From Jen Sookfong Lee's blog:

BOYS ON FILM | DECEMBER 19, 2006

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an advance screening of Dragon Boys, a new mini-series set to air on CBC television on January 7 and 8. You see, this is the thing: I heard about this project some time ago and knew long before I saw it that it would be a two-part film that fictionalizes the world (and underworld) of Chinese Canadian gangs. "Hold up," I thought, "haven't we all heard enough about that?"

When I was a teenager in the early 90s, Asian youth gangs were big news. Terms like dai lo, snakehead and triad were being bandied about in the media everyday. One night, I was sitting in my friend's parked car, outside my own house when a police officer pulled up and demanded to see our identification, not trusting, of course, that I actually lived where I said I dd and suspecting that we were home invaders. To me, this was a lot of fear without a lot of substance.

Sure, we all knew one or two bad seeds who swaggered through the hallways at school or waited for their grilfriends across the street leaning on their sports cars. But I emerged from my youth, as did all of my friends, totally untouched by the gang experience. So, I had mixed feelings going into the Dragon Boys screening, fearing that I was going to watch three and a half hours of well-produced gang hysteria.

As it turns out, I was totally unprepared.

Dragon Boys is easily the best-acted and best-written television movie I've seen in years. The actors (including Byron Mann, Tzi Ma, Lawrence Chou, Eric Tsang, Steph Song, Michael Adamthwaite and my two favourites, Jean Yoon and Simon Wong) were so great at giving their characters the kind of depth most television shows can only dream of. The screenwriter and producer, Ian Weir (who, incidentally, taught me my very first term of creative writing at UBC, but I'm sure he has no memory of my crappy, crappy screenplay), wrote a sensitive and far-reaching script with multiple narratives, a little like Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.

Chinese Canadian gang activity is a sensitive topic, especially here in Vancouver where gangs are often linked to ethnicity in the media. Dragon Boys is about gangs, sure, but in the same way that The Sopranos is about the mafia. The gang thing is really a landscape, a kind of stage where all the characters and their plotlines converge.

(I should mention that Vancouver and Richmond play a huge role and are almost characters in and of themselves. The accuracy of how these two cities feed and play off each other is really very incisive.)

Am I gushing? Yes. Listen, I'm not a film critic and never will be. All I know is that this movie, which I expected to be either pedantic or hysterical, was neither of these things and is, in fact, something far greater. Flawed characters who sometimes rise to the occassion and sometimes fail miserably. Plotlines that reveal we are all connected. And a particularly Canadian cinematic portrayal of violence: few guns, no car chases, just suggestion. Brilliant.