They might as well have filmed it in yellowface

Anybody who regularly watches TV has probably seen the ads for the upcoming Hollywood film "21". Like most Hollywood trailers, this one also reveals much too much about the plot, making the film not really worth seeing. The film is about six MIT whiz kids who develop a sophisticated method of counting cards in Blackjack. After spending months perfecting their skills, they move on to Vegas to take the city by storm. Suddenly they're caught in a glamorous world of sex, money and alcohol, but the seedy Vegas underworld is getting suspicious.

The story sounds like another Vegas movie along the lines of Ocean's 11, 12, and 13 (just with mathematics a little more advanced than counting beyond the fingers on your hands), but surprisingly enough, it actually happened. In the early nineties, six MIT students did in fact take advantage of Vegas casinos. Their entire story was documented by Ben Mezrich in his New York Times best-selling non-fiction "Bringing Down the House".

The two main characters in the book are Kevin Lewis and Jason Fischer. The character of Kevin Lewis has actually been directly ported into the film as Ben Campbell to be played by Jim Sturgess of "Across the Universe" fame. (He's the guy on the front of the promotional picture at the top). Kevin Lewis and Jason Fischer are actually fictitious names Mezrich invented to protect the identities of the actual individuals. Not very long ago it was revealed that Kevin Lewis is actually Jeff Ma and Jason Fischer is really Mike Aponte.

Now is it just me or does Jim Sturgess look nothing like Jeff Ma. I smell something fishy here...

If my nose is correct, I believe this is the smell of racism. Meznich, author of the original text "Bringing Down the House", agrees with me as he states in a 2005 talk at MIT.

During the talk, Mezrich mentioned the stereotypical Hollywood casting process — though most of the actual blackjack team was composed of Asian males, a studio executive involved in the casting process said that most of the film’s actors would be white, with perhaps an Asian female. Even as Asian actors are entering more mainstream films, such as “Better Luck Tomorrow” and the upcoming “Memoirs of a Geisha,” these stereotypes still exist, Mezrich said.

So when an Asian American man does something smart and dashing in real life, racing through a Vegas-style life of sex, drugs, and money, Hollywood decides that all those traits and such a lifestyle is much more befitting a white man, with perhaps an Asian female.

Were they simply unable to find some Asian American actors? Obviously that couldn't have been the case since they casted Aaron Yoo for the part known only under the single moniker "Choi" (yet another ethnically ambiguous Asian side character, I wonder if he's related to Cho Chang). Did they want Sturgess's star power to attract an audience? What star power? They already have superstars Kevin Spacey and Lawrence Fisburne, what do they need a relatively unknown kid from a recent emo film about the sixties?

This is actually very old news, as is especially evident from the fact that Mezrich's talk was in 2005, and several Asian American blogs have already had a lot to say on the matter, with probably much more eloquence than I can pretend to have. Nonetheless, I just wanted a chance to ask Sony Pictures, why didn't you just put Sturgess in yellowface? At least it would have been more accurate...