Michaela Ternasky-Holland is named for her father, Michael Anthony Ternasky. It’s one of many connection they share, a connections that was cut short when her father died in a car accident when she was young.
Continue reading “Michaela Ternasky-Holland on Combining Grief and Philippine Mythology in ‘Mahal’”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was unlike any other Spider-Man film we’ve seen before. It was a highly dynamic cinematic experience that used a variety of animation styles and techniques to deliver something wildly psychedelic and separated itself from the rest of its animation studio rivals.
Continue reading “‘Across the Spider-Verse’ Stars Brian Tyree Henry & Luna Lauren Velez on Super Parenting”
New York City/San Francisco/Los Angeles: Mixed Asian Media proudly presents their second annual Mixed Asian Media Fest (MAM Fest) September 14-18.
Continue reading “Mixed Asian Media Fest Returns with Virtual and In-Person Programming”
Southern Fried Asian is back and so is one of our previous guests. Keith welcomes back Greg Pak — whose moving new autobiographical project I Belong to You / Motherland is being turned into a choral performance in Austin — to discuss belonging and loss and share memories of his mother and childhood in Texas.
The road to adulthood is messy, imperfect, and unkind. Media depictions of adolescence tend to rule these realities out, or otherwise forgoes depicting representation of this demographic at all. But the truth is, sanitizing the experience does not hide the mistakes and many questions that will inevitably be made along the way.
Continue reading “‘Inbetween Girl’ Shows How Maturity Sometimes Means Accepting Your Mess”
For this episode of Southern Fried Asian, Keith talks to his friend, the New York Times-bestselling author Jamie Ford, and learning about his southern roots in Arkansas. Consider this Southern-adjacent Fried Asian.
Ashly Burch is proud of her Thai heritage.
Being of Thai descent, Burch has never really gotten the opportunity to play a Thai character, let alone showcase her mixed heritage onscreen until now with Disney Channel’s new animated series, The Ghost and Molly McGee. After Burch was cast as the title character, the creators — Bob Roth and Bill Motz — decided to base Molly and her family on Burch’s own cultural background.
Continue reading “‘The Ghost and Molly McGee’ Star Ashly Burch Celebrates Thai Culture in Her New Series”
Being “white-passing” comes with a certain kind of privilege. One that can mean the difference between a life of discrimination or a life of luxury. Such a privilege is the topic of discussion in Passing, the brand new film based on the book by Nella Larsen, coming to Netflix and select theaters later this year.
Continue reading “Nothing is Black and White in Monochromatic Trailer for ‘Passing’”
Jay Lycurgo is ready to represent mixed kids everywhere as Tim Drake in HBO Max’s Titans.
The 23-year-old British actor, who is himself a fanboy of comic books and pop culture, never saw someone who looked like him on television or in film. Prior to his casting, Lycurgo tweeted about needing more people of color as superheroes because these kids need more role models. After he was cast as Tim Drake, the biracial actor recalled seeing a mixed race kid wearing a Robin suit and feeling proud about it.
Continue reading “‘Titans’ Star Jay Lycurgo on Representing and That Major Moment For Tim Drake”
Mixed Asian Media (MAM), formerly known as Hapa Mag, have announced their inaugural festival to celebrate mixed Asian and Pacific Islanders and their creative art forms — including film, theatre, art, dance, and many more! Partnering with Leviathan Lab and CRUX XR, the virtual celebration will take place on the platform Bizzabo.
Continue reading “Mixed Asian Media Presents First Annual Mixed Asian Media Fest!”
Last month, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore hosted our own Keith Chow in conversation with New York Times bestselling author Kevin Kwan as part of their “Writer’s Live” series. Because they spent a portion of their talk discussing Kevin’s childhood in Texas, we are presenting that conversation in its entirety for Southern Fried Asian!
I once heard the great political philosopher and activist Angela Davis argue that Americans are so obsessed with race as an identifying feature that when we meet racially ambiguous people, we are anxious until we know on which side of the color line they fall. Upon hearing this, I was relieved by the articulation of something I had suspected was at the heart of my experience. It was like experiencing great art, that rush of adrenaline that comes with recognizing what we’ve known all along presented as fantastically new.
Continue reading “The ‘Heights’ of Anxiety and the Color Line: Racial Ambiguity in a Culture of Absolutes”
Hollywood, a new miniseries created and executive produced by Ryan Murphy, will be coming to Netflix this Friday. Audiences will both travel back in time to the 1940s and explore an alternative universe where a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers — who’re female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ — break into the business and dismantle the boundaries against them in the process.
Continue reading “The Lessons Learned and To Be Learned from Darren Criss in ‘Hollywood’”
Last week, a list started circulating online that supposedly contains all the previously released content that will be made available on Disney+ on its November 12 launch date. Of all the titles, the Disney Channel Original series, So Weird, is one of them.
Continue reading “How Disney’s ‘So Weird’ Deepened My Connection to My Filipino Side”
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the films, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Detective Pikachu, and The Sun Is Also a Star.
Although Loving v. Virginia officially abolished all remaining anti-miscegenation laws in the United States in 1967, it really hasn’t been until recently where the portrayals of mixed race characters and interracial couples on the big screen have improved significantly. Within the last six months alone, several films have had either mixed race characters as the leads or interracial relationships as the central focus. An added dimension to some of them is that apart from some of the characters being of the younger generation, the focus wasn’t on their race(s). That didn’t, however, stop these films from acknowledging their backgrounds. While it’s good that films like Aquaman are out there that get really real about being mixed, not all mixed race protagonists need to go on a journey of self discovery to that extent.
Continue reading “Spider-Man, Pokémon, and Star-Crossed Lovers: Mixed Race Characters Take the Lead”
I went to Aquaman for two reasons: First, the ticket was free. Second, this is basically underwater Magic Mike, right? I came for the pecs, I stayed for the pecs. But also for the analysis of what it is to be of two cultures. I mean races. I mean… worlds?
A lot of people of color of my generation who are passionate about diversity and representation in the media tend to point to the media we consumed as children as the reason why — to the absences, omissions, and misrepresentations, and to the token presences we latched onto like lifelines. Today, our childhood experiences are ever-present motivators in our lives as fans, consumers, and creators in our own right, trying to redress past wrongs by ensuring the existence of the mirrors, windows, and doorways we were denied years before.
As a father watching contemporary media aimed at kids, tweens, and teens with my own tween and teen daughters, I’m slowly getting the hopeful feeling that their future will be different — or, if it isn’t, there will be hell to pay. That’s not to say that there isn’t vast room for improvement — we haven’t solved it, not by a long shot — but the energy, the diversity, the mere and sheer presence in the media world with which my children interact and which they take for granted as normal is so far from what we grew up with, and so close to what we wish the media landscape at large looked like, that I can’t help but be a little optimistic.
Continue reading “‘Andi Mack,’ Children’s Television, and a Future in Full Color”
On Hard NOC Media’s We’re Not All Ninjas podcast, Melissa sits down for a one-on-one with hip-hop artist and star of Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians, Awkwafina!
The “Whitelash” theory of Trump’s super-embarrassing slide into the presidency (well, we never claimed the U.S. wasn’t anti-intellectual, did we?) has the still-ascendant, but demographically shrinking and culturally stagnating white/cis-het/male contingent (helped substantially by their female counterparts) striking back at the diversity of Obama’s America by electing a crypto-white-supremacist in response to his racist and xenophobic dog whistles. Although not the only compelling narrative of the last year and a half, Trump’s Whitelash has enough truth to it to make it into at least a Ronald-Takaki-authored history book, if not a textbook from Texas.
Meanwhile, pop culture may be lashing in the opposite direction — and, in fact, contributing to the panic. Whereas the last Academy Awards shows of Obama’s presidency featured a field of winners that rivaled a wedding-dress-clad polar bear fainting on an iceberg for whiteness, it is President Trump’s first Oscars that saw the Academy — now led by a black woman — crowning its first African-American-made Best Picture. The last season of tv was the most diverse in history, and we don’t need numbers or stats to know this. And even the debate around diversity failures points to how far we’ve come, and how aware of the changing nature of American culture the mainstream has become.
So it’s not much of a stretch to see Logan, clearly the end of a franchise, as the gentle, mournful and mourning, Hollywood-sanctioned version of conservative white panic.
After reading Desiree Rodriguez’s essay about Latinx representation and how we assume one’s race based on looks, I was inspired to write my own essay on the assumption of one’s race and biracial representation, while sharing some of my experiences as a black biracial woman.
Before we go any further, I’m African-American, Greek, French, and Scottish. However, I identify as being Black-Greek, black biracial, or half black/half white. I know this is a question I’m going to get, so I had to address it as soon as possible before diving even deeper into these subjects. Please remember that not everyone who is biracial and or a POC have had the same experiences as me; however, I’m simply adding my experiences to the conversation to hopefully give a new perspective.
Okay my fellow NOCs, there are just a few truths we need to acknowledge when it comes to Spider-Man on the big screen. Out of five films, only one of them, Spider-Man 2, was any good. The rest were bloated messes that robbed Spidey of any and all joy. Tobey Maguire was a decent Peter Parker but not the best Spidey. Andrew Garfield was just the opposite. Spider-Man was done an injustice.
Depending on where you stake your claim on the internet, there has been a lot of chatter about a movie that tanked at the box office1 and another one that isn’t due in theaters for at least another year. The thing that links these seemingly disparate films is that both thought casting white women as characters who are written as Asian American and Pacific Islander was a good idea.
Last night, the director of one of those films — Cameron Crowe — finally broke his silence and offered this explanation for why he cast Emma Stone (Amazing Spider-Man) as a character called Allison Ng:
Continue reading “These Actresses are Not Asian or Pacific Islanders”
Two years ago, comics writer and filmmaker (and familiar name to NOC readers) Greg Pak, known for his work on several Hulk and X-Men titles, including the current Storm book, and his current runs on Action Comics, Batman/Superman, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, among others (like Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology), was raising funds on Kickstarter for a graphic novel based on beloved geek culture singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton‘s Code Monkey character. As a reward for meeting a stretch goal, Pak and his collaborators promised an original children’s book based on Coulton’s popular twist on children’s fairytales, “The Princess Who Saved Herself.”
Continue reading “Kickstart This: The Princess Who Saved Herself“
