Ping Pong Playa

[GeneChing]

Looks far better than Balls of Fury. From Jessica Yu, an Academy Award winning filmmaker and wife of Mark Salzman.

Ping Pong Playa trailer

[doug maverick]

heard the movie was based of this hillarious commercial for venom sportswear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4yHEIoD8HU

[GeneChing]

Yu and Tsai are appearing at some local screenings - one went down in S.F. already, another in San Jose I think, that may be tonight. But I'm practice bound tonight. I just got back from vacation and haven't been at practice in a week. Priorities...

'Ping Pong Playa': Jessica Yu's new comedy
G. Allen Johnson
Thursday, September 4, 2008

There's a saying in sports: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

In Jessica Yu's comedy "Ping Pong Playa," C-Dub, who wants to be the first Chinese American player in the NBA (he practices by dunking on little kids on the playground, part of his master plan of refusing to grow up), has suddenly been called on to defend his family's honor at a pingpong tournament.

C-Dub is played by Jimmy Tsai, who hadn't acted professionally before starring in this film. He's a production accountant at Cherry Sky Films, an independent production company in Los Angeles. He created the character of C-Dub as a joke, featuring the wannabe rapper on a spoofy Web site for a company that sells athletic apparel for the committed Asian American athlete ( www.venomsportswear.com).

"Well, I've never been a wallflower," Tsai said, laughing, over a recent lunch at a Thai place near AT&T Park.

Making "Ping Pong Playa" was basically a lark for all involved. Tsai, who is from Houston and went to UC Berkeley, collaborated on the script with Yu, an Academy Award-winning documentarian from Palo Alto who once was on the U.S. national fencing team.

The idea was to make a family comedy poking fun at cultural stereotypes yet showing that it's possible to find one's individual identity without rejecting family heritage. Tsai had to learn how to play pingpong, enlisting the help of husband-and-wife table tennis champions Diego Schaaf and Wei Wang, who won a bronze medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

"I trained for six months, playing every day at least an hour, sometimes six or seven hours," Tsai said. "Surprisingly, in the first month I lost like 15 pounds - it's serious."

As fun-loving as Tsai appears, he's not much like C-Dub. He majored in business at UC Berkeley, immersed himself in a less-glamorous side of the film industry and now, at age 30, he's married (to a dentist) and has just signed with a literary manager, a sign that he's committed to writing and producing, as opposed to acting.

OK, maybe he has one or two C-Dubesque urges.

"I love action movies, especially '80s action movies," Tsai said. "Like, half of my top 10 are John Woo movies."

Ping Pong Playa: Comedy. Starring Jimmy Tsai, Roger Fan and Khary Payton. Co-written and directed by Jessica Yu. (Rated PG-13. 96 minutes. At the Metreon and the Shattuck in Berkeley.)

"China produced four great inventions: paper, the compass, gunpowder and the printing press," Christopher's father tells him. "But people forget about the fifth great invention: pingpong!"

After two weeks of televised table tennis at the Beijing Olympics, that last part might be out of date. No matter: It doesn't sit well with Chris, the endearing title character of "Ping Pong Playa," who calls himself C-Dub, wants to rap, has frustrated dreams of making the NBA and takes out those frustrations by dunking on 10-year-olds on suburban L.A. playground courts.

Pingpong may be the family business - C-Dub's parents own an instructional school and his brother regularly wins local tournaments - but the sport is too old-school Chinese for C-Dub's taste. It also gets in the way of playing video games and reading comic books all day. But C-Dub is forced to take over as lead instructor at the school and defend the family honor in a tournament when his mother and brother are injured in a car accident.

To say that Jessica Yu's first fiction feature is a departure is an understatement. Yu, a Palo Alto native who makes documentaries, won the Oscar for the made-in-Berkeley short "Breathing Lessons" and also directed "In the Realms of the Unreal."

C-Dub is the creation of Jimmy Tsai, a production accountant for Cherry Sky Films, which produced "Ping Pong Playa." He introduced the character on a Web site ( www.venomsportswear.com) that supposedly hawks athletic apparel. The sometimes hilarious character caught Yu's eye, and she and Tsai co-wrote the script.

The result is a mostly amusing, appealing family comedy about going from pretender to contender, in life as well as pingpong.

There are kids - C-Dub's "disciples," who are eternally grateful to their master for saving them from a life of calligraphy lessons and SAT studying; there's a girl (Smith Cho), the older sister of a disciple who provides sarcastic incentive for the suppression of C-Dub's inner child; there's a best friend, JP Money (Khary Payton), a black man who wishes he was Chinese; there's an older brother, the successful member of the family; and a showdown with a villain (Peter Paige) at the big tournament.

In short, there's a formula that is honored, which at times threatens the goodwill built up by the likable characters. Its predictability hints that Yu, like C-Dub, is dunking over kids on the playground instead of playing with the big boys, but that's OK.

The movie works because of Tsai's fun performance - this from someone who has never acted. He neatly avoids the over-the-top obnoxiousness that has sunk many a Will Ferrell sports comedy.

[MasterKiller]

This movie was actually funny.