Saturday, December 8, 2018

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Well this movie pissed me off in so many ways. This film is rather racist.  While it is has been exclaimed multiple times that this film contributes to diversity, having a film that features only a single race, with the nearly complete exclusion of others does not quality as diversity, unless you think that films like Blacula and Black Belt Jones contribute to diversity.

Another thing is that film is called Crazy Rich Asian, but it focuses solely on Chinese in Singapore.  While I understand that a large number of people use the term Asia to refer to East Asia and South East Asia, Asia is most obviously an extremely large continent, and by making a VERY broad generalization, in includes 5 very large cultural groups who live there, with the majority of Russia there, as well as more than half the the middle east, the stans, which were previously part of the USSR, South Asia (the Indian Subcontinent), and the aforementioned East Asia and South East Asia.  There is also a small peninsula sticking of the north western part of Asia, which for some inexplicable reason is given status as it's own continent, when several of the other groups inhabit areas larger than Europe.  While I realize that Europeans are the ones who made the maps and they wanted to give themselves special status, it irks me.

Anyhow, getting beyond that, and limiting our concept of Asia to cover both East Asia and South East Asia, it is still an area that includes a dozen countries.  The Asians of this film are ONLY Chinese, so the film would be more appropriately titled Crazy Rich Chinese, or an even more appropriate title would be Crazy Rich Chinese Singaporeans.  While Singapore itself does have 4 recognized ethnic groups which it draws it's four official languages from, this film not only completely ignores the other three groups, but they are completely absent from this film.

Even more so, the actors in this film don't feel very Singaporean to me.  While they spend the majority of the film in the land of la, no Singlish is heard.  And while a great number of Singaporean Chinese can speak Chinese, the film also has its American Chinese able to speak Chinese, which while quite possible, seems like a slight to all the Chinese Americans and Asian Americans who do not speak their ancestor's language.  In the case of most haoles, not only do they not speak the language of their ancestors, but no one gives that a second thought, even if they travel to the country of their ancestors.

One thing it does okay with is that kind of  "you have just taken your first step into a larger world" kind of thing, where the Rachael Chu enters a world she didn't know previously existed.  This is the same concept that was done with Star Wars (the Jedi Knights), Harry Potter (the world of magic) Men in Black (aliens living among us, in disguise), Shades of Gray and even Futurama (the WORLD OF TOMORROW) along with many other films.  While it worked well for Harry Potter for a while, as he encountered new and amazing things which he previously had no idea existed, the world that Rachel Chu enters is not as new or secret as that (there are dozens of reality shows that focus on rich people), so that the concept barely can be carried til the middle of the film.  I don't know how this concept will be extended into the next film in a way that would make it interesting, as there is nothing left to be surprising to her.

And of course it's good to see Singapore represented in a film thought the number of scenes that show actual Singapore in this film are extremely limited.

Let's be honest, just as was pointed out in the film, "small tits", which is much like this film has a flimsy concept to go on and isn't really able to be stretched out for an entire film.

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