By Diane Garrett - Variety - Georges Chamchoum has a simple mission: He wants to share the rich and varied offerings from Asian filmmakers with Hollywood players and beyond. A cultural counter force to Washington isolationism, he has lined up a wide array of screenings, panels and tributes for the third annual Asian World Film Festival. The eight-day event kicks off Oct. 25 in Culver City and concludes Nov. 2, sponsored in part by Variety. This year’s installment is the broadest yet in scope. Movies range from “Dearest Sister,” the first film from Laos submitted for a foreign-language Oscar, and “Little Gandhi,” Syria’s first entry in that category, to pioneering Hollywood drama “Joy Luck Club,” part of a beefed-up Asian-American focus.

Relations between Ankara and Washington have grown so fraught during recent months that the Pentagon should prepare alternatives to a key Turkish air base for regional operations, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey said Tuesday. U.S. forces have operated out of Incirlik Air Base since the 1950s, but growing distrust between the NATO allies — from U.S. backing of Kurdish militias in Iraq to its refusal to extradite U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen — has put that military relationship at risk, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman.

The Phoenix Suns had a brutal Sunday afternoon that included the firing of their head coach, Earl Watson, and a subtweet from their veteran Eric Bledsoe about wanting to get the heck out of there. Then Bledsoe was openly recruited by conference rival DeAndre Jordan on Twitter. It was all somehow uglier than the two 40-plus-point losses the team suffered in its opening week. Now-former assistant coach Mehmut Okur added onto the pile.

A Turkish bartender at Disney Springs has filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against STK restaurant, saying he was fired after a Yelp review accused him of making anti-American comments. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando said Serkan Sorkon was fired from STK Orlando in January after a negative posting about the bartender left on internet review site Yelp. The Yelp review, which is still online, said a Turkish bartender made disparaging comments about the United States, which Sorkon denies. “The Bartender, I don’t remember his name but he was from Turkey,” said the review from user “Joseph K. of Lakeland, FL.”