New Keanu movie: Asians are “zipperhead dog-munching dinks”

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Can you believe that my last gratuitous Keanu Reeves post was back in December? I figure it’s long overdue for a new one, and this item caught my eye / horrified me on Angry Asian Man. (I’m slooooowly catching up on my blogs – am still in the home stretch of finals.)

One of AAM’s readers, who’s a working actress, wrote in with this:

So I just got called in to audition for this new indie movie with Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker and Chris Evans called Kings X (a.k.a. The Nightwatch).

I’m actually going to call the casting director tomorrow and cancel my audition after reviewing the sides. So I can’t give you the entire plot of the film but after reading my sides and a couple of other sides, I know that a part of it does take place in Koreatown, with lo and behold korean sex slaves and korean guys as the baddies.

There’s also a part of dialogue where Reeves’ character greets the korean guys with ‘konichiwa.’ The Korean guys in turn tell him that phrase is Japanese and insulting to Koreans but Reeves says that he can’t tell the difference. Then Reeves’ character responds “It means you got eyes like apostrophes, dress white, talk black and drive Jew. So how’m I supposed to know what kind of zipperhead-dog-munching dinks you are if you don’t.”

Sounds Oscar-worthy doesn’t it? Well, you can check out the rest of the sides on Showfax. It’s pretty discouraging to be an asian actress these days…

Dude. I know homeboy identifies primarily as white (which is totally cool with me – I’m all about the right to self-identify however you choose), but does he need to go out of his way to shit on Asians? I know, I know, he’s acting. But damn…

First the puke photo (errr thanks Dumi). Now this. He’s really trying to destroy my love for him.

And as we discussed back in October in the thread about The Departed, isn’t racism — like smoking — a really lazy way to handle character development?