About That "Power Rangers" Fan Film

 

Adi Shankar is not an unfamiliar name to fan film connoisseurs.  He's the producer of such unauthorized "bootleg universe" favorites as "The Punisher: Dirty Laundry," and "Venom: Truth in Journalism."  He's also produced some fairly successful mainstream action flicks like "The Grey" and the recent reboot of "Dredd."  His latest, a grim 14 minute short film directed by Joseph Kahn, based on the "Power Rangers" franchise, was released last week.  It was titled "Power/Rangers" and quickly attracted a storm of attention.

 

Once word got around to the studios, Saban Brands, which holds the rights to the "Power Rangers" IP, had the short pulled from Youtube and Vimeo.  An agreement was reached two days later that allowed it to be put back up with several new disclaimers in place to emphasize that Saban had absolutely nothing to do with it.  After all, "Power Rangers" is still being produced with new episodes currently running on Nickelodeon.  There's also a feature film in the pipeline that has been scheduled for the summer of 2016.  This is a lucrative IP with a lot of mileage left in it.  Those two days when "Power/Rangers" was in limbo were a lot of fun, with speculation flying around about copyright implications and whether or not the short could be categorized as fair use. 

 

It's good to see that fan films and other unofficial derivative media are so commonplace now that trying to pull something like "Power/Rangers" from circulation is recognized as being completely counterproductive.  Any controversy just makes more people want to see it, and pushes curious viewers to employ less visible distribution channels.  Something like "Power/Rangers" might be pushing the definition of fair use a bit, since this kind of "reimagining" is something that Saban could create and monetize if they wanted, but I doubt that they would ever be in the business of doing something so violent and bleak with the property.  And so more creatives are taking risks on doing projects like this, playing with various IP in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

 

My thoughts on the actual quality of the fan film?  Sadly, not very positive.  It's kind of embarrassing how bad this thing is considering the involvement of such recognizable faces as Katee Sackhoff and James Van Der Beek.  The whole things plays out like a College Humor parody of a "dark and gritty" reboot of "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" dreamed up by overgrown, navel-gazing fanboys.  In the short film's universe the bad guys won.  All of our heroes are now dead or foul-mouthed, cynical, badass cliches.  The production design apes every other generic, dystopian sci-fi movie that's come out in the last five years.  The plotting is a confusing tangle of rehashed noir and revenge story tropes that goes to great lengths to relay the sordid fates of our once squeaky-clean teen protagonists.

 

The production values are very good, and there was clearly a lot of time and effort poured into this, but I guess I just don't get the point.  Most of the short is almost comically overserious, but the final reveal is very goofy, undercutting everything that the filmmakers were trying to accomplish.  The truth of the matter is that you can't do a "Power Rangers" adaptation that isn't on some level silly, campy and over the top.  At their core all sentai series are designed for small children, and trying to darken it all up for adults - even nostalgic adults -  just ends up looking ridiculous.  

 

I understand the fun in dreaming up "darkest timeline" scenarios for kids' shows to illustrate their shoddy worldbuilding, but this was way too earnest in its aims to be a joke.  At the same time it doesn't evoke any of the elements the fans might have genuinely liked about "Power Rangers," aside from some generic brawling.  No kaiju battles?  No wacky robots?  No wildly elaborate morphing sequences?  Clearly the filmmakers were familiar with "Power Rangers," but I don't they liked the series much.  And that defeats the whole point of a fan film. 

 

So while I'm glad that "Power/Rangers" survives online to inspire other fan filmmakers, I don't care much for the short itself.  Seriously, guys, with all the resources you have at your disposal, you're capable of better than this.

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Closing the Book on "The Hobbit"

I have maintained from the start that Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" movies wouldn't be as bad as George Lucas's "Star Wars" prequels, and now that "Battle of the Five Armies" is behind us, I can safely conclude that I was right.  The "Hobbit" movies weren't nearly as bad on any level as the "Star Wars" prequels, and I quite liked the second one, "The Desolation of Smaug."  There were big chunks of the first and third films that I thought werevery strong too.  Overall, however, I have to concede that the "Hobbit" films didn't live up to the "Lord of the Rings" films, and it's perfectly fair to characterize them as having had a pretty negative impact on the film series.  I doubt they're going to be viewed very kindly by future generations.  But while the two shared some of the same problems, the faults of the "Hobbit" movies are very different from the faults of "Star Wars" Episodes I through III.

 

We all knew that the "Hobbit" novel simply didn't have enough material to sustain a trilogy of blockbuster films.  Most of the worst missteps could have been completely avoided if the filmmakers had simply made one long film or two shorter ones that cut out all the padding and the unwieldy original material that was needed to stretch a 320 page children's book into nearly eight hours of screen time.  There are already Tolkien buffs hard at work producing fan-edits to excise the ill-considered elf-dwarf romance between Tauriel and Kili, the Gandalf storyline, and my nominee for the "Hobbit" equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks, the comic relief character Afrid (Ryan Gage).  The "Lord of the Rings" films benefited from having to cut out some of the book's smaller episodes and minor characters like Tom Bombadil.  The "Hobbit" films easily could have gotten by without the shapeshifter Beorn or even a few of those extra dwarves.  After three films, I still can't name more than six of the thirteen.

 

As much as I disliked the "Star Wars" prequels, they were alwasy first and foremost the chronicle of the early years of Anakin Skywalker, from his childhood to his corruption as an adult.  Bilbo Baggins is a much better protagonist than Anakin Skywalker, and had the benefit of Martin Freeman's wonderful performance.  However, for much of "The Hobbit," especially in the last film, he doesn't feel like the main character.  Instead, the dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and the human leader Bard (Luke Evans) were often at the forefront, and both characters were portrayed as much more classically heroic than their literary counterparts.  I wonder if Jackson was trying to evoke Boromir and Aragorn from "Lord of the Rings," though the characterizations felt so forced that Thorin and Bard weren't particularly appealing leading men in the end.  Then there was all the time taken up by Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and their stories.  Sure, all the extra characters made the story larger scale and more epic, but Bilbo ended up a bit lost in the crowd.

 

I think "The Hobbit" fared better than the "Star Wars" prequels did regarding references to the previous series, though not by much.  I liked the framing device with the older Bilbo (Ian Holm) and a couple of the minor in-jokes.  There weren't many instances of the ham-fisted foreshadowing George Lucas deployed.  However, I found that Peter Jackson had a hard time letting the "Hobbit" be its own story instead of another installment of "Lord of the Rings."  He kept reusing bits and pieces from the previous films, including several that he's been criticized for - the the massive CGI battle sequences, the deus ex machina, mucking with basic character motivations, rearranging the story structure, and the addition of questionable original characters.  Watching some of the action scenes in "Battle of the Five Armies" certainly reminded me of "Return of the King," but not in a good way.  Since I didn't care about most of the characters, the warfare just felt tedious and endless, and it was much easier to see the bad bits.  And those ended up reminding me of the flaws from the earlier sequences, which I was no longer inclined to forgive or ignore.  In short, watching parts of "The Hobbit" made me like the "Lord of the Rings" films less.

 

I feel that one of the biggest mistakes that both Peter Jackson and George Lucas made at the outset was trying to utilize a new technology in these movies that wasn't quite ready yet.  With Jackson, it was the increased frame rate projection systems, which resulted in some very unsettling visuals in the first film.  Fortunately he made the necessary corrections so that the second and third installments fared much better.  However, Jackson  and Lucas also share a more damaging trait: they misunderstand what audiences enjoyed about their previous work.  Jackson brought back everything that we loved about "Lord of the Rings," regardless of whether or not it was a good fit for "The Hobbit."  A good example is Legolas, a highlight of the first trilogy whose appearances in "The Hobbit" movie just served to lessen the character overall.  

And too often, that's how I felt about the "The Hobbit" as a whole.

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The March 2015 Follow-Up Post

This follow-up post is coming sooner than I had anticipated, but there has been a lot going on.  For first timers, these are posts where I write up brief additional comments updating pieces that have been previously posted, specifically where I don't feel I have enough to say about the matter to justify writing an entire new post about them.  In this installment, we're focusing on the business side of show business.  And here we go:

It's Going to be Quite a Summer - I never did get around to writing up a post-mortem of 2014's summer blockbuster season, did I?  It was a really fun one too, with a lot of surprises.  The "Spider-Man" and "Transformers" franchises had their big weekends, but were disappointments overall, smaller comedies like "Neighbors" and "22 Jump Street" exceeded expectations, "Lucy" beat up "Hercules," "The Fault in Our Stars" snuck off with a big total, "Maleficent" put Angelina Jolie back on top, and "Guardians of the Galaxy" blew up August, proving that Marvel movies will make bank no matter where you put them.  My favorites were "X-men: Days of Future Past" and "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" two remarkably strong genre films from two of the most interesting ongoing franchises.  And sadly, "Edge of Tomorrow" was the least deserving flop of Tom Cruise's career. 

 

Now 2016 is Getting Crowded - Now roughly a year later, the schedule of releases 2016 is coming into much sharper focus, and it's gotten much more interesting.  Nearly all of the potential showdowns I was looking at have been defused. Warners has backed off from the confrontation with "Captain America: Civil War," and will be releasing "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" in March.  "How to Train Your Dragon 3" has been delayed, leaving "Finding Dory" with no competitor, and the "Amazing Spider-man" sequels have been cancelled.  "Alice" and "X-men" are still on for a head-to-head though, and there are some more interesting titles that have been scheduled.  March in particular is currently stuffed with Tim Burton's next movie, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," Disney's next animated film, "Zootopia," the "Warcraft" movie, a "Divergent" movie, "Batman v. Superman," "Kung Fu Panda 3," and the long awaited "Beverly Hills Cop 4."

 

The Late Night Landscape - This isn't so much a follow-up to my previous post as it is a prequel to the post I'm going to write eventually about the departure of Jon Stewart from "The Daily Show," which was recently announced.  This is the big one, as far as I'm concerned, because Stewart has been the only late night host I've been inclined to keep watching regularly throughout my adult life, and I have no idea what "The Daily Show" is going to look like without him.  People have already been circulating the names of potential replacements, but I don't even want to think about that yet.  It's going to take me a while to come to terms with Stewart's departure, and right now all I want is for him to get a sendoff worthy of his accomplishments, and all the best of luck in whatever he decides to do next.

A "Fifty Shades" Rant - Okay, clearly I was completely wrong about the financial prospects of a "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie.  Despite lousy reviews and lots of hand-wringing about harmful depictions of kinky business, the movie raked in plenty of dough over Valentine's Day weekend, enough to ensure that we're going to see sequels and rip-offs for a long time to come.  There is an upside to this, though, just as there was with the "Twilight" films. The success of "Fifty Shades" means the studios will try to keep catering to this audience and won't be so squeamish about this kind of subject matter in the future.  I'm hoping, in the short term, that it might help fuel some interest in Peter Strickland's latest film, "The Duke of Burgundy," which shares similar themes but has a far higher artistic bona fides.

 

The Sony Hack Scrum - The axe had to fall on somebody in the wake of the Sony hacking scandal, and that person, sadly, was co-chair Amy Pascal.  I witnessed several happy reactions from fanboys who were critical of how Pascal had handled the "Spider-man" franchise.  And then came the bombshell: Pascal's successor will be Tom Rothman.  Penny-pinching, superhero-disparaging Rothman has long been a nemesis of superhero-loving movie nerds everywhere, after the time he spent at FOX blocking the "Deadpool" movie and mucking up the "X-men" and "Fantastic Four" franchises.  The new Marvel deal allowing their use of Spidey in upcoming MCU films looked like it would give the faltering film series a boost, but now I'm a lot less sure.  

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Letting in "The Babadook"

I was deeply, deeply apprehensive about watching the Australian horror/thriller "The Babadook," despite hearing nothing but praise for it from every corner.  The subject matter sounded right up my alley, but also like something that could hit too close to home.  I'm also one of those people who can't easily brush off the experience of certain horror media, and I had no desire to but up at 3 AM jumping at shadows for several weeks.  But I gathered up my courage and watched the thing, and I'm so glad that I did.

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a widowed single mother to six-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a little boy with an overactive imagination and behavioral problems.  One night a picture book mysteriously appears in Samuel's room titled "Mister Babadook," about a dark creature who kills anyone unfortunate enough to let him into their lives.  Samuel becomes convinced the Babadook is real, and he starts acting out in worse and worse ways as a result.  The stress on an exhausted Amelia, compounded with unresolved issues about her husband's death, grows to unberable levels.  And then the Babadook comes to call.

My favorite horror films are about threats to the family unit, especially the ones that take the time to explore family dynamics and get the audience to care about its characters, like "The Shining" and "Poltergeist."  "The Babadook" is one of these, which takes its time easing us into Amelia's lonely world, where she feel trapped and isolated by the demands of motherhood.  Her struggles with her son are plenty daunting before any of the supernatural elements come into play - and it becomes clear that the monsters are really allegories for existing problems.  "The Babadook" doesn't become a traditional horror movie until the second half, and you could just as easily classify it as a febrile psychodrama in the same vein as "Repulsion" or "Black Swan."

But when it does become a horror movie, boy is it a treat.  I don't know the last horror film that I've enjoyed so much simply for its aesthetics.  The visuals and the sound design are fantastic.  I love the disturbing drawings of the Babadook book and all the various ways that the filmmakers find to keep referencing them as the movie goes on.  I love the transitions.  The soundtrack makes wonderful use of silence, muted sounds, and vocal manipulation to reflect Amelia's deteriorating mental state.  Gore connoisseurs may be a little disappointed that the movie is more disturbing than outright scary, but it does nail some key moments of nail-biting fright.  Nothing in this movie will be keeping me up at 3 AM, but some of those images are going to be staying with me for a long time.

"The Babadook" is writer/director Jennifer Kent's first feature film, and she has proven herself to be a major talent already.  I love how cleverly constructed the narrative is, the way that it plays with perception and framing.  Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman both give excellent performances that go places you wouldn't expect them to.  And I love that there's so much going on beneath the surface, how the film is an examination of guilt and grief and resentment and how a parent-child relationship can go so very, very wrong.  The horror comes from such a real, visceral place and sinks its claws in deep.

I've just counted up the number of times I've used the word "love" in this review, and I think it's safe to conclude that "The Babadook" is one of my favorites of 2014.  And I'm happily reserving it a spot on my top ten list - the one I set aside for the movie I just plain enjoyed the most.

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2015 Oscar Wrap-Up

Here's the confession right up front.  For the first time in about two decades, I didn't watch the Oscars live.  I was simply too busy with other commitments to be able to set aside three hours for an awards show.  Instead I checked in on livebloggers throughout the evening and caught up on the highlight clips a few hours after the ceremony was over.  I have the whole thing recorded so I can fast-forward through it at my leisure over the next few days.  And the funny thing is, this really didn't hamper my enjoyment of the Oscars much.

 

The only major categories where there was any suspense about the eventual winner were Best Animated Feature and Best Actor.  In the former, I knew that my favorite, "Princess Kaguya," had no real shot at winning.  In the latter, all the really interesting contenders - David Oyelowo, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Ralph Fiennes - weren't even nominated.  The whole business of waiting in happy suspense for a winner to be announced has been off the table for years because I'm way too savvy to how the whole process works now.  If you follow the Guild awards, you know who wins long in advance.  The announcement of the nominations is a far more interesting event.

 

If you can put aside personal feelings toward who actually deserved what, it's still a lot of fun to follow the Oscar politicking.  This year, none of the Best Picture nominees got shut out.  Everyone went home with something, so everyone was a winner, even if some of those kudos were very minor - "American Sniper" left with Best Sound Editing, and "Selma" got Best Song.  The clear victor, however, was"Birdman," which carted off Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography.  "The Grand Budapest Hotel" also got a lot of love, winning four Oscars that covered the bulk of the design awards,  This year's scrappy underdog "Whiplash" emerged with Best Editing, alongside its Best Sound Mixing and Best Supporting Actor trophies.  The once heavily favored "Boyhood" clearly suffered a loss of momentum, coming out with only a Best Supporting Actress win for Patricia Arquette.

 

I had no particular issue with any of the winners this year.  Three of the four acting awards went to performers who have been around for a long time and were very worthy of the recognition.  Julianne Moore in particular has been overdue for her statuette for a while.  The exception was the Best Actor category, which was a mess this year, as previously stated.  I'm fine with Eddie Redmayne's win as he was really the least objectionable choice.  And while "Birdman" wasn't one of my favorites, certainly there were enough good things in it that make the choice a decently palatable one.  I could quibble about the outcomes of some of the smaller races like Song and Animated Feature, but it feels petty to do so when I liked all the winners to some degree anyway.

 

The ceremony itself had its ups and downs, as they usually do.  Neil Patrick Harris finally got the opportunity to host after years of giving us a reason to tune into the Tony's, and he ended up being merely okay.  Not as fun as Ellen Degeneres last year, and clearly not as comfortable delivering one-liners.  His big opening number was nothing to sneeze at though - not quite at the level of the epic Hugh Jackman opening in 2009 - but good enough.  I'd love to see him back for another round next year.  There were a lot of nice surprises among the other performances too - Lady Gaga, John Legend, and Lonely Island were all at their best.  I'm absolutely delighted that they managed to get Will Arnett into a Batman suit to growl "DARKNESS. NO PARENTS," at the assembled throng.  And an awful lot fthe speeches turned into platforms for various causes, but none egregiously so.

 

Getting down into the nitty gritty of the show, I thought the graphics packages looked great, the set design was a little lackluster, and the projected effects were awfully gimmicky but not bad.  Whoever was writing the jokes needs to be kicked to the curb, and whoever keeps choosing spoiler-ful nominee clips doesn't seem to grasp the purpose of the Oscars.  And who didn't cheer when Paweł Pawlikowski had his standoff against the orchestra and won?

 

All in all, it was an entertaining evening.  See you next year, Oscars.

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Rank 'Em: The 2015 Best Picture Nominees

I've barely managed to catch up on all the Best Picture nominees this year in time for the Academy Awards, so I'm way behind on awards season coverage.  So instead of the usual post on predictions and politicking, I'm going to rank the contenders and give my general thought about each.  And that's probably a better way to do it anyway.

 

Selma - I'm still stunned at how intelligent, how nuanced, and how effective this film is, the way it puts across its own, pointedly inclusive POV on history and takes pains to emphasize the humanity of every major participant. I was initially a little miffed at Oyelowo and DeVernay missing out on nominations, but as Scott Beggs over at Film School Rejects put it, "The Oscars need 'Selma' more than 'Selma' Needs the Oscars."  It has no chance at Best Picture, but that's okay.  I'm convinced that this will be one of the 2014 films that will still be talked about long after most of the other nominees are forgotten.

 

The Grand Budapest Hotel - On the other hand, sometimes the Academy gets it very right.  "Grand Budapest" is Wes Anderson's best film in ages, and I'm so glad he's getting recognition for it.  There's a real sense of purpose to all his usual stylizations and flourishes this time.  This one just misses out the top spot for me because I don't think the movie has quite the overall impact that "Selma" managed, but it's still exceptional from start to finish.  It isn't just a career highlight for Anderson, but for Ralph Fiennes, for Robert Yeoman, for Alexandre Desplat, and for many others. 

 

Whiplash - And here's to finding great human drama in unusual places.  "Whiplash" is a movie about a student-teacher relationship, about world-class musicians vying for status, and about an ambitious young man trying to acheive his dreams.  It's also one of the most jaw-droppingly intense, violent, and cringe-inducing movies of the year, with a supporting performance by J.K. Simmons that is already iconic.  Pigeonhole it in a single genre at your own risk.  What a magnificent debut for writer/director Damien Chazell, and hopefully this is just the start of a great career in film.

 

Boyhood - Richard Linklater couldn't have predicted that Ellar Coltrane would have less than stellar acting skills as a teenager, or that his daughter would lose interest in the project she was initially a big part of.  But he worked around those issues, and a thousand other little problems making "Boyhood," an experiment in filmmaking that nobody had ever attempted before on such a scale.  And by any measure, the end result is impressive, particularly the performances by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, and Linklater's own evolving filmmaking style and sensibilities. 

 

Birdman - I had a very positive reaction to "Birdman," but it wasn't one of my favorites.  Lots of good ideas and performances, but it was missing a few vital pieces.  I have to put it ahead of the rest of the remaining contenders, though, for sheer degree of difficulty and cinematic ambition.  "Birdman" tries to do so much at once that it's incredible that it manages to deliver so well on almost every single level.  I didn't connect with it the way that others have, but if it does win Best Picture, which it's heavily favored to, I certainly don't begrudge it an ounce of success. 

 

The Imitation Game - Now here's the kind of movie that everyone expects to be nominated for an Oscar: a British biopic with a World War II backdrop, anchored by a charming performance from a talented male lead, .  "The Imitation Game" checks all the boxes, and it's entertaining enough that it's difficult to summon any real hard feelings against it.  However, it's also difficult to summon much enthusiastic praise.  I'm glad to see director Morten Tyldum and Benedict Cumberbatch are advancing their careers, but that's the extent of my appreciation.

 

The Theory of Everything - Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones do perfectly lovely work together as Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde, but otherwise this one fell pretty flat for me.  I understand that Stephen Hawkings' battle with ALS makes for more compelling drama than his work as a physicist, but I found that there was far too much romance and not enough science in the film.  It's a good effort, but I don't see anything here worth celebrating beyond the performances.  The bungled final act lands this in the second-to last spot on this list. 

 

American Sniper - I don't like it.  I don't get it.  I think a lot of the vitriol aimed at "American Sniper" is undeserved, but so is all the praise.  I can't find anything here that strikes me as awards-worthy, from the painfully jingoistic story to the oddly sub-par filmmaking from Clint Eastwood.  The marketing team should surely be handed all the kudos.  The silver lining here is that the film's boffo box office will mean that we'll see more mid-range films being made by the studios, and more films about the Middle East conflict. 

 

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The Time is Right For "Fresh Off the Boat"

 

I finally found the time to watch the first couple of episodes of "Fresh off the Boat," the new ABC sitcom that has been trumpeted as the first Asian-American family sitcom in two decades.  This has been a banner year for minorities on television, and Asian-Americans are getting a second shot at the spotlight after the sad demise of "Selfie" a few months ago.  Based off the memoirs of Eddie Huang, we follow eleven year-old Eddie (Hudson Yang), his parents Louis (Randall Park) and Jessica (Constance Wu), two younger brothers (Forrest Wheeler, Ian Chen), and their Grandma (Lucille Soong) after the family's big move from Washington D.C. Chinatown to Orlando, to run a cowboy-themed steakhouse.

 

Eddie's background matches mine pretty closely.  We both had families with Chinese immigrant parents originally from Taiwan, American-born kids, and a family business to keep afloat.  While I wasn't a fan of rap or hip-hop music, I sat next to boys who wore Wu-Tang Clan gear at school, and while I didn't have a Tiger Mother, several of my friends did.  Stories were often swapped about the various tirades they subjected our school principals to.  I can vouch for the fact that all the Chinese spoken in "Fresh Off the Boat" actually is perfectly comprehensible Mandarin Chinese, though the accents vary.  And despite various exaggerations and simplifications, I think the show essentially got all the important stuff about growing up Asian-American in the '90s right. 

 

I should point out that I haven't watched any family-themed sitcom regularly in a long while, so it's difficult to make comparisons to other current shows.  The dynamic of the Huang family is similar to "Malcolm in the Middle" - outsider main character trying to fit in, multiple brothers, and an overbearing but ultimately loving mother.  A lot is made of being Chinese-American in an overwhelmingly white Orlando neighborhood, but the characters' basic archetypes are very familiar ones, and the Huang family is easy to sympathize with.  They aren't exoticized much - Jessica is the only one who speaks with a noticeable accent - and the show pokes fun at a few of the Caucasians neighbors and stereotypical American culture too.  You can tell that the real Eddie Huang had a big hand in keeping the show as grounded in reality as it is.  I think it helps that more TV is high-concept these days and a certain style of rapid-fire dialogue has come into vogue, making it easier to add the necessary qualifiers and disclaimers when the show tackles potentially touchy subject matter.

 

I'm very heartened at how accessible the "Fresh Off the Boat" is.  I understand that Eddie Huang had some major concerns over how his family was depicted - father too milquetoast, mother too acerbic - but I like that the creators have figured out how to make the Huangs fit into the template of the usual sitcom family while still remaining recognizably Asian enough that they could have been people who I knew growing up.  Twenty years ago, Margaret Cho's "All American Girl" placed her as the normal, American-born girl trying to deal with all the wackiness caused by her Korean family.  This time all the Huangs are treated as the normal ones.  They're just a different kind of normal than what's usually found in Orlando.  Is it the American viewing audience that has grown used to Asian-Americans in the media enough for this to happen, or is it Hollywood that has finally realized that creating more realistic portrayals of Asian-Americans can attract an audience?  Probably a little of both. 

 

"Fresh Off the Boat" isn't perfect, but it's a major achievement already.  I especially like Constance Wu as Jessica, who humanizes the Asian mother with impossible standards and makes her funny too.  Randall Park hasn't had as much of a chance to show off his comedic skills, but there's a lot of potential there.  I really, really want to see what this show will look like in a couple of years with multiple seasons under its belt and the initial jitters behind it.  And a little part of me wishes I could have grown up with Eddie Huang on television to commiserate with.

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