Long distance relationships are never easy, but as Randall Park‘s upcoming directorial debut Shortcomings will show, they’re even trickier if you’re not technically in a relationship anymore, still hung up on your ex, and also outright refusing to acknowledge your own…well, shortcomings. This is the predicament that will Ben (Justin H. Min) when the film opens in theaters on August 4th, and by the looks of things in a new exclusive-to-Collider clip, he is really not handling things well.
The clip sees Ben and his best friend Alice (Sherry Cola) out for lunch, where Ben is venting about his longtime girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki), when the two are interrupted by the arrival of their food. Alice strikes up a flirty conversation with the server while Ben attempts to get ketchup out of an empty bottle, his surly attitude and outburst for a condiment refill interrupting the two women, who rightfully give him a dirty look. Little wonder Miko broke up with him.
Ben Behaving Badly
In her review of the film, Collider‘s Therese Lacson said of Ben “Min’s own performance as Ben balances the nuances of the character, able to pull him back just shy of being an outright asshole, while still maintaining the prickly personality that is at the heart of the character.” The sentiment is somewhat echoed by Min himself, who in an interview at Sundance Film Festival with Collider‘s Steve Weintraub said: “he is incredibly cynical and hypercritical at times, but at the end of the day there’s a heart inside of him that is, unfortunately, wrought with a lot of insecurity and paralyzed by his own perfectionism.”
It’s this grounded aspect of the film that also appealed to Cola, who in that same interview said of the film:
“It’s literally just people, and I think that’s the most universal thing about this movie. It’s so human, and we’ve never had a movie like this. When we watched it, I was like, “Whoa.” I was blown away because it felt so modern and overdue, yet it felt like this classic that we’ve been missing for so long.”
Along with Min, Cola, and Maki, Park‘s film also stars Debby Ryan, Jacom Batalon, and Sonoya Mizuno. Shortcomings hits theaters on August 4. Check out the exclusive clip and the film’s synopsis below:
Ben, a struggling filmmaker, lives in Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film festival. When he’s not managing an arthouse movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blonde women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his best friend Alice, a queer grad student with a serial dating habit. When Miko moves to New York for an internship, Ben is left to his own devices, and begins to explore what he thinks he might want.
via Collider