✯✯✯½

Kevin Kwan’s novel was a satire written with the intent of showing what life is like in contemporary Asia to a North American audience, so how exactly could a story of excess translate onto the screen by a Hollywood studio? If you’re bringing in Jon M. Chu, the director of Jem and the Holograms and two of the Step Up movies of all people, it’s easy to be skeptical of the result – yet even the expected turns out to be satisfactory. I wasn’t exactly sold from the marketing of Crazy Rich Asians because it looks like just about any other Hollywood romantic comedy, just an Asian-centric one if anything – but maybe that also might have been what I needed for the time being. Yet given what the film stands for, being the first film by a major Hollywood studio directed by an Asian-American to feature a predominantly Asian cast, there’s also something more admirable underneath the surface of Crazy Rich Asians. And of course, speaking as a viewer of Asian descent (my parents are born in the Philippines but we have spent our lives living in Canada), it also felt nice just to see that a story of our very own had its chance to be told.

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