Finishing the Game [of Death]

[yutyeesam]

http://www.youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily.com/

I saw it last week - pretty funny, especially if you're a Bruce Lee fan. Directed by Justin Lin, who made Better Luck Tomorrow.

[doug maverick]

justin lin redeemed himself with this film. cause all his of stuff was sub par after better luck

[GeneChing]

A Recipe for Success
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: September 30, 2007

BY 1 a.m., the Korean barbecue beef had been consumed, and the table was littered with kimchi-stained wooden chopsticks and empty bottles of OB beer.

The film director Justin Lin slouched casually against the wall of Kang Suh restaurant in Manhattan’s Koreatown and revealed his home remedy for staving off colds to a fellow filmmaker, Karin Chien. “Fish and chips and vinegar,” he said. “You have to really soak it, like use a half-bottle of vinegar.”

Ms. Chien, beset by a week-old cold and carrying a grocery bag of ginger, barley, honey and lemon, looked skeptical. But Mr. Lin swore by it. “Batter, oil and vinegar really cleanse you,” he said. “I eat it every time I feel like I’m getting sick.”

Mr. Lin, who directed “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” is a connoisseur of fried seafood. His parents had been running a fish and chips shop since they were lured into buying the store in Orange County, Calif., on their way between Taiwan and Paraguay when Mr. Lin was 8.

They retired in the last year, after Mr. Lin received a handsome check from “Tokyo Drift,” his first big-budget Hollywood movie since arriving on the scene with the self-financed “Better Luck Tomorrow” in 2002.

Now, said Mr. Lin, who lives in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, “I can be creative without worrying about how I am going to pay my rent.”

With a movie that grossed $158 million under his belt, Mr. Lin is using the windfall to take an 18-month break from the Hollywood swirl, mainly to work on his quirky low-budget film “Finishing the Game,” which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is opening in New York on Friday.

Made for $500,000 (as much as “Tokyo Drift” could cost before lunch on a single day, Mr. Lin pointed out), “Finishing the Game” is a retro-mockumentary that chronicles the search to find Bruce Lee’s body double after the superstar died in the middle of shooting a film.

Mr. Lin prefers to talk about his working-class roots. He reminisces fondly about his mullet from his teenage years (“Business up front, party in the back,” he said. “There is something to that.”)

He is 35, but at 5-foot-4 and with smooth skin and casual attire of T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, he looks barely old enough to drink — which he knows gives studio executives pause. “They look you up and down,” he said, “and think ‘Can I trust this guy with $100 million budget?’”

The Tuesday-night dinner was part of a nine-month cross-country tour by Mr. Lin and two stars of “Finishing the Game” — Roger Fan (a Brown University graduate who switched from finance to acting) and Sung Kang (who has a stand-up comedian’s wit and a gangster’s demeanor). The three have put their mainstream careers on hiatus to discuss Asian-Americans and film with anyone who will join them.

Earlier stops that evening had included a showing of a student documentary about Mr. Lin’s mockumentary at Hunter College and a Q. and A. session at the Asian American Film Lab.

Dinner dissolved into bar-hopping on Koreatown’s dense neon strip along 32nd Street. At 3:30 a.m., after the third last call in the third bar, Mr. Lin was offered a ride home. He declined: “No, man. I like to walk.” And he sauntered down the street, away from the lights.

Finishing the Game was the centerpiece flick for the last S.F. Asian Film Fest, but I missed it due to prior engagements. Looking forward to the new staggered national release...

[GeneChing]

See our latest e-ziner SAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL: The See-World of Festivals by Dr. Craig Reid

[yutyeesam]

Nice! I highly recommend it...not much martial arts action, but pretty funny! And, it's one of those few movies ma related to bring your spouse/significant other to without them getting bored or annoyed!

-123

[GeneChing]

I was hoping to make the premiere, but now it looks like I've got too tight of a schedule for it.

DIRECTOR JUSTIN LIN AT TOP OF HIS 'GAME'
G. ALLEN JOHNSON
Sunday, October 14, 2007

America can be a lonely place for a 12-year-old kid recently arrived from Taiwan, his family struggling to make it with a small fish-and-chips shop in Anaheim.

Justin Lin looked for heroes wherever he could at that age in the mid-1980s: Los Angeles Lakers Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actor Bruce Lee.

"I grew up peeling shrimp and making tartar sauce," Lin says. "We came over when I was 8 from Taiwan. That was my life: going to school, working at the restaurant, playing basketball. Even though Anaheim is just 40 minutes away (from Los Angeles), it's like a whole different world."

One afternoon, Lin watched a VHS tape of Lee's "Game of Death" (memorably co-starring Abdul-Jabbar), a film released five years after the martial-arts star's death and completed with the use of a double - a la Bela Lugosi in "Plan 9 From Outer Space" - because Lee had completed just a small percentage of the filming. Most of the movie is structured around a guy with big sunglasses (and sometimes a fake beard) knocking off members of a criminal organization.

"I didn't know anything about body doubles. I was a 12-year-old, Lin says. "I was watching it, and obviously that's not Bruce Lee, but why is he in this movie for 70 minutes playing him? ... Because of the lack of information, there was always this play in my head, and the one thing that always intrigued me was, 'Who was that guy, and how did he get the job?' "

That question became the basis for Lin's new film, "Finishing the Game," his first independent movie since the groundbreaking "Better Luck Tomorrow" in 2002. It's a delirious mockumentary-fantasy about actors auditioning for the role of Lee's double after producers decide to complete the film despite Lee's death.

But it's more than scratching the itch of a childhood idea. The movie is also a return to Lin's indie roots after becoming successful as a Hollywood studio director ("Annapolis," "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift"), a kind of a victory lap for a guy who has made it. While savaging and celebrating Hollywood at the same time, it has the grit, passion and individuality that Lin loves about independent filmmaking.

"Finishing the Game," which stars Sung Kang, Dustin Nguyen, Roger Fan and James Franco, among others, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and opened the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March, when much of Lin's interview with The Chronicle took place. Recently, by telephone, Lin said he had spent the summer traveling the film-festival circuit in the United States and abroad, and having a blast.

"The whole point of making independent films is to go out on the road and meet the people seeing your film," Lin says. "I've spent much of the past year going from town to town, to whoever will have us."

The screening at the San Francisco Asian festival was significant, coming 10 years after Lin premiered his first feature, "Shopping for Fangs" (co-directed with Quentin Lee), at the same festival. That led to "Better Luck Tomorrow," a controversial film about overachieving Asian American high school students involved in crime (famously defended from the PC police by film critic Roger Ebert at Sundance), which was bought by MTV Films and released nationally. Then came his studio work.

For Disney, Lin made "Annapolis," a tale of a shipyard worker and amateur boxer (Franco) who dreams of attending the naval academy. The fact that the film did not have an Asian theme was a career breakthrough.

"When I read that script, I could relate to the journey of that guy," Lin says. "He was a working-class kid, and he's being defined by the shipyard, and across the river he sees the academy. He thinks if he can get in there, all his problems could be solved. Then when he gets there, he feels like he's being defined by that environment, and he realizes he can't let the environment define who he is."

While Lin stresses that working on "Annapolis" was a positive experience, he quickly found out how much he needed to learn about working for a big studio.

"There are a lot of - not guidelines, but a lot of points that are there to protect the brand," he says.

After trying to fight against some of those "points" to improve his movie, he discovered that they are usually "nonnegotiable because you're trying to go against the brand," Lin says. "But that's the reality of a studio movie. I didn't know that. I thought I was hired to make the best movie possible.

"I wanted to be creative without worrying about how I'm going to pay the rent next month. I had gone through 10 years of eating oatmeal and making documentaries and trying to survive and, even with independent films, it wears on you."

"The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," in which Lin succeeded John Singleton ("2 Fast 2 Furious") in the popular street-racing series, is Asian themed, but Lin at first turned down the job because he felt the studio, Universal, was stuck in a 1950s view of Japan.

"Personally, I felt it was very offensive, very dated," Lin says. "Why were there temples and kimonos and stuff in Tokyo, a very postmodern city? They're ahead of us, visually. Why don't we explore that? They said, 'Oh, that's what we want. Let's do that. Do what you want. Give it your sensibility.' And, to their credit, they gave me that. It was just tons of rewriting."

Lee, who has not worked with Lin since "Shopping for Fangs" but has remained a close friend, said in an e-mail from Hong Kong that he is proud of the fact that Lin has neither abandoned his indie roots nor allowed Hollywood to eat him alive.

"He can make both big movies and also make smaller passion projects without a doubt," Lee wrote. "I'm sure he'll do both. Why not?"

That word - passion - sums up Lin. He has eight projects in development, including a remake of the Korean film "Oldboy," and is close to signing a deal to direct a big-budget action picture scheduled for a 2009 summer release. Most of his projects, though, are independent films.

"It was out of necessity that I took out 10 credit cards and went into six-figure debt," Lin says of making "Better Luck Tomorrow." "I don't recommend that. But it was something I had to do. It taught me that money is a part of making independent movies, but not what drives it. The currency that drives it is passion. Because when you're passionate, people want to help you and be a part of that process. The struggle in the studio world is to find that passion, because it's being co-opted and becomes a business. The currency truly is money that runs it.

"I learned (passion) from sports. I loved basketball and grew up with the Lakers and Magic Johnson. That was a big part of me. It's a privilege to go and have fun and do what you're passionate about for a living. I'm always learning, always trying to get better. (Filmmaking) is like sports: You're always working on your game."

FINISHING THE GAME (not rated) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.

[GeneChing]

Check out FINISHING THE GAME: It is Never Over by Dr. Craig Reid, exclusively on our ezine.

[GeneChing]

The official Finishing the Game MUsic Video.

[GeneChing]

...I finally caught this on Blockbuster exclusive DVD.

It was funny. It would make a good double-bill with Foot Fist Way.

[冠木侍]

justin lin redeemed himself with this film. cause all his of stuff was sub par after better luck

It's all a matter of opinion brother.