Hip-hop heads and westsiders poured a little liquor last week, when it was announced that KDAY (93.5 FM), aka the best radio station in Los Angeles, was bought out by a company looking to replace 90s g-funk, hourly Eazy-E, and the Westside Connect Gang with Mandarin-dialect programming. If that’s true, L.A. is losing, yet again, the namesake to the legendary station that helped propel rap music over 20 years ago, as well as unarguably the best weekend mixes on the FM dial.

There are only five ways the alleged KDAY sale will be tolerable.

1. Mandarin DJs spinning nuthin’ but west coast gangsta rap.
2. Fung Brothers named head of programming.
3. In return, KAZN 1300 AM bought out by Greg Mack and the original Mixmasters.
4. Nightly kung fu theater of English-dubbed 70s Shaolin films.
5. LA Boyz.

They called it the Bananapocalypse, which could refer to some kind of yellow-faced take-down of the internet-as-we-know-it, a changing of the (racial) guard, or perhaps the fact that Hollywood is willing to get their hands dirty playing in the same sandpit as the YouTubers. But having now seen every second of new YouTube channel YOMYOMF Week One, I think the Bananapocalypse might actually be the fact that 350,000 subscribers (the “big story” of the week!) clicked “like” on explosions and b-list stars and somehow we’re now writing epitaphs for Long Duk Dong.

Yeah it’s just week one, but this banana-flavored Kool-aid is getting to people’s heads, and in a few months, those subscribers risk looking like the Mayans after week one of 2013.

Here’s all you need to know.

Love the trailers, until…

You know those hilarious fake trailers before Tropic Thunder? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we got some of the brightest young Asian American faces and let them go nuts and pitch the most ridonkulous ideas in trailer form? Sung Kang as a crime-fighting acting teacher! Ryan Higa as a judge on an American Idol-ripoff contest for aspiring YouTube stars! Co-starring Al from Step-By-Step!

Ah, good laughs and high-fives all around, fellas.

Well, you know what’s next. Those ain’t fake trailers. That’s the content. Sorry subscribers, you just slipped on the bananapocalypse: the joke’s on you.

The YOMYOMF channel takes YouTube very seriously…

That shouldn’t be surprising because YouTube is YOMYOMF’s major partner and YouTube has long been something of a utopia for young aspiring Asian American artists. And YOMYOMF is a mutually-beneficial project that allows YouTube to domesticate those vloggers and short filmmakers and “raise” them to the level of mainstream pop, for better or worse.

Check out Internet Icon, Ryan Higa’s talent competition that turned out to be real. One of YouTube’s major impediments to being taken seriously is that there are so few good critics who can raise the bar. (Well, KIDS REACT is pretty great.) So the idea of a competition show that creates some kind of critical self-reflexivity seems like a very good thing.

But Internet Icon is not so interested in criticism. The clips presented to the judges are heavily abridged (into 2- to 10-second snippets) so that we can’t judge them, and the criticisms are so hackneyed (“I love his personality!”) that it makes me wonder if Ryan Higa even knows why he’s so popular. Meanwhile, the judges agree on everything (at least in episode one) and seem to have the exact same taste, so what’s being proposed isn’t criticism so much as doctrine. Because what we want on YouTube is more of the same.

Speaking of which…

I guess it’s funny, but that’s the same joke…

You know the one. Two men walk into a bar and we watch them squirm as they get accidentally homoerotic. There might be a glimmer of this in some of the male-male duos in Internet Icon, but I’m too scared to click refresh to find out. But certainly in episode one of Acting for Action w/ Sung Kang, the joke, which runs for about five minutes (plus outtakes) of the six-minute episode, is that Sung Kang, Ryan Higa, and co-star Antonio Alvarez find ways to groom, fondle, and kiss each other in different positions.

And then there’s Blueberry, the 2008 short film to inaugurate Anderson Le’s The Short List show. It features the ever-out-of-water Randall Park discovering that his $73 hooker looks like Chris Kattan. On their own, Acting for Action and Blueberry are funny in a five-minute viral video sort of way. But as the sole jokes of two of YOMYOMF’s five series premieres, they make that “Asian guys can be funny too!” rhetoric look kind of flaccid.

It should be noted that one of the other five premieres, Mandarin Time, pins its comedic hopes on the assumption that misogyny is funnier when it is in another language and when it’s done by puppets.

You offend us and our family. We get it. It’s just strange to see mild homophobia and misogyny be the jokes of choice from a blog that consistently finds the most clever, informed, and convincing ways to dissect race while being attuned to the interests of artists and industries. The YOMYOMF blog features some of the sharpest and funniest commentary on subjects in and around Asian America. It’s depressing that the site of Philip, Beverly, Elaine, Roger, and mutha-fuckin’ David Henry Hwang has no bite behind the camera.

“Not trying” is bad SAT advice, but…

Leave it to KevJumba to make the best episode of the week, simply by making a KevJumba video. The Bananapocalypse trailer featured special effects, Hollywood celebrities, costumes, and color, and YOMYOMF Week One delivered with CGI (Drone), talking puppets (Mandarin Time), and prime-time lighting and wind machines (Internet Icon).

Kevjumba’s video, “KevJumba Takes the SAT w/Felicia Day” does feature an internet star guest, but its real bursts of joy come from the simple pleasures of documentary realism and celebrities doing mundane things. As the title suggests, the video follows KevJumba and Felicia Day to an SAT prep class where they face off in three rounds of a mock SAT.

It’s got a single hook just like Mandarin Time and Acting for Action, but it’s not built around a single joke. As the situation plays out, with genuinely unpredictable results, we take joy watching them confront anxieties about their own abilities, the standards by which we measure ourselves, and how we’re defined. It’s six minutes of light, spirited fun, and is even anarchic enough to fit the You-Offend-Me brand.

And it’s all so effortless, like just another day for KevJumba. In other words, it’s what’s made Kevin Wu such an infectious online sensation: intimate, self-deprecating, adorable, and even bold.

Progress Report:

“Acting for Action w/Sung Kang trailer”
B-
Moderately weird, and silly Sung is better than furious Sung.

“Internet Icon Trailer”
A- (when I thought it was fake)
D (when I realized it was real)

“BFFs Trailer”
C
Smells awfully like a female, more renegade version of Better Luck Tomorrow. I’ll give it a chance when it’s out.

“Internet Icon Ep 1 – The Search” (in two parts)
D+
The whole thing just strikes me as wrong. Mimicking TV (with all of its glittery clichés) to validate YouTube? Internet artists seeking Internet Icon status from anybody other than their users? Doesn’t this kind of celebrity-endowed validation go against the idea of the internet as being democratic? Or maybe this is a tongue-in-cheek critique of the corporatization of YouTube?

“DRONE Teaser Trailer”
C-
I’m not the target demographic, so don’t mind me when I say I wanted to laugh repeatedly.

“Acting for Action w/Sung Kang – Lesson 1”
B-

“KevJumba Takes the SAT w/ Felicia day”
A-

“Mandarin Time”
C+

“Blueberry (YOMYOMF Short List)”
B- (for the film)
A (for the concept of the series)
I love that they’re carving out a space for short films. Programming shorts for the internet isn’t the same as programming for a festival, but there are few people I trust more for the task than Anderson Le.

But we’re lurking behind a corner. No water fountain and abandoned car is safe. We’re armed with Twitter, and don’t make us use it.

In the meantime, re-visit our year-old Jeremy Lin blog summit, featuring Oliver Wang, Hua Hsu, Jay Capsian Kang, and ourselves. It’s a weird combo of the prescient, the timid, the wildly off-base, and the desperate. But most of all, the line we can draw from September 2010 to Jeremy Lin dunk #1 says it all about why we’re all struggling for words right now.

Poor Amy Chua.  If she were only old, male, unattractive, washed-up, alcoholic, and too pathetic and self-hating to write a memoir, nobody would be giving her any fuss about her parenting methods.

On the other hand, lucky Jackie Chan.

Things I learned today about parenting, from The Karate Kid (2010):
1. “wax on wax off” parenting is most effective because it’s not only torture, it’s also highly amusing
2. black kid’s message to Chinese parents: chill out! your daughters are safe with me!
3. American mothers fail at teaching their children to clean up their rooms because they have not mastered the Chinese parenting method (hours of unexplained physical torture) (see lesson #1)
4. Chinese dads will cry over their dead sons, but only when drunk
5. Will and Jada Pinkett Smith were on set all the time, no doubt whipping Jaden into speaking perfect Mandarin. (“We’re not auto-tuning those tones you lazy piece of garbage”)

1. Copie conforme – Certified Copy – Copia conforme – رونوشت برابر اصل (directed by Abbas Kiarostami)

A French woman meets a British man on the streets of Tuscany. In a mix of English, French, and Italian at times cacophonous, at times melodic, they — the silver-maned baritone William Shimell and the luminous Juliette Binoche — play out scenes from a marriage between intellectuals who think, and of course love, across cultures. Things they share, like wine and art and an enlightenment (though not necessarily enlightened) of self, don’t necessarily transcend national borders, but certainly make their trespassing so much livelier. The director is Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, long called one of the artists of our times, but who for the first time imagines “our” beyond his native soil and across continents.

2. Carlos (directed by Olivier Assayas)

His name needs no translation. Carlos didn’t try to topple nations, he tried to bust OPEC. He aligned himself with Marxist and pseudo-Marxists from Paris to Palestine to Tokyo. He was protected by multiple nations and hated by more. To realize such a story, you need a director with an international pedigree — Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover, Summer Hours, Boarding Gate, HHH: a Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien) — and an actor who can slip chameleon-like into any culture — Édgar Ramírez, born in Venezuela but reared everywhere. IMDB lists eight languages spoken in Carlos, but rather than count the cultures this mini-series traversed, why not just say that it is film about terrorism and capitalism — phenomena of the nation, yet carry no passports.

3. My Name is Khan – माय नेम इज़ ख़ान (directed by Karan Johar)

An American film? An Indian film? My Name is Khan is a fantasy of American justice done up as a cross-country road film. It’s also Bollywood melodrama of the tallest order. Shah Rukh Khan’s character is hokey in a way only Hindi cinema can concoct, and Kajol is the penultimate Bollywood woman. And yet it’s also a movie about what it means to be Muslim in the western world.  I wouldn’t say that My Name is Khan denies a nationality — content-wise it is an Asian American film — but it certainly forces us to ask questions about what happens to familiar styles and genres when they gets lodged between cultures. The making of the film too proposes new possibilities: that there are no big musical numbers might have to do with the participation of (gag me) Syd Field. Also, while on the set during a climactic scene of MNIK, I observed how smoothly crews from two industries can work together when they speak the same language (English) and share the standards of film production.

4. Exit through the Gift Shop (directed by Banksy)

We know Banksy is British, but he’s also a shadowy figure, a kind of subterranean creature who sees not nations, but walls, signs, and pavement that he can claim and transform. Meanwhile, documentary subject Thierry Guetta is a French transplant in Los Angeles, whose ideas of art are European but his talent and motivation purely Hollywood. The characters creep around the world with their posters and bad attitudes. They love in-between spaces like the West Bank and Disneyland — zones where cultural confusion become ripe for cultural mischief. Banksy is a modern-day Carlos the Jackal, only with the talent to back up the celebrity terrorism.

5. The Warrior’s Way – 워리어스 웨이 (directed by Lee Sngmoo)

American bombshell Kate Bosworth, Korean hunk Jang Dong-gun, Australian thespian Geoffrey Rush, and Hong Kong legend Ti Lung star in a martial arts Western set in the American badlands. It’s also a New Zealand production with financing from India. I’m sure the producers received some pretty government penny, so I won’t exactly claim that The Warrior’s Way doesn’t need nations. But not since Dragon Wars has there been such a cineplex perplexity, inviting — no, daring — mainstream American audiences to wonder where the heck this movie is from. (Or how to pronounce the vowel-challenged name of South Korean director Lee Sngmoo.) Hollywood makes plenty of “transnational” films set in faraway places with cast and crew from around the world. But with decades of experience, Hollywood makes it look seamless. When foreign companies attempt a Benneton blockbuster, colors clash but new identity combinations are forged.

• Location: K100 Karaoke (Alhambra, CA)
• Shout out: Eddie with the heat, Christine with the cool.

I think this can all be summed up by Portland, Oregon. If you’re a Chinese company trying to break into the U.S. market, a logical entryway might be a cosmopolitan major market like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. But if you’re rising athletic shoe brand Li Ning, you go through Portland, Oregon. And you make commercials like these:

My head is spinning like the Shanghainese when Baron Davis brushes by. Why do I love thee so? Because amidst the confusion of what Americans want and what Chinese think American want is a representation of basketball, U.S. customs , race, and comedy that seems to be what nobody wants and yet is what everyone can get behind by sheer force of its audacity. Some advertising genius wanted to use stereotypes but realized that stereotypes are much funnier when they’re randomly assigned. Donnell Rawlings and Gerry Bednob have never been better/worse. Why not have the Chinese immigrant speak better English than the U.S. Customs agents? Why not choose Portland as your point of entry?

I’m so happy I wish I had the budget to Interpretations short this bitch. Justin Lin, let’s make this happen.

INT. Some dark building. Doesn’t matter. As long as it’s in Portland, Oregon

WHITE TSA AGENT hands BLACK TSA AGENT some exotic-looking shoes. Because it’s the logical thing to do, White TSA Agent starts to put them on.

BLACK TSA AGENT: It’s not something I’d do.

WHITE TSA AGENT hesitates, but not really. He laces them up, and then starts to dance like Michael Jackson, or at least like Elliot in the L.X.D.

WHITE TSA AGENT: Well?

BLACK TSA AGENT: It’s not what I expected.

WHITE TSA AGENT takes off the shoes, shrugs, and throws them into a garbage can.  He starts to head out the door and BLACK TSA AGENT follows. White TSA Agent shuts off the light as he exits. Thinking White TSA Agent doesn’t notice, Black TSA Agent quickly bends over to the trash can to take the shoes with him.

WHITE TSA AGENT: You sure?

Canned studio audience laughter.  Dissolve to musical number of ASIAN MEN in exotic shoes doing “Thriller” in a prison while SEXY BLASIAN WOMEN dressed as zombies gyrate. End title: WELCOME TO AMERICA! Gunshot in the background.

• Location: Fantacity (Vancouver, Canada)
• Co-conspirators: for goodness sake, by way of Davis

Dragons & Tigers jurors: Jia Zhang-ke, Denis Cote, Bong Joon-ho

We may have missed the last week of the Vancouver International Film Festival (those hotel bills add up!), but I’d say we got what we came for. Poutine nights, Japadog breaks, dim sum discoveries, Granville Street fadeouts. Did we mention the films? We came to Vancouver to cover the Dragons and Tigers sidebar for Asia Pacific Arts. Most of the D&T films were toploaded in the first week of the festival, and we managed to watch 28 of the 44 films in the sidebar, including all of the competition films. We got to chat with filmgoers and filmmakers, cover the D&T awards ceremony and press conference, and still manage to have time to live blog from the festival every morning we were there.

As we reluctantly return to our regularly-scheduled lives, we look back on a week of Asia’s best. That’s right: disgruntled commentary, top 10 lists, and awards!

Brian: I had to sacrifice watching some high profile films (Uncle Boonmee, 13 Assassins) to make this happen, but I managed to catch all eight of the competition films at this year’s festival. The Dragons and Tigers Young Cinema Award is designed to highlight and reward filmmakers from Asia who have not yet received notice on the international stage. This year’s award to the 23-year-old Hirohara Satoru seems a bit premature, in my opinion, as his film Good Morning to the World! demonstrates promise but not necessarily progress. In my silly attempt to handicap the competition, I had Good Morning to the World! at a measly 10:1, and I hope no fortunes were lost as a result. (That my top predictions Don’t Be Afraid, Bi! and Rumination received special jury mentions softens the blow somewhat.) Don’t Be Afraid, Bi! and Rumination seemed to me to be achievements on a whole different level than Hirohara’s film, but only time will tell if the young film student will follow into the footsteps of former winners like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, and Jia Zhang-ke.

The Vancouver crowd was fantastic. Erudite without being stuffy, they knew when to walk out and when to burst into thunderous applause. They knew the auteurs and they’re caught up on their Film Comment. They were of all ages and races. I had plenty of disagreements with fellow filmgoers, but it was good to be in the company of sincere passion for film. But most of all, I loved that almost every screening was well-attended, yet none really ever sold out.

Brian’s top ten: 1) I Wish I Knew, 2) Winter Vacation, 3) Hahaha, 4) Rumination, 5) Poetry, 6) Red Dragonflies, 7) The Fourth Portrait, 8 ) Echoes of the Rainbow, 9) Don’t be Afraid, Bi!, 10) Sawako Decides

Chi’s top ten: 1) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2) I Wish I Knew, 3) Winter Vacation, 4) Sleeping Beauty, 5) The Fourth Portrait, 6) Microphone, 7) Hahaha, 8 ) Poetry, 9) Leap Year 10) Single Man

And lastly… Culture Breach’s own Dragons & Tigers awards:

• Best newcomer: cast of old men in Single Man
• Best oldcomer: Yoon Jeong-hee (Poetry)
• Best song: song that sputters into nothing in Winter Vacation (runner ups: office anthem in Sawako Decides, and karaoke drone in Crossing the Mountain)
• Best sound effects: loud walk-outs during Crossing the Mountain
• Best Q&A session: only in a Hong Sang-soo film does the awkward art of the Q&A get its proper due (Oki’s Movie)
• Hong Sang-soo award for funniest alcoholic: Sawako in Sawako Decides
• Blu Rain teacher of the year award: Terri Kwan (The Fourth Portrait)
• Best talking heads: all of them, even the boring ones, in Jia Zhang-ke’s sweeping I Wish I Knew
• Best soundbite: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Pause. Blank Stare. “An orphan.” (Winter Vacation)
• Best reason to believe in an afterlife: karaoke for the Soul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)

Don't Be Afraid, Bi! (Phan Dang Di, 2010)

Breaking news (7:20pm): Upset! Hirohara Satoru’s Good Morning to the World! is winner of the Young Cinema Award. Phan Dang Di’s Don’t Be Afraid Bi! and Xu Ruotao’s Rumination given special mentions.

The winner at this year’s new Asian cinema competition will be announced at 6:30pm PST. We’ll update this page whenever we have a chance.

In the meantime, I wanted to have fun with the prestigious Young Cinema Awards by handicapping the competition. Cannes always inspires the most exciting bookmaking (like at Neil Young’s Film Lounge), and though I’ve never done anything like this before, I thought I’d try to replicate the fun for the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons and Tigers sidebar. I’m basing my predictions on: 1) impressions on likelihood based on my own viewings of the films, 2) film buzz I’ve heard at the festival or read online, and 3) very very presumptuous  assumptions based on the style and content of the films by jurors Jia Zhang-ke and Bong Joon-ho (I don’t know much about the work of third juror Denis Cote).

I’ve served on two three-person festival juries in the past so I know how arbitrary this sort of thing can be, and how one or two more vocal personalities can sway a decision. It gets even messier when you account for jet lag, translators, and the difficult task of judging “young cinema.” But arbitrary though it may be, this award has been surprisingly prescient. Among its past recipients include first features by directors now considered among the best in the world: Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong, Jia Zhang-ke, and Wisit Sasanatieng.

Here are my predictions (updated at 3:15pm following screening of Rumination):

• 3:1 Don’t Be Afraid, Bi! (Phan Dang Di)
• 3:1 Rumination (Xu Ruotao)
• 6:1 Sandcastle (Boo Junfeng)
• 6:1 End of Animal (Jo Sunghee)
• 8:1 Insects in the Backyard (Thanwwarin Sukaphisit)
• 10:1 Icarus Under the Sun (Abe Saori and Takahashi Nazuki)
• 10:1 Good Morning to the World! (Hirohara Satoru)
• 25:1 Kimu; The Strange Dance (Park Donghyun)

[Check out part 2 of our capsule reviews of VIFF films (Hahaha, The Fourth Portrait, I Wish I Knew, Don't be Afraid Bi!, Sandcastle, Single Man, Icarus Under the Sun, Good Morning to the World!) at Asia Pacific Arts.]

[Check out part 1 of our capsule reviews of VIFF films (Winter Vacation, The High Life, Seven Days in Heaven, Cold Fish, Crossing the Mountain, Pinoy Sunday, Red Dragonflies, The Drunkard, R U There?) at Asia Pacific Arts.]