Word: cinemas
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...piracy, the Internet, shrunken regional markets, competition from ever more spectacular Hollywood effects movies and a more sophisticated hometown audience that is harder to satisfy with formulaic celluloid offerings, the famous Hong Kong film scene is in crisis. Granted, overall cinema takings rose slightly in 2007, helped by flashy new movie houses like West Kowloon's Grand Cinema, where are seats wired to shudder and shake along with the mostly imported on-screen action. But now, tough times loom and the industry's recovery is by no means certain. The only real prospect of hope on the horizon, selling films...
...there is a big catch to having a production classified as Chinese, and that's censorship. Mainland regulations can stifle creativity and place tight restraints on Hong Kong cinema's anything-goes style. Ghost stories are ruled out or carefully tweaked, as are sociopolitical comment and almost anything racy. Finales with wrongdoers walking off scot-free are among other no-nos, too. For some, meeting Chinese standards is a matter of good business sense. "You just have to adapt when it comes to the market," says Wellington Fung, secretary general of the Film Development Council (FDC), a government body established...
...internationalist. He loved Hollywood movies - as a young man he went to Los Angeles, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse - and he learned as much from their robust pace as he did from the gritty humanism of Italian neo-realist films and the romantic sweep of Indian cinema in its postwar Golden Age. He was both an art-house auteur and a director of popular hits, at least in the Arab crescent. He made political points, often different ones in different movies, but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain...
...Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov astutely observed that "reality" is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." He was arguing that any event is channeled, distorted, enriched by our perspective--that there's no objective reality, really. Nabokov was writing in 1956, just before the film form called cinema verité proved that even truth-seeking documentaries could have a social agenda and decades before shows like The Real World, Survivor and Big Brother made "reality TV" a phrase that is meaningless without sarcasm. Today, with reality programs using scriptwriters and dramas going for that realistic shaky-cam vibe...
...right. Back when Dustin Hoffman received the most famous one-word piece of career advice in cinema history, plastic was well on its way to becoming a staple of American life. The U.S. produced 28 million tons of plastic waste in 2005--27 million tons of which ended up in landfills. Our food and water come wrapped in plastic. It's used in our phones and our computers, the cars we drive and the planes we ride in. But the infinitely adaptable substance has its dark side. Environmentalists fret about the petroleum needed to make it. Parents worry about...