Justin Chon is the Korean-American actor and comic who had a returning role in the Twilight franchise; he here directs and stars in a punchy, freewheeling movie set around the LA riots, shot in black-and-white, with something of Spike Lee’s style. In some ways, it’s a fictional reworking of the real case of Latasha Harlins, an innocent black teenager shot dead by a Korean convenience store owner in Los Angeles about the same time as the Rodney King beating.
Chon plays Eli, a young American-Korean guy who runs a shoe store with his brother Daniel (David So). Kamilla (Simone Baker) is an African-American kid who likes hanging out with them, to the rage of her family and particularly her brother, Keith (Curtiss Cook Jr), who is suspicious of the Koreans. A grumpy convenience store owner, Mr Kim, is played by Chon’s father, Sang Chon. When the King jury acquits the cops, the riots and looting commence.
It’s a film with loose-limbed energy and passion and nice comic moments and vignettes, leading inexorably to tragedy. I have one caveat, or footnote. Sometimes the dialogue with Mr Kim splits on generational lines into the languages from the old and new countries; Eli might hear something in Korean and answer in English. But Mr Kim’s lines are left unsubtitled, and so is a long, long speech he has about two-thirds of the way through, in which the gestures and body language convey conciliation and wisdom. But shouldn’t the audience be told what this speech meant? Maybe leaving it unsubtitled preserves the importance of the cultural fracture. This is a fierce and forthright film.
