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Watching 2012 in China

by Nora Chute | November 22, 2009 9:47 AM
3 Comments

Thompson on Hollywood
On opposite sides of the world, my 20-year-old college student daughter Nora and I both enjoyed 2012, which was more fun than I was expecting. Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) crafted a truly global movie, starting off in a mine shaft in India and proceeding to blow up Yellowstone National Park and destroy the world's most revered monuments, from the White House and The Vatican's Sistine Chapel to Brazil's Christ The Redeemer. (Critics were mixed.) After its second weekend, the utterly implausible disaster E-ride has already racked up $268-million worldwide. "#1 Movie in the World!" reads the LATimes ad headline.

Nora, studying abroad in Kunming, China, went to see 2012 on the day it opened all over the world. (The other western movie playing there now is Michael Jackson's This is It.) She got a kick out of watching the wreckage of her home town Los Angeles, which slides into the Pacific. Here's her report on watching 2012 in China:

The movie was 40 kuai to get into on a Friday night, or about $5.50 U.S., or we could have decided to buy the DVD for 10 kuai, $1.50, at one of my neighborhood’s several DVD shops. I was the only foreigner in the theater because I went with one of my best Chinese friends, Xiao Zhou, who speaks great English, and this was crucial because when the movie broke into Tibetan and French I needed her to quickly read the Chinese subtitles and tell me what was happening. She turned to me at one point in the movie and said, “This is so cool! First they destroy your hometown and then everyone flees to my home country to be rescued!”

Everyone cheered at the moment when John Cusak opens the map and declares that they’re going to China. I guess the idea was that they were fleeing to the highest point in the world, the Himalayas, and they couldn’t very well have them fleeing to Tibet so they decided on Western Sichuan. It was interesting, they barely ever actually speak Chinese in the movie, it’s all Tibetan, but that didn’t seem to stop the audience from loving it. When Danny Glover as the president came on the guy next to me said, “Oh! Ao Ba Ma (奥巴马),” Obama in Chinese.


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3 Comments

  • kermode | December 13, 2009 12:18 AMReply

    Funny, I find it strangely delightful that the Chinese so love 2012 :)

  • rgm | November 24, 2009 3:40 AMReply

    Good for Nora, she has inherited the writing gene

  • Xu | November 23, 2009 5:30 AMReply

    Hi, Anne, Your daughter is paying extra fee for the DVDs, we could get them as low as 7 yuan in China Shame on me for the supporting of piracy, but that's the only way I could get in touch with all those classic cinemas.

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