Why Searching is as important as Crazy Rich Asians

I saw the preview for Searching when I went to go see Crazy Rich Asians, and my first thought was how it was the blatant obligatory targeted preview because it was the only preview displaying an Asian face, in John Cho.  But upon watching the preview itself, Searching seemed like a pretty intriguing plot, about a dad whose daughter goes missing, and how he has little other than combing through her social media outlets to hope to find out any information, only to discover just how little he knows about his own kid.

Needless to say, I was interested, so I made a point to go see it; even if the flick wasn’t that great, it would still be supporting films created by minorities, as the credits are overwhelmingly names that don’t look like an episode of a CW show, and not just confined to the CGI section.  Because, it’s important to me that Asian and other minority-created media actually cracks into the grossly whitewashed Hollywhite, and it’s going to take way more support than just the fad of going to see Crazy Rich Asians is going to accomplish.

However, it turns out that Searching is a very well done film, and I have a lot of admiration for the acting and the creative execution of the entire film itself, from the perspective of the myriad of phone and tablet and computer screens that saturate the vast majority of all of our lives today.  The plot is linear and pretty basic, but it’s a good example of how execution and creativity can take basic and make it compelling and engrossing.  At no point did I correctly predict any reveals or major plot points, but very much went ohhhhhh and came to realization of several hints sprinkled throughout the rest of the story.

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