China takes another chunk of the USA

I noticed something funny here the other day when I was going to watch “The legend of Bruce lee” from 2008.

The movie is telling the story of Bruce Lee’s unorthodox life. It shows him to be more than just a martial art hero. He is portrayed as a very intelligent person with great interest in philosophy and scriptwriting in addition to his contribution to marital art scene.

Surprisingly enough I was not able to find a single version of this movie that was not “dubbed” in Mandarin. It was not until I looked up the movie in IMDB (The internet movie database) that I discovered the truth: That this was in fact a Chinese production in USA.

Maybe I’m way off, but that seems to me like a pretty big step forward for the Chinese within the movie and art domain. Don’t get me wrong: I am sure there must have been several Chinese movies recorded in USA the last few years, but this was such a big production and made so well that I thought it was a Hollywood production. The fact that Bruce Lee was an American, more or less, made me anticipate that this movie would be an American production

While this can be seen as an isolated incidence it is pretty obvious to me that Asia in general is slowly rising to challenge Hollywood. There are an increasing numbers of skillful Korean movies hitting the market these days. Hollywood seems to be stuck in the same old pond without really being able to get out of it. They are “stealing” from Scandinavia as well as Asia.

Is this a premonition of what is going to happen to America’s role as a superior power in the near future, or is art and politics not connected? What do you guys think about this? Could a Bruce Lee movie of this proportion have been produced in the same manner ten or twenty years ago? Are the times changing?