Apart from entertainment, an outstanding movie can broaden our horizons on the changing world as well as cultures and history of other countries. Great movies, such as “Gone…
By George H. Tsai
Good movies, like music and arts, transcend national or cultural boundaries.
Apart from entertainment, an outstanding movie can broaden our horizons on the changing world as well as cultures and history of other countries. Great movies, such as “Gone with the Wind,” “Cleopatra,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “The Ten Commandments,” will forever be with us.
This year a foreign film, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” is captivating Hollywood and American movie-goers. It has offered something that many of us never saw before. This martial arts spectacular is the best foreign film of the year and the first foreign film to have set a box office record in America, if not in the world.
The epic, which has been shown at Flushing’s Multiplex since early January, has attracted Queens residents of different ethnic backgrounds. It’s one of the longest-running movies in town and perhaps in the nation. It recalls the best martial arts films of the 1960s and pushes the genre in new directions.
While entertaining audiences of all ages, it promotes the understanding of a mythical culture of an ancient country in Asia.
The masterpiece, an astounding combination of action, comedy and romance, has won 10 Oscar nominations. No other foreign movie has ever won such a bundle of Hollywood honors. And a panel of judges made it official at the 73rd Oscar Award ceremony last month that “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is the best foreign picture. Besides, the $15 million film also has collected Oscars for the best original score, the best cinematography and the best art direction.
On the eve of the Oscar presentation, The American Independent Filmmakers Association presented its best picture award to “Crouching Tiger,” the best director award to Ang Lee of Taiwan and the best supporting actress award to Zhang Ziyi, who plays Jen Yu, the masked heroine in the film. The double victories the film has scored are beyond his imagination, Lee said.
A Flushing resident, Xian Gao of Gao's Kung Fu Academy on Roosevelt Road, has played a supporting role in the movie.
Asian-Americans across the nation, especially those in the Big Apple, are excited about the honors the film has achieved. Why? It is the first movie starring actors from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan that so charms Americans. It’s probably the first such movie made to cater to Western audiences.
The film’s eye-catching sequences include the flying-over-the-rooftop, climbing-up-wall and dueling-on-the-bamboo-branch stunts that are most characteristic of the genre. It’s a love story, but most viewers seem to enjoy those dazzling fight scenes, thanks to the high-tech tricks.
With four Oscars and other Hollywood awards, “Crouching Tiger” makers see a very lucrative market in China with 13 billion people as well as in other parts of the world. It will probably be among the most-watched movies in history.
However, some local Asian-Americans, especially those from Hong Kong, have shown little enthusiasm for this film. Kung Fu movie are nothing new in Hong Kong. A great majority of them produced and shown in that former British colony have featured traditional martial arts since the early 1970s.
“Crouching Tiger” tells of two strong, young women whose fates intertwine during a tumultuous period of Qing Dynasty. It is based on a series of pulp-fiction novels published in Shanghai in the 1920s. It starts with the revenge plot common in the wuxia pian, or film of martial chivalry that is rooted in a mythical China.
To Lee himself, the film is a kind of dream of China, a China that probably never existed except in his boyhood fantasies in Taiwan. His childhood imagination was fired by the martial arts movies he grew up with and by the novels of romance and daring-do he read instead of doing his homework.
With breathtaking landscapes, this film was shot in almost every corner of China, including the Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Plateau, north of Tibet, near the Kyrgyzstan border.
“Crouching Tiger” has created a great sensation in this country and has become a trailblazer for other Asian filmmakers who have long set their sights on Hollywood. And we hope Lee will continue to produce movies that will contribute to the understanding of cultures — mythical and otherwise — of Asia.
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