Saturday School Podcast

• Season 9, Ep. 10: Finishing the Game

  It's our final episode of our 9th season of Saturday School, which covers "Stars of Asian American Cinema." Before YouTube, if you wanted to see an abundance of stories with Asian Americans as stars, you'd have to go to an Asian American film festival. And there, we had our own stars who would walk down our own red carpets and get standing ovations at our own screenings (regardless of whether Hollywood took notice). For the last 9 episodes, we've been paying tribute to some of the regulars of that scene -- and if we missed anyone, chances are they are in our season-concluding film, 2007's "Finishing the Game," directed by Justin Lin. To guide us through this 1970s-set mockumentary which follows a casting call for a new stand-in for Bruce Lee, we have a special guest! We welcome Phil Yu, our fellow Potluck Podcast Collective member who hosts They Call Us Bruce, All The Asians on Star Trek and the official "Squid Game" podcast. You might also know him as the blogger behind Angry Asian Man and the co-author of "Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now." But guess what, he was also an extra in "Finishing the Game" who shows up for 1 second just before the credits. "Finishing the Game," at its heart, is about all the pre-2010s anxiety about what we would need in order to have an Asian American leading man in Hollywood. Not a loveable sweetheart (like Sung Kang's character in the film), a serious actor (like Dustin Nguyen's character), reliable B-Lister (like Roger Fan's character) or Asian star visiting from a foreign country (like Leonardo Nam's character), but a bankable Asian American Hollywood star who could greenlight a film and get the screaming fans to show up. At the time, it was almost unimaginable. But now, we can see why it was so important that we continued -- and continue -- to imagine.

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• Season 9, Ep. 9: Lucky Grandma

  This week's Saturday School episode is a celebration of Tsai Chin, as we revisit the 2019 film, "Lucky Grandma," directed by Saisie Sealey.Some might know Chin as a classically-trained theater actress and original star of the London "The World of Suzie Wong" stage show. Some might remember her as a Bond girl. Many likely think of her as Auntie Lindo in "The Joy Luck Club."But "Lucky Grandma" gave Chin the role of a lifetime. Now 91, she was in her mid-80s when she played the cranky, chain-smoking grandma who gets herself mixed up in a gang-related heist on the bus ride back from a trip to a NY Chinatown casino. The film's national commercial release coincided with the pandemic, alongside the rise of hate crimes targeting Asian American seniors. "Lucky Grandma" provided a free-wheeling fantasy of an old Asian lady trying to get away with the perfect crime, despite having no skills, smarts nor plan. We root for our star, who is only armed with judgmental stares, lack of empathy and brazen stubbornness. As the tagline says: Respect your elders.

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• Season 9, Ep. 8: Crush the Skull

  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.

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• Season 9, Ep. 7: Karma Calling

  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.

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• Season 9, Ep. 6: Saving Face

  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!

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