The following is a Rant. A Rant often erupts when one is sick and tired of being sick and tired about whatever makes one sick and tired. Sometimes they surprise you by knee jerking out and other times you’ve been preparing your monologue for years, craving the opportunity to perform. Some professionals have honed the craft of the Rant into an artform, such as the Classics-alluding and dictionary-requiring Rants of Dennis Miller or the on point social analysis of Chris Rock. Their comedic talents illuminate issues better than any heavily-footnoted doctoral dissertation.

But there’s also the Rants that seek to confuse us about issues involved, requiring the listener/reader to maintain ignorance for the said Ranters jokes and comments to work. We find this in the homophobic harangues of Laura (I’m Not a Doctor of Psychology) Schlessinger or the Great Obfuscator, Rush Limbaugh.

My hope is that this Rant is more comparable to the former artists than the latter. With any Rant, one risks regretting what was said/written in the heat of passion, realizing one was too harsh or too lazy to really think deeply about the issue. But sometimes you just have to give it a try. So I do here.

If you’re not in the mood for a Rant, you won’t want to read this. That’s fine. I can only watch/hear so much of Limbaugh or Schlessinger and you may feel the same about Miller or Rock. But for those of you who are in the mood for a good old Rant, I’ve got a helluva beef about somethin’.

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When I saw the preview for The Wedding Planner, I couldn’t help but voice a frighteningly redundant comment. “Oh great,” I said, “another film about San Francisco where everyone’s White and nobody’s Gay.” In the spirit of Ed TV, the film focuses on the lives of White people in a city where they are a minority. As anyone who’s ever been here can obviously see, the majority are Asian-American. The city’s Latino-American population is quite large, and although small in comparison to some other cities, the African-American community is not lacking either. And every facet of this city experiences a heavy presence of the Lesbian and Gay community. In San Francisco, your plumber is as likely to be Gay as your hairdresser. Yet those in control of our movies in Hollywood and New York appear to not see what everyone else here in San Francisco sees. To them, prominence is again given to White people, and Straight ones at that.

This blindness is not peculiar only to film Of the TV shows who’s characters are alluded to live in San Francisco, such as Dharma and Greg, Too Close For Comfort, Full House, Party of Five, and Suddenly Susan, only Nash Bridges has recurring characters of non-White descent, although they are given a disproportionate lack of attention. And none of these had a recurring Gay-identified character. Of course, Suddenly Susan, a TV show that could only be argued as a form of Corporate Welfare for the un-talented Brooke Shields, had a French character. But, all due respect to the owners of the French cafe in my neighborhood, when one thinks of San Francisco one does not think of French people. Yes, they also had a Jewish character who was strongly identified with her ethnicity, but as my SF-transplanted, Jewish friends have contested often out here, that is not the identity they’ve found in this city. They’ve been surprised to find that many acquaintances need them to explain Rosh Hashanah and Yum Kippur. Suddenly Susan’s Jewish character’s identity is one bred in the White Ethnic communities of the East Coast or large Midwestern cities like Cleveland and Chicago. Or the cities of New York and Los Angeles where these shows are produced and created. Along with the bleachy complexion of all these supposedly-in-San-Francisco shows, the references to Lesbians and Gays are merely fodder for jokes. The common denominator of all these shows are the White families with often solely White friends, where the only colors are the ubiquitous Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies, continually shown on shows like Full House to remind you that they do in fact live in San Francisco.

Yes, there was All-American Girl, the show that launched Margaret Cho into the mainstream. Her show, often ridiculed, was a milestone, but keep in mind, of all the writers on the show, only one was Asian-American. The non-Asian-American writers and producers found her family’s ethnicity so troubling, they moved Margaret Cho’s character out of her Asian-American home to live with two White girls the second season. Yes, it wasn’t a great show. But was Suddenly Susan or Full House?

But, you may be saying out loud to yourself, ‘Hey, Jennifer Lopez is in this movie,’ The Wedding Planner, ‘and she’s Latina!’ Well, yes, in real life she is. But, you know, Latinas aren’t really marketable so the producers, writer, and director of this film felt it was in the movie’s best interest in profitability to make Lopez’s character ITALIAN-AMERICAN!!! The cliched testimonial now turns in on itself, “I AM a Latina-American, but I DON’T play one on TV.”

The fact that those overseeing the production of this film felt the necessity to make Jennifer Lopez’s character Italian-American, a whiter shade of ethnic, is simply sad. It’s ironic that Hollywood’s mainstream portrayals of our country’s most diverse city could not deal with the fact that Jennifer Lopez is Latina. [Or Hispanic, whatever your region’s nomenclature is.] We all know she is. Girlfriend’s proud of it. But those involved in the making of this film feel a need to hide it, as if it’s an obstacle. All the Italian-ness of her family could have been easily replaced with Latina-ness. If the White writer of this film couldn’t deal with her Latin flavor, the producers should have seen to it to bring in some Latina-American writers who could have done a much better job of handling her ethnicity.

Now, I know some in the progressive Latin press are already slamming Jennifer Lopez for letting herself get played like this, just as Lucy Liu is slammed in the Asian-American press by many who see her doing her brother’s and sister’s wrong by Dragon Ladying it on Ally McBeal. Yes, each could stand up and ask for more respect. Sandra Oh’s choice of characters demonstrates that some can. But the dearth of female roles for Asian-Americans and Latina-Americans is not their causing. They only have so much available to them. [And we could make that scroll bar to the right even tinier if we brought in the lack of roles for male Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans.] As evidenced by Hollywood’s Whitening of San Francisco in the films and TV shows they position there, Latino-American and Asian-American actors and actresses have slim pickings when their ethnicities are acknowledged at all.

The Wedding Planner does have an African-American character, but in a filmic sense of time compared to an hour-long drama series sense of time, his presence is felt similarly to non-White characters on Nash Bridges, that is, having little impact if any. Basically, he's used as a prop to deflect any views that this family might be racist because, 'See, they have a Black friend.'

Couple the surreal racial analysis of the characters of this movie with the formulaic narrative and opposite of illuminating dialogue, I would encourage you not to look at the screen, it only encourages them. I recommend you make other plans. The movie is not particularly horrible. I’m sure there’s some parts we could call entertaining. While it’s no Suddenly Susan, it’s no Dharma and Greg either.

And for those who might feel I spent too much time on my racial analysis of this movie and too little on the actual film, I ask why is it every reviewer I’ve read who‘s reviewed this movie, even the reviewer in the SF Chronicle, a paper that’s supposed to represent the community of San Francisco, ignores the pink elephant on the screen? It may anger some what I’ve said up here, but it angers many of my friends and I that so many are so oblivious to the blatant misrepresentations of this beautiful city we’ve chosen to call home.

San Francisco is a city where a Thai grocery store on 16th/Mission knows to call itself “Casa Thai”; where further down Mission, if you take a left on 24th and head to Galleria de La Raza on the corner of 24th/Bryant, you’ll see a combined art exhibit between Asian-American and Latino-American artists exploring the issues of geography in their lives, knowing both their communities are affected by definitions of boundaries in similar ways; where you go to the local franchise of the Korean restaurant chain, Hahn‘s Hibachi, (By the way, what other city in the US has a Korean restaurant chain?), on Haight/Fillmore not for the Korean food, because it’s much better elsewhere, but for the Soul Food of Chef Rene; where every night of the week you can decide between a Latina (Esta Noche on 16th/Valencia), Asian (Asia SF on 9th/Fillmore), or old school White (Marlena’s on Hayes/Octavia) Drag Show; and where every trip on the 38 Geary Bus will surround you in multilingualism from Arabic, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Japanese (usually a tourist), or any number of the languages we lump together and call Chinese.

And finally, San Francisco is a city where a Latina-American does NOT have to pretend she’s Italian-American to get a job.



Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age