Aventurina King

There are a few things which have amazed me in Beijing this week. Here I was, I thought having spent three months last summer in the city, nothing would stay my steps and have me make that inhaling sound which quickly rises into a screech.
This happened last Saturday at 8 o'clock in the evening, I was strolling down the highway to IKEA, the only IKEA in Beijing. Now I have seen queues before, I participate in them frequently when I am catching a flight (first class is for those other inferior mortals) or when I was younger, to climb up to the Eiffel Tower on one of those crisp blue crowd-magnet summer days, but I had never queued to go shopping. The customer is the king, and why would a bunch of kings gather in the same place and queue in front of a shopping mall.
Low and behold, there they were, all the nobles in a long queue which coiled around the building, just to get in and by IKEA stuff. Having come all this way, I wasn't going to be snotty about the whole thing and turn on my heels. So I stood there like the others, 15 minutes out in the Beijing winter. When I finally neared the entrance, two guards herded my group in like cattle through a gate, and I was in among the throng of people, unable to rush through the store at my pace without knocking a flowerbed of legs with my big yellow, and smiling, IKEA bag.
Now here comes the deep analytical part of the blog:
But hhhhhwhy do so many Chinese people like IKEA, enough to queue in and out every weekend?
The attraction of the new (IKEA is just recently installed).
The attraction of what is new and foreign.
And miracle of all miracles, what is foreign and ........... cheap!
For once in Chinese people's lifetime, Western products can actually rival in price with their hometown ones. And that is worth queuing for every Saturday hail or snow, noble or not.

Chen Kaige's The Promise cost 35 million dollars. It is the most expensive Chinese movie ever made. But not expensive enough.
If you are aiming for an image as slashed over with computerized effects as Final Fantasy, well the budget might have to be more ... say ... on the latter's 135 million side if you want to avoid a cartoonlike, clumsy image. There's just too much ambition in this film--women with mile long levitating hair, a protagonist who races road-runner style through dabs of green, thousands of stuffed animal look alike irate bulls--and not enough means to follow up.
I generally look for a deeper spiritual message in a Chen Kaige movie, but this one is going to take some doing. ( I am tempted to dismiss it as Chen Kaige passing through Zhang Yimou's "House of the Flying Daggers" phase.) Let's see, we have this beautiful wisp who's been promised everything buy some queen fairy (the one with the levitating hair), but she must lose it if she ever attains love. I suppose you could see in there an illustration that love requires sacrifice. The rest is somewhat confusing, we have the handsome protagonist who was born into slavery (track the christian haves-and-have-nots theme). He has mega rasta hair but he runs fast. A revered general makes him his Sacho Panza. Then there is an evil general (he fights with a dagger equipped fan, and compulsively peels into evil laughter). In the midst of all that is the wisp, she falls in love with the protagonist and somewhere before the end, there's a big showdown with a lot of flying feathers and capes.
At least the movie makes a small effort to slip in character depth: a flashback informs us the wisp stole a sesame cake from the evil general when they were children, that's why he's soooooooo evil. He's still my favorite character though, the only one who seems to be laughing with me at this whole pompous fantasy.

As promised, I have returned to the Chinese urban scrabble. I moved into my apartment yesterday. It has a picturesque (if you can imagine that) view on a gravel field guarded by other young concrete sentinels.
Beijing in winter isn't half as bad as I had imagined it from accross the phone line with one of my Chinese friends. Her description evoked Siberia, its barrier snow storms, six layers of wool, frozen sheep and icycle nose snot. I naturally came well prepared, four heavy layers, only to find the cold quite mild. It is under 0 centigrade for sure, but the absence of New York sky scraper catalyzed wind and stinging snow makes wandering around outside my new abode enjoyable. I wear gloves though.
Yes I wandered around, I live in the North East of Beijing, just outside the Fourth ring road. Imagine cranes and 20 floored apartment buildings sprouting at every corner. The rest is low ceilinged shops, wide dusty avenues. There is a mega market nearby that sells everything from nasty colored bed spreads to health food oatmeal.
The wandering stopped quickly though when I discovered the gold mine, alibaba's collection of 50 cent dvds including all the new Chinese blockbusters: Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige's new movies along with Memoirs of a Geisha and Ruguo Ai (if love). So instead of spending my limited cash flow on useful goods, I purchased these dvds and carried a dvd player away from the mega market.
This morning heavily jetlagged at 3 am, I started watching Zhang Yimou's latest: Qian Li Zou Dan Qi: Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles.
It is calculated to ring out tears from fathers. The other members of the population which include children cynicists such as me will sink into the sofa waiting for something to happen until the movie ends.
The camera follows a Japanese father on his quest to China to find a gift for his dying son. It is the video of a Chinese opera performance. Of course, there are second act complications and these constitute most of the film, as improbable obstacle after obstacle to his objective arise. The Chinese opera performer is in prison, he misses his son and can't perform, the eight-year old doesn't want to see his father and so on... Most of the film is in Japanese. This is probably the most interesting and laudable part.
Zhang Yimou's Chinese audience is Japanophobe, but by presenting Japanese and Chinese characters sharing the same respect for filial piety, he might succeed in bridging some of the xenophobia.
I can only applaud Zhang Yimou for having distanced himself from his House-of-the-flying-daggers flying wire creations. With Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles he has reappropriated what he had found in Not One Less and Qiu Ju Goes to Court: his good savage venture into the values of Chinese country men. The tiny saintly voice in me sings hurrrah, he is digging out the meat of humanity and showing it to the urban corrupt masses. The real me mourns the films in which he told a story, like Raise the Red Lantern. Those had real characters, who commited sins, acted under the impulse of emotions to beat out a story. Riding Alone for a Thousand Miles is more two dimensional, it is not a story, it is a still painting of morals that have survived.

PS: Left alignement gives me the illusion of originality

Everything I knew about Munich before seeing it had set me up for a painful three hours in an overcrowded velvet dark room. Just take a look at the poster, a contraluce forlorn figure. And not only that. It is a history movie, one of those The Pianist-like award winners that drag on with bodies punctured like cheese graters and the tic tac of firing.
Munich definitely has all that, but I found even the layering of excess sequences on at the end (this happens in most history movies after the 1 and a half hour mark when lassitude makes the audience member project a grandiose curtain fall on every cut) if not welcomed, at least acceptable. On the whole, Munich is a moderatly paced movie. There are some infrequent thrills, the assassinations of the responsibles for the Munich Olympic games murder. The se are organized by a team of Israelis lead by the razor cheek-boned Eric Bana (but no Hollywoodian excess of erotic steam, he has a pregnant wife, and pleasantly surprising, he stays faithful to her throughout). The killing comes in quick dashes, it is the skeleton more than the muscle.
What makes Munich more than a bearable history movie is that it spends time on the right elements: character development. Eric Bana's angel faced assassin sets off blindly devoted to his motherland Israel. Blood-bathed dreams of Munich's murders and sleepless nights in the closet surface his struggle between his wife and daughter and his invading paranoia and lust for murder.
The Wall Street Journal reads "Munich is a Spielberg film for better and worse, a vivid, sometimes simplistic thriller in which action speaks louder than ideas." The critique continues pounding on the film's Zionism.
Munich is not Zionistic. Yes, we see everything through Bana, but the film's foray into the mind of this assassin, his final inability to enjoy what is most dear to him--his family--despite his patriotism raises the message above 'taking a side'. It is about the infernal spiral of violence, the squelching of peace by the instinctive "tooth for a tooth" mentality. And this is what I admire most about the movie, it uses our empathy with the Israeli assassin not to shovel us on his side, but to spin it into a suspicion of patriotic violence. If it does not sample a necessary insight into the Palestinian view, it at least turns the questionning on the Israelis.