‘Dìdi’ Review: Fremont-Set Sundance Movie Recalls Being the Kid Brother in an Immigrant Household
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Writer-director Sean Wang is tough on himself in “Dìdi,” a fresh and funny summer-before-freshman-year flashback that provides an Asian American angle on that Sundanciest of indie-film genres: the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie.
In what feels like a cross between Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” and Jonah Hill’s “mid90s” — courtesy of the young director’s teenage desire to make skate videos — Wang serves up some of his most wince-inducing adolescent memories, from an aborted first kiss to the realization that he’d been trying to downplay his Taiwanese heritage.
Hacky creative writing coaches are always insisting, “Write what you know.” And yet, when the result comes out as specific and self-effacing as Wang’s Fremont, Calif.-set time capsule, it’s hard to improve on that advice.
As Wang reminds, the year 2008 (which also saw the financial crisis in full swing) found thousands of teens making the transition from MySpace to Facebook — both platforms where people could curate which aspects of their identities they wanted to share with the world.
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