BY ALEX HO

In print | Published February 7, 2008

Darn, just one column in, and already I have to retract something I said. It turns out that the box office in mainland China is far from dead, and in fact has been steadily growing over the past five years, having reached its peak last year with the equivalent of 455 million U.S. dollars. Despite rampant piracy, China’s film industry seems to be doing just fine attracting audiences. For a nation so long deprived of popular culture, a film tradition is slowly creeping towards the whorish blockbuster mentality of Hollywood. And just as we have our summer season, the Chinese film industry is taking full advantage of an age-old holiday, beginning on this very day — the Lunar New Year.

Yes, the Spring Festival is a time for hong bao, firecrackers and all those generic things, but apparently, it’s also become inextricably linked to the New Year comedy, a genre begun in Hong Kong cinema that the mainland has since capitalized on. When I was in Beijing over the summer and was introduced to this genre, I was given a rather humanist explanation for its existence — something to the effect of “On New Year, you return home to see relatives, and then what else is there to do but go to watch a feel-good movie?” It was this endorsement of the New Year movie’s mass appeal that piqued my interest. So, among the piles of snooty art films I bought during my trip (they’re so freakin’ cheap there), I made a point of buying a few lowbrow New Year comedies — okay, two, to be more precise.

So, what makes a New Year comedy in the 21st century? Based on what I’ve seen, it means really low production values, really erratic editing and really cheesy musical cues — disarmingly similar to our stoner genre (e.g. “Harold and Kumar”) but, of course, far less hell-bent on satiating the teenage Id. It’s a kind of movie that doesn’t try too hard and just has fun with itself. It’s also a genre that, unlike a lot of the initial mainland output in the ‘80s and ’90s, appeals only to a mainstream Chinese audience. Stephen Chow’s “Kung Fu Hustle” is probably one of the few crossover exceptions that you’ll recognize.

And so, as an American-born Chinese far removed from my tribe, I’m no judge on how entertaining the movies are. Comedy-wise, it felt like most of the gags fell flat, but that’s probably because I didn’t really get the jokes. It’s also probably because, for supposedly mindless entertainment, the two films I saw were ridiculously obsessed with business and commercialism. Ready for “Dude, Where’s My Subprime Mortgage?”

My first case study, “Big Shot’s Funeral,” is about a “big-shot” U.S. filmmaker (played by none other than Donald Sutherland, sporting a vaguely offensive Pai Mei-like ‘do), who, during his remake of “The Last Emperor,” lapses into a coma. Consequently, the director’s assistant and a lowly cameraman scheme to make his funeral a big commercial event in the Forbidden City, selling ad space to all different companies. The film is self-aware to boot, poking fun at real-life filmmakers like Chinese film poster-boy Zhang Yimou, whose recent streak of crowd-pleasers and current position as the Olympic Games artistic director has made him the ultimate sell-out.

While “Big Shot” is an outrageous satire, the second film’s major conceit is flat-out parody. It’s called “Big Movie”, and I’m pretty sure that, by naming it such, its makers intended to take after “Scary Movie,” “Epic Movie,” etc. Indeed, the cover claims it will parody 20 classic movies. “Big Movie” pretty much fails as a parody of any of these (excepting a send-up of “In the Mood for Love,” which makes that movie’s somberness pretty hilarious). Instead, its countless references are just laundry on the clothesline that is the movie’s real plot, a vicious brawl between its characters over Shanghai’s housing market. It’s no “Pulp Fiction,” but its actors sell its story with such gusto that you have to believe that this is the talk of the town amongst China’s movie-going middle class — business, business, business.

Naive ABC that I am, these two New Year comedies have been a fascinating window into Chinese popular culture today. And what I see is a messy hodgepodge of random cultural signifiers cleanly removed from their origins in a way that only consumer demand could accomplish (hip-hop and rap, for instance, are prominently and nonsensically used in both films). At the same time, both films, whose characters are motivated by nothing but avarice, are keenly aware of how closely media and money converge. In the post-Tiananmen era, currency is China’s popular culture today.

Alex is a sophomore. You can reach him at aho1@swarthmore.edu.

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