DVD OF THE WEEK: Ping Pong Playa

Ping Pong Playa
Directed by Jessica Yu
2007, 96 minutes, English

"We flavored the script with details from our own lives: the dad who sings Chinese opera while frying the breakfast Spam (mine), the grown man taking lessons at a Chinese school class of kids (Jimmy), the parent who insists everything was invented by the Chinese (all of us)."
- co-writer and director Jessica Yu

Underrated at the time of its release last fall, the first narrative film from erudite documentarian Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal, Protagonist) couldn't have been a more unexpected project: a squeaky clean sports comedy that self-mockingly riffs on Chinese-American culture by way of hip-hop.

Discovered by Yu as an employee for the production company who helped fund her In the Realms of the Unreal, newcomer and co-writer Jimmy Tsai stars as Christopher "C-dub" Wang, a character so bad-mannered that his very existence in a cultural-experience story marks him, and the film, post-racial. (Hooray, it's about time that Chinese-Americans are allowed to have less than warm, thoughtful, hard-working heroes!) He's an emotionally stunted California slacker with a mall-kiosk job, pipe dreams of being a pro baller, and an affected jive bravado ("What up, my ninja?") that overcompensates for his insecurity of being overshadowed by his older brother -- a successful doctor and ping-pong tourney champ. Oversensitive to racial stereotypes (one of his t-shirts reads "I speak English"), C-dub plays cultural martyr while the rest of his suburban family has comfortably assimilated; when his mother is injured in a car accident, he's quick to pick a fight with the doctor whom he incorrectly presumes has implied that Chinese people can't drive well. He's also a shit talker, but you wouldn't hear anyone use that phrase because every expletive in the film has been cleverly masked by the sound of a basketball or ping-pong ball bouncing. It's refreshing to see a PG-13 comedy that isn't sickly sweet.

With his mom out of commission, C-dub is coerced to take over her ping pong classes, and just as in The Foot Fist Way or most Will Ferrell sports movies, he abuses the opportunity to prove he's superior to a gaggle of little kids, then hustles them for money. The token love interest is the older sister of the most outspoken pipsqueak (and C-dub's most gushing fan), and the villains are a preppie master-and-valet duo who have been allowed to use the space to practice on the table-tops; can you almost smell the grand finale competition as all the Golden Cock tournament posters foreshadow?

But if the premise itself is thin, even predictable (which is perhaps why so many have unfairly dismissed it), Yu has proven before that she has a bright visual élan and a lively wit, and she's fully aware that the quirky misfit behavior and family-friendly demeanor are not breaking ground. ("Unless you want to be the Chinese Napoleon Dynamite, get out of ping pong," C-dub name-checks.) The comedy's in the details, and they do breeze by nimbly: not the overly familiar training montages, but the subverting of stereotypes (C-dub's best friend is an African-American who just happens to be learning Chinese, and most every Caucasian character mispronounces Wang wong... er, wrong. One woman actually says "Me lovey ping pong long time" without a hint of self-awareness). Though its silly title and box art might be a turn off, Ping Pong Playa is smarter and far more entertaining than its comic brethren.

Posted by ahillis at January 6, 2009 10:15 AM