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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, 06:07:33 PM)
Dear Presumptuous,
Don't dis until you have digested -- or at least tasted a single bite of the dish in question.
"BULLETPROOF MONK" is one one of the hottest (meaning best and potentially most succesful) scripts in Hollywood and the leading role was crafted specifically FOR Chow Yun-Fat -- by writers intimately familiar of his extensive pantheon of work in HK movies -- in an expressed attempt to AFFORD Yun-Fat the opportunity to be more than just the "iron-bound-man-of-integrity" which he has played in EVERY SINGLE ONE of the films you mention -- including the one good film on the list, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Describing Chow Yun-Fat's role in this script as that of "...an aging master who passes on wisdom to a white guy" is like describing his role in the original "A Better Tomrrow" movie as "a second bannana gangster who gets his legs shot off at the end of the first act" -- perhaps not factually inaccurate but so far off the mark from the multi-dimensional, incredibly dynamic truth of the role that it might as well be.
I challenge you (if the movie turns out half as good as the screenplay -- which, as you may have guessed, I have read) to say that Yun-Fat's role as the "BULLETPROOF MONK" is not truly sexy and heroic. It is both of these things -- as well as funny. The Monk has a great deadpan sense of humor -- crafted to take advantage of Yun-Fat's own awesome comic talents, which he has never been afforded the opportunity to tap into in an American film (nor was he afforded in Crouching Tiger -- which is nothing against that excellent film, just a factual observation).
Beyond the humor, the MONK characer in the script is also incredibly philosophical -- in an enlightened but still grounded way. The story includes white villains and Asian villains, an incredible Asian hero and a credible white hero. Without giving away too much of the story I would sum up its theme as: "Multi-Culturalism doesn't have to mean Moral Relativism." And I know that I myself -- who have been a HUGE CHOW YUN-FAT FAN ever since seeing him in the original "A Better Tomorrow" -- am looking forward to it with eager anticipation. It IS a comic-book movie. Americans LOVE comic-book movies. To me that means this movie is a chance for all those Americans who never saw Crouching Tiger to finally fall in love with Chow Yun-Fat -- and for the ones who did see Crouching Tiger but know nothing of his multi-dimensional performances in Hong Kong films covering every genre from screwball comedy to searing drama, it's the chance for them to realize what I've known for close to 15 years now: that Chow Yun-Fat is one of the greatest movie stars on the face of the earth.
By the way -- where did you come up with the idea to use the phrase "PRO-ASIAN" in describing CHINA? I doubt if the millions upon millions of purely "Asian" citizens of various nations such as India (which has fought 3 wars with China since the end of WWII) or Vietnam (which fought a war with China over Chinese support of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) -- not to mention Tibet or Taiwan -- would agree with your characterization. When I write this I am not trying to bash China, or even picking sides in any of the conflicts I just listed -- I'm just trying to point out how absurd and over-simplistic your thinking and your resultant choice of words was. You couldn't bring yourself to write "Pro-Chinese", no doubt because that would have struck you as characterizing the Chinese as being jingoistic nationalists (which in fact many of them they are), while you wanted to imply they were big-hearted brothers who embrace all their fellow "Asians" with love and support.
And as far as Jackie Chan's American films and his performances in them having been what kept Ang Lee from ever considering casting Chan in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon --
ARE YOU INSANE?!?!?!
What kept Ang Lee from considering Jackie Chan was the fact that he is a very talented director. Jackie Chan is also an incredibly talented actor and director -- of brilliant ACTION-COMEDIES! Since when does having a lot of talent mean you are right for EVERY ROLE that comes along? Do you have such deep worries over why MGM is not considering casting Adam Sandler as the next James Bond?
Wait for "Bulletproof Monk" to come out and then -- if you see it and don't like it -- trash it as much as you want.
But I seriously doubt -- if you do go see it -- that will happen.
Chinese family man in Hollywood
MadGuru@aol.com
Friday, March 01, 2002 at 19:19:36 (PST)
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