism in the business of acting (the paler you look as an Asian, the better chances of you getting a good role).
This is just my opinion, but I also think that there aren’t a lot of Asians in theatre, in film, because we’re all taught to view it as something not serious, that this is a path is one that only leads to debt and starving and perpetual waitressing jobs. I know I’ve been given that talk, and I know another Chinese (mainland) girl in my acting class that’s been given the same talk as well. And even then, it just seems so much easier to find acting jobs in whichever country our ethnicity is from.
This article is written after a critique I saw about this new tv series about something something Kimmy Schmidt, that it’s racist for Ki Hong Lee (Korean) to be cast as Dong Nyugen (Vietnamese). I’m pretty sure there are other things that are problematic about that whole thing, but I feel that the cross casting thing isn’t. I know that there are definitely aren’t a lot of Taiwanese characters for me to play, so if I have to play a Japanese character, or mainland Chinese, or whatever, I’m certainly going to cash that check.
(Another problem is directors casting names they’re most familiar with instead of taking on new actors who MIGHT ACTUALLY match the ethnicity of the character)
One of my classmates one mentioned in a chat, that musical theatre is what she imagines flying to be like.
I'm strongly inclined to agree with her. Citing some of the more popular examples, I'm sure every musical theatre kid (around my age) can remember the shivers from hearing (or seeing) "Defying Gravity", or "One Day More", or basically any rousing number for musicals (La Vie Boheme, So Much Better...etc). I mean, I'm pretty sure people can get those shivers in other fields (I know people in dance who would say so), but for me, there's no faster way for me to fall in love than a good musical number.
For example, I've been hitting the replay button on the Final Performance of the Barton Bellas in the movie Pitch Perfect for the entire day now.
Entire.
Day.
That brings to me say that I wish that musical theatre would expand more among Asian communities. I'm fairly positive that every Asian kid (East Asian, South Asian, whether in America or not) has been told that our path is unstable, that we may have to sleep with people to get places, that we should be teacher instead.
But why can't we fly, like the other kids?
There's a layer of understanding that good roles we don't land good roles. My uncle once told me that in the entertainment world in America, there is a hierarchy of what races get roles. According to him, it went whites, blacks, latin@s, and then asians. And even within asians, good roles would go to Mainland Chinese people first, then Korean, then Japanese.
I remember my high school self thinking "wtf????" and at the same time feeling a sinking feeling in my gut because he's probably right.
But I feel like it's a sorely under-appreciated field. There's something to be said for feeling that sense of euphoria when you're not just singing, you're feeling so much emotion that you have to project it by song. That's where I feel the essence of musical theatre is, and I mean to improve and understand it more.
*
Side notes -- I attended Four Seasons Theater (FST) and Musical Theatre of Madison (MTM) Campus musical theatre idol night earlier, and apparently I was remembered by one of the judges from FST. I had auditioned for RENT back in 2011 and left an impression for being polite and having a lot of questions. She said I'd improved a lot since then, and was happy to see me taking lessons.
Aw shucks.
And yesterday I went to audition for Middleton Players Theatre for their summer season. I can at least say that I did my pieces well. I didn't do all that well for the callback right then and there though -- I haven't listened to any Miss Saigon at all! I was so unprepared.
And have an audition selfie (rare instance of me looking presentable):
So today in musical theatre class, we put our group numbers on their feet and--
so anyone who knew me back from high school choir would know that I had a shitton of self-esteem issues (still do), and even though I craved for a chance to be in a group number or a solo number, I never got it. Not once in three years of choir.
So when my group unanimously decided to do "You Gotta Have a Gimmick" from the musical Gypsy, that was basically a huge moment for me. For some more context on that song, it's basically sung by burlesque strippers talking about their unique thing that let's them get paid.
I dress like a potato (I know I clean up nicely but hush hush hushhhh).
Showing up today in a shirt that had a slightly more revealing cut, leggings, and a skirt was basically how I got myself psyched to do the number with my group members, who are probably actually as shy as I am.
MAN WE KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK. I wish I could've had a recording, but I'm glad I didn't because having gone through the number three times now, I'm confident that it will be spectacular if we work on it more.
This Youtube series aims to retell details of Taiwanese history that aren't often taught in our (Taiwan) textbooks. It's actually very interesting, since the early episodes cover the period of time when Taiwan was under Japanese rule, and the laws and society back then.
The creators created these videos entirely from found resources, and I believe they are making news back in Taiwan! Go support them in this creative endeavor, and learn what has been omitted from the books. English subtitles are officially available (I considered applying, but I don't have the time...).
I have not posted anything here for such a long time. Wow.
I went to the Illinois Theatre Association's Annual Statewide Non-Equity Auditions on Saturday, and just got home around 4pm Sunday. I'm wiped. So wiped. But I think for my first time attending a professional audition, I kinda feel good about myself.
There's a huge chance that I won't get a callback, or any offers back, but the experience was valuable. I was friendly with some of the other auditionees and had my friendliness reciprocated. A lady named Michelle and another girl named Katie were other people there to audition, and we chatted, practiced the dance routine together, and gave each other encouragement.
I love theatre because it reminds me that we're all people, we all have a story to tell.
I think that's particularly important for marginalized races and genders and identities. I want to see more Taiwanese-American, Chinese-American people get into performance arts because of passion and not be discouraged because of how it's a difficult path, of how it's not lucrative.
fungbrothers Hey did you know a good way to dispel racist stereotypes is to make more by combining both misogynist and racist stereotypes? You might be like, how the fuck do you fuck up that badly?! Well, here are some easy points to follow:
make sure that when you point out self-hatred while you simultaneously support it
get an asian woman to participate to partially disguise your asshattery
appropriate AAVE multiple times because idk youre a “cool" asian dude who wants to distance them self from stereotypes of "weak feminine east asian men" by wearing the identity of a different poc(black men) who has been stereotyped as hypermasculine and aggressive.
generalize all asian ethnicities and use asian when you clearly mean east asian
shirk responsibility for making this by saying “we just made it up”.
make sure your audience is mostly white
make the background music “blurred lines” by robin thick because racialized misogyny needs that creepy vibe
and finally and most importantly, start your video seemingly criticizing white men’s racist views about asian women and follow that up with 18 new ways to generalize and dehumanize asian women in case they ran out or got bored with being racist and sexist the old fashioned way
BAM awesome video that executes multiple types of oppression with ease+ lots of approval from white people and east asians w/ internalized racism or sexism
PS: fuck you, maybe get funnier instead of relying on your audience’s bigoted tendencies for weak, bland humor
the worst part about this awful fucking video is all the asian women in the comments proudly stating that they are “whitewashed”. Because you made it a good thing. Because you said it was your “favorite” type.
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
kaledo-art
