A cross-cultural contextual study of Wong Kar-wai’s films driven by online reviews
Authors: Dong Hanzhang 
Published: January 2024

With the development of science and technology, the distance between people in space is getting smaller and smaller, and economic globalization has been a historical inevitability. At the time of accelerating globalization, the film and television industry, as a part of the economy, cannot escape the impact of globalization. Moreover, compared with other industries, film and television works often carry more cultural connotations. How should filmmakers cope with the cultural differences in storytelling, create cross-cultural works, and get the same or different word-of-mouth feedback from different cultural groups? In the current multi-cultural context, Wong Kar-wai can be said to be one of the representative figures. In his films, From "Carmen", "Ashes of Time" and "Days of Being Wild" to "Chungking Express", "In the Mood for Love" and "The Grandmaster", Wong Kar-wai has been widely understood and accepted in different cultural and social contexts. This article start with online comments and study the elements of cross-cultural film creation in the context of globalization according to data mining technology. Research methods and processes: Firstly, data acquisition and pre-processing are carried out. The data source of online comments needs to be determined before crawling the review data. For the research objects selected in this study, the relevant sections of online movie rating websites, online movie platforms and social attribute platforms with large audiences were chosen as data source. For example, metascore has a weighted average of many movie reviews from well-known critics, which is highly reliable. Then, the key step in text mining is word segmentation. It's the process of breaking a sentence into several words. Accurate word segmentation can improve the efficiency and accuracy of subsequent text mining. After the word cloud is established, attribute features of the comments are extracted and classified, and the factors that highly affect the acceptance and empathy of Wong Kar-wai's film works in the cross-cultural context are summarized. Finally, combined with the study of his film scenes and narrative structure, the research focuses on the following factors:1.Theme selection: Explore universal themes, such as love, loneliness, loss and dreams. These themes are cross-cultural, and people face similar issues and emotions across cultures.2.Narrative structure: Such as non-linear narrative structure, which not only increases the complexity of the film, but also provides the audience with space to think and interpret, so that audiences from different cultural backgrounds can interpret the film in different ways.3.How emotions are expressed: Wong Kar-wai's films emphasize the emotions and inner world of characters, which is a universal emotional experience that can touch people's emotions across cultural boundaries.4.Character complexity: Complex and multi-dimensional characters with unique personalities, desires and inner conflicts enable the audience to immerse themselves in understanding the inner journey of these characters, regardless of their cultural background.5.The beauty of cultural elements: Different cultural elements, such as the backgrounds and traditions of China Mainland, Hong Kong, or elsewhere. Although these elements sometimes have a specific impact on the story, they are usually presented in an aesthetic and emotional way that allows the audience to enjoy the film without knowing the cultural details.6.Aesthetic of sight and sound: Films have a distinctive vision and sound style. Create memorable movie atmospheres. This visual and aural allure can transcend the language barrier and touch the hearts of the audience.In a word, the reason why Wong Kar-wai's films can be accepted and understood by people in cross-cultural contexts will be explored in a more specific way along the above directions, and the methods of film creation will be explored under the background of multi-context globalization.