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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
[This page is closed to new input. --Ed.]
(Updated
Tuesday, Apr 1, 2008, 06:07:36 PM)
Pokey,
Jacky Chan will not change the style of acting he has been doing since the 70's. He basically filled Bruce Lee vacuum in HK.
Jackie in the HK movie scene is another one in the crowd. So he is not seen as so foolish as in USA where we only have Jet Li to compare him to.
His style to try to promote a non-violence. He does not kill or viciously hurt anyone in his movies. If you watch his movies closely it is all about defense and how to escape the situation.
Jacky even runs back and forth between HK and hollywood to make movie for his different audiences (Aisa and USA).
As for Chow Yun Fat. I don't know about his success in the USA. Most of his big roles in HK, all involved the Chinese Organized Crime. I don't think it would be a good idea to have the popular media in the USA promote Chinese Americans like Italian American, a bunch of mobsters.
AC dropout
Monday, January 07, 2002 at 14:35:45 (PST)
Chow Yun Fat has been around for as long as i can remember - in old Hong Kong movies (I'm 25 and grew up in the U.S.). All the guys that I grew up with idolized him. It was a compliment if guys referred to another guy as Chow Yun Fat because he's good looking or is a Playboy. It's a shame that because of the return of Hong Kong to China that Chow Yun Fat and other Hong Kong stars had to come to Hollywood to try to continue their acting careers.Chow Yun Fat will never be well received or as coddled in Hollywood as the aging Caucasian leading men like Sean Connery and Robert Redford.
asian female
Monday, January 07, 2002 at 14:09:03 (PST)
Chow Yun-Fat is destined to be a Hollywood casualty because Hollywood does not create the kind of roles that Asian men can thrive in -- the kind of roles Chow thrives in. The article got it right that it is no coincidence it took an Asian director who can see Asian men as more than the "sage to the white hero" or "cute buffoon" to put his career back on solid footing. (An Asian director working outside of Hollywood, I might add).
And even after "Crouching Tiger", look at the crap they're funneling Chow back into. "Bulletproof Monk"?! Another turn as a sage to the white hero? Sounds like the same old crap on the scale of "Corruptor" and "Replacement Killers".
Jackie Chan might have been named actor of the year by Variety, but so what? Hattie MacDaniel won a best supporting actress Oscar for her Aunt Jemima role in "Gone With the Wind". Just because you "make it" playing a buffoon doesn't give it any more legitimacy. It's about time Jackie tried to play something other than the Asian fool. (I wonder if Jackie even entered Ang Lee's mind when he first thought of the casting for "Crouching Tiger". Probably not).
And sure, whites gets written up as buffoons in shows like "The Hughleys" and movies like "Freddie Got Fingered". The difference is that those aren't the only images of whites you see. They are also most likely to be cast as the hero, or as the romantic lead. In other words, there is a balance -- with the scale favoring the positive images. Black actors are only now just beginning to approach that kind of balance in Hollywood, and they still have quite a ways to go. Asian actors...oh man. At the rate things are going, it'll be another 20 years at the least.
Pokey
Sunday, January 06, 2002 at 01:38:08 (PST)
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