Tag: Los Angeles

Conventions, Gaming, Video Games

A Washed Up Gamer Goes to E3

There were more than 68,000 total attendees at E3 this week, and I’m almost certain all of them have been gaming more than I have in the past five years. I’m retired. Too many consecutive days of realizing I’d played through the night until dawn had me putting the sticks down. Not to mention, I just can’t keep up with these kids. I’m washed.

Yet here I got the fortunate opportunity to cover E3 for NOC in the conference’s first year open to the public. I had to do this, for the culture, for the kid inside who never finished Mario 2, and for the same kid that reached the end of Streets of Rage and chose to kill my brother to take over the gang.

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Art, Music

Getting Geeky With The Hollywood Fringe Festival

For those living in the Los Angeles area, the Hollywood Fringe Festival is upon you. Perhaps you might have seen their flags flown throughout the city or perhaps you might have heard whispers of it from your actor friends yapping away about which fringe play to watch. And you go, “What the heck IS the Hollywood Fringe Festival?”

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Movies

Our Picks For The 2017 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival

 

The Annual Gather-up of Los Angeles Asians in Entertainment is upon us.

I mean, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

Starting tomorrow, from April 27 to May 4, the LAAPFF will showcase a week of films from the opening of Better Luck Tomorrow for its 15th anniversary, the centerpiece Gook starring Justin Chon, the closing film Columbus with John Cho as the romantic lead, and a whole slew of shorts and features in between.

To be exact, there are 45 features and 139 shorts to choose from. Here are the few select ones that have caught my attention as Josephine Chang and I will cover the festival:

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Interview, Movies

One-on-One with “Oscars Tourist” Yulree Chun

When Yulree Chun stepped off Starline’s tour bus on Sunday, she didn’t expect herself to be in the center of attention at Hollywood’s biggest night — The Oscars. She and her husband, Patrick Tio, who recently returned from their honeymoon, were just planning on enjoying a nice day walking around Hollywood before they were asked by Starline “employees” to try out their new tour for free.

Chun and the other unexpecting tourists were told they would be viewing a special Oscars fashion exhibit but found themselves in front of the Dolby Theater among Hollywood’s elite.

While Chun and Tio were mingling with the celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Ryan Gosling, host Jimmy Kimmel called on Chun and asked for her name. Chun told him, “My name’s Yulree. Rhymes with jewelry.” This followed an exchange that would cause a bit of controversy on Twitter. Chun remained cool as she was too starstruck to think anything of it.

We got to chat with Yulree Chun about the event and how she’s now happy that everyone is able to pronounce her name correctly.

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DC Comics, Guest Post, Television

Supergirl: An L.A. Story for Today

by AJ Joven

It must have happened when I noticed Kara running in front of a slightly obscured monument that could only have been at Pershing Square. The flat sky scrapers, palm trees, and the technicolor brightness of the world all felt so familiar. An alien, misunderstood and hiding in plain sight, here in DC’s analog of Los Angeles is what makes Supergirl such a watershed moment: it takes this specific angle of the City and wears it unabashedly. As I’ve been playing catch up on the series (sorry… as a Filipino, I’m generally late to everything), I’ve found lots to like about the confident voice in Supergirl. Often steeped in questions of identity, Supergirl’s writers send up the concepts of being a professional woman, a millennial, and, most personal to me, an immigrant with swagger and intent. Seeing National City be so clearly depicted as Los Angeles (seriously, that flat top sky line is unique, y’all) and all of the auxiliary connotations involved in that is not, to my mind a mistake. It is, however, a first.

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Animation, Art, Toys

Hello Kitty, Not Actually a Kitty — Or Asian

In a stunning development, it has been revealed that Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s iconic — and forever mouthless — character is not, and has never been, an actual cat. How is that possible, you ask? Beats me.

The Los Angeles Times broke the news today — in advance of a special exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo — in an interview with noted Hello Kitty scholar Christine R. Yano:

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Comics & Graphic Novels

Genius from Top Cow: An Endorsement

This image does not do the book justice.
This image does not do the book justice.

After reading this book, I was hesitant to review it. It is one of those rare books that transcended the four-color realm and hit me in my real life. I was also unsure if my endorsement of the book was an endorsement of some of the messages in the book. Artist Afua Richardson and co-writers Marc Bernadin and Adam Freeman’s Genius is a book that I am still digesting. First introduced in 2008 by Top Cow via “Pilot Season,” Genius is a book that challenges me in a way that I haven’t felt in a while.

Comics are my escape from a stressful job. I want to read snikt and see folks teleport, and leap off buildings — it is a great way to decompress after days of seeing people in pain. Hell, even the more serious fare can act as 22-page escape pods — escaping into the fantastic from the sad and mundane. But this book read more like a possibility than a fantasy. In light of the killings of Eric Garner, Pearlie “Miss Sully” Golden, and Kathryn Johnston at the hands of the police, Genius is almost prescient. And it is a little foreboding.

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Horror, Movies, Sci Fi

Unidentified: Coming Soon to a Roadtrip Near You…

Last week, the movie Unidentified was screened to a select audience of family and friends in Los Angeles. This movie was a two-years-in-the-making-shoe-string-budget-labor-of-love that began with producer/star Eddie Mui‘s bizarre dreams, then expanded into a full fledged movie when Eddie brought producer/star Parry Shen and writer/director Jason Richard Miller on board.

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Movies, Sci Fi

I Renounce My Elysian Citizenship

Strange. All I remember from Elysium is sand.

Sand without end. Sand that cakes upon people and things, children and toys, mothers and baby bottles. Sand on the productive and listless alike. Desert sand. Sand that obscures hope and defines poverty. The opening scenes of Elysium, director Neill Blomkamp’s recent sci-fi thriller, center the viewer in a ruined Los Angeles, circa 2154, populated by an undifferentiated brown stuff only George Orwell could appreciate. American Marrakech. Quickly, we learn that the only people who live in this God-awful Depression postscript are those without means; an undeveloped protagonist dreams of Elysium, where poverty, war, sickness, and even death have been vanquished by man. Heaven, not on Earth, but above.  The nun who listens with ancient grace cautions the roguish boy. “That place is not for us.”

We’ve heard this refrain before. Know your place.

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