Hollywood Hucksters Ambushed By Tiger.(Brief Article)

Culture and the arts have been "globalizing" for years now. In movies this has usually meant dumb Hollywood blockbusters invading foreign screens on the strength of their world-famous stars, gaudy special effects, and monstrous marketing campaigns. But last month the globalization of movies took an interesting turn when ten Academy Award nominations--the most ever for a foreign-language film--were lavished upon the Chinese-language import Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Crouching Tiger is a visually stunning and highly romantic epic. But it has prospered almost by reversing the Hollywood formula for worldwide blockbusting. After all, this is a subtitled martial arts movie populated with unfamiliar Asian faces. Sony Pictures Classics has supported the film with a clever, word-of-mouth promotional plan more than with traditional marketing. And yet the film has managed to nestle its way into the hearts of American critics and audiences alike, landing on countless top-ten lists and knocking off Life Is Beautiful to become the United States' box-office champion of foreign-language cinema.

Strictly speaking, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is not so much a foreign film as a global film. Its main creative force is director Ang Lee, a native of Taiwan who attended college in America and stayed here to direct films such as Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. He collaborated on both of those pictures with American James Schamus, an independent producer and screenwriter who also adapted the Chinese novel that Crouching Tiger is based on, with the help of Taiwanese screenwriters Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung. Add to this a trio of stars--Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi--who hail from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and China, respectively. Top it off with a score written by Chinese composer Tan Dun and performed in part by Yo-Yo Ma, an Asian American who grew up in France, and you can see the true intercontinental cast of the creative crew behind this product.

This eclectic team has created a movie that shimmers with a sort of grand lyricism ...