Jack Lee is a 39-year-old Korean American who’s convinced himself that he’s a failure. He didn’t become a doctor, which would have been the mark of success for his immigrant parents, he hasn’t given his father the grandchildren he desires, his short films have flopped, he bombed out of writing code and is now working in low-level IT with a couple of losers. Seemingly hopeless, Jack sits down in front of a camera and spins out his philosophy of loss and despair, then returns to his life, which, of course, gets worse with few signs of it getting better.
That’s the setup for “East Bay,” a smartly observed, gently funny dramedy from writer/director Daniel Yoon, who also stars as the hangdog Jack. Jack winds up living in a closet in the apartment shared by his loser co-workers, pot-addled Tim (Edmund Sim) and video-game addict Stuart (Destry Miller) because his live-in girlfriend, Beth (Melissa Pond), gets pregnant by another guy. The other two prime players: Sara (Constance Wu of “Crazy Rich Asians”), a film festival programmer who puts Jack’s newly completed feature film — “so bad it’s good,” he hopes — into the Dim Sum Dance Film Festival and thinks Jack is cute; and Vivanti (Kavi Ramachandran Ladnier of “NCIS: Los Angeles”), a public access TV “medical intuitive” who, after an interview in which she claims “we’re all God,” becomes Jack’s spiritual adviser.
The kicker here: Sara and Vivanti are beauties who tussle, as it were, over .
