Monthly Archives: March 2022

Ke Huy Quan swung that damn fanny pack everywhere. It hung from an unusually long strap, and for weeks Quan swung it in the kitchen, he swung it while watching TV, he swung it all over the house. I broke so many things, he says, laughing. My wife was not too happy about it. But Quan was determined to master his technique because that fanny pack plays the weapon in his big action scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Up to that point in the story, the film has mostly been a domestic drama, and Quans character, Waymond Wang, a meek, soft-voiced husband, father, and laundromat owner. When things suddenly go haywire, he tears off the fanny pack hes been wearing and whips it around with breathtaking expertise, using it in the style of a wushu rope dart to subdue a group of IRS security goons.

Everything Everywhere turns out to be a deeply emotional, multiverse-hopping sci-fi action-fantasy about life, family, culture clashes, and the cosmos. Its the second feature directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work together under the moniker Daniels, and as it proceeds, Quans performance explodes into different personae, all of whom frantically circle around Waymonds wife, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a harried Chinese immigrant who has just discovered she may be the only being powerful enough to prevent the forces of nihilism from destroying all of existence. Evelyn is the protagonist, but Waymond is in many ways the films heart and the first time he appears onscreen, you may realize youve seen Quan before. He looks a little older, a little wearier, but his face is seared into the brain of anyone who grew up in the 1980s: When he was 12 years old, Quan scored a lead role in one of the biggest movies of the decade, playing the wisecracking street-urchin sidekick Short Round in Steven Spielbergs Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Quan as Short Round. Photo: MARKA/Alamy Stock Photo

While the film was a huge hit in 1984, it was also controversial, criticized for its gore and its outdated, exotic-cultures-of-Asia story line. Still, kids loved Short Round. We wanted to be Short Round, the only child lead in a series we worshipped. A year later, Quan played the boy inventor and intrepid adventurer Data in another Spielberg-produced blockbuster, The Goonies. The friend group I had in middle school was obsessed with The Goonies we would watch it every week. I was the Asian kid of the group, so whenever we would go out and play pretend, the mantle of playing Data was put on my shoulders, says Kwan. And I loved it. That character is so smart and so brave and so weird. We didnt have many great role models.

But then Ke Huy Quan grew up. It didnt take long to discover that Hollywood roles for Asian men were few and far between. He did a few films in Asia. He left acting behind and went to film school, then started working behind the scenes. Decades passed. Not until Quan saw the success of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 did he allow himself to think about performing again. I was happy working behind the camera, but this entire time something felt missing, he says. When those opportunities dried up, I spent a long time trying to convince myself that I didnt like acting anymore. I didnt want to step away with the feeling that it was because there were no opportunities. I was lying to myself.

He hired a new agent, and within just a couple of weeks he wound up with the script for Everything Everywhere. He stayed up all night reading it, waking his wife with shrieks of laughter: I had tears running down my cheeks. I said, I think this role was written for me!

It wasnt but the Daniels became taken with the idea of reviving Quans acting career. The hardest thing about finding this role was that it required a lot of different skill sets, says Kwan. He had to be able to speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English. He had to know martial arts. But he also had to be an incredibly believable sappy pushover. The directors imagined someone like Jackie Chan, who can serve as sweet comic relief one minute and perform dazzling feats of heroism the next. One day, on Twitter, I saw a picture of Ke Quan as Short Round, says Kwan. My brain was like, What is that guy doing right now?

I meet Quan, now 50, on a chilly, windswept day in Los Angeless Chinatown. Hes chatty and energetic as he shows me around this neighborhood, where his family including his mother, father, and eight siblings settled after arriving in the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam in 1979, when Ke was 8. The family, which has roots in Hong Kong and mainland China, tried to get out of Saigon twice. They succeeded by splitting up: Kes mother and three of the kids went to Malaysia. Ke, his father, and the rest of Kes siblings boarded a boat with thousands of other people; it was among the largest vessels involved in what was known as the Boat People crisis of the late 1970s and early 80s. They landed in a Hong Kong refugee camp.

It wasnt very big. We had a chain-link fence around the building, and it was just makeshift beds right next to each other, Quan says. There were guards to make sure we wouldnt get out. He pauses. I dont think Ive spoken about this stuff in 30 or 40 years. I knew that it was tough. I knew that was not my home. I knew we left a home behind. I knew I missed my brother. I missed my mom. They were stuck there for a year. He remembers the elation of getting U.S. visas and flying to L.A., where the family was reunited. It was the first and most important plane ride of Kes life.

We make our way to the historic Chinatown public school Castelar Elementary, where Spielbergs casting director, Mike Fenton, discovered Ke in 1983. The Temple of Doom team was desperate, searching all over the world Hong Kong, Singapore, London, New York to find the right child to play Short Round. But, strangely enough, they had not tried L.A. Kes younger brother David tried out for the part first. Ke had to wait while David auditioned, and he couldnt resist coaching his brother: I didnt know what the hell was going on. I was like, Hey, David, do this, do that! Fenton asked Ke if he would like to try out too; the first time he auditioned, his mother made him wear a three-piece suit with a little gold chain hanging off the pocket, he remembers, chuckling. Id never seen Star Wars. Id never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. I walked in the room, and it was just three grown men with a beard and a mustache. They were Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford. Three weeks later, Ke and his mother were on a plane to Sri Lanka.

A few other parts followed: The Goonies; one season of the sitcom Together We Stand, in which Ke played the adopted son of Elliott Gould and Dee Wallace; a season and a half as a transfer student on the high-school sitcom Head of the Class. Soon, though, the work dropped off. Quan remembers hanging out with other young actors at parties and feeling embarrassed hearing them talk about all the auditions they were going to. Yeah, this week I just have three auditions. I got five next week! And Im thinking, Man, the last audition I had was six months ago.

But he continued to fight literally. Quan loved Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies growing up, and hed been training with a Tae Kwon Do master ever since he started learning the martial art on the set of Temple of Doom. He leads me to an abandoned shopping center once called Bamboo Plaza, where we sit on some benches in an atrium surrounded by pigeons and long-shuttered businesses. He points to an empty storefront where one of his sisters used to have a travel agency. One day in 1998, he visited her while Lethal Weapon 4 was shooting in the mall. Behind the camera was his old Goonies director, Richard Donner. He also ran into Lethal Weapon 4s action director, Corey Yuen, whom hed met before. Quan was then studying film at the University of Southern California, and he told Yuen he would graduate in a year; one year later, Yuen called and asked if Quan could fly to Toronto on short notice to help with the fight sequences in a new film. It was X-Men. He taught me everything that goes into choreographing a fight sequence: how to shoot it, how to edit it, Quan says. It was one of the best times in my life.

He spent the next decade or so working on productions in the U.S., Hong Kong, and elsewhere, mostly as an assistant fight choreographer and assistant director. He learned the difference between how Hollywood and Hong Kong crews do action scenes: The former tends to plan everything in advance, while the latter choreograph as they go, making scenes look fresher, more spontaneous, and creative. As the assistant director on Wong Kar-wais 2046, he watched as Wong spent a whole day focused on one elaborate tracking shot, adding takes and tweaks long after everyone else agreed it was perfect. Quan brought the all-hands-on-deck attitude of Hong Kong shoots to his work on Everything Everywhere and some of the traditions too. Scheinert and Kwan (who compare Quan to a fun uncle who loves to party) say the actor insisted on getting a suckling pig for the first day of production; every time an actor shot a scene in which they had to die, Quan made sure they received a hongbao, a red envelope with money in it.

Quan and Michelle Yeoh as Waymond and Evelyn Wang.

For all his enthusiasm, Quan still carried the bruises from his last experiences acting in Hollywood. This was only Quans second acting gig in nearly 20 years. (The other was a 2021 Netflix film, Finding Ohana.) Even when he got the part of Waymond, he didnt tell anybody but his wife, his agent, and his entertainment attorney Jeff Cohen, who also happened to play Chunk in The Goonies because he was worried hed be fired a week into shooting. He couldnt believe he would be working alongside actors like Yeoh, whom he describes as the freaking queen of martial-arts movies. He became obsessed with getting everything right, working with a number of trainers and coaches to master Waymonds fighting skills and the vocal inflections and movements of his various iterations. If you look at the movie, theres a lot of whiplash moments where that character has to go from being like a dopey, wimpy emotional wreck to a straight-faced alpha male, Kwan explains. But we didnt have to resort to cutting or anything too overdramatic. It was all in his performance.

The picture bears the hallmarks of Quans many lives: Hong Kong action (the kind Yuen helped pioneer), melancholy lyricism (as perfected by Wong), and sci-fi fantasy that builds toward cathartic, unifying uplift (which one might call pulling a Spielberg). The film also channels something deeper, a sense of stifled potential unlocked. A few days after we speak, Quan will start shooting the new streaming series American Born Chinese alongside his Everything Everywhere co-star Yeoh, Daniel Wu, and Chin Han. Hes surprised to be a working actor again; he is relieved that he stayed the course. I dont think I could have played Waymond had this been ten or 15 years ago, Quan says. I needed all that life experience to give me the nuance and the depth to give me the different versions of him.

Want more stories like this one?Subscribe nowto support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 14, 2022, issue ofNew YorkMagazine.

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Ke Huy Quan on 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' - Vulture

The Los Angeles Lakers lost again on Wednesday night, falling to 28-37 on the season, failing to pickup any cushion on a Pelicans team that lost to the lowly Orlando Magic earlier in the evening.

The Lakers likewise faced off against one of the leagues worst teams as they paid the Rockets a visit in Houston, and while their stars performed much better on the offensive end LeBron James had 23 points, 12 assists, and 14 rebounds and Russell Westbrook had 30 points, six assists, and eight rebounds they were conscientious objectors to the concept of defense, allowing the Rockets to pour on 139 points in what became an overtime win.

Jalen Green had one of his best games as a pro, scoring 32 points in the win, as the second overall pick from last June embraced the stage of playing the Lakers and took over to start the overtime period. In overtime, Houston opened things up with a 10-0 run, which included a three-pointer from Kevin Porter Jr. that was waved off after review because the shot clock had expired, to bury the Lakers almost immediately after the extra period started.

It was a disastrous performance from a team that has had a number of those this season, and after the game James Worthy summed it up best on the Lakers postgame show stating matter of factly that I didnt think we could hit a new low, but we hit a new low tonight.

I think my favorite part of Worthys remarks are him closing simply with they dont seem to believe in anything [theyre doing], because if you were to ask someone to describe the ethos of this Lakers team, nihilism certainly would have to be up there. Worthy on the postgame show has often been a more entertaining watch this season than the Lakers themselves, and tonight even he seemed more defeated than usual by what transpired in Houston.

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James Worthy Can't Believe The Lakers 'Hit A New Low' In Loss To Rockets - UPROXX

According to Lionel Latoszek of Long Jetty, nothing comes close to having to explain Column 8 in another language. My 18-year-old niece with rudimentary English was flicking through the pages of the Herald I had bought when leaving Sydney Airport for Poland in 2019, when she read in Column 8 about spotting a pair of budgie smuggler swimmers at the beach on the weekend. Can you imagine my already difficult task of explaining this with my limited Polish language skills? I tried to keep a straight face while her parents and her friends listened with mouths agape. In case your interest is piqued, the column in question was from January 29, 2019.

Hearing himself described by Kerrie Wehbe as one of the quirky nerds who need to get out more, only without the faces (C8), George Manojlovic of Mangerton offers the following correction. Kerrie, I take my face wherever I go, unattractive as it may be.

Rhoda Silber of Manly shares the description her brother Gus in Johannesburg uses to explain Column 8 (C8) to the uninitiated. The side-bar where all the cool, interesting and curious people hang out. Gus is clearly angling for inclusion as one of the quirky nerds.

Column 8 can now add gift guide to its growing list of attributes. Among the birthday gifts recently received by Don Bain of Port Macquarie was a king-size magnifying glass, requiring some strength to heft but more than capable of dealing with microscopic packet instructions. An appreciative shoutout to Richard Stewart, who was credited with the thought behind it, and who has spared me many a surly squint.

Reading of the renamed street in Latvia (C8) brought to mind images of Cold War spies for Randi Svensen of Wyong, and of a certain Nordic creativity. In Oslo, the street where many embassies are located is called Inkognito Street.

Writing to Granny as one grandparent to another, Jim Pollitt of Wahroonga heard the following word salad on his favourite radio station: The new vibe in the zeitgeist could be a blend of nihilism and opulence and wondered: Is it time for us to stand aside?

Betty Radcliffe of West Ryde recalls that a friend who was an academic at a shall remain nameless university, told her that, a few decades ago, scribbled above the toilet paper dispenser in a cubicle (C8) of the senior faculty loo was BAs, please take one.

Column8@smh.com.au

No attachments, please.

Include name, suburb and daytime phone.

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Incognito in the zeitgeist - Sydney Morning Herald

A few weeks ago I came across an article about a kid who watches television at 1.5x speed so he can cram as much viewing in as he can. It seemed that his unquenchable desire to get through shows in the Golden Age of television meant hed sacrifice the entertainment value of the show just to get to the end.

Man, this guy would have been crucified in 1993, I thought.

As a 45-year-old card-carrying member of Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1979), I remembered a time when nobody bragged about the amount of TV they watched. In fact, they bragged about not owning a TV. I don't watch TV, man, people would say. It only exists to sell you stuff.

This complete reversal on the social acceptance of gluttonous TV viewing made me wonder what happened to the values we were raised on as Gen Xers? We were taught that sincerity was for simpletons, everything corporate is evil, old school is always better than the latest and greatest, authenticity is king, conformity is death and there is nothing worse than being a sell-out or a poser.

Nobody would have ever referred to themselves as an influencer in 1991thats the definition of a sell-out.

After writing this book, Im back in the mindset of 90s thinking, which is that nothing is worse than selling out, Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties: A Book, told Esquire. Nothing was more embarrassing in the 90s than trying to convince people to like the thing you made."

Deep inside the heart of almost every Gen Xer is a deep-seated feeling of nihilism. We didnt trust the corporations that laid off our parents or gutted their pensions in the 80s. In fact, everything corporate was predatory. We didnt have a lot of faith in family values because we were the first generation raised by single parents or in daycare. We didnt care much about politics either. Back in the 90s, Gen Xs aversion to politics was historic.

Of course, these are all generalities about a generation of nearly about 65 million people, but studies show that there are some definite hallmarks of being a Gen Xer.

According to a generational differences document circulated through the business community, Gen Xs core values are skepticism, fun and informality. Theyre described as self-reliant, independent, unimpressed with authority and motivated by freedom.

In the young Gen Xer, the culture of the era instilled a wariness and skepticism, and a kind of figure it out for yourself mindset, Paul Taylor, author of The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown told The Washington Post. And with that came a sense that you dont have to shine a light on yourself. Youre not the center of the universe.

But things have changed since the 90s when Gen X was coming of age. We live in an American culture that is fractured by political partisanship, fueled by a constant culture of outrage, crippled by a preoccupation with technology, plundered by greedy boomers and annoyed by overly sensitive millennials. All of this is happening while we face the greatest challenge of our times, climate change.

The answer to all of these problems is simple: admit that Gen X at one point had it right and if we followed its lead, we could reverse these terrible trends. OK, it might not fix all of our woes, but the way things are going now surely arent working. Plus, werent the 90s great?

Also, with hat in hand, I must admit that this message is for Gen Xers as well. Many of us have lost our way by forgetting our disdain for authority and skepticism toward institutions. This is a call for us to remember what we once stood for and to fight back by doing what we do beststaying above the fray.

Gen X, its time to strap on your Dr. Martens boots and get back to fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less. Its time we collectively got our whatever back and showed the other generations how powerful dismissiveness can be.

Here are the top five Gen X values that we need to embrace again.

Nothing was less hip in the early 90s than wearing mall clothes. If you had any style you shopped at a thrift store and bought used duds from the 70s and early 80s and remixed them into something awesome. If you were into hip-hop or skating you shopped at the surplus store and rocked some super-durable Dickies or Carhartt gear. The mood of the times was totally anti-fashion. These days, we live in a world where fast fashion is killing the environment. By embracing the Gen X value of old-school cool, we can help the planet while looking much more fashionable in the process.

In the early 2000s, people fell head-over-heels in love with smartphone technology and social media so quickly that nobody stopped and said, Hey, wait a minute! Now, we have a world where kids are depressed, the culture has become divided and nobody talks to each other in public anymore, they just stare at their phones. I can totally understand why young millennials and Luddite boomers would fall for the big-tech ruse, but sadly, Gen X was asleep at the wheel and fell victim, too. The generation that embraced the notion that TV rotted your brain needs to remind everyone to go outside and play in the sunshine or read a book. And if you read a book it should be by Bret Easton Ellis.

Two of the most popular Gen X phrases were whatever and talk to the hand (because the face dont give a damn). These may seem to be flippant responses but they are the correct way to deal with other peoples nonsense and in 2022, we have to deal with a constant barrage of it.

Somewhere along the way, people forgot that its even more powerful to ignore someone than to admit they got under your skin. In the world of social media, we unintentionally amplify the most wretched voices by subtweeting, commenting and liking the posts from the army of grifters fighting for our attention.

We also live in an era where many seem to be addicted to outrage. The quickest way to stop fanning the flames of outrage is with a simple, whatever. Like dogs distracted by squirrels, weve got our heads on outrage swivels these days. Throwing around the occasional whatever gives us the time and energy to focus on the problems that really matter and take action.

These days whatever matters more than ever.

Good taste used to matter. In the 2000s, millennials decided that people have the right to like what they like and that its worse to judge someones personal taste than to have bad taste. Gen Xers based their entire personalities on taste and demanded integrity from artists and were rewarded by living in a time of superior films and music. These days, no one listens to new music and were stuck in a world dominated by comic book movies because no one stood up and shamed people for liking low-effort culture.

Americas political divide has calcified over the past decade because more and more people are basing their personal identities on their politics. This has created a culture where the dialog between liberals and conservatives has become a shouting match that only makes people dig their heels in further. Its also created a culture in Washington, D.C. that has attracted a more debased form of politician and led to the gridlock that has halted any sense of progress. Sadly, Gen X has also been sucked into this vortex.

Things were a lot different in the 90s. Back in 1999, Ted Halstead at The Atlantic noted that Xers appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life. He added that Gen Xers exhibit less social trust or confidence in government, have a weaker allegiance to their country or to either political party.

Compared to whats going on in America in 2022, this type of apathy seems welcome. Back in the 90s, taking a chill pill could solve everything. Wouldnt it be great if everyone took one, and then we could open our ears and hearts and have some constructive discussions?

There was a common lament in the 1980s that the boomer hippies had sold out and became boomer yuppies. They went from being concerned with peace, love and the planet to stocks, bonds and conspicuous consumption. Gen X is now in its 40s and 50s and its fair to say that we've moved from being the outsiders to creating technological and political machines that are generating the type of conformity that we once railed against.

Now that Xers are at the age where we get to run the world for a few decades, its time to recommit to the core values that make us well us. The great news is that as Gen Xers, itll be easy to get back to our roots because we were raised to ironically love the past.

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Five Gen X values from the 90s that can save todays world - Upworthy