I was never a huge fan of the X-files series but I was quite looking forward to this movie ever since I first saw the previews when at a movie theater in Paris. I just got the DVD in Shanghai and watched it just now. What can I say? Like the blogger at Apropos of Something I thought it was almost underwhelming its fairly mundane plot, which was gruesome but not nearly as government conspiracy/alien abductions heavy as one might have expected. And the movie did dispense with the whole mythology, which was nice. Like many others, I have my own theory of why the X-files theme song played when a picture of George W. Bush and J. Edgar Hoover appeared: because the FBI and government are all in cahoots with the aliens. Chris Carter might be insinuating that Bush is an alien himself.

It was strange, how unambiguous in certain regards was their relationship in the movie. They are sleeping together, cuddling, kissing. The dialogue was ok for the most part. None of the acting was really standout; everyone did their part and discharged their duties with the usual competence–nothing exceptional there. The plot moves but doesn’t quite twist and turn, it’s all fairly straight forward, the pacing and tension is simply created by the unfolding of certain events or the slow accumulation of clues, making it a fairly linear detective story.

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Lately, I’ve been noticing some fairly huge poster ads in the Shanghai subway of heart throb actor Wentworth Miller, most notably of the Prison Break series, which is wildly popular in China. Featuring WM in some snazzy threads and with the words Me&City stenciled across, At first I thought that this was the name of some new TV series that WM was in, and was disappointed b/c I thought this implied that Prison Break had been canceled or else put on the backburner. However, what these are just new ads for a Chinese clothing line that WM has decided to represent.

In Chinese, Wentworth is commonly known as wenshuai (温帅）or mishuai （米帅）– the first takes ‘wen’ the first character of his first name in Chinese and adds to the end the character ‘shuai’ which means handsome, while the latter does the same using ‘mi’ which is the first character in the Chinese translation of his last name.

Such nicknames are usually reserved for boring Mandopop boys du jour, like the awful Wilbur Pan of Taiwan/Canada. So you can imagine just how popular WM is in China. Prison Break is so popular that English textbooks use dialogue and elements of the series to teach English as a second language, and its legion of die-hard followers in China are what lead to some someone to think of the bright idea of spawning a Chinese version of the show, set sometime in the early or mid-20th century, which I have had the unfortunate experience of watching for a couple of minutes in my life. As usual, I am not being fair to the show, but I will stake my reputation on the claim that, regardless of whether you’re a fan of PB or not, that the Chinese version can’t hold a candle to the original. It also makes me wonder, as I have so many times on this blog, whether or not Chinese people will, one day, be the ones contributing high-concept shows to the world that will inspire emulation in other countries.

Anyway, here’s one of the pictures for the new clothing series: 2999 rmb for that leather jacket. That’s about 300 euros or over 400 US dollars. Not quite couture, but it does seem that Meters/bowne is aiming for something along those lines with this new series.

77d7640a8307a127b0351d2b.jpg (JPEG Image, 717×568 pixels) via kwout

The following is a youtube vid of WM making the commercials for this line.

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I was watching the Australia-China women’s basketball last night and listening to the commentary, I finally snapped: I’ve just become to sick of hearing them say the same things over and over. Most of the time it’s stuff along the lines of:

我们在跟世界一流的队的对抗中可以发现自己的不足。
我们跟世界一流的篮球对还是有一定的差距。
亚洲人不能光靠速度取胜，外国队也很灵活的。
经过跟世界一流的队的对抗我们可以不断提升我们各方面的素质、水平。

yadda yadda yadda. It’s like they barely talk about the game. They don’t try to be funny. Some commentators do, and I appreciate that, but that sure was not the case last night with the Australia-China game. Whenever China is really far behind—Australia had a twenty point lead most of the game—they have to talk about why this is, they have to take on this developmental perspective which is fine and valid in itself but really detracts from the viewer’s (or should i just say MY) appreciation and enjoyment of the spectacle (game+commentary) as a whole.

And it’s been repeated throughout the Games, and forms the standard interpretation of events at any sporting event where China loses or gets its ass kicked by another team. In that sense, it’s nothing new and why I’m yammering on about it is beyond me, and perhaps beyond you as well. It just irks me.

While I’m in the mood for getting things off my chest, I might as well add that I hate the whole “1.3 billion” (十三亿）business, which usually modifies something like “dreams of”, as in “the dreams of 1.3 billion people” (十三亿人的梦想）or in “the Olympics of 1.3 billion people.”

I’ve been traveling to China throughout my whole life, starting in 1980 at the tender age of three. I’ve been around Chinese people my whole life, though not necessarily mainland Chinese. And yet, because I grew up in America, where the individualist ethos is so strong and ingrained (the pioneers and explorers are part of our cultural-historical narrative), I simply just cannot fathom this collective ethos, this insistence on the unity–indeed, homogeneity—of the group. Everyone is their own person, their own individual, but somehow when you get to these public announcements, like ads on TV or the speeches of China’s leaders, you have to adopt this “1.3 billion” rhetoric, snap your fingers and somehow they all fall into line into some intellectual phalanx formation. I just think it completely laughable for anyone to speak of the entire nation as one. I would find it insulting. Even in the aftermath of 9-11, when we were all New Yorkers, this kind of rhetoric was not present. There was a kind of national unity and solidarity, but that was in response to attack and tragedy. You could never imagine anything like “the dreams of 300 million people” intoned the same way it is over here.

As I write these last sentences, I am watching a Toyota commercial where the audience is told: “You are no like no one else. But you have to have your own style.”

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