A week ago or so I saw and loved the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians. Not usually much of a rom-com kinda guy, but this film was clever and smart. One of the things I liked best about it was that none of the main characters acted stupid.(Something I really hate about comedies.) Surrounded by far-fetched circumstances? Certainly. But really good story. Highly recommend.
It also brings to mind what I thought after seeing Black Panther – that we need to see and hear more stories being told by people other than white men.
It’s not that white men don’t have good stories to tell. They have many great ones. But they don’t have the exclusive patent on stories. It is so refreshing to see stories, characters and families who are both the same and different from people from a range of backgrounds.
As multiple stories have pointed out, CRA is the first contemporary film in 25 years to feature a predominantly Asian cast.
Just as Black Panther featured black actors from Africa, Europe and the Americas, so does Crazy Rich Asians give us a great range of Asian actors from around the globe.
Such a treat to see Michele Yeoh as a fully formed adult character and not just as a kick-ass action character. (Though don’t get me wrong – I loved her in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies.”)
The movie left me wanting to read Kevin Kwan’s novel that the film is based on.
Another movie I saw recently had diversity of story telling in a very different way. I went to the Alamo Drafthouse to see the newly restored print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Overture, Intermission and post-credits music. While the movie is not diverse in terms of actors, having almost an exclusively white, male cast, it is very different in how it tells its story. Like Christopher Nolan’s recent World War II movie Dunkirk, 2001 has almost no dialog and tells its story almost exclusively through stunning visuals, sound and music.
As I first wrote about 3 years ago, my parents took our family from small-town Iowa to Des Moines so we could see the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey at the River Hills 70 mm theater. For you too young to remember, that was the biggest film format of the late 1960s, at least for commercial films. That movie made such an impression on eight-year-old me that I can still tell you what the trailers were that we saw (Ice Station Zebra and Shoes of the Fisherman)
Ever since that night, I have been in love with going to see movies in the biggest theaters with the best projection system. I got to see Interstellar at a museum 70 mm film IMAX theater and Nolan’s followup of Dunkirk at a commercial digital IMAX theater.