Avatar in China

Herald reviewer Peter Calder calls Avatar “inane and implausible”. Dim-Post responds:

I had similar concerns, feeling that the scenes in which the soldier inhabiting the body of a giant blue alien used his magic powers to beseech the planet’s aid via a giant glowing tree were not handled with the care and factual accuracy appropriate to the material.

Looking slightly further afield, Andy Yee at Global Voices reports that some Chinese viewers also object to what Calder describes as “cringingly stereotypical noble savages who apparently know the meaning of life but still must be saved by the lantern-jawed Marine”. A sample:

男主角得是一个外星人, 当然，他会是外星人的叛徒。在这部
电影里，某个拥有高度文明的河外行星，由于那里的人们肆无
忌惮地发展经济，他们的家园被污染得无法继续生存，只好选
出一小撮人做种子，跑到地球来。由于贪恋他们的高科技以及
地球人的同情心，地球人打算接纳他们并打算合作搞某一个注
定要对环境造成巨大破坏的能源基地。

Oh all right, here is the translation:

From Madame Chrysanthème to Last Samurai to Avatar, when could Westerners stop seeing foreign cultures as female and themselves as male? And when could they stop the cross-cultural narcissism that, no matter how unsuccessful the Western man is, he will be loved by the Oriental woman?

Two comments at EastSouthWestNorth:

Some Chinese movie critics think that while the movie is not bad, parts of the plot were too mundane. I completely disagree, because brute-force eviction is unimaginable for audiences in other country because they think that it can only happen on alien planets or in China.

Avatar let me realized how far our movies are from simple perfection; how far our movies are from crystal-clear purity; how far our movies from passionate dreams; how far from genuine sincerity are we who are embroiled in grim entanglements and dim vulgarity! We ought to ashamed in the face of the purity of Avatar. This is a complete defeat that we Chinese filmmakers must collectively witness and concede.

And four from ChinaSmack:

Strongly condemn the Western director for using Avatar to allude to China’s current situation!!

China’s demolition crews must go sue Old [James] Cameron, sue him for piracy/copyright infringement.

Seeing Pandora’s beautiful scenery, I think of the environment around me that has suffered serious destruction.

Seeing the main character’s dauntless energy in fearlessly raising the resistance against the powerful, I think of the LZ and similar people reacting to society’s injustices only by hiding here [on a BBS forum] and spitting [their complaints].

Boys and girls are different

Who would have thought? But now we know for sure, thanks to Google. Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational writes:

You know how Google sometimes “predicts” what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. So I tried teasing out some gender differences.

Here is what girls wanted to know:


And here is what boys wanted to know:


Says it all, really. As does this clever-clogs comment at Marginal Revolution:

It is interesting how both of them mostly answer each other.

They so do.

Matt Nolan comments further.

UPDATE
Kiwiblog linked to the same story on 16 January – three days after this post – as did Dim-Post in response. Come on, David and Danyl – you guys really should try to keep up.

Time bandits

Christopher Caldwell writes in the Financial Times:

Unpleasant things are supposed to drag on and on: dentists’ visits, workplace orientation sessions, almost all speeches. Yet no one complains that “this decade seemed to last 15 years”. Decades never do. Time may slow down from hour to hour, but from year to year it has a uniform tendency to accelerate.

We can demonstrate this with a little game. We are now in the year 2010. Measure the number of years back to a certain event in your life – say, your entry into university, if you attended one. Then measure the same number of years back from there. Invariably, the event in the middle will seem closer to this year than to the older date, even though it is equidistant from the two.

Righto. Then consider this:

The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) is closer to the second world war than it is to the present. The Beatles’ release of “Love Me Do” (1962) is closer to the first world war than to us. Bill Haley’s "Rock Around the Clock" (1954) is as close to the Spanish-American war (1898) as it is to us. There is nothing hipper than hip-hop, but the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), the first rap song, is closer to Al Jolson’s last hits than to the songs in the rap charts now.

How old does that make you feel?

11 obvious newspaper articles

Sam Greenspan of the excellent 11 Points writes:

Without the immediacy of the Internet, the disregard for ethics and proper reporting of the blogs, or the classifieds – and prostitutes – of Craigslist, the print media simply isn't viable in the modern world.

And that’s sad for many reasons... but today, I'm going to call it sad because it means that, one day, there will be no more printed stories like…

and then he lists the 11 Most Painfully Obvious Newspaper Articles Ever. They include “Studies show frequent sex enhances pregnancy chances” (above), “So far, they have determined that the crash occurred when the plane struck the ground”, and – ta-dah! – “Death is the nation’s top killer”. You will also be surprised to learn that “teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25”.

Whoever wrote this stuff must now be working for the Herald on Sunday.

Strip tease

Home Paddock posts on stripping as therapy, the saucy minx.

How to succeed in business

UK business writer Martin Vander Weyer looks back at the technological achievements of the last decade and singles out low-cost carrier Ryanair’s website:

The story of how it came into being is told in A Life in Full Flight, Alan Ruddock’s biography of cost-slashing Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary — who initially rejected the e-commerce concept. When he was finally persuaded that a website was essential, the first quote for its design came in at £3 million from some fancy consultants who O’Leary disliked on sight. So he gave the task to a 17-year-old Dublin schoolboy, John Beckett, and a dentistry student, Thomas Linehan, who proceeded to create a simple but workable site, with the characteristic Ryanair feature that it was almost impossible for the customer to contact the company if anything went wrong.

Excellent. But the story gets better:

The agreed fee for the task was £15,500, but when it was completed O’Leary tried to chisel them down to £12,000.

Brilliant.

NZ blog round-up

One of these days I’ll think of a generic title for this, like NZBC’s “Mixed Lollies” or “Something for the Weekend”. Suggestions welcome. Until then, this:

David Cohen is unimpressed by the coverage sad old, mad old John Minto got with his absurd noise-making about Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer. Yes, Israel-Palestine is the real hard yards but what has that to do with her? An individual professional, she was hardly what the Springboks were in 1981. As Prince put it so eloquently, “Shut up, already.”

Karl du Fresne does not agree with Chris Knox that the Beatles were punk. He says: “revisionist bullshit”. He also reveals that the title of Knox’s most famous song, “Not Given Lightly”, comes from the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs”. Well, I never.

Laughy Kate blogs about the younger daughter. Well, she is adorable. Her mother’s daughter. I shall say no more.

Phil Parker rates The Lovely Bones. Unlike many reviewers of the movie, he has read the book.

Cactus Kate talks sense about Whale Oil’s breaching of name suppression by posting the name in binary code, or possibly hexadecimal converted into binary (as David Farrar, who knows this geekery, suggests). Mac Doctor also has a view.

On the same subject, Andrew Geddis comments at Dim-Post:

I’ll go on record as saying I had no idea who it was until I ran Slater’s binary code through two internet decoders (that took me one Google search and two cut-and-pastes). Finding out his partner’s name took one further Google search. I stopped looking at that point, having no desire to learn the alleged victim’s name.

The Fundy Post has performance issues. That does not excuse his posting a picture of Jonathan Ross.

Home Paddock has been out driving and isn’t happy about the other drivers. She reckons that roads would be safer if:

People who drive slowly would let others pass.
People who drive slowly wouldn’t speed up when others could pass.
People in the vehicles behind slow vehicles would pass when they could or keep back far enough to allow others to pass them.
People wouldn’t try passing when they can’t see what’s coming the other way.

All true. But imagine how cross she’d be if she had been driving in Northland recently, as I was. Tutukaka is a wonderful place, but getting in and getting out is a challenge. Still, look at this, the view from where we were:

Yes, it was totally worthwhile.

Frank Zappa ringtones

Happy new year everybody.

A new decade, a new mobile phone. My wife has a Blackberry so I have inherited her not-very-old one which has camera, music, email, Bluetooth etc. This is all new to me. I figured out how to make my own ringtones with the help of the brilliant free program Audacity and even – without the help of a teenager – how to associate a different ringtone to each caller. OK, this is five years later than everyone else, but still.

What I wanted was to make my phone sound different from everyone else’s – not because I’m a wanker, or not only because of that, but because sometimes I have to endure an all-day meeting with seven other people, all of whom are likely to get a call at some stage. Their phones sound more or less the same so we all dive for ours every time one rings. What, I wondered, was the least likely source material for anyone else to use and so the best choice for me? Obviously, the Frank Zappa songbook.


So far I have my wife as “Peaches en Regalia”. Mark from NZBC is “Willie the Pimp”. I’m not sure what to choose for Laughy Kate as there are so many options: “Oh No”, perhaps. Or possibly “No Not Now”.

Rob from NZBC is “Filthy Habits”. Chris from NZBC is “For the Young Sophisticate”. I’m not sure to whom I should assign “Treacherous Cretins”, but “Cocaine Decisions” is pretty clear. As is “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”.

Sentence of the day

From Chad Taylor’s novel The Church of John Coltrane:

Living in Auckland was a disadvantage if you had aims, but if life had unfolded in the opposite direction, then it was perfect.

Happy New Year 2010

New Zealand blogging has been quiet for the last few days. Which is a good thing. As Cactus Kate says, “Anyone who blogs over Christmas I have decided is a wee bit sad.”

Among the other local bloggers I follow, Fundy Post managed a cracker on Christmas day, with a massive serve to Glenn Cardy, the vicar – actually no, he’s an archdeacon now, just like Richard Prebble’s lovely dad was – at St Matthew-in-the-City. Cardy is the one who hired Saatchis to put up that challenging billboard of a post-coital Joseph and Mary which challenged some believers so much that they vandalised it.


No one came out of that looking good – not the fanatics and certainly not the egregious Cardy. (I met him when he baptised my eldest and he really is the sort of pleased-to-be-me progressive Christian that gives progressive Christians a bad name. Sort of like a Bob Lowe for the Noughties.) One wonders how much Saatchis charged, and what the parishioners thought they had got for their money. UK blogger Mick Hartley, among others, noticed and lifted Cardy’s profile even more. Which, one suspects, was the point of the exercise.

Chad Taylor is conducting “an experiment in making previously unavailable fiction available to readers”. There are five pieces on his website, including a chunk of his latest novel, The Church of John Coltrane, the sequel to his 1994 novel Heaven. I have a copy of the whole thing which I am part-way through (though I have forgotten almost everything about Heaven and cannot now refer back to it to get my bearings as my copy was one of the casualties of the Great Book Robbery of 1998 when almost my entire library was stolen. Yes, I know, who would steal books?). The new novel is, as we literary types say, shit-hot so I cannot understand why it has been published only in France. New Zealand publishers truly move in mysterious ways.

Phil Parker talks sense about wine fashions.

Home Paddock doesn’t approve of Helen Clark being made a member of the Order of New Zealand.

Karl du Fresne gets a bit snippy about Snoopy. Maybe I don’t go to enough malls – you try when you’re surrounded by cows and horses – but I quite like the cheerful Christmas ditty that enraged him so much. However, he goes on to make some eminently sensible points about modern Christmas music in general. (In our house it was Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Would have been A John Prine Christmas too except my wife can’t stand country music. But when she’s out. . . )

BK Drinkwater is still on sabbatical.

As is Laughy Kate, but that’s because she is still infesting our house and I won’t let her near the computer. One tries to do one’s bit for humanity.