For a couple of years now, I've been following along with the progress of
21, the movie based on Ben Mezrich's
Bringing Down the House
, about real-life MIT students who took Vegas for millions by counting cards in blackjack. Very interesting story, particularly because most of the guys involved were Asian American. However, the story we've been hearing about the movie version is that most of the characters would be magically Hollywoodized into white people, with maybe one or two Asians speckled into the mix. Well, an early (poorly written) review of the movie was recently posted to
Ain't It Cool News, and it's apparently what we feared:
... all the characters were interesting and had a reason of being in each scene to tell the story that they were telling . every character except the two asian actors that is ... they seem to be there simple for comic relief and it worked but mostly because the other actors just treated them like they we're just retarded.
Granted, if you read through the entire review, it's really poorly written. But the reviewer makes it a point to specifically highlight the two Asian characters, who are used for comic relief... That's not very encouraging. I'm assuming he's talking about characters played by
Aaron Yoo and
Liza Lapira. Too bad. Can't say you didn't see it coming. For those who care, the movie is scheduled to be released next March.
