Bouncing Balls
August 29, 2007 admin 0 Comments
source: http://www.khon2.com/news/local/9411261.html
A fairly lighthearted review of Balls of Fury and other recent projects.
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For those of you out there who specialized in Silly in high school or are doing so now, you might want to head over to the Dole Cannery tonight about 7:30. They’ll be presenting the premier of a comedy called “Balls of Fury”. (General distributions is set for this Wednesday.)
Before your imagination gets the best of you, we wish to immediately add that the “balls” referred to are of the ping- pong variety and nothing more than that. So don’t get any ideas. This is, after all, a family website.
Moloka`i man Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is that kind of actor who everybody recognizes, but many people can’t put a name to. He’s doing a fine job of changing that. This is an actor in possession of skill, conscience and occasional foolishness. The latter attribute is notably demonstrated in “Balls of Fury”, where Tagawa plays the bodyguard, “Mysterious Asian Man” (ooh!), to another fine actor with a silly streak, Christoper Walken, aka “Master Feng” (aah!).
The storyline behind “Balls of Fury” involves a former pro ping-ponger who wants to recapture the glory of his former pinging days and find out who ponged his father.(!?) He unfortunately gets involved with the FBI who gets him involved with nasty and nefarious ping-pong people. You need to remember this is a comedy and the FBI, especially in recent years, is loads of laughs. (They tend to pong before they ping.)
Before you know it, people are trying to ping the other guy’s pongs all over the place and therein lies the tale and the laughs.
Tagawa and Walken have made their cinematic reputations by playing the bad guy on both big screen and little. And both men can be seen doing the same thing in “Balls of Fury”, but as heavies with tongues firmly placed in both cheeks. Both men, both on-screen and in real life, are capable of giving you a stare that will cause you to make use of a fresh pair of the “Balls of Fury” underwear they’re passing out. (Lots of “boths” in the last paragraph, huh?)
If you ain’t laughin’ real hard by the end of the movie, we hear Cary and Chris may drop by your house later to have a long look at you. You might have to subsequently call in a cleanup crew to get all of the moisture out of your carpet. Don’t forget to ask for another pair of “Balls of Fury” undies, too.
Note in the video Tagawa’s remark on why he took this role. He did it because he wanted to work with a master like Walken. He also talks about carefully reading the script before making his decision to join the cast. Why? Because Tagawa is very concerned about the way Asians, in general, and Japanese, in particular, are portrayed on screen.
Back in May on PBS, Tagawa took part in a documentary called “The Slanted Screen”, a very frank discussion of how, historically, filmmakers and Hollywood folks have done a swell job of stereotyping Asian actors. We can’t bring ourselves to describe in any further detail how this documentary demonstrates the disgusting, unfair and flat-out racist propaganda formerly fed us by the film industry. We’ll just say it went on for about half a century and still shows up occasionally in theaters or on our TV sets. Tagawa thinks this sort of thing should stop. We couldn’t agree more.
On the other hand, we sometimes learn about our mess-ups best by poking a little fun at the truth every now and then and “Balls of Fury” certainly appears to do just that.
In today’s shoot, it was unanimously agreed that it would help if we could find some guys who could actually get the ball over the net. So you see the crew of 808 Ping Pong on hand to embarrass everybody else in the frame. Man, a ping-pong ball in the booty at 200 mph! That gotta hurt the lemu.
Hey! Doesn’t Tagawa look funny with the underwear on his head? We ain’t smilin’ or nuttin’…he might stare at us.
A serious moment:
Back in 1991, Tagawa had a part in a TV film called “Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis”. It was the story about a Navy heavy cruiser that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine just a few days before W.W. II ended. Hundreds of Americans were killed. Many died of exposure in the ocean or were eaten by sharks. Stacey Keach played the Captain of the Indianapolis, Tagawa the Captain of the submarine. The Navy reacted by putting the American commander on trial. Keach’s character was the only officer in American history to be court-martialed through the use of enemy testimony, Tagawa’s character. The Japanese Captain did not want to testify, but the Navy forced him to. They needed someone to set up the fall guy. It lead to the conviction of the American officer. Some years later, he committed suicide.
There is a scene in the film between Tagawa and Keach. If you ever get a chance to see this powerful confrontation between two former enemies, do it. It’s a great moment in film, albeit, far too brief. That’s how we learned Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa’s name.