After a week of writing essays and journal articles (in fairness!), I gave myself a night off yesterday to watch
21.
21 is based on the real life story of an MIT maths whiz who used his genius to win big in Las Vegas blackjack. My friend and I were shocked when we arrived at a fully-packed cinema for a Tuesday late-night screening, especially since most of the undergrads are home for spring break. But then again, it should really be no surprise that the geek-gets-rich-and-Kate-Bosworth storyline plays well in Geektown.
21 is directed by Robert Luketic, the ultimate ditzy geek director. He covered ditzy in
Legally Blonde, his ode to perky sorority girls the world over (My fave quote: "You got in to Harvard Law?" "What? Like it's hard?"). Now he gives geeks their due in
21.
Their casting of little-known Jim Sturgess in the lead role of Ben is perfection. With his scruffy hair, dewy eyes, and too-pale skin, he stands in for that effortlessly cute nerdy classmate you (I?) adored in college. The kind who rarely recites but gets you all excited when he does. Even if it was too profound for you (me?) to take in. :) Anyway, Ben uses his braininess and shyness to good use in the cardgame. Where in reality he's very reserved, at blackjack he's cool, methodical, rational, with probability and variance as his secret powers.
Sigh.
Yeah okay, Kate Bosworth's casting as an MIT rocket science major is a bit of a dubious representation. But me thinking that her role is underwritten actually means that she got me interested to know more about her character. In their geek version of
Ocean's Eleven, she plays the low-profile cardplayer who signals Big Player Ben when a table "gets hot" (i.e., when the big cards are about to be played). The scene where she and Ben get hot together practically drew cheers from the Cambridge crowd. Here's a hero who dreams to build a robot, enter Harvard Med School, and get the sexiest smartest girlfriend in campus. Talk about identity as being and becoming!
And like
Legally Blonde, the moral is staying true to oneself. Needless to say, I loved it.
21 demonstrates that one should never underestimate geek powers. The power to discourse analyze and deconstruct a text. The power of dialectical and integrative thinking. The power to summon quotes at will, complete with author, year, and sometimes even page number. All these will get me somewhere. Yes, I'll keep telling myself that.
3 comments:
any thoughts on the film's so-called racist casting, with white characters instead of asian-americans, as in real life?
Heehee. You representations scholar, you!
Yeah. While the what of representation is definitely enjoyable, the who of representation does raise a red-flag. I do think that Asian-Americans have a long way to go in achieving visibility and voice in Hollywood. That (East) Asians are not bankable leading men is as much a function of the limits that producers/casting agents impose. We need more rounded Asian characters like Lost's Sun and Jin! And we need producers to think in more inclusive terms.
That said, unlike other people, I'm not totally against ethnicity-blind casting per se, i.e., Chinese actors taking over Japanese actors (in Memoirs of a Geisha) or American actors acting British/French/Portuguese/etc. It is acting after all. But with the Asian case, I am just a bit more sensitive because so few representations are made available out there. And so the few that are there or SHOULD be there are all the more constitutive.
hear hear!
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