Read My Lips

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Xavier Fan

How often are you in a situation where you don’t understand the language being spoken around you? While hanging out with family and friends over the last week, I could count three distinct languages where I had to muddle my way through…

First was when my parents and I were in staying in a hotel on a day trip to Montreal. As we passed by one of the housekeepers, she asked in French which room we were in, and whether she can clean it. I was able to understand and reply smoothly, somewhat to my surprise. And down in the parking lot, another guest asked whether the parking ticket should be paid at the machine before leaving (yes). One thing I like about Montreal is that they don’t assume that you can’t speak French. Looks like those years of Alliance Française, high school and college French classes paid off.

Then we were at dimsum with some friends of my parents: a couple, and their two kids (ages 2 and 9). They spoke Mandarin. My parents did also, but my Mandarin is pretty bad (I grew up speaking Cantonese and English with my parents). At first – it was all I could do just to sit there and try to catch snippets of whatever was being said. But since I could ask my parents to help translate, I relaxed and just let the conversation flow. Towards the end, I could even make attempts at conversation. My parents said they were impressed – I wasn’t, but it’ll have to do, when my Mandarin was never that good to begin with.

Another wrinkle was that the wife in the family is deaf, and so also knows ASL. She’s pretty good at lip reading, but at times, her family would combine Mandarin and ASL when speaking with her. When speaking with my parents, she’d also sometimes write out short notes on pieces of paper when talking about more complicated topics. I do have an ASL visual dictionary at home, but this made me think that it’d be fun to take some ASL classes, say at the Sign Language Center. So many things to do, so little time!

Languages are tough to learn and maintain when you don’t have speakers to practice with. But I think it’s so rewarding to be able to converse even a little in somebody’s native language – it’s literally how they think. You’re entering their world – as a guest. It’s up to you to hold up your end and not mangle their language. If you’re lucky, they’ll appreciate your gesture.

Stuntbusters

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Xavier Fan

After doing stunt school this past summer, you can imagine how my interest was immediately piqued by a new TV show on Speed called Stuntbusters. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at deconstructing and demonstrating stunts – focusing on automotive stunts. I was hoping that they’d cover the full range of stunts – but I understand why they had to focus, if only because they have find the right real-life stuntpeople as hosts.

Ripping off the Roof

Garrett Hammond and Vanessa Vander Pluym serve that role well – they’re photogenic, well-spoken, and do their own stunts on the show. The last part is a really important part of these type of shows – the hosts need to be a credible expert. For example, the Discovery Channel show Future Weapons has a ex-Navy SEAL demonstrating all the cutting-edge weapons they can get their hands on.

Future Weapons Season 1 (3 DVD Set)

The portions of the show where they deconstruct stunts are only mildly interesting – it’s like Mythbusters Lite. In the episode (Ep. 2 “Bulletproof Beater”) where they crash 2 cars head-on, they use the cable-tow system that Mythbusters fans have seen many times.

Mythbusters: Collection 1

What makes Stuntbusters unique is when Vanessa and Garrett actually go and do their own spectacular stunts. Watching Vanessa do the “can-opener” stunt in the first episode is heart-stopping. This is where stuntwoman drives a car at 50mph up a slight ramp, where it proceeds to launch into the air, impact and rip the roof off a target car, then flip end over end to land roof-on-roof onto a third card. Crazy. I remember thinking, “I hope they’re paying these guys a lot to do this.” They’re putting their lives on the line. An injury while hosting a TV show can derail their careers, just as surely as doing stunts on TV and movie gigs. (See the recent injuries and deaths of stuntmen on the movie sets of The Expendables and G.I. Joe 2). That’s why they don’t feature a lot of spectacular (read dangerous) stunts on the show – which unfortunately is exactly what viewers are looking for.

I’ll keep watching the show – I just love to learn about stunts, especially about an area that I’m not familiar with at all. Best wishes to Vanessa and Garrett – stay safe!

Margin Call

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Xavier Fan

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Margin Call is a remarkable movie. The premise is straightforward: 24 hours in the life of a Lehman Brothers-esque finance firm at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. Since we all know how that turned out, the audience can sit back and just watch the wonderful acting, the smart, tight writing, and atmospheric dread hanging over every shot.

Margin Call [Blu-ray]

Let’s start with the actors. Zachary Quinto (Star Trek) plays a young financial analyst who discovers that something’s very wrong with the firm’s books. I’ve liked his acting ever since I saw him as the scarily malevolent Sylar in the TV series Heroes (before it jumped the shark). Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects and so many others) is his world-weary boss. Simon Baker (The Mentalist) plays Kevin Spacey’s boss. Demi Moore (A Few Good Men) and Jeremy Irons (Die Hard: With a Vengeance) round out the star-studded cast. Even Aasif Mandvi (The Daily Show), and Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica) make appearances in the film.

The Mentalist: The Complete First Season

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 10/20/08

Battlestar Galactica: The Complete 2004 Series [Blu-ray]

All this acting talent is not wasted. The opening scene of mass layoffs at the firm recall the impersonal corporate coldness of George Clooney’s Up in the Air. As the scope of the coming financial disaster is revealed, the situation is “escalated” to ever-higher layers of superiors who are as willfully ignorant of the details of how their own firm runs as they are obscenely rich and profligate in their use of power.

I loved how the director assumes the audience is smart. Financial jargon is largely unexplained, combined with clever use of “plain-English” exposition where the underlings have to explain to the bosses how much trouble they’re in. Even the movie’s title is never mentioned in the movie – if you know what a margin call is, you know it’s bad, and it doesn’t bode well for the firm. Another touch I really liked was the use of Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude during a key point in the film. The prelude (Prélude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15) is all about rain – a sweet, light sprinkle in the beginning; stormy and turbulent in the middle; the rain washes away in the end. The passage used was, of course, the middle passage to presage the coming storm. A perfect touch.

Easily one of my favorite films of the year.

Special Skills: Ping Pong Madness

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Xavier Fan

On an acting resume, the “Special Skills” section is generally where people put those skills that might be useful on the stage or on set. I have a special place in my heart for them, because, let’s face it, the vast majority of on-camera work I’ve done has been more “special skills” than “acting”. I booked my first gig (as a ninja on a national TV commercial) because of hobbies I’d pursued for years – and in the logic of commercial casting, Asian + Martial Arts + Gymnastics = Ninja.

One special skill I’ve been training in is ping pong. Purists might refer to it as “table tennis” – I guess because it makes it sounds less like some rinky-dink game, and more like a “sport”. In Chinese, the characters are literally a transliteration of “ping pong”, so it doesn’t bother me to call it that. When I lived in San Francisco, I trained with Masaaki Tajima at the Sunset Table Tennis Club, and even competed in a few tournaments (my last USATT rating was 988, dating from May 2001 – which makes me a good beginner). Then I stopped playing for a long time, and picked it back up in the last couple of years.

After leaving my latest ping pong training session (tired but happy), I thought of how ping pong related to acting. As I’ve mentioned before, you have to build up your foundation of training – the basic core skills of any pursuit. But then, once you’re “performing” in a game or on camera, you have to let your “muscle memory” take over. Overthinking is what will destroy your rhythm and take you out of the moment. In a sport as fast as ping pong, you do your strategy beforehand – once the point starts and the ping-ponging gets crazy, you can only react to what your opponent and the situation is giving you. When the point is over, you have to put it behind you, and move on to the next point. You retain some awareness of what has gone on before, and the general arc of how the game is going, but the important thing is to be present in what’s happening now. Hmm… sounds a lot like the way you’re supposed to approach auditions, or takes, doesn’t it?

Like everything else – eventually the robots will take over. Here’s a video clip of Chinese robots playing ping pong:

Of course, the robots are not quite at this level yet:

Look especially at 2:30, when Timo Boll of Germany switched the paddle to his other hand in mid-point, hit a stroke, switched it back to this original hand, and won the point. Ridiculous.

Xavier Fan

Stunts & Improv Actor

Author Archives: Xavier Fan

Read My Lips

Stuntbusters

Margin Call

Special Skills: Ping Pong Madness