Films such as “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Searching” and “MDMA” show a wide range of representations, styles and artistry that American cinema could use more of.
It is a moment.
After years – no, much longer – of being marginalized on screen and seeing Asian characters whitewashed (i.e., played by Caucasians) in Hollywood films, a cluster of movies by and about Asian-Americans is finally hitting theaters.
“Crazy Rich Asians,” the first major Hollywood studio release since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club” featuring a majority Asian/Asian-American cast and directed by the latter, opened Aug. 15 to a rare 100 percent fresh rating on the movie review aggregator Rottentomatoes.com.
On Aug. 24, Sony’s Screen Gems division is opening nationwide the independently produced “Searching,” a missing person mystery starring John Cho told entirely via computer and other secondary screens, which won an audience award at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. On Sept. 14, Angie Wang’s semi-autobiographical “MDMA,” about a Chinese-American college student who made a killing marketing the party drug ecstasy in the 1980s, starts its theatrical run.
Add to that Friday’s Netflix debut of its movie adaptation of Jenny Han’s YA novel “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” starring Vietnamese-American Lana Condor, the early August film of a different YA book, “The Darkest Minds,” directed by Korean-American Jennifer Yuh Nelson, and the hit, Chinese co-produced and co-starring prehistoric shark thriller “The Meg,” and it’s no wonder . .
“We’re referring to this as Asian August,” said David Magdael, a Filipino-American movie publicist and the co-director of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. “We’re here at this moment, studio-wise after 25 years and 16 years since ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’ broke out on the indie level.”
Various factors have contributed to this. Inclusion, in general, has proven highly successful at the box office recently, some examples being the multi-ethnic “Fast and Furious” franchise and such unprecedented African-American-helmed hits as “Black Panther” and “Get Out.” In the last several years, social media has provided an effective platform for Asian-American actors to lobby for a wider range of roles, and for complaints to be focused against white actors such as Scarlett Johansson (“Ghost in the Shell”) and Emma Stone (“Aloha”) playing Asian-identified characters.
Elsewhere on the Internet, #StarringJohnCho has taken a lighter and – as the actor himself, who is not personally associated with the website/hashtag movement bearing his name, points out – perhaps more effective strategy of Photoshopping the successful Korean-American actor’s face onto posters of mainly white movies, thereby making a point by making it look as natural as can be.
Then there’s the fact that “Crazy Rich Asians’” distributor, Warner Bros., is the first major studio run by an Asian-American, Kevin Tsujihara, although the movie’s director Jon M. Chu said that Tsujihara didn’t appear super-involved with bringing the project to the Burbank studio. It was more the success of Singaporean-Chinese-American writer Kevin Kwan’s 2013 source novel that got Hollywood interested in the project.
So interested, in fact, that Chu and Kwan turned down a rich Netflix series offer in order to make sure the cross-cultural, class-conscious romantic comedy would be presented first in theaters.
“Our goal was to get contemporary, romantic Asian leads on the big screen,” Chu said of his film, which stars “Fresh Off the Boat’s” Constance Wu as a New York economics professor who visits Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s (British-Malaysian actor Henry Golding, who also plays the romantic lead opposite Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in next month’s mystery thriller “A Simple Favor”) ridiculously wealthy and judgmental family, led by his mom (Chinese-Malaysian superstar, and “Star Trek: Discovery’s” Georgiou portrayer, Michelle Yeoh).
“It says these people and this story are worth your time,” added Silicon Valley native Chu, who’s primarily directed “Now You See Me,” “Step Up” and “G. I. Joe” sequels up until now. “It’s something we have been wanting to do and waiting to do. Netflix obviously has huge reach and everyone can see it in one instance – and it’s amazing – all around the world. But for this, in particular, we wanted to make sure that message was communicated.”
“Searching’s” first-time feature director Aneesh Chaganty also comes from the Southern Bay Area. He and the film’s producer/co-writer Sev Ohanian wrote the film with Cho in mind to play the lead character – a widowed software engineer who, yes, searches the Internet for clues after his 16-year-old daughter (played by O. C.-born, Glendale-raised Michelle La) vanishes. Their script was always about a Korean-American family in crisis – although if there are any actual mentions of Asian heritage in the film, this reporter missed them.
“I grew up in San Jose, Silicon Valley where the story takes place, and it was important to us to have a cast of characters that looked like the people in the city,” Indian-American Chaganty explains, then added with exuberant laughter, “We found out in a [recent] Vanity Fair article that this was the first, contemporary, mainstream thriller to ever have an Asian-American lead. First of all, that’s crazy in 2018. Second of all, that’s crazy that we’re mainstream!”
“We really do believe that there should be movies that are made about race and representation and diversity – I’ve made a couple of those myself – but this is not one of those movies,” Ohanian noted. “This is just a universal story about a family, a father and a daughter, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be an Asian-American cast. In fact, as we were making the film we often got asked, ‘Why do they have to be Asian-American?’ and our only response was always, ‘Why not?’”
Cho, who’s arguably the leading Asian-American male in both commercial (he was Harold in the “Harold & Kumar” comedies and plays Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” prequels) and art films (“Better Luck,” last year’s acclaimed, Kogonada-directed “Columbus”) hopes that, soon, why not doesn’t even need to be said.
“I’m excited” by the current spike in Asian-American movies, Cho said. “I hope it’s not a moment, I hope it becomes the norm. I don’t want Asian Heritage Month, I hope these films are enough of a success that we make more of them, that these films are normalized and there’s no need to note it.”
Although “MDMA” is a very personal, fictionalized version of her own wayward youth, first-time writer-director Angie Wang feels like part of the bigger picture while adding a very specific, stereotype-defying story to the mix.
“What I learned was, you don’t sit around and ask for permission for something to be granted to you, you’ve got to go and kick the door down,” she said regarding her modestly budgeted indie film, which stars “The Leftovers’” Annie Q. as the young Angie. “More and more are doing that, and as we’re able to crack the door a little bit, others can follow.
“I’m delighted to see these other films come out and I’m really proud to be part of that movement,” Wang, who acknowledged that her self-modeled movie character could be quite an unpleasant piece of work at times, continued.
