What movies would you list as 'Essential Asian Films'?

Toshiro Mifune played an outlaw samurai in Akira Kurosawa's 'Sanjuro'

MY FILM SCHOOL consisted of Saturday nights at Chinatown's Grand Star Theater and J-Town's  Kabuki Theater in San Francisco. The teachers were Akira Kurosawa and Run Run Shaw. Throw Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, West Side Story, a few new wave French films and any movies by John Ford western and Satyajit Rey - that's the extent of my film education. 

A really interesting four-part series of articles written by Kate Hagen on the blog The Black List is a  list of what she considers the "Essential Asian Films." Although she doesn't tell us her criteria, from the commentary on each film, I'd say the listing is of movies that open new worlds or shows the universal humanity of its characters.

'Enter the Dragon' made my list.

She's come up with a wide-ranging list of her own - plus contributions from other cinephiles -ranging from esoteric movies made in Asia to the popular Hollywood fare such as the John Carpenter-directed Big Trouble in Little China for featuring Asian characters played by Asian actors (how novel is that?) and Stephen Spielberg's version of the timeless Peter Pan fantasy, Hook for introducing Lost Boy leader Rufio (played by Filipino/American Dante Basco), proving that countless tweenage girls can have a crush on an Asian guy.

Enter the Dragon made her list as well as: Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra, Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou, Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet, Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth, Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, Jessaca Yu's Ping Pong Playa, Jennnifer Phang's Advantageous, Wayne Wang's Joy Luck Club and Suzuki Seijun’s Tokyo Drifter.

Creating lists like this is always tricky because it is so subjective and personal experiences come into so much play. Sometimes, the list says more about the list-maker than it doe about the movies themselves. With that in mind, here are my contributions

In terms of films that allows us to peek into new worlds and raises empathy for its characters, I certainly would have included Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai, the Sanjuro/Yojimbo trilogy and Rey's Apu trilogy. I would also include Lee's Enter the Dragon. for its groundbreaking and stereotype-busting introduction to an Asian hero, which, ironically, created a new stereotype; Better Luck Tomorrow, Justin Lin's shattering of the contemporary model student image; and the list would not be complete without adding Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman for showing the universality of family and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because western audiences had never seen anything like it before, and yet - pay attention studio heads - people flocked to watch it again and again.

While going over the lists, what strikes me is how much talent there is and casting directors and producers should not be so closed minded. These movies should prove, once and for all, there is an audience for good movies, no matter what race the cast is. I don't understand the caveman-thinking that says U.S. audiences won't be able to relate to leads who are not white.

What motion pictures about, or by, Asians would you consider essential viewing to gain an  understanding of Asians and all the different cultures from that continent or about Asians in America?

As the title suggests, food and family are at the center of director Ang Lee's  'Eat Drink Man Woman'

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Enter the Dragon: Bruce Lee, El Niño

Like Bruce Lee, this year's El Nino will pack a wallop.

EMILY BECKER, who blogs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, proposed - lightheartedly - that the current El Niño event taking shape in the Pacific Ocean be named after martial artist  Bruce Lee. Here's her reasoning:

What’s in a name?Tropical storms and hurricanes have been given names since the early 1950s, which helps to clarify communications. In recent years, the Weather Channel has attracted attention by naming winter storms, perhaps with similar intentions. “So why don’t we name ENSO events?” you ask. Excellent question! I propose we do name them, starting this year. Since I think we should have a theme to the names, and the theme should be action movie stars, I hereby designate the 2015-2016 event as El Niño Bruce Lee.

Now, NASA scientists are saying the warm weather cycle is expected to unload its biggest punch early this year.

According to its latest satellite imagery, the strong El Niño that’s been brewing in the Pacific Ocean has shown “no signs of waning” and is on pace to match or even surpass the 1997–98 El Niño event—the biggest ever recorded.

Becker's very readable blog appears in the organizations climate.gov website. If you want an easy to understand reason for weather events without the political or too-scientific jargon beyond most of us, go to Climate.gov, It provides science and information for a climate-smart nation.

Since this year's El Niño is expected to have a "strong" impact, that's how she makes her connection to Bruce Lee; or perhaps this year's El Niño will kick some ass.  I might add that one of Lee's most quoted pieces of advice, "Be the water," has an application to this topic.

The name seems to have stuck. Climatologists refer to the current weather phenomenon as  the Bruce Lee El Nino.

In that same vein that she proposed the naming of El Niño, she sparked some reaction which were pretty amusing:

Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor?

So what's up with the weather? It doesn't take a scientist to note the higher temps, the drier climate (in the western U.S.), the melting glaciers, the rising sea levels and the spate of superstorms, hurricanes and typhoons that are ravaging our globe.

For California residents, Becker notes that even a strong El Niño is not a sure-fire drought-buster for California, so it’s not time to stop conserving water, especially given how entrenched this drought is (i.e. it will likely take more than one good year to erase). However, a strong El Niño does increase the chance of more precipitation overall during the winter, and also brings the potential for extreme rainfall. This may help alleviate the drought, but also can also lead to mudslides and flooding.

So at the Climate Prediction Center they’re not spending a lot of time debating about if El Niño Bruce Lee will be the strongest El Niño in history, or the second-strongest, or the third, etc. A strong event increases the probability that the U.S. will experience weather and climate impacts, but the strength of the event does not indicate directly to the strength of the impacts.

RELATED: Paquio, Bruce Lee and the Asian male stereotype

With all the talk about climate change, Climate.gov is a good source for scientifically backed information about what's happening to the planets climate; not the hot air pulled out of a hat that climate-change deniers use.

NOAA Climate.gov is a source of timely and authoritative scientific data and information about climate.  Its goals are to promote public understanding of climate science and climate-related events, to make our data products and services easy to access and use, to provide climate-related support to the private sector and the Nation’s economy, and to serve people making climate-related decisions with tools and resources that help them answer specific questions.

For more news about Asian/Americans & Pacific Islanders, go to AsAm News.

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