Crazy Rich Asians

Man, this movie. I've written quite a bit about my thoughts on both the book and movie versions of Sibei High SES Siao Lang elsewhere, but I thought that a dedicated thread would allow me to unpack more of my crazy complicated feelings on it and help provide an opportunity for us all to learn about what the whole representation and diversity thing means on both sides of the Pacific, so here goes.

The Good

• It's a competent romcom, which is something special by itself.
• The lead couple is likeable, if nothing special. But Constance Wu and Henry Golding really pushed them past the romcom mould and made them feel like people that you'd be happy to hang out with.
• Michelle Yeoh is a goddamn force of nature in this movie. Every line she speaks is dripping in equal parts with parental burden and ice-cold menace. Every time she stares at someone, you can almost hear their soul scraping against the burning surface of the sun. And that moment towards the end where she trades stares with Tan Kheng Hua is a legit goosebump moment. I want to see her play off Toni Colette in the ultimate angry mum showdown.
• The mahjong scene is an absolute masterpiece. You get a fast-paced, emotionally loaded standoff between Rachel and Eleanor that digs up every last bit of their respective philosophies, set against a gorgeous indoor scene. The game itself is expertly choreographed and overflowing with symbolism. There's a detailed breakdown on Vox if you're interested, but I also noticed a couple of extra details:
  • Eleanor's hand relies heavily on the tiles taken from other players, representing the wealth and generational burdens she inherited, while Rachel's hand doesn't, symbolising her self-made nature.
  • Rachel also keeps a keeps a Red Dragon tile hidden, bearing the character "中" - as in "中华", zhōnghuá, representing the Chinese heritage she holds on to deep inside.
• Actually, the direction of the scenes is really good overall. The travelling gossip scene near the beginning is a masterpiece in visual exposition, the wedding scene at CHIJMES is straight out of a fairy tale, and Nick's proposal on the plane is a very satisfying pay-off to several layers of plot devices and elements introduced in the middle of the movie.
• I really like the colourful title cards and motion graphic effects used in various scenes.
• The soundtrack is smurges. As a swing dancing geek, I was rather glad to hear some recognisable swing jazz classics throughout the movie.
• There's not as much comedy as you might expect (a price for adapting the unabashedly anti-PC book into a progressive-minded production), but the jokes mostly strike home and are pretty well-timed. The party boat in particular is just hilariously tacky.
• Finally, I'm gonna talk more about my complicated feelings on the diversity aspect later, but I'm glad that this movie got made. I'm glad that Hollywood is opening itself up to diverse voices and giving minority creators more opportunities to tell their stories. It's not quite right to call this the first Asian-dominated cast in Hollywood since The Joy Luck Club (there's Better Luck Tomorrow, Slumdog Millionaire and a bunch of others that didn't see wide release), but it matters that this movie is getting the publicity it does, and it's great to know that more movies like it will be made in the future. I think that in 5-10 year's time, when the blockbuster lineup has a much larger array of minority stories to show, a lot of people who are being critical of this movie right now (myself included) will look back at it a lot more kindly.

The Less Good

• Nick is a relatively two-dimensional character, as far as male leads go. He triggers the plot by bringing Rachel home without telling her that his family is crazy rich, does the airport thing as per industry standard, and mostly just acts as a semi-blank canvas for Rachel and Eleanor to go off on. Henry Golding carries the role with raw charisma, but you can't help but notice how underwritten he is when you think about it.
  • If he'd tried that in real life, his ass would've totally landed in Changi Prison. Just saying.
• Astrid and Michael's subplot is rather underused. We barely see Michael interacting with the rest of the family, so we don't really feel the pressure that Astrid has to endure for marrying a dirty pleb. I don't know how else they should've dealt with it, though - that storyline is significantly more complex in the book, and they probably couldn't fit in more of it without squishing it against the main Rachel-Nick-Eleanor storyline.
• Oliver feels like a lazy use of the Gay Best Friend trope. He's basically there to provide exposition, help dress up the female lead and run social errands on behalf of his more privileged relatives. Not a good look.
• It's an inevitable consequence of the international casting, but the characters' accents are all over the place. Henry Golding and Gemma Chan sound super ang mo Anglo. Koh Chieng Mun overdoes the "heartland auntie" voice to a degree where a local comedy show would've told her to tone it down. Pierre Png sounds like he has something in his mouth, and his accent clashes quite sharply with Gemma's at times. Ken Jeong just plain doesn't bother, and Awkwafina's... whatever it's called... seriously rustled my jimmies. She doesn't sound like that in interviews. It's not something that you'd consider a problem in most movies, but it makes the cast's dynamic feel pretty damn disjointed.
  • Michelle Yeoh and the Singaporean actresses who play Nick's aunties strike a happy balance with a neutral-ish accent that nonetheless sounds discernibly Southeast Asian.
  • Also, I'm not a native Mandarin speaker, but Lisa Lu's accent sounds distinctly mainland rather than Singaporean. It's actually revealed later in the series that she's a Mandarin-speaking immigrant from Shanghai who married into the colonial elite class, so I'm kind of wondering whether they'll continue that storyline in the movie sequels, what with her being ancient and all.

Representation and Diversity

First off, I'm more familiar with the social justice discourse in Australia and Singapore (where I've spent most of my time for the past four years), but I think I get why this movie is such a big deal in Hollywood. It's a pretty damn empowering to know that people who look like you are seen, admired and desired by the world's movie-going population. And as a moviegoer, it's important to hear from people with different lives and experiences no matter where you are. But at the same time, I don't think that the movie managed to do justice to the folks it should've represented..

You might've stumbled upon this article where Singaporean journalist Kirsten Han lays out the disconnect between the movie's racial politics and the country's own, where ethnic Chinese citizens enjoy a position of majority and privilege over their Malay and Indian compatriots. It's another baggage from the satirical and politically incorrect novel, but it's also a point where the movie had room to improve.

Principally speaking, I think it's unfair to expect a single movie to carry all that burden. Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of The Sympathizer, wrote that the real issue lies in the lack narrative plenitude. Asian-American stories are only seen through the lens of the few works that break out into pop culture, and those works are unfairly saddled with the responsibility of representing the community and achieving mainstream success. But at the same time, Crazy Rich Asians isn't just an Asian-American movie - nor is it just an innocuous romcom. The discussion around this movie - by the creators, marketers, fans and media - is couched in the language of inclusion and diversity. It doesn't ask to be enjoyed for its surface quality, it demands to be looked at closely and held to scrutiny. And more importantly, it's set in Singapore, where the President looks like this, the Deputy PM looks like this and the star Olympic gold medallist looks like this. The country is built on the backs of over a million migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, mainland China, and many other countries. It's a real, complex society with its own set of social issues and racial baggages. And by choosing to tell the story here, with Southeast Asian talent on display,^note As opposed to, say, a fictional island called Wakanina populated entirely by ethnic Chinese billionaires the movie becomes an Asian-American and Asian one. In that light, I think it's fair to hold it up to a magnifying glass and see whether its claim to representation extends to the other side of the Pacific.

True to the book, darker-skinned Asians are only seen as the background help. There's a scene where the armed Sikh guards at Nick's mansion are basically portrayed as Scary Dark-skinned People - which is slightly better than in the book, where they're mislabeled as Gurkhas, but still, it's pretty gross. My Chinese-Filipino girlfriend spilleth her drink at that part. It's stated that Nick's family gets rich from property development, so there's a pretty disturbing real-life undertone to that scene.

Some people have argued that it's fair to exclude minority faces, given the story's subject. But you know what? The frustrating thing is that there's so much they could've done to address that without even touching the main story. Those Sikh extras could've gotten actual lines. The hawker centre scene shows Nick ordering his food in Malay, so why not throw in a few shots of the Malay uncles and aunties he's speaking to? The part where Rachel and Peik Lin share a brunch at Chinatown could've been shot at Arab Street or Little India instead. Maybe don't have Eleanor order around her Filipino housekeepers in Cantonese. And so on. Instead, the movie trims off Singapore's multiethnic heritage in favour of a pastiche of various Chinese cultures, which essentially turns its crazy diverse society into a theme park version of 1930s Shanghai.

You could uncharitably interpret it as the Asian-American creators appropriating native Asian viewpoints and projecting their community's (very real) issues and identities onto them. But I honestly don't think that's the case. This movie got a lot right in its portrayal of a diaspora Asian struggling to be accepted as fully Asian in addition to American. The call for extras emailed to my swing dancing group asked for applicants from all ethnicities. While it's likely good for Asian-American representation, there's something lost in the transmission - whether by oversight or genuine lack of understanding - that held it back from becoming a truly great piece of Asian representation. So at this point, I think that the responsibility falls to us to do our own homework and learn about all the ways that media representation is a global issue, not just an American one. And the movie's release gave us a valuable opportunity to start the discussion, I guess.

Okay, I'm pretty invested in the subject because I'm a museum volunteer who spent a semester writing a paper on race relations across the greater Nusantara, but you can also read from folks who have spent a lot longer studying the issue than I have:

• Kwame Anthony Appiah gives the skinny on the history of race relations in Singapore.
• Real-life Crazy Rich Asians discuss the movie's accuracy, tell haters to eat cake.
• Malaysian blogger Sam Cheh writes about the specificity of Asian representation and the colonial roots of the movie's imagery.
• "This is so sad, Alexa play 'Tian Mi Mi'": Poet Pooja Nansi (an IRL acquaintance) writes about minority erasure, and whether Hollywood representation is something for minorities to strive for.
• On the flipside, Connie Wang writes about how weird it is that an Asian story ended up being written, filmed and marketed as an Asian-American one.
• Mimi Wong writes about what it means for Asians to be portrayed as "crazy rich".

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 28th 2018 at 7:57:25 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

So I am a Latinx viewer of this movie, though I live in a town with a 67% Asian-American population. There were parts that felt familiar to me, the outdoor dinner scene recalling visits to restaurants on the south main street, and the scene of the family’s Bible study bringing to mind the local Chinese-Christian churches.

Female Gaze is very prevalent in this movie, both in closeups of the shirtless male leads and the times they're just casually shirtless during scenes. It causes the boat party to feel even more tacky, since suddenly the POV changes to Male Gaze of the swimsuited women very jarringly.

Also concur that the mahjong game is a stunning climax.

As for Awkwafina... yeah, her “blaccent” is just a heap of Unfortunate Implications. One’s that weren’t necessary, considering the character is already written in a funny way and hadn’t lived in America for long. This is a good article on the subject. It’s a fairly common phenomenon for Black culture to be appropriated like so. Among my own people, it’s sometimes done to diminish the presence of Afro-Latinx members. Native comedy group the 1491s also satirized tribesmen who attempt to perform white or black culture. (Video uses r-word once.)

Astrid’s subplot made me wonder if it was meant to be a dark mirror of Rachel and Henry’s story, where the poorer spouse simply can’t accustom themselves to this elite world. It could’ve made for some higher stakes of what could go wrong in the future, but instead it barely intersects with the main story. “They’re happy, then they’re not. The end.”

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 2nd 2018 at 10:05:39 AM

I posted some thoughts in the Diversity & Representation thread, but in short, this movie was really important to me. I've watched Asian-Asian and indie Asian diaspora films at home, but seeing this in the movie theatre was a completely different experience. Hell, just seeing the poster at the movie theatre was something I've never seen before.

On the plane scene, Nick bought a ticket to NY, so he probably would've been fine. It's not like he broke into the airport or anything.

I liked how they used accents as another way of differentiating the characters. Nick and Astrid (and Colin and Araminta) all have very posh-sounding English accents which drives in how upper-class they are. Michael's Singapore accent is another way to contrast him with Astrid and to mark him as different from the rest of the family. Rachel is also flying solo in her scenes with the Young family as the only one with an American accent (Peik Lin and her dad have American accents and are on her side, so to speak. And yeah, Peik Lin's accent was... bad). And Eleanor of course has all the authority of 2000 years of Asian parental guilt behind her.

On representation and how the movie was marketed: One 2-hour romcom was never going to represent the entirety of the Asian-American experience, let alone all Asian experiences. And yes, the creators have been pushing how important this movie is in interviews about the film, because it is a huge moment. But they haven't been talking about it as the be all end all of Asian representation! Every time they've spoken about it, everyone from Kwan to Chu to all of the actors have said it's the beginning of a movement. It's one movie to open the door for many more that will tell a much wider variety of stories. And they've been putting their money where their mouths are on this - Jon Chu, Henry Golding, and Harry Shum Jr. all bought out theatres for Searching last weekend. Anecdotally, Asian-Americans in the industry have been saying/tweeting that at least 2 Asian-American projects have been greenlit since opening weekend and casting departments have been looking for more Asians. So, I'm cautiously optimistic that the ball will keep on rolling.

Hope so. The thing is that "starting a movement" could really go either way - take a look at how Hollywood has never really gotten past the evil sheikh stereotypes that started in 1921 in its portrayal of the Middle East. If representation matters, then misrepresentation could have far-reaching effects too. For forty years, Hollywood's idea of Southeast Asia has been rice fields and the Vietnam War, so there's a lot of expectation riding on it from the other way. The path to inclusion isn't always pretty, and it took a lot of yellowfaces and shutting down of Asian-American creators like Sessue Hayakawa for Hollywood to arrive at this point. And to be fair, the movie probably wouldn't have to shoulder all this burden if people hadn't been using movies as their primary sources on foreign cultures in the first place.

I'm wondering about how they're going to tackle China Rich Girlfriend, to be honest. It's mainly set in Shanghai and heavily features the fùèrdài class, with whom my real-life experience has been... somewhat less than positive. I'm not sure how Jon Chu and co. are going to handle that without running afoul of the Communist Party apparatus, but fingers crossed.

One of the local friends I watched it with is actually named Intan (Malay for "jewel"), so our group burst into silly giggles when Kris Aquino's character was introduced.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

I mean, I think the major difference here is that Asian diaspora creators are at the heart of things this time - the movies and TV shows that have been making waves this summer are all directed and/or written by Asians, they don't just have them in major roles. You have Kevin Kwan, Jon Chu, and Adele Lim in charge of Crazy Rich Asians, Aneesh Chaganty directing Searching, and Jenny Han writing To All The Boys I've Loved Before. So there's more control about how people are portrayed.

I haven't read the 2nd or 3rd books yet, so can't comment too much on what I expect from them. But Crazy Rich Asians has already made a whole lot of money without China's market, so maybe it's not a big concern for them?

From my perspective, how successful the AAs-in-film movement will be on bringing out representation for all its cultures depends on how much communication will allowed to flow between the various parties. I hope the activists and producers within the movement will see the criticism raised as new opportunities to spread, not weights they would rather ignore.

It could very much end up the mold of old Hollywood not wanting to move from easy stereotypes or unequal activism in the form of "actually Scar Jo represents all women", but the Internet has rapidly increased the speed and accessibility of criticism. What remains is seeing how much folks will actually listen to it.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 30th 2018 at 12:02:20 PM

They are! And it's cool. The thing that sets Crazy Rich Asians apart, and I think most people forget, is that it's not just an Asian-American story. It's also an Asian story set in Asia. And when trying to tell the latter, Asian diaspora creators aren't immune from their own misconceptions and biases - I had some experience with this exact issue myself while working on a student musical.^note Yeah, the reverse also applies, but something like Kal Ho Naa Ho isn't going to wield the global influence that CRA currently has.

Throughout this movie, you can spot the threads where Jon M. Chu and co. replaced Southeast Asian culture and people (even Southeast Asian Chinese) with facades of Chinese heritage that they're more familiar with. That's... kind of what cultural appropriation is like. I'm sure that the intentions were benign. Maybe it's to put the central theme of Chinese vs American values in a spotlight, and to conform better to mainstream audience's conception of "Asian". But it's not without its externalities. Folks of East Asian extraction in the West see vignettes of Singapore with the minorities, migrant workers and non-Chinese signage kept just out of focus, see artefacts of other Asian cultures blissfully unlabelled, think all is well and then proceed to shut down Southeast Asians who criticise it (just look at the replies to this WaPo tweet).

As if the real Singapore is a stand-in for myriad East Asian homelands. As if the country wasn't originally founded by the Johor Sultanate, which even to this day owns the derelict Tyersall Park estate where Nick's mansion is located in the books. As if there's no space for diversity within the scope of the story the movie set out to tell.

And that sucks for everyone. Asian-American filmmakers had to jump through all sorts of hurdles for the right to tell their own stories, and they risk losing it the moment they fail to live up to unreasonable expectations. The motherlands are distant and tricky to tell a marketable story in - hard enough in Hong Kong and Taiwan, even harder in the politically impenetrable establishment of the People's Republic, which is ironically all too receptive to selling out its own heritage for pocket change. Then they got the opportunity to tell an Asian story that sounds culturally relevant, and surprise. It's set in a part of Asia that most of the diaspora only know in passing. A place that's undergoing its own process of self-interrogation on race relations and equality.^note It's pretty telling that while the Crazy Rich Asians novel currently tops Singapore's best-selling fiction list, the top non-fiction title is Teo You Yenn's This Is What Inequality Looks Like.

It probably sucks for Asian-Americans to have their big coming-out project so thoroughly pulled apart by fellow Asians. And it sucks for Southeast Asians who'll have to deal with Westerners putting their identities against the litmus test of a summer romcom. But I guess it's a necessary part of the greater inclusivity project. This movie did well in telling pieces and parts of the story, but it still falls short by filling in the gaps with erasure and uncritical portrayals of ugly truths.^note It's not even that the movie doesn't bother to portray inequality - it's that it does so without stepping outside its dreamy fairy-tale construct. We're supposed to feel for "down-to-earth" Astrid when she tells her army of uniformed Filipino maids to hide a couple bags of jewellery worth more than their cumulative lifetime earnings, but... I don't know. I've worked with people from both ends of that power ladder and the moment felt too real, repulsively so, for me to continue to register her as our POV character. It took an inherently radical story and repackages it in a conservative, almost Disney-esque way... which was probably necessary in some ways, but it could've done better. Its follow-up movies should do better. And both creators and viewers should be part of that ongoing process - to continuously learn, introspect, and reiterate.

The second book features a mainland Chinese pharmaceutical/political clan whose patriarch turns out to be Rachel's biological father, and whose young heir gets into continuous level 9000 debauchery in London, Paris and Hong Kong, and we get to see a lot of overseas Chinese prejudice against the mainland new money. It's not exactly political, but it still involves a biting satire of the Chinese political upper crust, which might complicate the use of Chinese locations and actors - not to mention any Chinese money riding on the production. It's certainly not impossible - one of this year's biggest Chinese movies, Dying To Survive (我不是药神), is a very politically-minded satire. The third book goes back to Singapore and features more non-Chinese characters.

Good point. A lot of the conversation leading up to the movie's release was about giving minority-led stories the same opportunities as Old Hollywood. Minority creators shouldn't have to stop making movies the moment one of them falls short of expectations, and knowing how difficult it was to get this movie financed and produced (there were talks of making Rachel white early on), it's probably right to be concerned that Hollywood will take the criticism as a sign that movies like this are too politically toxic to make, rather than to do it better in the future.

I've already written my opinion on the co-authorship of Asian and diaspora Asian stories above, but within the scope of Asian-American representation, I think that future works would do well to move away from the model minority stereotype. There's a part in the movie where Wye Mun speaks broken English to Rachel in a manner that evokes the FOB immigrant stereotype. That contrasts with how almost every Asian in the movie is depicted as well-off, high-achieving and thoroughly Westernised, and I think that future Hollywood productions ought to avoid seeing that as the only kind of Asian that they could profitably depict.

There's some precedent for alternative modes of representation: Gran Torino paints a complex picture of a struggling Asian-American neighbourhood, and Jian Yang from Silicon Valley, though still rooted in some FOB tropes as well as modern Chinese stereotypes, manages to be a fairly original character with his own agency and character arc. It's not antithetical to the inclusivity project to show minority characters who are struggling or less Westernised, so long as they're portrayed as people and not props.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

The fact that the film is a criticial success and a massive hit at the box office probably makes them feel better about things.

Also, one probably shouldn't expect migrant workers in a film called Crazy Rich Asians that is about crazy rich Asians. If anyone makes a film called Singapore Migrant Workers, that film probably won't have a lot of super-rich people.

Yeah, that's actually what I was getting at. Migrant workers in Singapore number in the millions - you will run into them on a daily basis unless you spend your whole life cloistered inside one of those now-extinct jungle mansions and don't get your grass cut or your plumbing checked or whatever. Property developer clans like the Youngs in particular would depend on construction workers from India, Bangladesh and mainland China to get their hotels and condos built. It takes the deliberate effort to stage, shoot and edit the movie in a specific way for them to not show up in the frame, even incidentally. People who haven't been there wouldn't know that. People who get their idea of Southeast Asia from this movie wouldn't know that. That's why representation matters.

The movie does actually show Filipino migrant workers as the Youngs' household staff. That's... a bit uncomfortable but not inauthentic. Earlier on I suggested that the movie could've presented them less as props and more as people with some extra lines and minor changes. The writers didn't need to make them full protagonists to portray them as... well, people. If the movie isn't about the lived experiences of non-crazy rich Asians, then it still could've done more to avoid problematic tropes in its limited depiction of them.

Yes, this movie set out to tell one specific line of Asian narrative. It's also sold on promises of diversity and representation. Maybe it's not responsible for telling other kinds of stories, but there's still so much room for diversity within the scope of the story it's telling. There's a whole spectrum of representation from "yellowface" to "background prop" to "fully realised main character", and I feel that the movie is still stuck near the wrong end of the spectrum despite having the narrative wiggle room to handle that.

Not a local! Just that I've been here for quite a few years now and talked about the representation stuff at length with local friends both before and after the movie came out. It's actually been cordially received overall despite being a cool movie to make fun of in the literary/humanities spheres - just that for me it's kinda hard to unsee the real-life subtexts that manage to sneak into the story once I spot them. >_>

My thoughts exactly, glad you enjoyed it! Hoping that our respective homeboys Ronny Chieng and Remy Hii are going to get bigger parts in the sequel, as their characters do in the book.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 3rd 2018 at 7:10:38 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Indeed. Doesn't seem fair to fault a movie for not being a completely different movie.

I mean... I’m gonna listen to the person from Singapore here.

That seems like an entirely fair point. I actually went to Singapore, when I was 13. My sister worked there for a few years, and we went out to visit when she had her first child. I don’t remember much, but I definitely agree that a pretty big chunk of the people in the street were Malay or otherwise non-Chinese. The scary brown man thing with the Sikh guards and Awkwafina’s accent were both... cringe.

I don’t think I have much else to contribute to the discussion. I saw the movie yesterday; I quite liked it. Michelle Yeoh is fantastic, and Constance Wu was delightful. The mah-jong scene was really well done. I loved the emphasis on family, and the dialogue between tradition and independence, between old country and new country. That being said, I understand the reservations that other people have expressed about representation in the film. The film can’t be all things to all people, but they could’ve tried a little harder. I personally don’t feel like condemning it (which, as a white woman, it’s not necessarily my place, and I’m not starved for representation) but I can see why some Southeast Asian people feel disappointed.

Thanks for your analysis, eagle. I concur completely.

As a Chinese-Malaysian, I admit I'm not sure if I'm part of the demographic the movie aims for ^*  For various reasons, namely that many Chinese here never really assimilated, we're a target market for mainland/Hong Kong/Taiwanese works, and have decent representation in local government, media and businesses , and I can recognize the moments its depiction of the region aren't perfect.

But it doesn't take away from the strong performances, the research done, the story and message, and of course its importance in terms of representation. I look forward to the sequel and all of the possibilities this milestone hopefully opens up.

Edited by Alycus on Sep 3rd 2018 at 6:00:56 AM

Well, sure. But this particular objection seems an odd one. The movie doesn't have any migrant workers in it, because it isn't a story about migrant workers. It also doesn't have any Italians.

Imagine a movie about Crazy Rich New Yorkers, where every single crowd scene in New York has zero non-white people, even though 55% of NYC is non-white.

You've just described quite a bit of American cinema. And one wonders just how much the cause of diversity is furthered by having Singaporean migrant workers as extras.

All this is, is criticizing a movie that is a certain story for not being a completely different story. It would be equally justified to be mad at Crazy Rich Asians for not being a murder mystery.

1) That’s really more a valid condemnation of American cinema then a good excuse. Crowd scenes should be reflective of the time and place. It’s no less troubling to have almost no non-Chinese extras in crowd scenes, effectively erasing 1/4 of Singapore’s population, than it is to have crowd scenes that are only 17% women.

2) False equivalency. Asking for crowds that reflect the nation’s demographics in a romcom is not demanding that it become a murder mystery.

Edited by wisewillow on Sep 3rd 2018 at 12:42:36 PM

But what do you suppose you've achieved if you throw in random poor people into this movie? What story has been told if you make sure a couple of migrants are on the sidewalk when Constance Wu is going to a restaurant?

Again, if you want to see Singaporean migrant workers in a movie, make a movie called Singapore Migrant Workers that is about Singapore migrant workers. Calling for random background poor people in Crazy Rich Asians is criticizing an apple for not being an orange.

But in any case we're just arguing on the margins as the film is a massive success. And apparently most people in Singapore aren't too troubled by the absence of migrant workers in the movie, as it's a huge hit in Singapore too.

EDIT: Also huge in the Phillippines.

Edited by jamespolk on Sep 3rd 2018 at 10:05:00 AM

Uhh... a film that reflects the reality of the place where it is set???

And if you want a movie without them, don't set your movie in Singapore.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Because Singaporean migrant workers only exist in Singaporean dedicated migrant work places and completely vanish into thin air if they step outside them.

Meanwhile, every black person in the US can spontaneously combust if they appear anywhere outside a blaxploitation film.

No, you can make a movie about crazy rich Asians instead, set it in Singapore, and make a lot of money.

And suffer righteous criticism for it. If the box office rendered all criticisms null and void, X-Men Origins: Wolverine would be the masterpiece of the 21st century.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

To be clear, I definitely want to acknowledge that I don't going to have the clearest perspective on this movie, and eagleoftheninth's criticisms are probably definitely right. I'm a trying to be a little more chilled out [dunno if this is the right phrase. less scared?] about it now that it's been out a bit longer.

The scene with the guards made me uncomfortable even on my first viewing. And Awkwafina's accent was super unnecessary. Her best line in the movie ("I'm not an animal, Rachel.") didn't have it. Her natural delivery is great, her normal accent would have been just as hilarious.

I've seen some people suggest that they could have had white actors playing the servants instead, but I'm not sure if that would have helped much because it would have just erasing even more SE Asians from the movie, right? Again, I haven't read the 2nd and 3rd books, but would it be possible for them to deviate a bit and cast an Iban (or Iban/Chinese) actor as Nick's dad? Would it be a good way to acknowledge Henry Golding's heritage and have more SE Asians in the movie?

Something I've realized on later viewings is that Oliver, on the surface, seems like a standard gay best friend character but his presence in the movie and how other characters treat him is really important to me. At least from my experience as a queer Asian Canadian, half the reason I haven't come out to the extended family is the fear of losing my already tenuous connection to them. But Oliver is out and he's a part of the family. He was in the dumpling scene when Edison and Alistair weren't, with Nick and Astrid, and he's in the family's row at the wedding, and he's at the party at the end. I dunno, it's small stuff, but it was nice to see.

Cute thing: 2nd gen Asian Americans are bringing their immigrant parents to see the movie and bonding. I can attest to the fact that it's hard to get my mom to go to the movies with me - she'll go see Chinese movies sometimes when they get shown here, but it's pretty rare for us both to be interested in a movie. She's a big Michelle Yeoh fan (trying to get her to watch Discovery now) and she likes Constance Wu from when I showed her Fresh Off The Boat, and it was cool to see it with her. Also, not mentioned in the article, but there's been a definite trend of people taking pictures of their parents in front of the poster doing the same pose as Constance Wu and Henry Golding and it is adorable.

This was really sweet to read: Jon M. Chu's letter to Coldplay, which he wrote to convince them to allow the movie to use their song Yellow in the closing scene. I loved Katherine Ho's performance, it's right behind Kina Grannis' as my favourite part of the soundtrack. My mom really liked the range of songs they picked, she said that some were a lot older and would have been popular with her parents' generation, and some were big when she was a kid, and some were more modern. I knew I heard some of them before but I didn't know where.

Also I loved that Kina Grannis got a cameo. It felt like a nod to my generation ie those of us that were born/grew up after The Joy Luck Club, All-American Girl, and Better Luck Tomorrow. We all went to Youtube to look for representation and I don't know if it was intentional but I remember seeing Kina Grannis in Wong Fu Productions shorts when I was a teen. My theatre on my first viewing was mostly other Asian Canadians around my age, and the crowd EXPLODED when she appeared on screen. In a really loud and excited showing, I think she got more cheers than any other moment.

93% at Rotten Tomatoes.

As far as the suggestion that setting a movie in Singapore requires one to feature the underclass—do all movies set in Los Angeles have to be set on Skid Row?

Edited by jamespolk on Sep 3rd 2018 at 3:24:36 AM

Getting a good score at rotten tomatoes is not the same thing as a film having no problematic aspects. Hell, if you want an extreme example, Gone with the Wind has a 92%; that doesn’t make it any less despicably racist.

Edit: in response to this:

Uh... you know that not all minorities in LA live in Skid Row, right? If you film in LA on any random street, there’s gonna be non-white people. Ditto for Singapore- they don’t lock all non-Chinese inhabitants in a single neighborhood. And maybe we should listen to the person who posted earlier (eagleoftheninth) that, y’know, lived in Singapore?

Edited by wisewillow on Sep 3rd 2018 at 6:31:32 AM