June 19, 2023

The directorial debut by Randall Park is today’s entry in the June Swoon 3. It is an unconventional rom-com called Shortcomings.

According to IMDB, “Ben, a struggling filmmaker, lives in Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film festival. When he’s not managing an arthouse movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blonde women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his best friend Alice, a queer grad student with a serial dating habit. When Miko moves to New York for an internship, Ben is left to his own devices, and begins to explore what he thinks he might want.”

This was an interesting film. Usually, I have problems when the protagonist is such an unlikable character, and Ben (Justin H. Min) is absolutely in that category. He is opinionated, mouthy, rude and arrogant. It seems like every scene he is in, all I want to do is yell at him to shut up. Yet, there was something about Ben that was appealing. Don’t get me wrong, I was cheering actively for him to understand what a jerk he was being, but I was also ready to support him learning from the events of the film and adjusting his behavior.

I have to say, I did like this conclusion to the movie. It felt real and played with all of the conventions of the rom-com.

The movie had some great laughs in in, although nothing that was going to be over the top hilarious. The situations are where the humor came from and they all worked very well. Probably the one moment that stood out was when actor Jacob Batalon joked about loving the Spider-Man movies, considering he played Ned in the MCU Spider-Man movies

Sherry Cola played Alice, Ben’s friend, and she was the standout performance for me in the movie. She had an Awkwafina type vibe about her and she was both funny and an excellent ‘straight-man’ character.

I found this to be very entertaining and a creative way to take the rom-com genre in a new way.