Reappropriate on "Falling From Grace"

Jenn at Reappropriate has a long and thoughtful post about Fay Ann Lee's "Falling From Grace." The kicker:

As I have described in my other posts, I worry that Asian American moviegoers are too wrapped up in their own interests to consider supporting films within the Asian American cinematic genre but outside their own personal experiences. Asian American cinema is languishing without robust investment and distribution of artistic works exploring the diversity of Asian American identity, both by mainstream investors and apathy within our own community. Our community is defined by its stratified differences in ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality: not every film can address and satisfy all of these competing interests. While most of the community agrees that stereotypes of Asian Americans remain prevalent in Hollywood, stereotypes are best combatted by an increasingly varied offering of Asian American depictions, not a transition to an equally limited by arbitrarily "more positive" form of Hollywood-as-political-propaganda. "Falling for Grace" depicts a traditional White male/Asian female pairing, but it does so in order to offer a non-traditional re-interpretation of this coupling -- in essence, it combats stereotypes by offering a different take on how Asian American women have been traditionally portrayed, lending complexity to the Asian American female archetype in film.

Until we, as a community, are willing to support all kinds of Asian American cinema -- even those that don't speak specifically to our individual political interests - and thus demonstrate our interest in this genre, we cannot expect that Asian American cinema will ever be as varied and as interesting -- not to mention artistic and experimental -- as we need it to be. There are few Asian American films as feminist as "Falling for Grace" because it's so difficult to sell such films to a community so enraptured by the narratives of men, but the lack of such purely feminist stories remains a sad disparity in Asian American cinema.