SFIAAFF: No Sleep Til Shanghai
The crowd at the Kabuki Theater on Friday night had more hip-hoppers than usual, as SF Int'l Asian-American Film Fest attendees eagerly lined up three-deep for the sold-out showing of No Sleep Til Shanghai, a documentary following Chinese-American rapper Jin Au-Yeung's 2-week 8-city tour of Asia. The excitement reached a fever pitch in the pre-screening intros, with audience members shouting out "Holla!" as Jin himself called in on the producer's cell phone to say hi. "There's probably a lot of Asians there, right? So TURN OFF YOUR CAMCORDERS!" Best part: everyone laughed.... but no one actually turned their camcorder off.
Jin is a NYC-based rapper who stormed into battle dominance on 106th and Park with his quick rhymes and sharp racial analysis -- he's often been called the Asian Eminem, though to Jin's credit, he seems profoundly uncomfortable with that title. Jin was then signed to the Ruff Ryders label, and released his first album, "The Rest Is History" in 2004. In support of that album, he went on an 8-city 2 week tour of Asia, camera crew in tow. It was his first time in Asia (other than Hong Kong).
After the jump, Jin meets some lovely Asian ladies, freestyles in Cantonese and Mandarin, and does an awful lot of interviews.
Picture from No Sleep Til Shanghai
Jin's an engaging and charismatic MC, and seems like a very nice guy to boot. Any hyphenated American who's gone back to their quote unquote motherland will relate to the profound sense of dislocation and self-doubt that it stirs up about identity and ethnicity. And any Asian-American who's gone back to their quote unquote motherland will not only be able to relate to that, but also to that unique Asian jet lag that hits you at about 4 a.m. in the morning. We kept thinking, "you guys totally should have brought some melatonin with you."
So Jin zips around from interview to interview, some with translators, some without, in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore, and various cities in Japan. The filmmakers interview some local rappers and local hip-hop aficionados, but mostly, hang out with Jin and his posse in hotels and in local clubs as he performs his big hit, "Learn Chinese" over and over and over. In one hilarious scene, Jin muses in a voiceover that he thought Asian women would be very reserved and quiet, as you see him set upon by three scantily-clad Japanese girls with a loopy grin on his face. "Love, man -- love is worldwide!" he concludes. And the scenes where Jin spontaneously raps a little in Cantonese, and in Mandarin (which he doesn't speak), were very impressive.
Our main complaint about this movie, though? Nothing really happened. We would have loved to see some scenes showing more clips of Jin's rise to fame, or Jin's process in preparing for rap battles, or Jin's thoughts on his Asian-American identity -- and we would have liked to have gotten to know the rest of Jin's posse a little better too. We were particularly intrigued by the African-American tour manager who wore an anti-Bush t-shirt through the entire movie -- what's his story? Also -- touring looks exhausting, this was the first movie we've ever seen about the trials and tribulations of stardom where we've left the theater thinking we didn't want to be one.
There's no denying that the audience had a great time at the movie, though, and people are genuinely eager and proud to support Asian-American hip hop artists. That's not so bad.
The movie was preceded by "Future Rock Stars of America" by Grace Su, which was a snippet of a longer movie she's directing about Korean hip-hop and indie rockers in the Bay Area (we think -- there wasn't much of an explanation in the snippets included.) Nice to hear more about an underappreciated scene.