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This article talks about how modern this movie felt and how it broke the racial standards of asians. I will be using this article to talk about what the movie did for people as a whole.

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'Crazy Rich Asians' | Anatomy of a Scene

Jon M. Chu narrates a sequence from his film.

Hey, this is Jon M. Chu, director of "Crazy Rich Asians." And this is in the beginning of the movie, where we get to meet Rachel Chu, played by the incredible Constance Wu, and Nick Young, played by Henry Golding, who, this is his first movie. We found him from our accountant in Malaysia. He was a travel host there. Never done a movie before, so this is his first movie. This is his second day shooting. And he really improved every day he was there. He's an incredible actor, actually, and super natural. And you're going to see him a lot. And he plays the lead in our movie. And here, he's inviting her to Singapore to meet his family. What she doesn't know is that his family is the richest in Singapore. And so she's about to fly into a hornet's nest, as they say. This is a very popular section in the book. In our script, it's about two sentences. So we had to design from the ground up. But in the book, they talk about how all the gossip spreads through Radio 1 Asia. And you can see her slyly taking a cell phone pic there. And she's going to pass it on to all the friends, socialites, ex-girlfriends, family members to destroy this American girl coming to Singapore to take their man. How did we communicate this stuff is through text message and social media. And there's so much and so many ways you can do it. We really didn't want to shoot people's screens. So we tried to come up with the most buoyant way that even the book describes of how information passes. So we had these wispy, colorful things, sort of in the colors of the book covers, that spread through all the people throughout Singapore. And we had a great company, Aspect Ratio, to help design it. There's my baby in the second there, screaming "no," that was born about two weeks after we finished shooting. And then we really wanted to show that this information was spreading all around the world and ending up at this beautiful home, during this Bible study, where we meet Michelle Yeoh, who plays Nick Young's mother and wants nothing to do with this American girl coming to Singapore, which is very relatable to my experience as an Asian-American going to Asia for the first time, where it feels sort of like home but not like home. And that's really what our movie is about is this dual cultural identity that we all go through, especially in this generation of no matter where you're from - whether you're Asian or not - everyone's figuring out who we want to be for the future. And so text messaging is a great way to show all the ways that those things spread.

Jon M. Chu narrates a sequence from his film. Credit Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

Crazy Rich Asians

Directed by Jon M. Chu

Comedy, Romance

PG-13

2 hours

As of the moment as an Instagram feed, "Crazy Rich Asians" revisits Jane Austen's timeless universal truth about a man in possession of a fortune being in want of a wife. The man in question is Nick Young (Henry Golding), the exquisitely eligible scion of a Singapore real estate family. The scale of his fortune is suggested by the first scene, in which his mother, insulted by the manager of a fancy London hotel, buys it out from under him.

There's no doubt in Nick's mind about whom he wants to marry: Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an economics professor at N.Y.U. originally from Queens. She and Nick, who have been together for a year, are clearly a perfect match. At least in Manhattan. But when they travel back to Singapore for a wedding, Rachel finds herself subjected to the disapproving scrutiny of the older generation and vicious sniping from potential rivals.

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Constance Wu stars in the romantic comedy "Crazy Rich Asians," the director Jon M. Chu's adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel. Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

Every romantic comedy depends on obstacles to the central couple's ultimate happiness. "Crazy Rich Asians," a busy, fizzy movie winnowed from Kevin Kwan's sprawling, dishy novel, sets up a series of clashes - between tradition and individualism, between the heart's desire and familial duty, between insane wealth and prudent upward mobility - that are resolved with more laughter than tears. There are squalls of intrigue and a melodramatic cloudburst or two, but nothing that threatens to spoil the festivities.

The venue is fabulous - if there is any part of Singapore that is less than dazzlingly picturesque, we don't see it here - the music is great, and the food includes homemade dumplings, street-stall delicacies and lavish banquet dishes. But the key to this party is surely the guest list. It has been noted that this is the first Hollywood movie in a long time with a mostly Asian and Asian-American cast, and if anything this observation understates the diversity of the performers onscreen, in terms of both their origins and their pop-cultural affiliations. They include Michelle Yeoh, one of the great international movie stars of the past quarter-century; Ken Jeong, a staple of naughty American comedy for almost as long; and Awkwafina, a hip-hop artist, actress and web celebrity of more recent vintage.

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A preview of the film.

[ Why did it take so long to see a cast like this?]

That's only a small sampling. Mr. Kwan's book, a best-seller that has spawned two sequels since it was published in 2013, runs to more than 500 pages and includes footnotes, genealogical charts and a telephone directory's worth of names. Its digressions and tangents would easily fill up a television season or two, and the movie, directed by Jon M. Chu, can feel a bit rushed and cramped. There's too much and also not enough.

Still, it's hard not to have fun, though not always for poor Rachel. After a pleasant excursion with the soon-to-be newlyweds, Nick's boyhood friend Colin (Chris Pang) and his fiancée, Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno), the family drama and the peripheral silliness kick into high gear. Rachel meets an ex-girlfriend of Nick's, Amanda (Jing Lusi), who is less of an ally than she seems. More simpatico is Astrid (Gemma Chan), Nick's ultraglamorous cousin, whose marital troubles provide the most developed secondary plot. Her husband, Michael (Pierre Png), is, like Rachel, an outsider; his insecurity about his wife's money and status turns their marriage into a potential cautionary tale.

From left, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Ms. Wu in the film. Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

A more serious intimation of trouble arrives every time Nick's mother, Eleanor (Ms. Yeoh), looks in Rachel's direction. (His father is away on a business trip.) Her judgment seems severe and unfair, but she also possesses an undeniable grandeur, a seriousness about family, power and her own identity that is noble as well as cruel. While there is never any real doubt that "Crazy Rich Asians" will come down on the side of free choice and true love, it does pay lip service to the gravity and durability of other values.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time. It is an unabashed celebration of luxury and money, with hints of class conflict that have more to do with aspiration than envy or anger, set in an Asia miraculously free of history or politics. Comic relief is provided by Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina), Rachel's nutty friend, and her nutty parents (Mr. Jeong and Koh Chieng Mun), whose nouveau riche tackiness stands in contrast to the aristocratic hauteur of the Young family. Not everyone in that clan is as regal as Eleanor or as blandly agreeable as her son. There are a gaggle of funny aunties and a witty gay cousin (Nico Santos), who is no less amusing for being a rather tiresome stereotype.

You could also view that character as a self-conscious throwback - part of the film's sly and appealing old-fashionedness. Without betraying any overt nostalgia, "Crazy Rich Asians" casts a fond eye backward as well as Eastward, conjuring a world defined by hierarchies and prescribed roles in a way that evokes classic novels and films. Its keenest romantic impulse has less to do with Nick and Rachel's rather pedestrian love story than with the allure of endless luxury and dynastic authority. Which I guess is pretty modern after all.

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Review: 'Crazy Rich Asians' Is a Party With a First-Rate Guest List (Published 2018)

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Crazy Rich Asians Directed by Jon M. Chu Comedy, Romance PG-13 2 hours As of the moment as an Instagram feed, "Crazy Rich Asians" revisits Jane Austen's timeless universal truth about a man in possession of a fortune being in want of a wife.

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This article talks about how successful the movie became. I will use this article to talk about the strengths the movie has.

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Constance Wu and newcomer Henry Golding play a young couple in love bedeviled by questions of class, money and family background in the screen adaptation of Kevin Kwan's global best-seller.

Given that it's been 25 long years since The Joy Luck Club, the first and only other major Hollywood studio film with a Westernized Asian ensemble and a contemporary setting, anyone who cares about cultural representation will be in the corner of Crazy Rich Asians even before the jazzy title sequence gets underway. So it's both a relief and a pleasure to report that this high-gloss rom-com - based on the bestselling novel of a Singaporean author, directed by an Asian-American and featuring an all-Asian cast - is such a thoroughly captivating exploration of the rarefied question of whether true love can conquer head-spinning wealth.

Warner Bros. has high expectations for the Aug. 15 wide release, which should do gangbusters business in Asian markets. The real test will be its ability to transcend the core domestic audience of Asian-Americans and play more broadly at home. The signs in that regard appear auspicious.

Director Jon M. Chu, novelist Kevin Kwan, co-screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim and the appealing cast make the story culturally specific yet eminently relatable. It's a rocky romance dripping in the kind of stonking extravagance most of us can only fantasize about, like a $40 million wedding, for instance. And yet it's viewed from the anchoring perspective of a young woman who comes from nothing and remains true to herself throughout, played with grounded intelligence, backbone and emotional integrity by Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu in a lovely performance that gives the film real heart.

What will likely sweeten the deal for many voyeuristic audiences is the movie's mouth-watering sampling of guilt-free luxury porn. It's a sybaritic celebration of high-end travel, food, architecture, decor and fashion, but it somehow eschews the vulgarity of conspicuous consumerism. There's flashy excess aplenty, but at the story's core, Trumpian ostentation takes a backseat to proud tradition, family honor, friendship and, most of all, love.

The romantic stakes are misinterpreted as gold-digging aspiration only by judgmental snobs, whereas for the couple at the mercy of gossiping meddlers and suspicious relatives, dizzying wealth and all its attendant clubby insularity are an obstacle to be surmounted. The movie is less satirical in tone than Kwan's novel; as a result it has the necessary depth of feeling to make us root for the beleaguered lovebirds to beat the odds and make a go of it.

Wu plays Rachel Chu, a self-possessed NYU economics professor raised by a working-class single mother (Tan Kheng Hua) who emigrated from China when Rachel was a baby. Her dreamboat boyfriend of two years, Nick Young (Henry Golding), invites her to be his date for the wedding of his best friend Colin (Chris Pang) in Singapore and then spend the summer traveling through Southeast Asia. That news pings through the international social-media grapevine of moneyed Asians at dizzying speed in an amusing montage that represents director Chu's effervescent style at its best.

Nick has been reticent about his family's astronomical, old-money wealth, evasively describing their situation as "comfortable." Even when he and the wide-eyed Rachel are ushered into their first-class private suite on the flight from New York, Nick brushes it off as a perk of family business connections. But his desire to explore a relationship with Rachel on equal terms, unimpeded by his elevated social status, soon proves naive, especially once his hyper-vigilant mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) gets wind of it. Even before any actual talk of wedding bells is broached, multiple forces are conspiring to separate Singapore's golden child from the perceived interloper.

The comedy is one part Meet the Parents, two parts Cinderella story, with those familiar elements reinvigorated by the fresh setting of upscale Singapore, with its architectural splendors embracing both colonial history and imposing modernist forms. Cinematographer Vanja Cernjul shoots the locations in dynamic widescreen compositions full of bold colors that add to the sense of a 21st-century fairy tale. The writers also expand the geographical canvas by taking in Nick's globe-trotting extended family, and dropping the principals into exotic locations for the pre-nuptial partying of Colin and his bride-to-be Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno).

While that couple's fondness for Nick makes them instantly accepting of Rachel, that is generally not the case. But she has a few strategic allies on her side.

Chief among them is her hilariously unfiltered former New York college friend Peik Lin Goh, played by rapper Awkwafina, the scene-stealer of Ocean's 8, who effortlessly repeats that feat with her irresistible insouciance here. Having returned home to her wacky nouveau riche parents, played to the hilt as shamelessly broad caricatures by Ken Jeong and Koh Chieng Mun, Peik Lin sets Rachel straight on the true scope of Nick's family fortune. She then teams with Oliver (Nico Santos), the flamboyantly gay "poor-relation rainbow sheep" of the Young family, to give Rachel the necessary makeover to pass muster with Eleanor. Even more important is Rachel's first impression on Nick's doting grandmother, or Ah Ma in local parlance, played with beatific serenity and just the right touch of inscrutability by veteran Lisa Lu.

Rachel also gets insider support from Nick's favorite cousin Astrid (Gemma Chan), the essence of poise, beauty and sophistication, whose own difficult experience of marrying beneath her income bracket makes her sympathetic to the outsider's discomfort. While screenwriters Chiarelli and Lim generally have been successful at corralling Kwan's vast panoply of characters into a manageable group, Astrid's troubled marriage to Michael (Pierre Png) gets somewhat shortchanged as a subplot, even if it serves to show the fissures that wealth disparity can create in a relationship. Nevertheless, Chan is a radiant presence who lights up her every scene.

Chu's pacing is uneven, and the film lags especially when Rachel and Nick are kept apart for extended periods. But Wu and Golding have charming chemistry that drives the plot and keeps you invested in their future together, even when it seems most hopeless.

It helps also that the luminous Yeoh brings such complexity to Eleanor, refusing to make her a one-dimensional dragon lady but rather a woman fiercely protective of her family and mindful of the kind of wife she thinks Nick will need in order to take his rightful place as head of their massive pan-Asian real estate empire. Her own uneasy entrée into the family as a young woman and her thorny past with the formidable Ah Ma also add texture to her interactions with Rachel, whom she dismisses as an American with insufficient understanding of Chinese family traditions. Those scenes are beautifully contrasted by affecting moments between Rachel and her mother, who appears when her daughter most needs her.

The filmmakers stir occasional bursts of raucous humor into the mix, primarily via Peik Lin's family or Bernard (Jimmy O. Yang), an obnoxious overgrown frat boy who takes charge of Colin's lavish bachelor weekend. But mostly, the comedy is breezy, smart and tethered to issues far more universal than the obscenely rich high-society milieu would suggest.

Aside from Peik Lin's outrageously campy mother, there are surprisingly scant traces of pronounced Singlish in the dialogue, and few brown faces to represent Singapore's large Indian and Malay communities. (Eagle-eyed viewers, however, will find subtle Singaporean references embedded throughout.) But the choice to go for a less localized, more borderless cosmopolitan feel seems right in terms of maximizing the film's reach and eliminating the need for explanatory footnotes, like those dotted through the novel.

Chu has put together a slick, highly entertaining package. Unsurprisingly for a director who cut his teeth on films including the Step Up sequels and Justin Bieber concert docs, Crazy Rich Asians is energized by infectious use of Brian Tyler's big, bouncy score and some terrific song choices, notably fun Cantopop versions of "Material Girl" and "Money (That's What I Want)." What makes it so genuinely uplifting, however, is the establishment of the central relationship as a union between partners determined to remain on equal footing, far more concerned with each other's mutual happiness than with all the wealth and luxury that stands between them.
Production companies: Color Force, Ivanhoe Pictures, Electric Somewhere
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Cast: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Harry Shum Jr., Ken Jeong, Sonoya Mizuno, Chris Pang, Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, Remy Hii, Nico Santos, Jing Lusi, Tan Kheng Hua, Carmen Soo, Pierre Png, Fiona Xie, Victoria Loke, Janice Koh, Amy J. Cheng, Koh Chieng Mun, Calvin Wong
Director: Jon M. Chu
Screenwriters: Peter Chiarelli, Adele Lim, based on the novel by Kevin Kwan
Producers: Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, John Penotti
Executive producers: Tim Coddington, Kevin Kwan, Robert Friedland, Sidney Kimmel
Director of photography: Vanja Cernjul
Production designer: Nelson Coates
Costume designer: Mary Vogt
Music: Brian Tyler
Editor: Myron Kerstein
Casting: Terri Taylor

Rated PG; 121 minutes

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Given that it's been 25 long years since The Joy Luck Club , the first and only other major Hollywood studio film with a Westernized Asian ensemble and a contemporary setting, anyone who cares about cultural representation will be in the corner of Crazy Rich Asians even before the jazzy title sequence gets underway.

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This article talks about the director choosing an all asian cast for the movie. I will use this article to talk about how they are trying to change the industry bu have an all asian cast.

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At New York's Serendipity 3 café, money-is-no-object customers can order a $1,000 sundae that's garnished with gold leaf. Like plunking a cherry atop such an extravagant dessert, the delirious sugar high that is " Crazy Rich Asians" ends with fireworks exploding along the roof of Singapore's Marina Bay Sands hotel - one of the world's most expensive buildings. Surprisingly enough, it's the first touch that genuinely feels over-the-top in a movie that expertly manages to balance the opulence of incalculable wealth with the pragmatic, well-grounded sensibility embodied by its heroine, Rachel Chu ( Constance Wu), a middle-class economics professor who discovers that her Singapore-born boyfriend is not just handsome but worth more than the GDP of most countries.

If those pyrotechnic bursts seem to be gilding the lily, it's only because Warner Bros.' spared-no-expense adaptation of Kevin Kwan's status-obsessed best-seller already feels like a grand, two-hour fireworks show, one in which gorgeous Asian stars parade around in dazzling, brightly colored couture, driving luxury cars to and from locations that suggest a cross between Versailles and Donald Trump's bathroom (no, really, those are the design influences). Normally, such grandiosity is reserved for the queen of England, or the rarefied circles in which James Bond operates, although director Jon M. Chu ("Step Up 2: The Streets") has crafted a broadly appealing charmer in which practically anyone can identify with Wu's character as she's whisked into this elite milieu.

This is wish-fulfillment fantasy on a whole other level. Kwan's characters aren't just rich, they're crazy rich (and in some cases, just plain crazy), which makes Chu's version the most blinged-out big-screen romance since Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" - minus the looming sense of tragedy that separates F. Scott Fitzgerald from a guilty-pleasure beach-read writer like Kwan. As books go, " Crazy Rich Asians " is unapologetically tacky, a finger-snapping satire of the conflict between old-money attitudes and nouveau-riche ambition at a moment when Asia is producing billionaires by the dozen. To their credit, screenwriters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim keep the sass while filing down its fangs to make the characters more agreeable all around.

Rachel remains a smart, self-reliant character who finds herself at the center of a sparkling princess fantasy - except that unlike the clichéd heroines of such movies, she isn't waiting for a makeover or for some kinky Christian Grey type to come along and transform her life. If anything, the conflict here is that her boyfriend, Nick Young ( Henry Golding), has to convince his family that she's the one for him and, as favorite son and heir to a dynasty of real estate moguls, might have to sacrifice his fortune if he doesn't want to lose her.

Following brief prologues in London and New York, the pageant that is "Crazy Rich Asians" takes place on a trip back to Singapore, after Nick invites Rachel to be his date at his best friend's wedding. She's understandably nervous about meeting his mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh, kinder and far more dignified than the conniving matriarch described in the book), and never imagined that Nick, who hasn't mentioned what kind of family he comes from, could be so loaded.

Hanging out with his friends, who take her to the city's hawker stalls for an unpretentious street-food meal, she's slow to pick up on just how wealthy the Youngs are. The movie milks this brilliant young woman's naiveté for as long as it can (until the big reveal of the Youngs' palatial estate, shown in a breathtaking flyover helicopter shot), although it cleverly tips audiences off to the family's buying power in that earlier London-set scene, in which the racist British staff turns Eleanor away from a posh private hotel, only to be instantly humbled after she makes a quick phone call to her husband, who purchases the business out from under them.

That's a hugely empowering moment for not only Asians but anyone who has ever been discriminated against for not being part of the white establishment, and it sets the tone for a film that celebrates a world in which money can buy everything but common sense, rolling its eyes at how outrageously those who have it choose to spend their millions. Once in Singapore, Rachel reaches out to her filthy-rich college roommate, Peik Lin (Awkwafina, winning laughs with her mix of wide-eyed incredulity and faux-disaffected 'tude), who essentially serves as a substitute fairy godmother, coaching Rachel on fashion and how to handle herself among the Singapore super-elite. (The movie's other comic standout is "The Hangover" star Ken Jeong, playing Peik Lin's hilariously inappropriate father.)

Nick and the guys head for a bachelor party on international waters (where there are no laws against firing bazookas, apparently), leaving Rachel to join the bride's friends on a nearby island, where they're treated to an all-expense shopping spree and other chichi perks. While audiences try to process the excess, Wu plays it cool and unimpressed, earning our admiration as precisely the opposite of the gold-digger everyone mistakes her for. And though the movie becomes predictable in its final stretch, the depth of her character's integrity is poignantly conveyed over a strategic game of mahjong with her would-be mother-in-law.

As entertaining as the more opulent displays must have been to stage, director Chu actually had to tone things down from the source material, in which the wedding involves private performances by the Vienna Boys' Choir and Cirque du Soleil (even so, the multimillion-dollar event is jaw-dropping, leaving "Mamma Mia!" and "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn" in the dust). In the book, Kwan quotes Far East explorer Marco Polo's deathbed claim, "I did not tell half of what I saw, for no one would have believed me," and the same filter was clearly required here - without limiting the film's visual excess in the slightest. Though most of the dresses are designer (Asians' obsession with European brands is a running joke), costume chief Mary Vogt is to be commended for the way her selections convey the personalities of the characters who wear these fabulous frocks, as her job isn't merely to wow but to define the people she's outfitting.

And this is one massive ensemble she's working with, so much so that it can be tough to keep the characters straight. Money may be the surface distraction here, but the true theme is family - and what it means to Asian culture in particular. Rachel may be an embodiment of the American dream, having been raised by a single working-class immigrant mom (Kheng Hua Tan), but her lack of family ties is an issue with the Young clan, whose many generations are assembled for the occasion.

The moment Rachel meets Nick's amah (Lisa Lu) feels wonderfully propitious as the camera pans to witness the rare bloom of a Tan Hua flower, although not all the relatives are so welcoming. Of Nick's three cousins, two are insufferable with their jealous gossip and shameful shenanigans, while big-spending Astrid (Gemma Chan), who flies to Paris regularly and has been known to drop seven figures when she shops, makes an elegant ally for Rachel.

It's no secret that there's a lot riding on this movie, which seems to have anticipated the call for wider representation in Hollywood, but comes with the added pressure that one bomb is all it takes for skittish development executives to nix future projects featuring nearly all-Asian casts. Don't worry: "Crazy Rich Asians" won't bomb, and while it won't beat "Black Panther" either, the film is every bit as exciting in the way it takes an ethnic group that is seldom given more than one or two supporting roles per movie and populates an entire blockbuster with memorable, multidimensional Asian characters.

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At New York's Serendipity 3 café, money-is-no-object customers can order a $1,000 sundae that's garnished with gold leaf. Like plunking a cherry atop such an extravagant dessert, the delirious sugar high that is " Crazy Rich Asians" ends with fireworks exploding along the roof of Singapore's Marina Bay Sands hotel - one of the world's most expensive buildings.

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They talk about the movie creates a high class society. I will use this article to see how ell the writing was done for this movie.

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Crazy Rich Asians is about Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a Chinese American economics professor at NYU who has a nice boyfriend named Nick Young (Henry Golding). Casually at dinner, Nick mentions that his friend is getting married back home in Singapore and that Rachel should come with him and finally meet his family. The request seems innocent enough-but then off in the distance, a lady in a stunning houndstooth shawl snaps a picture of the couple and texts it to her friends. Suddenly, the movie screen explodes in a cacophony of text messages, angry gifs, and animated emojis, as the entirety of Singapore's upper crust tries to figure out who this mystery woman in Nick Young's life could be.

That's because Nick is the scion of the richest and oldest family on the wealthy island nation, and Rachel is about to walk into a hornet's nest without realizing it. The bulk of Crazy Rich Asians ' two-hour running time sees her navigating the myriad egos and personalities at play in the Young family: the gossiping aunts, Nick's power-hungry cousins, the imperious matriarch Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), and the equally imperious (but more outwardly kind) grand-matriarch Shang Su Yi (Lisa Lu).

It's largely a blast, anchored by an extremely confident lead performance from Wu. This isn't a story about Rachel being tempted by Nick's riches and getting drawn into the power plays that might come with trying to secure them. Rachel is just in town to meet the folks. She's secure in her own identity and in the strength of her relationship with Nick (who's somewhat bland but very lovable all the same); it's everyone else who sees her as an intruder.

The sometimes hyperactive script (from Adele Lim and Peter Chiarelli) lays out the movie's stakes with the help of Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina), Rachel's friend from college who belongs to a much gaudier "new money" Singaporean family. The wealth of the Youngs, Peik Lin explains, is rooted in Singapore's postcolonial history. For the Youngs, the idea of the family heir marrying an American simply won't do, no matter how charming or accomplished Rachel is. As Eleanor later explains, Americans are cursed with wanting to pursue their own happiness; to the Youngs, that value ranks a distant second to family tradition.

Yeoh is perfectly cast as Rachel's foil; she's a commandingly cool movie star who can show just the right hint of sublimated emotion when necessary. The film's first scene is a prologue set in London where a stuffy hotel concierge tries to deny the Young family service, after which Eleanor quickly, and cleanly, exacts her revenge-just so the viewer knows what a hard case she is. She's an adversary deserving of the greatest respect, and her steeliness prompts Rachel to try harder to prove her worth.

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'Crazy Rich Asians' Is a Breath of Fresh Air

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Crazy Rich Asians is about Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a Chinese American economics professor at NYU who has a nice boyfriend named Nick Young (Henry Golding). Casually at dinner, Nick mentions that his friend is getting married back home in Singapore and that Rachel should come with him and finally meet his family.

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This article talks about controversy in Singapore. I will use this article to address what kind of actors the director chose for this.

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singapore 'brownface' advertisement sparks controversy - cnn

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An ethnically Chinese actor who allegedly darkened his skin to portray characters of different races in an advertisement has sparked a "brownface" controversy in multi-ethnic Singapore.

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This article talks about what its like being an asian American watching this movie. I will use this article to get perspective on other asian American who have seen this movie.

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Days before the national release of "Crazy Rich Asians," the film has attracted a lot of soaring language: "Historic." "Landmark." "A watershed moment for Asian representation in Hollywood."

Compared to the typical feel-good romantic comedy, there's much at stake for this Hollywood film, which is based on a novel of the same name by Kevin Kwan and is pitched as an Asian version of "Meet the Parents."

It's the first Hollywood studio production in 25 years to have an all-Asian cast and Asian Americans in leading roles. Drawing actors from across the world - including Australia, Malaysia and Singapore - the film has been praised for advancing diversity in Hollywood, an industry that rarely puts Asians in lead roles and has been chided for "whitewashing," or casting white actors as nonwhite characters.

As the film's Aug. 15 release in the United States nears, expectations are high - crazy high.

'Asian, ew gross': How the 'Crazy Rich Asians' movie could help change stereotypes about Asian men

Despite generating a largely positive response among Asian Americans, the film has drawn some criticism. Some say it struggles to showcase diverse perspectives, falling short of adequately representing the wider Asian experience or what life is like in Singapore, where most of the movie takes place.

"It is diverse when you look at it in the scope and context of Hollywood, which is predominantly white," said Nancy Wang Yuen, chair of Biola University's sociology department. "But in terms of representing all of Asians and Asian Americans, it doesn't hit that mark. It is a very specific story to a specific enclave, and even within that enclave, a specific class of that enclave."

But Yuen adds that the expectation for a film to achieve that level of diversity holds it to a higher standard than most Hollywood films. Since stories about nonwhite characters are so rare to begin with, movies that break the mold are put under a stronger microscope.

"The problem is that we don't have enough stories," Yuen said. "It's not that this film is terrible and Kevin Kwan's book is so horrible, but that it is one story and it shouldn't represent all of Asia and nobody wants that to happen."

The film follows a Chinese American economics professor named Rachel Chu, who accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore to meet his family for the first time. But Rachel doesn't know she's dating the "Prince Harry of Asia," who comes from one of Singapore's wealthiest families.

When the movie's trailer was released in April, critics noticed something was missing in the scenes showcasing the opulent lives of Singapore's elite: South Asians or anyone with dark skin.

At just over 74 percent, ethnic Chinese make up a majority of Singapore's population, but the island city-state is also home to Malays (13.4 percent) and Indians (9 percent).

Although viewers spotted two brown faces in the trailer, the characters weren't guests at the lavish parties - they appeared to be in servant roles. Yuen, who has seen the movie, said she saw South Asians as guards at a mansion.

By depicting non-East Asians in this way, Singaporean writer and activist Sangeetha Thanapal told The Post that the film exacerbates existing representation problems faced by minorities in Singapore.

"Already within Singapore, minorities are finding it hard to be represented in ways that are dignified," Thanapal said. "Now this movie is saying, 'Hey you know what, the only people that count in Singapore are Chinese people' and doing it on a global stage."

Singaporean actress Tan Kheng Hua, who plays Rachel's mother in the film, told The Post the movie is a reflection of Kwan's "specific perspective" and that the author "is not a general Singaporean talking about general Singapore."

"If you read the book, the book is about a specific set of characters from a specific lifestyle," Tan said. "It's called 'Crazy Rich Asians,' it's not called 'Every Singaporean.'"

She said the film aims to open dialogue, adding, "anything that fosters greater understanding of different cultures is something that we all could do more with today."

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

At first glance, the movie is an extravagant display of excessive lifestyles, which many may find difficult to relate to. But its story goes beyond money and wealth, highlighting universal themes about love, friendship and negotiating family dynamics "that transcend ethnic and racial boundaries," said Christina Chin, a sociology professor at California State University, Fullerton, in an email to The Post.

In addition, the movie presents an experience that most, if not all, Asian Americans have dealt with at one point or another in their lives: Struggling to feel accepted in Asia and the United States.

"This feeling of being an outsider in both worlds not only struck a deep personal cord in my own lived experience, but it could not be captured in a film with white actors," Chin wrote, noting that she was struck by "how well the film was able to speak to the Asian American second generation experience in subtle and important ways that have been so rarely captured in movies."

Critiques of the film's diversity stem from a shortage of mainstream movies with all-Asian casts that focus on telling the wide range of Asian and Asian American stories, Chin added.

"There are so few films that we can make any kind of comparison to that when one does come out, there's this heightened expectation that it's going to be a representation of every Asian American voice and experience," Chin said. "That's just impossible."

This type of criticism is most often faced by movies with all-minority casts or minorities cast in lead roles, Chin said. Films with all-white casts aren't held to the same standard because so many exist to offer varied voices and perspectives, she said.

One of the ways to solve this problem is to support a film like "Crazy Rich Asians" not for its narrative, but for the opportunities it could create, Yuen said. If it succeeds, the film can be a signal to Hollywood that Asian and Asian American actors, and films that center Asian stories, are bankable.

"We are throwing dice to say, 'Okay, we're hoping that this is going to be it, and this is going to open so many more stories,' " she said. "It's not guaranteed, but do we sabotage this and possibly close the door for another decade or two? Or do we toss the dice and hope that just by showing the box office dollars, Hollywood will be like, 'Okay, at least we know Asians sell.'"

But for native Singaporeans such as Thanapal, the film's potential to produce more chances for Asian narratives to be told in Hollywood does not justify its shortcomings.

"I know how it's going to negatively impact us," Thanapal said. "This vague possibility that it might possibly one day get us a big South Asian movie in Hollywood is not enough."

She added that she's not saying no one should watch the film, but instead people "should consume it in a critical way."

While people have declared intentions to boycott the film due to its representation issues, Yuen said the likelihood that Hollywood executives understand the message is slim.

"For us to be like, 'Well this one isn't representative,' all Hollywood is hearing is 'Asians don't like this,' " she said. "We're looking for authenticity on a different plane than Hollywood is. They don't even get it."

"Hollywood is just not ready to hear the nuanced critique of Asian representation."
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While it's drawn praise for an all-Asian cast and universal themes, critics say the movie fails to capture the diversity of the Asian experience.

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A fight broke out on Twitter over Crazy Rich Asians not long after the first audiences got to see the movie, in a series of carefully curated word-of-mouth screenings back in April, just after the trailer dropped. The argument wasn't about the inarguable milestone Jon M. Chu's romantic comedy represents - it's the first Hollywood studio movie in 25 years to feature a heavily Asian American cast and to come from an Asian American director - but over how people were talking about the film. "Is this our Black Panther?" wondered one person, while another insisted "Singapore is basically Chinese Wakanda."

The pushback was immediate, and pretty much what you'd expect: This comparison was appropriation of a black success story. It was a clumping together of disparate movies in a way that regrettably implied the POC blockbuster was its own genre (or that the two titles were in competition, and one had to come away the winner). It equated a film with a sharp political edge to one that is decidedly disinterested in politics. Also, guess what, Singapore is a real place, not a fictional creation - a warts-and-all country that, unlike Wakanda, has very much been shaped by the forces of colonialism. All warranted points, all true, but perhaps overlooking what people were trying to articulate with the misguided parallel and why, exactly, Crazy Rich Asians feels like such a big deal to so many people.

The film is not just a new Asian American story writ large, finally, after a quarter century in which the only way you could really find Asian American-centered fare on the big screen was in smaller indie releases. It's not just another historical marker to be crossed in the industry's glacial push toward greater inclusivity and toward more Asian American visibility in particular. Crazy Rich Asians is remarkable largely because it is a swoony, sumptuous fantasy, a movie made with the underlying assumption that people will see it not just because they should, because of its importance, but because they will want to, because of the pleasure and the emotional journey it offers. It is a good time.

Crazy Rich Asians feels blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering.

And there is something exhilarating about that, about the film's effortless indulgence, even as it also gets scrutinized for perceived shortcomings - with regard to what it owes the sprawling Asian American population, for how it portrays the country in which it takes place, and for the pass it gives to the incredible privilege most of its characters enjoy.

Crazy Rich Asians feels blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering that has long been part of the implicit bargain made with so many mainstream movies focused on characters of color - that they are treated as marketable in relation to the pain they portray. The film isn't devoid of drama or of cultural specificity, but there's nothing dutiful or didactic (or, for that matter, especially progressive) about its content. It aims to entertain, to serve up the sacred cinematic gratifications of watching beautiful people in beautiful settings overcoming obstacles in order to be together - only this time, you know, with Asians.

Crazy Rich Asians wasn't intended to be an awardsy movie (though with the new Oscar category, who the hell knows), and it isn't a superhero story, either. It's a reworking of another traditional mainstream genre that's jolted back to life recently - the rom-com. It's a genre that, with Netflix original To All the Boys I've Loved Before also out this week, is shaping up to be the format of choice for something so new that we're still feeling out what it means. These films are trying to carve out space not just for Asian American narratives, but for glossy Asian American escapism. And when you're dealing with the weight of immense and decades-in-the-making expectations from a whole host of different communities grouped together under an overarching label, spinning out fizzy, lighter-than-air delights is not nearly as easy as it might, on the surface, appear.

The last big Asian American feature film produced by a US studio is generally accepted to be The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang's classic 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan's novel about the sometimes turbulent relationships between four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters. It is, in many ways, the type of movie Crazy Rich Asians appears to be distancing itself from. It's a movie that has cast a long shadow over a lot of Asian American narratives - a litany of intergenerational anguish and affection that generated critical acclaim and great sobby gouts of tears from its audiences. God knows, it extracted them from me - I've never cried as hard during a movie as I did the first time I saw The Joy Luck Club. I was torn between shocked recognition, as the Californian daughter of a Chinese Singaporean mother, and resentment at being twisted into knots so easily.

The Joy Luck Club, with its assimilationist assumptions and arrays of long-suffering women and absent or oppressive men, hasn't aged as well as Wang's 1982 movie Chan Is Missing, which remains rough and vibrant and the greatest onscreen evocation of the kaleidoscopic, contradictory concept of Asian Americanness I've seen. But its power is undeniable. The Joy Luck Club is the most full-throated chorus about the heft of immigrant parent expectations, the theme that's become a maybe too stubbornly inescapable throughline in Asian American output, from Justin Lin's not-your-model-minority 2002 debut Better Luck Tomorrow to Master of None to the most recent Pixar short.

One of my oldest friends, the Bay Area-born child of Japanese Peruvians, occasionally trots out lines from The Joy Luck Club when she's feeling especially pinned down by obligations, usually ones she's put on herself. It's a kind of mantra for warding off feelings of internalized inadequacy. She likes the four-hanky scene involving June (Ming-Na Wen) and the aftermath of a dinner party at which a childhood frenemy immediately went for the nicest food on the table, when June's mother offers her daughter some rare words of praise. "Waverly took best-quality crab. You took worst. Because you...have best-quality heart," my friend will intone, and the two of us, children of different Asian diasporas, will howl with laughter, united in amusement at all that weaponized guilt and self-sacrifice and a little horrified by the hold it still has on us.

They're movies that aim not to break open forms or to reimagine storytelling, but to simply put Asian American characters front and center.

Maybe that's why the idea of Asian American escapism feels so radical, even as there is, pointedly, nothing radical about the content of either Crazy Rich Asians or To All the Boys I've Loved Before. They're movies that aim not to break open forms or to reimagine storytelling, but to simply put Asian American characters front and center and declare, counter to years of showbiz bias, that they are compelling, endearing, desirable, and worthy of audience attention by themselves. Putting so much pressure on the value of representation can be a dicey thing, especially when both movies offer narrow spectrums of experiences on screen. They are both about characters of specifically East Asian descent only, and they're set in bubbles of either extreme, insular wealth ( Crazy Rich Asians) or upper-middle-class suburban comfort ( To All the Boys I've Loved Before), with no interest in looking outside.

There's much more to Asian American cinema than the few titles that have gotten mainstream attention - films as varied and diverse as Asian America. Even this week, there's Bing Liu's excellent and decidedly non-escapist Sundance doc Minding the Gap, which just premiered on Hulu, and which considers modern masculinity through the experiences of the filmmaker and the friends he made while growing up in a Rust Belt town and seeking solace in skateboarding. But the stories that have gotten mainstream attention have almost all been threaded through with concern about not measuring up, either to parental hopes or outside perceptions - about doubt. And so, seeing these new movies and their creators shamelessly claim the spotlight, it feels like it's been a long time coming.

Authors Kevin Kwan and Jenny Han, whose respective novels are the source material for Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I've Loved Before, have both shared stories about meeting with would-be adapters who wanted to whitewash their work, to erase part or all of their Asianness. "The more alarming part of it was that people didn't understand why that was an issue," Han told Teen Vogue. I can't dismiss the frustration some feel about the constrained ambition of these features, but I can't shrug off the poignance of their modest aims, either - to insist on not just visibility but stardom, the right to be projected larger than life.

If there's some irony to the fact that Crazy Rich Asians needs to travel to Singapore in order to make a film about Chinese American identity, it's reflected in the long tradition of Asian American talent heading east in search of work because there's been so little place for them in the US landscape. Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), the NYU economics professor who gets whisked away on an intense trip to meet her boyfriend's family, is the lone American in the movie's sea of Chinese scions. But there's no mistaking the fact that the movie is about her, and how she stands her ground against an overseas aristocracy intent on casting her as an unworthy upstart, a gold-digging interloper.

Crazy Rich Asians has been criticized for not portraying the full reality of Singapore, a country that's only around three-quarters ethnically Chinese and heavily propped up by migrant labor. But it doesn't really try - it barely sets foot on the country's soil before ascending to the selective, nearly nationless space through which the Youngs and their equally monied compatriots move. The ending literally takes place high above the cityscape, on the elevated SkyPark of the Marina Bay Sands, one of the most expensive resort casinos in the world.

The movie's lack of a critique or even an examination of its outrageous opulence is its most uneasy aspect, though that gives some cynical bite to its opening flashback, in which Eleanor Young (Michelle Yeoh), the mother of Rachel's eventual boyfriend, buys a London hotel out from under the sneering employees who snub her and her family when they try to check in. Money is the great equalizer for these characters. It allows them to push back against racism, take care of their own, and demand to be seen. And that has in some ways filtered into the public messaging around the movie: the idea that the future of mainstream Asian American cinema rests on its box-office returns.

Like any good glossy rom-com, Crazy Rich Asians provides its heroine with certain expected beats; there's a makeover montage, as well as a truly moving last-minute confession of love. But it's never really Nick - played by handsome-as-the-sun newcomer Henry Golding, who is half English and half indigenous Malaysian minority, and whose casting has become a fascinating inflection point in American attempts to discuss Asian colorism - who has to be won over. It's Eleanor, with her serene smile and razor-blade asides, who's the final boss at the end of a Jane-Austen-by-way-of-Singapore matrimonial gauntlet.

It's Eleanor who finds Rachel wanting, believing her to be too individualistic for her golden princeling of a son, too much the American-made overachiever, her striving suddenly turned against her. It's Eleanor who sets up the film's most singular moment of triumph, one that has nothing to do with wealth but is instead a heady evocation of laying claim to and drawing power from an identity that is neither Asian nor American but something in between. Rachel ultimately defeats her foe and proclaims her own worth - by out-martyring her. The Joy Luck Club moms would be proud.

And they'd likely be bemused by To All the Boys I've Loved Before, in which the Korean American mom died years before the movie starts (no direct applications of intergenerational immigrant guilt here), leaving Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) to live with her doctor dad (John Corbett) and two sisters. There's a touch of Wes Anderson to director Susan Johnson's carefully composed frames, depicting the fetchingly smooth-featured suburbia in which Lara Jean lives, but the film's heart belong to another auteur whose perspective has always been firmly white: '80s teen movie maestro John Hughes. At one point, Lara Jean and her lacrosse-bro love interest Peter (Noah Centineo) even watch Sixteen Candles on her laptop. "Isn't this character, like, kind of racist?" he muses as Gedde Watanabe's Long Duk Dong appears onscreen. "Extremely racist," she sighs, smiling anyway, while her sister explains that they're watching it for the romantic lead, the forever hunky Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling).

If the escapism in Crazy Rich Asians rests on the assertion that Asian American characters are just as deserving of aspirationally gorgeous romps through unquestioned extravagance as any of their predecessors in the genre, To All the Boys I've Loved Before opts instead for a more willfully limited act of wish fulfillment. The Netflix movie wants to racebend the traditional Molly Ringwald figure into one played by a winsome hapa heroine, and to allow her to be the center of all those teen-movie adventures. Lara Jean might have come across as a bit of a pill on the page, but thanks to Condor's immense charm, we're willing to afford her that ultimate high-school-movie privilege: to pass herself off as an invisible outcast with quirky taste when she's clearly the most beautiful girl on screen, wearing enviably dorky-chic outfits, with a bedroom right out of an Anthropologie catalogue.

Lara Jean tangles with various layers of popularity. She samples not just one teen movie contrivance but a series of them - she has forbidden feelings for best friend/boy next door Josh (Israel Broussard), she writes confessional letters to her five biggest crushes that someone finds and mails out, and she embarks on a fake relationship in order to make someone jealous. Most importantly, she wins the heart of the popular jock, the dreamy white boy, the king of the cafeteria, the Jake Ryan.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before revamps and updates John Hughes so that the school is no longer so racially monolithic, the gender politics no longer so objectionable, and the depictions of characters of color no longer so racist. But it doesn't change too much - it loses Long Duk Dong while keeping its object of desire pretty much exactly the same. In that, it plays like a tentative half-shuffle forward next to Crazy Rich Asians' confident stride: wanting change, but not too much. But when something is as sweet and cozy as a mug of cocoa, it's hard to criticize it too much - familiarity, after all, is the point.

A few months ago, I was on a panel alongside some other writers from a variety of big and respected outlets, and we talked about a few of the various crises journalism has been dealing with, and we did not manage to solve them. Afterwards, a few of us were lingering nearby to chat when one of the panelists brought up the event's unignorable lack of diversity. Everyone onstage and in attendance was white, she pointed out, not clocking that I'm biracial - or maybe she did, because she added, "unless you want to count the Asians."

I did, in fact, want to count the Asians. I probably could have done it on my fingers, because there weren't many in the crowd, certainly not so many that you'd ever describe the gathering as mixed. I have no doubt that they were acutely aware of being the scattered few in the room, because that's what it means to be in the minority, to be forever surrounded by people who don't look like you.

It was far from the first time I'd heard someone talk about Asians as basically white when we are not and have never been. But it might have been the first time someone had said it to my face so baldly, as if it were a compliment instead of a casual rhetorical act of sweeping erasure - that Asians shouldn't need to see themselves, because we should be content to see ourselves in white people. Amazing how this alleged interchangeability only ever goes one direction, to rendering one party invisible, to the point where 25 years can pass between Asian American projects you could catch at the cineplex. And even then, when something marketable comes along, a producer will say, hey, maybe the main character could be a white girl, because then people might actually want to see it, might actually care, and what's the big deal anyway.

There isn't a "relatable" white girl inserted into the middle of Crazy Rich Asians, and while it's ridiculous that that was ever a vague possibility, it's also a huge relief. But even more of a relief are the fights being had over the movie in addition to the praise it has gotten, that it's being called too Asian and not Asian enough, that there are arguments about whether its portrayal of Singapore is accurate and whether it needs to be, or if its collection of pan-Asian actors all playing Chinese is actually the most American thing about it. Because Crazy Rich Asians isn't the great Asian American movie. It doesn't remotely begin to reflect the whole Asian American experience - only an entitled fraction of it. And there is never going to be a definitive Asian American movie, because Asian American identity is too wide-ranging and debated a concept for a single narrative, or a hundred of them. The answer is only for there to be more, until we stop needing to debate whether we all see reflections of ourselves in any one particular title, because there are so many of them - some that are serious, and some that are sweet, and some that are allowed to be soap-bubble light. ●
More on Crazy Rich Asians and To All The Boys I've Loved Before:

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"Crazy Rich Asians" Doesn't Care About Your Impossible Expectations

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A fight broke out on Twitter over Crazy Rich Asians not long after the first audiences got to see the movie, in a series of carefully curated word-of-mouth screenings back in April, just after the trailer dropped. The argument wasn't about the inarguable milestone Jon M.

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This article talks about how this movie is like an asian cinderella. I will use the article to answer the media literacy questions.

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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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In Jon M Chu's spectacular comedy, a Chinese-American academic discovers her boyfriend belongs to a fabulously wealthy dynasty

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Crazy rich asians led to many open doors for asians American actors. Asians American are misrepresented in Hollywood by having most asians actors playing stereotypes and racist roles. I will use this article to show strengths of the movie.

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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."

More Must-Read Stories From TIME

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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People think that this movie is too stereotypical. Many views found this movie to miss-represent asians. I will be using this article to discuss the weaknesses of this movie.

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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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Asian American loved this movie. However many asians overseas did not view the movie in the same way the Asian Americans did. I will be using this article to discuss the weaknesses of this movie.

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Beijing, China - Frankie Huang could not hide her excitement when she heard that Hollywood blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians was going to be screened in China. For the Beijing-born, US-raised writer, the story of the daughter of a Chinese-American immigrant going to Singapore to meet her fiancee's traditional Asian family hit close to home.

"The thing that moved me most wasn't the love story," says Huang, 31. "The real fairy tale is for someone from the traditional culture to really understand an immigrant."

A Shanghai resident, Huang was eager to see how the film - based on the first book of a three-part series by Singaporean-US author Kevin Kwan - would be received on the mainland. It presented, she said, an opportunity for Chinese audiences to learn about and feel a connection to the wider Asian diaspora, and "feel part of this family".

The first Hollywood movie to feature an all-Asian cast for 25 years, the last being Joy Luck Club in 1993, Crazy Rich Asians was a global box-office smash, generating more than $230m worldwide. It has been hailed as a major step forward for Asian representation in Hollywood, with 2019 Golden Globe nominations for Best Movie and Constance Wu rounding out the trilogy's rapturous launch this year.

But in China, where the film opened on November 30 under the title An Unexpected Tale of Picking Gold, the response was starkly different.

Since its release, Crazy Rich Asians has only grossed $1.5m in China, an "atrocious" performance, according to independent China film industry consultant Jonathan Papish.

"It ranks in the bottom half of all films released in the country this year," Papish told Al Jazeera, pointing out that the film earned even less than Show Dogs, a US family comedy given a paltry 3.6/10 rating on film-ranking website IMDB, which made $2.2m.

And while internationally buzz has already been building over Crazy Rich Asians' sequel - China Rich Girlfriend, which producers say will be filmed partly in Shanghai over the coming year - the abysmal performance of the first film at the China box office suggests dubious prospects for the series in the world's fastest-growing film market.

"My advice is just to make the movie for its core market," Papish said, referring to the sequel.

Online criticism

Zhao Yi, manager of Shanghai's Premiere Cinema, said she was shocked by how few tickets Crazy Rich Asians sold. "It's doing far worse than I expected. I saw the film in advance and thought its box office would be at least 200 million yuan ($29m)."

While most cinemas in the city have discontinued or drastically reduced screenings, Zhao says she's been able to maintain viewings at her theatre only because "it's popular with foreigners".

Meanwhile, Chinese cinema lovers have sharply criticised the film online. According to popular reviews posted on Chinese movie websites mtime and douban, Crazy Rich Asians wasn't a celebration of Asian culture - it was a demonisation of it.

Many review writers took issue with the film's extreme materialism and promiscuity. "It shows the dregs of oriental culture," wrote one. "A film that openly exposes the 'ugliness' of the Chinese is being brought into our cinemas."

While director John Chu said the film aimed to quash stereotypes of Asians, one reviewer said it propagated them, saying "all the female elders in the film are given the most stereotypical and cliche image: serious, reserved and maintaining strict control".

Others said Crazy Rich Asians presented traditional forces, embodied by the character Eleanor (played by Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh) as villainous and backward. "The confrontation between Rachel and Eleanor - two women representing completely different countries and ideas about family, marriage and being female - ends with Rachel's victory. It almost implies the destiny of contemporary China: thanks to the wind from the West, the old and unprogressive East is given a new life."

For Huang, the overwhelmingly negative reviews felt like "a gut punch". She says Chinese audiences simply failed to relate to the film's main character and even felt rejected by her.

"Rachel is essentially seen [as] a race traitor. She turns up and doesn't speak Chinese, doesn't understand the customs etc Because of her appearance, she's still considered a Chinese person but one who turned her back on her culture," says Huang.

'Panda Express of Chinese culture'

Beijing-based filmmaker Stanley Tsang says scenes where lead male Nick Young, played by English-Malaysian actor Henry Golding, speaks Mandarin with a foreign accent, might have also been off-putting.

He says the same happened with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, a Mandarin-language kung-fu epic directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee which was a major global hit but suffered a similar fate at the box office when it was released on the mainland in 2000.

"Cantonese was the actors' first language, not Mandarin," says Tsang, referring to leads Michelle Yeoh - who also starred in Crazy Rich Asians - and Chow Yun-Fat, adding that the different accent "might have perplexed the audience at the time".

Ultimately, the filmmaker says the film portrayal's of the Asian culture might lead to its flatlining in China.

"Crazy Rich Asians is the 'Panda Express' of Chinese culture," says Tsang, referring to the popular US-based food-chain which serves Westernised Chinese dishes. "I studied in Canada and relate to the overseas Chinese people, so I enjoyed the movie. But the mainland market has a different palate."

Papish agrees. "Mainland audiences prefer their 'Chinese' stories to come from China and their Hollywood stories to come from Hollywood; they walk away when the lines are blurred," he said.

It's a point Huang understands. She says Hollywood's appeal on the mainland is based on presenting an "exotic white experience".

"When they see this movie filled with Asian faces, that's not really what they're used to or want. When they see Chinese faces what they expect is a Chinese story with Chinese sensibilities," she says.

But according to Hu Shan, a Beijing-based creative producer and self-described movie buff, the reason for the film's lacklustre Chinese performance is much more simple: its key selling point - an all-Asian cast - was irrelevant for the world's biggest Asian country. Instead, mainland movie-goers opted to spend money on films like Venom, a Marvel action movie released in early November which has so far grossed more than $240m in China alone.

"The novelty of Crazy Rich Asians only works for Western people who don't know much about Asian culture and are fascinated by how 'crazy rich' Asians can be ... and the Asian diaspora, who are mostly happy just to see their own culture presented in a Hollywood movie," says Hu.

"For the Chinese, both of these points aren't relevant. The love story itself isn't even touching because it's too distant from their own lives."

Marketing complaints

The film's late release date in China didn't help either. Crazy Rich Asians hit mainland screens almost three months after debuting in the United States, giving any keen Chinese viewers plenty of time to source and watch bootleg versions online.

Hu says most of her friends hadn't even heard of the movie. Herself, she only watched it because it was available on-board a recent long-haul flight.

But for Huang, a die-hard fan of what she described as the movie's unique exploration of the "misunderstandings and the misgivings between Asian diaspora and the motherland", the lack of substantial marketing in China was "lazy and ironic".

"They should have known that there's a big gap. You need to reach out and make an effort to establish an understanding between people in China and abroad. The movie is a great metaphor for how to attempt to do this, but that wasn't reflected in the marketing. They just took the American trailer and gave it Chinese subtitles."

She still holds out hope for a better result for the sequel but says one thing at least needs to change.

"If they don't want it to be a fail from the beginning, their marketing needs to start yesterday."

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Why Crazy Rich Asians was a box-office flop in China

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Beijing, China - Frankie Huang could not hide her excitement when she heard that Hollywood blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians was going to be screened in China. For the Beijing-born, US-raised writer, the story of the daughter of a Chinese-American immigrant going to Singapore to meet her fiancee's traditional Asian family hit close to home.

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This article talks about how the movie went up against impossible standards to create this. The writers could not please everyone making this film but overcame it. I will be using this article to show how the writing is affective and powerful.

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In traditional American media, Asian characters are frequently stereotyped as meek, corner-dwelling folks with little to say. They're rarely more than a shorthand: bully victims, the romantically inept, people who are good at uncool stuff like math or piano. (Occasionally, they know kung-fu or they dispense ancient wisdom.) Nuanced Asian representation is hard to come by in Hollywood. That's why so many people seem to be hoping that the strong critical and box office success of the widely released romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, which features an entirely Asian cast playing a variety of character types, will help change the media landscape. The "quiet Asians" stereotype already looks out of step next to the film's bombastic arrival, which has ignited discussion and praise in every corner of the internet pretty much since the project was announced.

the film has inevitably drawn scrutiny for who it depicts and how it depicts them

There's also been a fair bit of controversy over the film, starting with an outcry over the casting of the male lead, Henry Golding. Some people questioned whether his mixed heritage meant the studio was defaulting to Western standards of beauty: was he Asian enough for Crazy Rich Asians? Next (and most notably) came vocal criticism about the film lacking diversity in depicting its chief setting of Singapore. The few darker-skinned characters who showed up in the trailers were subservient to the glamorous crazy-rich East Asians in the principal cast. Those criticisms were renewed after the film's release: what about the South and Southeast Asians?

The title of the film is partly to blame here. It's taken from the title of the book it adapts, Kevin Kwan's best-selling 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians. In bringing the story to a wider audience, Jon M. Chu's film has attracted attention and debate over the use of "Asians" as a term. With such a broad promise of representation in the title, the film has inevitably drawn scrutiny for who it depicts and how it depicts them. And it's been held to a burden of representation it couldn't possibly meet.

The film follows Chinese-American Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), who travels to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young (Golding) to meet his family. Though they've been dating for some time, Rachel wasn't aware that Nick's family is immensely wealthy. The title works two ways: "crazy rich" is an accurate descriptor of the Young fortune, but "crazy" also describes how the rich Asians resist Rachel's presence. Some family members and hangers-on think she's a gold-digger, while the Young matriarch Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) is convinced Rachel and her American pursue-your-passion philosophy are a poor model for a dutiful Chinese son and heir.

There are no white audience surrogates in 'Crazy Rich Asians,' and no apology for it

The movie's cultural stakes and the scrutiny they've invited come perilously close to eclipsing every other facet of the movie. Crazy Rich Asians isn't the last chance for Asian-American filmmaking outside the indie circuit, partially because "last chance" implies that there have been many other chances. It is, however, an all-too-rare test case. There hasn't been an Asian-heavy Hollywood production like this for decades, and Chu's film is unapologetic about that fact. There are no white audience surrogates. Non-Asian viewers are invited to see the movie's world through someone else's ethnic lens, as minorities have had to do since the beginning of cinema - and still have to.The film's financial success could open the floodgates for further representation, or so the thinking goes.

But in this case, the quality of the film also matters. Though five Michael Bay Transformers movies might beg to differ, Americans tend to conflate a film's financial success with its quality. For a film that represents a marginalized group, however - films like Moonlight or Tangerine or The Florida Project - the demands become more complicated. For people who are so rarely depicted on-screen, the well-documented hunger to be represented is surpassed by a deep-seated need to be represented well.

Decades of representation that's either trivializing or nonexistent have made many groups protective of their image. Nobody wants Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles or Apu from The Simpsonsto be the definitive cultural touchstone for their background, and yet it's painfully apparent that with so little representation, any representation easily becomes the definitive representation. The 25-year-old film The Joy Luck Club is cited in countless Crazy Rich Asians articles not because it's an easy reference, but because it's historically the only reference for a major studio picture solely about Asian-American characters. Crazy Rich Asians has prompted retrospectives on Joy Luck Club, Better Luck Tomorrow, and a handful of other movies specifically because they represent the entirety of the mainstream Asian-American cinema.

And within such a small space, films like Sixteen Candles, The Joy Luck Club, or Crazy Rich Asians are essentially what Asian people will be to millions of people. For Slate, Inkoo Kang has written about how such a burden has had negative repercussions for The Joy Luck Club in particular: "an environment where only one person, or portrayal, is permitted to stand in for the whole is bound to turn into a breeding ground for resentment."

Nobody wants Long Duk Dong in 'Sixteen Candles' to represent their culture

American society is heavily defined by the media we consume. Our real-life exposure to different types of people is supplemented with (or in some cases, superseded by) the people we encounter in our entertainment, fictional or otherwise. I grew up in the Midwest, a half-Vietnamese kid perpetually mistaken for the only other Asian kid (half-Chinese) in my grade. Growing up, I was repeatedly asked whether I spoke Chinese or Japanese (never Vietnamese) and whether I knew karate because the kids around me had only seen people like me through martial arts movies and TV shows or stories about people with strong accents.

I grew up with my appearance compared to Korean-American actor John Cho (I look nothing like him) or outright called "Harold" because all the kids in school had seen Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. This kind of profound ignorance of other cultures is reflected in and reinforced by the culture at large where the types of projects that do or don't get greenlit depend heavily on what people think of Asian-Americans. Can they lead films? Play love interests? Manage any role greater than the local geek, the walk-on delivery boy, or the martial-arts henchperson?

I felt relief sitting in the theater for 2017's Ghost in the Shell. And I felt equally relieved sitting on my couch, watching the first episode of Iron Fist or the American Death Note movie on Netflix. These projects didn't have Asian leads, but they might have. There were vocal pushes for someone other than Scarlett Johansson to play the definitively non-white character of Motoko Kusanagi (renamed Mira Killian), and the same went for Nat Wolff as Light Yagami (re-envisioned as Light Turner from Seattle). People wanted the comics character Danny Rand, the Iron Fist, to be rewritten as an Asian guy to push back against the original comics' white-savior overtones. None of these anti-whitewashing campaigns succeeded. And none of the resulting projects were enjoyable or worthwhile, either, which is where the relief came in: Asians had escaped any marquee association with these clunkers, avoided any damage to the "brand" of Asian representation. Bullet dodged; crisis averted.

I felt relief that Asians had escaped any marquee association with these clunkers, avoided any damage to the "brand" of Asian representation

I felt relief of a different kind while sitting in the theater watching Crazy Rich Asians. The leads have great chemistry. The jokes are funny. The film is profoundly normalizing and pleasant to watch. When a group is given such a small space in the media landscape, it leaves no room for error. Creators can't blow their handful of chances on financially unsuccessful or creatively unfulfilling projects: they need to make the most of their space by being powerful, enriching, and unique. When your voice is so rarely heard, you have little choice but to use every opportunity to prove that everyone should have been paying attention all along. A project like Crazy Rich Asians is a rare chance to change minds, and if it flops, it might be another 25 years before a similar chance comes along.

That's why there's been so much backlash around Crazy Rich Asians. Detractors say the film fails to represent the true diversity of Singapore, while headlines ask whether it's "Asian enough." With so much pressure to get things right the first time, "right" has come to mean reflecting the sheer breadth of the Asian experience in a single film. The film has been heralded as a victory for diversity, so members of a widely diverse group are all hoping to see themselves represented.

Crazy Rich Asians does have its shortcomings. Its heavily criticized narrow perspective does make sense in the context of the insular, classist culture of Nick's family, who are largely poised as the film's antagonists. But the movie stops short of reproach. Rachel is, after all, fighting for their approval, and she eventually reaches an accommodation with them. The darker side of the movie's wealth fantasy dissipates once Rachel is welcomed into the fold.

Although that's an expected part of this romantic fantasy, it's still somewhat disappointing, given the otherwise authentic emotions the film invokes. Crazy Rich Asians shows Rachel's sense of inadequacy and alienation in a place where it would seem she should be accepted; she's second-generation Chinese and a young professor at the prestigious NYU. Henry even remarks that he thought she'd impress his mother. But while an outside observer might think she fits in, Rachel is all but shunned. Her feelings are amplified as Eleanor recognizes her pain and even empathizes with it yet still gives her the cold shoulder.

That combination of sensations feels deeply relatable to Asian viewers who feel disconnected from their heritage. Personally, as the child of a Vietnamese mother adopted and brought to America by a white family, I often feel like I only have a slightly stronger connection to my "homeland" than anyone else who has spent time in a pho joint. I left the movie wishing it had gone a little deeper into that interrogation of Asian-American insecurity. Ultimately, however, Crazy Rich Asians seems to prize a more broadly appealing celebration of extravagance. It must, after all, play to the largest crowd it can.

And why shouldn't it? For BuzzFeed, Alison Willmore notes that the movie is an escapist fantasy, "blithely liberated from the obligation to offer up suffering that has long been part of the implicit bargain made with so many mainstream movies focused on characters of color." Chu and the writers are out to tell a fun story, with Asian actors front-and-center in a narrative that could not easily be painted over with white characters. The movie does grapple with racial insecurities, but it isn't required to. And the feeling that it must comes from a similar place as the demands that it represent a broader swath of the Asian experience. Ideally, a movie like Crazy Rich Asians could simply be what it is: a light, enjoyable good rom-com that dramatizes the lives of the wealthy, as white films have been allowed to do for more than a century. Instead, it's being saddled with 25 years of built-up expectations and unfair hopes.

In an age where blockbusters are driven more by brand names than the people who actually star in them, Asian representation is still sorely lacking. Though films like Crazy Rich Asians may be PR wins for distributors who briefly bring the marginalized up onto the wide-release stage, that space could just as easily go to white-male-centric entertainment that's still considered a safer, more familiar bet. We are made to fight for our space, and we argue over how to divide the scraps. We hope for optimistic box-office reports, and we pray for any movie we're in to be good because these are the tools we have to fight and to justify the use of the small space we've been given. Crazy Rich Asians opened as the biggest film of its weekend, and its success has continued into its second week, with a minuscule drop in viewership. The way audiences have embraced it only proves how unfair this cycle has been, as Hollywood has consistently failed to represent the marginalized while asking them to prove the existence of an audience that has been there all along.

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Crazy Rich Asians has survived impossible representation standards

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Even before its release, John M. Chu's adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel Crazy Rich Asians was facing impossible representation standards. As the first major Hollywood studio film in 25 years to focus entirely on an Asian cast, it's been criticized for everything from underrepresenting South Asian characters to casting a mixed-race lead who some saw as "not Asian enough."

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At first they wanted to start off by making a romantic comedy but they achieved more than what they planned. It wasn't just from the writers, but the whole crew and actors saw what more the movie could be.  I will use this to give sense on what the writers of the movie were going for when they made this movie.

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Making any movie is hard, but nothing is more challenging than creating a film that looks fun and effortless - and original. Warner Bros.' " Crazy Rich Asians " succeeds on all three counts, and the film's popularity proves that it struck a nerve with filmgoers.

"From the start, we wanted more than a romantic comedy," director Jon M. Chu tells Variety. "We had something to say. That was not just from the writers; that's from the actors, the crew, everyone; there was a sense of purpose."

The film looks at family and tradition, but it's fundamentally about identity, which is a struggle of the heroine (Constance Wu), her fiance ( Henry Golding) and her future mother-in-law (Michelle Yeoh). But it's also about the very different cultural identities of Chinese, Chinese-Americans and the specific subset of wealthy Chinese people living in Singapore.

With $238 million worldwide box office, it's clear the film had appeal far beyond those demographics. "The universality was created through the specifics," says Chu. But it wasn't easy to create that world on a $30 million budget.

"When you're called ' Crazy Rich Asians' but you don't have a crazy rich budget, it can be extremely challenging," laughs Chu. But they were able to achieve a lush look thanks to the work of costume designer Mary Vogt, production designer Nelson Coates and cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, among others.
Chu and his colleagues did a lot of research into that world, which is also underlined by cultural-specific montages of shopping and spa outings, dim sum, Mahjong and smart phones, via great work by editor Myron Kerstein.

The movie became a symbol and a test case, since it was only the third film in 50-plus years from a Hollywood major starring an all-Asian cast (after 1961's "Flower Drum Song" and 1993's "Joy Luck Club").

In retrospect, the success seems like a slam-dunk, starting with the screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, adapting the novel by Kevin Kwan. But Chu says at every step of production, there were endless naysayers, particularly online. Chu says, "I think there were a lot of scared people. They were scared of how Hollywood was going to represent Asians and Asian-Americans. They were scared of us getting it wrong.

"Everyone got beat up, especially the actors. But we knew the importance of what we were doing. We wanted to move the representation forward on what we hadn't seen onscreen. We said, 'Don't get into a Twitter war. Let's just make a great movie.' "

One mark of its success is the kudos attention, including a SAG Award nomination for ensemble and Oscar buzz. "You're humble about your movie, but then there's a moment when you say, 'Our people deserve to be recognized.' I'm excited to be celebrating with the community of Hollywood that is changing and moving, and I think our cast represents that change. We're grateful," says Chu.

The movie seems to be a gamechanger. "We weren't allowed to fail on this one. I hope that burden is lifted; I hope it's lightened the pressure on other films."

That appears to be the case. Chu is hoping to make two back-to-back sequels to "Crazy Rich Asians," if everyone's schedule can be arranged. Plus, he says with enthusiasm, "The studios, networks and streaming services are taking a chance on Asian stories and Asian-American stories. We are going through a renaissance and I can't wait to see the results in the next few years."

In addition, USC just announced the Jon M. Chu APAA Cinematic Arts Scholarship, to students whose projects focus on Asian-Pacific culture. The director said, "It's surreal! A couple of very generous USC donors saw the movie and heard me speak, and asked to do a scholarship in my name. I'm overwhelmed by the generosity and the movement to make a real on-the-ground difference, to tell more stories like this."

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Jon M. Chu on 'Crazy Rich Asians': 'We Had a Sense of Purpose'

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Making any movie is hard, but nothing is more challenging than creating a film that looks fun and effortless - and original. Warner Bros.' " Crazy Rich Asians " succeeds on all three counts, and the film's popularity proves that it struck a nerve with filmgoers.