[LINK] "Toothless tigers: Can a film please China and the West?"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera's Phil Hoad describes the efforts of Hollywood to break into the Chinese market, successfully and otherwise.

The new Crouching Tiger has turned out to be toothless. When the sequel to the 2000 martial arts masterpiece was released in China two weeks ago, even the state media were blunt: "Sword of Destiny is out, but it'll only remind you that Ang Lee's original film was indeed a classic."

"It was extremely uncomfortable watching a group of ethnically Chinese performers speaking English and then being dubbed into Mandarin," said a programmer for Shanghai International Film Festival. "This kind of disharmony embodied the film's entire style; it was a complete and utter mess."

Filming in English, and overdubbing for Chinese audiences, was a quick fix to the most pressing question facing mainstream filmmakers today: how to please both the West and China. With the Chinese box office due to become the world's biggest next year, this is uncharted territory for everyone.

It is understandable that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny - reliant on Michelle Yeoh's bygone elegance to chaperone its flat-footed Ang Lee tribute act into this brave new world - opted for the easy route. It is essentially an old-school Hong Kong chop-socky flick with English dialogue (unsurprisingly, with its Western audience mostly on Netflix). But 15 years ago, Ang Lee made Yeoh and co-star Chow Yun-fat, both Cantonese speakers, recite Mandarin lines phonetically. That is just one sign of the commitment that made the original Crouching Tiger, Hollywood in origin, a pioneer in seeking out that elixir of 21st century cinema: combining East and West.