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ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUES
IS HOLLYWOOD UNDERMINING CHOW YUN-FAT?
f it's a sin to make ambidexterous mayhem look stylish and virtuous, Chow Yun-Fat was once eternally damned. Blame it on the camera. Its slow-mo infatuation with his every grin and grimace in John Woo classics like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled had made him the world's most idolized action star long before his 1996 leap to Hollywood.
Chow's Hollywood projects have undermined rather than enhanced his godlike stature.
Take The Replacement Killers (1996). Its plot was contrived and sterile to a surreal degree. Add to that the look-but-don't-touch romance with leading lady Mira Sorvino and a box office flop was assured.
The Corruptor (1998) did even less for Chow. Not only was he cast as a cop who became corrupted for no good reason, but the action was set in the kind of squalid fleshpot one sees only in the poorest of third-world countries and the Chinatowns of schoolboy fantasies. The coup de grace were jokes casting aspersions on Asian male sexuality. Strike two!
Then came Anna and the King (1999) in which Chow donned embroidered silk buffoonery to play a backward monarch held in thrall by a western schoolteacher. The reworked plot wasn't as ludicrous as the original King and I, but the remake cut Asia's top male superstar to fit the old Hollywood cosmology in which Asians are a quaint race in need of western enlightenment. Strike three!
After that Chow might have been reduced to playing wizened oriental masters dropping metaphysical pearls on young white heroes in training had Taiwanese director Ang Lee not come along to cast him as a legendary swordsman in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Despite its modest production and promotion budgets, the movie slashed all expectations and fairly flew up to become the year's most profitable release.
No coincidence, some suspect, that the role that saved Chow's chestnuts was conceived and written by an Asian and filmed with an all-Asian cast in the world's most pro-Asian nation -- China.
It isn't so much that Hollywood consciously sets out to undermine Asia's top male superstar, argue some. It's just that its imagination has been stewed for so long in its own racist malarkey that it is incapable of letting an Asian leading man play a truly sexy and heroic role. Look how it turned Jackie Chan into a tool (fool?) of Asian-male-bashing comedy in Rush Hour 2. And Hollywood may yet get its apparent wish to deep-six Chow Yun-Fat. In early 2002 Chow starts shooting Bulletproof Monk, a cult comic adaptation, in which he plays an aging master passing on warrior wisdom to a young white hero.
Is Hollywood undermining Chow Yun-Fat's action-superstar stature?
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WHAT YOU SAY
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(Updated
Tuesday, Apr 1, 2008, 06:07:36 PM)
In case anyone is really interested Jackie Chan just got named actor of the year by none other than Variety. I don't think that is doing so bad! He has been paying his dues to Hollywood for a lot of years and he deserves to be honored by it. As far as Chow Yun-Fat..his great acting ability, good looks and charm will be recognized in time. Actually his good looks and charm have been recognized in "People Magazine" several times. He has only been in Hollywood for about 5 years and he has been a "new kid in town" as he likes to say. I'm hoping that he and Woo working together this year in "Men of Destiny" (the lastest title for this movie) will be the superstar break he needs.
Hollywood only recognizes people for their ability to create box office revenue. Right now it is driven by a young audience with lots of money to go to movies more than once and buy and rent videos. Perhaps "Bulletproof Monk" with some young actors in it will create some good box office for Chow.
Lacy G
Lacyguymon@aol.com
Tuesday, December 25, 2001 at 17:29:54 (PST)
YOU GO GIRLO!
WhyTheyDoThat
Monday, December 24, 2001 at 03:03:29 (PST)
You can't blame it all on the Hollywood Producers. Chow and Chan weren't forced to take those stupid roles. Just because good roles are hard to come by, doesn't mean you have to sacrifice and accept stupid movie roles. There are lots of American actors avoiding mainstream Hollywood movies and doing art nouveau and small-budget good films. Chow is rich enough and famous enough that he doesn't have to put up with this type of crap. His Hong Kong agents and film friends should have researched the US market properly and told him that stupid movie roles + huge stars do not guarantee box office hit, plus tarnishes the star's movie career in America. It might be different in Asian countries, where people most often ignore the plot and acting, and only focus on the star appeal and/or action. But it's different in America. This Hollywood typecasting crap applies not only to Asians, but to other minorities as well. What do you expect when the majority of the film producers, directors, Hollywood power folks are white and jewish? Westeners get stupid typecasting in Hong Kong movies as well. Even here in America, white folks get written up as stupid idiots in black shows such as the Hughleys. So it goes both ways. Just hope that Mr. Chow would get some sense into him (same for Jackie!) to stop taking stupid US movie roles and stick to H.K. or Chinese films.
Bokchoy Brain
Saturday, December 22, 2001 at 17:54:34 (PST)
WhyTheyDoThat,
That's right. Most whites cannot accept the idea of Asians being as tall as they are. This is why they want to cast the shortest and ugliest Asians possible in acting and the modelling world--so that everyone can say, 'See, Asians are shorter and less attractive than whites.'
And this is why shorter whites will sometimes resent you if you are taller than them: believe me, I've seen enough chihuahua white women at 5' glaring at me from head to toe, because I'm lots taller than them at 5'5".
Asian Dominatrix
Monday, December 17, 2001 at 09:21:20 (PST)
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