Chinese Moviemakers Betting On A-list Hollywood Star

Christian Bale

Bale in The 13 Women in Nanjing

Hollywood star Christian Bale and China’s top movie director Zhang Yimou have teamed up in a movie production in China. In the midst of the shooting, Bale received a slew of awards, including an Oscar, for his role in "The Fighter."

Bale’s success certainly delighted his Chinese colleagues, who are betting on his stardom to boost box office performance of the new movie, "The 13 Women of Nanjing" (金陵十三钗), not just in China, but around the globe.

The movie is about 13 Chinese prostitutes’ struggle against Japanese invaders during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. Bale is said to portray a westerner who was in the city and helped these women.

The budget for the movie set a new record for China’s movie industry, and a large portion of the over US$90 million budget goes to Bale’s pay check, Zhang Weiping, producer of the movie, told the Chinese media. Bale is paid about US$300,000 per day, Zhang said.

But Zhang Weiping said Bale, the latest Batman as in "The Dark Knight," will attract a huge number of audiences to go watch the new movie in theaters around the world. The movie will be shown in 150 countries and regions, Zhang told Chinese media.

“What we need to do is to let them [international market] open the door and welcome Chinese movies,” Zhang Weiping said. How? Zhang’s strategy is to stop being copycat of Hollywood productions, but to import Hollywood actors and techniques to the service of Chinese filmmaking.

So Bale was imported. The British actor has been called the most dynamic actor of his generation. His possession of charm and talent has brought him a huge fan base around the world. Even his recent F-bomb loaded lashing out at a co-worker on the set of Terminator Salvation did not seem to undermine his star power, but perhaps made him even hotter.

And the Chinese filmmakers can now afford someone like Bale. In 2010, box office gross in China exceeded 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) for the first time. Chinese moviemakers in recent years have increasingly endeavored huge budget productions, such as John Woo’s "Red Cliff," which cost US$80 million, a record in 2008.

But being able to hire Bale does not mean Chinese moviemakers now have the same leverage as Hollywood. For Zhang Weiping and Zhang Yimou, pouring out so much money on one big star is still a huge gamble. If "The 13 Women" failed to do well in box office, the Chinese filmmakers will have to suffer the loss.

Bale, regardless, will emerge intact. As an A-list star in Hollywood, he has even bigger projects lined up, including another Batman movie to be released next summer. The new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises," is going to have a budget of at least US$175 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. That is nearly double the cost of The 13 Women, and yet to set a Hollywood record.

Related links:
On Location: 'The Dark Knight Rises' in L.A. as studio sets up production office

Zhang Weiping talks about The 13 Women: here and here

Story of the Other Side

Lin Yulan had good reasons to pronounce her whole life a failure.

Her revolutionary course with the nationalists in pre-communist China, to which she devoted the heyday of her life, was denounced and forgotten in her homeland once the communist party won the civil war. She fled to Taiwan, along with other nationalist elites. Personally, the man she married to cheated on her throughout their marriage, no matter in Guangzhou or Taiwan. Worst of all, amid the chaos and despair right before they fled the mainland, her only son wandered away in the city of Guangzhou, never seen by his parents again.

Lin Yulan is one of the characters in a newly released novel, A Thread of Sky, written by Chinese American writer Deanna Fei. Although not the leading role in the novel, Lin’s story is particularly touching to me, because it made me realize that something is missing, on the part of mainland China, in the representation of last century’s revolution.

Growing up in the mainland, I have known the nationalists almost always as the bad guys, while the communists the good ones, in all kinds of representation of the revolution—novels, movies, television dramas, children’s stories, etc, with Mr. Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) being the only exception. Occasionally, the nationalists are portrayed as heroes, but usually only when they cooperated with or joined the communists. I never got to know how it was like for the individuals who belonged to the other camp, what they experienced, how they felt, and what they had to tell.

Lin Yulan’s story somehow became my first chance to gain some insights. Born and raised on the mainland, Lin rose from the countryside to join the nationalist revolution, fighting for women’s equal rights. Qiu Jin, the legendary female revolutionary who sacrificed her life to overthrow the rule of the Qing court, was Lin’s idol.

I found Lin’s passion and dedication just as strong as her communist counterparts depicted in stories popular in the mainland. They might have served different party, but they had the same goal of liberating Chinese women from cruel depression and above all, to change China.

Lin’s story is also the first one that shows me the personal distress and pain experienced by the nationalists when escaping the mainland. It was chaos, fear, and misery. Mainland stories never gave much attention to the kind of human suffering the other side lived through.

The corruption of some nationalist officials notwithstanding, thousands of individuals like Lin in the nationalist party fought, died and shed blood for the revolution: first to overthrow the Qing ruling, later to defend the nation against Japanese invasion. Their life, their struggle, their pain and sacrifice should also be recognized and remembered in mainland China, as have been done with stories of communist revolutionaries.

As mainland cultural workers increasingly try to move the focus of narrative from prominent historic figures to ordinary individuals in the communist camp, more similar stories should be devoted to the nationalists as well. The commemoration of the revolutionary achievements of the nationalists should not be limited to showing the giant portrait of Sun Zhongshan on the Tiananmen Square during the October 1 national holiday. The younger generations of China deserve to know a more accurate and complete version of the revolutionary history. To quote from the novel, “But her [Lin Yulan’s]sacrifices, even forgotten, had made a difference.”

Related article: 
For a Chinese-American Writer, Split Images of China

A Different China in "The Karate Kid"

The Chinese version of the poster. The title is "Kung Fu Dream." It says on the poster: Kungfu kid, dreams come true in China.

China is no longer the far away, exotic and ancient land, but a modern, familiar place. This is the kind of image “The Karate Kid” presents about China. 

The two-hour-long movie, which opened in the US yesterday, is a remake of a popular 1984 movie of the same title. The year is 2009, and twelve-year-old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) moves to Beijing with his mom, only to find himself bullied by a group of kung fu-practicing Chinese boys. With help from Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), a kung fu expert disguised as maintenance guy, Dre finally defends himself and wins respect. 

Intentionally or unintentionally, the movie shows a China that is quite different from previous Hollywood productions with a Chinese setting. 

First off, China is not a country where “everything is old.” While looking at a tour book about China on the flight from Detroit to Beijing, Dre tells his mom: “Look, everything in China is old.” 

Arriving in Beijing, on the way from the airport to their apartment, Dre and his mother see the postmodern CCTV tower, the National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) and the car packed streets. “Well, I guess nothing in China is old, huh,” says Dre’s mother. 

Dre is soon to discover that Beijing is, after all, not so foreign. Switching on TV, the first show he sees is “Sponge Bob,” an American cartoon program, although translated into Chinese. 

He plays basketball with Chinese kids in a park, same game as he played in the US. He meets another American boy who lives in the same apartment building. Not to mention that he attends a school that enrolls quite some western teenagers, and everybody eats lunch very much the same way as in American schools, except for the use of chopsticks. 

American music is also not so hard to find in Beijing. Going into a game room, Dre and his Chinese girl friend both show off some American dance on a dancing machine that not only plays American music, but also speaks English. 

Another image about China featured in this movie, but rarely in other Hollywood productions so far, is that of rich people in today’s Beijing, which is new to Chinese society itself. 

The Chinese girl, whom Dre is trying to get close to and consequently bullied for, is from an upper-middle class family in Beijing. Her parents dress nicely, drive a nice car, and live in a fancy court-yard residence with stone lions standing at the gate. They also can afford to hire a western musician to teach their daughter to play violin! 

In reality, this kind of people might not be everywhere in China, but does exist. As a matter of fact, the father character might well resemble one of the creators of this movie, Mr. Han Sanping, president of China Film Group Corporation, the state-owned powerhouse of China’s movie industry. Han Sanping himself is likely the most powerful movie maker in China, having produced international blockbusters such as “Red Cliff” and “Kung Fu Hustle.” People like him, who head profitable state-owned enterprises, have become the most affluent in today’s China.

Still, a movie like this cannot totally leave out China’s rich history and culture. Thus the scenes of the Forbidden City, the Taoist temple in Wudang Mountain, and of course, the Great Wall. Comparing to the scenes of car-packed streets, junk-stuffed narrow alleys, i.e. the messy and hectic inner city, which are fairly truthful portrait of life in Beijing, those from the famous sites seem to demonstrate that China still has some beautiful places. 

A co-production between China Film Group Corporation and Columbia Pictures and set to be released in China on June 22, this movie also intends to make both American and Chinese audience feel good at the end. 

American audience is happy when Dre finally beats up the aggressive Chinese kids, while Chinese audience will be satisfied by the success of Mr. Han, who is arguably the biggest winner. Besides turning Dre into a brilliant kung fu kid, Mr. Han also wins over those aggressive Chinese kids, who decide to turn to him as the true kung fu master. 

For Mr. Han (Sanping), mission accomplished.


More about The Karate Kid (2010)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155076/

The Life-and-Death Struggle for Chinese Home Owners: At Least in a TV Drama

Guo Haiping (right) and Guo Haizao, sisters experiencing the struggles for owning a home, in the TV drama Wo Ju.

To own a home could be a matter of life and death for Chinese people. This is one of the messages a popular yet controversial TV drama tries to send.

"Wo Ju" (蜗居, meaning living like a snail in a small place), a 33-part series adopted from a novel of the same title, was one of the most popular TV dramas in China in 2009. The show tells stories of conspiracy between corrupt officials and real estate developers, the disparity between haves and have-nots in urban China, and the tough life people have to live in order to save or make money for buying a home, among other things--all very familiar to Chinese people.

In the drama, which is set in contemporary China in a fictional Shanghai-like city of Jiangzhou (江州), a low-income family even lost a life in a stand-off against the demolishing of their ghetto. The developer offered the family a brand new apartment for free, something these people could never dream of owning, in exchange for the family dropping the charge against the developer for killing a family member during demolishing.

"A life exchanging for a home," a government official in the show said of the incident. And yet, this official is behind the demolishing effort and devotes himself to using his political power to make way for property developments, and then shares with the developers the huge profits.

Besides plots that vividly depict today's social reality in China, the censorship rumor around the show made it even hotter. The rumor started when the rerun of the show on a Beijing television channel stopped abruptly after 10 episodes. Words then spread on the Internet that China’s governing body of broadcast media ordered the show off the air, on the ground of sexual content.

Viewers also noticed that the TV version of "Wo Ju" had 33 episodes, while the web and DVD versions had 35 episodes. Beijing News said in a story that Beijing TV cut two episodes' length of sexually explicit content before showing it.

Wang Lizhi, a university professor in Beijing, said the show went through the first round of broadcast across China but is not up for reruns like many other popular TV dramas. As Prof. Wang saw it, the issue with the show was not obscene content, but sharp language.

"Wo Ju" is known for its stinging comments that reflect the reality only too candidly. For example, one character told his wife that he took a usurious loan in order to make down payment for their new home. “The interest is only a little bit higher than bank loans,” he says, trying to calm down his furious wife. This comment implies that mortgage in China are having interests almost as high as usury.

In another scene, the wife of the low-income family complains: “We are all proletariat, all working people. There is neither lowliness nor nobleness among labor divisions, but why in a place like Jiangzhou some people live in garden villas…while we live in such a place [a city ghetto]? We are working honestly, too!”

"Such extreme language will influence social mood,” Prof. Wang said. When such expressions gain currency among people, they might encourage extreme actions. “It is better to use rationality. There is no benefit if people are emotional,” he said. For him, stopping reruns of the show was more of a stability consideration.

Despite the controversy, the series is still available on various websites.

News reports about the controversy:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2009-12/12/content_12634070.htm

Watch the show:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI1NzAyMjYw.html

Related story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/business/global/05yuan.html

Entertainment Extravaganza and/or Propaganda Campaign: The Spring Festival Gala Show's Tough Job

Wang Fei performs at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala






The people, the party, the advertisers, all of them need to be pleased, and that’s the mission of the Spring Festival Gala show. By the eve of the Year of Tiger, the job for China Central Television (CCTV) has only gotten tougher.

For the past nearly three decades, watching the Spring Festival Gala show on CCTV has become a new custom of Chinese people’s lunar New Year celebration. The show is never pure performing arts, but always carries messages that the ruling party wants to convey to the people, which mostly promotes the legitimacy of the party. But in this year’s show, comparing with those in recent years, the propagandist intention seemed to be more blatant.

Particularly in those group song performances, by singers dressed up in minority outfits, or very old artists dubbed as teenagers, etc., political slogans have been turned into lyrics. A singer in Uyghur costume, for example, sang enthusiastically about the benefits of the newly established rural cooperative health care system. In reality, though, the system is facing all kinds of problems, and exactly how many rural residents are benefiting from it is worth questioning.

In another performance, a group of teenagers expressed loyalty to the party by singing: “without the communist party, there will be no new China”, and “following the community party, let’s build a great China.”

The first line has been the central theme of the party propaganda since the foundation of the People’s Republic, and has become such a cliché that very few young Chinese today would embrace it. But for the purpose of propaganda, sing it anyway. The second line is a relatively new invention, and more or less bears some nationalism sensation, which is gaining popularity among the Chinese youth. In one way or another, the party is trying to fortify its legitimacy in the minds of the entire nation by imposing the message on the performances, rather aggressively.

A show full of political preaching could only annul the intended political messages, of course. So for a better part of the entire gala show, entertainment is still the focus. Super star Wang Fei’s appearance certainly put this year’s show at a high point of China’s pop culture, while the reunion of Xiaohu Dui satisfied the nostalgia of China's rising middle-class: the generation born in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, putting together such entertainment extravaganza has become increasingly expensive, with ever fancier visual effects, better stage equipments, etc. CCTV therefore had to use the show to serve the advertisers, too. Unlike the Super Bowl broadcast in the U.S., CCTV’s five-hour airing of the gala was commercial free, which left the television station with few choice but to weave product promotion into performances. So actors wore aprons printed with the name of Lu Hua cooking oil, magician Liu Qian made a magic with Hui Yuan juice, and an actress in a short drama giving out Guo Jiao 1573, a famous liquor, as gifts.

Overall, it’s a tough job for the gala to appeal to everybody. After all the extravagance was over, however, people would keep talking about those entertaining or nostalgic moments, while forget those propagandist messages pretty quickly. Chances are, people would remember Guo Jiao 1573 better than the success of the rural health care system.

See more of the gala:
http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/v/2010cctvcw/index.shtml

Big Production Celebratory Film Shunned by Netizens

Movie-star packed production

Despite the incredible star power of the soon-to-be-released movie, "The Founding of a Republic"—the main celebratory film for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, Chinese netizens only sniff at it by announcing “absolutely not going to watch it.”

A recent post on Tianya BBS lists three reasons of not to watch this huge production: no money, no time, no need. This netizen, self-named “I am No. What,” claims that he would rather donate the money to help poor kids than buy the ticket for the movie. Jet Li might have been his idol, he writes, but in this movie Mr. Li is only a decoration. With so many—nearly 100—renowned movie stars, from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all packed in one movie, all the audience could do while watching it is counting the stars, the post states.

This movie, due on Sept. 17, is yet another astonishing production of China Film Group Corporation and its Chairman, Mr. Han Sanping, the company and man behind last year’s blockbuster, "Red Cliff", directed by John Woo. Set at the end of the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang in the 1940s, the movie depicts the historical development of China’s political consultative system, in which the communist party governs in “collaboration” with social groups other than those deemed as the proletariat in the Chinese society.

The post of “I am No. What” has attracted over 100 responses, mostly in favor of its motion. Netizens also point out that several big stars featured in this movie, such as Jet Li and Jacky Chan, have renounced their Chinese citizenship and become citizens of other countries. Letting them play a role in a movie about the founding of the People’s Republic is like “slapping on one’s own face,” one comment reads.

For decades, showing celebratory films during the Oct. 1 National Day holiday has become a political, as well as cultural ritual in China. These movies tend to have relatively big budget, comparing with average Chinese production. "The Founding of a Republic" is of no exception, only with even eye-popping collection of big-name movie stars, which could well set the record of Chinese film. It is an indication that the party intends to make some strong public impressions upon the 60th anniversary of its ruling.

Tianya BBS posts

http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/1673271.shtml

"The Founding of a Republic" Official Website

http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/m/jgdy/index.shtml

The Warlords Sparks Political Criticism

Hong Kong director Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s newly released movie, The Warlords, has generated not only tens of millions of yuan in box office revenue since its opening on Wednesday, but also comments from Chinese netizens regarding its political indications.

The movie, set in the Taiping Rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty, featured the love-hate story among three men: General Pang (Jet Li) and his two sworn-blood bandit brothers, Zhao (Andy Lau) and Jiang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Pang persuaded Zhao and Jiang, who themselves were initially rebelling peasants, to fight the Taiping Rebellion for the Qing court. In the end, Pang, in his pursuit of legitimate power, betrayed Zhao and Jiang, murdered Zhao and was later assassinated by Jiang upon becoming a powerful governor of the Qing regime.

Some of the online comments may be reflections of real anger, suggesting that the movie’s somewhat positive portrayal of anti-Taiping Rebellion militants is offensive to some Chinese viewers, who have been used to the idea that the Taiping movement is a revolution against the corrupt Qing regime. Other comments, however, may simply try to reveal what they see as the political indication of the movie by pretending to criticize it, to avoid online censorship.

A post titled “11 College Students Appeal: Cracking Down on the Counter-revolutionary Art of The Warlords” has been circulating on the Internet in the past couple of days, accusing the movie of defiling revolutionary peasants by portraying them as helping the corrupt Qing Dynasty to suppress the Taiping Rebellion. The authors called for young students to wake up and resist the influence of such “counter-revolutionary and consumerism culture.”

Pretending to write a public letter to the Chinese government and calling themselves “a group of patriotic, progressive, reasonable and kindhearted college students,” the authors signed their names on the Internet, although it’s not hard to tell that the names, containing words like “wen ge” (cultural revolution), “hong xin” (red heart), and “wei dang” (protect the party), are fake and somehow satirical.

It is not entirely clear why these people, who apparently also assailed Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution in a similar manner, posted such a comment, but they are not alone. Several other netizens, some of whom have watched the movie, also posted similar comments at different times on different online forums.

A “Menglong Professor” wrote on Tianya public forum that a slogan highlighted in the movie, “rob food, rob money and rob women,” was telling people to rob whatever they did not have, which implied the Communist revolution. In the movie, Zhao and Jiang were betrayed by General Pang, which, according to Menglong Professor, meant that once the revolution was successful, one had to be careful because your comrades and leaders may attack you from behind. “Isn’t this attacking our great Party and people’s army by insinuation?” Menglong Professor asked.

Another commentator, named “Obligation of Life,” listed six “counter-revolutionary” points of The Warlords, including being against the Taiping Rebellion and promoting slogans like “rob food, rob money, rob women” and “he who wants to be a bandit should try to be the biggest bandit,” which would “severely undermine the rejuvenation of the Chinese civilization and impede the establishment of a harmonious society in current China.”

One netizen said he was angry at the movie because it “all but sang the praise of three Qing lackeys who murdered Taiping soldiers” and “The Taiping Rebellion was a great peasant uprising movement.”

Most viewers seemed to like this movie and some of them called those political comments nonsense, because after all, it was only a movie that aimed to entertain.

This article is originally published on China Digital Times

Online comments:
http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/1072538.shtml
http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/free/1/1072926.shtml
http://www.neocha.com/sankin77/blog%2110412.html
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http://comment4.news.sina.com.cn/comment/skin/default.html?channel=yl&newsid=28-3-1355796&style=1&nice=0&rid=0&page=0&face=&hot=yl_default

The Warlords websitehttp://www.warlordsthemovie.com/en/index.htm

News about The Warlordshttp://www.chinanews.com.cn/yl/dyzx/news/2007/12-14/1105402.shtml