“‘What’s he saying?’ Donald Duk’s pal Arnold Azalea asks in a whisper.
‘Same thing as everybody- Chinese are artsy, cutesy and chickendick.’ Donald whispers back.”
The first thing I’d like to say about the film was that I thought it was a nice film. I didn’t like the lead guy all that much, he alternated between about 3 facial expressions and had okay delivery at best, but I liked everybody else. Camerawork was pretty good, script/dialogue were pretty good. Plot progression seemed a little whacky, but it worked. 8/10
There’s definitely some truth to the whole Asians in school stereotype. I think my sister made fun of some guy once, for being Asian and also in a lower-level math class. Generally speaking, most of the Asian people I’ve known throughout grade school have always either been excelling or at least competent when it came to math, and always with pretty good grades. Ignoring delinquents such as myself, of course. Heh.
I’d like to talk a little more about the high achiever thing though. I used to hang around those types of people because everyone else didn’t care about school or learning. What I eventually found out was that they were just gaming the system. That’s what the main cast does in the movie: game the system. Some of them are better at it than others, and realize that it’s a game where they are in a winning position and have always been in a winning position and know how to stay in a winning position. I don’t want to call it a power trip; rather, I’d say they were looking for some way to break the system without breaking the system. I believe Steve referred to it as ‘breaking the cycle,’ but I personally wouldn’t call it a cycle.
“Why did you write that paper about me?” Ben asks Daric outside the hospital room where Virgil is sleeping with a bullet hole in his head somewhere. Because that may have been where it all started, with that paper Daric wrote about Ben. Daric was trying to break the system that Ben had set up around himself to play the game the world had set up for him, using a paper that invoked Ben’s race.