Lost, "The End": "I don't believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape"

As someone who's watched every single episode of Lost since the still-amazing pilot and recapped the series' entire fourth season for another blog (and never got paid for writing those recaps--as Chris Rock would say, what kind of gangster shit is that?), I'm still processing the events of Lost's lukewarmly received and sometimes frustrating series finale. I wasn't expecting the finale to answer every remaining question about the series' mysterious goings-on. How could it do so in one episode, even with an extra half-hour? I just wanted a finale that gave proper farewells to the characters and brought the goods action-wise like those eps when Sayid busted out his badass breakdance fighting moves, and "The End" delivered in the character and action sequence departments. But was all that time spent in the sideways universe during the final season worth it? I don't think I'm completely satisfied with the reasoning for the sidewaysverse. That whole business with the giant cork didn't make much sense either. Bullet time:

-My favorite recurring Lost theme was the conflict between a man of science (Jack) and a man of faith (Locke). The final season resolved that conflict beautifully, with Jack finally accepting Locke's beliefs in the specialness of the island and dying the way he wanted to (which was seeing his remaining friends leave the island safely) in a pitch-perfect final image that referenced the pilot's first moment and showed how much of an influence the Watchmen comic had on Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof.

-I'm glad Ken Leung's Miles, the character who provided the above one-liner about duct tape, lived to see another day. Bloggers like angry asian man and DISGRASIAN were disappointed that their favorite pair of Lost characters, the supercouple of Jin and Sun, was offed in "The Candidate" (some have even cried racism over the demises of the Kwons and Sayid), but I think the death of Miles, the show's sole Asian American regular and one of the few APA guys in prime-time who's neither a martial arts expert nor a coonin' buffoon, would have been a bigger letdown. (Speaking of Asian stuff, spoken-word artist Bao Phi wrote a nice post earlier this season about Lost's huge Asian American following.)

-I was also jazzed to see Miles' fellow freightie Lapidus alive after the submarine debacle in "The Candidate" because Jeff Fahey, who was underused on Lost but served as great comic relief whenever he did get screen time, is a master at making something out of nothing, ever since his laconic turn as the eccentric title hero of ABC's short-lived '90s procedural The Marshal. One of the reasons why the Star Wars prequel trilogy was an epic fail was because it lacked a Han Solo-esque figure who would wittily comment on the mystical goings-on and serve as a relatable audience surrogate. I like to think the Lost creators took notice of that flaw in the prequels, so they gave us not just one Han Solo-esque foil, but four: Sawyer, Miles, Lapidus and the not-as-cynical-or-snarky Hurley.

-The sci-fi geek in me who enjoyed all the time-travel material during my favorite Lost seasons, four and five, was disappointed that neither the nuke in "The Incident" nor the island's funky science was the reason for the sidewaysverse. The afterlife angle pretty much shot down my theory that Desmond or some other character with extraordinary powers created the sidewaysverse to hide his friends in there from the homicidal Smokey. On a superficial note, Sidewaysverse Kate looked slammin' in that black miniskirt.

-So Hurley and Ben are basically Mr. Rourke and Tattoo now? I bet the new island protector begins each morning by greeting everyone else with "Smiles, everydude, smiles!"

-Since when is Shannon the love of Sayid's life? I thought he was into Nadia. Whatever, man. I'm sure the Sayid and Shannon shippers got their panties wet that night. God, I hate that term "shippers." Other terms I hate are "squee" and "bromance." All those terms should be taken out back and shot and given a burial like the one Rick Rubin gave to the word "def" when he removed "Def" from the name of his label American Records.

-Yes! Lt. Van Buren is cancer-free! Woops, wrong series finale.

My starting six for Asian American cinema

A discussion about supporting Asian American cinema inspired blogger and R&B/hip-hop scholar Oliver Wang to invite experts on Asian American cinema to post their lists of six films they would recommend to people whose idea of an Asian American film is Rush Hour. Phil Yu of angry asian man, who helped spread the word about Wang's little starting six project, contributed his own starting six and had a couple of surprising picks on his list, like the corny Flower Drum Song, which he even admitted had some cheesy moments.

I saw Wang's starting six and wanted to post my idea of a starting six on my blog to show people who are underwhelmed by a lot of Asian American cinema that there are a few gems out there.

1. The Breakthrough Film: Chan Is Missing (director: Wayne Wang, 1982)
I first saw Wang's comedy about assimilation and Asian American identity on KQED when I was in high school, and I dug how the film is unsentimental, smart and documentary-like, whereas Wang's other signature Asian American film, the Joy Luck Club adaptation, is annoyingly sentimental, syrupy and cartoonish, with a point of view that constantly and Frankenstein-ishly screams out "Asian man bad!"

2. The Serious Filipino American Film: The Fall of the I-Hotel (director: Curtis Choy, 1983)
This outstanding hour-long documentary about the razing of San Francisco's Manilatown is a landmark work in the short history of Filipino American cinema, and it contains powerful footage of the 1977 protests against the eviction of 50 manongs (elderly Filipinos) from their soon-to-be-demolished Manilatown residential hotel.

3. The Actioner: Big Trouble in Little China (director: John Carpenter, 1986)
Twentieth Century Fox marketed BTILC as a movie in which Kurt Russell's Jack Burton is the hero ("Jack Burton's coming to rescue your summer"). In actuality, Jack is the buffoonish sidekick in a role that's usually reserved for the Asian guy, while the real heroes of the piece are the resourceful badass Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) and the wizardly tour bus driver Egg Shen (Victor Wong). That sly and subversive role reversal is one of the reasons why I admire Carpenter. It's a shame that no Asian American filmmaker has yet made an Asian American-centric action flick as enjoyable and empowering for APA viewers as BTILC (Enter the Dragon and later vehicles for the likes of Brandon Lee, Keanu Reeves, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu don't count as APA-centric). When are we going to see the APA equivalent of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Coffy or El Mariachi?

4. The Humorous Filipino American Film: The Flip Side (director: Rod Pulido, 2001)
José Sáenz is a comedic standout as an untalented Pinoy baller who thinks he's black in the most obscure of my six choices (it's never made it to DVD). Though Pulido's only feature film is more like an 80-minute sitcom than a movie, I prefer it over The Debut, and the sharpest and most dead-on parts of Pulido's screenplay deal with Pinoys who wish they were black and Pinays who pass themselves off as "Hawaiian," whitewash their looks and date only white guys. No other Asian American feature film has irreverently poked fun at self-hating Asian women like The Flip Side did (c'mon Pinoy screenwriters, it's time to rip Michelle Malkin a new one like Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Boston Legal did to Nancy Grace).

5. The Indie Film: Better Luck Tomorrow (director: Justin Lin, 2002)
I prefer the pre-MTV Films version with the ballsier, Taxi Driver-esque ending over the final cut with the slightly modified ending. The conclusion Lin opted for in the final cut is like if Martin Scorsese took Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver screenplay and tacked on a couple of lines at the end in which Travis Bickle says he plans to turn himself in for murder because he suddenly felt sorry for slaughtering all those pimps.

6. The Mainstream Film: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (director: Danny Leiner, 2004)
This hilarious cult favorite annoys Asian American film scholars who find it misogynist and slam it for being lowbrow. But it's lowbrow humor for smart people, and even Stephanie "Actresses with not-so-toned bodies should be allowed to do nude scenes too" Zacharek didn't call it misogynist and enjoyed how it's "so unaggressive in the way it addresses the issue of what it means to be a minority in this country that it coaxes you into thinking about it." (If those haters want to see better-written female characters, the somewhat inferior sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is up their alley. It appears to have been written to appease them.) The fact that many Asian American viewers like myself find Harold & Kumar--which was written and directed by white guys--to be more accurate about our experience than rather shrill and heavy-handed indie dramas with similarly aged lead characters made by Asian American filmmakers is a sign that those indie filmmakers need to step their game up.

Six honorable mentions

The Crimson Kimono (director: Samuel Fuller, 1959)
A lengthy Asian male/white female kiss in 1959? Wow. We have Fuller and his brass ones to thank for that.

Who Killed Vincent Chin? (directors: Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña, 1987)
I don't think I can watch this hard-hitting staple of Asian American studies movie screenings again because the subject matter infuriates me so much.

Robot Stories (director: Greg Pak, 2003)
Matt Zoller Seitz is right. This low-budget anthology from Greg, whom I'm honored to be in the same graphic novel with, is a great sci-fi movie. It contains several terrifically written roles for actresses of color. Lesser-known actresses like Wai Ching Ho (as a grieving mother with a comatose son) and Julienne Hanzelka Kim (as a laconic yet very expressive android) are among the standouts in the cast. If that silent movie I always wanted to write ever gets made, Kim would be perfect for it.

Sucker Free City (director: Spike Lee, 2004)
I know it's a made-for-TV Spike Lee Joint, but this Alex Tse-penned unsold pilot about San Francisco gang life, which co-stars the always superb Ken Leung, premiered first at the Toronto International Film Festival before debuting on Showtime. It ranks with the Twin Peaks and EZ Streets pilots as one of the best feature-length pilots ever made, and it's a more satisfying Tse film than Tse's Watchmen adaptation.

The Motel (director: Michael Kang, 2005)
I appreciate how this indie comedy has none of the formulaic touches that Rotten Tomatoes Show hosts Ellen Fox and Brett Erlich skewered in their "Ode to the Indie."

Beerfest (director: Jay Chandrasekhar, 2006)
The first Broken Lizard flick I ever saw is the funniest one the troupe has done so far, with a hilarious performance by Chandrasekhar as a fallen beer pong legend who's turned to whoring himself out and giving $15 "ZJs."

Coming either later this year or next year: My starting six for Asian American comic books and graphic novels.

Goh Nakamura records a tune based on the movie White on Rice

My older brother's a fan of witty Bay Area singer/songwriter Goh Nakamura, "who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands." One of those impossible crushes is on Natalie Portman, the subject of my favorite Nakamura track, "N.P." ("And you can retain your maiden name/And I'll be 'Goh Portman'/till my dying day/And I'll be 'Mr. Portman'--it'll be written on my epitaph/I'll be 'Mr. Portman' just like your dad").

Nakamura wrote and recorded a nice tune inspired by director Dave Boyle's indie comedy White on Rice. Like "N.P.," both the song and Boyle's film are about a dreamer with an impossible crush, an immature 40-year-old Japanese immigrant (Hiroshi Watanabe) who competes with a younger, suaver and much more Americanized Korean co-worker (Heroes' James Kyson Lee) for the affections of his brother-in-law's beautiful niece (Saving Face star and Secret Identities contributor Lynn Chen).

White on Rice has been hyped all over the Asian American blogosphere. angry asian man said "Watanabe is brilliant as one of the most annoying and unlikeable heroes you'll ever find yourself rooting for," and Ningin praised how the film "doesn't rely on the usual stereotypes," while non-Asian reviewers seem to be less enthusiastic about White on Rice. Cinepassion's Fernando F. Croce gave it one out of four stars and called it an "asphyxiating ethnic sitcom." PopMatters' Cynthia Fuchs found the "outrageous-silly-boyness" of White on Rice (and similarly toned previous comedies like Napoleon Dynamite and Eagle vs. Shark) to be repetitive and monotonous, which means Rotten Tomatoes Show hosts Ellen Fox and Brett Erlich, who pointed out how formulaic indie comedies have become in a savage spoof of Juno's "Anyone Else But You" number, will probably hate it.

I don't watch the music video channels anymore. Do labels still make atrocious videos of movie themes or songs inspired by movies in which clips from the film are haphazardly edited together with footage of the stars pretending to jam with the singer? The "White on Rice" video features Watanabe and Lee doing exactly that together, except not on the same rooftop with Nakamura (were Watanabe and Lee unable to meet Nakamura?--it looks like they're not even in the same city). It reminds me of those '80s and '90s tie-in videos, except it's less cheesy, and Nakamura's tune doesn't suck.

Angry Reader--that's my name, uh, uh, uh

"Quick Kick is angry, too. Why does he have to be bare-chested all the time? Even on an episode of G.I. Joe when he's fighting the enemy outside and it's snowing?"

--one of my favorite quotes from angry asian man

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I'm honored to be angry asian man's Angry Reader of the Week.

Here's a sneak peek of the Q&A:

I'm Filipino.

And this concludes the sneak peek. Juicy, huh?

Peep the Q&A now. Thanks, Phil.

One day of San Diego Comic-Con '09 is all I can take

Like angry asian man blogger and Secret Identities booster Phil Yu (more on him later), I picked only one day to attend San Diego Comic-Con '09, and one day is really all I can tolerate of the overwhelming, overcrowded and smelly Nerd Prom.

My favorite aspect of Comic-Con is not the panels--I wasn't able to go inside any of the ones I wanted to see--but unexpectedly meeting writers and bloggers whose work I've enjoyed for several years, such as Phil. Here's my recap of Comic-Con Friday in pictures.


Hey Optimus, why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?


I didn't know Bumperboy creator Debbie Huey and I worked for the same university newspaper 12 years ago until my older brother pointed it out to me recently. We never met each other because her department of City on a Hill Press never really interacted with my department. I also didn't know Secret Identities approached Debbie to contribute a story, but she had to decline. I'm glad to see another alum from the paper doing well as an author (Azadeh Moaveni is another alum from my period at the paper who's had quite a career as an author).


From left to right: a group of cosplayers suited up as Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy, the Golden Age Flash, Harley Quinn and Green Lantern.


Here I am with Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who looks like he's pointing at me and saying, "Who the hell is this guy?," but actually, he's looking at another camera. The underrated Middleman TV series--one of my favorite shows that debuted last summer--may be cancelled, but it's having one hell of an afterlife at Comic-Con (Javier and the cast reunited to promote both the debut of a "series finale" in graphic novel form and a fully loaded DVD box set). It was also cool to unexpectedly run into one of the series' biggest boosters, blogger and Newark Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall, at Javier's booth. Javier's next TV series will be the post-apocalyptic NBC drama Day One.


These Clone Stormtroopers are so lazy they don't even notice the guy's flashing a peace sign and outing himself as a Galactic Republic sympathizer. Quit falling asleep on the job, you goosestepping test-tube babies!



At the booth shared by Secret Identities and the Epic Proportions studio, I signed a few copies of Secret Identities for fans and then decided to challenge myself by doing something I rarely do, which is draw the character I scripted, "Sampler" heroine June Park (I prefer to have artists who are way more skilled than I am--like Erwin Haya--visually interpret June). I did a pencil drawing of June for a jam piece, the grand prize in a Secret Identities scavenger hunt.


I had to sketch out June first before doing the final drawing on the jam piece. Here's the rough sketch I made before redrawing it on the jam piece. JLA and Justice League Unlimited comics inker Walden Wong did a nice job inking the final drawing.


Erwin and I finally meet face-to-face. He said he didn't do the final lettering on "Sampler," which contained a few typos, and if he had gotten to do it, the typos wouldn't have appeared. I'm glad to see Erwin's artwork in "Sampler" has been getting positive feedback. He told me people have said to him that they want to see more adventures with June.


The recession's been so tough for Transformers' token female bot Arcee that she's had to moonlight as a bodyguard for the constantly pawed-at Olivia Munn.


Former Gilmore Girls co-star Keiko Agena and the talented--and lovely--Ming Doyle worked on the clever Secret Identities story "Learn to Share," about a blind Thai girl whose powers make Daredevil look like Don Knotts.


Avengers member Mockingbird prepares to use her battle stave on nerds who don't shower.


I could use a utility belt like Captain America's. I'd rather rock that than a camera murse.


It's Firestorm, back when he was white and into Seinfeld puffy shirts.



The Spy vs. Spy feud started when Black Spy dissed White Spy during "Pull Your Skirt Up."


Psylocke ought to use her psychic knife to shut down fake psychics like Dr. Girlfriend soundalike Sylvia Browne. Does Sylvia Browne smoke cigarettes or does she just eat them?


The Joker (with a bikini-clad Harley Quinn) refuses to join the spray tan bandwagon.


"Jayna, did you tell Gleek to take a shit in the bucket again? That shit's not funny!"



A G4 booth babe promotes the network's new reality show Focus Group, in which people are locked in a room where they're forced to watch nothing but G4's reruns of Cheaters.



Paramount Pictures booth babes take it to the bridge.


Only Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot and Fluid Man from Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles can pull off the scuba flipper look.


From left to right: Eternal Smile author Gene Yang, Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone and Secret Identities editor-in-chief Jeff Yang discuss the growing numbers of non-white or female comic book buyers at the SDCC panel Jeff moderated, "Four Color Reality: Making Comics Relevant to Readers Across Cultures."


During the "Four Color Reality" panel, Milestone Media founder and Justice League Unlimited writer Dwayne McDuffie recalled being the second African American to ever write a Marvel comic, as well as Milestone's efforts to tap into an underutilized talent pool of writers of color (Dwayne noted that Valiant was the only other comics company at the time that had an equally diverse staff). Yes, I know I look like I represent the Lollipop Guild, Daly City Chapter.


Dwayne stands with the four Secret Identities editors who followed his example (from left to right: Jerry Ma, Jeff, Keith Chow and Parry Shen).


Dwayne briefly reunites with letterer Janice Chiang, who worked on his issues of Iron Man and Hardware. Thanks, Janice, for introducing me to Dwayne, as well as past Spider-Man letterer and current Tales from the Crypt artist Rick Parker, former Marvel editor and current Papercutz editor-in-chief Jim Salicrup and '90s X-Men writer Scott Lobdell.


The highlight of the day was hanging out late at night with the likes of Jeff (who took this picture for me), Keith (not pictured), Amulet creator Kazu Kibuishi (not pictured), who contributed the "Go" pinup to Secret Identities, Eternal Smile artist Derek Kirk Kim (left) and Phil of angry asian man (right), whose shirt says "My Ninja!" and whose blog I've been following for several years.

I wasn't aware Phil and I both hailed from the South Bay. The first and last time I talked to him was via e-mail during the early years of his blog (I don't remember what we talked about in our exchange--I bet it was about Asian American movies). I was jazzed to learn from Phil that he's been checking out my blog, but I had to admit to him--and another guy in the room admitted this to Phil too--that I can't read his blog on some days because the hate crimes or moments of verbal Asian-bashing that he reports really make my blood boil.

I told Phil I'd like to be part of his blog's Angry Reader of the Week section someday (hey, my new friend Kate Agathon is the Angry Reader this week!), though one question might make me nervous: "What makes you angry?" I'd be nervous trying to answer it because the list of things that make me angry would turn the Angry Reader of the Week post into a three-parter.

Now added to that ever-expanding list: the long lines and claustrophobic Exhibit Hall at Comic-Con.

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Added on July 27, 2009: The Facebook version of this gallery contains some different photos. Also, almost all the captions for the pics on the Facebook version are completely different from the captions I wrote on this post. Check out my alternate silly captions.

An old G.I. Joe comic has eerie parallels to Laura Ling's ordeal

I posted about this recently on my Twitter page. While searching my storage boxes in my parents' dusty garage for some old Starlog issues because I wanted to look at a couple of Starlog articles about Gerald Fried and the making of The Rocketeer, I stumbled into a stack of '80s Marvel G.I. Joe comics written by Asian American comics author Larry Hama, whose work is admired by all of us creators from Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. (Quick Kick--one of the few Asian American heroes in '80s comics and voiced on the original G.I. Joe animated show by none other than Dr. Pierre Chang--was Hama's creation. A chat between Hama and Secret Asian Man creator Tak Toyoshima appears in Secret Identities as an interstitial feature drawn by Tak.)


At the top of the stack of G.I. Joe comics I unearthed from the garage was one of the first comics I bought for myself, G.I. Joe #61 from July 1987, which is notable for two things: a badass Mike Zeck cover depicting Snow Job, a wounded Quick Kick and a mad-as-hell Stalker in the middle of a shootout (one of my all-time favorite comics covers) and some early Todd McFarlane artwork that Marvel rejected because it didn't meet their standards. Marvel replaced the future Amazing Spider-Man and Spawn illustrator with Marshall Rogers, whose late '70s Batman comics I've always dug (one of Rogers' Batman stories was later adapted by Batman: The Animated Series into "The Laughing Fish").

But McFarlane's scrapped art actually isn't the most interesting thing about issue #61, which, like many of Hama's other G.I. Joe comics, is grittier than the bloodless, Star Wars-like '80s animated series and Paramount's upcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (Uh, Stephen Sommers, I think you've gotten your '80s cartoons mixed up. The shiny skintight power suits aren't G.I. Joe. That's Silverhawks, pal. And that long-winded Rise of Cobra title is terrible. It's not going to attract non-fans who think it's a documentary about health insurance for the unemployed.)

Hama's story in #61 centers on the Joe unit's attempted rescue of an American reporter who's arrested on trumped-up espionage charges in the fictional country of Borovia.


While re-reading #61, I couldn't help but think of recent headlines involving captured journalists, like the North Korean detainment of Current TV staffers Laura Ling--a correspondent for Current's Vanguard and the younger sister of reporter and ex-View co-host Lisa Ling--and Euna Lee.


Hama's comic makes me wish that a special ops unit would sneak into North Korea and bust them the hell out of there.

Those of us former or current journos who are worried about Ling and Lee's impending trial (and hope they are released like captured Iranian American journo Roxana Saberi recently was) should read the LiberateLaura Twitter page, which has been posting both updates on Ling and Lee's case and links to candlelight vigil announcements and press coverage. I first learned about the page when its tweeter replied to my tweets about the 1987 G.I. Joe issue.

A lot of bloggers are blasting the Al Gore-owned channel for not publicly acknowledging the ordeal. Current continues to air Ling's past Vanguard segments as if nothing awful has happened to her. For instance, the channel has lately put Ling's segment about Vietnamese bird flu into heavy rotation because of its relevance to the swine flu problem, but Current Tonight host Rawley Valverde didn't mention his colleague's present situation at all during a recently recorded intro that preceded the bird flu segment. The channel's silence must be due to legal reasons--as angry asian man notes, not even Ling's family members can publicly "go into detail regarding her ordeal due to the sensitive nature of the case"--and what I assume is the Current staff's discomfort with having two of its reporters become the story.

By the way, when will newspapers and blogs stop posting the same two blurry DMV driver's license photo-quality pictures of Ling and Lee? Are these papers and blogs lazy or what? Ling wasn't exactly reclusive in her line of work, so how can that be the only picture these papers and blogs have of her?

Name of the Year? More like Name of the Millennium

I didn't know there's an actual contest for Name of the Year until angry asian man blogged that a Pinay named Iris Macadangdang (pronounced macka-dong-dong) is competing in it. She instantly got my vote.

You know what would be really cool? If she wins, I think Iris Macadangdang should meet up with Texas state Rep. Betty Brown to discuss names that are "easier for Americans to deal with."

I have a special attachment to the name "Macadangdang." In high school, there was a guy with that last name who would elicit snickers from douchey white kids whenever his name was read over the PA. As a shout-out to that poor Filipino kid--had I ever met him when I did time at that school, I would have told him, "Be proud of that billboard space-hogging indigenous Filipino name and tell them fools to eat your 'dangdang"--I have used "Macadangdang" repeatedly in my writing, particularly in A Fistful of Soundtracks Halloween Special sketches back when I was on terrestrial radio. I plan to continue to slap that last name onto Filipino characters, in much the same way Wonderland and Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg continues to name hot female characters after Lyla Garrity, a girl he had a crush on when he was a kid.

Go Macadangdang!