Ping Pong Playa

Ping Pong Playa got the royal shaft from Hurricane Ike. This unpretentious film was set to open in Houston on September 12 on two screens. One of the theaters the film, in its release from distributor IFC, was set to open, the Edwards Marq*e has yet to re-open as of the end of the month. The other theater Ping Pong Playa was booked into, the AMC First Colony (technically in Sugarland, a community Southwest of Houston) was open by Sunday (9/14) and played the film throughout the week.
Ping Pong Playa follows the fortunes of self-professed basketball freak played with brazen physicality by Jimmy Tsai as C-dub Wang. C-dub has to assume duties at his family’s ping pong training school when his mom’s injured in a minor car accident. It hardly puts a crimp in his lifestyle since he’s jobless, living at home and nursing hoop dreams of playing pro basketball.
Jessica Yu, who picked up an Academy Award for the documentary short subject Breathing Lessons in 1996, directed Ping Pong Playa. Her resume includes helming episodic television shows like West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy. Yu and Tsai wrote the script for Ping Pong Playa with an ear for C-dub’s cultural acclimation to American society at large. Yu cleverly substitutes sound effects (like a pin pong ball) whenever C-dub curses. The movie references everything from Napoleon Dynamite to Free Willy to fast food and C-dub wears a succession of basketball jerseys like 3 Denver (Allen Iverson), 1 Suns (Amare Stoudemire), 20 Spurs (Manu Ginobili), 24 Lakers (Kobe Bryant), 11 and 1 Rockets (Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady). C-dub’s parents remind that Chinese contributions to the world include inventing paper, gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, and of course ping pong (technically the Chinese didn’t event the latter).
Tsai, whose parents live in Houston, talked with Free Press Houston a couple of days before Ike rolled through. The conversation was spirited and Tsai showed a lot of knowledge about being in front of as well as behind the camera. His first film was a mock series of ads for a pretend clothing line called The Venom Sportwear Ad Campaign. “That started as commercials that lampooned the phenomenon of child endorsement deals. These companies are looking for the next Michael Jordan but the kids just keep getting younger and younger to the point where they’re offering endorsements from five-year olds.”
With the assistance of a friend they actually had a brief run of clothes produced. “That’s where the character of C-dub was born,” explains Tsai.
Tsai worked for Cherry Sky Films, which is where he met Yu. It was her idea to make C-dub a protagonist in a ping pong movie. In the course of the film C-dub goes from being a playa to being a real man but Ping Pong Playa also goes for a realistic tone in depicting the character releations. “In the terms of the movie there’s not enough time for the girl to really get to know and like C-dub, but you can see the seeds of romance that indicate they might hook up later,” sums up Tsai.
People may have missed PPP in its brief theatrical run but Tsai assures, “It’s hard to get a theatrical release, but at the end of the day that’s what drives the DVD.”