Actor Randall Park made his directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival with his film adaptation of the graphic novel Shortcomings, Collider reports.
Shortcomings follows Ben Tanaka (Justin Min) as he begins dating again in the Bay Area after a split with his longtime girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki). The script was written by Adrian Tomine and addresses some of the challenges Asian Americans specifically face in the dating scene.
“You know, when I read the graphic novel that Adrian Tomine wrote – he also wrote the screenplay, but when I read his graphic novel 15 years ago, I was just so, so struck by how real and authentic it felt,” Park said in an interview with Collider. “I was around the same age as these characters at the time and it felt like my life in a lot of ways, and people that I knew, and places that I’ve been.”
“That was really mind-blowing for me at that time, specifically, because I had never seen that reflected back at me in any kind of media,” he continued. “So the thought of telling a story like this where it’s really like what we do every day, which is to hang out, go to restaurants, talk about our lives, I mean, to make a movie like that was particularly exciting for me.”
The film has received positive reviews so far and currently has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Cortland Jacoby, a critic for Punch Drunk Critics, noted that Park navigated Tomine’s script with “hilarity and insight.”
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