Shortcomings

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

"Shortcomings" is a story about a trio of young Bay Area urbanites--Ben Tanaka, Miko Hayashi, and Alice Kim--as they navigate a range of interpersonal relationships, traversing the country in search of the ideal connection. This is Randall Park's first debut feature and I gotta say it's a pretty good first time directing project. Shortcomings explores about friendship, love, narcissism, and growth revolving around Asians or Asian American communities. I wasn't fully wowed by anything from the movie but I was still able to connect with the movie.

Park is able to capture the interesting chemistry between the cast members and the modern setting with some fun humor and personalities explored. The performances from each cast members was really good and Justin H. Min does a pretty good job portraying a man child of a person. The camerawork wasn't too special but it was good for the overall setting. The production is good and some of the dialogue was well-written and funny.

However, the story does become pretty predictable as it continues. A generic rom-com story where predictable movements were going to happen. But without Park's charms and chemistry, it would have been like a bad hallmark movie. Despite having some good dialogue, there were some dialogue moments that felt really awkward or forced and I am not sure if that was intentional or not. If it was intentional then I can understand but if not then those dialogue moments were pretty rough. Some of the supporting characters were a little annoying. Even with my gripes, I was still able to be entertained throughout this film.

By all means, it's a decent romantic comedy with good pacing and interesting concepts explored. I'd recommend for those who wanna have a drink or two and watch it for fun.

Rating: B-

Ok. I overrated it. It's not that something worth a 10/10. But I really enjoyed watching it. It reminds me when I'm young. When I don't know how to appreciate what I have. Keep chasing the feelings like trophy collection. Obsessed with one relationship. Biased. Sometimes frustrated. All of these are actually called growing up. It's a period of time, while you learn how to fight, how to let go and move on. Learn how to live with it en enjoy the moment. Learn how to appreciate and respect. Park, I think I got what you trying to say.

There are several times in the movie people used the term of "what age is he living in". I think that was a key of explaining some times we are deeply impacted by the ideals that we were educated or lectured during our childhood. One day when you wake up and start to think and selectively review these things we were taught, that's called maturity.

That's what this movie made me think of. Kinda deep. Again, I really enjoyed it.

Stephanie Hsu had a good cameo, you forget about it as the movie progresses but it comes up again and plays an small but enlightening and important role for what the movie's convey. There are a lot of Asian-American movie's coming out recently, I think EEAAO took the spotlight but I watched joy ride a few weeks ago which was great, and now Shortcomings, even though it seems like it'll fly under the radar.

Some elements of the movie reminded me of Wes Anderson movies, with frequent pauses to divide the movie into chapters as if it were a novel. It didn't forgo realism in favor of his orange sunset dollhouse aesthetic feel however. Something that I realized was that the movie was awfully quiet, like minimal surrounding sounds and you barely notice the scene's background characters too. I love how Spider-Man exists here and Jacob Batalon recognizes it.

Subtitle's would be nice but the movie is in English in almost it's entirety. It's not the funniest but the funny scenes did feel real. It feels like real people and above all the movies story, events and characters were believable so the moments that need to invoke emotions do that well... the cringe moments, the romantic moments, the humiliating moments, self realizing moments all felt like you were there in the moment for the characters.

I think it's less of a romcom and more of a drama comedy, even though Ben's relationships play a huge role I think it was a character study in the end for the character himself, self reflection and all that; so his love interest are just used as tools to that end. I liked that they each got meaningful endings too. He reminds me of Ramy from the tv show of the same name, in the sense of the second hand embarrassment, his world views and how much his decisions or what he says annoyed me because I wanted him to choose better. A man child basically.

It's not as excitingly paced, so not one of those cinema experiences were you get to have a blast, probably a movie better watched alone. Reminds me a little of Destination Wedding too in it's anti-romcom-ness, except this has a few more cute scenes. It did make me feel mushy inside at points but it's still not a romance as I said. I think it gets better as it goes, I wasn't sure at the start but I loved it by the time the movie was done.

Of course, a protagonist can be a loser, but he or she has to have something of quality that the audience can fall in love with or even at least can relate to or root for. Ben is controlling, unfaithful, negative, and being a racist himself. Most importantly, he's the biggest hypocrite. All the other things, he can be loved by character development, but he does what he despises and criticizes without any moral conflict. That's when the audience drops any interest left in him. The ending is weak as well.

As Randall Park's directorial debut, 'Shortcomings' is not bad at telling the story and continuing it smoothly without any huge leap of logic.

In a funny way, this movie is exactly the type of movie that is talk about in Shortcoming... The main character is someone who does not accept himself with his bias...but also project on others this bias...he is unhappy and make everyone around him unhappy ...your typical guest to find happiness by discovering & accepting who were are...the thing that make this movie different is that the main characters are Asian...but also their acting which make it believable, some funny moments, some serious, some unreal, just like life itself. An other spectator used the term man\child which would also fit.