Vampire movie

Would you like to see a vampire movie that's not for teen girls?
You should try the 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In. Like Twilight, it's also a "romantic" vampire story based on a book, but once again, it's Swedish and not for kids.
The creepy thing is it's about kids. One is a sweet, bullied boy with an awful Swedish haircut, the other is a strange new girl who plays outside at night without a suitable winter coat.
It's visually interesting, disturbing in all the right ways, disturbing in a few of the wrong ways, and available for instant watching on Netflix.
Here's the trailer:

Summer Concert Series

Every dorky morning "news" show has them, so Can You Dig It? is going to join the fray and host its very own summer concert series every Friday.
I promise no American Idol winners or castoffs will be invited to perform and there won't be a bunch of waving idiots from Nebraska trying to get on TV wearing matching T-shirts.
After having a great time watching a lot of fantastic videos, I finally decided to open the series with this clip from a rare documentary filmed in 1981 while Marvin Gaye was living in Belgium.

Blessed by television

In times like these, you may have to look a little harder to find the bright side. I’m looking very hard.
One great blessing is that my daughter is on the verge of graduating from diapers. That’s going to be a savings of about $40 a month in disposable diapers, not to mention this great landmark in my child’s development has afforded me the opportunity to repeatedly and joyously exclaim the phrase “Big girl undies” without irony or fear of repercussion.
But mostly, I’m very thankful for the engineers and technicians responsible for manufacturing my extraordinarily durable 19-inch RCA color television.
My parents bought
me this TV in January of 1992 for my 16th birthday. I was a pimply, braces-wearing high school sophomore who spent a lot of time in his room. A TV in there would make the time in self-imposed exile waiting out the travails of puberty pass much faster.
It was a huge deal back in ’92 because it was a “stereo” TV. My life would no longer be lived in mono. I could finally enjoy “Major Dad” and “Unsolved Mysteries” the way they were meant to be experienced. Not in Dolby Digital Surround Sound like you can get today, just regular old, lower case “stereo sound.” I connected that baby to my old stereo receiver, cranked up the volume on “Designing Women,” and you could almost hear Delta Burke sweating.
This TV has seen a lot of changes – VCRs to DVDs to Blu-ray; Nintendos to Playstations to Xbox and Xbox 360; and analog antenna to cable to satellite, and back to digital cable, analog antenna again, and now thanks to a converter box, digital antenna.
Considering what my television has been through, it’s amazing that it has survived.
I thought I’d lost it forever just two years into its life when in the fall of 1994 I moved into the dorm room for my freshman year at Indiana University. It was resting comfortably on my new rented bed waiting to be placed in a more permanent location when it fell a good three feet screen-first onto the floor.
Now, longtime fans of Can You Dig It? will probably wonder what my dorm neighbor Jared the future Subway spokesperson thought when he heard such a crash, but I guarantee you at that point in his life he was probably down in the dining hall too busy working on his fifth helping of goulash to care.
While its owner fell face first out of bed many more times in college, the TV remained stable. Later that year, my second roommate, a sloppy, hairy, metal-music-loving Long Islander spilled a Pepsi directly into the air vents on the back of the set. It sizzled, fizzed and smoked for about a week until the Pepsi’s chemical properties evolved and mutated to create what probably can be considered the first high fructose plasma television.
When my otherwise technologically-challenged parents upgraded to a big, fancy HDTV last year, they bequeathed their 29-inch 1998 model to us. I should have been ashamed at how quickly I relegated my dear television to the guestroom upstairs, but this thing was a full 10 inches bigger. I could finally (albeit five easy payments of $39.95 too late) read the “Results Not Typical” disclaimer on the dreamy Ab Circle Pro advertisements.
Three weeks ago, the hand-me-down conked out right in the middle of my kid’s favorite show. She was mad and told me, “You have to fix it.” My only solution was to go to the guestroom and lug old faithful back down the stairs.
The RCA Dome in Indianapolis has been demolished, I’ve grown from a pimply, awkward teen to a pimply, awkward married father, and Jared may have slimmed down, but my television still weighs 300 pounds.

More on Asians

When Hollywood decides it's OK to have Asians in movies with or without Kung Fu, I would pay to see these two in anything.



"You stand in middle of car showroom and boom! Poo come out your long pants."
Here's the kid's site: http://www.kevjumba.com/.

And in my previous post, I failed to mention another recent offense by Hollywood when they took the true story of a group of Asian American MIT students who defrauded Vegas casinos and replaced them with white characters in the 2008 film 21.
And how about Brian Dennehy as Kublai Khan in the 2007 Hallmark movie Marco Polo?

Let Asians Be Asians

In the age of Stuff White People Like, it can feel dangerously fetishistic for your average white male blogger married to a half Chinese girl to seem overly interested in Asian culture.
I know what people think when they see us walking around town, because I can't help think the same thing when I see a white guy with an Asian woman. You know what I'm talking about. Mail order bride, sexual fetish, math tutor.
It's wrong and I feel bad about it, but this is the power of the media. Even the most culturally savvy among us are not immune to the images we ingest.
To try to counteract the stereotypes, I take great pains to make sure my Chinese bride isn't walking too far behind me in public, and I've finally trained her to not cover her mouth when she bashfully giggles at every hilarious thing I say. Her sword work is now confined to the garage and she can only wear three pieces of Hello Kitty! paraphernalia at a time.
So, we're doing our part to change the world, but apparently Hollywood and the rest of the imagemakers are not.
The other night, while my wife was engaging in her stereotypically Asian pastime of surfing the internet (they're just so cute when their adept little hands are working with technology) for gay-friendly and lesbian comics, she stumbled upon racebending.com, a site created to protest the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan (real name Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan) film, The Last Airbender, based on the Nickelodeon animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender."
I've never seen the show, but the site's creators say it "featured Asian characters in a fantasy setting inspired and informed by a variety of Asian cultures. The characters fight with East Asian martial arts, have Asian features, dress in clothing from Asian cultures, and write with Chinese characters."
That sounds nice, and culturally appropriate. Of course, we're not going to be allowed to see a show with Asian characters that doesn't involve martial arts, etc., but even so, the site claims the program's "cast and setting were a refreshing departure from predominantly white American media, and were a large part of the show's appeal as well as an inspiration to many Asian American children."
Then Paramount gets involved to turn it into a big budget blockbuster and decide to cast young white actors in the lead roles of Katara, Sokka and Prince Zuko.
While extremely disappointing, this isn't surprising. You've probably heard of Hollywood's history of performers in blackface, but maybe you missed the long and star-studded list of actors who appeared in "yellowface." Katharine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Sellers, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Lon Chaney and of course, David Carradine took unfortunate, embarrassing and sick turns getting made up to play Asian characters.
The casting announcement last December outraged fans of show, who began a letter writing campaign to convince Shyamalan and the producers, big-timers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, to change their minds.
And it worked, sort of.
While the protesters never heard from the producers, it was announced in February that Dev Patel, star of the Oscar-sweeping film Slumdog Millionaire, which if you didn't notice, featured an all-Asian cast, would replace white teeny-bopper Jesse McCartney in the role of Prince Zuko. Victory! Right?
Nope, Prince Zuko is the lead bad guy. And it seems that all the other Asian and dark-skinned actors cast in supporting roles will play characters from the "evil, genocidal" Fire Nation, while white actors will play the roles of the heroic Water Tribe.
As liberal as Hollywood is supposed to be, the entertainment business is excruciatingly slow and stubborn when it comes to breaking racial stereotypes. In fact, it does way more creating than breaking.
It took until the 1990s and the otherwise inane blockbuster Independence Day before movie studios felt the world was ready to see a black man save the world from aliens, and it was a quaint little novelty in 1998 when black actor Morgan Freeman played the President of the United States in Deep Impact.
Ten years later, we actually have a black President, but Hollywood still thinks the ticket-buying public covered in Asian character tattoos isn't ready to watch Asian actors be the heroes in a story replete with Asian themes. Just imagine how long it will be before we see an Asian guy play the lead in a major studio romantic comedy. No, Harold and Kumar don't count.
While we wait:
1) Go to racebending.com and sign the petition.
2) Read how the casting director was quoted telling extras "If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, where lederhosen."
3) Read how the white lead actor told MTV "I think it's one of those things where I pull my hair up, shave the sides, and I definitely need a tan. It's one of those things where, hopefully, the audience will suspend disbelief a little bit."
4) Spread the word
5) Don't see the movie

Hannity concert

Faster than you can say filibuster-proof majority, the summer concert season is here and just look at the roster schmohawk Sean Hannity has lined up for his "Freedom Concerts."
Wow! I haven't seen Billy Ray Cyrus and Oliver North on the same stage since Lollapalooza '92 when they jumped on stage to mosh with House of Pain and Sweaty Nipples.
Can you imagine who the "many special guests" are who couldn't make it onto the bill ahead of Lee Greenwood?
Apparently, money raised at the concerts goes to military families who've lost loved ones in the wars Hannity thinks we should be fighting. I think I'll just send a check.