*

11.23.2007

"angry asian man" emerging

CBC ran a story the other day about the increasingly visible trend of the "angry Asian man," a figure that has emerged quite a bit in news and popular culture in the last year or so... for better or for worse: All the rage: Tracking the trend of angry Asian men. Funny. I might know a few things about that. It's an okay article, though it tries to draw together a hell of a lot of disparate elements to illustrate this "angry" concept, everything from Harold and Kumar to Giant Robot to Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings. It's kind of all over the place. But I get it.

The article also mentions a low-budget independent film, apparently 7 years in the making, Tetsuro Shigematsu's Yellow Fellas, a comedy (I think) about "a disgruntled young Japanese-Canadian named Howie Hiroshima, who decides to create a politicized (and unintentionally bumbling) Asian gang to combat skinheads and racism." Sounds kind of crazy—could be really good... or really bad. Watch the trailer here.