THE YEAR OF THE YAO
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
THE YEAR OF THE YAO is a good-spirited and entertaining look at a famous anomaly, Yao Ming. At 7' 5", Yao towers over his fellow Chinese citizens like a giraffe in a zoo. And, as the first National Basketball Association player from China, he has a billion of his fellow citizens rooting for him. This documentary, about his first year in the NBA as the center for the Houston Rockets, after being the number one pick in the 2002 NBA draft, is also a remarkable story of a friendship between Yao and Colin Pine, Yao's interpreter. Colin, a rookie like Yao, is, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, six years Yao's senior. Colin narrates the picture as well as interprets Yao's words for us and those around him.
Coming from a culture in which the only person ever permitted superstar status was Chairman Mao, Yao was raised in a team culture in which modesty was one of the chief virtues. Precisely because of this, many believed that Yao was destined to be an NBA dud. Indeed, in his first few games, he is awkward and stiff. The NBA plays a very fast paced, aggressive and physical brand of basketball, quite unlike the games Yao was used to in Shanghai. He appears so hopeless at first that, on a national sports show, Charles Barkley brags that he would kiss his fellow newscaster's ass if Yao ever scores nineteen in any game in his first year. After a non-scoring opening in which Yao appears hopelessly lost and completely out classed, Barkley's boast looks like it might be right on the mark.
In Yao's first year, the Los Angles Lakers, the most consistently excellent team in the NBA, provides the opportunities for the turning moments in his NBA career, as his fellow Chinese citizen watch him in fascination on their television sets. In Yao's first game against the Lakers, Shaquille O'Neal, the Lakers' biggest star, is sidelined due to an injury, and, in that game, Yao, for the first time in the NBA, finally blossoms like a flower after the first heavy rain of spring.
The movie's equivalent of the "big game" occurs in the two teams' second match-up and the first time that Shaquille and Yao go head-to-head. It is a nail-bitter that is a real sports classic. The game goes into overtime and is won in the final second. In the championship playoff, Yao's first NBA season comes to a screeching halt in another game against O'Neal and the Lakers.
Throughout all of this, Yao never takes on airs, remaining as modest in success, no matter how many magazine covers he graces, as he was when people were prematurely writing him off as a clumsy oaf and a giant joke. Yao shows that he has class and the ability to compete with the best. He's also quite funny, in a sweet, deadpan sort of way. As a person who finds professional basketball rather boring, I'm about ready to change my mind entirely after THE YEAR OF THE YAO, especially if I could see Yao playing.
THE YEAR OF THE YAO runs 1:28. It is rated PG for "some mild language" and would be acceptable for all ages.
The film opens in limited release in the United States on Friday, April 29, 2005. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
The film was shown as part of the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival (www.naatanet.org/festival), which ran March 10-20, 2005 in Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose, California.
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