Trisha Reviews: Fake Famous, and Some Musings About the Blog

Earlier this week, I was watching the new HBO documentary Fake Famous while writing my blog post for the week. I had heard a lot of buzz for the documentary and was curious about one specific point: two out of the three participants drop out of the experience before the end – why?

Hearing about the amount of power that Instagram followers and likes and online clout in general have on society was fascinating and simultaneously made me want to bang my head against a wall. I’m not surprised that the most successful influencers end up being pretty rich to begin with, since they need to put a lot of money into their craft! I’m not surprised that kids now grow up wanting to be influencers, and not the ubiquitous “doctor”, “firefighter”, “ballerina”, etc. from my youth! I don’t want it to be the truth, but it is, and I don’t gain anything from digging my head into the sand and pretending like this isn’t how the world works now.

Though the movie is not particularly kind in its portrayal of “influencers” in general, I surprisingly didn’t hate the remaining participant, Dominique, like I thought I would. She had signed on for the perfect opportunity for her burgeoning acting career and did what she could to succeed in the experiment, and she did it well! Good for you, girl!

However, as I mentioned before, the most interesting bits of the documentary for me were the other two participants who decided to call it quits before seeing any tangible popularity gains. Though their individual stories and journeys were different, they were both rooted in general discomfort with the entire process and the fear of appearing “fake.” Though my first reaction was to think, yes, this is what you signed up for!, the reality is definitely that things are different when it’s happening to you. One participant, Chris, was weary of fake comments and followers after years of cultivating a persona of being authentic to himself (and, again, good for you, dude!). The other participant, Wylie, became anxious after hearing from an old acquaintance who was judging the path that he was going down. Because the only influencers that I ever really see are those who have fully “bought in” to the lifestyle, it had never occurred to me that there may be people who start down that road but are discouraged by people’s perceptions of them – especially the perceptions of those who already know you.

All three of their stories made me think about the delicate tightrope walk between being genuinely true to yourself and “selling out,” and how everyone’s ability to walk that line is different. We all have different things we want to get out of life, after all!

As for the blog post, the topic I was writing about – inclusive language – was extra tricky, and I spent hours racking my brain for how to approach such a tricky topic. At the end of the night, I walked away from my keyboard even more stressed. On one hand, I wished that I had more time to write the post; on the other hand, I was so worried about my thoughts on the topic coming across as pretentious, at best, to offensive or even just incorrect, at worst. After a night of tossing and turning, I realized that I didn’t even want to write about that subject, and deleted my post before it was published.

I didn’t mean for Fake Famous to affect my blog moving forward, but it definitely planted some seeds. I now have some new plans for my blog moving forward – read about them below!

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Trisha Reviews: Everything I Never Told You, Minari, and Being Asian American

I finished Everything I Never Told You a few weeks ago and, though I was excited to finally read it, I ended up being – spoiler alert – not thrilled with it. I then watched Minari a few weeks later and loved it, and realized that the reasons that I loved the latter contrasted nicely with the reasons that I didn’t love the former, and that everything tied back to my own experience with being Asian-American.

Read on for more – and this is your warning for lots of spoilers for both the book and the movie below!

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Trisha Reviews: Night is Long, Walk On Girl

This movie is one of the most random things I’ve ever seen in my life – and I went through both a MySpace ~adorkable~ phase and an improv comedy phase.

Before watching Night is Short, Walk on Girl, I watched another movie by the same director, Masaaki Yuasa, called Ride Your Wave. I thought Ride Your Wave was sweet and breezy, but nothing to write home about. After watching it, I came across a review that said something along the lines of, “it was too normal compared to the director’s other movies,” which left me intrigued. I decided to watch Night is Short, Walk on Girl because it was the only other movie by this director available on HBO Max.

I was initially hesitant to watch it because, as the trailer above implies, drinking, especially Japan’s sometimes-intense drinking culture, is a big part of the movie. I’ve been wrestling a lot with my relationship with alcohol over the past year and, because of this, I’ve tended to shy away from media that glorifies drinking. However, I was happy to learn while watching that it didn’t “glorify” drinking that much, and was only really a big part of the first third of the movie. Great!

I mention my relationship with alcohol because it has affected many of my interpersonal relationships (for better or for worse), and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that, beneath all of its randomness, Night is Short, Walk on Girl is really about how we are all connected to each other. While watching the movie, I thought it was just coincidence – for example, “Wow! The unrequited love guy is pining after the bride from the wedding scene!” However, as the movie played on, I realized that this was all by design.

We’re all bit players in each other’s movies! You may think you’re unimportant, but you also might not even realize the role you play in someone else’s life! Everyone has their own motivations, and they may not always match up with yours! People do unexpected things, and they affect other people in unexpected ways!

Sweeping existential themes aside, I just loved this movie’s humor. It was frantic and chaotic and had so many characters and storylines. There was a fact-filled, serious soliloquy about the interconnectedness of literature and an outrageous spicy soup eating competition – within minutes of each other, in the same place, but with little overlap with each other! Still part of a continuous storyline! How!

The wildest thing was that, despite its volatility, it also had everything tied up and together by the end. As strange as a random throwaway line or outfit choice was, as the story progressed, I was able to pick out clever little nuggets of foreshadowing or ultimately meaningless and absurd, yet well-chosen, callbacks.

Though the movie definitely slowed down at the end, I still enjoyed the journey enough to give this movie a strong recommendation. The art is beautiful, the story is silly, and the characters are eccentric – and the journey overall is a strange romp with a surprisingly touching ending. I’ll be thinking about this movie for a long time, for sure.