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Audiences who flocked to see "Crazy Rich Asians" this past weekend have heralded the movie as a milestone for Asian representation in pop culture, with many Asian viewers remarking how much it made them feel "seen" after years of being stereotyped and diluted in mainstream American movies and television.

The movie, based on Kevin Kwan's bestselling novel, is a romantic comedy about the drama that ensues when Chinese-American Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) travels to Singapore to meet the extremely wealthy extended family of her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding). Tensions boil in particular between Rachel and Eleanor, Nick's steely and domineering mother, played by the legendary Michelle Yeoh.

The film is remarkable for how it balances the general with the specific, following the conventions of a fun, splashy, summer romantic comedy while providing nuanced representations of Asians, which have deeply resonated with Asian audiences.

Here are some ways, both thematic and stylistic, in which the film captures aspects of Asian culture. (Minor spoilers ahead.)

Asian-American Versus Asian

Eleanor doesn't just reject Rachel over class differences. As she explains in several pivotal scenes, she also looks down on her for being Asian-American and considers her not really Asian or not Asian enough, and therefore not worthy of marrying Nick.

Setting up one of the central themes of the film, Rachel's mom, Kerry, warns her early on that while she may look Chinese, "here and here, you're different." And she points to Rachel's head and heart.

You're a foreigner, an American. Eleanor Young to Rachel Chu, in one of the movie's climactic scenes

Later, Rachel's friend Peik Lin (the riotously funny Awkwafina) reminds her that Nick's family sees her as "an unrefined 'banana' - yellow on the outside, white on the inside." It's an expression used to describe Asian-Americans.

The Mahjong Scene

The conflict between Eleanor and Rachel culminates in a mahjong showdown between the two women, a frenetic and impressively crafted scene in which the game's strategy and tactics cleverly match up with the women's conversation and symbolize their cultural tensions. (Journalist Jeff Yang has a much more comprehensive explanation of how the game works.)

"You're a foreigner, an American," Eleanor says with derision, adding that Rachel is not "our own kind."

Eleanor's remarks reflect the experience of many Asian-Americans when they go to Asia and meet their extended families. Those relatives then treat them as strangers, making them feel out of place. Add to that the experience of being seen as perpetual foreigners in the U.S., and Asian-Americans can feel caught between two cultures, not belonging in either world.

Speaking Chinese

A significant portion of the film is conducted in Mandarin Chinese, and for those who understand that language, there are additional moments to savor.

In one climactic scene involving Nick running onto a plane, a woman in line to board, exasperated by the holdup, says, "Hello, quickly quickly," in Mandarin. Unlike some other non-English parts of the film, her remark is not subtitled, making it an Easter egg for some viewers.

Another potential Easter egg: When Nick, speaking Mandarin, orders food for Rachel, he discreetly asks for one dish with extra spice. Moments later, the taste of that dish appears to take Rachel by surprise.

Language can also indicate social class. For example, Nick's grandmother, who presides over his ultra-wealthy family, speaks precise and refined Mandarin.

Some scenes feature two major Chinese dialects, Cantonese and Hokkien.

Also, There's 'Singlish'

Reflecting the range of cultures that form Singapore, viewers can also hear bits of Malay and "Singlish," or Singaporean English. Kwan's book goes into much more detail about these various tongues, with sardonic footnotes explaining certain oft-used expressions.

When Nick's family and friends send a flurry of text messages trying to find out information about Rachel, one person writes, "Why are there so many Rachel Chus, lah," tacking on a Singlish phrase commonly used for emphasis. (They also appear to be using WeChat, a messaging app popular among ethnic Chinese people, both in China and overseas.)

While serving Rachel a multi-course meal, Peik Lin's mother tries to downplay it as just "simple food, lah."

Ancient Designs With A Modern Flair

Chinese culture is reflected in some of the film's more subtle details and aesthetic choices.

Rachel and Nick's grand hotel room contains a blue and white ceramic vase that bears the Chinese characters for "double happiness," a phrase often used in wedding decorations. The same characters appear on other objects and ornaments throughout the film.

The gates that lead to the Young family's mansion, Tyersall Park, are designed to resemble ancient Chinese coins with a square hole.

The film's style was also influenced by modern Asian cinema. Costume designer Mary Vogt told Vulture that the movie's color palette was inspired by the vivid colors of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love," a favorite of "Crazy Rich Asians" director Jon M. Chu.

The Symbolism Of Red

Before Rachel embarks on her trip to meet Nick's family, Kerry instructs her to buy a red dress. The color symbolizes good luck and prosperity - as well as "fertility," Kerry says with a wink.

Later seeing the dress, Peik Lin's family teases Rachel about it before advising her to wear something more lavish to meet the Youngs.

"Isn't red a lucky color?" Rachel asks.

"Only if you're an envelope," Peik Lin's dad (Ken Jeong) jokes, referring to the red envelopes of money traditionally given at Chinese New Year and other special occasions, like weddings and births.

Addressing Elders As "Auntie" And "Uncle"

"Call me auntie," Peik Lin's mother instructs Rachel early in the film. In many Asian cultures, younger generations refer to older people as "aunts" and "uncles" as a sign of respect, even if they're not related. The practice also reflects how close family friends can be considered family, especially in immigrant communities where, in the absence of relatives, friends provide a support system.

Sometimes it's hard to keep track of the correct forms of address, like when Rachel is unsure what exactly to call Eleanor: Mrs. Young or Auntie.

"I'm still learning the lingo," she says nervously.

Making Dumplings As A Group

Making dumplings brings families together, particularly when celebrating Chinese New Year. In the film, Nick introduces Rachel to the assembly-line process: You first flatten the dough using a rolling pin (a smaller and thinner kind than its Western equivalent). Then you place a dollop of filling in the center of each circle of dough, and fold and crimp it to seal the dumpling and prevent the filling from leaking out when cooking. Nick's grandmother gives Eleanor, her daughter-in-law, a hard time for the appearance of her dumplings.

Bringing Leftover Meals On A Trip

When they get to the airport for their flight to Singapore, Rachel shows Nick the three Tupperware containers of food prepared by Kerry for their long journey. Before heading to the airport in a key scene toward the end of the movie, Kerry can be seen carrying another container of food.

Which Chu Family Do You Come From?

When meeting Rachel for the first time, Nick's cousin Eddie (Ronny Chieng) jokingly inquires which famous Chu family she belongs to. He offers up "the packing peanut Chus" and "the 'Cup of Noodle' Chus," before finally asking, "Rachel, Chu are you?"

BEFORE YOU GO

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10 'Crazy Rich Asians' Cultural Moments That Speak Directly To Asian Viewers

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Audiences who flocked to see "Crazy Rich Asians" this past weekend have heralded the movie as a milestone for Asian representation in pop culture, with many Asian viewers remarking how much it made them feel "seen" after years of being stereotyped and diluted in mainstream American movies and television.

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USA Today discuss differences between movie and book. I could use little examples mentioned in the article. its an interesting article because ive never read the book.

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Warning! Spoilers for "Crazy Rich Asians" (the book and film) ahead.
For readers who loved Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel "Crazy Rich Asians," worry not: Jon M. Chu's film adaptation brings to life all of the best parts of the book.

"Crazy Rich Asians" tells the story of Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an Asian-American NYU economics professor who travels with boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) to his family home in Singapore, where she learns his family is a little more financially stable than she expected, to say the least.

The movie, out Wednesday, is just as lavish - if not more - in its depictions of the kind of homes, clothing and food you'd expect from Kwan's large ensemble of rather economically inclined characters.

One helpful difference in the beginning: an easy breakdown (courtesy of a conversation between Nick and Rachel while flying first class to Singapore) of the story's major players - replacing the convoluted family tree with more than 50 names at the front of Kwan's novel.

From character changes to new scene additions, we break down the five biggest differences between the novel and the new film. Here's your final warning: Turn back now if you want to avoid spoilers from both the movie and book!
More: More: Who is Awkwafina? Meet the breakout star of 'Ocean's 8' and 'Crazy Rich Asians' Review: Spectacular 'Crazy Rich Asians' clinches a win for Hollywood representation
1. Astrid's storyline is vastly simplified

Astrid (Gemma Chan), Nick's cousin with a larger-than-life affinity for shopping, gets considerable screen time, though her story is condensed. Her husband, Michael's (Pierre Png), insecurities toward his wife's bank account become apparent much earlier on - we see his struggle the first time we meet him, rather than only at the end of Book 1 as a justification for faking an affair.

In the film, the affair is real, which ends up making for a more satisfying arc: Astrid decides she isn't going to let Michael's insecurities hold her back from being herself.

The downside of shortening this plot: An appearance by Charlie, Astrid's former fiance (Harry Shum Jr.), is reduced from several chapters to a nonspeaking role in a short scene in the middle of the end credits.

Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno) is another character with a trimmed storyline. In the book, she's a world-renowned model, but we don't get much of a backstory here, though she still gets plenty of killer fashion moments, including her epic PJ look when she and Colin pick up Rachel and Nick from the airport.

2. Peik Lin and her dad become outlets for comic relief

Rachel's college friend Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina) and her father, Goh Wye Mun (Ken Jeong), are helpful side characters in the novel: They assist Rachel in realizing just how big a deal Nick's family is.

In the movie, they totally steal the show.

Awkwafina and Jeong stray farthest from their book personas in a way that completely pays off. There are times each actor delivers jokes that elicit laughter so loud, you'll miss the next three or four lines. In a movie that is largely funnier than its source material, these two characters get much of the credit.

3. We never meet Nick's father

Nick's father, Philip Young, never makes its to Ah Ma's (Lisa Lu) big party, as he does in the book. While book Philip flies in from Australia for the weekend, movie Philip is away on business the whole time.

4. Eleanor reveals Rachel's secret family history much earlier

Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) is just as vengeful in the movie version, though her investigation into Rachel's past comes much sooner than it did in the book. Instead of intercepting Nick's proposal with the news that Rachel's estranged father is in a Chinese prison, she reveals everything at Colin (Chris Pang) and Araminta's wedding. And we do mean everything: Rather than Rachel's mother filling in key points, Eleanor lays out almost every major detail about Rachel's mom's affair and escape to the U.S. in one fell swoop.

5. There's a new scene with a nod to "The Joy Luck Club"

Most of the film shows some semblance of the original book DNA, but one scene is entirely new. Instead of wrapping things up once Nick flies Rachel's mom out to Singapore, in the film Rachel invites Eleanor for a final briefing before heading back to New York.

It can't be a coincidence that the two women meet for a game of mahjong: the same game that was at the center of "The Joy Luck Club," the last studio film with a predominantly Asian cast, released almost exactly 25 years ago. On top of being a nice homage, the strategic imagery of a fast-paced game plays wonderfully alongside Rachel's calculated conversation.

In the film, Rachel confesses that Nick proposed but says she turned him down, lest his family disown him out of disapproval. She effectively puts the ball in Eleanor's court: Fix things with Rachel, or risk losing Nick forever.

Game, set, match, Rachel.

And while the book ends on more of a question mark (setting up the next two stories in Kwan's trilogy), the big screen rom-com is perfectly wrapped up from there, complete with a last-minute airport confession, a (second, successful) proposal and, what else? One more crazy party.

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'Crazy Rich Asians': The 5 biggest book-to-movie changes

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With every book-to-movie adaptation comes change. Luckily, fans of Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel, "Crazy Rich Asians," will find that director Jon M. Chu's film stays mostly in line with the novel. We break down the five biggest differences between the novel and film.

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gay representation in film. personal interview of gay character to know his feelings and point of view on film and representation

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Showbiz Tonight: Nico Santos on why "Crazy Rich Asians" is monumental

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facts on how there are no representations of povery in china in the film. dicsusses high level of poverty and misrepresentation

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Earlier this month, former Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was asked by a 70-year-old resident if the government could cut its lawmakers' sky-high pay to fund pensions for the elderly.

Goh's response was the same one that Singapore has always trotted out to explain its generous salaries: Cutting ministers' pay would be "populist" and a bad move, because it would be hard to persuade high-flyers in the private sector to give up their top-dollar jobs to get into politics. "You are going to end up with very, very mediocre people, who can't even earn a million dollars outside to be our minister," he said.

If we adopt this logic, then the characters of Crazy Rich Asians must be the cream of the crop in Singapore. They are, after all, crazy rich. That's the only Singapore we get to see on screen-and it's a sign of the direction Hollywood is taking its depiction of Asia.

Crazy Rich Asians, based on the novel by Singaporean-American author Kevin Kwan, premiered in Los Angeles to enormous fanfare. The film, which will open in Singapore-where most of the story is set-on Aug. 22, follows Chinese-American Rachel Chu (played by Constance Wu) as she follows her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), back to his hometown to attend his best friend's wedding and meet the family. The family, as it turns out, is ludicrously rich, and so Rachel gets sucked into a world of extravagance and eye-watering wealth.

As the first Hollywood-produced film in a quarter of a century to feature an all-East Asian cast, Crazy Rich Asians has been heralded as a watershed moment for representation and diversity. Many Asian-Americans, long starved for seeing people like them on the big screen thanks to Hollywood's penchant for whitewashing, are unsurprisingly elated. "It's not a movie, it's a moment," gushed the Guardian. A writer for Vox was so excited he declared the film "The Best Movie About Asian People in Decades and the Best Rom-Com of the Summer."

But what of Singapore? Most of the story is set here, and the majority of the characters are meant to be Singaporeans. The Crazy Rich Asians team has talked a lot about the politics of representation, telling the Hollywood Reporter that care was taken to avoid cultural cliches and blind spots. Yet it's important to remember that, from the book through to the film, the presentation of the Southeast Asian city-state is about as reflective of Singapore as Gossip Girl is of America.

In a country where elderly people still collect cardboard on the streets to scrape together a few dollars and low-wage migrant workers are often shortchanged for the hard labor they've performed, the media depiction of it always focuses on the gentrified neighborhoods, the tourist-friendly hawker centers, and the Marina Bay Sands, one of the most expensive buildings in the world. Crazy Rich Asians is no exception. Singaporean actors weren't able to speak as much Singlish-a local patois sometimes frowned upon by the government-in the film as they had hoped. The Singapore Tourism Board must be over the moon with this portrayal of a manicured, glossy city.

Then there's the film's most glaring erasure, more egregious than any failure to feature the public housing estates in which 80 percent of the country's resident population live. Crazy Rich Asians erases Singapore's sizeable non-Chinese population-15 percent of the island's citizens are Malay, and 6.6 percent are Indian-relegating the country's ethnic minorities to backdrop characters who open doors and guard mansions.

The film's producers are well-versed in American racial politics and white dominance but don't seem to have realized that, in the Singaporean context of power and privilege, Chinese Singaporeans-especially the superrich ones-are the "white people" here. Without this recognition, they came to Singapore and ended up replicating precisely the power dynamics they claimed to be fighting against in the United States.

Of course, the film was never meant to be everything to everyone. As the title tells us, it's about a very specific, very exclusive segment of the Singaporean population. It'd be unreasonable to expect it to please everyone, and there's an argument to be made that it's being so heavily scrutinized precisely because there are so few Hollywood-backed films about Asians and Asian-Americans.

But would the white Hollywood executives who backed the film have done so if it hadn't been about over-the-top Asian wealth? If Rachel Chu had come to Singapore and Nick Young's family turned out to be living in a public housing block, struggling with the cost of living-perhaps more like the families depicted in the critically acclaimed Singaporean films and Singapore Dreaming-the issues of identity, belonging, and place would arguably have been even more interesting than in a context where one can literally buy one's way around racism. But would Hollywood even have been interested?

Singapore has long been seen as a playground for the superrich; in the 2018 Knight Frank Wealth Report, the city-state tied with Chicago in fifth place on the overall Wealth Index. It's an image the Singaporean establishment is more than happy to buy in to-the government refuses to set a poverty line and rejects the idea of a national minimum wage. As we see from Goh's comments, Singapore is a place where the size of one's bank account is linked to the notion of one's worth.

The indulgent decadence of Crazy Rich Asians plays straight into this idea, and also the broader trope of an ascendant Asia, where East Asia-once seen as the home of exotic conical hat-wearing peasants-is now an economic power to pay attention to, with Chinese speculators making their presence felt in Western markets.

There's another way in which the film's title can be read: These aren't just crazy rich Asians, they're crazy rich Asians. It's drawn from author Kevin Kwan's own experience growing up among Singapore's wealthy elite, but it's not meant to be a lifestyle for the majority of audiences to identify with. It's meant to be a lifestyle for audiences to gawp at.

Sure, it can be fun to watch rich people parade about, wearing things we could never imagine hanging in our own closets and partying hard without ever having to worry about the bill. But portrayals of the vastly wealthy in faraway climes can also be othering. Watching Asia's moneyed classes fling their wealth around doesn't tell one very much about the realities of life for billions of people in Asia; it's mostly exoticized fantasy.

"[W]henever the exploits of rich Chinese people are reported for the consumption of Western readers, these accounts are unabashedly Orientalist," the American journalist Pooja Makhijani wrote about the Crazy Rich Asians book series in her review of second installment, China Rich Girlfriend. "It is only the inclusion of Rachel Chu, the Chinese American interloper through whose eyes we view these excesses, that obfuscates this claim to the Western reader. But as I've learned, even being an American person of color does not wholly erase one's American point of view."

Race and the politics of representation have made Crazy Rich Asians a more scrutinized film than such a rom-com would otherwise be. It's a huge burden to carry. The hope is that it'll pave the way for more films centered on a variety of Asian-American experiences-a highly desirable development, even from the standpoint of a non-American Asian.

But for Singaporeans like me who'd hoped that this story would be a chance for a more nuanced representation of our country than as a smoky pirate haven on stilts ( Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End) or a soulless background for super-soldiers ( Hitman: Agent 47), it's clear that this is an Asian-American milestone, not ours.

"They talk about cultural appropriation," a friend remarked after having watched the film. "But they appropriated Singapore."

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Hollywood Has No Time for Crazy Poor Asians

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Earlier this month, former Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was asked by a 70-year-old resident if the government could cut its lawmakers' sky-high pay to fund pensions for the elderly.

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opposing outlooks on the film compared to mine. reminds me to keep an open mind on reasoning. not sure if i will use or not

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Crazy Rich Asians is a ground-breaking moment for Asian representation in Western film, with the first all-Asian cast in Hollywood in 25 years - an industry where Asian actors constitute 1% of lead roles.

After watching the film, I did feel something had changed. Something felt different about what was possible in mainstream Western film. I felt the film spoke to me as an Asian person, and this is a feeling I very rarely feel from Hollywood. The film has an engaging story line. I was invested in the characters and appreciated their personal struggles with Asian cultural values. I cried.

I also liked that an Asian man was in the leading romantic role and that he was represented as sexy and desirable. So often Asian men are feminised and made to lack sexual desirability. I think it was significant that the Asian women in the film desired Asian men too. People have already been talking about how the film heralds a change in how we view Asian men.

Read more: Why aren't there more Asian faces on Australian screens?

However, the film does have its critics. The most convincing of these are perhaps those that highlight how the film is good for Asian-American representational politics but not great for Singaporean or broadly Asian politics.

The film is about Rachel, an Asian-American professor of economics at NYU, visiting the family of her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), in Singapore. The biggest challenge for Rachel is convincing Nick's mother, Eleanor Sung-Young (Michelle Yeoh), that she is worthy of her son. Eleanor tells Rachel out-right she will never be good enough, not only because of her lack of wealth, but also because she's American and is likely to pursue her personal passions rather than put family first.

The film centres on the lives of extremely wealthy Chinese-Singaporeans. As Kirsten Han has pointed out, the film erases the problems of poverty in Singapore, and also ignores the racial hierarchy within that country. "Chinese Singaporeans - especially the superrich ones - are the "white people" here," she writes.

One of the most glaring examples of this hierarchy at play in the film is its only significant representation of South Asian people. Soldiers, who work as servants guarding the mansion of the "Crazy Rich Asians", pop out of the jungle and frighten Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) and Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina). Peik Lin talks to them through a tiny gap in her window, but is otherwise too terrified to interact with them.

While the film may challenge racial politics in the US, it's blind to the racial politics in Singapore. Indian people are seriously marginalised within the context of Singapore, and are often used as cheap labour.

While the film may fail to capture the nuances of racial politics in Singapore, it does shed light on the relationship between Asians in Asia and Asian-Americans. At this point I need to discuss some spoilers. Rachel is placed between her liberal US individualism and the filial piety of Chinese tradition. When Nick eventually proposes to Rachel against his mother's wishes, he's willing to give up his family for Rachel: he's willing to give up these values to pursue his personal passion for Rachel. The film sets up a conflict between US values and Asian ones.

IMDB

In the end, Rachel gets the guy, and we could say this highlights a triumph of US individualism over Asian collectivism. We could say Asian-American people are being used, in this film, as cultural translators that help to propagate Western liberalism in the Asian context. There are also a large number of Eurasian actors in this film: Golding, Gemma Chan, Jing Lusi, Sonoya Mizuno, Remy Hii. Why are there so many of them? Does this constitute a whitening of Asian identity?

Despite these important questions, the film is not just a piece of US propaganda. Rachel gets the guy because she convinces his mother she's worthy. She rejects Nick's proposal at first, because she knows he would have to choose her over his family. This convinces his mother, Eleanor, Rachel is worthy of her son. Eleanor allows Rachel to marry Nick.

As a Hollywood film, and like Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians was always going to reflect the fantasies of the Asian diaspora about the mother country, rather than reflecting the experience of Asians in Asia. Even so, it doesn't help to pit "Asians" against Asian Americans - or Asian Australians for that matter.

As Rachel and Nick (or should we say Eleanor) give up rigid investments in their own cultural perspectives, they symbolically pave the way (through Rachel and Nick's marriage) for a new relationship between Asia and the Asian diaspora. The question is: can we do the same?
Crazy Rich Asians is now showing in Australian cinemas.

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Crazy Rich Asians is a great moment for representation -- but slides over some important questions

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Crazy Rich Asians is a ground-breaking moment for Asian representation in Western film, with the first all-Asian cast in Hollywood in 25 years - an industry where Asian actors constitute 1% of lead roles. After watching the film, I did feel something had changed. Something felt different about what was possible in mainstream Western film.

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example of film watched in class. Women being portrayed as sex objects vs actual people in media. Rachel being harrassed by characters for not having plastic surgery

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I saw the premiere of MissRepresentation this past Friday at the Vancouver International Film Festival and have been thinking about writing about it since. MissRepresentation was an exposé documentary about the mass media's devaluation of women in North America.

The film illustrated the pervasive sexualizing and objectifying gaze that is placed on women in the popular media - in advertisements, movies, TV shows, music videos, journalistic articles, newscasts - pretty much everywhere you can imagine. It was argued that women are valued in the media only for their physical appearance - they have worth only insofar as they are "attractive" bodies. This attractiveness must conform to the (white) male ideal of female beauty - flawless skin, symmetrical features, silky long hair, and impossibly tiny proportions. These characteristics are marketed to women and girls as standards that they must achieve in order to succeed in our society. This is an endeavour that is made futile by the advent of photoshopping, which airbrushes, slims and adjusts features to impossible perfection. The viewing of women as mere bodies has become so extreme as to turn women into objects, literally, in advertising. For an analysis of this phenomenon, see Jean Kilbourne's "Killing Us Softly".

Complementary to the message that the most important thing about women is their physical appearance is the limitation of roles they are depicted playing in the mass media. These roles are all too often supportive roles to men, who are the real "protagonists". It was pointed out that rarely are women the protagonists in movies, and that when they are, the majority of their pursuits revolve around securing love and a stable relationship. Female characters that might be considered powerful are stripped of their power either by their sexualization (for example the archetype that Caroline Heldman defines as the "fighting fuck toy" in movies which feature barely dressed female superheroes, often in dominatrix-type attire) or their demonization (for example, the character of the "bitchy boss" who has traded fulfilling relationships for career development and is consequently bitter, uptight, and unattractive). The devaluing and delegitimizing of powerful women through demonization/sexualization can also be found in the media's portrayal of political figures such as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. While Hillary was vilified as calculating, cold and nagging, Palin was sexualized as a "Barbie", a "ditz" or pornography for Republicans.

The overwhelming message sent by the media is that women exist, and should exist, primarily as objects of desire, whose ambitions and desires revolve around securing white male attention and approval. There is no acknowledgment of women's diversity, intellectual and creative capabilities and achievements, or capacity for self-determination. Considering that the only role attributed to women is to please men, it is not surprising that they are constantly pitted against each other in their competition for male affection. An arena in which this is most painfully and shamelessly demonstrated is that of "reality" television, for example "The Bachelor" or "America's Next Top Model" - which in my opinion is as far from reality as things can get. Here's Jennifer Pozner, unpacking reality TV for GRITtv.

While MissRepresentation does an excellent job of illustrating how the media treats women, it is limited in its analysis, which is primarily from a U.S., white, middle-upper class perspective. The movie portrays media representation of women as if it:

a) applies to all women equally and

b) affects all women equally, neither of which are true.

While women are objectified and sexualized, the overwhelming majority also fit a highly specific profile: white, young, affluent, able-bodied and heterosexual. Where is the representation of the fantastic diversity that exists among us? Where are the women of colour, Non-status, Immigrant and Refugee women, poor women, old women, Indigenous women, lesbian women, women with disabilities? In the mass media -especially in mediums such as advertisements, which are meant to represent the "ideal", these groups are nearly non-existent. Where they do exist (more often in movies and TV shows) they are portrayed in a highly negative manner. I can't count the number of times that I have seen stereotypes of women of colour, Indigenous women, lesbians, and fat women. Often these stereotypical characters are used as comic relief, tokens, or supporting characters that are used in order to help the main characters achieve a mean to their ends. They are rarely complex, rarely taken seriously, and certainly never protagonists. Mass media is not only misogynistic; it is racist, classist, heterosexist and colonialist as well.

What are the effects of the messages that mass media sends on women? MissRepresentation lists a host of dangers and harms, including low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, lower scholastic achievement and less participation in civil society (for example vot
ing). This is tied to a lack of positive role models and a phenomenon called self-objectification, in which women are subjected to constant external pressures in which they are viewed as objects by society, and ultimately come to view themselves as objects as well. Self-objectification is a type of internalized oppression, in which the oppression that one is subjected to is turned inward against the self and others of that same group. Another similar consequence may be internalized sexism, where women begin to adopt sexist beliefs about themselves and each other. A personal example I can provide of this is that as a child and teenager growing up, I was convinced that I only wanted sons as children. I did not want a daughter because I was convinced that she would be catty, fickle and difficult to deal with. It was only later in my life that I was able to realize that these views were a result of me assimilating sexist stereotypes about my own gender.

I would like to add that while these harms may be shared to some extent by all women, they are experienced to different extents and in different ways by diverse groups. Marginalized women (who, globally, are the vast majority) from diverse groups are told by their relative invisibility in mass media are told that they do not fit into North American society, that they are not welcome, that they do not have value. These messages are reinforced by the negative ways in which these women are portrayed when they do appear in the media. They have to struggle under intersecting oppressions that attack multiple facets of their identities, and the consequences they suffer can be much more pervasive and severe than for women who fit the idealized norm. It is important to recognize that although we live in a society that values men over women, white, middle to upper class, heterosexual, able-bodied women exercise considerable privilege over other women.

Media messaging does not only have consequences in terms of how it affects the way that women feel and act, but how they are treated. One of the most serious consequences touched upon in MissRepresentation is violence against women (VAW), particularly sexualized violence. In the film, the link is made between media messaging and violence, pointing to the fact that objectification is a form of dehumanization, and dehumanization is the first step towards legitimizing and encouraging violence towards that person. MissRepresentation also shows how sexual exploitation and violence against women are depicted in capitalist bids for more shock value and thus higher viewer ratings, which in turn encourages male acceptance female domination and rape myths. As with other forms of oppression, this violence does not affect all women equally - as can be seen with the substantially higher rate of rape of Indigenous women and black women than of white women. It is also important not to confuse media as the cause of violence against women. MissRepresentation positions media-induced objectification as a potential cause, but the long history of violence against women proves that it runs much deeper than that. Violence against women is the result of a society that gives some groups the right to oppress others based on attributes such as gender, class, and race, among others. Mass media is a tool that is used to enforce this culture, but it is not the root cause.

One question that MissRepresentation begins to address is, "what purpose does the negative portrayal of women in the media serve?" They link it primarily to capitalism, noting that holding women up to an impossible ideal of beauty drives the sale of body-related products such as clothes, makeup and hair products, plastic surgeries, etc. Using women as objects on male-oriented advertising (for example, beer) also makes men more likely to buy the products. I agree with this, but I also think that there is a larger analysis that can be applied. As I mentioned above, mass media is used as a means to enforce the dominant paradigm and oppress any other groups that challenge that. The paradigm is white male supremacy, operating through capitalism. Looking at which groups are best served by capitalism, one can see that it is a extremely small, elite group of older white males. Looking at those that are most harmed by capitalism, it can be seen that those bearing the brunt are largely poor people of colour, the majority of those women. Mass media serves the interest of capitalism, yes, but capitalism is not a neutral phenomenon. It is part of a larger system of domination that oppresses people not only according to gender lines, but class lines and race lines in order to maintain an existing hegemony. For an excellent and interactive analysis of capitalism see "The Story of Stuff".

We are coming to perhaps the most important question of all, which is "what can we do about it?" About 7 minutes of the movie was dedicated to this portion, with suggestions going into the credits. The solutions were mainly individually focused - such as using your consumer power to boycott sexist media products, taking a pledge, supporting other women in their endeavours, attempting to be a good role model for youth, and mentoring other women. I was a bit disappointed with these suggestions, as I was with the time that was allocated to them. I was disappointed because I think that women are already doing these things - the problem is that they are not acknowledged. While I think it is important that we attempt to act as individuals, I think that we need to act on broader levels as well - relational, community and societal levels, in order to effect a significant change.

Right now, the media is pushing a dominant discourse about what women are, what they should be, and what they do or do not have the potential to be - and as passive consumers, we sit back and take it. A step towards the solution is not to only to try to ignore this discourse, but to create a new one. We need to organize to create the space that will allow this to happen. Although it's not highly advertised (of course it isn't), women are already in fact doing this and have been for some time. Take for example , which works for the empowerment of women in the media. In Vancouver, British Columbia, a feminist media collective called The Women's Media Centre Feminist Frequency creates video blogs to have "conversations about pop culture." The F Word Reel Grrls based in Seattle, Washington that focus their efforts on empowerment of young women from diverse communities to realize their power, talent and influence through media production. #notcool a micro blogging site run by The National Organization for Women - New York inviting posts of offensive ads as action to fight discriminatory, sexist, racist, misogynist and overtly-sexualized images in the media. WIMN - Women in the Media & News a media analysis, education and advocacy group, works to increase women's presence and power in the public debate. WIMN is headed by Jennifer Pozner author of Reality Bites Back: Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV. hosts a radio show dedicated to alternative media and feminist dialogue. Beyond media, there are innumerable actions that women are taking every day that challenge the ideology that women are things, that they are incapable, that they exist for men. What is needed is a stronger, organized movement to make these actions visible and to make our voices heard.
Dana Gore is a volunteer crisis worker at Battered Women's Support Services, currently studying Public Health at Simon Fraser University

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MissRepresentation: The Media is the Message and the Messenger-A Film Review | BWSS

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MissRepresentation The Media is the Message and the Messenger A Film Review by Dana Gore I saw the premiere of MissRepresentation this past Friday at the Vancouver International Film Festival and have been thinking about writing about it since. MissRepresentation was an exposé documentary about the mass media's devaluation of women in North America.

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analysis of characters and their backgrounds. discusses intentions behind certain actions and beliefs. not sure is source is reliable or not.

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"Crazy Rich Asians" hasn't hit theaters yet, but it's already breaking barriers. The film is being lauded as the first Hollywood movie with a majority Asian cast since "The Joy Luck Club" dropped 15 years ago.

The plot follows Rachel Chu, an Asian-American woman who accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore for his childhood best friend's wedding. Of course, when she agrees to go with him to meet his friends and family, she has no idea that in his home country he is The Nicholas Young, Asia's most eligible and wealthy bachelor.

Kevin Kwan's bestselling novel was adapted into a film, and admittedly - even for those who have read the book - it can get a bit confusing to keep track of everyone and their relation to one another.

In preparation for the movie's release, here is a guide to all of the main characters and families in the book.

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Everything you need to know about the characters in 'Crazy Rich Asians'

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"Crazy Rich Asians" is based off the international bestseller by Kevin Kwan. The film, like the book, involves a lot of characters and it can be hard to keep track. To make things easier, here's every character you need to know in the upcoming film.

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includes information on the tan hua flower and its significance. example can be used as representing chinese culture in film

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Before we go any further, there's something you should know. Every single instance of ostentatious, mind-blowing wealth described in Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians trilogy is based in reality. With his novels, Kwan finally had a creative outlet for the gossip he'd accumulated after years of hearing his Singaporean mother discuss the lives - and spending habits - of her privileged social network. All the books' wild extravagances, like plastic surgery for pet fish, are entirely rooted in these stories.

The Crazy Rich Asians movie adaptation, out August 15, translates the books' opulence into lavish sets, each more over-the-top than the next. Your eyes will feast on the displays of wealth. Your brain will say: "Who lives like this?!" The .01% of Singapore, that's who.

Here are some of the most memorable instances of wealth from Kwan's trilogy, and the reality that inspired them.

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Is Plastic Surgery For Fish Real? Fact-Checking The Wealth Of

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Before we go any further, there's something you should know. Every single instance of ostentatious, mind-blowing wealth described in Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians trilogy is based in reality. With his novels, Kwan finally had a creative outlet for the gossip he'd accumulated after years of hearing his Singaporean mother discuss the lives - and spending habits - of her privileged social network.

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how having an all asian cast has affected hollywood. As well as having a asian women as the lead character and exceeding everyone's expectations

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There's a scene in Crazy Rich Asians in which Rachel Chu, the lead character played by Constance Wu, is in a game of poker. Her hand is much weaker than her opponent's-he's got two pairs-but she fearlessly bluffs and puts in all her chips. He folds, only to be crushed when she reveals her cards. As Rachel, a professor of economics and game theory at New York University, tells her students, "The key is playing to win, instead of trying not to lose."

To many in Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians might look like a risky bet. It's the first modern story with an all-Asian cast and an Asian-American lead in 25 years; the last, The Joy Luck Club, was in 1993. It's an earnest romantic comedy in a sea of action and superhero films. It features two leads who are new to movies: Wu, an actor most recognizable for her role on the ABC series Fresh Off the Boat, and Henry Golding, a virtual unknown who last worked as a travel host for the BBC. And it makes use of a multilingual script that flips seamlessly from English to Cantonese to Mandarin and back again.

But if you understand the cultural forces that are at play-an underserved audience, the rapidly expanding influence of Asian culture and the power of the global box office, this $30 million movie doesn't seem like much of a gamble at all. In fact, it seems destined to be a hit. Crazy Rich Asians is pure escapist fantasy, a Cinderella story about an Asian-American woman meeting her boyfriend's colorful and, yes, crazy-rich family in Singapore. It also boasts a relatable rom-com heroine, opulent set pieces and witty dialogue. It has already won over critics: the film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

That doesn't mean getting this movie made was easy. An early prospective producer suggested casting a white woman as the lead. Later, the filmmakers turned down a lucrative deal with Netflix to make the film with Warner Bros., which guaranteed it a higher-profile release. This mattered, both for fans of Kevin Kwan's best-selling book series, which inspired the film, and for Asian audiences the world over who have waited decades to see themselves represented onscreen in all their diversity. Hollywood has grown increasingly dependent on Asian financiers and global audiences to turn a profit. Crazy Rich Asians has the potential to revive the romantic comedy-a genre that has foundered at the box office recently-for a massive general audience. By representing Asian people so vividly, the film could set a precedent for many more stories like this one to be told. It's coming at the right moment. After years of work in the game of Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians is poised to win.

For Wu, the film's success is about so much more than just its ability to establish her as a marquee star. Wu first broke out on a sitcom, and she has killer comedic timing-but she's also deadly serious, and fiercely outspoken, about issues of representation and equality.

For decades, Asian Americans working in the film and television industry have carried the impossible burden of fixing a system that has tended to punish, stereotype and ignore them. "They think we'll say yes to anything and we'll just be grateful," Wu tells me as we walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles a few weeks before the film's release.

Wu is, nonetheless, grateful. With her experience on Fresh Off the Boat, the first network comedy to feature Asian-American leads since Margaret Cho's show All-American Girl in 1994, the Taiwanese-American actor has now had the unique experience of being featured in two milestone projects about Asian Americans. This matters to her. Both she and the film's director, Jon M. Chu, she says, are Asian-American pioneers. "We are not supporting roles," Wu says. "We are stars on our own journeys."

Her casting in this film as Rachel signals that she's the most bankable Asian-American movie star in a generation. But Wu has spent years discussing the state of Asian representation, both in interviews and with fans, and a sense of pressure has made her terrified of what will happen when the film is finally out.

Behind the smiling Instagram posts and glossy photo shoots ahead of the movie's release, Wu tells me she has been having panic attacks and crying every night. She's not typically an anxious person, but she's sensitive, which is part of what makes her such a great, funny actor and outspoken advocate of women's issues and greater diversity in her field. It also means that she's vulnerable to criticism about everything from her hair to her pronunciation of Mandarin to her love life. "I'm really scared of being such a public figure and opening myself up to scrutiny," Wu says. "I'm very panicked that I'm not going to be able to handle it, and I'm just going to have hurt feelings for a really long time."

For so long, Asian-American women have been told to be grateful for whatever they get, and that being objectified is better than being ignored. But Wu's clear ideas about the type of work she wants to do, along with her race and gender, have made her a target on and off sets. "I couldn't do a shoot because I had a sick family member, and I was punished for it," she says. "Even saying I'm worthy of being a leading lady-people don't like it when a woman asserts her worth." But her experience on Crazy Rich Asians, being supported by people with the same commitment to representation that's guided her career, was more positive. "At the end of the day, the thing that drives people and moves people is truth and story and humanity," she says. "If you make sure all your work has depth, even if it's something fun and light like a rom-com, that's how you make good work."

In Kwan's book, Rachel is Chinese-American, raised by an immigrant single mom with decidedly American values. Her boyfriend Nick Young is the scion of a Singaporean family that is described as "richer than God." When Rachel goes to the Southeast Asian country to meet Nick's relatives for the first time, she's exposed to a world of privilege unlike anything she's ever seen. While the stories may seem outlandish, the details are from Kwan's own life. He drew on his upbringing as a member of one of Singapore's wealthy families, his experience as an immigrant kid in suburban Houston and his observations of his friends and relatives during visits to Asia as they became even richer.

At the time Kwan sold the rights to Crazy Rich Asians, he was already tasked with writing its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend. But as one of the film's executive producers from the start, he organized a research tour of Asia for other producers, answered questions from screenwriters Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli, and helped pick the director.

Kwan and the other producers set a high bar. That included independently developing the screenplay for two years, sending casting directors to search for Asian actors in several countries outside of the U.S. and seeking an eye-watering amount of high fashion to rival that in The Devil Wears Prada.

The viewer encounters this glamorous world through Rachel's eyes, making the film function as much as lifestyle porn as it does as a romantic comedy. It was critical to get the details right. One scene features a 'Paul Newman' Rolex Daytona, which holds the record for the most expensive watch ever sold. Several pieces from Hong Kong-based bespoke jeweler Carnet also make an appearance. "These women wouldn't wear Cartier," Kwan says of the matriarchs in his story. "Cartier is too common for them."

Having directed, along with two S tep Up movies and the blockbuster G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a pair of documentaries about Justin Bieber, Chu knew a lot about expectations from fans and how even small details could be the subject of fierce scrutiny. "We had a mah-jongg specialist come in and design a game for us and teach us," Chu says, in order to nail a climactic tête-à-tête between Rachel and Nick's mother Eleanor, played by the venerable actor Michelle Yeoh. For day-to-day details, such as what food should be served and which language should be used, many of the cast and crew members, but especially Kwan, were treated as on-set experts. "It just opened a channel of communication on a set where it's usually, 'Just do what the director says,'" Chu says. "It's going to exist forever on film-you better do it right."

Evoking the sights and sounds of an outdoor market and the gleam of ultra-exclusive Mouawad jewelry was important, but even more crucial was the film's ability to represent the profound tensions within the Asian experience-especially the differences in identifying with mainland Asia vs. the diaspora. Rachel is part of a group that isn't the dominant culture; when she goes to Singapore, she's surrounded by people who look more like her, but the way she grew up makes her an outsider.

Moreover, despite the movie's title, Asian isn't a monolithic identity-something that's easier to understand from the vantage point of a cosmopolitan place like Singapore, which serves as a nexus for many Asian experiences. But Hollywood has tended to treat it as one category. "Obviously, Korean is different than Chinese, which is different from the Vietnamese culture, but the way the [American] culture has treated us is a point that we can probably find some common ground on," Wu says. She's frustrated by people who don't seem to understand the differences, especially in the limited number of period and independent films featuring Asian actors. "They think that having an Asian in their movie is the same thing as having an Asian American, and it's just not," she says.

While the film is charming you with its romantic-comedy affectations, it's slyly doing another kind of work as a commentary on class: Rachel's back-ground is working-class, while her college roommate Goh Peik Lin, a Singapore native, is hilariously rendered as nouveau riche-and then the Youngs are so old-money, they don't even talk about it. There are Asians from several countries, with different accents and different values-funny housewives, total jerks, devious socialites, air-headed actors and sassy friends. Oh, and hot guys with great abs too.

Few major studio productions explicitly aim to educate their audience, and non-Asian viewers going to this film may just want to see a glitzy rom-com. But many might walk out with a deeper understanding of the class gradations even just within Singaporean society, and the collectivist vs. individualist tensions found in many Asian families. And there's no obvious stereotyping. For decades, female Asian actors have been asked to portray stereotypes like the vindictive dragon lady, the submissive China doll, the nerdy overachiever or the inert sex worker. Crazy Rich Asians avoids all of these, instead showing the nuances of Asian women's experiences across generations.

Even Eleanor, who butts heads with Rachel, isn't a typical potential monster-in-law-she just comes from a different world and thinks only of what's best for her son and the families that depend on him. "In the old traditional sense, the elders came first. They were always put ahead of us," Yeoh explains. "That's how we showed filial piety and love." The film, Yeoh says, represents "a great opportunity to show our heritage and our traditions from the Asian side."

Given its ambitions, it's unsurprising that Crazy Rich Asians has been held to high standards. It was criticized before a single scene was shot-specifically for the casting of British-Malaysian actor Henry Golding as Nick and Japanese-British-Argentine actor Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Lee. But the litigation of whether mixed-race actors are "Asian enough" has overshadowed the number of cast and crew members who are Straits Chinese, such as Lim, Yeoh, associate producer Janice Chua, actor Tan Kheng Hua and Ronny Chieng, who was born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore and cinched the multi-national life of his character Edison Cheng by attending law school in Australia. "We strived very hard to match the perfect accent to every actor, and I think we did a pretty amazing job, but sometimes we had to make concessions," Kwan says. "Like, this actor was amazing, but he's not going to sound like he went to Hong Kong's top boarding school his whole life."

Everyone involved in this film says they hope it will pave the way for a Hollywood that allows many more stories about Asian Americans, with different perspectives, body types and ethnic backgrounds. And they're counting on that change to happen quickly. For Crazy Rich Asians, the pressure to succeed at the box office is high. But there are several factors already working in the film's favor.

Kwan's novels are hugely popular globally, with plenty of non-Asian readers, having sold more than 1 million copies in more than 20 languages. During readings for his first book tour, in 2013, Kwan says it was housewives in Texas and New York City socialites who made up his audience. It happened globally too: "There wasn't a single Asian person," he says, recalling a packed reading in Zurich with 300 people. "It was a sea of white faces that came out. To see that level of interest just speaks to the universality of the story. "

The film is being released in mid-August, traditionally a time when studios dump action films and mediocre comedies. But Crazy Rich Asians is different. Tracking estimates already peg the first-week sales at about $26 million. Warner Bros. screened the film for taste-makers months in advance to help build buzz. That strategy is working: Kwan's first book is on the New York Times best-seller list again.

The mood in which the movie opens also matters. Recently, Asian culture has exploded in popularity among Western audiences: K-pop supergroup BTS reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in June, sales of Korean beauty products have tripled since 2015, and Japanese clothing company Uniqlo signed tennis star Roger Federer as its brand representative. Fresh Off the Boat has reached syndication status, meaning many more viewers will have the chance to see it.

After years of saying otherwise, Hollywood has finally realized that telling more inclusive stories is just good business. In the past three years, a number of films-including Straight Outta Compton ($202 million), Creed ($174 million), Get Out ($255 million), Girls Trip ($140 million), and especially Black Panther ($1.3 billion) -have shown that movie projects in a variety of genres with black and female leads as well as directors of color can be hits. Plus, Chu already has something in common with Nancy Meyers, the queen of romantic comedies: both directors have generated over $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide.

Still, there will be other definitions of success, beyond the numbers. Chu dreams of this movie being repeatedly played on a television channel like TBS, and he has heard directly from fans about how it has changed the way they see themselves-including men who tell him they're "proud to be an Asian dude" and those who never would've watched a romantic comedy before. "I didn't know we would get that kind of reaction," he says.

Wu hopes for a future with "narrative plenitude" through a wide variety of creative projects, so that one story doesn't have to represent all Asians, or all Asian Americans-a world in which the ability to tell stories that represent billions of people won't hinge on one movie's reception. "When you can be mediocre and still not feel like you have to prove something," she says. "That's when you know you've hit success."

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Contact us at letters@time.com.

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'Crazy Rich Asians' Is Going to Change Hollywood. It's About Time

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There's a scene in Crazy Rich Asians in which Rachel Chu, the lead character played by Constance Wu, is in a game of poker. Her hand is much weaker than her opponent's-he's got two pairs-but she fearlessly bluffs and puts in all her chips. He folds, only to be crushed when she reveals her cards.

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usually when asian people are in movies it revolves around martial arts. Those characters are usually male. explains the importance of this film in contrast

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Perspective | An all-Asian cast and no martial arts: Why the 'Crazy Rich Asians' movie matters

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Being Chinese American, I grew up watching movies and TV shows with characters who looked like me but didn't act like me. One of them was Lawrence, the nerdy Chinese student in the 2003 film "School of Rock." He was bespectacled, soft-spoken and insanely good at the piano.

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Points out important parts of the film that discuss gender roles. Not sure if it is a reliable source and will be able to use in my analysis

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Thoroughly assimilated and confident Chinese-American woman Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) has fallen in love with supremely suave but slightly enigmatic Singaporean man Nick Young (Henry Golding). Nick's big secret: his family back home belongs to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The broad joke behind the setup: their healthy Greenwich Village romance scandalizes his hoity-toity kith and kin. On her first trip to Singapore (and Asia, for that matter), Rachel, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, gets treated worse than Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman . Nobody ever put a dead fish in the L.A. streetwalker's bed.

In the novel, the first time Rachel hears Nick's name, she asks, "A Brit?" Casting Golding in the role has roused controversy, because this first-time actor is a British-Malaysian model and TV host. But he's effortlessly persuasive as a Singaporean golden boy.

Crazy Rich Asians requires our willing suspension of disbelief for other reasons-such as its premise. Yet it comes on cool and amusing enough for us to buy that Nick could shield Rachel from the truth about his wealth for many months. Rachel protests that he couldn't be loaded, or, as he puts it, "comfortable"-after all, he uses her Netflix password. It's a nifty gag, especially if you know that Netflix made a major bid for Kevin Kwan's novel and two sequels. (Kwan also serves as executive producer.)

A binge-able series might have been a better way to go, since the script squeezes a sprawling supporting cast into boisterous caricatures and transforms an intricate flow chart of status among Singapore's superrich into a flood of affectations. I'm not a fan of the book. But I prefer Kwan's sly, patient catalogue of outré, vulgar, and exquisite customs to the film's rim-shot burlesques or its awestruck interludes of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous , Singapore Edition.

The director, Jon M. Chu ( , Step Up 3D, G.I. Joe: Retaliation ) smartly retains the novel's period introduction. In 1995, the racist manager of an august London hotel disrespects Nick's mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), ignores her confirmed reservation, and recommends that she and her group seek a suite in Chinatown. Quietly, and quickly, she outflanks him and re-enters in triumph. For Asian billionaires, living large is the best revenge.

With that idea safely noted, the rest of the film simply revels in the instant power at the Singapore nabobs' fingertips. In the cleverest sequence, Nick and Rachel share dessert at a New York café while he begs her to attend his closest friend's Singapore wedding. A svelte observer recognizes Nick, snaps a picture, and relays the news across the globe via her Asian in-crowd (or, as Nick puts it, "RadioOneAsian"). The frame fractures into an ultra-hyperactive version of the split-screen telephone scenes from Bye Bye Birdie and Pillow Talk . Magnified text messages, search results, and profile pictures fill every inch of the wide 2.39:1 aspect ratio. By the time Rachel agrees to go, Eleanor calls Nick from Singapore to verify the breaking news.

I wish Chu had conceived the entire film this playfully, the way Norman Jewison did Thomas Crown , another film that lets us glimpse the affluent life. To pull it off, Chu and his screenwriters, Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, might have had to stylize the straight-arrow love story that made the 2013 book a best-selling "beach read." The way it is, the film's most daring humor comes from dropping its lovebirds into hedonistic gilded cages.

Can we retire the use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" for helicopter music? It has worn out its welcome as a smart-alecky way to reference Apocalypse Now , and here it blares out while choppers fly the groomsmen to a bachelor party staged on a cargo ship. Hidden by walls of containers, the men cavort with bikini-clad Miss World contestants-all Caucasian. Meanwhile, the bachelorettes carry on as if they're cramming a Bravo Housewives getaway weekend into 24 hours. They jet to a Sumatran resort complete with spa treatments, free shopping sprees, and multiple opportunities to play Mean Girls at poor Rachel's expense. The comedy (and in Rachel's case, the drama, too) feels forced and sour. Happily, there's some genuine gaiety in the big-hearted, nouveau riche household of Rachel's college pal, Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina). The Gohs' home glitters with gold and its reflections, but their low-comic exuberance is infectious. They've patterned their décor on Versailles' Hall of Mirrors and Donald Trump's bathroom. Elsewhere, the excess starts at "wretched" and never quite makes it to funny.

The director often seems as glamour-obsessed as his characters. (The anti-climactic wedding scene, staged with physical effects like water coating the aisle to mirror shimmering lights, amounts to high-gloss kitsch, down to best man Nick and Rachel mouthing a heartfelt "I love you.") Once they board the plane from New York to Singapore, all we can do is look agog at the features of Rachel and Nick's first-class sleeping cabin and the upscale wonders to come. Nick's pal Colin (Chris Pang) and his fiancée Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno) graciously pick up the couple at the airport and join them in scarfing down the viands of Singapore's renowned street hawkers. Rachel couldn't, then, be more stunned when Nick's mom starts cold and grows antagonistic, or when Araminta's friends accuse her of being a gold-digger, or when Mandy (Jing Lusi), Nick's malicious ex, informs her that was Eleanor's pick for her son's bride. They rationalize that Rachel is too déclassé and too American. Raised by a single working mother, Rachel doesn't know her own back story, and she believes in following her professional passion-which the Singaporeans think precludes her from devotion to "family."

We're geared for Rachel to summon her you-go-girl spirit and take on Nick's mother and wily old grandmother (Lisa Lu). For all their pompous, snooty talk, they appear to be expelling her reflexively. The film takes too long to clarify why Rachel should care about these self-important people or try to preserve Nick's links to them. Her responses to their luxury are passive, ambiguous, or dazzled. But Wu rises to this complex acting challenge. She uses her own emotional transparency to reveal Rachel's confusion, then insight. She communicates, way before the script does, that Rachel wants to win Nick without severing him from his insular family and its opulence, because they are part of what makes him who he is. Without much writing help until her final showdown with Yeoh's Eleanor, Wu demonstrates how intensely Rachel gropes toward understanding this forbidding elite. All the while she steels herself to fight it for her man.

At least one actor every episode punctures the Old School "class" or the new-style glitz with skeptical intelligence or anarchic energy. When Rachel and Peik Lin first ooh and aah over the Youngs' palatial estate, I thought they must be reacting to its size, because there isn't anything glorious about the Asian-colonial style. On the outside it's a house of seven or eight gables, with each gable topping its own wing. Inside, it resembles a museum containing objects they can touch, including an enormous stuffed tiger. Luckily, even here, Awkwafina's Peik Lin imbues her screen time with live-wire attitude. Awkwafina turns Peik Lin grabbing selfies on the Youngs' grand staircase into an uproarious little dance. The jagged, springy rhythms in her voice and her walk animate the conventional material. Her father (Ken Jeong) says her blonde pixie hairdo makes her look like "Asian Ellen," but her farcical instincts are more ferocious than DeGeneres's. She finds an apt buddy in Oliver (Nico Santos), the gay wit of the Youngs' extended clan. He stays in Eleanor's good favor as a problem-solver, whether by finding just the right ceremonial gong or by neutralizing a troublesome guest. Santos boasts an apt Wildean flair: he articulates outrageous perceptions with his sparkling conversation. He describes himself as the Youngs' "poor relation rainbow sheep."

Golding, an impressive first-time actor, and Wu, the star of ABC's Fresh Off the Boat , do make a charming couple. Golding has physical grace, candid expressions, and an engaging gentleness. From certain angles he resembles that debonair master James Mason. Wu, always genuine and sympathetic, can also be immensely touching: she instinctively hugs Eleanor at their first meeting. Neither Golding nor Wu suggests hidden mysteries or fire-one reason it's hard to believe that Golding's Nick could keep his nuclear family life a secret for over a year.

In different ways, Yeoh and Gemma Chan (as Nick's closest cousin, Astrid), transcend familiar domestic melodrama because of their power to surprise. Few can top Yeoh for still waters running deep. We don't want to believe that someone of her gravity would be so bigoted toward "ABCs" (American-born Chinese) and so cruel to Rachel, who immigrated with her mother when she was six months old. Yeoh subtly expresses the underlying tensions beneath Eleanor's blanket statements of principle-a triumph of understatement in a hyperbolic movie. As Astrid, considered the perfect woman in her set, Chan doesn't over-rely on elegance. Her luminous beauty vibrates with thought and feeling. She conveys the importance Astrid places on remaining composed: for her it's an aesthetic choice, not just learned behavior. She won't violate her personal style by screaming at her husband over his infidelity.

Media coverage of the film has focused on how significant it is for all audiences, especially Asian-Americans, to see an all-Asian ensemble in a big-studio release. (The precedents include 1993's The Joy Luck Club, 2004's Memoirs of a Geisha , 2006's Letters from Iwo Jima , and my favorite in this list, Justin Lin's sizzling 2002 teen-rebel movie, Better Luck Tomorrow .) Several actors here do get a chance to prove their talents in a film that immerses us in a rarefied, exotic milieu.

What gives the movie its erratic vitality, though, is its of Asian and European mores and culture, jet-set flash, and American Pop, which evokes the particular ambiance of Singapore's high-society subculture. The score emphasizes eclectic, cosmopolitan vibes. The Elvis hit "Can't Help Falling In Love" (itself loosely based on a classical French ) becomes Colin and Araminta's wedding song. Berry Gordy's "Money (That's What I Want)" emerges as the movie's theme song. The strictly instrumental music ripples with American swing and Big Band flourishes.

In Kwan's novel, Rachel decides that Nick is her true love when he knows the words to the Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)." The Talking Heads' sweetest lyrics celebrate, "You're standing here beside me / I love the passing of time/Never for money, always for love." Too bad this number didn't make it into Chu's Crazy Rich Asians. It would have infused this literal, glittery film with some downtown lyricism and irony.

Michael Sragow is a contributing editor to Film Comment and writes its Deep Focus column. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and a contributor to the Criterion Collection.

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Deep Focus: Crazy Rich Asians - Film Comment

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Thoroughly assimilated and confident Chinese-American woman Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) has fallen in love with supremely suave but slightly enigmatic Singaporean man Nick Young (Henry Golding). Nick's big secret: his family back home belongs to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

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This give a very good overview of the movie. It discusses the plot and underlying messages that could help with my analysis. It makes many good points about little scenes that I didn't notice the first time I watched the film.

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Rating: 3 stars

"Crazy Rich Asians," the hotly anticipated film based on Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel, won't disappoint fans who have been counting down the days till its arrival, like so many daisy petals. What's more, it will more than satisfy the sweet tooth of romantic comedy fans everywhere who have lately despaired that the frothy, frolicsome genre they adore has been subsumed by raunch and various shades of gray.

On the surface, there are no permutations to speak of in a story whose formula is instantly familiar: After a brief prologue, set in 1995, when a prosperous Chinese family is snubbed at a London hotel, the action zips ahead to New York City, where the little boy of that preamble, Nick Young (Henry Golding), has grown up to become an economics professor and is dating a bright, attractive colleague named Rachel Chu (Constance Wu). He's invited her to attend his Best Friend's Wedding back in Singapore, which will entail the ritual of Meeting the Parents, meaning that Things Are Getting Serious (is that even a movie yet?). While the two are out on a date, a stranger snaps an iPhone pic that goes viral before the second drink is served. Nick, it turns out, is a multi-multi-millionaire, and Rachel is the mystery girl who has finally managed to snag him.

That sequence, filmed with alacrity and flair by director Jon M. Chu, asks the audience only to believe that someone as smart as Rachel would not know who Nick is, in an age of Google and Instagram. But with disbelief duly suspended, "Crazy Rich Asians" whisks its characters and the audience to Singapore for a delicious, visually vibrant dive into the sensory delights of its streets, historic homes and gaudy, nouveau riche McMansions.

Like the finest forebears of the rom-com genre - including its urtext, "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - "Crazy Rich Asians" indulges in the escapist pleasures of aspirational wealth, obscene consumerism and invidious judge-iness. Nick's family, led by his imperious mother Eleanor (the magnificent Michelle Yeoh), is one of the oldest in Singapore, and their material surroundings show it, from their sumptuous, impeccably tasteful home to their subtly elegant wardrobes. The more arriviste environs of Rachel's friend Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina) are pointedly more gauche, gilded to resemble Versailles crossed with Donald's Trump's bathroom. But it's the Goh house, overseen by Peik's manic dad (Ken Jeong) that's more comforting, which will come in handy when Rachel experiences the inevitable rejection from Nick's hyper-protective mom.

Along the way, the down-to-earth Rachel will suffer mean-girl bullying, cultural misunderstandings and hurtful put-downs regarding her own background. ("I'm so Chinese," Rachel says at one point, "that I'm an economics professor who's lactose intolerant.")

"Crazy Rich Asians" possesses a sprightly, optimistic tone that pushes every pleasure-button of inveterate rom-com fans, including a fabulous soundtrack of Chinese language pop covers, homages to mouthwatering excess, the requisite fashion-show montage and hilarious comic relief by way of Awkwafina and her co-sidekick, Nico Santos. But it turns out that the movie has layers of meaning and nuance that give it added richness, including a respectful critique of the Chinese tradition of filial loyalty, a withering look at intra-community prejudices that coexist with external racism, skeptical digs at unbridled materialism and sometimes stingingly on-point acknowledgment of China's rising strength as a global economic and cultural force. "Crazy Rich Asians" - the first Hollywood movie to feature an all-Asian cast in more than 20 years - is itself an expression of that power, as is Papa Goh's admonition to his twin daughters over dinner early in the film. "Eat your nuggets," he tells the girls. "There's a lot of starving children in America."

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some suggestive material and coarse language. 121 minutes.

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Review | 'Crazy Rich Asians' is an escapist rom-com delight. It's also a lot more than that.

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Rating: 3 stars "Crazy Rich Asians," the hotly anticipated film based on Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel, won't disappoint fans who have been counting down the days till its arrival, like so many daisy petals.

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This article analysis the cultural effect and response to having an all asian cast. Discussing backlash from critics and how this film had high chances of not being successful. Im not sure if this would help me in my analysis.

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That pressure may have lessened after high audience turnout and celebrity theater buyouts helped the movie successfully rake in $34 million in its first five days. And while the film's defenders have admonished critics for expecting one work to fill the cultural void left by decades of Hollywood exclusion, it's noteworthy that this is the sort of story that industry advocates and audiences have coalesced around-one that eases collective anxieties about Asian and Asian American difference by adopting the universal aesthetic of the ultra-rich.

Though it has been trumpeted as a landmark victory in the fight for Asian American visibility in Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians enacts a remarkable disavowal of certain forms of Asian representation. In one notable scene, Goh Wye Mun (Ken Jeong) plays up an affected Chinese accent, repeating Rachel's surname until it devolves into a parody of the "ching-chong" stereotypes of Hollywood's past. Then, the payoff: "Just kidding," Wye Mun says in an assuredly American accent: "I went to Cal State Fullerton." The scene stands in for the prevailing spirit of the film: We're not those kinds of Asians. Gone are the "Oriental" accents and broken English, replaced with the sophisticated air of Golding's British tongue, Wye Mun's familiar all-American vernacular, and Goh Peik Lin's (Nora Lum a.k.a. Awkwafina) contrived " blaccent."

Later in the same scene, Wye Mun scolds his young daughters to finish their chicken nuggets: "There's a lot of children starving in America." The barb-which turns a classic white American parent's chiding on its head-drew raucous laughter from the mostly Asian audience at the screening I attended. But the punch line also rejects the "wrong" kind of Asians. Look, the joke seems to say, we're not the third-world farmers or factory workers you might have imagined. We're just as good as you. Or, more accurately: We're better-and richer.

Despite the film's all-Asian cast, and Kwan's refusal to accept industry suggestions to cast Rachel as a white woman, Wye Mun's jab suggests that white, Western expectations still cast a long shadow over the movie. Take the opening scene, whose drama hinges on Eleanor Young (Michelle Yeoh) triumphantly distinguishing herself-in the eyes of a white hotel manager-from the kind of Chinese who might stay in London's Chinatown. While viewers are compelled to cheer these moments as subversive, such scenes stage a certain kind of respectability politics for a presumed white audience (or, these moments assure Asian American viewers that they are, in fact, the "right" kind of Asians).

But it's unfair to single out Crazy Rich Asians for its apparent concern with white standards of respectability. The arguable crowning of media representation as the defining Asian American issue points to some deep concerns about how we are perceived. While many speak of the legitimate importance of seeing people who look like themselves on-screen, the investment in mainstream depictions in particular-often to the marginalization of a thriving Asian American indie-film circuit -implies a preoccupation with not only (or even primarily) how Asian Americans see ourselves, but also how others see us.

Like the wider fight for diverse representation, Crazy Rich Asians struggles with the conflicting pursuit of a universalism that " transcends race" and a specificity that reflects Asian and Asian American lived experiences. More often than not, it errs toward the former. While the film's many Chinese-Singaporean cultural details are heartwarming and refreshing-wrapping dumplings at the family table, a climactic conversation over mahjong-at times they feel oddly tacked on, almost ornamental to an otherwise westernized story. In fact, the director Jon M. Chu has been forthright about his desire for the film to transpose Asian faces onto a quintessentially Hollywood-which is to say, white American-story. In an interview with IndieWire, Chu said he wanted the movie to convey "this idea that old, classic, Hollywood movies could have starred Asians with just as much style, just as much pizzazz." It's no surprise, then, that the film drips with an art-deco aesthetic, nodding to American cinema's black-and-white days with one party scene-which rivals Gatsby's finest-where women in flapper fashion swing and twirl to a Singaporean jazz band.

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One Way That 'Crazy Rich Asians' Is a Step Backward

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That pressure may have lessened after high audience turnout and celebrity theater buyouts helped the movie successfully rake in $34 million in its first five days.

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This article discusses the importance of an asian asian casts. It compares the importance and impact to Black Panthers all black cast. It also includes the change in culture for the asian society after the film was released.

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It's a surreal and a pioneering moment. Since the release of The Joy Luck Club in 1993, it has taken 25 years for another movie with an all-Asian cast based in the modern period to reach the silver screen. Chances are you've heard the buzz about Crazy Rich Asians. The story revolves around two NYU professors, Rachel Chu, played by Constance Wu, and Nick Young, played by Henry Golding, who are in love and visit Singapore for Nick's best friend's wedding. While they are there, Rachel finds out that Nick is from one of the wealthiest families in Singapore and that he has generations' worth of reputation and responsibilities to live up to. It's an entertaining and engaging story, but more than that, it proves that diversity can drive business in Hollywood. Crazy Rich Asians is a game changer. Here's why:

The struggle of Asian-American women is represented realistically

For many, Rachel Chu is not just an Asian woman lead character but she is also relatable. She was raised by a hard-working and fierce single mother who immigrated to the United States. I believe many of us can look to our parents or a few generations back and relate to those who come to the country seeking a better future. Persevering through a sometimes challenging new life in the United States is something many people have great respect for. Through Rachel's and her mother's experience, we see similar sacrifices and struggles that women still face today.

Indra Nooyi, who is stepping down as CEO of PepsiCo, once said "I don't think women can have it all . . . we pretend we have it all." This movie reflected that opinion in the scene when Nick's mother, Eleanor Young, played by Michelle Yeoh, shares with Rachel that she withdrew from university when she met Nick's father in order to support him and raise their family. The tone is cool, but nuanced, and encapsulates Indra Nooyi's assessment. So can women really not have it all? Where does the success of a woman lie? Does it have to just be in the home or the workplace? How can companies help women to have both if desired by creating better workplaces? Through this scene specifically, and the movie as a whole, viewers can relate to the dilemma of the modern woman.

In the movie, Rachel struggles with Nick's family's objections to their relationship. Through this struggle, the audience has an opportunity to understand a little bit more about the cultural context of how important family is and what it means to be a woman in some Asian cultures. Rachel is a strong woman who wants the opportunity for both a career and a family, but ultimately it's complicated. Regardless, Rachel shows us resilience and strength, rather than common Hollywood stereotypes of meekness and submission. She is a strong and modern Asian-American woman.

This movie is a win for diversity in Hollywood

Why did it take so long for Hollywood to make a movie like this? One reason is that there may be an underlying unconscious bias around Asian characters in Hollywood. Asians are often portrayed as meek and unfit for leading roles, and Asian women characters are frequently objectified and fetishized.

After watching Crazy Rich Asians I had to ask myself, "Was there really no white lead?" and "Did I see ANY white people cast in this film beyond extras?" I was astonished when I did my mental tally and found that indeed, the cast really is fully Asian or Asian American. The film hearkens back to 25 years ago, when The Joy Luck Club made history for being the first movie of its kind with an all-Asian cast. It might have taken 25 years, but Crazy Rich Asians really did feel that important, especially since attempts at busting Asian stereotypes between these two films have been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm.

In 2000, Romeo Must Die, starring Jet Li and Aaliyah, came out with a wide release. The two find themselves on opposite sides of a gang feud, but nevertheless fall in love. But despite the lofty, Shakespeare-evoking title, the two characters never even kissed onscreen. Why didn't the producers go all the way and fully commit to their Asian male romantic lead?

And maybe society wasn't ready for a non-martial arts, Asian-cast movie even as recently as 15 years ago, when Better Luck Tomorrow was widely released. An indie festival darling and favorite of many critics including Roger Ebert, the Justin Lin-directed subversive teen romp tried to break with stereotypes about Asian-Americans. But the film, while pushed initially by MTV, was quickly forgotten. So Crazy Rich Asians is succeeding where other films ultimately failed.

The film is making an impact in Asian American communities

Before its release, not everyone in my Asian-American community shared the same enthusiasm about Crazy Rich Asians that I had. Some simply didn't like the genre, while others didn't feel that it was relatable to their personal Asian-American experience. So I held my breath and kept my expectations at bay as the release day rolled around, to see how it would do at the box office.

With $34 million recorded for a five-day opening weekend, I was floored. My social media channels were buzzing with so much energy and pride for the movie. And there was a humble gratefulness through it all. There was a sense of pride, but also a responsibility to keep this momentum going. Would this be a one-hit wonder?

While writing this blog, news broke that a sequel is already in development. This is one of the first times something of this magnitude has happened for the Asian-American community in the entertainment industry. With cautious optimism, I look forward to seeing where this takes us, while keeping a keen eye trained on the upcoming entertainment awards season. The rise of Crazy Rich Asians gives me hope that #WhiteWashHollywood could soon become a thing of the past; certainly that's where it belongs.

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Why "Crazy Rich Asians" Is A Game Changer - Catalyst

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It's a surreal and a pioneering moment. Since the release of The Joy Luck Club in 1993, it has taken 25 years for another movie with an all-Asian cast based in the modern period to reach the silver screen. Chances are you've heard the buzz about Crazy Rich Asians.

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This article includes specific details in the film that I can use as a reminder to include in my essay. Discusses the many characters and their roles

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They have very large amounts of money but remain entirely rational. The title means crazily or extremely rich. Jon M Chu's highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera, adapted by Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli from the Kevin Kwan bestseller, is about a Chinese-American economics professor in New York called Rachel, fluent in both Putonghua and English, whose younger Singaporean boyfriend, Nick, invites her back to his country for a big family wedding. Only once Rachel finds herself in the plane's first-class section does it start dawning on her that Nick is heir to the most staggeringly gigantic fortune in Asia. (Wait. Did it never occur to this smart analytical thinker to type his name into Google? And why is Nick doing something so low-rent as flying commercial? Well, no matter.) When they arrive in Singapore, her astonishment and disorientation escalate at the sight of the unfeasibly lavish airport. "JFK just smells of salmonella and despair," she mumbles. Soon the dizzying skyline of Singapore presents itself, with the colossal Marina Bay Sands hotel looming up like a postmodern Stonehenge, and evidently much more to the point than the boring old Raffles.

Rachel is played by the elegant and luminous Constance Wu, and the Malaysian star Henry Golding is self-effacing zillionaire Nick; amusingly, the original novel suggested that Nick should resemble the Japanese-Taiwanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, star of many Wong Kar-wai films, but now presumably too old for the part. And Michelle Yeoh gives a showstopping performance as Nick's scary mother Eleanor, who is enigmatically displeased at the sight of this American outsider's claws in her son.

Could it be that the displays of mind-bendingly conspicuous wealth on display at the weekend's lavish parties are being deployed by Eleanor and other disapproving family members to intimidate Rachel, to scare her away? Finally, Rachel will face off with Eleanor over the mahjong table, a contest with the icy seriousness of the chess match in The Seventh Seal.

Crazy Rich Asians isn't big on subtlety and wants to overturn just one cliche: that rich people are bad. But, with a mostly all-Asian cast, it's a corrective to the Hollywood racism that decrees Asian characters can only be shown fleetingly, if at all, and then mostly in subservient roles. Marvel's Black Panther did something similar with black characters, in a similarly unpretentious way. And the Crazy Rich Asians here do have a superpower, the same superpower as Bruce Wayne: they are crazy rich! There's a cheerful honesty in the title. Maybe Nancy Meyers comedies should all be renamed Crazy Rich White People. Moreover, white America can relax: the only racists on display here are Brits. A haughty London hotel manager presumes to insult Eleanor. As Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman: big mistake, big, huge.

Gemma Chan has the rather thankless role of Nick's serene fashion-plate cousin Astrid, but the scene is stolen by the funny supporting roles. Awkwafina is a highly enjoyable turn as Peik Lin Goh, Rachel's sarky college contemporary who now also lives with her comedy extended family in Singapore: there are some big laughs from Ken Jeong as the paterfamilias, Wye Mun Goh, who mocks Rachel's provincial fashion sense and her red dress. ("I thought red was lucky!" "Yeah, if you're an envelope!") Ronny Chieng is Nick's pompous cousin Eddie, and Nico Santos is the witty fashion connoisseur Oliver, who describes himself as the "rainbow sheep" of the family. The 91-year-old Lisa Lu has style and presence as Nick's revered grandmother, who takes a shine to Rachel. "The shape of your nose is auspicious," she tells her, gnomically. All this intrigue ends inconclusively, even abruptly, with every sign of a sequel in prospect.

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Showstopping performance ... Michelle Yeoh, standing centre, in Crazy Rich Asians. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

Perhaps inevitably, the progressive claim for Crazy Rich Asians has been countered against it, with complaints that it ignores Indian and Malay Singaporeans, that it naively reimagines Singapore as a luxury resort, and that it is another orientalist fantasy. This last accusation reminded me of Edward Said, the great anatomiser of orientalism, once describing Singapore as "the Israel of Asia" - and he did not intend that comparison politely. All these things are fair comment, but fail to account for the qualifying or extenuating factor of it being a fiction - and a funny and extravagant one.

I would add that the issue of erasing Asians from the movie screen has been a problem if you rigidly stick to Hollywood and have no interest at all in Asian movies. Perhaps this good-natured and spectacular comedy will be a jumping-off point.
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Crazy Rich Asians review - Cinderella does Singapore in a riotous romance | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

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They have very large amounts of money but remain entirely rational. The title means crazily or extremely rich. Jon M Chu's highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera, adapted by Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli from the Kevin Kwan bestseller, is about a Chinese-American economics professor in New York called Rachel, fluent in both Putonghua and English, whose younger Singaporean boyfriend, Nick, invites her back to his country for a big family wedding.