Ping Pong Playa (DVD)
APPROX. 96 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2007 - MPA RATING: PG-13
" Though not as outlandish as the recent Balls of Fury, Ping Pong Playa can be equally outrageous.
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I remember Jessica Yu winning an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject. I was still in high school, and the morning after the Oscars, my Chinese American friends and I all talked about how excited we were to see a Chinese winner in the sea of white. Yu obviously had a sense of humor as she joked about how her dress cost her more money than her movie´s budget. What my friends and I didn´t understand at the time was how complex racial issues are. On the one hand, it really was nice having an Asian American woman win an Oscar. On the other hand, Yu won in a category that most people don´t even know exists. Ang Lee is the first Asian to win Best Director, but he won for a very American movie with an all-white cast (Brokeback Mountain).
That was back during the mid-1990s. Since her Oscar win, Jessica Yu has been working steadily on other shorts and even narrative-fiction features. Her latest effort is Ping Pong Playa, a comedy about a 25-year-old deadbeat who has to help his family when his older brother and their mother are injured in a car accident. Instead of playing basketball against kids in elementary school or videogames in his room, Christopher "C-dub" Wang (Jimmy Tsai, who also co-wrote the script) has to substitute as a ping-pong instructor for his mother. Eventually, C-dub is motivated enough to enter a ping-pong tournament, which his brother usually does every year in order to boost their parents´ business at their ping-pong shop.
The movie has the usual sports-movie tropes, such as inspirational training montages, come-from-behind victories, and moments of self-doubt. There´s also a love interest, though the movie makes fun of this convention by having the hero participate in a parade while sitting next to Miss Chinatown in a convertible. C-dub´s love interest throws a Cinnabon at his face to express her displeasure.
Though not as outlandish as the recent Balls of Fury, Ping Pong Playa can be equally outrageous. C-dub dresses, talks, and behaves like a wannabe gangsta, and when he´s not busy whining about racism, he´s busy spewing racism. The "villain" is an obsessed white man who sneers his way through the tournament, and he´s accompanied by a "yes" man who totes tea and offers hugs when the "villain" is down.
