Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Whites Will Always Be Better Than Asians Says Hollywood

To make up for my previous post (I can't act natural in front of a camera or a microphone) I am posting another topic today :)

I went to watch "Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift" yesterday (who in the Malaysian blogosphere didn't). My review? It was a fairly watchable movie. No real "Wow" factor in it. Haiya you know la the plot to me is like everything in a good movie. FF was literally throwing cars and babes directly at you to blind you from the shallow story line.

But what ticked me off the most about the movie was of course the 'great white protagonist defeat evil asian villain' plot. You know:

- White trash gets exiled off own country
- White trash ends up in an asian country
- White trash gets into a fight with the best asian driver/fighter/athelete
- White trash looses
- White trash learns EVERYTHING from a local elder in a montage
- White trash defeats the best asian driver/fighter/athlete
- White trash gets a statue of himself erected right in the middle of asian country

It happened in a lot of movies e.g. Karate Kid, The Last Samurai and this installment of Fast & Furious. What we asians take years to master, the whites (the worse bunch of them) can easily learn in a week. So fucking degrading, no?


9 comments:

WH?

hey, the knife cuts both ways la.
Before you go off shooting like that, you should really think back a bit...

Like the Bruce Lee movies, who were the bad guys? Similarly, Jet Li movies.. who did he beat up?

It's the same la... what goes around comes around. The East invented kung fu, the West did invent the car anyway.

Edmund Yeo

Yeah, a hell lot of action movies from HK I can think of have caucaseans as villains, and that they are also depicted in a shallow and ridiculously stereotypical manner, I don't see this starting riots in America.

Sewjin

wh?: Fast and Furious isn't talking about westerns and their invention of the car. It's talking about asians and their invention of the 'drift'.

the great swifty: did you know that americans don't really watch foreign films? It's like how most of them don't know who david beckham is or what is a 'Malaysia', they just don't care about the outside world. You try to personally screen those shows over there, see whether they start a riot or not.

additional response: caucasian stereotypes? i guess you mean no brained, big sized americ.. I mean EUROPEANS screaming and running at jet li or bruce lee. oh yeah, ridiculous alright.

i'm talking about hollywood, you know, USA. The one that makes the most impact on the movie industry. The one that's suppose to be extra sensitive to the world when it comes to movie making. (Aya cannot attack black people already la, come we attack asians)

lethal weapon 4. Another movie just popped into my head.

did you realise in hollywood movies, if we asians land a role as a protagonist, we're actually fighting the whites to earn their respect? Unlike them who just wants to kill us off.

Yes, I admit the knife cuts both ways but doesn't it feel A LOT sharper on one end? That's why the title says, "BETTER THAN".

hey swifty, nice review site u got there :)

wh?, u member of rojaks? that is beyond coolness!

lookenneth

Yeah how many western movies present us Asians as black market small eyed paikia with so-so kung fu wearing black coats already?

Edmund Yeo

It's simple. Asians = minority. Thus they always have to be depicted with a hint of exoticism. That's why you see Lucy Liu in martial arts films more than actual drama or romantic comedies. It's all about the business, making money. Of course, we can say something like 'nooo, commercialism, capitalism is bad! filmmaking is a platform to express oneself! art and culture should be preserved, let's forget about the money!'... well, that will be rather impractical.

Edmund Yeo

Actually, my site's more than just a review site, just that my recent entries have mostly been my reviews, hence the misconception that it's a reviews site. But thanks anyway.

Dabido

Arrived here via Swifties Blog.

Last Samurai didn't have white trash becoming a hero who kicked Asian butt.

It was about an American (call him white trash if you like), and he arrived in Japan during the Meiji era (which was when the Japanese first started to embrace everything Western). He was in charge of training the Japanese Imperial army in terms of fighting using Western Weapons. [Lets face it, a small modern army can kick the butts of people with pointed sticks and the Meiji Emperor realised that].

He meets up with [gets captured by] a Japanese Samurai who basically showed him a sneak peak of Ancient Japan, which then enticed him [basically he got the meaning of it all ... believe it or not, that's happened before with missionaries, traders etc].

In the end he got his arse kicked by the Japanese Imperial Army along with the Samurai whom he was with.

So, not really a movie which fits your description.

Yeah, Hollywood basically depicts things that way ... but it's not White Trash, it really revolves around 'American', as they don't just make movies about 'White Trash' going into Asian countries, but Americans going into all sorts of places (like Europe, Africa etc etc).

If you check out Bollywood, you'll find they do a similar thing but with the Indians as the heroes, and the 'Whites' [usually British], as the bad guys. [One of my friends brothers went to Bollywood and played the bad guy for a few movies. He's actually Sri Lankan, so he's not a white].
Anyway, it comes back to where the movie is made. If the hero in fast and the furious was an Afro American, wouldn't he also have kicked the Japanese butts in the movie? Yep!

The plot you describe, if you take the 'white trash' and 'asian' references out and just look at it in terms of pure plot, is called 'The Mono Myth'. The mono myth has been around for a LONG LONG time.

Basically, it goes like this:
Hero is an outcast, not fitting in etc.
They get forced to go on a journey of some sort.
They get into great difficulties and have trials etc.
They are usually helped along the way by a mage etc (who gives them either secret knowledge or a magical item of some kind ... possibly a car or a weapon in Hollywood!)
Along the way we find out who the good guys are bad guys really are. Quite often the hero is betrayed, or a 'hidden' enemy is revealed.
The hero gets into their greatest trial which they must over come.
The hero wins.
There is a journey back. [Not always back to the villiage or where ever they started, but often back to where they want to be].
At the end,it either ends in triumphal return, or in a tragedy (depending on the story. Some heroes die along the way, BUT always succeed in their mission).

The monomyth is used in all cultures in story telling, and psychologist actually believe it is hard wired into our brains. It's also why we keep going back to movies that use that same plot.

Hope that's helpful in some way or form. :-)

Sewjin

-stumped-

Edmund Yeo

Well, hopefully, this fabulous screenplay will put your fears to rest.

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