I Read Therefore I Am
Outstanding news for Beijing bibliophiles like myself. Page One, the Singapore-based bookstore, opened their first store in Beijing two months ago, beneath the Tiffany’s in the China World Mall. It’s a big step up from the other bookstores that we have been forced to rely on to get English-language books.
Goldfarmen Macht Frei
Fyodor Dostoevsky supposedly once said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If that’s true, then Chinese society must be the most civilized because I’ve never heard of another country letting their prisoners play computer games at night.
Wait, they are forced to do it? And they are tortured and beaten if they don’t meet specific gold farming quotas?
Okay, fine. But it sure beats breaking rocks and digging trenches. Wait, they do that during the day? Well shit.
Facepalm d’Or
Danish film director Lars von Trier was at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, promoting his new film Melancholia, where he made some remarks that have become the talk of the cinema blogosphere.
The camera angle here on Kirsten Dunst (star of Melancholia) lets you watch her go through a whole range of emotions as she processes what von Trier is saying. As one Internet commenter put it, it’s like a real-life performance of The Office, with von Trier as Michael Scott issuing forth an awkward stream of verbal diarrhea, digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole while everyone in the room sits uncomfortably, hoping that it will stop.
A Cross-cultural Commercial
Here’s an interesting addendum to my post yesterday about Chinese advertisements. When I said in that article that the two commercials featuring Chinese actresses literally yelling at the viewer was not representative of Chinese commercials in general, what I meant was that I’ve seen many Chinese commercials that are better, and many that are worse. Well, here is one that is better:
Ganji la!
Anyone who rides the subway regularly or spends time around a television has probably seen, or more likely heard, the advertisement for the Chinese Craigslist-esque website Ganji starring actress and super microblogger Yao Chen, where she yells “Ganji la!” and rides a poorly-animated donkey.
The advert is catchy, maybe too catchy. According to the Darwin Marketing blog, the animated donkey made such an impression that people who wanted to visit the site couldn’t remember the name and instead of typing Ganji (赶集), which means “hurry to the market,” they typed Ganlv (赶驴) which translates to “hurry a donkey.”
Tittle-Tattle Fatigue
I’m a regular CCTV viewer. Hand to God.
However, most shows I watch grudgingly because I can’t avoid it. Living with a Chinese partner in a miniscule one-bedroom apartment has forced me to accept the ubiquity of the television in the Chinese household—it is switched on in the morning and in the evening, and left on at full volume. Why? Just because. It is only recently that I’ve come to see the striking similarity between the television itself and the programming it broadcasts.
53: This Movie is Broken (2010)
When George Ding (editor of this site) read my entry on Catfish (#12), he said that at the end he didn’t know whether I actually liked the movie or not. That’s fine, because I’m not really writing reviews here. The film scholar David Bordwell argues that suspending critical judgment of a film is often necessary [...]
52: Dark City (1998)
Revisiting Dark City (directed by Alex Proyas and scripted by Proyas, David S. Goyer, and Lem Dobbs) after a decade, I’m surprised at how transparently ridiculous it all is: John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) telekinetically shattering a jail window so he can give his wife a final kiss; an asthmatic crippled Kiefer Sutherland delivering a truckload of [...]
51: Design for Living (1933)
When film critic Lou Lumenick introduced Ernst Lubitsch’s adaptation of Design For Living (scripted by Ben Hecht) at the TCM Classic Film Festival, he mentioned that the film was so sexually charged and racy for its contemporary audience that once the Hays Code was enforced in earnest in 1934, it was refused a re-release and [...]
50: Benny’s Video (1992)
Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke captures a portrait of technological alienation and dehumanization in Benny’s Video. The titular Benny (Arno Frisch) is a teenager in middle-class Austria, a kid whose world is predominantly mediated through video images; he prefers to watch the street outside his apartment through a camera feed rather than looking out the window. [...]
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