The Opposition…

Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen

Jon M. Chu,

Jeremy McCarter

Discussion: 2024-July-Aug-Sept

Why we're reading this: July 30, 2024
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Sep 09, 2024 Ronald rated it liked it

This was fine. Mostly well written. But the story blatantly glosses over bad things in Mr Chu's life.
I'm a bit older than our star of the story but I have eaten at his parents restaurant and they are far from a broke family business. The family is a pillar of the community. The kids went to a very expensive, very elite, very prestigious high school. It is that kind of school. Chu's mom once said he was not doing real homework at that school. Anyway, the whole book he acts like he was brought up This was fine. Mostly well written. But the story blatantly glosses over bad things in Mr Chu's life.
I'm a bit older than our star of the story but I have eaten at his parents restaurant and they are far from a broke family business. The family is a pillar of the community. The kids went to a very expensive, very elite, very prestigious high school. It is that kind of school. Chu's mom once said he was not doing real homework at that school. Anyway, the whole book he acts like he was brought up by people who could barely keep the lights on. At the same time having season tickets to the SF Ballet and Orchestra - the kind of seats that if you were not rich and let your children run amuck you would not be offered those seats next season. So that kind of rich.

Mr Jon M. Chu is the youngest of the family and it shows. He keeps doing all this dumb stuff and getting away with it suffering little consequences. Even after he makes it to Hollywood he continues to get away with crap that would get others unemployed. But from reading the book you would think everyone was against him. The world was out to stop him making movies! His vision!

He is so focused on the "Me, me, me" thing that he turns down a Netflix 3 movie deal. Which really hurts his "people" when Mr Chu decides to take the WB deal with a rather racist (big budget cut!) how dare you talk to Nexflix hit. He was so in his own bubble he white washed In the Heights. But the problem was that he took a stage musical and tried to improve it. The movie version was just not as good as the stage production. Then expecting people to risk COVID to watch his movie and not watch it on MAX is disheartening. There are then a few pages where he sounds exactly like one of those "big shots" he mocks earlier in the book. At this point I'm thinking he really should have taken the Netflix deal as we see what happened at HBO Max / WB soon after.

Just remember this is really a cleaned up story and really reads like an advertisement for his next movie Wicked! Its not a bad read, but I grew up in the same area a few years ahead of him so I see him and his but I'm the baby world view. ...more

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