Samurai Girl- A Rant
Monday, September 1, 12:06 PM
Nuh uh, shut up! This has to be one of the corniest thing ever. This 3-day movie event doesn't automatically attract the Asian audience since the lead character is admittedly the pretty actress, Jamie Chung. Okay, maybe it does...a little. But I've waited so long to rant on this topic. Why is there a need to associate Asians and the martial arts/kung fu violence/protect your honor sort of genre? So, this is Samurais...It's Japanese. But it's utterly not believable! Plot summary for you guys: Heaven, played by Jamie Chung, is a girl adopted into the wealthy Kong family after a planecrash that killed her biological parents. At the age of nineteen, ninjas invade her wedding and kill her brother. Woah, now stop right there! I don't care if it's based on a book. How tacky can you get? I've never seen any American TV show with a leading Asian , having a normal life.Is the small-screen too afraid that the audience won't be interested into such a character? Probably. But I'll let them know, Asians are an under-represented demographic not reached out to. While we're at it, why not target Native Americans, Middle Easterns, Eskimos? Our airwaves need more color. And until a change, I'll continue to indulge in foreign films and Asian dramas. Three days, and Samurai Girl will never be spoken about again.
Disney Channel. Must arth thou painst me? To begin with, Disney offers lame contracts. They take advantage of the child actors. It's an exclusive dealing, Disney expects the kids to stay a minimum of 2 years. It's creating scene, an image that all child stars can act, sing, look pretty. Are these kids naturally triple threats? I think not, they've been trained to take up all these skills. I don't see how they could have a normal fun life when they're caught up in all the fame. Poor kids, the media show lay off them. Stress, stress, stress to be perfect and sell the most records. One small mistake, and the media-sharks are all over you. Quoted my friend, "It'll be 20 years before Corey Baxter (Kyle Massey) will ever get out of Disney, and by then he'll never be offered a contract. So much for his rapping career. Shiloh Buff barely made it out alive..." It hasn't always been this bad, the few Mouseketeers made it out alive. Britney, Justin, Christina..but it's been a decade.
I got offtopic. For what I was going to say, Disney channel does a mediorce job covering the Asian demographic as well. I loved American Dragon, it's a cartoon. It's great for the action. Jake from American Dragon had a white dad, well it's expected. Some of us do live in families like that. But Wendy Wu: Homecoming Queen. What a disaster! My friends looked forward to watching it. I did as well. I was disappointed to see them show her as shallow and uncaring. Disney portrayed Wendy's family, an Asian family, accurately but they lost me with the plot. I didn't enjoy the whole storyline. It was too typical. Sorry, that chance of an real teenage Asian-American girl on TV is gone. Shall I go on about the unreleased DragonBall Movie, Jamie also happens to star in? No, I'll leave it to Angry Asian Man to explain.
