I watched this really awesome movie called Boogie last night. It is about this Chinese American young man named Alfred “Boogie” Chin, a basketball player born and raised in Queens, New York. The movie was released in 2021 and I had watched the trailer a couple of years ago, and was so interested because the acting looked really good. And to be perfectly honest, another reason I watched it was because I hadn’t seen a lot of Asian American stories represented on screen in a long time. I watched the movie Crazy Rich Asians a long time ago, which is about an Asian American young woman named Rachel who travels with her boyfriend, Nick, to his best friend’s wedding in Singapore and finds out that his family is extremely affluent and that Nick is extremely famous. Rachel has to deal with jealous mean girls who want nothing more than to make her feel ashamed for being born lower middle-class and not growing up with family money like Nick did, but her friend, played by the Korean Chinese actress and rapper Awkwafina, is super down-to-earth and helps Rachel shrug off the haters and develop confidence in her beauty and herself. I absolutely loved Constance Wu in this movie. I remember she was in a show called Fresh Off the Boat, which isn’t on anymore, but I haven’t watched it yet. I usually watch a lot of movies with white people and Black people in them, but I really want to watch more movies that are directed by other communities of color, namely the Indigenous, Latinx and Asian American communities. I really loved Crazy Rich Asians, as well as the novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan, but I want to also expand my watch library, too, to watch other movies with diverse representation like Crazy Rich Asians.
I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once with my parents, but I guess I was so tripped up by all of the crazy scenarios in the movie that I failed to appreciate how awesome this movie actually was and that, like all movies, it had a plot and a story. In fact, my dad watched it more than once and he was able to understand the plot, the characters, everything, so the first time my mom and I watched it we were so confused as to what was happening in the different universes, and my dad broke everything down and explained it all. I also don’t watch a ton of science fiction or fantasy movies (except for the Harry Potter movie series and Arrival), so I wasn’t able to turn off my logical analytical brain and just appreciate seeing Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu’s characters go through all these different universes and how their mother-daughter relationship evolved over the course of the film. Maybe if I read up more on multiverse theory I could have grasped it better, but maybe I also just need to watch it again at some point.
Anyway, back to the movie Boogie. First of all, I really loved the acting! At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to watch the movie because Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 41%. But honestly, I loved the actress Taylour Paige in the movies Zola and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, so I really wanted to see her in Boogie. I also don’t see a ton of movies with romantic relationships between African American women and Asian American men, except for the movie The Sun is Also a Star, which is adapted from the novel of the same name by Nicola Yoon and is about a Jamaican young woman named Natasha Kingsley and an Asian American young man named Daniel Bae who fall in love in New York City and whose love is tested when Natasha’s family is about to be deported. It was a very moving film, and I also really loved the book. In the movie Boogie, Boogie meets this Black girl in his high school English class named Eleanor, and he finds her attractive and is with his friend checking her out at the gym, but Eleanor thinks he is weird and isn’t attracted to him at first. However, as they get to know each other, Eleanor falls in love with him, and she and Boogie become girlfriend and boyfriend. However, there is a basketball player on the opposing team named Monk (played by the late rapper Pop Smoke) who is Boogie’s rival and constantly calls him anti-Asian slurs like “egg roll” and “wonton soup.” He also tells Boogie that Eleanor was his ex-girlfriend, which Boogie didn’t know. Boogie at first stops responding to Eleanor’s texts when he finds this out, and at first, I thought this was going to crush him and make him stop playing basketball. But Boogie’s determination is so strong, and also because his uncle believed in him and encouraged him to go after his dream of playing in the NBA, especially because if accomplished that dream, he could potentially inspire other young Asian American men who wanted to play NBA basketball but felt that no one would want to hire them because of this stereotype that Asian men can’t play basketball. He also forgives Eleanor after they talk it out, and they rekindle their relationship.
I have a crush on this friend of mine, who is of South Asian descent and is from Queens, New York, so as I watched this movie, I got quite a few butterflies because I think about all the times that we gazed at each other from across the room and giggled shyly at each other during conversations. He found someone else, so we never got together, but I can still appreciate those past memories of us having those subtle little moments of flirtation. I don’t know how he felt about me or whether he was interested in dating me, but it doesn’t matter now because my love for this person goes beyond just romantic love, and honestly, I just want this guy to be happy and fulfilled whether or not we were to end up in a relationship or not.
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