China Film Journal

We just read an article in Xinhua about a “made to order film vignette and profile series” called “Boy Meets China” is going to “introduce some of the country’s most colorful, influential, and potentially influential people: sports figures, superstars in the music, movie, and fashion scenes, young entrepeneurs and artists whose works sell for millions in the Western world.

The “boy” who is hosting the show is 22 year old New Yorker Eames Yates, Jr. The point behind this show, which is supposed to air on the new international channel, is to remedy the information asymmetries between China and the US, because not enough US people really understand what the “new China” is like. So Yates goes out and interviews a bunch of famous people, such as Jet Li, and had this to say about the experience.

“Mr Li was genuinely happy and fun. After I got over my initial fear that he was going to deliver a fatal blow if I said the wrong thing, I loosened up and we really connected in a way that should occur much more often between East and West.”

Well, need we go on? The whole thing sounds hopelessly cliched — or is that just the soporific effect of Xinhua-nese language? I don’t know. All I know is that the Olympics is not just about a platform for athletes — no, it’s going to end up being a platform for a whole host of wankers to host their wankathons on TV, engaging in a type of spiritual pollution that the commies, had they any sense, should get riled up about.

We haven’t found any clips online yet, but we’ll post some them as soon as we do.

So you might have heard that Jackie Chan recently went to Australia to bury his father, who died of cancer at the age of 93.Well, what you might not have known is that Jackie Chan’s father Charlie, aka Fang Daolong, had a whole other family (Jackie’s mother was his second wife) that he lost touch with and then had to leave behind in 1949. There was an article called “Enter the Parents” written a few years ago that gave some of the background. The video above covers some of the same ground, but was made more recently, as it mentions the thorny issue of why Jackie doesn’t want to get in touch with his half-brothers Fang Shisheng and Fang Shide, especially when their father died and there was a funeral to attend. The interviews also broach the question of whether or not they are revealing their identities so openly now in hoping of getting some of Jackie’s (and his father’s) money. To this question they reply that it would be a lie to say that they aren’t hoping for some help (university tuition, jobs for the young uns) but are NOT coveting Jackie’s wealth. The video is in Chinese.