I spent the week or so prior to the chinese new year in Anchang and the Beichuan area, which was one of the hardest hit and in which there are many quake victims living in temporary housing. I talked a bunch of them and in general just observed their lives there. I will write something more in depth later. I hope to follow their story in the coming months and years.

Technorati Tags: quake, earthquake, victims, pictures, photos, tragedy, life, china, chinese

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OK, so Will Smith is sad because he caused the death of his beloved wife and a bunch of other innocent souls, and now is suicidal. He impersonates his brother’s IRS identity and goes on moral audits of people, people that we find he is scoping out for eventual organ donations–where the organs being donated are his own.

At first you might not see where the movie is going. You might think that he really is just an eccentric IRS man, a former hotshot entrepreneur that lost it after the tragic accident. However, when the meandering strands start falling into place, you begin to realize what is happening.

The disparate strands keep you guessing, and sometimes to the detriment to the emotional depth of the movie–because you could never fully settle into the lives of any of the characters, other than Will Smith’s character. For example, Woody Harrelson’s fine turn as a blind telephone operator/piano player gets somewhat short-shrifted, mostly in order to develop Will Smith and Rosario Dawson’s blooming romance. Many aspects of the plot defy belief, but overall, there was great chemistry and charisma in the two leads as they slowly, haltingly, did a little dance and then finally got around to making a little love. Dawson’s character has a failing heart that puts her at fate’s mercy, and the tremulous romance that develops between someone on the verge of death and someone who has planned his own death–opposites, in that regard–is quite interesting. Dawson has a lot of charisma. She can take something as far-fetched as this role and use her naturally accessible beauty to make it completely believable.

Part of that is because she isn’t say, Nicole Kidman. Rosario Dawson is the undiscovered Latina beauty next door that vast idiotic mass of men somehow managed to ignore. I can’t say the same for Will Smith–being, after all, the black actor with the most star power working in Hollywood today. He tries to be shy, diffident, damaged, despairing–and for the most part, he pulls off this range, though for the longest time you still stare at his face and say to yourself, “this is Will Smith”. This is an aspect of the modern cinema-going experience that I wonder if anyone has explored–that is, how does someone’s off-screen fame and media exposure influence the way that we judge their performances. Of course, it’s not to say that our criterion are warped by their fame, just that the basic act of suspension of disbelief, upon which the act of watching movies is predicated, becomes that much harder when you are talking about someone famous.

The industry perpetuates that, of course, by making them take huge roles. Thus Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman do roles like the ones in Australia. You aren’t going to find them in small indie, character-driven movies anytime soon. As far as recent movies go, I would have to say that Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler or any of the actors in Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World was much better, in terms of bringing the emotional truth of a character out.

So as far as Seven Pounds goes, I would have to say that the movie ain’t terrible, but fairly forgettable as they go.

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Well, no one knows, just yet. There are no official answers, but from what i’ve been able to cull from the internet, there were several factors. Some people have said that the tubes used to prop the tunnel up were of inferior quality. Others have said the collapsed site was near a heavily trafficked road, upon which there had appeared cracks and little pits weeks earlier. There was also, mentioned in some other article whose links i’ve lost now, the issue of how the route was changed, and how the project was hastened by a whole year, which perhaps lead people cutting corners or making less than sound decisions. If, as mentioned earlier on this blog and all over the internet, suspicious problems were discovered weeks before the collapse, then there is some huge problem with the way that problems are treated, reported, and dealt with. “Bureaucracy with Chinese characteristics was responsible for the deaths of these people” is how one commenter put it.

Now, every aspect of this subway is going to be examined. I have read some brief snippets on the web about bidding process for this contract…in any case, i hope that even if there is no courageous muckracking by any one individual or outlet that at least, collectively, people can arrive at something approximating the truth.

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I’m usually not a fan of the 骇人听闻 type of news but this just caught my attention: the title of the article claims that Shenzhen nightclub fire that killed 43 people might have claimed this many people b/c some people thought it was a performance and thus did not evacuate the building while they still had the chance. The other horrible thing pointed out by one eye-witness account is the number of people that died after being stampeded in the narrow tunnel leading out of the club: people were trampled and one guy said that one of his friends who made it out hit his head on the ceiling while fleeing, meaning that he was pretty high up — because he was stepping on many people … I’m a bit skeptical about that, but without a doubt what happened there must have been gruesome, no two ways about that.

Fuck.

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I saw this book when i was in the Xingguang Photographic Equipment Center on Luban Lu, in one of the bookstores on the third floor. The book is called 震动中国(百名摄影记者震区全记录 and cost 80 rmb, but I felt cheap at the moment, so didn’t end up buying it. I think it’s a good book, but it’s not the quality of the product that matters to me, or even the quality of the photography contained inside, but rather just the fact that it’s a pictorial record of what happened, and that’s just something that I feel I ought to have with me. Order it from Amazon China. Look at more images from the book on this blog. There are some other photography books on the earthquake, one of them was a big coffee table one that I saw in the same bookstore but I didn’t find it online. But it may be called 震殇5·12(崔益军汶川大地震摄影纪实) and be purchasable from Amazon as well.

Technorati Tags: china, wenchuan, earthquake, photography, books, art, culture, news, tragedy, disaster, photojournalism, documentary

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