Summer brought a “crazy” diverse Hollywood

By Liliana Ma,
BlueDevilHUB.com Editor–

“Crazy Rich Asians” is a Cinderella story for the 21st century. The romantic comedy, based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, was released on Aug. 5. The movie features familiar Asian faces like Constance Wu, Awkwafina and Ken Jeong, as well as some new faces such as Henry Golding.

This wildly popular Hollywood film made $8.7 million in the box office and received a rating of 93 percent from Rotten Tomatoes. While the movie may be like many other romcoms at first glance, there is much more upon a closer look.

“Crazy Rich Asians” has a mostly Asian cast, the first since “The Joy Luck Club,” released in 1993.

For the Asian community, this movie is an important improvement for representation and correcting old stereotypes.

“It was successful in promoting Asian representation in Hollywood because of its massive popularity, which will lead to more movies like this,” junior Hanson Li said.

“They did a good job of showing not just one side of what being Asian means, which I think is important because a lot of people have one single idea of what an Asian person is like,” senior Jade Lundy said.

The last movie that portrayed strong Asian leads was “Mulan.” “Crazy Rich Asians” showed a new type of diversity for Hollywood.

Although Asian stereotypes are often perceived as negative, the movie showed the positive parts of being Asian.

“I found empowering Asian representation and it felt absolutely incredible,” junior Zoe Poppenga said. “For once, we were the ones the audience was told to look up to, and we were the people who were seen as gorgeous and desirable.”

According to Lundy, “it is still significant that a rom-com type movie with Asians came out, because it’s sort of showing that movies with diversity don’t have to be only focused on the fact that they are about diversity.”