China's bumper box office

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

04/29/2010

China's bumper box office

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) -- Grabbing some popcorn and taking in a movie is a habit few of us think twice about. In China it's been a different proposition, however, when cinemas are often old and run down, and there's a much better selection of movies free on the Web or pirated on DVD.
But now, new figures showing a huge jump in Chinese box-office receipts send a clear message -- mainland Chinese have caught the habit of paying for content.

As the industry leapfrogs into the modern age of digital and 3D cinemas, it has also stumbled onto a massive new movie audience. This will be making studio executives from Hong Kong to Hollywood sit up and take notice.

To foreign studios, China must have seemed like one long horror movie, with overseas films limited by quota to 20 a year, with a gross revenue share, and with piracy losses so large that few even bothered to try counting.
It could now be time for a new China script.
Read more at MarketWatch

Apr 29, 2010 12:36:41 AM | Current Affairs, Entertainment, Film

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