Another Hollywood movie, "Master and Commander", has recently been showing in Shanghai cinemas, starring Russell Crowe, who must be eyeing his chances in the upcoming Oscar awards.
Large amounts of investment have surely brought about some striking effects to impress the audience, while covering the fact that this is an ordinary film.
Hollywood movies are more or less inclined to present the audience with a changeless pattern, disguised under different kinds of garnishings.
However, I was very keen on Hollywood movies (which were more easy to find in theatres and TV channels) until, several years ago when I gained access to European and Japanese films. Then I discovered that movies could be in other styles.
It's not a question of which ones are better, but rather about the fact that people in this society are starting to have the chance to know more about different aspects of the world.
To people of my father's generation in China, who were born around 1949, most - or maybe the only - movies were from the former Soviet Union, ally of China at that time. They learnt Russian, read Russian novels and sang Russian songs.
While for us, English has taken the place of Russian and we have learnt more about US and British culture in the process of language learning, especially the US variety. Sometimes in our mind, we mistook what we knew about Americans to be the customs of all foreigners.
But then I found that not all foreigners felt comfortable being called by their given name at first meeting, as Americans do. They preferred to be greeted as Mr. or Ms.. And not all foreigners regularly eat fast food, as Americans do.
As China gets ever more open to the world, people here can also get greater access to the world in return.
The media and entertainment business have a great effect on these changes, since they are among the windows onto different cultures.
Every other year, Shanghai has an international film festival, at which US films are not the most popular ones. The locals are more willing to watch those from Iceland or Denmark, totally strange cultures.
Pirated DVDs, to some extent, have given people a wider selection of movies from various places. Meanwhile, the Internet has also helped in this respect.
This increased access to the world is surely a good thing for most Chinese, as long as we are not losing too many of our traditions, which would mean losing our specialness.
Primary schools used to have Chinese calligraphy and kungfu classes for their pupils, but now parents are more willing to let their kids learn to play the piano, the violin or baseball.
It's surely a matter of personal choice whether teenagers dye their hair in very light colours as Japanese or Koreans do and wear hip-hop clothes. This is nothing to be worried about, as long as we always make sure that in our inner-most being there are still some Chinese things left.
starcomment@yahoo.com
