I got another bit of reverse culture shock a couple of days ago which has definitley made me miss one aspect of movie-watching in China. This happened when I went to see Kevin Smith’s new film, “Zack and Miri make a Porno.” As usual, I got to the River View Shopping Mall’s Edwards Multiplex Cinema a bit early and plopped down into my plush reclining seat only to endear 10-15 minutes of commercials and movie trailers.
The commercials were totally moronic appeals to buy coke, beauty products, and computer games and software. This was followed by five or so trailers of upcoming films, all of which I’m sure have no redeeming cinematic merit whatsoever.
Two stick out in my mind. One was an idiotic comedy starring Anne Hathaway, fresh from her triumph as Agent 99 in “Get Smart”, about a pair of beautiful young women cat-fighting over reserving a room in a posh New York hotel for their respective weddings. The other movie, “Confessions of a Shop-aholic”, is yet another Jerry Bruckheimer atrocity about … you guessed it, some dumb but beautiful shopping obsessed bimbo. Perhaps Bruckheimer is making a lame effort to rouse the now suddenly frugal American consumers back into their big-spending habits just as the US economy slides into the dreaded liquidity trap. In any case, given the economic hard times ordinary Americans are now enduring, screening such a film at this particular moment strikes me as being rather obscene.
The nice thing about watching movies in China is that cinema goers are spared all of this pre-screening pelf. I’ve now seen about a half dozen films in various movie theaters in Beijing, and none of these movies was every preceded by a trailer for another film, much less advertising for products.
On the other hand, a movie like “Zack and Miri” would, due to its content, certainly never ever make it on to the Middle Kingdom’s movie screens. But notwithstanding its title and some of the things that happen in the film, “Zack and Miri” is hardly pornographic. Kudos to Kevin Smith for turning a tale about two down and out people making a cheap porno flick in order to get some cash—both have dead-end, low-paying jobs and face imminent eviction from the apartment they share—into a rather sweet romance and love story. And compared to "Confessions of Shopaholic", "Zack and Miri" is much more in sync with today's troubled economic times.
While Seth Rogin and Elizabeth Banks are Zack and Miri, the rest of the cast includes two people from Clerks I and Clerks II. One is the fellow, minus his long hair, who played “Jay”, or “12-Step”, one of the two dope dealers in these films who hang out in front of the convenience store in Clerks I and the fast food joint, "Mooby's", in Clerks II (his partner, “Silent Bob”, was played by Kevin Smith). And the actor who starred as the wonderfully misanthropic Randall Graves in Clerks I and Clerks II, is also in “Zack and Miri” as Zack and Miri’s video camera man.
However, my fellow laowai Kevin Smith aficionados need not despair. It will certainly be possible to download “Zack and Miri” from the internet and I have no doubt that DVDs of this movie will be showing up very soon, if they haven’t already, in DVD shops. I had no trouble buying a DVD of “Clerks II”, which, after all, featured a bit of “inter-species erotica”. Kevin Smith fans will know what I’m talking about and the rest of you can figure it out on your own, although what was actually shown in that particular scene wasn’t at all explicit (at least they didn’t get any complaints from the Humane Society).
In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying viewing mainly Chinese movies in the cinema without the highly annoying pre-screening commercials and trailers.
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