As a youngster growing up in Montego Bay, Jamaica, I was a thin, spindly child with an overly large head. But I was feared by the bullies in my school.Mainly because the most popular show on JBC, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, was Kung Fu starring David Carradine. Carradine spoke softly, mostly in garbled fortune cookie dialogue, and then would proceed to beat the crap out of anyone who threatened him.So basically, a white guy playing a Chinese martial arts expert saved my life.Lack of diversity in Hollywood isn’t a new thing. A University of Southern California study of film and television last year showed that all minorities were grossly underrepresented. But Asians fell well behind other people of colour, including Blacks and Latinos.Still, I was grateful for all that whitewashing by Warner Bros., even though the role was allegedly stolen from Bruce Lee who first pitched the idea for himself. (And how awesome would that show have been?) But it saved my nerdy bookworm self from a thrashing. It was perhaps the first time I realized the power of Hollywood to shape narrative. My narrative.So decades later, along comes Crazy Rich Asians. The movie, which opened Wednesday, is being hailed as a watershed mark in cinema. Finally, the first big movie in decades to have an all-Asian cast and director who are breaking barriers and shaping our own stories. It has a stellar 92 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Could this be our Black Panther moment? If only.Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t blow away stereotypes. It reinforces them. There is little room for subtlety here — the title underlines the mission statement. Asians are rich, vulgar and clueless.The movie is adapted from the book of the same name, the first instalment of Singapore author Kevin Kwan’s trilogy, and like the movie, it’s a Holt Renfrew catalog thinly disguised as a rom-com. It slavishly name drops every designer brand imaginable. It is the literary equivalent of ...
|
