Tuesday, April 9, 2019

8# - International Media

In a paper that I wrote for International Media Trends I talked about how Chinese companies have started helping with the production of films in the west the result of which is the 2019 Best Picture winner Green Book  So, we collectively as a country, as a human race, and Spike Lee can all blame not only Steven Spielberg's Amblin entertainment and the Chinese for that derivative "entertainment". The Oscar is a monument to success and Chinese audiences also loved Green Book probably because they hadn't seen a formulaic plot about race relations from the 1990's before. Jack Ma CEO of Alibaba the company that had a hand in producing Green Book went on to say, "Alibaba pictures will introduce more movies like this into China, and we will learn from them and gradually produce movies like this". This is what I want to use the topic of international media to talk about the ways that the Chinese cinema tries to copy American films, but does not put their own spin on it. 












In a YouTube video by the Channel AccentedCinema called Why are Chinese Movies so Bad, where he talks about how most of the big films coming out of China have been as the title would imply bad. How Chinese cinema is mocked by not only many around the world but, the Chinese people themselves. This is not because of a lack budgets or bad production design as many of the films that are shown as examples in the film have money practically dripping off the screen. The problem is communicated through the repetition of showing a scene in the film Crazy Rich Asians were a woman says that, "We were inspired by the Hall of Mirror in Versailles". In that these Asians standing in for all of Chinese cinema have plenty of money but can only be inspired by things that were produced in the west in other words Hollywood. One of film examples is the film Wolf Warrior 2 Chinese action movie where a lone Chinese special forces commando who's a bit of a rouge has to get this single handily stop foreign mercenaries in Africa from terrorizing the country side. The visual comparison that AccentedCinema uses is Rambo specifically Rambo III, where a lone commando single handely kills the entire Soviet Army in Afghanistan. We see critics in China ask the director why can your protagonist kill everyone by himself and save the day, he answered essentially if American characters can do it why cant we. There isn't and his character can do anything he wants but movies like Rambo III and action movies in general besides oddities like the John Wick series are not really made anymore. If they are they are vehicles for Stallone and Arnold to make some scratch before going on to do something bigger and better. 





AccentedCinema points how in the 1990's Chinese films were at the top of movie festivals and critics minds, films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine. That the directors of those films were trained in film schools and were cultural workers so there was less of a concern about the bottom line. How after China became the Ultra-Rich nation that it is today that private companies have started to produce all of the of the worst CGI riddled garbage that they are known for today. This is essentially the same problem that the US film industry has today with large monopolies making the same film over and over again, endless remakes, and nostalgia cash grabs. In the US if you want to see a "real" movie made by a filmmaker they are all in smaller studios that for the most part which dont spend to long in the theater or they are buried behind The Office in your Netflix queue.

 The films that are the "real" films that he is talking about are unmistakably Chinese and they are not afraid to be what they are.  That from what he says appears to be a problem that the Chinese themselves are dealing with. He says that there imitation is because they are ashamed of Chinese culture, I am little skeptical of this not that I think that he doesn't think this. China is one of the largest countries in world and a new superpower you would think that a people like that would be annoying you with how proud they are. I think honestly that he sees these trash films as a stain on the totality of Chinese Cinema and if were him I would have the same opinion. Chinese film needs to unmistakably Chinese of course and it also needs to aware of the larger world around them. He makes this point by saying that films about the issues facing China today and the larger human condition that we all share are the important ones.  

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10# - Wild Card

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