this will be crap.
He once said that he's done making films - too bad he lied, because otherwise he would have ended, oh, on a pretty horrible note (Chinese Zodiac was supposed to be his last film), but still not too bad aside from that mess. Now, he's digging himself a hole of poorly made, nationalistic films.
it's wrong. In 2009, with Shinjuku Incident, Derek Yee's movie showed the communitarian derivatives related to Chinese immigration to Japan. The following year, with Little Big Soldier (masterpiece !) Ding Sheng's movie questioned the blind patriotism. Through his character in Chinese Zodiac, he moderates vindictive character played by actress Yao XingTong. With Police Story Lockdown, Ding Sheng's movie follows the story of a police officer devoted to his duty, but failing in his role as father. His latest film Dragon Blade (demphasizes dialogue between different cultures deal with the conquering imperialism.
What the West can not stand is that the Chinese film industry can lift his head and be proud of their History. And even Jackie Chan would nationalistic films (see Project A). Why could not he do it when Hollywood continues to produce patriotic films. When the French cinema produced Socialist propaganda. Chinese cinema including that Jackie is more nuanced and they will certainly not be reduced to please American imperialism.
And you're only partly right.
China can make as many patriotic movies as they want, but what the west (which actually contains a much smaller number of people who even care about these things than you probably think) finds so laughable about China's constant stream of patriotic films is that China is STILL MAKING THE SAME CRAP THEY'VE BEEN MAKING FOR 70 YEARS, only now they've got access to all the Hong Kong actors who ACTUALLY introduced Chinese culture to the west because they were so FREE to do so compared to the Mainland. And mainland filmmakers now have access to tools that Hong Kong, European and Hollywood filmmakers have been using for DECADES. In fact, if it wasn't for Hong Kong cinema having such a glorious head start for decades and having a talented, technically proficient industry, Mainlander filmmakers would still be cranking out boring government propaganda films that looked like they were shot thirty years earlier than they actually were.
Nine times out of then, the only reason mainland Chinese revisionist patriotic epics get released in the west at all is because they have stars (Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung 1 and 2, and so many more) who've been household names here for decades while China was still living under an ideological quagmire. Now that China has admitted the west was right all along and adopted western style practices -- to a degree -- we get the same boring old propaganda films only with a WESTERN Hollywood gloss that western audiences have enjoyed for decades. As such, it's nothing special, and when it's married to yet another epic starring that turncoat Jackie Chan, for example, it gets released over here because of HIS name recognition ONLY, and once people see how tiresome, derivative and didactic such movies are, they end up savaged by critics and dumped in our bargain bins so quick your head would spin! Meanwhile, his old Hong Kong films -- and all the other great films that city produced for decades while mainlanders suffered in poverty -- are constantly finding new generations of fans the world over. NO old Chinese movies can make that claim, nor will they ever as long as you have the laughably "80-million-member-strong" (like THAT's necessary) Communist Party running the show.
So go ahead, enjoy all the "China is great and always has been" revisionist CGI epics you want, but keep in mind the only people truly enjoying them are other former sheep just like you: people raised to accept that their government could do no wrong (even though it did so -- repeatedly -- at a cost of millions of innocent lives post-1949), people FORBIDDEN to access western films until the almost the turn of the century (!!!), people who've been taught to believe that the suffering and poverty and paranoia inflicted on their RECENT ANCESTORS probably never really happened because all these great new Mainland Chinese movies (well, the ones that don't show how OBSESSED modern Chinese Mainlanders are with western-style materialism and money) say it wasn't such a bad time after all.
And we remake the same tired movies over and over again. How many reboots of Batman? Spider-Man? The Fantastic Four? And that is only scraping the surface.
Sure, China likes their patriotic movies. Unless you're a Liberal, so do we Americans. There's nothing wrong with that. They have their country and their beliefs, and we have ours. They also make fantastic, fun movies like Mei Ren Yu, The Sorceress and the White Snake, and Into the West.
And you're quite wrong about China. Many, many of them do not revere, or even like Mao after 1949- the 40 million he killed will not be forgotten any time soon. I vacation there at least once a year, and I talk to the people all the time- they're just people trying to make a living, make babies, and live their lives, same as us.
..Joe
He never said he would stop movies. He said he would do other kind of movies and stop his old school martial art movies.
shareHe said Chinese Zodiac would be his last *big* action movie. He didn't say anything about stopping altogether, and he didn't even mean to stop making movies with less action. Having said that, it's true his output in the last ten years is mostly horrible.
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