Saturday School Podcast

For all you overachievers out there, Saturday School hosted an AP Honors discussion group with 5 people who have seen Crazy Rich Asians in theaters 5 TIMES *OR MORE.* The #CRA5timersclub. Like the SNL 5-timers club, but more Asian. Spoilers galore. And full disclosure, Ada's only seen it 3 times, so she's both hosting and crashing the party. Brian has only seen it once, so he was not invited. If y...

It's the last episode of Saturday School Season 4, our exploration of Asian American troublemakers in film, and we don't want to say we saved the "best" for last, but we definitely saved the most badass for last. This week, we're talking about 1965's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" by Russ Meyer, starring Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams. It's a cult hit among certain circles: admirers include...

For Episode 9 of our season on Asian American Troublemakers, we revisit Jiyoung Lee's Female Pervert -- a film that we put at the top of our Asia Pacific Arts 2015 Best Asian American Films list, when 2015 was actually a really impressive year for Asian American film with lots of stellar movies that didn't, like, get one-star reviews calling it "more creepy than quirky" and a "ponderous laugh-free...

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we're going back to 1993 to revisit Jon Moritsugu's Terminal USA, his over-the-top, grotesque, drug-filled take on a Japanese American sitcom family. Moritsugu plays dual roles: twins Katsumi, a punk drug dealer, and Marvin, the repressed model minority. Their sister Holly is not as pure as the all-American cheerleader vibe she gives off, the father has s...

Episode 7 of our season on Troublemakers, and we're looking at the 1997 Rea Tajiri film, Strawberry Fields, which was part of the Class of 1997 "Asian American New Wave," featuring debut works of directors like Justin Lin, Quentin Lee, Eric Nakamura, Michael Aki, Chris Chan Lee, and Rea (the only woman of the group). Strawberry Fields features a firecracker performance by a young Suzy Nakamura, wh...

Skipped school last week, but we're back - and this week's episode is about Harry Kim's 2008 documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. Artist David Choe is kind of the ultimate Asian American troublemaker in ways that are both empowering and problematic. He exists in the often breathtaking intersection of beauty, insanity, genius, violence, machismo, perseverance, addiction, vulga...

We probably had a little too much fun with our latest episode of Saturday School as we continue to explore Asian American "troublemakers" in film. We look back at professor/filmmaker Nguyen Tan Hoang's experimental videos from the '90s and early 2000s, where he "pirates" Hollywood film, Vietnamese karaoke videos, and gay pornography and then appropriates them into his personal anecdotes about bein...

Bonus episode of Saturday School this week, as we speak with director Bing Liu and producer Diane Quon about their Sundance Award-winning documentary Minding the Gap. In the film, Bing Liu documents the stories of a couple of his skateboarding friends from Rockford, Illinois, and they bond over their volatile relationships with their fathers. We talk about Bing's route into filmmaking through his...

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're looking at Ravi Kapoor's 2015 film "Miss India America," a pageant comedy that we're arguing is the closest thing Asian America has to a heist film. But instead of stealing money, she's stealing the crown. We also wish there were more Asian American heist films, because Asian Americans are really good at cheating, whether it be in gambling (for exa...

For Episode 3 of our season on troublemakers, we quickly review the history of Asian American male gangster films, before focusing on a pair of Byron Q-directed films that made us think of gangster films in a whole new way. Bang Bang is a coming-of-age film starring Thai Ngo and David Huynh that is unique because the cast is made up of a combination of actors and gangsters and it also addresses th...

Part of the reason we thought it'd be fun to do Season 4 of Saturday School on Troublemakers was to highlight some of the bad girls/bad boys of Asian American film, but another reason was to remind ourselves that the Asian American movement itself was born out of a desire to create trouble. So for episode 2, we go back almost 40 years to Curtis Choy's 1976 film essay "Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Gran...

We're back! Season 4 of Saturday School, we explore Troublemakers in Asian American Film History, inspired by film scholar's Eve Oishi's reference to "bad Asians," aka "badass Asians," in media. We're looking at a spectrum of "trouble," from renegade filmmakers that are combating the model minority myth to avante garde artists that are happily incompatible with anything considered mainstream. We b...

This episode, with special guest Lee Ann Kim, was recorded live at the 2017 San Diego Asian Film Festival. Coming off our season on Asian American Music Movies, we talk about animated musicals like Mulan, Moana, and Ni Hao Kai Lan, before moving into Asian American children's programming in general. Plus, a discussion about how we talk to our kids about what it is to be Asian American and how Asia...

Our last episode of our season about Asian American music movies brings us full circle - from episode 1's "Cruisin' J-Town," produced by Visual Communications, co-founded by Robert Nakamura, to this week's episode about the 2009 documentary "A Song For Ourselves," by Robert's son Tad Nakamura, about the political life and music of the late Chris Iijima. We reflect on how the Asian American movemen...

This week's episode is about Roddy Bogawa's autobiographical documentary "I Was Born, But..." which takes us on a journey from his childhood in Hawaii, to his involvement in the punk rock scene in the '70s, to his time as a filmmaker the early 2000s, when this was made. Unfortunately, the film is unavailable on DVD or streaming, so in our attempt to convey the spirit of his work to our listeners w...

What started off as us planning to rattle off our favorite music videos turned into an epic history of the Asian American music video form, with much-needed help from our Potluck Podcast braintrust. Impress your friends with your knowledge of Asian American music video, from pre- and early-YouTube to today, with these audio Cliff Notes. We break down the history, from the inspired to the embarrass...

We're doing something a little different for this week's episode: it'll be a two-part exploration of Asian American music videos. Next week, Brian and Ada will be picking a few of their favorite music videos to share with everyone -- so this week, we talk about what technically makes something an "Asian American music video." Asian American musicians? Asian American music video directors? Asian Am...

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we revisit the 2006 documentary The Heavenly Kings, by Daniel Wu, about the time the Into the Badlands star was in a Hong Kong boy band with his friends. Sort of. We might have a little too much fun with this episode.

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we talk about Kumu Hina, a 2014 documentary about Hina Wong-Kalu, a hula teacher at an elementary school in Hawaii that aims to preserve the indigenous culture to the younger generations. Kumu Hina, who identifies as a mahu, someone in the middle of male and female, has the opportunity to mentor six-grader Ho'Onani, who also considers herself to be in the...

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we revisit the 2010 feature film The Taqwacores, which follows a group of characters living together in Buffalo, New York who are part of the Islamic punk scene. We laugh about how in Hollywood movies, the "outsider" character who introduces the audience to a fascinating minority subculture is usually a white guy, but in The Taqwacores, it's an innocent f...

This week's episode looks at two documentaries about performers in the San Francisco Chinatown nightclub scene in the '30s and '40s: Arthur Dong's 1989 documentary "Forbidden City USA," about the nation’s premiere all-Chinese nightclub Forbidden City, and Christine Choy's "Long Story Short," the story of Larry and Trudy Leung (Jodi Long's parents). Ada and Brian think about how the stereotypes and...

This episode is a straight-up lovefest, as Ada and Brian invite Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza to talk about their first film, 2006's Colma: The Musical. This is Ada's third time interviewing them about the same movie, yet she learns so many new things. Richard and H.P. talk West Side Story homages in Colma and try their best not to bash La La Land, but can't help themselves. H.P. talks about watch...

We have a very unique musical for Episode 2 of our 3rd season about Asian American Music Movies. It's a 2001 turntablism musical, based on an album by legendary turntablist DJ QBert. Brian reminisces about growing up in the '90s in Cerritos, where there was a prominent Filipino American DJ scene, while Ada admits she was not cool enough to know anything about the Bay Area hip hop scene, despite gr...

We're back! Season 3 of Saturday School will be about Asian American music movies. There weren't enough Asian American musicals to make an entire season about "musicals," but expanding it to "music movies" allows us to include concert movies, films about musicians, and stories that include music in interesting ways. 10 episodes, every Saturday starting today. We bring you Episode 1, recorded from...

This bonus episode of Saturday School -- recorded at the Potluck Podcast Collective Lounge at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival with special guest Oliver Wang -- is the equivalent of summer cram session: while class is usually a swift 10-min affair, this time around, you get a packed 40-min conversation that goes all the way from 1960 to today. We talk about the delight of seeing Asian American m...