Hi Leela! Have you read criticisms of Crazy Rich Asians made by Singaporean activists like Sangeetha Thanapal? I think you can support something while still being critical of it, and it's important to listen to the lived experiences of marginalized groups in Singapore!
yep, i have! and at first i was hesitant to see the movie because of it. when i first started seeing trailers i was like .. wtf is this? âcrazyâ and ârichâ right there in the title, really? who does this represent? who will this actually benefit? but having read more about it since then, having finally actually seen it and then talked to a close friend who is a singaporean queer activist and also comes from a squarely lower middle class background, i agree more with the idea that this movie was never trying to represent more than what it says on the tin. it wasnât trying to be a film about singaporeâs most marginalized groups, it wasnât trying to be a documentary about the various (important, obviously, incredibly important) class and race struggles within singapore. it was trying to be a lighthearted romcom about one extremely small class of people in one tiny country that makes up a fraction of a fraction of a minuscule percent of the entire âasianâ population. but it doesnât mislead about that imo. it doesnât ever claim to be showing all of singapore and its people. it never claims to be more than what it is. Â
for me, itâs enough of a win to have an all-asian cast dominate a mainstream box office film. of course i wish there were darker faces, of course i wish that every single person with my skin tone in the film wasnât delegated to vvvv background characters, like cab drivers or gatekeepers or other menial laborers, let alone skin tones darker than mine. but that wasnt my expectation of the film and i dont think that this movieâs inability to provide the full colorful diverse landscape of the asian or even the singaporean population detracts in any way from everything it does achieve for a mainstream film. from the perspective of most americans who donât even know where singapore is on a map, and who struggle to see asians as worthy of nuanced appreciation and respect beyond the ways in which we have been typecast in films and pop culture for, like, ever, i think this movie was groundbreaking and just really, solidly good.Â
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