I saw it in Cambridge on Saturday, where the Executive Producer was there for a Q&A afterwards.  This movie is ridiculously, amazingly awesome on multiple levels.  Not only does it have really catchy music (from MIT alum Woody Pak, the go-to “Asian John Williams” for a bunch of AA films), but this documentary explores multiple interesting teams from across the globe in the annual B-Boy (breakdancing) world competition.  The bulk of the documentary focused on a few teams: ‘Ichigeki’ representing Japan, ‘Phase-T’ from France, ‘Knucklehead Zoo’ representing the USA and two teams, ‘Gamblerz’ (the returning champions) and ‘Last for One’, representing S.Korea.

Some of the main protagonists are dancers from the S.Korean and Japanese teams, who have very heart-warming and emotional stories related to strained relationships with their fathers.  For example, one of the Japanese dancers lost his father before the competition, who he had a rocky relationship with, and one of the Korean dancers tried to bridge the distance with his father through his dancing.  A lot of these Asian dancers faced not only poverty, and not only the inevitibility of military service, but also cultural and family obstacles to pursuing their dream of dancing.  They worked jobs in order to pursue their dream of dancing (which paid little to no money) in their home nations at the time, and sacrificed much, including not sleeping at all for many days in order to train and be successful.  The film covered the poor beginnings and extreme poverty that one of the Korean teams came from, having grown up in the countryside and never having seen any buildings higher than a few stories tall.  The prize for world champion was under a thousand per member, so it’s clear their motivation was not money, but pride and winning for their countries.  There was also some emphasis on a young French youth and his racist mother.  A really funny scene involved the cultural differences behind food.

Just like in ‘America’s Best Dance Crew’, this movie does a great job of showing just how amazing at dancing Asians can be, as well as how creative, innovative, and personable they can be as well.  The end not only made me feel GREAT as an Asian person, but the movie gave me a greater appreciation as well as desire to learn more about the true hip hop culture.

Last For One (Korea)


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Ichgeki (Japan)


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Gamblers (Korea)


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This amazing film is currently playing in many places all over the country, to see if it’s near you click ‘screenings’ on their website:
http://www.planetbboy.com/

Also, without trying to give too much away, this website kind of gives an idea to the dominance of Asians in bboy dancing:
http://www.battleoftheyear.de/past-events.html



8 Comments

After watching Planet B-Boy, I’ve learned more about hip hop and now appreciate it. Go out and watch it! It’s worth the money.

This is awesome, when can we buy the dvd?

Ichigeki is my favorite. I love the dj theme

I like Last For One. They’re so in synced!

So many great one-liners. There should be a drinking game for this movie.

So what do you do when you drink Hoc?

I reckon you try divide by zero!

I’m down for anything. But I’ve had enough of cheap beer.