Pain don't hurt, whereas parts of Road House are pretty excruciating

All this week, everyone has been chiming in with their Patrick Swayze memories, from their love of Dirty Dancing and Ghost to the night they laughed their asses off during the classic SNL episode when Swayze spoofed both his sex-symbol image and his appeal to gay viewers and then played generous straight man to Chris Farley in the then-newcomer's breakout sketch, the Chippendales audition. Because I'm a guy who has zero tolerance for chick flicks, I'll always remember Swayze not for Dirty Dancing and Ghost, but for his creepy Donnie Darko supporting turn as a child-molesting motivational speaker and action films like Road House, where the mulleted star's dance background and willingness to do many of his own stunts played a huge part in making the fight sequences the best element of that Joel Silver camp classic.

Since 1989, Road House has been a source of great comedy, from Dana Gould's bit about Dalton's Zen bouncer thing-as-U.S. foreign policy to Michael J. Nelson's MST3K "(Let's Have) A Patrick Swayze Christmas" musical number and RiffTrax audio commentary (a more enjoyable commentrak than the Road House DVD's Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier one, which is a funny commentrak when Smith isn't tediously reading off pages and pages of Internet jokes about Dalton's superpowers because he ran out of things to say).

Road House is the white Dolemite. Like the Rudy Ray Moore camp classic, the Swayze vehicle is a bad movie, but extremely fun to watch and endlessly quotable.

Over at big WOWO, Byron Wong calls the modern-day western one of the best American martial arts flicks ever made. He raises a good point about how "Swayze didn't have to otherize us. Unlike Chuck, Steve, Jean-Claude, and just about every other White martial artist out there, he didn't have to hire a crew of Asians, blacks, or Latinos to beat up."

I agree with Byron that Road House's martial arts sequences are terrific--the complete opposite of Dolemite's fight sequences--and the movie surpasses anything Van Damme and Seagal have done (with directors who aren't Peter Hyams and Andrew Davis, that is). But outside of the convincing fight sequences and Swayze's charismatic star turn as the world's only NYU philosophy major-turned-internationally famous bouncer, Road House is pretty incompetent for a glossy '80s big-studio movie. Keith David (They Live, There's Something About Mary), one of my favorite actors-turned-announcers, shows up halfway through Road House, and then the movie leaves him stranded with nothing to do. Road House is loaded with almost everything I don't like about '80s big-studio filmmaking--the only '80s Hollywood touch that's missing is the John Hughes-style racism. The movie outdoes the first season of NewsRadio in the crappy clothes department. Swayze wears a weird-looking wraparound gi thing as a shirt, which, combined with the mullet, makes him look like Luke Skywalker's soap opera actor cousin from below the Mason-Dixon Line on Tatooine.


Road House is like a bad '60s Elvis flick, but with a pubes-flashing Sam Elliott as second fiddle instead of Bill Bixby--and Jeff Healey doing all the singing instead of the Big E. Healey has a painfully awkward "musician appears as himself and gives us his endorsement that the hero's a cool guy" scene, which was a staple of '80s movies, although that kind of cameo existed long before the '80s (Duke Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart in 1959's Anatomy of a Murder is the earliest example of a "musician cameoing as himself and helping to up the star's street cred" moment I can think of). The Healey tracks, which include a pretty good cover of Bob Dylan's "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky," overshadow a Michael Kamen score that sounds exactly like all the other drab scores Kamen wrote for the Silver action factory. There are attempts at wit that fall flat and make little sense, like the vague and homoerotic-sounding "I thought you'd be bigger" running gag, which seems to be a jab at Dalton's height--or not. I assume this botched attempt at a Silver catchphrase refers to how his height is below average for someone who's a cooler. So why didn't the script have the characters say "I thought you'd be taller" instead of "I thought you'd be bigger"? Oh, '80s Hollywood.

I never saw Point Break, Swayze's other signature action film, until shortly after his death was all over the news. I happened to have a long-unwatched Netflix copy of the 1991 bankrobbing surfer flick lying around my apartment, so as I watched the film for the first time, I was surprised by how well-made it was. The foot chase sequence, which concludes with the angsty emptying-of-the-gun moment that Hot Fuzz memorably mocked, is the best foot chase I've seen since the one in Raising Arizona. (During the DVD, I also constantly cringed over how Point Break's superbly shot surfing and skydiving sequences would have looked if the film were made in this current age of CGI instead of pre-CGI 1990.) Point Break is a better Swayze actioner than Road House, thanks to the skilled direction of underrated Hurt Locker helmer Kathryn Bigelow, but if I want a campy and unintentionally funny good time, I'll turn to Road House. Gay guys have their Valley of the Dolls, The Apple and Showgirls, while us straight guys have Dolemite, Color of Night, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and Road House.

Ever since Swayze went Swayze, I've been looking all over the file folders in my computer for Dana Gould's Road House bit. I finally found it. During an August 28, 2004 performance at the Largo in L.A., the stand-up and former Simpsons staff writer amusingly observes how America is "the world's bouncer." I like how Gould couldn't remember the Ben Gazzara character's name, so he gave him the name of the main villain from Rocky IV.

Let's do it to them before they do it to us (again): My obligatory thoughts on You Offend Me You Offend My Family's post

You Offend Me You Offend My Family is a blog that was originally conceived to promote Finishing the Game, director Justin Lin's 2007 mockumentary about the obstacles Asian American male actors have to put up with in Hollywood. The blog name is derived from an Enter the Dragon line that the actor characters in Finishing the Game are asked to perform during auditions (the actual line is "You have offended my family, and you have offended the Shaolin Temple"). The people who worked on Finishing the Game recently became the talk of the Asian American blogosphere due to a You Offend Me post that points out the ineffectiveness of the Japanese American Citizens League's protests against a lame gag involving the beating of an Asian American used car salesman in ex-Chappelle's Show writer Neal Brennan's The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (because hate crimes are funny!). Ken Jeong is a hilarious stand-up whom I've seen perform live, and I love his performance in Role Models, but what the hell was he thinking when he agreed to do that scene?

(If Silver Streak-era Richard Pryor were asked to do a scene like that, he would have walked off the set and caused the shoot to be halted so that the scene would have to be changed. That's exactly what Pryor did during the making of Silver Streak when he was uncomfortable with how the white writers scripted a sequence in which characters are fooled by Gene Wilder's lousy disguise as a black man. Pryor's angry protest resulted in a more believably written reaction to Wilder's disguise--the gag was changed to a black shoe shiner who sees his disguise and doesn't buy it at all--and the revision helped make the bathroom sequence the funniest part of Silver Streak.)

In "Hollywood and Asians: Why Protests Alone Won't Change Anything," the You Offend Me blogger suggests that instead of protesting like the JACL, what frustrated Asian Americans ought to do is concentrate their energy on supporting Asian American filmmakers and seeing their movies (easier said than done--the Asian American community is so fragmented and divided, and there are so many different sub-communities, from Chinese American to Filipino American, that it's impossible to get all these sub-communities to flock to these films). Many Asian American bloggers agree with You Offend Me's post, while a lone dissenter, my occasional boss TMM, has been fuming about it.

I don't have much to say on this subject other than the You Offend Me guy is mostly right, and the Angry Black Woman and Byron Wong have best articulated my thoughts on the subject.

First, the Angry Black Woman's thoughts:

But until Asian Americans as a whole are willing to put down our money to support the work of our Asian American filmmakers—nothing will change.

It’s a good point. But something about it bugs me.

Because it assumes something that I’m not sure is true, and feeds into a bigger problem. What Phillip suggests is that if Asian Americans just go and view more Asian American films, this will show Hollywood there’s a significant demand for positive portrayals. The same reasoning, IMO, underlies African Americans’ patronization of black films (and African American Interest books, and so on) — we’ve taken to heart the racist rationalization that if we don’t make it ourselves, and go see it ourselves, we can’t expect the mainstream to follow suit.

Except… African Americans have been making it ourselves, since the Sixties. We’ve been going to see those films, too, enough to create several blockbusters, catapult several African American filmmakers to auteur status, and launch a few subcultural film/theater movements.

But has all this success — all this proof that we will support our own — really changed anything in Hollywood?...

We’ve got to support the positive portrayals that are already out there. And that includes work by other PoC, because all this stuff feeds into each other. We’ll get more successful black actors in Hollywood once we prove that Latinos/as will go and see them. We’ll get more Asian actors when we can prove they appeal to black audiences. We’ll see fewer pretendians when audiences start going to see real Indians. And so on.

And now, Byron's thoughts:

I agree that things won’t change until we start paying, and I agree with his statement that a lot that comes from independent Asian American media “sucks.” ... The Debut was horrible. Yellow was beyond horrible. I couldn’t even finish One Hundred Percent, despite the fact that Tamlyn was in it. I’ve financially supported all of these...

I’ve said this from day one... the problem is the writing. If we improve the writing, if we work to improve our depth of vision by studying and developing writing, everything else will fall into place.

Good God, Yellow blew. That moment in The Limey when the otherwise understated Terence Stamp snaps and snarls, "Tell him I'm fucking comiiiiing!," with a deranged look on his face? Great shouty acting. The perpetually cranky and one-note lead actor in Yellow? The worst shouty acting I've ever seen.

I prefer not to march outside movie studios, multiplexes or--and this was really dumb--the Disney Store (huh?). Protests and letterwriting campaigns accomplish very little. In response to the JACL's furor, Paramount removed the Asian-bashing sight gag from the Goods commercials. So what? The scene is still in the movie. Yay, JACL.

A few months ago, I finished writing a two-week arc of my webcomic The Palace that's about the subject of grassroots protests against movies that are whitewashed remakes or are racially offensive, but I haven't illustrated the arc yet. In my script, the main character says to a classmate who's protesting against an Avatar: The Last Airbender-like martial arts flick, "Aren't there more important things to protest?... The way to fight Hollywood is not to keep organizing protests... but to go make your own fucking movies."

Personally, I think the best way to rob these racially offensive movies of their power is to publicly ridicule them and rip them and their creators to shreds through humor (hence the Hill Street Blues catchphrase that's part of the title of this post--I want to see more Asian American comedians be verbally aggressive towards our enemies and emulate the attitude in Sgt. Jablonski's morning battle cry). We need to do the same things that one of my comedy idols, Paul Mooney, did to Driving Miss Daisy and horror flicks that keep killing off white women or having them sleep with monsters and vampires in both his stand-up act and his 1993 album Race, one of my favorite examples of activism through comedy. To me, there's nothing more powerful than the comedic smackdown Mooney gave to mainstream Hollywood during Race.

Mooney's ridicule of Driving Miss Daisy ("I'll take a bagel and beat the shit out of Miss Daisy") and much less funny but equally dead-on comments about the inane 1989 Best Picture Oscar winner from black celebrities like Spike Lee did more to tarnish the reputation of that movie than any protest would have done. As Lee said to New York magazine about Do the Right Thing's impact in comparison to the Jessica Tandy/Morgan Freeman movie's impact, "No one's talking about Driving Miss Daisy now." When AFI announced its list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time, Driving Miss Daisy didn't make it. Do the Right Thing landed spot #96.

I'd love to see an Asian American comedian or actor ruin the box office grosses of an upcoming racist movie by snarking about that film while being interviewed by a talk show host or magazine writer. I wish that was the reason why The Goods tanked at the box office and quickly disappeared from theaters.

Bottom line? Let's take a cue from Byron and concentrate on improving our writing skills so that there can be more movies from us that people will remember far more than the Live Hard, Sell Hards and Driving Miss Daisys of the industry.

Enter the "Sampler": June Park vs. Ting and Joe

Slant Eye for the Round Eye has posted a lengthy but terrific interview with three of my Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology editors, Jeff Yang, Parry Shen and Keith Chow.

Props to Jeff for a well-thought out response to Racialicious contributor Sunny Kim's criticisms(*) about the novel (it's more East Asian than Asian, and where the hell are the heroes who are Southeast Asian or gay?), and for admitting that yes, the novel should have featured more characters from either of those segments of the diverse and complex Asian American diaspora. The minimal representations of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders were one beef I had for a while with my own anthology because I'm Filipino myself (when Jeff wanted to replace Mañanaman, a Tomorrow People-inspired Filipino background character in "Sampler," with one of the Chinese characters from his story, "A Day at CostumeCo," I told him, "No, the character should be brown because there should be more of us in the novel"). My beef died down when I was relieved to see a Pinay heroine in Greg LaRocque's "Trinity."

In fact, Pinoys were the lead characters in two story ideas of mine that the editors rejected in favor of "Sampler," which centered on a Korean heroine I based partly on the then-beleaguered Chung dry cleaner family. (I went into detail about my rejected Secret Identities ideas during big WOWO's podcast, which you can listen to here or as a direct download.) While I was gratified that the editors chose one of my story ideas, I'll admit to also being disappointed that Pinoys got the shaft once again. But I learned to deal with it and decided to maybe save those rejected brown heroes for a separate project where I'd have more control over their development, like say, for instance, a Filipino American hero anthology (you in, Baroza?). I knew Secret Identities was going to be an East Asian-centric book because the editors were all East Asian (if I were in charge, of course I'd opt for more Southeast Asian characters than East Asian ones), and I was also aware that this was their very first major graphic novel project, so they were bound to make mistakes. Plus, they had to work under insane budgetary and page-related restrictions(**), so not all the various Asian American subgroups that they would have liked to have seen represented were going to make it into an already crowded anthology, although to echo what Secret Identities reader Christina Chou said in a tweet, I wish the stories were allowed to be longer. You can't win 'em all.

(*) big WOWO has posted an insightful response to the Racialicious criticisms, which he says are part of a troubling and frustrating trend: "Someone will try to create something, and another person will step in and try to overdiversify it to death. They'll complain about one thing or another until they've managed to sink the project... Had Jeff edited a work that perpetuated racism, or pushed the same ol' WM/AF storylines, or did something else egregiously bad, I'd say go ahead, let him have it. But to quibble over something as vast and undefinable as diversity makes zero sense. It's petty."

(**) The fact that they managed to get this thing completed while dealing with all those obstacles is a superfeat in itself. If it weren't for what the DISGRASIAN bloggers call that Hardass Asian Parent upbringing, this book would never have dropped on April 14 or 15 or whatever the hell the street date was.

That's why we need everyone to support this novel--so that it's popular enough to spawn a second volume where we can rectify the mistakes we made on the first one.

And if you weren't satisfied with this Asian American hero book, stop complaining and start your own book! This shouldn't be the only collection of Asian American heroes out there.


All in all, the Secret Identities editors' chat on Slant Eye's blog is a must-read. But the best part of the interview is a question about my creation, June Park from "Sampler," and a couple of other Secret Identities heroes, Ting Lee, a teen who's able to manipulate heat from foods she eats in "You Are What You Eat," and the super-strong, lightning-quick title character of "Meet Joe":

Last question. Who wins in a superhero cage match: Lynnn Chen's Ting, Koji Steven Sakai's Joe, or Jimmy Aquino's June?

KC: That's an interesting collection of characters doing battle. There must be some evil overlord forcing them to fight each other (think Han from "Enter the Dragon.") I say they team up and go after Han.

JY: I love/hate this game! It's the fanboy's ultimate smackdown, "Who Would Kick Whose Ass?" And the answer is always Wolverine, because of ADAMANTIUM and CLAWS and HEALING FACTOR, even if it's Wolverine vs. Galactus or whatever.

Anyway, I hope the next generation of fanboys and fangirls end up playing WWKWA with SI's characters. Here's my take. Ting is screwed because she's dependent on food. If there isn't a ham sandwich in the ring, what's she going to do? If you have this battle royale at the Cracker Barrel buffet, watch out, kids, but you mention "cage match" so I'm assuming not.

Joe's problem is that, by definition, his powers are just what every Asian can do, right? I mean, can't you crush a brick with a single blow of your mighty yellow fist? I know I can. So, put him in a ring with non-Asians, and he's deadly, but against his own kind, he is effectively countered at all turns. Plus, he's the only guy in the ring, and I suspect he'd pull his punches, which would only really piss off the ultimate winner in this battle, June Park.

Yes!

June's Sampling ability (and her ever-present swatches of costume fabric) would put her combat skillz way above the less flexible powers of her opponents. At least, until Wolverine enters the ring and smokes her with his adamantium/claws/healing factor, FTW!

Noooo! Go back to Vancouver, ya hairspray-drenched prick!

PS: It would be a real nail-biter. Joe would be in a dilemma -- afterall, he's a gentleman and would never strike a woman. So to end this quickly, he chooses the lesser of two evils -- June wears glasses and he's always been taught to never hit anyone with glassses, so he mathmatically figures out the best vector to leap at Ting and take her out with a quick nerve pinch.

Ting sees this and whips out a Chili Pepper stashed in her utility belt - gulps it down and bursts into flames by going Super Nova - temporarily blinding Joe and knocking him unconcious.

Ting then turns to June, and sends a flare from her fingers - June dodges aside and the flame scorches her favorite "I SUCK AT MATH" Blacklava shirt.

All this yellow-on-yellow violence is killing me inside. [*Sniffle*] Can't we all just get along?

Anger flares up behind June's spectacles and Ting sees she is in trouble. She tries a different tactic, reaches into a punch on her utility belt and munches on a cucumber to freeze the moisture in June's body and knock her out - but June simply touches the utility belt absorbs all of Ting's Yin/Yin food conversion projectile abilities and Ting is met with a blasts of fire and ice -- and instantly knocks her to the ground with a really bad cold and uncontrollably sneezing for days. The winner: JUNE

Yes!! What what! Pay up, foolz! Cue the victorious Enter the Dragon end title theme!

My voice seems to be all over the podcastosphere this week (is that even a word?)

I don't have the cash right now to travel around with the Secret Identities crew on their publicity tour in New York and more recently, L.A., so I've had to stick to plugging Secret Identities without leaving the Bay Area.

On big WOWO's podcast, which you can listen to right now on WOWO's blog or as a direct download, I discussed with podcast host Byron Wong the Secret Identities novel and the development of "Sampler," as well as the need for more Asian American scriptwriters, whether in the comics industry, TV or sketch comedy.

I revealed to Byron that right before I wrote the treatment for "Sampler," I was going to make the title character the daughter of a tailor who caters to superheroes, but then I remembered that a J. Michael Straczynski Amazing Spider-Man story introduced a similar tailor character, so to avoid turning into the Carlos Mencia of comic books, I changed the characters from tailors to dry cleaners.

I wish Byron kept the digital recorder rolling after the interview was over because we then shared some funny wisecracks about the 1998 Asian American indie movie Yellow (what's up with the lead actor's shouty acting?) and my own self-portrait, which I drew for both Secret Identities and my blog profile page (Me: "My picture probably scared away your site's readers from posting questions to me [in the comments section]. Maybe they're like, 'Who the fuck is he? Another untalented Basco brother?'" Byron: "It looks like a mugshot." Me: "Yeah, the photo I based it on had me wearing a beret, but I wanted to draw myself with a more gangster-looking hat." Byron: "Maybe I should have said you're dating a white woman. Then I would have gotten some comments.").

The same week I recorded the podcast with WOWO, I also guested on The Ben and Joel Podcast, hosted by conservative Scripps Howard columnist Ben Boychuk (a longtime fan of A Fistful of Soundtracks) and his liberal fellow columnist Joel Mathis. During their roundtable chat about the summer movie season, I talked mostly about a subject that's unrelated to Secret Identities: film and TV scores. (UPDATE: Listen to this Ben and Joel Podcast installment right now on Ben's blog or as a direct download.) At one point, Ben even asked me to briefly discuss Secret Identities, and I explained how my Secret Identities experience made me see the advantages the comics medium has over film and TV. For instance, when you create a comic, you don't have to worry about a ginormous budget like the one Fox lavished on X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Ben and I are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but there's one thing we agree on: the awesomeness of the scores of Yoko Kanno, Michael Giacchino, Jerry Goldsmith and Basil Poledouris. Many of the scores Ben and I like are ones that are listenable outside of the movie or TV show. During the chat, I admitted that some of the scores I enjoy and have chosen for airplay on A Fistful of Soundtracks are from movies I've never even seen, like the 1999 cannibal horror flick Ravenous. It's an interesting discussion about music in movies, and I got to talk about aspects of film music and AFOS I haven't even addressed on this blog yet!