For this week's Saturday School, the 8th out of our 10-episode semester on Stars of Asian American Cinema, we are talking about Viet Nguyen's 2015 horror comedy "Crush The Skull." 

It's co-written by Nguyen and Chris Dinh, who also stars in the film. It also features a memorable performance by Tim Chiou -- and to whoever did the lighting for their arm muscles, good work. 

But we can't talk about Chris Dinh, the action/comedy/horror/romantic lead in an award-winning indie film, without contextualizing his stardom as a product of two worlds colliding. By the late-2000s, Asian American independent cinema was joined by a fresh crop of YouTube stars, including Wong Fu Productions, who had movie ambitions of their own.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

This week, we're revisiting the 2009 film "Karma Calling" by Sarba Das. It's a rom-com between a young Indian American woman Sonal Raj (Bernali Das) in Hoboken, New Jersey and an Indian man Rohit Rao (Samrat Chakrabarti) who works at a call center in Mumbai but is pretending to be an American named Rob Roy from Connecticut.

For this semester, which is about "Stars of Asian American Cinema," we are really leaning into our nostalgia and fondness for the actors who were everywhere in the 2000s and 2010s Asian American film festival scene. Maybe they weren't always the leads in Hollywood films, but they looked like stars, carried themselves like stars and could nail the grand onscreen romantic gesture like stars. 

Samrat Chakrabarti was like this, and "Karma Calling" also features early performances from other fan favorites including Parvesh Cheena, Poorna Jagannathan, Manish Dayal, Rizwan Manji and more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

In this week's Saturday School episode, we revisit the 2004 Alice Wu film "Saving Face," on the tail of its 20th anniversary.

If you've been following this semester, you know we are paying tribute to the "Stars of Asian American Cinema." This episode is our PhD thesis for why Lynn Chen is the ultimate star of Asian American cinema. We also talk about how "Saving Face" has become canon as it continues to gain new viewers over the decades. We marvel over how Joan Chen reversed aged by playing a mom of a pre-teen in "Didi." And we appreciate Michelle Krusiec for showing us that ABCs with non-fluent Mandarin can be nominated in the same Golden Horse Award category as Shu Qi!

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

In this week's episode, we're revisiting Gene Cajayon's 2000 film "The Debut," starring Dante Basco and Joy Bisco! Also starring Bernadette Balagtas! Eddie Garcia, Tirso Cruz III and Gina Alajar! Darion, Dion and Derek Basco! Premiere! DJ E-Man and DJ Icy Ice! Traditional Filipino Culture Night choreography! Trays and trays of food! Hip hop dance offs! 

Basically, Brian and I are jealous of Filipino parties, and we love that "The Debut" gave us an Asian American version of the classic '90s teen rom-com. And we also love that the main character's angst -- torn between his white American high school party and his older sister's debutante ball -- quickly melts away once he realizes that his Filipino family is much cooler and his sister's friends are much hotter. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

This week, we are revisting 1999's "ABCD," directed by Krutin Patel. It stars Sheetal Sheth and Faran Tahir as Indian American siblings, aka the "American Born Confused Desis" of the title. Madhur Jaffrey plays their mom, who has many opinions about who her kids should marry, and Aasif Mandvi (of "The Daily Show" fame) plays Sheetal Sheth's charming immigrant love interest.

The late '90s and early 2000s were a prolific time for indie Indian American films exploring the second-gen experience, with "ABCD," "American Chai" (which also starred Sheetal and Aasif), "American Desi" (which featured Kal Penn), and "Chutney Popcorn" (another great comedy by Nisha Ganatra that we covered in a previous season).

To contextualize, these films are all pre-"Bend It Like Beckham" (2002) and pre-"The Office" (2005-13), aka before the rise of Mindy Kaling. For this generation, Sheetal Sheth is the OG star who provided a much-appreciated image of a modern, rebellious, confident Indian American woman onscreen.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

Episode 3 of Saturday Season Semester 9 -- where we bask in the glow of our "Stars of Asian American Cinema" -- takes us back to the '90s. 1998's "Hundred Percent," directed by Eric Koyanagi, came out post-"Joy Luck Club," as Asian American filmmakers were experimenting with style, shedding the burden of representation and embracing hotness + silliness. 

There are three main storylines. A Venice cafe owner (the sweet and smiley Dustin Nguyen) crushes on a mysterious New Yorker (Tamlyn Tomita), who is on the run from a toxic ex-boyfriend. An aspiring actor (Garrett Wang) deals poorly with the stressors of being an Asian male actor in the '90s and puts his relationship with girlfriend (Lindsay Price) at risk. Two wannabe-Rastafarian potheads (Darion Basco and Keiko Agenda) accidentally get caught up in some criminal shenanigans. 

It's out of print, so we watched it on a DVD Brian kept from 2006. But there are four university libraries that carry it: UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, Sarah Lawrence and Tufts. (Shout out to universities with impressive Asian American media collections.)

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

Episode 2 of our "Stars of Asian American Cinema" season goes back to the beginning with 1980's "Hito Hata: Raise the Banner," considered the first feature-length film made by and about Asian Americans. It was recently restored in 4K by the National Film Preservation Foundation. The film traces Japanese American history from the issei generation's arrival to the U.S., to incarceration during WWII, to their fight against gentrification in Little Tokyo in the '70s. 

"Hito Hata" stars Mako (an Oscar-nominated actor who was one of the founders of the Asian American theater company East West Players) and Pat Morita (who got famous from "Happy Days" and would later become Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid"). The film was directed by Robert A. Nakamura and Duane Kubo, founders of Visual Communications, the organization behind the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival, and it symbolized an investment in Little Tokyo as a cultural hub for Asian America. 

For this generation, stardom wasn't just about fame or celebrity. It was about dignity. "Hito Hata" showed that a cast of Asian American actors who were usually limited to bit parts in Hollywood could be stars. It also used stardom to teach a history that wasn't taught in schools.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

Saturday School is officially back for Season 9! Brian and I are here to teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history (which includes Russell Wong and watermelons). The theme for this semester is "Stars of Asian American Cinema." In recent years, it's been fun to see Asian Americans starring in Hollywood hits and winning prestigious awards, because for so many years, we were told that the reason Hollywood wouldn't make any Asian American films was because there were no bankable stars. But as longtime followers of the Asian American indie film scene, we had our own stars -- those who we could count on to shine on the big screens of Asian American film festivals, even if they never landed on the covers of Entertainment Weekly. 

We start this season with "The Joy Luck Club," not because it's a groundbreaking Hollywood studio film, but to remind ourselves that when the film came out, none of them were considered "stars." But looking back at it 31 years later, it's a parade of stars-in-the-making. Yes, it's a meaningful story about mothers and daughters, immigrant struggle and intergenerational trauma -- but also everyone is very vulnerably charismatic, joyfully campy or entertainingly villainous. And it's ridiculous that Tamlyn Tomita, Ming-Na Wen, Lauren Tom and Rosalind Chao still kinda look the same. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

We’ve arrived at the last episode of Saturday School Season 8, which explored the history of Asian American sci-fi films! And we end this semester of boundary-pushing imagination with a… documentary! Pailin Wedel’s “Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice” from 2018, which is available to watch on Netflix.

“Hope Frozen” is about a Thai family who decide to have their two-year-old daughter Einz’s body cryogenically preserved in Arizona after she dies of brain cancer. Arguably an Asian American immigration story?

While to some, it may seem like they're embarking on a fringe pseudoscience -- or alternately, that they're forcing their daughter to be a time traveler -- the film is a quiet mediation on family, love and grief. It's a scientific quest passed along from father to son (who of course is named Matrix) to accelerate, perhaps even invent, the technology to give Einz a second chance at life. She is the youngest cryopreserved patient to date.

One of the reasons this season of sci-fi has been illuminating is because Asian American cinema often values authenticity, a natural reaction from a community that has seen their images distorted in Hollywood. But with recent films like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and "After Yang," there seems to be a hunger for Asian American stories that may seem impossible or dare to rewrite the future.

It’s been 6 years since we started Saturday School: Sept 8, 2016 to be exact. The landscape of Asian American cinema has changed a lot since then. Thanks for listening, reading and joining us on this journey!

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

Where were we going with a Saturday School season delving into the history of Asian American sci-fi? In some ways, all episodes prior were leading up to Jennifer Phang's "Advantageous," a 2015 feature film that started as a 2012 short film in the Futurestates series.

Often, Asian Americans and other people of color in Hollywood sci-fi represent a post-racial future. But what if in near future, these inequities are not gone but intensified?

Jacqueline Kim (who co-wrote the feature film expansion with Phang) plays Gwen, the spokesperson of a cosmetics company that wants to replace her with someone more "universal," just as she needs the money to send her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim) to an elite school.

Gwen, a single mother, believes this is Jules' only shot at a decent future in a world where society is collapsing. So in order to keep her job, she volunteers to be one of the first subjects for a procedure that will transfer her consciousness into a new, younger (less-Asian) body.

"Advantageous " won an award at Sundance, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and is available to watch on Netflix.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!

On this week’s Saturday School, we’re continuing our exploration of Asian American sci-fi with a second episode on Futurestates, a groundbreaking sci-fi short film series spearheaded by Karim Ahmad that ran from 2010 to 2014 on public television and online.

Before Black Mirror was another anthology series set in the future, Futurestates gave directors – including many notable Asian American filmmakers - opportunities to tell unique stories that imagined the future. Last week, we looked at Greg Pak’s short films, and this week, we delve into Tanuj Chopra’s shorts “Pia” and “Teacher in a Box,” and J.P. Chan’s “Digital Antiquities.”

“Pia” takes place in a futuristic San Francisco where robots are named Pia – and played by Pia Shah. “Teacher in a Box” explores a relationship between a teacher (Rebecca Hazlewood) and a student (Sarika Sanyal) who mostly converse through virtual reality but find reasons to connect in the real world. And “Digital Antiquities,” starring Jo Mei and Corey Hawkins, takes place in a future where CDs are antiquated and a man finds the only store that can help him decode the data his mom left for him after she died.  

Watching these shorts ten years later, many aspects of these stories seem uncannily similar to our current reality.

Mentioned in this episode:

Listen to Inheriting from LAist & NPR

"Inheriting" is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations. In doing so, the show seeks to break apart the AAPI monolith and tell a fuller story of these communities. In each episode, NPR’s Emily Kwong sits down with one family and facilitates deeply emotional conversations between their loved ones, exploring how their most personal, private moments are an integral part of history. Through these stories, we show how the past is personal and how to live with the legacies we’re constantly inheriting. New episodes premiere every Thursday. Subscribe to “Inheriting” on your app of choice

Listen to Inheriting now!