Flogging a Dead Groundhog

As I said before, I don’t think that Groundhog Day, the 1993 stuck-in-time movie starring Bill Murray, is a romantic comedy.  Yes, it’s a film both side-splitting and thought-provoking, but I think that the romantic story thread — Murray’s character pursues Andie MacDowell — is a mere subplot, with MacDowell not given enough screentime or scenes without Murray to rise to the level of romantic co-lead.  However, not that many people seem to agree with me.  If multitudes of moviegoers have no trouble affixing the rom-com label to My Big Fat Greek Wedding (it’s not — the romance is a subplot that’s resolved less than halfway through the running time), they have even less of a problem depositing the hard-to-categorize Groundhog Day in the same pigeonhole.  

But if Groundhog Day were a full-fledged romantic comedy — in other words, a kind of movie where the couple coming together was the story’s central concern — it would bear a closer resemblance to the trailer below, a forthcoming film from popular culture’s new chronicler of courtship and auteur of awkwardness, Richard Curtis:



Okay, I admit it!  This whole post was just an excuse to put another image of the mesmerizingly magnificent Rachel McAdams on my blog.

Another Casting Controversy: ‘The Nightingale’

Echoing my post “Yellowface Top Ten,” another casting controversy has been recently roused.  The La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, has originated a new musical (one still in development, in fact) called The Nightingale, based on the story by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Steven Sater, the team behind the hit musical Spring Awakening.  Andersen’s story, you might know, takes place in long-ago China, a setting that the new musical preserves.  From the news reports I’ve read, Sheik, Sater, and director Moisés Kaufman did not see The Nightingale as taking place in the China of history; they saw it set in a China of the imagination, China as envisioned by a 19th-century Danish writer.  For this reason, they say, they decided to cast The Nightingale “colorblind”: auditions for the musical were open to actors of all races  The result is a cast that is largely non-Asian, with a Caucasian actor playing the protagonist of the Chinese Emperor and an African American actress playing the Empress Dowager.  Only two performers in the twelve-member cast are Asian American.

The Nightingale’s casting sparked some heavy criticism by Asian American actors and others in the arts community for not casting all of its parts with performers who are ethnically Asian.  The controversy has become so widespread that the artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, Christopher Ashley, has scheduled a discussion on the subject following the musical’s matinee on Sunday.  I appreciate the people of the La Jolla Playhouse for taking the issue so seriously.  When Asian American actors complained in 1990 over the casting of British actor Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon’s Asian male lead, the producer cancelled the show’s upcoming Broadway premiere until Actors Equity dropped their objections.  It’s nice to see the La Jolla Playhouse taking a different tack because I agree with the Asian American actors’ complaints. 

Now, I haven’t seen The Nightingale, but there is no doubt in my mind that the show as it now stands is a good one.  I don’t doubt that the present cast — Caucasian Chinese Emperor and all — execute their roles with the utmost professionalism and aplomb.  I might even regard their performances as excellent.  My issue is not with these thespians themselves; my issue is with the creative team of Kaufman, Sheik, and Sater and their decision to cast The Nightingale in this way instead of casting primarily Asian American actors in these roles. 

By casting The Nightingale colorblind, Kaufman and company disregarded an important issue: Asian American actors do not have equal opportunities to play roles, especially lead roles, in the mainstream American entertainment industry.  Most roles on Broadway or in Hollywood are written as non-Asian, and Asian American actors are rarely considered for such parts.  So, this automatically tilts the industry’s playing field in favor of non-Asian actors.  Also, the entertainment industry has a long and troubled history of casting roles written as Asian with non-Asian actors while seldom, if ever, allowing the reverse.  As a result, whenever a non-Asian is cast as an Asian character — however well intended — this diminishes already scarce opportunities for Asian American actors and perpetuates a racially discriminatory double standard in casting. 

The issue that I’ve just stated is often misrepresented by its detractors as, “This means that only Polish American actors will be able to play Stanley Kowalski.”  No, it doesn’t mean that: Polish American actors don’t suffer from racial discrimination.  Asian American actors, by contrast, are subject to the unspoken racial assumptions of Broadway and Hollywood.  The issue isn’t ethnically specific casting; no one is saying, for example, that only Danish actors can play Hamlet.  The issue is the entertainment industry’s preferential treatment of its Caucasian talent over its minority talent. 

If the La Jolla Playhouse cast more of its shows colorblind, its creation of a multi-racial China in The Nightingale might be viewed differently.  But this is one of the Playhouse’s few productions calling for Asian lead roles.  As such, I believe that The Nightingale’s creative team should have given priority to Asian American actors for their show’s cast.  I think that professional theatres (including regional theatres like the La Jolla Playhouse) and movies should continue this practice until it achieves true parity among actors of all races.  Once this is accomplished, controversies about casting according to skin color will go the way of all flesh.  

Part One of the discussion following the July 22, 2012, matinee of La Jolla Playhouse’s “The Nightingale”

A Film Dwarfed by Controversy

This week, I went to see Snow White and the Huntsman, this year’s second revisionist take on the familiar Grimm Brothers fairy tale (the first being Mirror, Mirror), most widely known in its Walt Disney iteration.  The film was an intriguing, action-packed, PG-13-rated rendering of the story.  Of course, the tale’s best-known supporting characters are the seven dwarves, but Snow White and the Huntsman took so many liberties with the story that I began to wonder if the erstwhile titular characters would be part of the film at all.  Then, longer into the story than I would have imagined, the seven familiar figures inevitably appeared.  I appreciated the seven dwarves’s hardscrabble gruffness, which was perfectly credible given the film’s miserablist milieu.  

But as I watched the on-screen dwarves, I began to talk to myself.  “Hey, that dwarf looks like Ian McShane.  And that one looks like Bob Hoskins.  That one bears a certain resemblance to Ray Winstone.  I know Toby Jones is short, but he’s not as short as his lookalike dwarf on the screen.”  After reciting this litany of non-dwarf actors (with the possible exception of Jones, who isn’t an achondroplast in any case) inside my head, it gradually dawned on me: the film had digitized these regular-sized actors into dwarves.  I heaved a sigh of dismay.  Later, I discovered that a controversy about the casting of the dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman had been brewing for a month.

If you’ve read my blog post “Yellowface Top Ten,” you’ll know that I’m attuned to issues of casting underemployed minority actors in mainstream entertainment.  If a role is written as something other than a youthful, able-bodied Caucasian, casting directors ought to look to the pool of acting talent from those non-able-bodied and/or non-Caucasian communities first.  Why?  Because the overwhelming number of lead roles in mainstream entertainment are for thespians not from those communities.  This gives white TAB performers an enormous (functioning) leg up in the industry.  Casting directors first eyeing minority actors for minority roles helps to level the playing field a bit.  

But when someone puts forward the idea of reserving non-white or non-able-bodied roles for non-white or non-able-bodied actors, there is often some pushback from some quarters.  The usual retort goes something along the lines of: “It’s called acting!  It’s about the performer pretending to be something other than what s/he is!  Should only Danish actors be allowed to play Hamlet?”  This kind of reaction, of course, doesn’t view casting disputes in the context of the entertainment industry’s hiring practices, which is the source of such disputes in the first place.

The average dwarf actor in the industry has very few mainstream roles to choose from.  No director this side of John Waters is going to cast him as Fitzwilliam Darcy or her as Lizzie Bennet — or virtually any other mainstream character besides.  With his roles in The Station Agent and Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage has probably the highest profile of any dwarf thespian in the world, but he is very much the exception.  Other dwarf actors usually earn their money from other occupations and are lucky to be cast as one of Santa’s elves in a Christmas commercial.  

Snow White and the Huntsman could have given seven dwarf actors a rare opportunity to show their stuff on the mainstream screen, perhaps even discovering the next Peter Dinklage in the process.  Instead, the movie gave these opportunities to well-known character actors whose careers don’t face the same obstacles, thespians who have more character options than an elf.  

Snow White and the Huntsman’s snubbing of dwarf actors is rather personal for me.  As you might already know, I myself am very short.  I have a dwarfism (spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia tarda) that leaves me standing only four-feet, eight-inches tall.  I’m not an actor, but I did some amateur acting in high school and college, and I know what it’s like to be told by a director that I won’t be cast in a part because, however good my audition was, I’m too short.  When I did land a role back then, I was often complimented on my performance.  Would I have been drawn more to acting if I had been taller?  We’ll never know.  

But you might say, “This has been done before.  The Lord of the Rings digitized regular-sized actors into Hobbits.”  But Hobbits aren’t humans; they’re a fictional species.  In fact, I was rather relieved that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy used CGI instead of dwarf actors for its Hobbits because I’m tired of little people being portrayed as beings other than members of the human race (for example, Time Bandits, Willow, Munchkins, elves).  Although they inhabit a fairy-tale world, the dwarf characters in the Grimm story (and its various adaptations) are flesh-and-blood humans and not magical or supernatural creatures, especially in Snow White and the Huntsman.

Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang once said that when he watched television as he was growing up in the 1960s, he would change the channel when an Asian character appeared on the tube. He did that because he knew that the TV show would get it wrong, because he knew that the Asian character would do more to reflect the writers’ ignorance of Asian people than the character would to reflect Asian people themselves.  I feel pretty much the same way when it comes to portrayals of little people in the mainstream media: the non-dwarf creators are going to get it wrong, and the little person will wind up being a stereotype, usually the butt of a joke.  So, you might ask why I set myself up by going to see a movie version of “Snow White.”  I’m not entirely sure, but given that dwarf characters are so central to the story, maybe I’m hoping that a Snow White movie might prove the exception and get the dwarf characters right for a change.

Snow White and the Huntsman’s use of digital dwarves in place of real ones is especially disappointing because the film boasts the most intriguing portrayal of little people that I’ve seen on the screen in some time.  But in seeing these non-dwarf actors in the roles, my mind left the story and thought about all those dwarf thespians who don’t have the opportunities of an Ian McShane or a Bob Hoskins and who were passed over for this rare acting opportunity.  I also wondered if CGI dwarves would become the norm in the future, if instead of hiring dwarf actors for dwarf roles, movies would just digitally shrink a normally proportioned actor.  If so, that role as Santa’s elf in a Christmas commercial, for dwarf actors living in a non-dwarf world, may become one more thing out of reach.

Karl Rove’s New Political Ad

Here is the new television ad by Republican strategist Karl Rove’s political action committee, American Crossroads:



It's interesting: When Democratic president Bill Clinton left the White House with a prosperous economy and a $236 billion budget surplus, Republicans, like Karl Rove, said that our economic fortune was due entirely to the dot-com bubble and other things beyond Clinton’s control. When Republican president George W. Bush left the White House with the economy in a tailspin and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Republicans said that our economic misfortune was due entirely to the “war on terrorism” and other things beyond Bush’s control. 


In other words, to Republicans, our good times under Clinton had nothing to do with Clinton, and our bad times under Bush had nothing to do with Bush. But now that the economy is still troubled under a Democratic president — a president whose term has been marked by unprecedented GOP obstructionism — Republicans say that the economy suddenly has everything to do with the man in the White House. Can you say “double standard”?

Easter Bunny Breakdown

So Long, Sushi Nozawa

One of my favorite places to eat shuttered its door this week: Sushi Nozawa.  If the name of the 25-year-old Los Angeles restaurant sounds familiar to you, then you’ve probably heard the stories of the small sushi eatery in the nondescript Studio City strip mall, how celebrities flock there, how the chef is so temperamental that he sometimes throws customers he doesn’t like out of the place.  I can’t add much more to these stories of the celebrities, but I can say something about how much I enjoyed the food. 

The sushi restaurant was quite tiny, in fact (it seems strange to refer to it in the past tense), with room enough for only six or seven tables and about a dozen seats at the bar.  Because of this, especially during the restaurant’s height of popularity about a decade ago, the line to get in would stretch out the door and take up most of the room on the outside sidewalk.  Newspaper reports say that some customers would wait in line for two and a half hours for a 45-minute meal. 

I liked to go to Sushi Nozawa quite often because it was within walking distance of my apartment.  I moved to Studio City a year after the restaurant opened, and I remember the adventure of becoming familiar with places to eat near my new digs and was delighted to see so many sushi places nearby.  Since Sushi Nozawa’s reputation wasn’t established at the time, checking the place out wasn’t a high priority.

When I finally got around to going there, I was unimpressed by its lack of atmosphere and ambiance.  But that was okay with me.  I often eat alone and take something with me to read, so the bright lighting made it easier for me to scan my books and magazines. 

At the time, the place was largely a two-handed operation, with the taciturn chef Kazunori Nozawa slicing away solo behind the sushi bar and his soft-spoken and very charming wife Yumiko acting as host-cum-waitress (there might have also been a busman at the time, but I don’t remember).  I had no trouble getting a seat at the bar. 

Not until my second time there did I truly take notice of the food.  Perhaps I was distracted by what I was reading, but it only gradually dawned on me that the sliced fish I had popped into my mouth had a buttery consistency that I hadn’t tasted in sushi before.  Also the fish — yellowtail, I think it was — had a gentle flavor that didn’t seem fishy at all but still smacked of the sea.  And most impressive of all — the rice was warm!  I was so struck by this experience that as soon as I swallowed, I said out loud at the bar, in a soft but pleasantly surprised tone of voice, “That’s really good.”  I put down my reading material and concentrated on the parade of fish that the unsmiling chef behind the bar handed to me.  Each piece was as good as the last.  Before I left, I told the chef how much I enjoyed what I had just eaten.  I remember him only nodding in reply, as though he expected nothing less.  Fortunately, the ever-smiling woman at the cash register was there to thank me and wish me a good night. 

I noticed that the restaurant only served sushi, sashimi, miso soup, and beverages — nothing else.  Given this epicurean austerity, I concluded that so little thought had gone into the restaurant’s atmospherics because so much thought went into the fish it served.  I quickly made Sushi Nozawa a regular part of my evening meals.  I became acquainted with and would occasionally make conversation with Chef Nozawa and Yumiko.  Yumiko seemed impressed that I knew as much as I did about Japanese culture (maybe she was just being polite).  I would even practice my faulty grasp of the Japanese language with them. 

Once, when the chef asked me if I wanted any more sushi, I said, declining, “Iie, kekkô desu.”  Yumiko, who was standing just to the side of my chair, had a wide-eyed look of surprise on her face.  Thinking I might have put my foot in it, I asked her, “That is polite, isn’t it?”  Still with a look of surprise, she answered, “Very polite.”  I think I impressed her.  Chef Nozawa didn’t say anything.  For a time, before leaving, I would say to the chef, complimenting him, “Nozawa-sensei, totemo oishkatta desu.  Go chisô-sama deshita.”  Poker-faced, he would quickly nod and then go back to his fish.  To Yumiko, I would say, wishing her a good night, “Oyasumi nasai.”  She would pleasantly smile and repeat the phrase back to me. 

Chef Kazunori Nozawa and Yumiko

Although it was also open for lunch, I didn’t like eating my midday meals there — the sushi was so good that I didn’t want to go back to my workaday world afterwards.  In fact, when I would walk into the restaurant and the couple were within earshot, I would wish them a good evening: “Konban-wa.”  I got so used to saying this to them that when I bumped into Yumiko in town one sunlit day, I automatically said to her, “Konban-wa.”  Always smiling, she corrected me, “Not konban-wa — konnichi-wa.”  Not good evening — but good day.  Yes, I thought to my embarrassed self, I knew that.  I’m sure that wasn’t the only Nihongo faux pas I made. 

I was also something of a show-off about matters Japanese.  One evening in my early years eating at the restaurant, my check total came to $16.03.  I added a tip of $2.50 to bring the total to $18.53.  After I wrote down the figure, I was struck by a coincidence: two very important years in Japanese history are 1603, when Ieyasu Tokugawa became supreme shogun and created a ruling order in Japan that would last for the next 250 years, and 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. sailed to Japan and began the opening of the then-insular country to the rest of the world.  I thought this coincidence was too amusing not to show to Yumiko, but she seemed to be less impressed by it than I was. 

However, word of this restaurant must have gotten out because (no surprise there), before too long, I found it increasingly difficult to get a seat at either the bar or a table.  I also started to realize that there were some house rules: when you sat at a table, you could order anything you wanted from the small sushi menu, but when you sat at the bar, you had to eat whatever Chef Nozawa served you. 

Also, there were certain things that the chef wouldn’t serve.  At first, two signs adorned the wall behind the sushi bar — “Today’s special: no California roll, no spicy tuna roll” and “Today’s special: Trust me.”  Allowing the sushi chef to serve you whatever is the best catch of the day is a traditional Japanese way of eating sushi called omakase.  And the patrons who sat at the bar, including myself on occasion, would often talk among themselves about how good the food was. 

Soon, the stories started to spread about Chef Nozawa throwing patrons out of his restaurant who insisted on ordering items that he did not serve.  The stories were true; I was in the restaurant on one such occasion.  I spotted a number of celebrities at Nozawa’s — it’s the sushi restaurant where I encountered Johnny Clegg.  Artists from nearby animation studios would leave drawings and small paintings for Nozawa to display on the wall, works of art all on the theme of “trust me.” 

And when Nozawa handed his sushi to the customers at the bar, he would often tell them how to eat it.  “No soy sauce.” “No wasabi.”  “One bite.”  For customers having trouble wielding their chopsticks or mastering how to dip the sushi into the soy sauce lightly and quickly, Yumiko would come up to the bar and show them.  (But the sushi rice was packed so loosely — a trademark of Nozawa’s — mine often fell into the soy-sauce dish on its way to my mouth.)  The restaurant didn’t take reservations. 

One kind of reservation the restaurant did make: Chef Nozawa reserved certain kinds of fish — all of which he bought himself at the downtown L.A. fishmarket at 5:00 in the morning — for certain patrons.  My first taste of the chef’s discretionary powers came before the restaurant got extremely popular.  One of my favorite kinds of sushi is mackerel — or saba, as it’s called in Japanese — a delightfully salty fish that I never saw on Nozawa’s menu, despite Spanish mackerel (aji) being a restaurant staple.  One evening, when virtually the only other patrons in the restaurant were a group of Japanese businessmen, making animated conversation with the chef, I heard the word saba in their otherwise unintelligible speech.  I asked Yumiko if saba was being served that night.  She said yes, so I ordered some.  Word soon got back to me that Chef Nozawa wouldn’t serve it to me because he didn’t think that I would like it. 

This was something that I never experienced before: a restaurant item was available, and I was willing to pay for it, but the chef wouldn’t give it to me.  I could feel a quizzical, scowling “what the hell?” expression forming on my face.  Apparently, he was reserving the saba for the Japanese customers.  I stopped eating and reading to ponder what was going down.  Eventually, Nozawa relented and gave me some mackerel.  It wasn’t salty like sushi-bar saba usually is — maybe that’s why Nozawa didn’t think that I would like it.  But I still thought it was rude for him to refuse serving me an available item. 

And not everything that Nozawa served was always on the menu.  One of my favorite offerings of his was his monkfish-liver handroll.  Monkfish liver, or ankimo, is usually served in Japanese restaurants as an appetizer: the sausage-like liver is sliced and served in ponzu sauce.  Instead, Chef Nozawa would put his ankimo in a creamy sauce and wrap it with rice in nori seaweed.  The flavor was delightfully tangy, and the richness of the sauce contrasted nicely with the thinner consistencies of the soy sauce and ponzu sauce served in the other dishes.  But I only discovered this delicacy when a customer eating at a nearby table (he must have been a V.I.P.) was too full to eat the ankimo handroll that Nozawa served him, so he offered it to me.  If this fluke of fate hadn’t happened, I might never have learned about this outstanding menu item. 

Once, I took a sushi-loving friend from Baltimore to Nozawa’s.  He liked the food there so much that he couldn’t eat sushi in Baltimore for the next six months because it couldn’t measure up.  (Don’t get angry, Maryland — Nozawa used crabmeat from the Chesapeake Bay for his delicious crab handrolls.)  I took friends to Sushi Nozawa whenever I could.  In fact, I even had a few small birthday gatherings there, for which I brought slices of my own birthday cake, since the restaurant didn’t serve desert.  I always made sure to bring a slice for Yumiko to ward off any official disapproval of outside food. 

However, as the years went by, my fondness for Sushi Nozawa waned.  The biggest intervention into my enjoyment of the restaurant was the paralysis of half my face after my surgery: because one side of my mouth no longer closes completely when chewing, and because half of the inside of my mouth is numb, this made eating sushi in one bite rather difficult.  Also the prices got increasingly expensive so that it was hard to ingest a decent amount of sushi and sake without generating a three-figure check.  And the restaurant seemed to grow less welcoming.  One evening, I sat down at my usual well-lit table by myself but was asked to move to another where the lighting wasn’t as good, probably so that the table could be put together with another if a large crowd came in.  I quietly decided to eat elsewhere that night.  (To be fair, I was never asked to move again.) 

My visits became less frequent, and the visits I did make became more expensive.  With no real opportunity to speak it anywhere else, my Japanese got rusty, so I stopped trying it out on the Nozawas.  But by then, Yumiko all but stopped waiting on tables, leaving most of that task to the growing number of Latino busmen, and largely confined herself to working behind the cash register.  Some nights, she wasn’t at the restaurant at all.  But despite these changes, the sushi was always spectacularly good. 

The last time I ate at Sushi Nozawa was two weeks ago, after hearing of its impending closing.  I savored the food that night in case it was to be my last night eating there.  Sure enough, I showed up on its last night, but the line out the door was very long, and the night was very cold.  Since I was by myself, I decided just to hold onto my memories of the restaurant, especially in its early years.  In some important way, Sushi Nozawa on its last night was different from the restaurant whose food my taste buds fell in love with so long ago.  I decided to go somewhere else.  

Sushi Nozawa - Kazunori Nozawa's final day at restaurant

The Monkees - Daydream Believer