East Asia and the Transnational Movie

by Andrew Lam

These days when it comes to movie making in East and Southeast Asia, this motto seems now to work very well: Think globally, act regionally.

Why that is so is not hard to understand. The region is never as integrated, or as wealthy as it is now, 2 decades after the cold war ended. Tastes have grown horizontally in the region that previously knew little of one another. Culturally speaking, the region is becoming more aware of itself as commerce and travel and communications intensify. Japanese girls love Vietnamese new designs of ao-dai dresses, Koreans love Thai martial arts star, Tony Jar, Japanese mangas are popular everywhere, and everyone loves traveling to Vietnam and Korean movies and soap operas.

With regional integration, comes international style of movie making. Movies from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China seem to have blended into one another. Co-produced internationally the movies’ the plots oftentimes respect no borders.

The Bangkok International film festival last February, as if giving a nudge to this understanding, opened with “Invisible Wave,” a murder mystery directed by a Thai but with an international cast – Japanese, Hong Kong, Korean actors. Three languages are spoken in it, and the movie was filmed in 3 countries, with references to the Tsunami, which of course itself affected everyone in the region and beyond.

Budget wise it makes sense. Casting international stars – even if they can barely each other’s language- insures greater audiences. It also procures bigger budget production with international producers, something that individual, smaller studios hadn’t managed to do before.

A big part of this regional movie making formula, no doubt, has to do with the renaissance of South Korea, known now as the Korean Wave. By the look of how movie stars dominate billboards in major cities from Tokyo to Shanghai to Hanoi to Bangkok and beyond, one can see that Korea is hottest flavor of the day. Any movie that include one of Korea heartthrobs – the beautiful Jang Nara, say, or the energetic, sexy actor-cum-singer with one name, Rain – seems to guarantee international box office smash.

That’s why Ji Jin-Hee, the star of the mega hit soap opera “Jewel in the Palace” was cast in the Chinese musical “Perhaps Love” opposite multilingual, drop dead handsome Takeshi Kaneshiro (half Japanese, half Taiwanese), and Jackie Cheung, a Hong Kong star. Produced by Andre Morgan, the dances in the movie were choreographed by Farah Khan, India’s most famous choreographer.

Krrish, the new Bollywood superhero, on the other hand, starring Hrithik Roshan, is kung-fu fighting in Singapore when he’s not dancing to seduce his girl, and the fighting is choreographed by Hong Kong legendary stunt master, Tony Siu-Tung.

Hong Kong film director, Stanley Tong followed suit by casting Indian sex symbol Mallika Sherawat and South Korean Kim Hee-Seon as two princesses to star opposite Jackie Chan in “The Myth,” an action-adventure film ala Indiana Jones.

In Fearless, coming to an AMC theatre near you in September, 2006, Jet Li will fight for the last time (he is reportedly to retire from the kung fu genre) against an international cast. It’s the story of Chinese Martial Arts Master Huo Yuanjia (1869~1910), the founder and spiritual guru of the Jin Wu Sports Federation. In the movie, which is action packed, Li fights Australian Weight lifter, Nathan Jones, kick-boxer Jean-Claude Leuyer, American actor and swords master, Anthony de Longis, and last and not least, Kabuki trained actor Shido Nakamura.

With so much action in the Far East, Hollywood is eying the region now more than ever. Special overseas divisions or partnerships to produce and distribute films in languages other than English have been created by major studios like Disney, Miramax, and Sony pictures. It is, after all, the fastest growing regional market – Especially China and India, whose huge populations make them potentially much bigger markets than Europe could ever be. “Within another 2 decades,” According to Christina Klein, writing for Yale Global Online, “China and India, Asia could be responsible for as much as 60% of Hollywood’s box-office revenue… Asia is where the action is and will be for the foreseeable future.”

For years, the east plays subservient roles to the west, the receiving end of Hollywood visions. Hong Kong movies, for instance, traditionally copied Hollywood plots shamelessly. But the Asian economic ascendancy which started 3 decades has changed all that. As Hong Kong began to find itself in the late 80s, and it was Hollywood’s turn to copy. Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino all have expressed tremendous enthusiasm for the martial art genre, and Tarantino has admitted to being “inspired” by John Woo’s “City on Fire” when making his film “Reservoir Dogs.”

In recent time, Hollywood too has made it a habit to remake Japanese and South Koreans blockbusters like “The Ring” and “Shall We Dance?” and, the latest, “The Lake House.”

Korea, like Hong Kong and China, has been eying the growing market in the US for Asian style movies. Typhoon, a Korean movie about international espionage and revenge, was the first to be shown in a major US Cineplex (AMC theatre.)

The synopsis: a northerner Korean defector, betrayed both by the South, aims to destroy both north and south Korea with dirty uranium, and with the help of typhoon blowing over the peninsula. The National Intelligence Service dispatches a secret agent to stop him. What ensues is an international chase that takes them to Thailand and Russia and China. The cast, it must be noted, is as international as its plot whose script is in 4 languages.

The most expensive production ever made in Korea, typhoon unfortunately did not garner too many viewers in the US. Still, as far as Asian movie making history goes, it marks an important moment: It augurs of what to come: Big and bold and hybridized-regionalized visions that will continue to blow as regular as the hurricane season from the Far East.