Chris Knipp
09-03-2024, 07:55 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20ddi.jpg
IZAAC WANG IN DĚDI
SEAN WANG: DIDI (2024)
TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaj0yLUMRQ)
Young filmmaker tells his story growing up Taiwanese American in Northern California 16 years ago
'In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.' So goes the blurb. Actually he learns none of these things. He is never seen skating, only practicing how to jump on a board. His flirting is trumped by the girl's fingering him, which scares him off. And only in the final scene when he tells his mother as she picks him up from his first day of high school that he's signed up for "visual arts" is there a hint he's found something in common with her.
Because, oddly, she (Joan Chen, brilliant) is a dedicated amateur painter. The absent man of the house is in Taiwan earning money, never seen. She has shared to the boy a fantasy that she'd stayed single and become a famous artist. Instead, she must wrangle her husband's critical elderly mother Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua, the director's grandmother) and focus on raising the boy and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who's about to go off to UCSD.
Unformed though he is and always either imploding or exploding (or blowing up things, like the squirrel in the neighbor's mailbox at the beginning), the 13-year-old protagonist (Izaac Wang, impressive) is what this movie is all about. His fluid name dramatizes this boy's nebulous, uncertain existence. To his family he's Dědi. To his rainbow current local pals, Indian, Pakistani, African American, whom shortly he will ditch for some older white skater boys, he is Wang Wang. To anyone else, including the older white skater boys whose tricks he tries to film, he is Chris. When he signs up for visual arts that first day of high school, he's "Chris Wang."
This film excels in the fluency with which director Wang translates familiar moments into his time and his demographic, with his specific Taiwanese American family dynamic. Or appears to - because at a great remove of time and space, one can only assume the strangeness and specificity are spot-on - or why would the filmmaker have gone to so much trouble?
Chris is often at his (or the family?) computer, navigating an early YouTube, then made up of random junk that sometimes went viral. He and his best friends, Fahad (Raul Dial), Donovan (Cillia Denk), Nugget (Montay Boseman), and a kid everyone calls "Soup" (Aaron Chang), run around pulling dumb pranks and talking sex, which they know nothing about. Chris has a MySpace account, but his friends are starting to gravitate toward the superior Facebook. He does a lot of complicated one-line communicating with people online, and Wang shows it to us in quaint and specific detail. We watch and read and scrutinize because we know it matters, and now is part of a young teenager's formation.
Chris (we'll call him by his coming-of-age name) keeps his videos in a block with one-image files on the computer, and here's what we learn: none of them is any good. This leads to embarrassment with the older skater boys, but he is trying. He's trying also in expressing his anger through violence, and gets beat up sometimes and also does serious damage to another boy.
The burden of Dědi is embarrassment and shame. Chris has a crush on a girl a year ahead of him called Madi (Mahaela Park) and prepares with fruit and a video to do a "first kiss" when he gets to"hang out." But his approach leads to her fingering him and that scares him off. Also a boy he hit alienates Madi. Nonetheless for a minute Fahad and Soup are impressed. Then he hangs out with the older skater boys and when that stops working out, has no friends. Or maybe one.
It would seem home meant the least to Chris, but it's there that his slow burn is visible. Filmmaker Wang and actor Wang (no relation) both excel at making the silent and inarticulate moments matter the most. These alternate with times when Chris says too much, especially toward the end of the film when he yells and curses at his mother, as well as his sister. But his sister helps him, and of course so does his mother. This film has been seen as a "love letter" to the director's mother. Maybe it just more of an apology. It is a depiction of adolescent anger. As if it's not enough to be 13, Chris has to deal with being Asian in a white world with an absent father. Director Wang went through this, Fremont too. But then he made this movie. And it was a big hit at Sundance, winning an award, being celebrated by the audience, and getting snapped up for distribution by Focus Features. Sean Wang is lucky and talented and we look forward to what he does next. (He was Oscar nominated this year for his documentary short about his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wŕi Pó.)
Dědi 弟弟 ("Younger Brother"), 93 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 19, 2024, receiving the Audience Dramatic Award and Ensemble Award. Shown at many other festivals including Austin, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Seattle (Grand Jury Prize, Best Feature Film), London, Provincetown, Nantucket. Released in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany. Wider US release Aug. 16. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/didi/) rating: 78%.
IZAAC WANG IN DĚDI
SEAN WANG: DIDI (2024)
TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaj0yLUMRQ)
Young filmmaker tells his story growing up Taiwanese American in Northern California 16 years ago
'In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.' So goes the blurb. Actually he learns none of these things. He is never seen skating, only practicing how to jump on a board. His flirting is trumped by the girl's fingering him, which scares him off. And only in the final scene when he tells his mother as she picks him up from his first day of high school that he's signed up for "visual arts" is there a hint he's found something in common with her.
Because, oddly, she (Joan Chen, brilliant) is a dedicated amateur painter. The absent man of the house is in Taiwan earning money, never seen. She has shared to the boy a fantasy that she'd stayed single and become a famous artist. Instead, she must wrangle her husband's critical elderly mother Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua, the director's grandmother) and focus on raising the boy and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who's about to go off to UCSD.
Unformed though he is and always either imploding or exploding (or blowing up things, like the squirrel in the neighbor's mailbox at the beginning), the 13-year-old protagonist (Izaac Wang, impressive) is what this movie is all about. His fluid name dramatizes this boy's nebulous, uncertain existence. To his family he's Dědi. To his rainbow current local pals, Indian, Pakistani, African American, whom shortly he will ditch for some older white skater boys, he is Wang Wang. To anyone else, including the older white skater boys whose tricks he tries to film, he is Chris. When he signs up for visual arts that first day of high school, he's "Chris Wang."
This film excels in the fluency with which director Wang translates familiar moments into his time and his demographic, with his specific Taiwanese American family dynamic. Or appears to - because at a great remove of time and space, one can only assume the strangeness and specificity are spot-on - or why would the filmmaker have gone to so much trouble?
Chris is often at his (or the family?) computer, navigating an early YouTube, then made up of random junk that sometimes went viral. He and his best friends, Fahad (Raul Dial), Donovan (Cillia Denk), Nugget (Montay Boseman), and a kid everyone calls "Soup" (Aaron Chang), run around pulling dumb pranks and talking sex, which they know nothing about. Chris has a MySpace account, but his friends are starting to gravitate toward the superior Facebook. He does a lot of complicated one-line communicating with people online, and Wang shows it to us in quaint and specific detail. We watch and read and scrutinize because we know it matters, and now is part of a young teenager's formation.
Chris (we'll call him by his coming-of-age name) keeps his videos in a block with one-image files on the computer, and here's what we learn: none of them is any good. This leads to embarrassment with the older skater boys, but he is trying. He's trying also in expressing his anger through violence, and gets beat up sometimes and also does serious damage to another boy.
The burden of Dědi is embarrassment and shame. Chris has a crush on a girl a year ahead of him called Madi (Mahaela Park) and prepares with fruit and a video to do a "first kiss" when he gets to"hang out." But his approach leads to her fingering him and that scares him off. Also a boy he hit alienates Madi. Nonetheless for a minute Fahad and Soup are impressed. Then he hangs out with the older skater boys and when that stops working out, has no friends. Or maybe one.
It would seem home meant the least to Chris, but it's there that his slow burn is visible. Filmmaker Wang and actor Wang (no relation) both excel at making the silent and inarticulate moments matter the most. These alternate with times when Chris says too much, especially toward the end of the film when he yells and curses at his mother, as well as his sister. But his sister helps him, and of course so does his mother. This film has been seen as a "love letter" to the director's mother. Maybe it just more of an apology. It is a depiction of adolescent anger. As if it's not enough to be 13, Chris has to deal with being Asian in a white world with an absent father. Director Wang went through this, Fremont too. But then he made this movie. And it was a big hit at Sundance, winning an award, being celebrated by the audience, and getting snapped up for distribution by Focus Features. Sean Wang is lucky and talented and we look forward to what he does next. (He was Oscar nominated this year for his documentary short about his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wŕi Pó.)
Dědi 弟弟 ("Younger Brother"), 93 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 19, 2024, receiving the Audience Dramatic Award and Ensemble Award. Shown at many other festivals including Austin, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Seattle (Grand Jury Prize, Best Feature Film), London, Provincetown, Nantucket. Released in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany. Wider US release Aug. 16. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/didi/) rating: 78%.