1.29.2007

Check into Kang's Motel (18: Unedited)

Dodging the restrictive stereotype of Asian-American cinema is a difficult task for modern day filmmakers, especially in comedy. If the film isn’t martial arts based, then it usually focuses heavily on the difficulty of living in the U.S. through the scope of a character’s Asian ethnicity. The Motel, written and directed by Michael Kang, operates on the uneasy deadpan humor that made Napoleon Dynamite famous, but in a more genuine and less annoying way.

In The Motel, Ernest Chin is a semi-autobiographical 13-year-old character based on Kang. Ernest and his small nuclear family (a younger sister, his mother and grandfather) are English-speaking Chinese that own and operate a small hourly motel.

Ernest is an awkward adolescent going through the torturous and immediately identifiable period of puberty, and the changes he faces and endures are the heart of this story. His Chinese heritage has almost nothing to do with the plot, other than the two lines spoken in Chinese and the taunts he receives from an older bully.

The world of The Motel is a small and slow moving universe in which Ernest comes home from school and cleans up the rooms after the three-hour rentals. He’s bored, as most teenagers would be, and inattentively listens to the scolding of his bat-wielding mother with rolled eyes and a “whatever.” When Sam, a young and successful businessman, rolls through the motel drunk and with a woman under his arm, Ernest cautiously attaches himself to the wild, but cool 20-something.

After late nights of hanging out and sharing found chicken legs, Sam shows himself to be a sad and confused husband, either abandoned by or fleeing his wife.

With that realization, the audience begins to catch glimpses of everyone’s insecurities and how they try to deal with them. Ernest’s older love interest, Christine, smokes and drinks to be cool, and repeatedly shoots Ernest down when he finally musters up the courage to make a move on her from Sam’s advice. His mother, afraid of the feeling of abandonment already made familiar by Ernest’s father, tries to keep him on a short leash and discourages his contest-winning short stories with an emphasis for hard work. Even a bully, the son of a poor long-term room renter, expresses his insecurity by attacking Ernest and making him kiss his sister.

Although the characters and their situations are sad and humiliating, the film is hilariously written and acted. The subversive and situational humor of Ernest’s little sister asking why customers are so loud during their naps, while watching the infamously violent “Happy Tree Friends,” is trumped only by Ernest’s discovery of pornography and Christine telling him to “get your boner out of my face.”

The humor is very similar to Me and You and Everyone We Know, and most of the laughs come from your own discomfort. The dialogue between Ernest and the bully’s sister is as memorable as the “back and forth, forever” scene in Me and You, and the same naïve sense of maturity lends itself to heavy and embarrassing ridicule.

Ernest and Sam’s time together apexes when pair screams, “We want to be happy” at the top of their lungs, and the movie changes gears for the upsetting fight and self-realizations between them about themselves and each other.

The disc’s special features are great, the funniest of which is a half-hour behind the scenes documentary called, “The Making of The Motel.” In it, cast and crew members break down the casting process and their excitement over the professionalism of working with child actors. There are also a few bizarre tidbits about a fire breaking out and their dependence on power generators. The extras also include the original theatrical trailer and four “Director’s Picks” with outtakes and commentary.

Unfortunately, this independent film missed Houston’s theaters, but PALM’s DVD release offers the opportunity to relate the pains of adolescence most of us try to forget, without suffering the stereotypes of Asian-American cinema.

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