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Life & Arts

Indie comedy highlights the funny side of being down

by AUSTIN HAVICAN 
The Daily Cougar

Dodging the restrictive stereotype of Asian-American cinema is a difficult task for modern day filmmakers, especially in comedy. If the film isn't martial-arts based, then it usually focuses heavily on the difficulty of living in the U.S through the scope of a character's Asian ethnicity. The Motel, written and directed by Michael Kang, operates on the uneasy deadpan humor that made Napoleon Dynamite famous, but in a more genuine and less annoying way.

In The Motel, Ernest Chin is a 13-year-old character based on Kang. Ernest and his small nuclear family (a younger sister, his mother and grandfather) are English-speaking Chinese who own and operate a small motel that charges by the hour.

Ernest is an awkward adolescent going through the torturous and immediately identifiable period of puberty, and the changes he faces and endures are the heart of this story. His Chinese heritage has almost nothing to do with the story, other than the two lines spoken in Chinese and the taunts he endures from an older bully.

The world of The Motel is a small and slow-moving universe in which Ernest comes home from school and cleans up the rooms after the three-hour rentals. He's bored, as most teenagers would be, and inattentively listens to the scolding of his bat-wielding mother with rolled eyes and a "whatever."

When Sam, a young and successful businessman, rolls through the motel drunk and with a woman under his arm, Ernest cautiously attaches himself to the wild but cool 20-something.

After late nights of hanging out and sharing found chicken legs, Sam shows himself to be a sad and confused husband fleeing his wife. With that realization, viewers begin to catch glimpses of the characters' insecurities and how they try to deal with them.

Ernest's older love interest, Christine, smokes and drinks to be cool and repeatedly shoots Ernest down when he finally musters up the courage to talk to her, thanks to Sam's advice. His mother, afraid of the feeling of abandonment already made familiar by Ernest's father, tries to keep him on a short leash and discourages his contest-winning short stories. Even a bully, the son of a poor, long-term room renter, expresses his insecurity by attacking Ernest and making him kiss his own sister.

Although the characters and their situations are sad and humiliating, the film is hilariously written and acted. The subversive and situational humor of Ernest's little sister asking why customers are so loud during their naps, while watching the infamously violent "Happy Tree Friends," is trumped only by Ernest's discovery of pornography and Christine telling him to "get your boner out of my face."

The humor is very similar to Me and You and Everyone We Know, and most of the laughs come from discomfort. The dialogue between Ernest and the bully's sister is as memorable as the "back and forth, forever" scene in Me and You, and the same naive sense of maturity lends itself to heavy and embarrassing ridicule.

Ernest and Sam's time together apexes when the pair screams, "We want to be happy!" at the top of their lungs, and the movie changes gears for the upsetting fight between them, which leads to realizations about themselves and each other.

The disc's special features are great, the funniest of which is a half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary called The Making of The Motel. In it, cast and crew break down the casting process and their excitement with working with child actors. There are also a few bizarre tidbits about a fire breaking out and their dependence on power generators. The extras also include the original theatrical trailer and four "Director's Picks" with outtakes and commentary.

Unfortunately, this independent film missed Houston's theaters, but PALM's DVD release offers the opportunity to relive the pains of adolescence most of us try to forget, without relying on the stereotypes of Asian-American cinema.

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