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Back in Time, ‘Fresh Off the Boat’

February 23, 2015 in Book Matters, Reviews, TV Matters

Watching “Fresh Off the Boat,” the new ABC sitcom based on Eddie Huang’s eponymous memoir about growing up in Orlando, Florida, defies the time-space continuum in more ways than one. It’s not just that the series is set in the 1990s, or that I haven’t voluntarily viewed anything so old-school “sitcommy” since then. It’s that the last time television so matter-of-factly broke a glass ceiling was when “Will & Grace,” which featured two gay male characters, became an NBC smash in 1998. “Fresh Off the Boast” is the first stateside sitcom to star an Asian actor since Margaret Cho’s ill-fated “All-American Girl” was canceled in 1995 – the same year this series is set.

This doesn’t automatically mean “Fresh Off the Boat” is worth watching. Huang himself initially expressed trepidation about the production, suggesting it was a “reverse yellow face” – an attempt to fit an Asian American family into a traditional white TV family template. Others have rushed to the show’s defense. In a Slate roundtable, NPR’s Kat Chow agreed that it was “like a traditional sitcom” but praised it for “the various signposts for Asian Americans woven into them … the stinky tofu as the ‘weird Asian food’ … the ‘success perm.'” Continue Reading →

Neil Gaiman & Daniel Handler: Of Magic and Racist Jokes

February 19, 2015 in Book Matters, City Matters, Film Matters

They promised swordfights in their conversation but what we got was almost as good. At Tuesday night’s “En Garde! Gaiman and Handler,” authors, screenwriters, and general bon vivants Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) convened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House for a ninety-minute dialogue covering everything from the existence of magic to writing advice. Most notably, the friends and occasional collaborators also addressed Handler’s racist joke at last fall’s National Book Awards. It was a lively evening.

Perhaps to head off any unpleasant confrontations, the question-and-answer portion of the evening veered from BAM’s usual format: Audience members were encouraged to jot their questions on index cards upon their arrival rather than querying the authors from a microphone stand. Throughout the evening, the writers then answered the submissions of their choosing. Both men are terrific wits, and for a while it seemed Handler would circumvent the controversy entirely. Continue Reading →

‘The Humbling’ of Video on Demand

February 7, 2015 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

The term “straight to video” used to be the kiss of death for any film; for a while, “straight-to-video-on-demand” became the twenty-first-century equivalent. Sometime in the last five years, though, streaming video content became a legitimate movie distribution platform, one ensuring that more obscure content – documentaries, indies, foreign films – reached wider audiences than ever before, albeit with less pomp and circumstance. So to say that “The Humbling” is a straight-to-video-on-demand movie isn’t exactly an insult.

It also isn’t exactly true, since it concurrently opened in a scattering of theaters across the country late last month. But the fact remains that, though this film boasts a pedigree so impeccable it’d make a blue blood weep – Oscar winner Al Pacino stars, Oscar winner Barry Levinson directs, and Oscar nominee Buck Henry co-writes this adaptation of Pulitzer (and National Book Award) winner Philip Roth’s 2009 eponymous novel – its lukewarm theatrical reception was almost a foregone conclusion. You might wonder: What’s the catch? Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy