#there is no one in chinese internal entertainment industry who could have starred in this movie — only wang yibo!!!!!

[accio-victuuri]

From this article about One & Only “The "easter eggs" that are not on the screen of "One and Only" are here”

Recently, Entertainment Studio talked to "One and Only" director Dapeng and starring Huang Bo, and shared the stories behind the scenes of 10 movies with everyone here.

"Passionate" is an adjective that is aptly used to describe the newly released movie "One and Only".

This movie focusing on street dance is dazzling, and the last 20 minutes of the national competition are especially hearty, making people's palms sweat;

Outside the shoot, every member of the "One and Only" crew is doing their best for the cause they love, and the soul of the group is burning. Dapeng took the main creator to run desperately across the country, dancing in amusement parks, singing at barbecue stalls, checking tickets in movie theaters, handing out posters in frog suits under the scorching sun, riding bicycles for publicity, taking trains for publicity, and promoting at scenic spots... Wang Yibo fell ill and returned to the team after only two days of rest to continue the roadshow. Like Chen Shuo in the film, everyone is desperate to give, just to get closer to their dreams, and their warm emotions are constantly transmitted to more audiences.

"One and Only" is a film project born under the trend of the times to break prejudice.

"After the release of "Sewing Machine Band", the business of many local piano shops began to improve, because there were many children who went to learn musical instruments. This "One and Only" also carries the blessing of the entire Chinese street dance circle, from the preparation stage to the end of the shooting, the street dance circle is looking forward to and blessing this movie, I believe that this movie will definitely usher in a peak of rapid development of Chinese street dance after its release. They may be children and parents, or they may be people who have been prejudiced against street dance, but they will all fall in love with street dance and the people in the story. Dapeng said.

The best candidate for Bboy

In order to understand the real street dance culture, Dapeng did a lot of homework.

He watched street dance movies all over the world, and interviewed a large number of street dancers of different ages in various cities across the country, from three to forty and fifty years old. In April 2021, during the preparation of "One and Only" and before the start of "Keep You Safe", Dapeng asked all the Bboys he knew the same question-

"If I'm looking for someone to play Bboy, he has to be a well-known actor, he has to be able to act and dance at the same time, and his temperament can be recognized by the Bboy community, who should I go to?"

Dapeng got a unified answer, Wang Yibo.

At that time, Dapeng did not know Wang Yibo, he did not even have a script, and he met Yibo nervously through the brokerage company. In order to prevent his expression from being in place, Dapeng also wrote a letter in advance and handed it to Yibo.

Later, Dapeng received a reply from Wang Yibo and wrote a lot of words. Wang Yibo said that he is very happy to be invited to play this role, street dance and movies are his passion, so doing this thing is a superposition of love. He agreed to star in "One and Only".

With a specific object, the film began to enter a stage of rapid progress. Screenwriter Su Biao printed a photo of Wang Yibo and pasted it above the table, looked at his photo every day, and began to write the script.

The script grows from the double BO

The earliest "One and Only" stories tried different directions. At the beginning, the main line is the relationship between mother and son, about how a mother raises her children, and the "exclamation point" is actually derived from a plot in the early version of the script. When Chen Shuo was young, his mother took him to choose his favorite extracurricular class, and if he didn't learn well, he would put a cross or question mark, and only the street dance chosen by Xiao Chen Shuo himself was given an exclamation point. The exclamation point became a small code word between mother and son, and Chen Shuo finally used it on the stage of the national competition.

In the process of the development of the script, they want to write how Chen Shuo is getting stronger and stronger, then he must have a good coach. The coach's line is getting fuller and fuller, and slowly becomes the protagonist.

At the same time, Dapeng they are going to start looking for actors. An OG who can dance, his acting skills are also brilliant, and the only thing Dapeng can think of is Huang Bo. He had shown every script to Huang Bo before, but he didn't find a suitable opportunity for cooperation, but he didn't expect that Huang Bo agreed very happily this time.

"Brother Bo told me that he could finish his last job within a time frame and have a whole block of time to shoot "One and Only", which scared me. Because it is not even a complete script, only the outline of the story. He seemed to have been waiting for the role, and the invitation process went smoothly beyond my own imagination. Dapeng said.

"So we have the double BO combination. We project our impression of them into the script, maybe you can see that there is a part of Huang Bo's shadow on the characters, and there is a growth trajectory of Yibo, that is because these two characters can be said to be tailored for Huang Bo and Yibo, and the story is grown from them.

This time is different from my previous creative path, I used to write one draft, two drafts and three drafts of the script, and even the punctuation marks I felt very satisfied with before I went to find an actor, but in the end it didn't work, and I acted by myself. "One and Only" was unexpectedly smooth, and it was the most efficient film I created. ”

Chen Shuo and his mother

In the final film, the line between Chen Shuo and his mother was compressed, but it was still the biggest crying point.

"The two of them are still a bit alike, did you feel it?" Dapeng laughed.

Liu Mintao and Wang Yibo each did their homework for the role, and the first rivalry scene they wanted to shoot was the scene where Chen Shuo rushed to the wedding scene to find that it was his mother singing on stage, and he couldn't help but burst into tears.

The crew spent a while to set up the studio scene for the filming of this scene, and ran in a group of extras. As soon as the shout began, Liu Mintao and Wang Yibo quickly entered the situation, and both of them shed tears from their hearts.

Dapeng in front of the monitor was a little confused - a scene that took so much effort to prepare, the result was so easy? He said it would be okay or ... Do it again? But in fact, the first take is used in the end. The two actors have done a lot of homework before this, and their understanding of the characters has been very thorough, realizing the "one take" of this heavy emotional scene.

Uncle's wax figure

Living with them in the film is Chen Shuo's uncle, played by the bald Yue Yunpeng, a character with few scenes but dense laughter.

Because her mother's surname is Du, the team came up with a somewhat nonsensical shop name called "Madame Tussauds Restaurant". There are a lot of wax figures in the store, and authorization is required to shoot wax figures, so the crew first considered Dapeng's friends, Jia Ling, Zhang Xiaofei, Yang Di, Li Xueqin, etc., and also thought of world-class celebrity images such as Monkey King, Einstein, Bruce Lee, and Tyson.

Yang Di not only has wax figures, but he himself also came to play a moving wax figure in a nightmare, which is scary and funny. Li Xueqin could have had a wax figure in the shape of a female ghost in "Keep You Safe", but because it was not sure which of "One and Only" or "Keep You Safe" would be on first, the audience might not get this meme, so they could only remove it first.

"With wax figures and a little bit of my own thinking in it. What kind of people are those who have wax figures, they are all successful people. But my uncle has been sculpting a wax figure of himself, and the closer to the end of the movie, the wax figure becomes more and more complete. If you have a belief in your heart, no matter how ordinary and ordinary people are, you can shape your appearance like your uncle. Dapeng said.

Huang Bo backflipped, Wang Yibo hit closed, and the crew rolled up

For movies dedicated to street dance, the dance part must be burning and fried enough, and it must be able to bring a strong visual and psychological impact to the audience.

Dapeng spent a long time researching how to make street dance look better, he organized a group of dancers to the studio to test shoot, try various equipment and mirror movement, and also hired a new editing director, Zhang Yibo, who had cut "Young You", to cut the dance part, because Zhang Yibo himself is also a dancer.

Most of the members of the exclamation point are real-life top dancers, each specializing in different dances. Between "let professional actors learn to dance" and "ask professional dancers to perform", he chose the latter in order to save the dance. But I didn't expect that the dancers' performances in the final film were also very good, because most of the time Dapeng let them "play themselves", eating the hot pot scene, everyone talked about why they wanted to dance, which is the true voice of the dancers themselves.

And the two leading actors, Huang Bo and Wang Yibo, both showed the highest professionalism and did their best to exceed the required dance moves. In the original script, there was no Ding Lei on the scene, but Huang Bo felt that since he came, it was difficult to jump again. Wang Yibo also strives to jump to perfection every time, and finally jumps with closure.

"Yibo and Brother Bo are very serious, so serious that I don't think it's necessary, for example, Brother Bo has a flip, in fact, you can do it with a stand-in, and you can't see it, but he must do it himself. Spirits can infect each other, there is a competitive atmosphere in the crew, you want to do a backflip by yourself, what should others do?

For the last street dance competition, we filmed at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center for 10 days, and the shooting intensity was very large. The movie is cut shot by shot, but the actors can't jump only part of it, the movements are coherent, so jumping over and over again is a test of everyone's physical endurance.

On the penultimate days of filming, they told me that Chen Shuo (Wang Yibo) had an uncomfortable ankle, but he didn't tell me that I only learned about it after several people. Although there was a team doctor on the scene every day, I told Yibo at that time that the movie is edited, and it doesn't matter if a certain time you dance is not so perfect, as long as a few moments are good, and then we can make up for it through other angles.

But he just has to be good from beginning to end, he is too demanding of himself. On the last day, he should have filmed the scene in a closed position.

In order to live up to his efforts, in the end, in the choice of editing, you can go to watch, I try my best to ensure that his performance is a complete camera, not cut. ”

An avid group performer

Dapeng used to watch many group performances in film and television dramas, such as a group of reporters mechanically pressing the camera shutter, and a group of wooden audiences under the concert stage, they would feel very dramatic. The main creator may pay more attention to the protagonist, and the supporting role is just a human flesh background board. This time filming "One and Only", Dapeng felt that the atmosphere creation of the competition scene was the top priority, and it was the key point for the audience to have a sense of presence and thus believe in the story.

No matter how big the scene, Dapeng requires every group audience in the audience to react with passion and commitment.

"Every day I try everything to liven up the atmosphere on the spot," Dapeng said, "The whole voice is dumb, if I can't do it, I will want my sister to go up, and if she can't do it, I will go up to others, and take turns to drive the atmosphere."

One day at 11 p.m., everyone started to get sleepy, and I felt as if the atmosphere was going to fall, so I rushed into the crowd myself. I said, look how I play an avid hip-hop audience. When you go to drive the atmosphere, everyone will be infected by you, and the atmosphere of the game can be more enthusiastic. ”

Dapeng, who did not star in his own movie for the first time, played a fanatical live audience, and he also set his "black photo" as a Weibo avatar

Prepare the last scene as if it were a movie

The last 20 minutes of the hip-hop competition were constantly reversed, and the climax was stacked, and wave after wave raised the atmosphere. How was this scene designed?

"We prepared the last scene as a movie. Although it is an action scene, it also takes on a lot of narrative functions, so that the game is always in suspense, there are constant reversals and accidents, and each round has ups and downs. Before filming this competition, our crew stopped work for a few days, and there were meetings every day, and various departments coordinated how to shoot this game.

Fortunately, we have the best dancers in China, the best dance consultants, the members of the coaching staff of the national team, and they give a lot of ideas. For example, someone was injured on the spot, how to persist with the injury, and impress the judges with spirit, such as the music suddenly stopped, the team's creativity..."

In the end, the exclamation point won satisfactory results with the comprehensive strength of the dance company, Chen Shuo's personal efforts, on-the-spot adaptability, team soul and creativity, etc., and I believe that it will definitely bring unexpected surprises to the audience.

Making a movie is very simple, it is a group of people who go all out for one thing

Chen Shuo in the play and Dapeng outside the play are both inspirational examples of struggle.

Recently, Dapeng turned out an old photo, which was a photo of his back with Wang Yibo at an event in Sina when he first stepped into the film industry nine years ago. At that time, he must not have imagined that one day they would collaborate on a movie.

In the ten days we filmed the National Street Dance Competition, every day burned to the fullest. About one day at the end of work, I found a room, and when there was no one, I cried there myself. It's not sad, it's reluctant to finish filming this scene. Even if this group of people gathers at another event in the future, it is not the feeling at this moment, and I miss the time I spent together. ”

"I thought later, maybe that's why I prefer to make movies. Life is hard, but making a movie is much simpler because it's simple, and everyone is desperately trying to give it their all for one thing.

Have you noticed that Yibo has become more smiling in this crew? Because that's what a twenty-four-five-year-old young man should look like, but he is Wang Yibo, and I know the pressure he faces, so in the crew, I try to make him find more security and trust. I believe that he was also very engaged and happy not to talk about the outcome of the final movie, but only about the summer they experienced together. ”

"This time I am also immersed in the directing work, I hope that this film can have a breakthrough in my career, because it is different, with such a powerful Bo Ge, Yibo, and such a group of the best Chinese dancers, everyone likes actors, I think it will become my best work so far." Dapeng said.

As the exclamation point recruitment slogan writes, "Keep working hard and you'll succeed!" This sentence is also true for each of the creators of Dapeng and "One and Only".

( Note : I removed some parts and paragraphs that focus more on DP and his past works. what is left here is about the movie, wyb and chen shuo. )

[xz1005fanblog]

2021-02-27 Some things I want to say

WARNING LONG POST

Context first, translation of his post above will follow:

Disclaimer: I have no interest in other artists other than Xiao Zhan, and I am merely explaining the situation of the fandom in China that led us to the fiasco in March 2020. I do not care for bjyx, I ship WangXian but I do not ship real people as a basic principle.

My opinion as an international fan of Xiao Zhan and as an AO3 user (yes, I am not Chinese nor do I live in China, I just happen to be able to read Chinese) is that C-entertainment industry is TOXIC and celebrities are not free targets for you to cyberbully. They are human just like you and me. 

Everyone needs to learn a bit more about compassion. 

I am sure all of you read about the cyberbullying Xiao Zhan went through last year. There were multiple factors that started all of this, most of which XZ doesn’t talk about in this letter because of how sensitive the topic is in China. I’ve never explained entirely what happened because I personally thought that this is not something overseas fans should worry too much about. Especially since most of you don’t have a wb or db account, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. But since Xiao Zhan himself decided to post a letter to respond to this subject, I’ll put in my 2 cents just that so everyone is on the same page.

Basically, after The Untamed aired in China, the show fandom split into 3 groups. XZ fans, WYB fans, and CP fans (or bjyx, whatever you wish to call it, those who love shipping these two real people together - not just the characters in the drama). Of course there are still people who would watch the show without becoming a fan of the actors.

At the beginning, most people thought they were good friends with each other, with all the short BTS clips from The Untamed. However, fans slowly discovered that it wasn’t the case. Some unofficial BTS clips emerged where WYB said XZ was shooting multiple dramas at the same time = 轧戏 (which is very frowned upon and a disrespectful thing to say to an actor), whereas in reality, XZ only asked for a couple of days days off during the shooting for The Untamed because his scenes in Joy of Life had to be redone and he was bound by contract. On the contrary, WYB had to ask for most weekends off because he was participating in Produce 101 at the time. Other clips shows them fighting about somethings WYB said about WWX, which made XZ mad. So this broke a lot of CP fans’ image of their relationship, and they either stopped shipping/became XZ or WYB fans only. This angered WYB’s fans, of course, which made them blame XZ for the entire fiasco.  

Other incidents continued to happen after the show which increased the friction between these 3 fan groups. XZ fans and WYB fans would fight about various voting charts, and fight with CP fans because they don’t like seeing the two actors together. In the meantime, CP fans continuously feminize and weaken XZ in order to ship the 2 actors together (it’s rather an unhealthy trend in China, I’ve been in multiple other western fandoms before - not real person shipping - but we rarely glorify weakening/feminizing the bottom of a ship, because of the underlying prejudice against real homosexuals, who are not synonymous to transgenders).

Some incidents added oil to the fire afterwards. It’ll take me too long to explain everything, so I’ll just put here the main ones to explain why there’s so much bad blood between these 3 groups of fans.

On XZ’s birthday, some CP fans found XZ’s parents’ apartment building and yelled BJYX is real. This angered a lot of XZ fans, because of how disrespectful it was towards the old couple and the clear breach of privacy. WYB fans and some CP fans were also angry that XZ didn’t reply immediately to the birthday wish on wb that WYB sent at midnight (??? XZ was busy shooting a drama, can you blame him for not being on wb at midnight? Give the guy a break.)

In November 2019, WYB filed a lawsuit against some of XZ’s fans (instead against of his own haters!) for dissing him (although I’ve never seen any proof, and a few of those fans remain active on wb now, one of whom has even defended WYB's portrayal of LWJ before...). This angered a lot of XZ fans and CP fans who didn’t understand how he could have done this to his “friend”, and further proved that their relationship wasn’t that fantastic to begin with. WYB fans felt justified in hating XZ and all XZ fans as a result, and openly bullied XZ fans on the grounds of the Nanking CQL Concert. 

In January, The Untamed was named to Beijing Journal Drama award. CP fans and WYB fans were unhappy that XZ was named to the Best Male Lead category and WYB was named to the Best Male 2nd Lead. They attacked the award committee wb by spam commenting all their wb posts and the entire drama was pulled from the nomination afterward. XZ fans were especially angry that they started all this only for the nomination to be pulled out - because the only possibility was one Male Lead per drama, and anyone would agree that if chosen between WWX and LWJ, the character with the most scenes and importance in the story is WWX. 

Yadda yadda yadda, fast forward to February 2020, it started with a fanfiction written by a CP fan that depicted XZ as a prostitute transgender woman and WYB as a highschool kid (UNDERAGE) = AKA very sensitive material in China. It was posted on AO3, but the author posted the link of said fic on wb and a lot of CP fans broadcasted it around, so much that XZ fans became aware of it. Due to how sensitive the material is and how badly it would taint XZ’s image for his future roles, some XZ fans started reporting the wb post that contained the link (NOT AO3) and the author’s wb page. This is common practice in fandom on wb, usually done to get the wb posts taken down. This caused panic in the CP fans crowd because they thought XZ fans were reporting AO3 and that they were gonna lose the website (which is impossible, because AO3′s servers are in Sweden and not subject to Chinese laws anyway). 

Because of how sensitive AO3 was in China and how haters tried to pull in antigovernmental into their crowds, the subject quickly became too dangerous for XZ fans to get involved in. Official fan groups in China unanimously decided to ask all fans to stop participating in the online debate and stay within the fan group circle only. 

Someone on AO3 made a commentary about this incident that you can find here. She dug up a lot of info on the companies feeding money to the trolls online, but as I am an overseas fan and cannot really verify her info, I will not comment on those statements. 

Sometime in the middle of this fiasco, someone started spreading the notion that XZ fans hated fanfiction and were trying to report anything that goes against their image of their idol... And subsequently people who were not CP fans or XZ fans became aware of this problem when they couldn’t access AO3 suddenly because too much curious fans where trying to access it and they crashed the servers. However later on, people could access the website without any problems. I am not personally in China right now so I can’t verify these claims of the website being walled or not for real, but I know from various reliable sources that on March 1st it was only an overload of the server, and people could still access afterwards. 

With this however, haters (which include previous CP fans, WYB fans, and other idol’s fans) attacked XZ for not telling his fans to stop reporting, for not saying anything. They attacked XZ’s endorsements and spammed hate speech on the products he was promoting. They would rate 1 star in all his dramas and songs on db, and then buy accounts to further rate 1 stars (yes that thing exists in China, everything can be bought in China, don’t ask me why.) The reason why I believe that all this wasn’t coincidental, is that barely the day after the fiasco started, someone posted on db the exact list of all his sponsorships, detailing exactly who to call to protest, what words to spam in the comment sections of various official brands’ wb accounts. This entire thing was too well planned to be just a normal fandom fight. 

Whether it was other actors’ fans who organized this to cut down competition, we will probably never know for sure. The following year was laden with fake rumors, hate speech blasting from multiple directions. They attacked his personality, saying that his polite manners are just for show (when the reality is that he has always been a gentleman even when he wasn’t popular). They attacked XZ for faking donations to Wuhan, forcing him to show his donation certificate to prove himself. One of his friends couldn’t stand the cyberbullying anymore and revealed publicly that his grandfather recently passed away (the date on this drawing is 2020.03.03, he couldn’t post this last year). 

His friend defending him from the cyberbullies, saying that he had plenty of reasons to stay silent. That his grandfather passed away recently and his family has been planning his funeral. 

(Sources also said that his mother was hospitalized a few days afterwards. And that haters went to his mother’s hospital to harass her and her nurses)

Haters saying that XZ is using his grandfather’s death to excuse himself (??? is he not allowed to grieve like a normal person???)

Haters wishing that XZ becomes depressed from the cyberbullying and kills himself, wishing that he was dead, wishing that his fans were dead too. Photoshopping his picture into a funeral portrait to curse him

Haters admitting they are cyberbullying XZ, but rejoicing in the fact that they are so many so XZ can’t sue all of them. They have also reported his upcoming dramas for various reasons just so they cannot be aired. 

The airplane incident I’ve already talked about here.

A picture antis made to diss on XZ fans: AO3 can be still accessed even if it’s walled, Lofter can be still access even if it’s taken down from the app store. Your gege’s picture are still accessible even if he died. 

I’ve only posted here the tamest screenshots, there are far worst ones that I won’t be posting because the amount of vitriol give me nausea just looking at them. 

In all this fiasco, antis gave him the tag of “idol who didn’t manage his fans well”. But Xiao Zhan never thought fans needed to be trained, he thought of them like normal people, and their love, something to be treasured and not used. But some people in China still blamed his fans for starting all this mess, and partly him and his studio for not being able to stop it. 

Below is the translation for XZ’s letter, posted on the wb post above

Some Things I Want To Say

Today, I have something to say to everyone. I’ve thought of a lot of ways to do this, but in the end, I chose the simplest way to tell everyone about all my feelings and thoughts in the past year. These opinions, maybe they won’t be able to represent anything, nor won’t they be able to change anything, but I still wish to say this today. 

On this day last year, the incident happened very quickly, as if a bomb exploded on my face - endless phone calls, never ending message notifications, everyone’s opinions and questions came in like a tsunami. I wanted to say something back then, but I didn’t know what exactly. I was apprehensive of making a statement, afraid that one wrong word, or one wrong sentence would be taken the wrong way and end up adding oil to the fire. This is why at that time, I chose not to say anything. 

I never thought that the online fighting would grow bigger and bigger like an avalanche, getting larger crowds involved, and gradually leaving one person’s control. Even though afterwards I made repeated statements to make amends, it could not develop as I wished it to anymore. 

This life filled with broken protests and tumultuous noise continued to this day. And I felt I was going through a very dark and never ending tunnel. Unrest, ruminations, turmoil... I have also asked myself what did I do wrong exactly, why did everything after that day became as if it were an uncontrollable vessel. 

I spent a lot of time to digest, and then spent a lot of time to understand, understand everyone’s words and actions. Slowly, I started to understand what everyone was criticizing about me personally. The moment that I chose not to say anything, I lost that window of opportunity to reason with everyone. So I was wrong, from the very beginning. 

At that time, I wasn’t yet able to clearly understand the entire incident, to understand everyone’s feelings, nor did I know what kind of responsibility I had to carry as a public figure. Thus, I missed that opportunity to communicate with everyone, and wasn’t able to withstand the responsibility of letting these antagonizing feelings grow. Now, I can clearly recognize that throughout this year, this criticism that everyone had against me of “Idol Who Lost Its Voice”, was correct. During this year I reflected upon this repeatedly, as a public figure, I have to not only improve myself within the boundaries of my profession, but also have to carry the social responsibility that comes with my influence. To influence those who like me, who follow me, towards the right worldviews within my capacity. Even though my studio and I have already expressed some opinions through wb and interviews, but scars that this incident that brought such antagonistic emotions between different circles are still difficult to heal. 

No matter how late, my own problem has to be corrected. I would like to express my first comment: Xiao Zhan, would like to apologize for “losing voice” towards those who have been affected by this incident. This is my first responsibility towards the public, face the problem and admit my faults. 

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to speak with my fans. This is my second responsibility. In one of my interviews last year, I have said, I do not really agree with “managing” my fans (some celebs in China have hired people to manage fan groups in order for them to behave in certain ways for their purposes. Antis tried to spread the false rumor that XZ also had those people and that they directed their fans to start this mess), because everyone is an individual. No matter my studio nor myself, we do not have the authority to “manage” them like some would manage workers in a company. Afterwards, I reflected many times, maybe I cannot use the word “manage” to define my relationship with my fans, but I do have the responsibility to “correctly influence, and actively advocate”. So today, I would like to tell my fans, everyone has the right to like or hate something, and it should be respected and allowed within their own space. Of course this right should be reasonable, should not hurt anyone else, and remain within the boundaries of the correct values and norms. I hope my fans and friends can understand that no matter which profession, no matter what age, one’s own preferences or actions should not cross the line for one’s professional ethics or disrespect basic principles. 

(Here he is referring to reports of teachers using his name in class or asking children to say his name to cheer for him. This is a problem that occurred also with other celebrities in China, and for which he has already expressed himself previously.)

No matter online or in real life, everyone should be responsible for their own words. I also hope that we are not represented tags like “xx’s fans”, that we do not set this as the basis of where we stand on a topic nor do we let this determine what’s right or wrong. Everyone have their own hobbies and interest, respect everyone’s choice and freedom of speech. No matter whether they like me or hate me is their own right. Passion, this should be a source of strength to everyone, I do not wish for it to consume or hurt anyone. Perhaps I cannot change this kind of environment, but at least for you and me, today is a new start point. 

At last, I would like to talk a bit about myself. Ever since I came into this field, until today, I have always been defined by some tags. But the reason why I originally stepped into this circle was my passion for performance and music. And this is why, I will keep working on becoming a better actor and singer. The sudden criticism of “having lost voice” made me realize that, other than what I have always focused on professionally, I have to also be able to carry the responsibility of a public figure and an idol. I was born in a normal family in Chong Qing, and have lived a normal life, like many other people, for more than twenty years. Today I will also use this opportunity to apologize for the words I have said before as a normal person (I’ve already talked about it here), for the people I have inadvertently hurt. As I work hard on studying to become a better person, I will try to become a better “public figure”, so that these two Xiao Zhan can blend in together, for a better self. 

This past year, no matter big or small, I have to be responsible for the incidents that happened because of me. I can demand this for myself, but I have no right to force it on other people, so I can only hope that those who really like me can really listen to me: please be a bit more reasonable for things outside of personal preferences. Live a healthy life, put more time and energy onto one’s real life, and less on the senseless fighting behind fake IDs and unreliable online world. Only to become a better self. 

(Here he’s referring to an online fight that an anti called 晨小晨 started. I’ve already explained a bit here.  #微博管理员回应晨小晨事件# )

Sorry for any grammar errors, this post was really long to make and I didn’t proofread. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to translate the entire thing for overseas fans since you don’t understand the entire context, and because I wanted my wb records collection tag to be complete, I felt I had to... and I got carried away trying to explain everything. Tried to summarize it as much as I could.

As a fan of Xiao Zhan and also an AO3 user, I would still like to apologize for how this bullshi*t ended up disrupting respectful and peaceful users of AO3. The Untamed tag did not contain hate fics before all of this happened, it is unfortunate that a place where there used to be only love, ended up being tainted by antis and haters.

To the anonymous person who asked me a few months ago if I supported bjyx, this is my answer: You have the right to like whatever you want within your own corner, as long as it doesn’t bother anyone else and isn’t against basic principles. I ship WangXian as characters from a novel, but I have never liked RPS as a principle. 

[sgtpaine]

The Left’s Revolution Dominates Every American Height, And They Don’t Know Why We Aren’t Cheering

Herein lies a glimpse into just what kind of knuckle-draggers the left thinks we are. They think patriotism means we’ll do whatever they say whenever they say it.

By

Christopher Bedford

AUGUST 10, 2021

“Rooting against Olympians, scoffing at Capitol police, broaching civil war — meet today’s conservative movement.”

That’s the opening of an article last week at Vox.com. You’ve probably heard of Vox. Their self-proclaimed, self-aggrandizing purpose is to “explain the news.” But when Vox’s condescending reporters start talking about conservatives, Christians, guns, or really anyone outside of a few coastal cities, they have a habit of sounding like Jane Goodall observing apes.

So, what’s their qualm now? Let’s let them explain it in their own words:

[There is a] rising tendency in the conservative movement to reject America itself. In this thinking, the country is so corrupted that it is no longer a source of pride or even worthy of respect. … Queer female soccer stars demanding equal pay, Black basketball players kneeling to protest police brutality, the world’s best gymnast prioritizing her mental health over upholding the traditional ideal of the “tough” athlete — this is all a manifestation of the ascendancy of liberal cultural values in public life. And an America where these values permeate national symbols, like the Olympic team, is an America where those symbols are worthy of scorn.

Worthy of scorn; imagine that. Underperforming and overpaid people who for a living play a game no one watches want to be paid the same as people who are better players and earn more viewers.

Rich athletes publicly spitting on their country, their flag, and the men and women who have died for it, so they can push left-wing lies.

An enormously talented athlete quitting on the brink of competition, and saying the problem was she wanted to compete only for herself, not for her coaches, her teammates, or her country.

These are indeed “all a manifestation of the ascendancy of liberal cultural values in public life.” They’re the fruits of a spoiled, privileged, narcissistic, and self-obsessed revolution that began in the late 1950s and has been fighting its way to power ever since. They have it now, and it isn’t simply confined to our sacred soccer ball kickers.

Sports is just the latest, but look at its sponsors: You can be a subpar professional athlete, but if you spit on the flag you get a lucrative Nike contract.

Remember that Nike ad, “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything”? It featured Colin Kaepernick. The only problem is, he didn’t sacrifice anything — he discovered he could be paid a lot more playing the American public than he could playing football as a backup quarterback.

Now, thanks to his fake bravery, he gets to decide if the first flag of the United States is permissible. He says it isn’t, because America wasn’t perfect 245 years ago — and Nike sanctifies that decision with a lucrative payout.

They don’t mind; Nike may still be headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, but at heart they’re a Chinese company. That’s the People’s Republic of China: a godless slave state that uses forced labor to manufacture products and criminalizes dissent. That’s a country Nike respects, or at least one it cares about offending. Guess what: We don’t like that.

They’re far from alone. Silicon Valley was once a symbol of American enterprise: Young men working in their garages to harness technology and revolutionize our lives. Now Silicon Valley symbolizes the most powerful private companies the world has ever known — and they use that power to crush dissent, censor presidents and critics, and push left-wing propaganda. Turns out, when they do that we don’t like them.

We can go on. Blackrock sends its urchins to buy up affordable homes in growing cities to transform a society of homeowners into a society of servile tenants.

Mastercard and IBM build international databases for tracking humans so they can bar them from travel and commercial activity if they don’t take an experimental vaccine. Or, in MasterCard’s case, maybe they’ll ban you if they just dislike your politics.

Bank of America refuses to make loans to American gun manufacturers out of principle while making a $1 billion gift to Black Lives Matter, a racist, anti-American, anti-family, grifty riot squad responsible for dead police, murdered innocents, and burned-out cities. Huh — turns out we don’t like any of that either.

How about the Pentagon? Conservatives used to respect it because it won wars and embodied the finest of American values while doing so. But now the Pentagon loses wars, throws away lives, and wastes trillions of dollars while trashing those fine American values.

The military used to be a strict meritocracy. Now, they cut standards in the name of diversity. They used to demand that every soldier be fit and ready for war. Now, they slash the requirements for our troops’ physical performance and brag about maternity flight suits.

They teach weak and disgusting left-wing racism in their academies, they target Christians, they insult the middle-America conservatives who do most of the fighting and an overwhelming share of the dying in our armed forces. While our enemies run ads touting the manly virtues necessary to a warrior life, our generals run ads about having two moms. It’s not very intimidating. And hey, we don’t like it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we could all go on with example after example, but the point is this: The left got their revolution, the one they spent decades screaming and agitating for. They got their ideologues into the halls of power — not just the university halls, not just the halls of Congress, but all of them: Business, media, military, sports.

If there is an institution in your life and it’s not a good church, chances are that institution has implemented one policy after another pledging itself to the dogmas of the left. Now, the left is shocked — shocked — that we don’t like it one bit.

There was an America that we loved. It was an America of religious liberty and freedom of speech, and equality before the law. An America that loved what is beautiful rather than what is warped and ugly. An America that loved its founders and loved its children. An America that knew that whatever prosperity it possessed, it owed it all to the Almighty, and that it had a solemn duty to Him in return.

That was the America we loved. An America that hundreds of thousands of young men proved they loved more than life itself. We still love that America, and we’re not just going to cheer and applaud their active desecration of it.

Herein lies a great little glimpse into just what kind of knuckle-draggers the left thinks we are. They think patriotism means we’ll do whatever they say whenever they say it. “Drink your can of beer, sit on the couch, and cheer for sports. You like sports, don’t you, you ape? Come on, watch them on your 60-inch Chinese TV you bought at Walmart.”

“Buy our cheap, foreign products, do it now. You like free enterprise, don’t you? What’s more free than your boys and girls in the Navy guarding Chinese ships shipping Chinese products from Chinese companies to run-down American towns that were once industrial hubs?”

“You like cheap things, don’t you? I thought Republicans loved sports and business!”

“When Gen. Mark Milley says jump, you say how high. When he says you’re racist and you are showing white rage, nod along. When he says standards are overblown, and that diversity is our new strength, salute. Come on, don’t you support our troops?”

They don’t get it. They don’t get that we don’t honor and salute empty institutions and buildings! We don’t just bow down before the local magistrate’s hat on a stick.

They don’t get that a church is not just some building that can be made into a nightclub, it’s where we worship God — and it’s from his presence that it derives its meaning.

They don’t get that people watch sports for athletic excellence, good old American entertainment, and the thrill of cheering for the guys fighting for your team. No one watches sports to be condescended to, regardless of what uniform the athlete has on.

They don’t get that we respect the flag and the Americans who’ve fought and died for it and will again, but that doesn’t mean we stand and salute the Pentagon and all the foolish politicians in the brass.

They also don’t get that we’re not all 100 percent serious and miserable all of the time, like a couple of CNN anchors we could name; we still have a sense of humor. So yes, when a woman with an ugly heart says ugly things about America and then flops in a big soccer tournament, we’re going to chuckle about it. Maybe even laugh out loud. Maybe we will have that cold beer.

We’re Americans; we don’t resent success in sports, business, or military service. But as Helen Andrews of The American Conservative recently wrote, conservatives don’t resent the left’s success — we resent the ways they actively harm us. And we’ll never accept the rotten version of America they tell us we’re supposed to love.

America is worth saving. If you live in a major coastal city, leave it whenever you can and see that America. It can sometimes be hard to find — the left has warped it viciously. Today this country kills its children in the womb, celebrates decadence, and glorifies decay, but if Vox is onto anything it’s this: We are onto them. And we’re not buying it. And America lives on in our hearts.

There are a lot of problems in this country. We’re experiencing a secular elite trying to justify their existence in any way they can. Things are going to get worse before they get better, because they want things to and it makes them feel good.

But there’s no God at the end of this tunnel. Just as with drugs or money or sex, no amount of Black Lives Matter,  climate change activism, and yard signs can fill the hole they’re feeling. The good news is, it won’t work; the bad news is, our experiment is delicate and badly damaged.

The work — going to school board meetings, running for local office, speaking up in our towns and our cities and our states — is hard work. We’re going to lose friends along the way, but we will lose this country forever if we don’t, so there’s really no choice at all, is there.

Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on

Twitter

.

[letterboxd]

Drawing Closer.

Animation lovers: watchlists at the ready. From action capers to Irish folk tales, in 3DCG or the humble pencil, by manga legends and raucous newcomers, Letterboxd’s animation correspondent Kambole Campbell picks ten new feature films we’re excited to see.

When the gears of the live-action film industry ground to a near-halt earlier this year, animators were still at work. As a medium that, at its most fundamental level, is controlled fully by the imaginations of its creators, this might be the one element of the screen industry that has some kind of ability to operate throughout the pandemic.

Based on previews from this year’s online edition of the annual Annecy International Animation Film Festival, there’s a lot to look forward to that’s still in the works, even now. With everything from blockbuster capers and fantastical alternate histories, explorations of folklore and real human stories alike, we can expect a spoil of boundless and endlessly creative films limited only by the imaginations of those drawing them.

Here are ten animated features I’m specifically excited for, in no particular order (except for the first—fight me if you like, Masaaki Yuasa will always win).

Inu-Oh Directed by Masaaki Yuasa / Due to release in 2021

If there’s one new animated film to watch in the next year, make it Inu-Oh (but also, don’t limit yourself to one). Masaaki Yuasa has proven himself time and again to be one of the most exciting and versatile animation directors alive, as well as potentially the busiest. With his studio, Science Saru, this year alone he directed two television series—the fantastic ode to animators, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!!, and the intense Netflix disaster series Japan Sinks: 2020—as well as the melancholy, romantic feature film Ride Your Wave.

Inu-Oh looks to be just as imaginative and wild as anything else Yuasa-san has made, based on the work-in-progress glimpse at Annecy. Set in fourteenth-century Japan, the film is based on Hideo Furukama’s novel about the legendary masked Noh theater performer Inu-Oh, born with “unique characteristics”, which lead them to cover their entire body. Both novel and film focus on their close friendship with the blind biwa hōshi (lute priest) Tomona, and the success they find together.

“We often think of history as moving in one straight line, but it actually branches off, and people and events in those branches have been forgotten or disappeared,” Yuasa-san said during the Annecy preview. Inu-Oh explores those hidden branches through an anachronistic reimagining of the roots of traditional Japanese entertainment. The main idea: what if the performers of Noh theater were treated like Japan’s pop idols of today? Yuasa-san described the main characters as “kind of like The Beatles” of 1300s Japan.

On credits alone there’s a lot of promise, with the legendary Taiyō Matsumoto— the mangaka who created Tekkonkinkreet and Ping Pong (and collaborated with Yuasa-san on the latter’s fantastic anime adaptation)—lending his eccentric yet elegant designs to the film. The preview opened with minute movements comprised of rough, wide almost painterly brushstrokes, an art style almost completely unlike anything Yuasa-san has done previously.

As it turns out, this is but one way of representing the world of Inu-Oh, through the perspective of Tomona, a Notes on Blindness-esque way of representing how Tomona perceives things. From those small glimpses, Inu-Oh looks to be a beautiful, anthropological piece built with both the same free-form style that characterizes the rest of his work, and perhaps something more classical as well.

Wolfwalkers Directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart / Coming to theaters and Apple TV+ in late 2020 after a September 12 premiere at TIFF

Made and set in Kilkenny, home to the acclaimed animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the much-anticipated Wolfwalkers is inspired by animation’s past, Celtic legend, and the local area’s history. Set in 1650, Wolfwalkers takes place amidst attempts by the English (Cromwell, specifically) to pacify and tame Ireland. Representative of those wild elements the English are seeking to eradicate are the ‘wolfwalkers’—people blessed by Saint Patrick with the power to leave their bodies at night and become wolves during their sleep (Irish werewolves, essentially). The story follows an English girl, Robyn Goodfellowe (Honor Kneafsey), who moves to Ireland with her father Bill (Sean Bean), to help carry out Cromwell’s plan to kill the wolves.

Like his previous film, Song of the Sea (2014), co-director Tomm Moore says this new film is based upon a childhood story common amongst those living in Kilkenny. And like his previous films (including 2009’s The Secret of Kells), it looks to be a visual feast, with a mixture of dynamic camera styles, pre-viz work and hand-drawn animation for moments like its ‘wolf-vision’. Moore draws the ideological divide between the English and the Irish into every scratch of pencil, the occupied cities comprised of rigid lines and angular designs, while the forest and its inhabitants are more free-flowing and unkempt.

Moore cited the rough charcoal lines of Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya as one influence on the Cartoon Saloon animators’ approach; the way that Robin is drawn gradually changing along with her worldview. Cartoon Saloon is yet to make a bad film, and Wolfwalkers looks like it might be the company’s most beautiful myth yet.

Stay tuned to The Letterboxd Show for an interview with Tomm Moore.

Over The Moon Directed by Glen Keane / Due on Netflix, late 2020

The feature directorial debut of animation legend Glen Keane, early glimpses of Over The Moon look utterly bonkers. A long-time character animator for Disney, having worked on almost all of the studio’s animation output since Pete’s Dragon in 1977, Keane looks to be bringing his vast array of talents to his first feature film. The trailer alone shows off a vast blend of styles, from the 3DCG (three-dimensional computer graphics) and more realistic lighting that we’ve come to expect from Disney animation, as well as the more textured, hand-drawn work the director cut his teeth on.

The story itself sounds wild, though it starts out simple enough: Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) is enraptured by her parents’ stories of a goddess living on the moon. After her mother passes away, Fei Fei begins to believe the story is true, and decides to build a rocket to get there. There’s also a hint of something living there. Whatever the answer is, I’m curious to see it, and with a star-studded cast that includes the likes of John Cho and Sandra Oh, how could I turn it down?

Lupin III: The First Directed by Takashi Yamazaki / Released in select territories; wider release due late 2020

Takashi Yamazaki’s Lupin III: The First, the first 3DCG-animated Lupin III feature film, looks rather incredible. It’s the latest in a vast, 50-year history of anime based on the manga from the late Kazuhiko Katō (known by the pen name Monkey Punch). Despite that long history, the Lupin III franchise has always managed to resist being made obsolete; part of its ongoing appeal is its ability to continuously adapt to new contexts and styles while retaining its simple charms, and The First is no different.

The film announces itself in the same way as ever, the iconic ‘Lupin III’ theme blaring over a flashy title sequence that builds off familiar iconography, as well as moments from the franchise’s history. It revels in the style of old-school caper the show continues to embrace, taking delight in the exploits of a modern-day gentleman thief who announces his robberies with calling cards.

Even with the new and unfamiliar animation style, Lupin III: The First feels like a classic Lupin III tale, taking the story back to the 1960s (the decade during which the character was created), and even putting its main character back in his classic red suit. Each character design translates surprisingly well to this mode of animation—Lupin’s gangly frame, as well as the unique appearances of his compatriots Goemon, Fujiko, Zenigata and Jigen (who looks bizarrely attractive in this—although, to be fair, “everyone in this movie is f—king sexy” according to Letterboxd member London. Accurate).

Yamazaki does well to avoid the often sterile feeling of 3DCG animation by having these characters all move like the cartoons they’re based on (for starters, a long-running visual gag of Lupin leaping straight out of his clothes). It might take some adjustment (which for me, only really lasted up to the opening credits) before it becomes fully dazzling. Lupin III: The First might be the most exciting action caper of 2020, in any medium.

The Legend of Hei Directed by Mtjj / Released in China late 2019; international release TBA

Rivalling Lupin III: The First for most flamboyant animation on show at Annecy was The Legend of Hei, a feature-length prequel to the Flash web cartoon The Legend of Luo Xiaohei by Chinese artist Mtjj (real name Zhang Ping).

The series tells the story of the spirit Luo Xiaohei, who takes the appearance of a small black cat before being adopted by a young girl. The film’s story focuses more squarely on the cat, Xiaohei, who transforms into a man and goes on to live in the forest, his carefree existence soon interrupted by the discovery that humans are beginning to encroach on that territory as their cities expand, and technological progress puts the two worlds increasingly at odds.

As the film explores more of Xiaohei’s origins, the thick, clean line-work and cute art style disguises a much grander, epic conflict at play, realized in some wildly animated fight scenes. (“Starts off small and adorable, then expands into an epic conflict on an Akira scale,” writes Tasha Robinson.) The 2D-animated film allegedly took five years to produce, Mtjj saying in an interview that the complete film, at 100 minutes, required more than 70,000 drawings—or around twelve per second.

With its gentle score and clash of the spiritual world with the modern, the environmentally conscious work of Studio Ghibli comes to mind, as does the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender (perhaps the most popular consideration of East Asian spirituality in the West, especially with its resurgence of popularity thanks to Netflix). The Legend of Hei enjoyed an extremely lucrative run in China in late 2019 thanks to the original cartoon’s sizeable fanbase at home. No news yet on who will pick the film up in the West.

ON-GAKU: Our Sound Directed by Kenji Iwaisawa / Expected to release late 2020

Rotoscoped by hand over a period of seven years, the independently produced anime ON-GAKU: Our Sound has a rather appropriate match of creator and subject: a film about amateur musicians made by amateur animators.

Director Kenji Iwaisawa adapted the film from Hiroyuki Ohashi’s cult manga, and there’s a charm to the rudimentary style of its art, the plain faces of its characters resembling the designs of something like ONE’s Mob Psycho 100, while also matching that show’s deadpan, oddball sense of humor. The laid-back voice acting only adds to that effect, as main character Kenji and his cohort’s obvious excitement flattened into a consistently amusing monotone.

It’s not quite a classic tale of underdog artistry, as the group never really gets better, but the film embraces the primordial noise that emerges whenever they pick up an instrument. Iwaisawa takes the characters seriously, showing their raucous and unconventional performances with complete sincerity. “Loved the deadpan humor and appreciated the message about how art can act as an impetus for positive change in our lives,” writes Dan.

Passion, companionship and collaboration is what’s most important to Our Sound. It’s a deeply weird film, but one filled with great ambition and visual wonder, increasing in boldness as it goes. The different styles of coloring and expression that emerge beyond its initial palettes are radical enough to catch anyone off guard.

Connected Directed by Michael Rianda / Releasing in most territories in October 2020 (October 23 in the US)

Connected is the next step for Sony Animation as it moves in an exciting new direction (the studio recently stated that it would be green-lighting more animation aimed at adults). Produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, off the back of their immensely popular film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, Connected is imbued with the same kind of idiosyncrasy and innovation that made Spider-Verse a mega-hit.

From first-time feature director Michael Rianda, best known for his work on TV’s Gravity Falls, Connected is a family-road-trip-AI-apocalypse movie, based on the bizarre chemistry of Rianda’s own family. Formerly known as The Mitchells vs The Machines, the film looks at the push and pull between technology and human relationships, and how different generations respond to the ongoing changes in how we interact online and personally.

While this isn’t animated “on twos” (where each frame of character animation holds for two frames of background movement) as Spider-Verse often was, Connected also attempts to maintain a ‘drawn’ quality in its art. Characters move fluidly, but with clear outlines drawn from simple shapes. There’s also a strong contrast between the lived-in detail of human habitats versus the stark minimalism of the domain of the robots.

Thankfully the clips from the film don’t look nearly as finger-wavy and luddite as the trailers might suggest. (They appear to take the Boomer point of view that technology unequivocally ruins everything, but we know it’s more complicated than “screens bad”). In any case, it looks like the beginning of an interesting run for Sony Animation, and I’m keen to see how it turns out.

The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet des Dieux) Directed by Patrick Imbert / Due to release 2021

Le Sommet des Dieux distinguishes itself in this list by being the one most firmly grounded in reality, but it’s by no means less wondrous. Based on Jirô Taniguchi’s five-volume manga Le Sommet des Dieux—itself based on the 1998 novel by Baku Yumemakura—the story starts with the question of whether George Mallory died going up or coming down the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. 70 years later, Fukamachi, a young Japanese reporter, stumbles across a camera potentially belonging to Mallory, and embarks on an adventure of his own with his friend Hasu Joji.

In close collaboration with the mangaka Taniguchi-san, who passed away during development, director Patrick Imbert seeks to replicate his art style, which was more aligned with that of European comics than traditional manga, with less exaggerated and highly detailed line-work. The team also looked outward from Taniguchi-san’s art, to the character designs of works such as Hiroyuki Okiura’s Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, as well as his 2011 film A Letter To Momo, and the films of the late, great Satoshi Kon.

From what I saw at Annecy, there’s something of a mix between what Imbert calls the “documented detail” of Taniguchi-san’s work and simpler design for the larger urban spaces. To accomplish this, the studio draws its traditional 2D using modern techniques, such as “movie-style” framing—locations and interiors created in 3D software and then overpainted for detail, identity and authenticity.

The Summit of the Gods also seeks to recapture the detailed and subtle realism of Yumemakura-san’s depiction of George Mallory, with low-key voice performances conducted in shared sessions; recording movements and hiring a boom operator to make the sound more akin to live action, perhaps even more natural. Though production has already been long, the studio had thankfully pre-empted the long delays of Covid-19, so let’s hope we get to see the film with our own eyes, soon.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds Directed by Benoît Chieux / Scheduled for 2022

An original fable from animation director Benoît Chieux, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds is still very much in the midst of production, with an expected release in 2022. It looks captivating; a surreal tale set in an imaginary kingdom with delicate and clearly defined artwork, about a being named Sirocco, a despised figure with the power to control the wind, who is forced into solitude by the denizens of this world.

The dream kingdom resembles a Spirited Away-esque land, with its own hierarchy and bizarre set of rules, mundanity mixed in with visual wonder. Flying crocodiles, living houses and strange humanoids populate it, and the main characters, a pair of girls named Carmen and Juliette, turn into cats themselves. All are drawn with wavy lines, soft colours and fluid movement, the surreal presented with an inviting rather than foreboding air.

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 Directed by Hideaki Anno and others / 2020 release delayed; keep an eye on the official Twitter account for a new date

Hideaki Anno is set to bring his earth-shaking Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise to a close, again, with the fourth instalment of his ‘Rebuild’ series of films, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0. Delayed for almost a decade now (the previous instalment came out in 2012!), and delayed again by Covid-19, the film looks to close out a grand rewriting of the original series that shot Anno-san and former studio Gainax to fame—“Bye Bye, All of Evangelion” the tagline reads. But we’re gonna have to wait a while longer to bid this final farewell.

Made with co-director Kazuya Tsurumaki (who has served as director with Anno-san since the original series), the first ‘Rebuild’ film, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, seemed to be a fairly conventional remake, updating the visuals and score with more modern techniques. The story starts the same: the isolated, depressed and self-loathing teenager Shinji Ikari is forced by his absentee father to help fight the mysterious, giant, alien ‘Angels’ by getting in an equally mysterious big robot called an Evangelion (“Eva” for short). He finds no self-fulfilment in this, and if anything, the close contact with other people only seems to push him further into himself. So far, so familiar.

However, the second film, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, veered completely off the rails in the best way possible, destroying audience preconceptions. The line between sequel and remake was fascinatingly blurred, and only continued to get weirder with Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, as the story landed in completely unfamiliar territory, altering its characters beyond recognition while adding entirely new characters in the process. It’s now almost impossible to predict what 3.0 + 1.0 will be. The only footage available so far was a wild ten-minute clip in which the Eiffel Tower is wielded as a weapon by an Eva. We were this close.

Ayumu Watanabe’s ‘Children of the Sea’ (2019).

There are almost too many gifts, even just from Annecy alone, to describe at length. A couple more worth mentioning: Anja Daiman’s musical comedy The Island looks fascinating for its reclamation of the colonialist story of Robinson Crusoe; and Yuta Murano’s first anime feature Our Seven-Day War promises plenty of plot twists amidst the actions of rebellious youth. A range of beguiling short films were also on display—a selection helpfully compiled here by Letterboxd member Iknow.

Outside of Annecy, other films are finally arriving, virtually or otherwise—such as Gints Zilbalodis’s peculiar and quiet Away, and Ayumu Watanabe’s beautiful and surreal Children of the Sea (with music from none other than Joe Hisaishi!). Though not all animation is comfort food by default—it is simply a medium, after all—it’s reassuring knowing that animated films are able to continue, in some form, through the pandemic.

Related content

Maxine the Movie Person’s excellent animation list

The 100 Highest Rated Animated Films of the 2010s according to our members

Revchu’s lists of the Top 100 Japanese Animated Films on Letterboxd, and the Top 100 Best-Rated Japanese Animated Films from the Anime News Network

Kambole’s selections in a Letterboxd list

Follow Kambole on Letterboxd

[fyexo]

191011 SuperM On How Their All-Star Lineup’s Synergy Can Represent ‘The Next Step Of K-Pop’

There is a type of privilege afforded when an artist has reached a certain level of superstardom. Collectively, SuperM has 43 years of experience in the industry while its members appear on six albums to enter the Billboard 200 chart, have performed in sold-out arenas in multiple continents, walked in international Fashion Weeks, snagged roles in highly rated television shows and movies, model as the faces of global brands, and are key parts of some of the Internet’s buzziest boy bands. But as a newly created supergroup of Korean-pop performers, dubbed "the Avengers of K-pop" at their official unveiling this summer, they come to America as, technically speaking, a new group. A boy band with the passionate fandoms they've created in their careers to hopefully fuel a new, unexplored venture targeted at the world's largest music industry.

What that means is hitting the ground running for their debut, being open to opportunities they'd otherwise pass on, and, to an extent, starting over. Even with their established fanbases, a supergroup doesn’t necessarily mean guaranteed or automatic success. A less extreme example would be American quintet Why Don’t We who came together as five young singers with large online followings of his own, with the venture eventually paying off in a Top 10 album and sizable Top 40 radio hits with the boy band going strong today. But in the seven superstars coming together in Taemin of SHINee, Baekhyun and Kai of EXO, Taeyong and Mark of NCT, plus Ten and Lucas of the Chinese-pop band WayV at a time when K-pop is hotter than ever in America, there’s a higher pressure for quick dividends from debut.

Cue Capitol Music Group, the current label home to Katy Perry, Niall Horan and Sam Smith, who teamed up with SuperM’s K-pop powerhouse label SM Entertainment, to make sure this superstar charge has all the power and running impact it can in America. The international hype and accomplishments of this septet warrants a full-fledged backing, but as American audiences tend to crave authenticity and deeper connection from their artists, it begs the question if these seven can be successfully culled together.

At the October 1 press conference in Seoul where the members of SuperM are set to make their first public appearance together, there is a hotel ballroom full of reporters and photographers eager to see the K-pop magic in person—and perhaps also looking for clues on whether this collective works. Backstage before meeting the local press, the seven stars band together with an unexpected playful energy. The most experienced member, Taemin, seems to be the group’s perky epicenter as SuperM’s laughs and smiles begin with him and radiate outward—sometimes delaying interview questions and distracting his other members. With a kindhearted hyung (an honorific term in Korean translating to “older brother” used by Korean males, and here the younger members of SuperM, to address an older male friend), there’s an undeniable camaraderie present. There isn’t a diva or de-facto speaker, all seven appear to work and present themselves as equals.

Space is tight with two large tables for the band and their staff to hang out before meeting the press—and then immediately head to the airport for their flight to America once the conference ends—but there’s still an intimacy. Taemin and Ten pat each other’s backs when sharing compliments about one another, Kai and Mark smirk at each other like they have years of inside jokes together, while the singer newest to the industry, Lucas, looks around at his teammates like true older brothers with a mix of earnest admiration and curiosity at how they’re answering this American reporter.

The feel-good combination of their chemistry is important as the guys’ U.S. schedule saw them doing everything from high-profile appearances on Ellen and holding their own concert on a popular street in Hollywood, while also sitting alongside fans at a press conference and holding a four-hour album signing session at a local Barnes & Noble. Getting such intimate, face-to-face time with K-pop artists is rare—especially the more successful one gets—with the potential success of SuperM indicative of what other strategies international acts could utilize in America for the future. But, crucially, the biggest takeaway from their schedule may just be that this can only work with a team that has a palpable synergy among them like SuperM shows.

Forbes talked with SuperM ahead of the release of their self-titled debut EP, which looks to make a splash on the charts with what could be a Top 10 debut on the Billboard 200, where Taemin, Baekhyun, Kai, Taeyong, Mark, Ten and Lucas shared insight into the collective respect and synergy that radiates between them.

Jeff Benjamin: We’ve heard a lot leading up to SuperM as “the Avengers of K-pop.” In your own words, what is something you feel is unexpected about this group that goes beyond what people know about you already?

Mark: I feel like the combination itself is something people have never expected or thought they would ever see. I think the whole team itself, the assembly of us, is the next step of K-pop. We always thought of that as we prepared. We wanted to take that future step, pave ways for whatever’s yet to come to K-pop. If you come to our showcases, or whatever plans we have ahead of us, you can see the synergy—that itself is unexpected. I think the fans could see something that they never thought they needed before. That feeling of when you see it and realize this is something you could have always vibed to—I feel like that’s part of our job and we’re here to show that wherever we are.

Jeff Benjamin: Take us through the album, what are some of your favorite tracks?

Mark: I, honestly, personally like “2 Fast” the most. I was really honored to be on the song. But not only that, when I heard the demo itself, I really liked the melody, the hook, the feeling of the song.

Kai: So, “Jopping” is a really strong song for a single, but “No Manners” is very easy-listening, very memorable and really gets you moving so that’s why I like that one. I feel like when I heard that one I could see the performance.

Taemin: I like “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I like it because it has a really oriental feeling to it, an “oriental taste,” it has an essence of Asia. It may be a very calm song, but at the same time I feel like there’s a real performance to it and I can see the performance in it. When you’re listening in your earphones, it may not sound like that, but when you’re watching onstage it’s a different story. K-pop started in Asia and if a song like this is performed in Europe, the States or anywhere in the world, it still has that authenticity.

Ten: Mine would be “Super Car” and “No Manners.” Just like Kai-hyung said earlier, “No Manners” is very groovy and easy to listen to, and “Super Car” is very trendy and the beat is very strong. I feel like we can hype the audience up a bit more with a song like that. “Super Car” and “No Manners” are more my style.

Taeyong: I choose “Jopping,” it’s jumping and popping, right, but the reason why I pick it is because the performance itself is a never-before-seen performance in K-pop, in my opinion. It’s going to stand out.

Jeff Benjamin: As you look around at your fellow members in this supergroup, can you share what you feel is his specific superpower?

Taemin on Baekhyun: He’s a very, very special vocalist. His vocal is so unique that it has the ability to make a synergy between the members all on its own. We have dance songs and ballad songs, but Baekhyun’s voice plays a very important role. That’s a really important speciality of Baekhyun.

Taeyong on Lucas: He’s the maknae [Korean for the youngest] of our group in terms of when he debuted, so he has more energy so those kind of elements bring more fun to the experience.

Ten on Taemin: I always watch my Taemin-hyung [perform], his charm is his movement, but his eye contact is very strong, it’s striking, it sucks you in.

Lucas on Ten: Ten, well, he himself is a charm. [Group laughs] He’s very special in that even in the way he thinks is very charming.

Baekhyun on Kai: The height, the looks, and his dance skills. Enough said.

Kai on Mark: Me being two years younger than Baekhyun is almost a super power in and of itself. [Laughs] But seriously, there are so many things I could say about Mark and if I go on too long we’d never leave. I love his curly hair. He’s very handsome, he’s cute, he’s good at rapping, I almost want to put him on my lap because he’s so cute.

Mark on Taeyong: I see him like every day because he’s on my team, but even though I see him every day, his looks surprise me every time. He looks mad frickin’ good. I think the strongest thing is that he holds a very strong persona and that shows in the performance, in reality as well, and that balances us as a team. He holds a very vital role in every stage of SuperM.

source: Jeff Benjamin @ Forbes

[fayewonglibrary]

1994-2020: Faye Wong Advertisements (2020)

On August 19th, Faye Wong was officially announced as the newest global spokesperson for the underwear brand NEIWAI, which shocked the industry.

What’s interesting is that underwear advertisements are usually extremely sexy and show a lot of skin. But because it’s the heavenly queen, it became a high-class style of sexy. The heavenly queen’s image on the posters is quite covered up and her poses are elegant and comfortable as usual. It is rumored that Faye Wong's endorsement fee is sky high.

The former brand models Maizi and Du Juan gave the impression of coolness. Faye Wong is definitely the master of this temperament to the extreme.

The press release by NEIWAI said that they aim to "explore the freedom of body and mind in a more pioneering, profound and international way." Indeed, the endorsement of the heavenly queen suddenly added a touch of international style and high-class to this domestic brand that was founded on Taobao not long ago. It gives that feeling no matter what the cost is.

You must know that Faye Wong has always been very picky about advertising. Before NEIWAI, she accepted an offer to be the global spokesperson for Helena Rubenstein in 2019.  Last December 7th, L'Oréal Group's top luxury beauty brand Helena Rubenstein announced that Faye Wong became the first global spokesperson for its brand.

I still remember the queen attended the promotional event in all white and wrapped her head in a golden scarf. Her skin looked smooth and firm. The most impressive thing was that her facial features were more beautiful than even when she was young. It was surprising. After all, the queen is over 50 years old.

I could see that she was in a very happy mood, chatting and laughing with the host on stage. She described this cooperation as proof that it was love at first sight.  The flawless firm skin of the heavenly queen can help a beauty counter to sell thousands of bottles of expensive product.

For so many years, Faye Wong was sought after by advertisers for her image as a high-end, avant-garde, free spirited woman of a new generation. Her manager once proudly said that their main job was rejecting offers. Faye Wong’s advertisements are notoriously sparse and also notoriously expensive.

Today, let’s take a look at the advertisements by the Heavenly Queen since her endorsement debut from 1994 to the present day. It can be seen that her strategy is "less is more". The big brands she has cooperated with, of course, pay well. Ease is another important criteria for her to choose a job.

The advertisements that Faye Wong has received over the years reveal the changes in the status and mood of the queen. Of course, we can also see the changing of the times from her advertisements. Popular brands that are still ongoing, but some brands have completely ceased to exist. The changes and the rise and fall of a brand is really interesting.

1994-1997

Avant-garde idol, trend setter for the youth.

In 1994, Faye Wong released her iconic hit "Sky" making her the free spirited idol of the young generation. That year she received an advertisement for Just Gold.

At that time, the Hong Kong-based gold jewelry company was preparing to enter the Taiwan market. In order to abandon the old and outdated feel of the past style, this brand, hoping to find young customers, wisely found a budding singer who was also ready to enter the Taiwanese market. Back then she was called Wong Jing Man.

In the advertisement, Faye Wong read the narration in her beautiful languid voice. The whole concept seemed to be very trendy and forward-thinking, making women suddenly realize they do not need to wait for men to buy them gifts and gold jewelry. They can own it on their own initiative. It was the new idea of feminism that women rely on their financial strength to satisfy their inner desires.

Just Woman, Just Gold; Real Woman, Real Gold. Faye Wong's life attitude of being courageous to live her own life fits the brand's pursuit of "real woman" characteristics. The following year, the brand also specially designed the "Fei collection" with the theme of "true", "beauty" and "life".

Coincidentally, the Virgin Atlantic advertisement of the same year also took a fancy to Faye Wong's distinctive personality.

At that time, Faye Wong's performance in the movie "Chunking Express" left a deep impression on people, and in the advertisement, she also had a similar short haircut, various styles, and she even had airplane props. She swayed her body and narrated in Cantonese.  This advertisement made the top ten of Asia TV in 1995 and won the most popular TV commercial female star award.

In the ad for Virgin Atlantic's direct flight from Hong Kong to London, she used her hearty laughter to inspire people to take off whenever they pleased.

Faye Wong became a big hit in 1996 and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. She became the second Chinese artist and the first Chinese singer to appear on the cover. She was called one of "The Divas of Pop".

Faye Wong willingly lived in a Beijing hutong for love, married Dou Wei, and gave birth to her daughter Dou Jingtong in January of the following year.  The old photos of the two riding horses in Yesanpo bared witness to years of love.

Marriage and childbirth did not affect Faye Wong’s status. In October 1997, Motorola hired Wong Kar-wai to direct and spent 60 million on a large production to shoot her StarTAC (Palm Treasure Series) commercial. Anyone who has experienced that era knows that Motorola had a monopoly on the mobile phone market.

But with the advent of smartphones, after 2013, Motorola long lost its momentum. Motorola’s headquarters in Beijing has been downsized repeatedly. The era of holding a Motorola in one hand is gone forever.

Although shooting only lasted for 5 days, it was a huge collaboration:  big name stars, director Wong Kar Wai, cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and designer William Chang. It was a movie level production. And the actor was Asano Tadanobu who was popular in Japan at that time. Reportedly, the reason for seeking him back then was because his hair was messy enough to match with Faye Wong.

The whole commercial lasted less than 30 seconds, but it was full of Wong Kar-wai's individualism and uniqueness. It is considered the most unusual commercial advertisement. And Faye Wong, whose pay was as high as six figures per hour, had only two lines:  "Moshi Moshi".

Photographer Wing Shya also shot a set of print advertisements. Ah Fei as seen through the lens was smart and playful. With brilliant colors, it is entirely worthy of blockbuster art.

1999—2003

The fast-moving market adores the unconventional idol

In 1999, Faye Wong divorced the talented Dou Wei, which caused a commotion in the entertainment industry.

Pepsi spent 8 million Hong Kong dollars to invite Faye Wong, making her the first Asian female singer to endorse Pepsi. You must know that Pepsi’s strategy for so many years was aimed at the youth market. The stars they have invited over the years were the most popular among young people.

At that time, the commercial "Wish" depicted Ah Fei returning to an elementary school and seeing a little girl who resembled herself when she was a child. She recalled the scenes from when she was a child, expressing the theme: as long as you work hard, your wish can come true. The commercial song "Spectacular" was co-written by Faye Wong and Zhang Yadong, and included on the album "Only Love Strangers".

The following year's "Starry Sky Infinite" was a collaboration with Aaron Kwok. One was the god of water and the other was the god of ice. In the hot summer, the collision of ice and water brought coolness and pleasure.

Everyone remembers this poster. The heavenly king and queen who were still youth idols back then sang the commercial song "Starry Sky Infinite" together.

Faye’s styling in the ad now seems very ahead of its time. It was bold and creative. Whether it was the mini skirt with fishnet stockings or exaggerated color eye shadows, it is fashionable and cool at any time.

Also at that time, the theme song "Eyes On Me" of the classic game "Final Fantasy VIII" became popular in Japan. The song made the top ten of Japan's Oricon charts and Faye Wong also became a Japanese J-Phone mobile phone spokesperson.

As we all know, Japanese brands prefer their own artists, so Faye Wong's ability to break through and occupy a space is enough to prove her strength.

The six commercials that J-Phone shot for her at that time were all very advanced and full of new ideas.

The following year, she starred in the Japanese TV series "Usokoi" on Fuji TV. She worked with Takaichi Nakai and became the first Chinese artist to star in a Japanese drama as the main heroine.  Unfortunately, the ratings were lower than expected.

At the beginning of 2000, Faye Wong became the spokesperson for Head & Shoulders and it was rumored that the remuneration at that time was 32 million Taiwan dollars (about 8 million Hong Kong dollars).

The commercial contained 6 cool styles. The production cost was as high as 15 million. The jingle was her newly created song "Chanel", which was intoxicating and psychedelic.

What’s interesting is that she cut her hair super short when she attended the press conference. When asked by reporters whether this style would conflict with being the spokesperson, she replied in a way that is still so cool, "Don't you need to wash short hair?"

If the advertisements for the above high demand products were expected, Faye Wong's acceptance of the following brand is more interesting now.

In 2003, Baleno spent 5 million a year to invite Faye Wong to become a spokesperson. Baleno was first known as a Hong Kong brand. In 1996, it was sold to Guangzhou Deyongjia Group and then regarded as a mainland brand.

But it was willing to spend money to invite the most popular celebrities to endorse. At its peak, it had 4,000 stores in the Mainland.  Andy Lau and Faye Wong were invited to be spokespersons.

The phrase "brand, Baleno" caused everyone to laugh.

Ah Fei shot the posters and could manage all kinds of exaggerated makeup as always. At that time, Li Jianhui once wrote about the influence of Faye Wong on Baleno - hiring her was an upgrade for the entire brand.

The following year Faye Wong  became the spokesperson of Louis Vuitton in the Asia-Pacific region. A series of print advertisements shot that year now looks very advanced. She is lying sexily and lazily on a white sofa, and her poses exude a different charm with each different set of clothes. The Heavenly Queen had such magical powers and her cool expression enchanted people.

2004—2005

Getting older and moving towards the high-end market

Which brand was Faye Wong most responsible for helping to enter China? There is no doubt that it is Celine. It is Faye Wong who brought this French brand into the hearts of every Chinese woman who loves fashion.

In October 2004, at the age of 35, Faye Wong attended Celine's 2005 Spring/Summer Fashion Show in Paris as a close friend of the brand.

The queen’s photoshoot on the streets of Paris expressed her attitude towards life. She exuded self-confidence and self-reliance even when she was just standing.

In early 2005, Faye Wong appeared on the cover of the Hong Kong edition of "HARPERS BAZAAR" wearing Celine.

The magazine’s fashion spread was a blockbuster for Celine - just by simply sitting at a dining table, revealing her slender legs. The styles were both casual and fashionable. This photoshoot perfectly fits Celine's brand aesthetic with Faye Wong's own personality:  cool and sassy.

She also wore Celine's 2005 spring and summer collection and participated in the opening ceremony of the new store in Hong Kong.

For the next ten years, Faye Wong’s favorite was simply only Celine. She took brand promotional photos. She went to fashion week to participate in brand events.  She was photographed in major magazine editorials. Even in her private birthday celebration, she wore none other than Celine.

Celine's fashion style fits her own personality. She appreciates the brand's neutral, functional, and concise design concept, and its pursuit for a free and comfortable attitude of living.

Just as she always dared to love and hate, in the Spring of 2005, it was reported that she and Li Yapeng were about to marry.

It was also at that time that she had her first skin care product endorsement, Jovell. At the time, it was reported that Jovell paid tens of millions to invite her to become a spokesperson in Asia.

The Heavenly Queen was over thirty and her perfectly maintained face couldn’t not be used as a skincare platform.

This commercial was based on her daily work environment, with pure English narration. In April, she also attended the brand's launch event in Hong Kong. She maintained an awkward and polite smile, but she did not accept interviews during the whole process.

The endorsement was not satisfactory. Jovell, a brand used by so-called Hollywood stars, applied for liquidation after the defendant defaulted on a loan at the end of 2005. They were desperate to invite the queen to help out. They wanted to take advantage of this momentum to come back to life, but unfortunately could not in the end. Because of the company’s liquidation, there was no money for payment. Faye Wong's management company issued a lawyer's letter to claim 4 million Hong Kong dollars in remuneration, and it went to the High Court.

2005-2011

Coming back is not easy At the end of May 2005, Faye Wong’s manager, Katie Chan, confirmed to the media that the Queen had started an "indefinite rest".

On July 28th of the same year, Faye Wong and Li Yapeng married in a low-key banquet in Beijing. The wedding photos taken at Tianshan were only revealed many years later in a Smile Angel Foundation promotional video.

Faye Wong retired for four full years because of her marriage and newborn daughter, during which she only sang theme songs for a few movies. There was always news that she was going to make a comeback, but in the end it turned out to be nothing.

Until 2009, on the 20th anniversary of Faye Wong's debut, news confirmed that she was about to come back to endorse a shampoo brand. The sky-high price discussed was higher than Jackie Chan. It was also reported that it was because of Li Yapeng's failed businesses that the Queen had to return to make money.

The rich and powerful Bawang Group gave enough money and not much additional conditions. The two sides hit it off quickly, which also kicked off the first wave of Faye Wong's successful comeback. In 2010, the queen made a triumphant comeback. At the beginning of the year, she returned to the Spring Festival Gala stage after 12 years and sang "Legend".  At the end of the year, she held 10 sold out concerts.

She became the brand ambassador for the newly launched Chasing series shampoo under Bawang. Shooting shampoo ads was already familiar to the heavenly queen. 

Although the brand positioned itself as mid-to-high end, the commercials were not very flattering. Heavenly Queen wore a cheongsam with a huge lotus leaf hem and neckline, walked slowly like a scallop princess. The whole advertisement fell flat.

It can be said that this was a low period for the heavenly queen. Whether or not it was satisfactory, it was a means to make money. But I have to say that Faye Wong's role in the brand was still very obvious. The products turned out to be famous all over the country.

Although money is earned, the risk of advertisements is also high. First, in 2010, a Hong Kong weekly magazine slandered Bawang shampoo for containing carcinogens and the herbal line of shampoo endorsed by Faye Wong was also not spared from testing. The star’s credibility was questioned for a while.

It took Bawang six full years to sue for defamation. In the end, they won the lawsuit, but only received a compensation of 3 million. However, the accumulated losses caused by the damage to its reputation over the years reached 1.7 billion.

Then at the end of 2014, it was reported that the intermediary claimed the fee from Faye Wong. When the case came to an end, the intermediary who originally claimed 3.35 million received only 600,000 compensation. Although the queen was cautious, she was sometimes not 100% insured. It was inevitable that there would be disputes. 

2012-2020

Safe and easy money is the priority In 2012, she endorsed a dairy brand with sky-high prices.  Yili Jindian Organic Milk, which focuses on high-end dairy products, coincides with Faye Wong’s status as a queen. The brand used her super popularity and influence to broaden its appeal and greatly increase sales.

Faye Wong’s commercials could be seen everywhere on major TV stations and variety shows.  The contents of these advertisements contained similar features of natural innocence and quality.

The beautiful grassland featured in the commercial is located in the Shin Kong Chao Feng Ranch and Resort in Hualien, Taiwan. It was also called "Faye Wong Prairie" after the commercial became popular.

She has been cooperating with Jindian for nearly ten years and each year's commercials are considered by fans as a new opportunity to see their idol again. This year's newest commercial was no longer limited to the grassland, but used light and shadow effects and it was just perfect.

In recent years, Faye Wong was really low-key.

The protection and mystery of her private life has deepened the public's desire and imagination of her, so that every public appearance of hers causes an uproar and there are always speculations about how big a bargaining chip is used to invite her to appear.

She has also been questioned a few times about making money. For example, the biggest public backlash came from her Fantasy Music concert at the end of 2016, which caused controversy because of the high ticket prices.

This was her return to the stage after her 2012 tour ended. The cheapest ticket was as high as 1800 and the most expensive ticket was 7800. This triggered an "anti” storm and she was accused of marketing and money-making.  Although the organizer clarified afterwards that the production cost could not be reduced because of technical requirements such as global live streaming, the public did not buy it.

After 18 years, she participated in her first variety show, Hunan Satellite TV's "Phantacity", where she was rumored to have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars. The news at the time stated that "the investment of the program is more than 300 million, of which 150 million is used to invite a certain heavenly queen." Of course, they also say that the top price of super first-line talent like Faye Wong is worth it.

When the MC He Jiong questioned her on the show, "Why did you want to come here?", she still answered so bluntly, "Because it’s easy."

It really was easy. Just sitting and talking can make you money.

This was a highly anticipated show that invited a large number of stars. But since the post-production process is too boring and many technical highlights couldn’t be shown on the TV screen, the freshness of the first two episodes faded and the following episodes were weak. Even Faye Wong could not save the ratings from declining. However, her performance in the last episode fulfilled fans' dreams.

Every time someone asks: is Faye Wong short of money?

Nonsense! Who is not short of money? The heavenly queen is human. She also needs to make money to pay for living expenses, including children's tuition and so on. Children’s education, the monetary cost of maintaining her own high standard of living (nanny, maintenance, self-care, etc.), and preparations for retirement, these all cost money.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that the advertisements taken by the Heavenly Queen ten or more years ago were lively, interesting and creative. But after her comeback in 2009, they have been more grounded in a sense of reality. The long-term ten-year contract like Jindian Organic Milk is more worry-free and comfortable.

There is no longer a need to tailor songs for advertisements. You can easily make money by showing your face and narrating. Why not do it? It’s safe, worry-free, and comfortable. These are the benefits of advertising.

Of course, some people ask, why does only Faye Wong have such an influence in the advertising industry? It seems that you can pay anyone to stand there. Why don’t her contemporaries have such influence?

This only further proves that Faye Wong's body of work is excellent. She had continuous creativity and was always fresh. As the goddess of the music industry, she has been influential several times.  Faye Wong is the only super queen recognized by audiences on both sides of the strait. By gaining a big market, it is the simplest answer to this question.

Secondly, Faye Wong has an unparalleled personality. Her charm lead her to become an era’s rising female power and a new generation female legend. In layman's terms, she has lived the life that everyone wants, which is why she can bless the brand.

Her personality and charm is her brand premium. Her international style and her unconventional life are also her brand premium. This is why TV stations and merchants are willing to spend sky-high prices to invite her, because they can use their own efforts to upgrade the brand's profile. 

As for making money, Faye Wong is also a human being, not a god.  Like you and me, she has to work in life.

As for the so-called lowering herself to common mortals, as she herself once said, "I am not as perfect as you think and I admit that sometimes I can't tell the true from the false."  And sometimes mistakes are inevitable.

For 26 years, Faye Wong chose her advertisements. When watching these advertisements, we clearly saw time fly past us at a fast speed. The light and shadows were dazzling, and I sighed.

What can we say? The era has chosen Faye Wong and Faye Wong has accompanied us in every era.

She can do whatever she wants, since she has already given us beautiful moments in music.

------------------------------------------------------------------  

SOURCE: NETEASE // TRANSLATION BY: FAYE WONG FUZAO

[mulanxiaojie]

We were all thinking it, and finally someone had to ask: Why on earth would Disney cut Mushu? “Well, we made it 10 minutes in,” joked Mulan producer Jason Reed.

In case you missed the trailer, the headlines, and the tweets — so many tweets — the live-action Mulan will cut Mushu, leaving it bereft of the comedic energy from a dragon sidekick. The world has changed since 1998, and Disney has made a serious, more violent Mulan that’s truer to the Chinese folklore.

“Obviously Mushu is a beloved character, and one of the most memorable elements of the animated film,” Reed explained to a group of journalists huddled inside a tent on Mulan’s mountainous New Zealand set in October 2018.

“It turns out that the traditional, Chinese audience did not particularly think that that was the best interpretation of the dragon in their culture. The dragon is a sign of respect and it's a sign of strength and power, and that using it as a silly sidekick didn't play very well with a traditional Chinese audience.”

It's one of many indications that unlike with The Lion King, Disney is not going for a by-the-numbers Mulan remake.

While a classic to kids of a certain generation in the West, 1998’s Mulan flopped in China, released a year late after Disney was effectively banned for releasing the film Kundun, a film sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. On screens in Mulan’s birthplace, Hunan, the film only made $30,000 at the box office after three weeks.

You could blame the film’s late release in China, which caused some audiences to watch pirated versions months before its eventual arrival in theaters. But it's also likely that local audiences didn’t warm to the idea of Americans taking on a Chinese legend, especially one which already had multiple adaptations on film, TV, and stage.

“This is not a Chinese dragon," one Chinese moviegoer told The Baltimore Sun in 1999. "I can tell the people who designed the dragon are from America."

In that light, Disney’s resistance toward a comedic dragon sidekick in the new Mulan makes financial sense. Once chump change for Hollywood, China’s film market is set to overtake the U.S. this year. For Disney, its three biggest 2019 releases in China — Captain Marvel, The Lion King and Aladdin — accounted for more than $320 million in takings.

Despite the omission of Mushu, Reed promises the film will be funny. Just admittedly not Eddie Murphy funny.

"We have some scenes that, although they're played very real, are gonna get some very big, big laughs.”

“Take one of the greatest comedians of all time, make them a dragon, have him prance around, and give him like, two years refine the jokes — we're not gonna beat that, in terms of raw slapstick comedy,” he said.

“But we have added a couple of elements to this movie which I think really do the same thing of grounding it, bringing you into it, we have some scenes [that], although they're played very real, are gonna get some very big, big laughs.”

Other big changes are afoot as well. There aren’t any of those singalong theatrical musical numbers like “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” “Reflection,” or “A Girl Worth Fighting For”, although Reed promises there will be “songs that you recognize and remember” in the movie.

Also gone is the cathartic scene in which Mulan cuts her hair in preparation for battle, which Reed admits he gets mocked for during meetings in China. “[It’s] actually a Western anachronism,” Reed explained. Chinese male warriors wore their hair long, and to cut Mulan’s hair would make her look more of a woman.

Nor will you see Mulan’s smart-mouth grandmother, Fa, or Li Shang in the live-action film. The latter decision has been particularly controversial, given Li Shang’s status as a bisexual icon. Reed was surprised by the backlash, but the decision was made in the light of the #MeToo movement.

“I think particularly in the time of the #MeToo movement, having a commanding officer, that is also the sexual love interest, was very uncomfortable. We didn't think it was appropriate and we thought that in a lot of ways, that it was sort of justifying behavior that we're doing everything we can to get out of our industry,” Reed explained.

Instead, the character of Li Shang will be split into two characters: Commander Tung, played by Ip Man star Donnie Yen, will serve as Mulan’s surrogate father and mentor in the film, while Chen Honghui, a role filled by New Zealander Yoson An, will be an equal to Mulan in the army and her eventual love interest.

It still leaves questions about how the queer element of the relationship between Mulan and Honghui will play out, or whether it will even be present. While homosexuality was decriminalized by China in 1997, Chinese censors are infamous for cutting out LGBTQ TV and movie scenes.

Chinese moviegoers saw no reference to Freddie Mercury’s sexuality in Bohemian Rhapsody, while Call Me By Your Name was pulled from official screenings (although it soon gathered a cult following). Disney doesn’t believe censorship will be a problem for Mulan, with Reed explaining it worked “very closely” with censors and its releasing partners in China.

“We feel that we are secure in the censorship issue, that we have our permits approved and I believe that we will continue to have a good relationship with the releasing entities in our various partners in China,” Reed claimed.

While the storyline will largely remain similar, new characters are joining the fray. A powerful shapeshifting witch, portrayed by Gong Li, will feature alongside the main antagonist Bori Khan, played by Jason Scott Lee. The story will begin with Mulan as a child, and she will have a younger sister in the film, something present in other adaptations of the folklore.

“It makes it more than just her having to take care of her father and mother, who are sort of in the role of taking care of her,” Reed said. “By adding a younger sister we thought that it added sort of a broader emotional context, and added more motivation for her, particularly for the end.”

On the monitor inside our tent, actor Yifei Liu is effortless in her swordplay. It’s no surprise she’s landed the titular role; she is Mulan. Liu battled through a tough physical audition for the role, admitting to us she couldn’t walk properly after.

“I wanted to thoroughly explore this girl,” Mulan’s director Niki Caro told Empire in February 2020.

“Because I needed a warrior, and I needed a partner. So she did this grueling audition and then we sent her straight to the physical trainer to do an equally grueling physical assessment. Weights, push-ups, pull-ups, everything. She was brilliant in the dramatic part of the audition, and in the physical part she never stopped, never faulted. I knew at the end of that day that I’d found my warrior.”

Liu has plenty of experience acting in wuxia films, a genre of martial arts films in China. Besotted, Mulan's filmmakers even pushed back production five months for Liu.

“She was doing a television show and so she wouldn't be available to a certain point, and the point when she was available was terrible weather for us,” Reed said.

Liu, who exudes confidence onscreen and is praised by her co-stars for her professionalism, is more reserved in conversation. She said she doesn’t try and think too much about how Chinese audiences will perceive her as Mulan. Nor would she be drawn on a question comparing the character of Mulan in the animated and the live action version.

“I would not really compare, because I think each creation was its own form, and I really respect that,” Liu explains. “I’m also open to Mulan’s possibilities. We tried not to fix too many things.”

For Honghui actor Yoson An, who only has a handful of credits — mostly in his home country of New Zealand and in Australia — the whole international fame thing hasn’t quite set in.

“I don't think it’s hit me yet, I don't know where it's gonna go until this movie’s released, I guess. I'm still kind of rolling with things, just one day at a time,” An said.

Admitting that he would’ve been looked over if the live-action Mulan had been a musical, An said he only picked up acting in his late teens, disillusioned with his university studies.

“When I heard that Niki [Caro] was set to direct this movie back in 2014, I was like, ‘Oh, so cool. A New Zealander is set to direct Mulan,’ and I was just walking back to get my car and I was like, ‘Wouldn't it be cool if I played the love interest?’, just like a little thought in my head, and I'm thought, ‘No, that's never gonna happen.’ And then, four years later, here I am,” he said.

"It really dispels all the classic Asian stereotypes from all the other films."

The world of Mulan is inspired by the Tang dynasty, a golden age of imperial China during which it experienced flourishing trade with foreign nations and cultural advancement. In An’s eyes, Mulan could be a major moment for Asian diaspora worldwide — although Liu’s praise for police during the Hong Kong protests last year has prompted calls for a boycott of the film.

“In this film, the cast, you see people from different kinds of cultures interacting with each other and every single character has a multi-dimensional layer for them. So it really dispels all the classic Asian stereotypes from all the other films,” he explains.

“And with what Black Panther has done for its community, and I really feel that Mulan is gonna do the same for the Asian community as a whole, taking on what Crazy Rich Asians has already done for Asian community, with the momentum it created.”

Like Crazy Rich Asians, Mulan looked far and wide for Asian actors. There’s a mixture of Asian New Zealanders, Asian Australians, Asian Americans, and of course, Chinese actors. Mulan is mostly in English, to the joy of the subtitle-averse out there, and thus all actors are aiming towards a Chinese-influenced American dialect — a goal which Reed admits has been “complicated.”

It’s no problem for An, who said he’s performed Chinese accents on screen before. Reminding us how young he is, An mentions he practiced as a kid to YouTube videos of Canadian stand-up comedian Russell Peters, who went viral a decade ago for his “Be a man! Do the right thing!” bit.

“You guys know Russell Peters? Right? As a kid, I’d watch his stuff and do exactly as he did. But that's a very comical version of the accent, it’s very different to what we’re doing,” An said.

In research for its live-action reboot, Reed and the production team went back to the original ballad and the “many, many variations” which told in China since, including several modern film and television adaptations made in China — before watching the Disney animated version again, thinking how Mulan would appeal to multiple audiences.

With the coronavirus shutting down all 70,000 of the country's theaters since Jan. 24, it's unclear — and more unlikely every day — that multiplexes will reopen in time for its planned release.

"It certainly has worldwide and global appeal, but there's no denying that this is a very important film for the Chinese market," Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's a huge blow for Disney if it doesn't release in China." Disney president of production Sean Bailey told the publication he's "looking at it day by day."

Whenever and wherever it arrives, the hope is that Mulan will appeal to four audiences: the Asian diaspora community worldwide; women; Disney movie fans; and of course, a Chinese audience. But why would a Chinese audience watch another adaptation of Mulan? The answer lies in the hope that Disney can create something exceptional this time around.

“One of the things that was made clear to us from the very beginning was, make a Disney movie. Don't try to make the Chinese version of Mulan, because they've already made it several times, and they've already seen it,” Reed explained.

“So if you wanna make something that's going to play to the Chinese audience and be interesting to them, make the Disney version. And what that meant to us, was that we had to bring the highest level of execution, production, design, costume, hair and makeup, the cinematography.

“The people that we hire, they were hired with the expectation that we wanted awards-caliber work, and they weren't meant to think about this as a kids movie or an animated remake, or any of those things.

“Our references are David Lean and [Akira] Kurosawa — we're not looking at 101 Dalmatians.”

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON NIGHTMARE’S VOCAL, DANCE ZHAO DAXIA...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Xia CURRENT AGE: 19 DEBUT AGE:17 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 16 COMPANY: Koala.T SECONDARY SKILL: N/A

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): nightmare’s babydoll, xixi INSPIRATION: daxia was largely inspired to be an idol by her favorite groups, who she’d began to love after seeing online videos. after winning a small talent contest at her school, she said that it showed her what fame and being loved by fans felt like and that she’d give anything to feel that for the rest of her life. from there on, she began grinding to work towards becoming the sweet and talented idol she is today. SPECIAL TALENTS:

martial arts - she started learning at the six and continued classes off-and-on until receiving her black belt at the age of thirteen.

choreography - after being a dedicated for so long, she’s practiced many years so master several of her favorite group’s choreographies from the last three generations, going as far as to try to mimic their mannerisms.

impressions - often teasing, but she has a special skill for impersonating both her members and other idols she’s fond of.

NOTABLE FACTS:

she was first found after starring on the show “superstar k”, where she placed 4th.

she once went on a trip to new york city and took a picture with rihanna.

daxia’s a huge fan of western music from the 90’s, and once a week she posts song recommendations for fans to follow and add to their playlist, along with an extended explanation and preferred method of listening.

she is known for her significant weight loss during her time as a trainee to debut, losing around 22 kg in a month. she refuses to say how, for fear others will try it as well.

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

daxia does not hope that nightmare will change their concept, but instead that it will be better received by the public as they keep promoting, she also hopes that as they get more experienced, she will be more natural at fitting in with the dark concept. she wants to also better connect with international fans more, and hopes to be able to travel to china on tour and connect with fans in her native tongue.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

despite the cultural difference, daxia hopes to become a beloved figure of the korean entertainment. while highly ambitious, she hopes that she’ll have a lengthy and successful career and eventually be able to venture into other types such as acting and more variety. she wants to be a long term public figure known for her personality, and eventually be able to earn enough to move her parents to korea.

IDOL IMAGE

[did you see that new girl  they added, daxia? she doesn’t look like the nightmare type at all.]

cute face, devilish grin. daxia’s introduction to nightmare was certainly a shocking one, such childlike features accompanying such an eerie concept. and yet, in a way, it works. the deceitfulness in her smiles is just the soft energy they need. sure, nightmare doesn’t ever catch a break because of their concept, but in a way it’s xia who helps bring the cuteness back that they’re missing.

[i heard she’s the least talented out of the bunch, though. is she just a pretty face?]

upon her debut, she receives almost instant criticism. she’s lacking skills. she shouldn’t have debuted so soon. she barely can speak korean. all in all, everyone seems to view her as a trainee who still needs lots of work. what could she do? it’s not like she doesn’t agree, but daxia had been dying to make it big and nightmare seemed like her only chance. she tries her hardest to work hard, but they don’t seem to get past her swift debut and lackluster skills. the only thing that’s saving her is her charisma, even the anti-fans can’t deny she has an incredible stage presence and personality onscreen.

[yeah, i think so. but she’s a little cute….right?]

so koala.t uses a new method, using her downfalls as their strength. within a month of debut, they stray her away from the dark character it seemed everyone else was playing. instead, they have her play dumb. since they can’t seem to do much with her, they work with her flaws and make them “cute” to the audience. her korean, which is lacking but nevertheless improving, is told to be intentionally worse to play the clueless foreigner card. her voice cracks are made to be a cute mishap, and her lack of coordination can be attributed to her adorable clumsiness. koala.t feels that all her critiques have been swiftly cleaned up, but xia can’t say she feels the same. unable to be completely herself, to be made to be some quirky, relatable little kid for the public’s sake.

[i guess so. she’s sweet, at least. i think she likes what she does.]

but it’s not all bad, in xia’s book. being among the youngest of the bunch means she’s frequently doted on, and gets the privilege of teasing her members without seeming to mean. she’s known as “nightmare’s babydoll”, the sort of sunlight in such a dark concept. her fanservice and frequent streams make her a favorite among those who prefer personality to skill, something she can’t decide on whether she likes or not. whatever her beliefs, her marketing as the cute side, the “dawn”, of a hellish nightmare, has been one that’s put xia out of the darkness.

IDOL HISTORY

begin. from the very first few seconds she left the womb, daxia knew she was special. born a daughter, the only child to parents who for so long had tried to conceive a child. while she wasn’t hardly wealthy enough to be deemed spoiled, daxia always felt confident that there was a place for her in the world. her first steps, first words, first meal, all of it was caught on camera alongside the cheers of proud parents. they cherished her. cherished her so much that they never let her out of their sight. how could they, anyways, when all the bad in the world was so willing to swallow up girls like her? daxia was known to be terribly susceptible to colds, had an extensive list of allergies, and all the likes. even her asthma, which she felt was a minor setback, would result in panic anytime it decided to cause her some trouble. she was a small, cute thing, their bao, or treasure.

both in their mid 30s, they raised her in a disciplined yet loving household. to satisfy their fears, the girl was homeschooled all throughout her schooling years, drilled with lessons in math, english, and more. her friends all lay within her stuffed animals, and when she got older shifted to living souls behind her computer screen. with the bulk of social interaction coming from her parents and penpals, xia soon got bored and resorted to a different form of entertainment. something fresh. something….exciting. kpop. her parents, being extremely traditional, accepted nothing but the chinese ballads they filled the house with. so, in secret, she plugged her headphones in and began to fall a little deeper for the celebrities who seemed so far away. her hobby soon became addiction, and within a few months she could tell anyone who listened an alphabetical list of over a hundred boy and girl groups. you see, it took her away. away from her parents, from wuxi, from china. for once, she felt like she wasn’t trapped within her house but instead apart of something much more. korea, in general, soon gained her interest, and she slowly shifted from interest solely in idols to learning the language and culture. by the time she turned 17, she’d begun learning simple phrases and had her eyes set on the country.

if she was being completely and utterly honest with herself, daxia knew she had no place at home. she had no work skills, no real talents, only a passion and a kind soul. it was only when she stumbled upon an advertisement for a talent competition based in korea that she began taking the idea of a future seriously. a future with her passion, in which she may even be able to share the stage with her idols. daxia, being the ambitious teenager she was, worked her hardest to land a spot. staying up late at dance studios, visiting vocal coaches. her savings account, which had largely been holding funds from her job, was emptied to get her plane ticket there.

those dreams soon came crashing down, when her reign of superstar k quickly ended as she left the show with 4th place. the people had loved her bright spirit and small-town girl feel, but it hadn’t been enough to win a talent-based competition. with low spirits and even lower funds, she’d just begun her travels back home when the company she knew well, koala.t, contacted her in hopes of bringing her into the agency. it was clear she had a lot to improve, but her bright spirit and work ethic gave them a sort of momentum.. sooner than she ever thought possible with the talents she had, she was put into nightmare’s lineup. how was it possible? even daxia knew, with the optimistic lenses she saw the world with, that there was less celebrating than she’d hoped. other trainees had worked far longer, far harder, and had the talent to back it up. what was daxia doing, standing next to such talented girls? the thought haunted her, and the constant criticisms of her surprise debut didn’t make it any easier.

just like that, all daxia’s ideas of what reality was were all ripped from her eyes. she was thrown into the trainee scene faster than she could imagine, as her family watched on with shock. in a country she could barely understand, working to be just like the people she’d always felt were in another universe. the transition was anything but easy, filled with tear-filled nights of frustration and the same, sad homesick feeling whenever she thought of her family back home. she was 16, her parent’s bao, who had always been raised a baby. now, here she was, with the culture shock of her life and struck with the reality of independence and the entertainment industry.

nightmare’s concept hit her like a pound of bricks, as she had to learn concepts such as alluring and sexy. never had she been associated with these words before, but she tried her best to catch up with the rest of her members. the cute, soft daxia was certainly still there. but with such high stakes, she was willing to do whatever it took. she was already let go once, and she’d be damned if she let her only opportunity to be a somebody go through her hands like that again. her hard work seemed to be working against her, though, for every time

everyone swears her charm is in her uniqueness, but daxia wishes everything in her it isn’t true. because it’s all her differences that make her faults, and no matter how out there nightmare might be in concept she hopes they don’t say the same about her, the individual. so she smiles like everyone, tries to speak like everyone, and doesn’t dare complain.

because she’s different, she knows, but will do anything to hide from the spotlight and blend into the background.

[philippmichelreichold]

#scifi #Review Barrington J Bayley's Collision Course daw books

#scifi # Review Barrington J Bayley's Collision Course

I first read Barrington J. Bayley's Collision Course/Collision with Chronos more than thirty years ago. I must have given my first copy to the Goodwill. I searched for years before finding my current copy at Haslam's Books in St. Petersburg, Florida. They are the best. Collision Course is the sort of story you want to not lose.

Bailey follows a fairly unique approach to time travel stories. The vast majority deal with an alterable timeline that must either be changed or preserved to save the viewpoint character's way of life, the universe, etc; or with a multiverse where myriads of ways unfold and whatever decision a character might make, other versions of that character are deciding to do the same thing or its opposite. One example of the former is  Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. There are many examples in Star Trek with its time loops and Predestination Paradoxes and Chiefs O'Brien averring their hatred for Temporal Mechanics.  Larry Niven's All the Myriad Ways is an example of the latter.  Catch that Zeppelin by Fritz Lieber and Joe Haldeman's Manifest Destiny offer alternate time lines within a multiverse. Another approach, my personal favorite, is that you can't change the past. This the premise of By the Time We got to Gaugamela by R Garcia y Robertson. You can go back, but whatever is about to happen has already happened. To paraphrase, all the history books agree that Alexander the Great is going to be alive tomorrow, but no such assurances are available for the time traveller in question. Bailey takes a totally different tack from any of these, one ""so original that it avoids all (most?) time-travel clichés".

According to The Newsletter of the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic, Bailey followed the ideas of J. W. Dunne set forth in An Experiment with Time. Time travels as a wave or a torrent through six dimensional space in a local region of what we perceive as three dimensional space, creating and carrying life and consciousness with it as side effects. The future is dead and decayed, the past dead-- a collection of insensate automatons. You can build a machine to carry a bit of time with you ahead of or behind the time wave, but it won't do you any good. Times finger, having writ, moves on and you cannot change a word, act or dead. The trouble comes when two different time streams are headed along the same planet in opposite directions, like a pair of locomotives rushing along a track on a collision course set to arrive at a fatal destination. Life-consciousness-intelligence, it cannot be over emphasized, are byproducts of the time stream/wave/torrent.

And so it is in Collision Course that two time streams associated with Earth will crash together in about 200 years, with serious effects noticeable in about 100 years. Collisions of this nature must occur with some frequency as the International Space Society Retort City, located many light years from Earth and populated by the descendants of Chinese emigrees, has recently had a near miss with an entity whose time stream is situated obliquely to that of Retort City. The inhabitants of Earth are just beginning to understand time travel. The inhabitants of Retort City can literally run rings around the Earthers, and the Oblique Entity has nearly godlike (not Godlike as it points out) powers. The abilities of Retort City's scientists and the Oblique Entity, combined with obliqueness of their paths, allowed them to avert total disaster. Even so, things got pretty bad. The Oblique Entity and a researcher on Retort City have been watching events on Earth unfold with detached insouciance and mild concern. Time travellers from Retort City rescue stranded time travellers from Earth and offer to help.

Matters are not so straight forward at this point as one might hope. ISS Retort City was established 5000 years before the setting of the story, which is many thousands of years ahead of our own time. The races of man on Earth bare little physical resemblance to the people of our times (the "Chinks" of Retort City are a legendary race on Earth). The dominant race on Earth, led by the Titanium Legions (think SS), follows an Earth Mother religion. They believe with all the fervor that religious conviction can bring that they, True Man, are Earth's true sons and all the other races are defiling deviants whom they must expunge. There are archaeological ruins of alien design scattered about they believe support these beliefs.

The Titans see these ruins as proof of Alien Interventionalists who diabolically caused the rise of the Deviant races to destroy True Man. Never mind that there had been nuclear wars in the past with radioactive fallout to increase background radiation levels and thereby raise the mutation rate and never mind that the new races arose isolated from one another for a long time. Natural selection and niche filling divergence don't fit their self image or self interests. Or their self serving propaganda. Genocide is something the Titans have been quite successful at with only a few remnants of the other races remaining on reservations. The Titans have roving "experts" that can tell at a glance if someone is "racially impure". There is of course opposition and an underground which is losing faster each day. When the Titans learn of the ISS, with its wondrous technology and mighty industrial capacity, the natural recourse is to mount an invasion.

Retort City is designed as a double retort with the retorts set end to end. Lower Retort/Production Retort is devoted to industry and production. The mastery of time is so complete that different sections of a ping pong table can have different time streams moving at separate rates. Production lines can be run through time loops so that an artefact that was months in the making can be available hours after being ordered. The two halves are offset by about 34 years, so direct travel between the two halves is futile. Manufactured goods travel along a time gradient to the other half of the city and always arrive just in time. So great is Production Retort's efficiencies that it has greater industrial capacity than all of earth. The workers there are wholly devoted to their work. Their absorption with work is so great that off duty conversation often centers on how and where work is going. To them any other way of life would be a waste. "Technology was, after all, their life."(pg 54)

Life within Upper Retort/Leisure Retort is more luxurious, more devoted to subtle esthetics, and "was probably the most refined culture the galaxy had to offer". (pg 57) It's inhabitants are wholly absorbed in advancing the arts and sciences, so absorbed that they tend to objectify people and ignore any human factor not connected with the research that holds their attention. (So self absorbed that the sounds of fighting with the Titanium Legions is less a survival threat than an annoying distraction.) Little physical labor is performed directly, there being machines to handle that sort of thing. The apparent social disparity between the two halves of Retort City is solved by their mastery of time. Envy is avoided by the Exchange of Generations. One sends one's children by way of a temporal differential tunnel to the opposite half of Retort City and receives one's grandchildren in return. Robert Gibson hits the nail firmly when he says the equanimity of the arrangement eliminates jealousy between Retort City's two halves. The Leisure Retort's inhabitants are not so self absorbed as to not offer to help the inhabitants of Earth deal with the impending collision.

Once again, nothing is easy. An evacuation of refugees is impractical on religious grounds. The Titan dominated society could never abandon Mother Earth. It is unfeasible logistically as not Retort City lacks the lift capability. Diverting the time streams is beyond their science. They are not sufficient to the task and must ask the Oblique Entity for its help-- a sort of deus ex machina.

Aliens are described in some stories as being too alien to comprehend. Most human motivations/conflicts begin with food safety and shelter and proceed along Maslow's hierarchy to greed status fulfilment and pleasure seeking. Niven's Kzinti are motivated by status and the desire to acquire estates on which to hunt and raise families. The alien empires in Star Trek seem involved in dominance games characteristic of humans. I don't recall hearing an explanation for the behavior of the aliens in Independence Day unless it was pure revulsion. Certainly hatred was evident. All understandable as human like. The Oblique Entity may be beyond human comprehension by nature. No human definition fits and description is based only on vague and fleeting perceptions. No words suffice for it to explain its nature to humans. One common trait comes through clearly-- the enjoyment of entertainment. One of the human time travelers implores its assistance in saving the Earth. How does one obtain aid from someone who finds great entertainment value in the unfolding drama of one's plight?

For that matter, how does one convince someone that their murderous hatred is misplaced and futile? The Titans and the lemur like creatures in the approaching time wave ignore the fact that consciousness/life/intelligence are but byproducts of time. Even if one group succeeds in exterminating the other, the 2 time waves will still crash together ending time and life. (It is a theme of the story that despots and tyrants and haters ignore any information that contradicts their dogma and preconceived notions.) Effort and time that would be better spent working together for mutual survival are wasted on hydrogen bombs and plague weapons. As the Oblique Entity says, the final Battle of Armageddon must be fought.

Collision Course is tightly written, fast paced story that wants to be read all the way through without a break. As one reviewer puts it, "Bayley packs more into under two hundred pages than most authors come up with in a lifetime". The characters are sketched in quickly, but you know them as well as need be to follow the plot. The unique approach to time travel and the unique solution to the class struggle make it well worth reading. The ending of the story is fitting as the major conflict is resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned, even if they don't all know it. It is not a sugar coated resolution and conclusion, but the Titans would not have had it any other way, "with their cargos of death, death, and more death." I first read the story when I was in my late teens and then reread it some 30 years later. I enjoyed it as much this time as I did the first time. It is not currently available as e-text, but there are paper copies still available.

Selected dramatis personae:

•Leard Ascar- Earth's leading time scientist

•Chairman of Panhumanic League

• Grandfather of Hue Su Mueng

• Herrick- Amhrak scientist inventor of remote, intferometry-based remote viewing

• Rond Heshke- prominent archeologist

• Hue Su Mueng- disgruntled Retort City malcontent

• Hueh Shao father of Hue Su Mueng

• Hwen Wu- Leisure Retort prime minister and old friend of Hueh Shao

• Layella- Sobrie's "racially impure" girlfriend

• Leader Limnich- leader of Titanium Legions and de facto ruler of Earth

• Li Kim- friend of Hue Su Mueng

• Li Li San- Retort City envoys to future Earth aliens

• Blare Oblomot- assistant to Rond Heske at Hathar Ruins. brother of Sobrie. member of Panhumanic League

• Sobrie Oblomot- member of Panhumanic League

• Shiu Kung Chien- Retort City's leading expert on time. in contact with the Oblique Entity.

• Titan-Lieutenant Gann- time travel tech officer

• Titan-Lieutenant Hosk- time travel tech officer

• Titan-Captain Brask

• Titan-Major Brourne

• Whang Yat-Sen Retort City envoy to future Earth aliens

Further reading about Barrington J. Bayley, Collision Course/Collision with Chronos

•  COLLISION WITH CHRONOS on Ovias

•  Astounding Worlds of Barrington J Bayley on Ovias

• Review of Collision Course on Science Fiction Ruminations

• Wryte Stuff-- Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions

•  Jesse's Review on Goodreads

•  Barrington J Bayley on Wikipedia

•  Barrington J Bayley # ISFDB

• Barrington J. Bayley: Science-fiction writer who treated the human condition as a puzzle that must be solved

• Book Review: The Fall of Chronopolis, Barrington J. Bayley (1974)

• Book Review: Star Winds, Barrington J. Bayley (1978)

• Book Review: Empire of Two Worlds, Barrington J. Bayley (1972)

• The Zen Gun-Barrington J. Bayley (1983)

• Review: Let the Galaxy Burn - Warhammer 40k Anthology

• Obituary: Barrington J. Bayley

• Barrington John Bayley on Fantastic Fiction

Creative commons 4.0 

Credit cover art image under fair use for review. contact publisher for reuse 

[wuyifankris]

Kris Wu: Music Is My Instinct (VogueME June 2018)

As of late, Kris Wu has been preparing for his new album in Los Angeles. He had just completed shooting the MV for his new song <Like That>, which was scheduled to be released on 18 May globally. The female lead for the MV is our cover star, supermodel Stella Maxwell. This album is said to be a milestone in his entertainment career, as well as a highlight of his path of personal development. Compared to the previous two years, the Kris Wu now appears to be even more mature. Kris is fully confident in the album and his heart is more at ease. "I have wanted to release this album for a long time, and have been preparing for two, three years. You know, I've been too picky when it comes to choosing the songs, which is why it was dragged on for so long. This whole album is like telling a story, if you listen to the songs in order, you will truly understand what kind of person I am." Kris revealed that when he entered the industry, he was working hard towards an international audience, and he hoped that his works would be able to gain global recognition. Right now, he has fans worldwide. In 2017, the song <Deserve> which he collaborated with Travis Scott on, achieved outstanding results in the United States.

With regards to the new album, Kris expressed: "The music world established in this album is a complete representation of myself. It encompasses Urban, Hip-Hop, Pop, R&B and many other elements of different genres. There are even some songs which combine Chinese pop melodies and rap together. I hope that the music I make will be able to attract listeners in China as well as a global audience too. We're working hard at trying out some very cool stuff!"

Be it in China or overseas, in this era of social media, stars are increasingly portraying a more realistic side to themselves. Perhaps this is not enough to show Kris Wu's future direction, but he has clearly expressed: "I hate having to put on a celebrity facade all the time, that's not who I truly am." Kris's freedom of self expression is also incorporated into his music making process. "The way I make music is really unique. First, I'll listen to the beat without any melody. I'll let the sound engineer play the song, and next I'll get into the recording studio and write the opening lines of the melody, come up with a rough idea, and then begin to write the lyrics. This is my creative process. This is a natural instinct, the ability to listen to the heart."

Kris Wu express his admiration towards other musicians without reservations, and looks forward to the day that he will be able to reach their heights through his own hard work. Actually, last year Kris Wu had collaborated with Pharrell Williams on a song, which they even performed together in China. Kris expressed excitedly: "Pharrell and I will have even more collaborations soon. I listened to his songs when I was a teen, and he was the first singer I listened to! Have you heard the song <Frontin'> by him and Jay-Z? Up till now, I still occasionally listen to it!"

This year, one of the movies starring Kris that will be released is the action film <Europe Raiders>. During the filming, he received a great amount of stunt training. He was required to shoot many action scenes, often on wires, and you could imagine how tiring the whole shooting process was. "I feel extremely fortunate to be able to gain so much valuable experiences while filming, but at the same time, I also feel that being able to rest for a little is a good thing too. After all, the career expectancy of an actor is longer than that of a singer. Currently I have not accepted any roles, because I intend to focus on making music." Kris wants others to recognise himself for who he is, and not an idol that the masses dream of him to be. The best way to express himself, is through music.

"When I am not under the spotlight, I am just an ordinary person." Kris said. He describes his fashion sense as "very street style, jeans and hoodies, very casual." Of course, as the global ambassador of Burberry, he will also often wear clothes by the label. "Honestly speaking, I don't really have many requirements. Yeah... Except for cars." At the mention of sports cars, his eyes light up -- buying cars, talking about cars, his dream car models, getting to know like-minded car enthusiasts, and so on. Speaking of the 2014 Mercedes Benz SLS AMG, he could hardly contain himself. "This car's doors are scissor doors! The price is about $500,000 USD. It's way too expensive!" Kris said. " Since young I was really into cars, but at that time I didn't have the money to buy them. Right now I do, so practically every day I'll go to car dealers to do all kinda of adjustments and modifications, which I enjoy!"

Kris Wu owns cars in both Beijing and Los Angeles, but he does not drive in China. "If I go out and drive, I'll be surrounded." In the United States, the amount of people who recognise him is fewer. "This really suits me, and lets me return to (a more down-to-earth) reality. I'm a responsible driver, I won't seek the thrill of speeding. I know how to appreciate the genuine value and charm of a sports car, it's like buying a piece of art, I don't buy cars just for the sake of showing off."

"In places where people don't know me, I enjoy participating in events with other car enthusiasts, which is really interesting. In fact, I secretly follow the news that they post on Instagram, meet up at the venue with other car owners, and talk with them about topics related to cars... Over there, I feel like I'm an ordinary person." As such, a balance is achieved. Be it his personal life or driving on the road, just like laid back Los Angeles today, Kris Wu was satisfied and also hoped that things could slow down and develop steadily. As for his entertainment career, he is ready to blast off, all set to charge ahead at full speed.

--Bonus--

Vogue Me and Kris Wu seem to be fated to meet in Los Angeles. Here, he would radiate a type of coolness that is unlike ordinary days. Although Stella Maxwell was shot first, Kris arrived an hour ahead of schedule and displayed a completely good natured and cute side of him. Of course from time to time, our talented photographer was able to capture his handsome moments, and even Stella praised him: "Kris is too cool, no wonder he's a star, I've actually even heard of him before. If there's the chance to, I would really want to work with him again!"

translation: @wu_yi_fan

[mysilentmemory]

KOREAN SUPERSTAR SIWON CHOI COVERS PRESTIGE HONG KONG JULY 2018

Can one of Asia’s biggest singing and acting exports really be that nice? We find out.

JULY 1, 2018 , 

odestars change. An exaggeration? Maybe, but it’s a close call.

A room bustling with the click-clacks and chatter of people hanging clothes, setting up lights and taking pictures of the Hong Kong skyline from our set suddenly pauses. Choi is here. One by one, faces light up and the voices of those who are meeting the star for the first time rise in pitch. He takes it all in his stride, strolling around the suite greeting those he already knows by name and others he doesn’t with a smile and a firm handshake.

It’s convincingly sincere. First there’s the running quip – “Sum sum is our passcode today guys, OK?” he jokes with the crew. “Sum sum,” the Cantonese translation of the little finger-heart symbol Koreans have coined is now a running trend in most Asian countries. I ask him what it means. “I don’t know actually,” he says with a shrug. “I think other gestures are big displays of affection but this is a small gesture that carries sincerity? I didn’t actually like doing it that much at first but now it’s fun because it makes people happy – so I do it.”

His candour is refreshingly different from the hauteur one expects from someone who’s been in the industry for 13 years. Choi and Super Junior, the 10-piece boy band of which he’s a member, were instrumental figures in the Hallyu wave that swept across the globe. It’s no wonder, then, that the man has 4.7 million followers on Instagram, 6.37 million on Twitter and a staggering 16.4 million on Weibo (that last figure is more than double the population of Hong Kong). To many, he’s a god, with legions of Super Junior fans – self-named “Elfs”, a tribe unto themselves – and his own subdivision of fandom known as “Siwonests”.

Choi’s mix of friendliness and consummate professionalism becomes apparent as the shoot gets under way. He hits all the right angles, checking the screen to see if each shot passes muster and offering to shoot more. “Are you happy with it?” he asks those of us huddled around the display monitor. “I can shoot more if you’d like me to!” After an hour and a half or so, maintaining the pensive smoulder that celebrity features often require, he asks mid-pose, “Can I smile? I’m better at that, I think.” Immediately his crew remarks, “Ippo [pretty],” and it’s clear that those of us who don’t speak Korean are wont to agree.

Listening to snatches of conversation with his Korean team, the occasional oppa is dropped into the mix – Korea’s equivalent of the Japanese kawaii. Made popular by the country’s television shows and adopted by hordes of screaming tween and teenage fans at the sight of their favourite boy-band members, it means “big brother” and is used to refer to an actual older brother as well as to address all close older male friends. When I bring this up, I’m met with a sheepish grin.

“My team and I have been working together now for almost six years. We’re very close, so it’s OK,” he says. “When we work in Korea, they say Mr Choi but today, because I think they think you guys won’t understand, they can be casual and call me oppa.”

Line Choi’s amiability up against his accomplishments and you’ll understand why it seems so extraordinary. Even before his debut in 2005, he was the first person in Korea to be awarded the fourth row in the black belt for Taekwondo at the age of 14, changing the pre-existing rule that only people aged 18 could be awarded for the achievement. Before being invited to join Super Junior, he was already acting alongside Hong Kong’s Andy Lau.

“I wanted to be an actor first,” he says. His is a well-known story, auditioning without his parents’ knowledge and being accepted. The band was created as a collection of the best (hence “Super”) trainees (hence “Junior”) in SM Entertainment’s cohort. “They convinced me to be a singer and I said yes, but I definitely wanted to be an actor,” he says.

An actor he definitely has been. Although the group remains a fundamental part of Choi’s career – it’s the reason he’s in Hong Kong this time round, as part of its comeback world tour Super Show 7, performing the band’s first album since 2015 – Choi has always kept a firm foot in acting.

Inspired by his initial experience filming with Lau, Choi has gone on to act in hits such as Helios and To the Fore, as well as the international blockbuster Dragon Blade, in which he starred alongside Jackie Chan, Adrien Brody and John Cusack. “It’s an incredible environment for an actor,” he says. “They’re incredibly professional and very caring. I was really impressed with how they cared about the Korean actor.”

It doesn’t come without hard work, though, “When I shot To the Fore, I had to use three languages, English, Mandarin and Korean,” he says. “When they changed my dialogue on set, all the other actors and actresses were fine, because it was their mother language, but in my case it was really hard because it wasn’t my mother language – and even if they had changed the Korean dialogue, I might’ve gotten into some trouble because I want to perform the best that I can, and to do so I need to prepare.

“I’m the only Korean actor in that movie. If I’m not good, I’m not good as a Korean so I have to take responsibility for my country and I really need to do my best.”

Thanks to his determination to achieve fluency in English and Chinese, along with his native Korean, Choi is poised to become the next Asian superstar to make it big in the US. Choi’s mentor is Jackie Chan, who told him that “an actor’s character always comes first – manners and respect”, he says. “But that I should also always be very careful choosing each and every single role I undertake.”

It’s a lesson he’s taken to heart and it paid off when he chose to play Kim Shin Hyuk, a happy-go-lucky senior magazine editor, the supporting lead in 2015 hit Korean series She Was Pretty, right before Choi enlisted in the army. He didn’t end up getting the girl in the show’s 16 episodes, but he did leave an untold number of women swooning from what Korean drama discussion boards call “second-lead syndrome” and waiting for his return with bated breath.

After being discharged from the military in August last year, he picked up the lead role of Byun Hyuk in Revolutionary Love, reprising elements of his character in She Was Pretty – and this time he definitely gets the girl. So how does he pick them? “When I choose my roles, I only think about three things” he says. “First, what I can do well now. Second, what people want me to do. The third is what I should do now.”

“Military service is almost two years, and it’s quite a long time for my supporters and fans to wait for me. I wanted to show them my gratitude, so I was thinking about how I could do this. Revolutionary Love came along and it contained all three elements, as well as a little comedy, a little romance and a little bit of dynamism, so I chose it.”

What is success for Choi? It’s not money, fame or power, I learn, despite the fact that his fans can look forward to a new Super Junior album this year, more concerts, the possibility of more Asian and American projects and a mission with Unicef in the works. To Choi it’s happiness and contentment.

“I think happiness is the first thing that comes to mind,” he says. “If you’re not happy and you let that stuff get to your head, you might get ill. Does success actually equate to happiness? Maybe not to everybody, but I don’t think happiness is non-success either.”

His industry is not particularly predisposed to contentment and happiness, I counter, so how does he balance it? “Part of my job is to achieve balance. Alongside being able to face God at the very end, to know I have made him happy and to have helped those in need, I think it’s to be positive.

“I don’t want to show people when I’m mad or when I’m sad, because I don’t want people to worry about me. Part of my job is to achieve balance between the human Siwon Choi and the celebrity. As a celebrity it’s my responsibility to be a role model, to create a good environment. If I’m calm, focused on work and smiling, then everybody else will be smiling and having a good time. So I believe in always being positive.”

It’s perhaps this warmth that draws those around him to him. “I stay in the same hotel whenever I come to Hong Kong” he says. “I know the manager and the employees so well and I say hi to everyone. It’s been two years since I’ve been here, but when I came back this time they prepared a surprise for my birthday with balloons and a cake. They wrote ‘Welcome Home’ on the card and it touched me.”

How so? “Well, it made me grateful for what I have because, you know, if we give in to the negative thoughts in this job, it can become tough, very tough. So we always have to think positive, stay positive. That moment was the happiest moment of my year so far. It made me think, well, my life might not be so lonely in the future. It might be quite full.”

PHOTOGRAPHY | RICKY LO | prestigeonline

[itsk24posts-blog]

SM and Localized talent

The articles for this week really highlighted the K-pop world and its expansion from local Korean audiences to the global world.  Ju Oak Kim's and Seabrook's articles both discussed the various ways in which SM Entertainment has been able to become a powerhouse in and outside of Korea. They detailed the way that this company has cultivated an industry and artists that could expand into the world. Within his article Kim talked about SM's unique Song camp "which brings foreign composers to Korea. These foreign composers visit the music studios of SME’s head office in Seoul to collaborate with Korean producers (1048 ju Oak Kim)" Through this song camp SM has been able to really find gems such as SHINee's Lucifer and EXO's Love me Right; songs which were created by songwriters under Marcan Entertainment and polished through SM producers.  Through the YouTube channel of F(x)'s Luna, we are able to see a glimpse as to what goes on during these song camps. These song camps are one of the various ways in which SME has been able to ensure that their music stays fresh, up to date and sometimes ahead of its time. SM has also been known to purchase songs from artists such as Bruno Mars (Taemin's Press Your number) and Kesha (Girl's Generation's Run Devil Run) demonstrating that they are looking toward the West for musical influence.  Aside from their work with procurers and writers in their song camps, SME has various producers that they have all but claimed as their own. LDN Noise holds the credit for creating many of the top hits and B-sides to almost, if not all SM artists. LDN Noise have been very open about their works with the entertainment company and have often times attended events such as KCON to demonstrate the process of creating top tracks such as EXO's Monster.  One of the most peculiar things I have noticed about some of the songs SM has purchased has been the localization of songs that have already been released and made popular in the states. This was the case with SHINEe's Juliette, which was actually a song called "Deal with it" by Disney Star Corbin Bleu and Girl's Generation's Dancing Queen, which was Duffy's Mercy. It was very interesting to me that SM would remake these songs and release them using Korean lyrics. 

 Aside from their diverse producers and song creators SME has also put into practice a concept Lee Soo Man refers to as Cultural Technology. A term that outside of NCT (Neo Culture Technology) I had never heard before. In Kim's article we see this C.T, as they refer to it as, put into play with the partnership with companies in Japan and China. Kim states that "SME’s localizing strategy was another key to making BoA a top celebrity in Japan. In partnership with AVEX, one of the major Japanese music agencies, SME constructed BoA’s cosmopolitan image based on her English and Japanese language skills rather than highlighting her Korean background (S. Kwak)"  (1050). BoA's success in Japan and SM's attempts to infiltrate China via Chinese subgroups and groups (ex. EXO-M; Super Junior- M and the newly debuted WAYV, who in contrast to the two other groups does not hold any prominent ties to SM aside from the members having been trained by SM and including already debuted NCT members). The expansion by localization is one that emphasis the power of SM as a company and cultural export. SM recruits several trainees from different areas of the world and utilizes them as a token entrance to certain countries. Seabrook stated that “Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country.” (The New Yorker) The most current instances of this has been the multinational members of NCT127, Dream and U who through the umbrella term NCT are being used to spread K-pop as a localized product. I believe that SM is attempting to replicate the success of BoA in unfamiliar markets by using artists who were born in different countries and gaining fans through the commonality of nationality. I am extremely interested in seeing just how this plan will work out in countries outside of Asia as we have already seen the unsuccessful attempts of other Korean artists in Western markets. Similarly to SM, JYP has also begun to venture into this idea of localization through their first ever all Chinese group Boy Story, a group that is said to precede a Japanese girl group.

On a similar vein to the spread of K-pop through localization, SM is stated to also put an emphasis on fan connectivity. Kim states that "SME, who has recognized the significance of social media for the management of international consumers, supports the virtual interaction of Korean pop stars and international fans by producing online media content" (1052 ).  Over the years SM has opened up instagram and Twitter accounts for their groups and even one called SMTOWN Global for international fans. These accounts serve as a communication method between the company, artists and fans. It allows fans to feel more connected to artists. One of the more recent cases of fan connectivity that I have encountered from SM has been the opening of 4 additional NCT channels on Youtube (체날 NCT, NCT Dance, NCT Daily, and NCT Music). These channels each contain content from the group and individuals; these channels have been updated very frequently.  One of the most personal cases of fan connectivity that I have seen through these channels has been the uploading of Johnny's Communication Center (JCC), these videos are all filmed by Johnny Suh, the Korean-American member of the group. These particular videos are like vlogs that follow the activities of Johnny. The first was an introduction to Johnny and who he was and the following, a Thanksgiving video that demonstrated Johnny spreading his Thanksgiving tradition to his non-American members. Many of the comments under these videos demonstrated a connection between Johnny and his American fans; these particular videos seem to be a part of SM's plan to connect more to the audiences via a localized concept. To conclude it all, I believe that SM's prowess in the entertainment field really gives a lot to look forward to, will they succeed in their plans of expansion of K-pop through localization? Will they be able to step foot into a market that is currently only opening up to one group? Or will the company see a roadblock yet again as it did with Girls Generation in the States?

[ippworld]

Chinese Leading The Charge To Visiting Africa

In 2008, Chinese visiting the Africa Continent accounted for 3% of their total numbers in outbound travel. But in 2017, outbound travel rose to over 10%, representing 11.3 million that had travelled to Africa. As highlighted by Chinese news website Cankaoxiaoxi.com, China's social media platforms have been abuzz about travel experience to African countries. The website also cited African media commenting that the average spending by the Chinese tourist is 40% higher than most European visitors. The hashtag "前往非洲避暑” (meaning ‘travel to Africa to beat the heat') garnered more than three million clicks on Sina Weibo.

So, why is Africa gaining popularity amongst Chinese visitors?

One obvious reason is due to summers in China plagued by temperatures hitting a high or exceeding 35 degrees Celsius. African countries on the other hand, being in cooler temperatures of the Southern Hemisphere as well as those in higher altitudes, are ideal places for a cooling-off respite, during China's summer months. China Plus, a news broadcaster of print, radio and television, featured a report by online travel agency lvmama.com – that in 2017, the number of people who had pre-booked holiday travels to Africa was nearly doubled that a year ago. It was also noted that the higher earners between the ages of 25 and 40 made up for most of the visitors to Africa, with single trips on average lasting eight days and spending between ¥7,800 ($1,229 USD) and ¥48,000 ($7,566 USD).

Related Content:

Learn More: The Enormous China Tourism Market

Other factors could have been generated by the three most popular Chinese reality shows, ‘Flowers On Trip', ‘Divas Hit the Road' and ‘Our Journey', all featuring celebrities traveling to Africa. Enthusiasms could have been created by Chinese blockbuster movie ‘Wolf Warrior 2' (a sequel to Wolf Warriors). It carried a patriotic theme about a retired Chinese soldier in Africa rescuing Chinese workers from local pirates. Settles in the movie were portrait as intermarries and living there for ages. The movie grossed over $800 million USD in China alone, making it the world's 2nd highest box office sales from a single territory after Star Wars 7.

More contributory factors could be; the Belt and Road Initiative as explained by The Economist; the increased in air routes between China and African countries; or African nations easing their visa policy to attract more Chinese visitors.

Efforts were also made by African countries during Investour 2018 jointly organized by Casa Africa, UN's World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and International Tourism Fair in Spain (FITUR) in Madrid, attended by 30 African Tourism Ministers. Topics included “Tourism Investment and Business Forum for Africa” and the “UNWTO/Chimelong Wildlife Conservation and Tourism in Africa, Asia and the Pacific”. The programs were favoured by China which has signed bilateral agreements with several African countries that are enjoying Approved Destination Status.

(Notes: The Chimelong Group is a Chinese conglomerate which owns and operates theme parks, luxury hotels, leisure entertainment businesses and fine-dining restaurants. It is the leading enterprise in China's tourism industry.)

In early January, China Global Television Network (CGTN) staged a special dialogue in anticipation of the China-Africa Cooperation Forum, to be held in Beijing later this year. The Forum is in-line with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's recent visits to four African countries and aims to facilitate further integration of African nations into China's Belt and Road Initiative.

While in recent times, African countries have generally come to favour the Chinese model of development and are keenly looking toward greater coordination on the Africa Union's far-reaching plans to be assimilated with China's vision.

The writing is on the wall

Indeed, it is inevitable that many more Chinese will journey to African destinations and their arrivals will keep rising to unprecedented numbers. For Africa-based hotels, hospitality or lifestyle establishments vying for a slice of the enormous influx of Chinese leisure or business visitors, they must first answer two key questions, “Has the website catered for browsing in the Chinese language?” If ‘yes'… “Are content reader-friendly, inspiring and equally engaging?”

If answers are ‘no', then that website will find it hard to sustain prominence amongst Chinese communities, whether over social media platforms, or to be spontaneously discovered in Chinese keyword searches. The investment to create marketing content in Chinese is relatively small, however the returns are in many, manyfold. It is because modern day Chinese tourists prefer the D-I-Y experience by making informed decisions from content that they can read and understand comfortably in their preferred language. It follows the natural instinct that we ourselves would want to be able to read and understand product labels and instructions – attesting to the age-old adage in marketing, “Can't Read, Won't Buy”.

Conclusion

To compete for the tourism dollars in global markets, success or failure rightly depends on the quality of reader-friendly information provided in their preferred languages.

It has also often been reported that the creation of local language content just by translation alone will be an uphill task to achieve its objectives. For hotel, hospitality and lifestyle establishments, only transcreation (translations infused with creative writing) will deliver that emotional connection with specific target audiences – in their preferred language. Click here to read "Why Transcreation Does More than Translation?".

The call is for a new breed of Language Service Providers to assist hoteliers, hospitality and lifestyle business owners overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers which are constantly at play.

[fyexo]

191009 New K-pop Band SuperM: ‘We Don’t Want to Step on Other Groups to Get to the Top’

With K-pop firmly entrenched in the mainstream, SuperM say it’s time to start raising the bar

The well-coiffed guys from the new K-pop supergroup, SuperM, are sitting around a conference room at the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, and feeling like they may have left something on the table.

Two days earlier, the seven-piece unit — put together using members from four established K-pop boy bands — had shut down an intersection in the heart of Hollywood and made their live debut before more than 5,000 frenzied fans, some of whom had lined up for days just to get a prime spot to see the guys perform.

For SuperM, the outdoor show — which was also streamed live worldwide on YouTube — served as their official group debut as well, with the boy band finally being introduced to the world after months of secrecy.

“Going in front of our fans and performing as SuperM was nerve-wracking, and it’s not something we usually feel because we’ve all been in this industry for a while now,” says Kai, the pretty, pouty-mouthed singer who was chosen to join SuperM from the band EXO. “There were some members that felt like maybe we could’ve done better with this or stronger with that, but it’s okay,” he says, smiling. “More than anything, I was just proud that we could finally show everyone what we’ve been preparing for.”

SuperM is the latest creation of Korean management company, SM Entertainment (the band’s name is not exactly subtle). Founded in 1995 by Lee Soo-man, a man so famous in Korea he’s just known as “Mr. Lee,” SM is regarded as one of the pioneers of the global K-pop movement, having first brought Korean artists to North America in the early 2000s at the height of the teen pop craze.

SuperM is the company’s latest attempt to make a dent in the U.S. market. After years of breaking all sorts of records in Asia but remaining relatively unknown in the States, the crossover success of bands like BTS and Blackpink have given entertainment companies like SM a renewed interest in reaching the international market, with the U.S. as a pivotal launching pad.

For SuperM, it wasn’t about starting from scratch, but rather starting from the top. SuperM culled its members from some of SM’s most popular groups, who collectively have sold more than 14 million adjusted albums combined, and amassed nearly four billion views of their music videos online. SuperM’s fans lovingly refer to them as “the Avengers of K-pop,” stemming from the belief that the group features the most talented and popular members from each of the individual bands.

Baekhyun and Kai are from EXO, a stylish and well-packaged boy band that, as of 2018, had actually sold more records than BTS in Korea (the release of BTS’ Map of the Soul: Persona this past April have tipped the scales back in the latter group’s favor). At 27, Baekhyun is the oldest member of SuperM, and has unofficially acquired the title of group leader.

Taemin, the second oldest member at 26, is from SHINee, considered one of the veterans of K-pop, after having debuted in 2008. The group made news in 2017 after founding member, Jonghyun, died from an apparent suicide, which sparked a debate over working conditions and unreasonably high expectations for these young performers, many of whom are pulled from school to begin “training” for their debut.

The last four members of SuperM were culled from subunits of the massive 21-person K-pop group, NCT (Mr. Lee calls them the first “unlimited” boy band, with a constantly rotating roster of new members). Taeyong and Mark are from NCT 127, and Ten and Lucas are from NCT’s Chinese subset, WayV.

The idea for an all-star group was first discussed last year, though the seven members didn’t actually come together to record until earlier this spring. While the guys had met before — SM organizes an annual “SM Town” concert tour, similar to say, when Diddy took his Bad Boy artists on the road — they had never actually worked together until SuperM was formed.

The group’s debut EP, The 1st Mini Album, hit stores last week. The five-song set opens with lead single, “Jopping,” a turbo-charged track whose name comes from a combination of the words, “jumping” and “popping” (a publicist sighed that the name was both crazy yet catchy at the same time). The song mixes hip-hop with EDM, with the members trading verses in both English and Korean. The video for “Jopping,” meantime, was filmed in Dubai over the summer and has already amassed more than 22 million views online. Fueled by massive buzz for the song and album, SuperM announced this week that they will be hitting the road for a North American tour, kicking off November 11th in Fort Worth, Texas.

While BTS have blasted into the mainstream, with number one albums, appearances on all the late-night talk shows and even Grammy buzz, the guys in SuperM are motivated to find success on their own terms.

“Yes, the competition exists and we can’t ignore that,” says Taemin, “but we don’t want to step on other groups to get to the top. We want to stand alone as a group and bring something fresh and new to this K-pop scene.”

To that end, the group has been working on carving out a more signature sound for their debut LP, which will still sit comfortably in the hip-hop/pop/R&B arena, but also see them weaving in and out of different genres within a single song. While other groups — such as Blackpink and BTS — primarily perform in Korean, SuperM could also be releasing more English language tracks. (Though Mark was born in Canada and speaks fluent English, the band’s publicist confirms the rest of the group’s members have been taking English lessons.)

They’ve been doing their homework too, listening to the radio while they’re in Los Angeles and streaming an eclectic mix of artists like H.E.R., Ella Mai, Daniel Caesar and Billie Eilish (“Let’s get that collabo!” Taemin hollers).

And while Korean management companies are notorious for controlling their groups’ images and keeping their artists on a short leash (I once arrived to meet EXO in Seoul and was told I couldn’t interview the guys in person because they didn’t have their makeup on), from this perspective, SuperM feels a lot… looser.

On this recent swing through L.A., the young men reveal that their first stop after landing at LAX wasn’t straight to their hotel, but rather to In-N-Out. Though they’ve booked dinners in Malibu, the members also rave about the traditional Korean tofu stew at BCD Tofu House, a 24-hour Southern California chain of cheap eats (“It’s honestly better than Korea,” Taeyong says). During the interview, the guys are decked out in leather jackets and oversized sweats, sipping on iced coffees from Starbucks, and fidgeting with their phones like any other twenty-something, as they dish about trying to take a group vacation after their tour is over. They travel with a translator, but all of them try valiantly to respond to questions in English before they crumble in laughter when they lose their words. If their original groups gave them a crash course in making it in the music business, it seems SuperM will give these guys a chance to be themselves — and in doing so, a chance to grow.

“If I said I didn’t feel any pressure that would be a lie,” says Kai. “We all come from successful, established careers, but in a way, we are still unknowns, at least when it comes to this formation. But with that pressure comes this new level of excitement,” he continues, “because there’s so much more we can try and do, and the possibilities are endless.”

“There are a lot of groups out there and a lot of competition,” Taeyong admits, “but our goal is to make K-pop shine even brighter. The spirit of competition is not necessarily bad, because it pushes us to want to put out better things.”

Kai is more specific: “SuperM is here to level up the K-pop genre,” he asserts. “We are ready for K-pop to start raising the bar.”

source: Tim Chan @ Rolling Stone

[sotina886]

The CIA went to great lengths to make the Chinese like sissy

American male stars, however, are not so, most are tough style. In other words, the feminization of male stars is only a problem in East Asia, but not in The Entertainment industry in Europe and America.

So what accounts for this difference?

In fact, the origin of all this comes from the United States, and the beginning of the feminization of male stars is due to the establishment of an entertainment company in Japan in the 1980s -- Jenis & Associates. The company's founder is Kitagawa, who is responsible for the feminization of male stars in the entertainment industry in China, Japan and South Korea. But It wasn't Kitagawa alone. He managed to create the trend with the help of the Americans.

It all started in Japan after World War II.

After the defeat of the Second World War, Japan was the puppet of the United States in politics, economy and culture. However, the control of Japan by the United States was not so smooth at the beginning. At that time, there were two great powers in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. Japan was also one of the wrestling fields for power between the United States and the Soviet Union. At that time, the Soviet Union controlled the whole northern part of Japan, and the United States was at the beginning of the struggle in Japan.

After all, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, and American soldiers stationed in Japan after the war often oppressed the Japanese. So Japanese common people to the United States can be said to hate! In addition, the Soviet Union, in order to enhance its international influence, sent many Japanese prisoners of war back to The Japanese mainland and promoted socialism, so the Japanese people have a better impression of the Soviet Union than the United States.

However, the United States was not going to sit back and let the Soviet Union expand its influence in Japan, so the United States came up with a bold idea: to control the Japanese people in terms of ideology and public opinion, in order to make Japan away from the Soviet Union and closer to the United States.

The man who first came up with the idea was George Cannon, an American diplomat.

He suggested that the job of controlling Japanese public opinion should be left to "experts who understand Japan", and the answer is Japanese war criminals.

Because Japanese domestic intellectuals and officials were fanatical nationalists at that time, they could not help the United States and cooperate with the United States, but the war criminals who committed heinous crimes in World War II, their hands covered with blood, could only work for the United States in order to survive.

A CIA cable revealed the Americans' intentions:

On the left side of the telegram is a list of passwords and on the right are names. It can be seen that almost all the major Japanese media have been wooed by the United States, and many Class A war criminals of World War II are full of them. The war criminal Ogata Takeko, who once advocated for the September 18 Incident, escaped death penalty under the protection of the United States, and also served as the general manager of the Asahi Shimbun. Another war criminal, Masatotaro, who encouraged countless young people to invade China, also escaped punishment and was supported by the Americans to found Japan's largest newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun.

The United States not only pardoned them of their crimes, but also paid them a lot of money. These war criminals suggested to the United States: follow the popular line, brainwash the Japanese people with entertainment news, weaken the masculinity of the whole Japanese society through public opinion propaganda, to become flexible temperament, so as to reduce the aggressiveness of Japan, revolutionary. Gradually, the Japanese people will get close to The American culture and reduce their resistance to the United States.

Kitagawa was an important part of the American plan to change the masculinity of Japanese society. Although kitagawa is a Japanese name, he grew up in the U.S. and worked as a translator for the U.S. government. He also holds a U.S. passport. Also, Kitagawa was in a unit called the U.S. Advisory Corps, which was responsible for espionage and intelligence. Although Kitagawa has a Japanese face, he is loyal to the Americans, not the Japanese. Moreover, Kitagawa was a pedophile who preferred young, feminine boys until it was revealed that he had sexually abused male stars in his own company for a long time.

The first group that Kitagawa raised, the first show, was funded by the U.S. army, and at that time, Kitagawa discovered a lot of young boys who quickly took over the television entertainment market at the time. With the support of major Japanese media controlled by the war criminals, they quickly became popular and became a new force in the entertainment industry. Kitagawa, on the other hand, quickly became the godfather of fashion, dominating the Entire Japanese entertainment industry.

In 1995, a Japanese cosmetics brand invited the popular actor Takuya Kimura to shoot an advertisement for its new lipstick. In the whole advertising process, Kimura Takuya's gentle eyes and sexy smear, like a bomb in general caused an explosion in The Japanese female group, in two months, Kimura Takuya's endorsement of lipstick incredibly crazy sell 3 million!

Later, niangification spread from Japan to South Korea next door. At the beginning of its establishment, South Korea's SM company was imitating Japan's starmaking routine, looking for handsome and female boys everywhere and training them vigorously. In 1996, SM Korea also successfully launched the boy idol group H.O.T

HOT's great success in South Korea has led to more and more companies competing to imitate and launch more men's groups such as TVXQ and Super Junior. Their biggest common feature is comity, softness and female appearance.

Later, Japan and South Korea star trend also naturally blew to neighbors in China, China's entertainment companies see the business opportunities, also began to launch a large number of niang idol, they produce programs, packaging methods, propaganda means, completely copy Korea and Japan's performing arts companies.

Such as the early years of "Super girl", "happy boys" and so on, as well as before the fire of "idol Practice", the above mentioned CAI Xukun is this program out.

Therefore, in the entire Entertainment circle of Europe and the United States is still a tough man in charge of the time, China, Japan and South Korea's male stars are in a large area of feminization. While Captain America, Iron Man and Spider-Man are still popular in the US, the Chinese, Japanese and Korean screens are dominated by young actors.

If you go back a few decades, americans themselves might not have imagined how successful their cultural reinvention of Japan would be.

What are their idols like? Let's look at this video:

Like CAI Xukun this flow of fresh meat to acting acting, singing skills singing skills do not understand why suddenly fire? Who on earth is worshipping them?

Fan Chengcheng, fan Bingbing's younger brother, received 4.8 million views overnight for a paid selfie on his Micro blog. It can be seen that there are tens of thousands of Naocan fans behind each of these bitchies.

In the eyes of some fans, masculinity is just another word for vulgarity and brutality. They only know the pursuit of so-called "fashion, grade", the pursuit of the so-called exquisite life, do a quiet beautiful man, gradually forget that a real man should be indomitable.

A person wants to pursue the weak, that is his freedom, but once "sissy" becomes the mainstream of society, it will swallow the blood of the nation. The whole nation would risk re-entering the Opium wars and languishing in humiliation.

The transformation of China's womanhood fits into the CIA's strategy:

The CENTRAL Intelligence Agency of the United States formulated the ten Commandments, a guiding implementation plan for westernization, division and division of the new China and subversion of the Communist Party of China. After falling into the trap of the United States, these countries became weak states and even fell into war and destitution, which was the result the United States expected. Articles 2 and 3 read as follows:

Second, we must do everything possible to spread the word, including movies, books, television, radio waves... And the spread of new religions. As long as they aspire to the way we dress, feed, house, travel, entertain and educate, that's half the battle.

Third, they must divert the attention of their youth from the government-centered tradition. Focus their minds on sports shows, pornography, pleasures, games, criminal movies, and religious superstitions.

Liang Qichao said that when young people are strong, China is strong. If a country and a nation, boys more toward the feminine direction of development, then will bring the whole nation spirit.

The us plot to remake Japan with womanly culture has already affected China

Since ancient times, the Chinese people have advocated masculinity and warrior spirit. Today's China is so vast and abundant, because for thousands of years, our ancestors kept forging ahead and made contributions outside the region, so that our Chinese nation established the largest country in the East.

But in recent years, so-called "fresh meat" of all kinds has been filling the big screen, becoming the "new rich" on social media. Chinese aesthetics have changed, and many young people worship such "sissy" women. But all of this, it is very likely the United States cia secretly under the trap!

First, the culture of sissy gradually prevails

In the Han Dynasty, Emperor Wudi launched a comprehensive counterattack against the Huns. General Wei Qing and Huo Qubing drove for thousands of miles, giving the Huns a devastating blow. Since then, the Han Dynasty has stood at the top of the world with its greatest momentum!

A sissy culture doesn't make history

After that, the Tang Dynasty also had a strong wind of military, annihilating the east and west Turks, crusade against Xue Yantuo, the expedition to Korea, so that the prestige of the Tang dynasty spread today. It can be said that the martial spirit is often the source of national power, and today China can have a vast territory, it is by virtue of this spirit.

But in recent years, more and more "little fresh meat" has flooded the Internet, newspapers and TV screens. These handsome, young men, over the age of 18, all call themselves "boys" rather than men. As they win the attention and admiration of young people, Chinese people's notions of how men should look and behave are also changing.

It may not be fair to equate "fresh meat" with "sissy," but there is nothing masculine or feminine about them. If the masses get used to this fashion, the martial spirit of the Chinese people may gradually die out.

Some people may think that this is a trend in the development of a pluralistic society. In contrast, in western countries, no young meat has become the public idol, "tough guy" is still the mainstream of the public worship object. It's safe to say that girly culture thrives only in East Asia.

Why are there no such cultural trends in more diverse Western countries? In fact, the root of all this comes from the United States, the CIA of the United States, deliberately let Japan have the phenomenon of male star feminization, and China is affected by this trend!

Second, The United States uses the feminine culture to reshape Japan

After World War II, Japan became a virtual puppet of the United States, but the memory of its brutal soldiers in the Pacific still makes Americans shudder. The transformation of Japan's national character becomes the key to whether the United States can completely control Japan.

The CIA racked their brains and came up with a solution. With the gradual introduction of television into every household, actors and actresses have become popular idols. A campaign to reduce the masculinity of Japanese society as a whole and to make it more "docile" could be made.

And what changed the whole masculinity of Japanese society was an important man named Johnny Kitagawa. He grew up in the United States and has an American passport. Although Kitagawa looks Japanese, he is loyal to the Americans as a translator for the U.S. army.

In the 1980s, Kitagawa suddenly founded an entertainment company, Jaynes & Associates. The company's first group, its first show, was financed by the U.S. military. Kitagawa discovered many good-looking young men, who quickly became popular and became a new force in the entertainment industry.

In 1995, a Japanese cosmetics brand invited the popular male star Takuya Kimura to shoot lipstick ads. Kimura Takuya sexy smudging and gentle eyes, in The Japanese women caused a strong shock, this lipstick in two months sold 3 million!

Later, this feminine culture spread to South Korea, where SM companies imitated The Japanese way of making stars, looking for comely and feminine boys everywhere. In 1996, the South Korean boy band H.O.T debuted and became so successful that other entertainment companies imitated it. In the end, all South Korean boy bands are the same thing -- delicate, effeminate, known as sissy. The trend has spread to China as Chinese trainees at South Korean entertainment companies return home. Chinese local entertainment companies, recognizing the business opportunity, also began to launch a large number of niang idols, their packaging methods completely copied South Korea and Japan. At this point, Japan and South Korea screen, gradually occupied by small fresh meat!

Third, the female sex culture should be vigilant

If we go back a few decades, perhaps even Americans themselves did not think that their cultural transformation of Japan would be so successful that it could even affect the eastern powers.

The toughness of the Chinese soldiers

The CIA has what are called ten Commandments, of which number two and three read:

2, to do everything possible to do a good job of communication, including movies, books, television, as long as they look forward to our clothing, food, housing, travel, entertainment and education, is half the battle.

3. Divert the attention of their youth from tradition and concentrate their minds on sports shows, pleasures, games, entertaining films, etc.

A nation without martial spirit is bound to be submerged by external forces; A nation without a martial spirit will surely lag behind The Times. The prevalence of sissy culture greatly affects young people, and we need to be vigilant!