Double, double toil and trouble;
fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Yes, once again Denise Chong, that best-selling author and fellow Canuck, stirs the ol’ hot pot again with her latest snipe at Zhongnanhai’s corrupt geriatric set over their handling of the whole so-called “6-4 Incident.” Enter her latest smashing volley, Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship.

Recounted through the heartfelt memories of Lu Decheng, the intellectually dullest of the trio of wayward Liuyangers who one-timed oil paint-filled egg shells from a local jian bing stand at the Forbidden City’s omnipresent portrait of the Great Helmsman, Chong spins a vivid tour-de-force tale depicting the aftermath of their arrest and subsequent incarceration in the dying days of the late-’80s student democracy movement.

During the spring of what would become that fateful ‘89 year, Lu along with his friends Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue were caught up in the fervor of ousting the Party leadership once and for all. They became drunk on the idea of setting the People’s Republic’s sails firmly on a course for integration with the West along with the abolition of China’s corrupt glad-handing society.

Heeding the poetic words of student leader, Uighur activist Wu’er Kaixi, the “sun shining off of Mao’s portrait was so bright that the people couldn’t open their eyes to what was going on around them.” Hopping on the overnight choo-choo via Changsha, the three impressionable young cats — caught up in the inexorable flow of thousands from all across the nation descending on Beijing (or Peking as it was still then known in the West, still stuck in Wade-Giles mode) — somehow found themselves in the thick of it at the center of T-Bone Square, rocking it on ’til the break of dawn against the Big Bad Red Machine.

Chong employs a nifty literary technique shifting back and forth between what was and what is, flashbacking to our impressionable ones’ preparations as they eagerly anticipate traveling north to the capital, matched against their deep-seated doubts about what they were monumentally about to do. The portrait vandalizing incident was only an afterthought, can you believe it?

I found the most harrowing portions of this book — quite expectedly — to transpire inside the jail where the three were sentenced to life imprisonment for defacing the People’s Property. A couple of the guards sympathized with their cause, while many others were tasked with the deplorable job of smashing their willful spirits and crushing the resistance out of them via a daily slew of humiliation, physical abuse, and in several cases, unmitigated torture. Their prison authorities somehow remained convinced that they’d succeed in luring the young men, especially the brilliant Zhijian, from of their “counter-revolutionary” paths, by inculcating in them the values of Mao’s Homo Sineticus, the “ideal” modern Chinese super-ego.

Decheng, a bus mechanic and driver by trade, was the least educated of the bunch at the outset. His journey is magnificent because his life changes by 180-degrees by story’s end. Dongyue, youngest and most impressionable, was a mere wet-behind-the-ears type at the crime’s time, a mere teenager. Zhijian was the one with all the bright ideas and coffee house theories, the one who read all the European classics, and the one who became most disillusioned by the end thanks to the students’ perfidy in refusing to come to the three’s aid by secreting them away from the lurking plainclothes PSB goons at the time, instead offering them up like sacrificial lambs.

Given that Decheng was our narrative vessel in Egg On Mao, we came to learn of the harshness of the boys’ prison conditions through his arduous journey in his own words. As he arrived at the stark realization that the West was absolutely powerless (or unwilling?) to convince the PRC’s Party higher-ups to spring him and his mates from the cavernous clink, Decheng set out to improve his skills and brain power while living out the typical prison double life.

Compelled to undergo the routine Maoist ideological indoctrination and daily hammering of Marxist-Leninist Thought, Decheng would mechanically nod his noodle during classes, only to “raid” the prison library later in the evenings to feast his eyes on anything he could get his meat hooks on: well-thumbed, outdated tomes on all manner of Western theory and thought — all in English which the guards couldn’t read — realizing that eventually his salvation would come and he should be prepared for that eventuality. Guards would needle him for his seeming craziness; the mere sight of Decheng reading stuff that looked as if though it could maim, rather than educate, him elicited many giggles. In time, howe3ver, this strategy would prove ultimately successful, confounding the dastardly designs of the prison system.

By 1998, Decheng was a free man — first, gaining asylum in Canada, where Chong learned of his story.

There’s a lovely parallel story in this book, and that’s the love affair between Lu and his young bride Qiuping, a woman he eventually weds prior to performing the fateful deed.

Even before the first yolk is hurled at Mao’s grim, moled likeness, Decheng and Qiuping have birthed their first tot — a XX Chromosomal Child Unit. His subsequent imprisonment, despair, and eventual divorce from his wife who fears her man will never be released for the ignominy caused to the Party’s international image, is a touching counterpoint to the violence taking place within the prison compound’s walls. The brutal and repeated attempts by Decheng’s prison warders to destroy his rebellious soul do nothing to diminish his abiding passion for his wife and their oft-stated commitment to “never accept a divorce, neither in life nor in death.” When news of Qiuping’s request for a divorce trickles through to Decheng via a letter he receives from a guard, it momentarily sidelines him as he struggles to reason out the rationale for her irrational behavior. When she eventually remarries, it nearly slays him, though he soldiers on knowing that in the aftermath of Deng Xioaping’s October 1992 demise — the man responsible for approving the murderous actions by soldiers on the Square against their own citizens — changes may be soon afoot in the “peaceful” People’s Republic.

Author Chong was censured for this book in the PRC. No surprise there. While she doesn’t personally do any of the criticizing about the events which took place on T-Bone Square — nothing is couched in her own words save for her parting caustic remarks in the Epilogue and Acknowledgments — the mere fact that she’s chosen Lu Decheng as the vessel of her apparent disapproval with the septuagenarians inhabiting the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee have now branded her as a PRC persona non grata. She won’t be able to return now, though she likely made her peace with this reality the instant finger touched laptop keypad.

Given that she had a year and a half to contemplate her fate — the duration of all her interview sessions with Lu Decheng in Canada, where he now lives — this was a well-designed goal.

Why you should read this book, friends?

Egg on Mao was likely the first straightforward and direct account about the actions of the perpetrators of the portrait defacement, told in their own words. No third-party stuff here, folks, or PRC spin-meistering for our ravenous Western investigative appetites.

Also, for those of you late-arriving (and young) Western stragglers who are convinced that TAM was a student-lead and directed protest crushed by the heavy-handed Chinese state apparatus, complete organized student hierarchies and chains of command on T-Bone Square itself, you’ll be shocked to discover that chaos was more the order of the day during those fateful two months. Chong does well to highlight this through the authentic recollections of Lu himself. Good job.

At 249pp, your bottom-line cost to purchase this brand new is just a few cents shy of a short paper route (wink, wink). The copy isn’t crafted to wallop you over the noggin from its apparent brilliance, and Chong, for lack of a better term, “keeps it real.”

This is a mean-slugging account of a very unusual time in China, an era when things were still in flux and the regime was deathly afraid of losing its balls years before Hu Jintao’s policy of China’s “harmonious rise” was even promulgated. I polished the book off on the trusty exercise bike over the course of a few days, wagging my head in several spots as I made my way through in astonishment, careful not to permit sweat droplets to damage its pristine acid-free (and lovely-smelling) pages. Cautious, as well, was I to ensure that my neighbors didn’t think I was becoming a closet Maoist, what with the Chairman’s identifiable head on its cover, even if it was smeared in a cocktail of egg and paint goo.

If you’ve already read the book and digged it hard, let us know.

If you haven’t caught it yet, it’s not the sort of “China book” that will make you dizzy-busy (so busy, you’re dizzy) from its girth and heft. ;-) Try it, Mikey, you’ll like it. I promise.

And, oh yeah…my name is Adam Daniel Mezei and thanks again for tuning in.

Love,
ADM

ps I’m in search of a new “China book,” friends, so if you’ve got any suggestions for me — which I promise to subsequently review — kindly let me know.

huxia juqui

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Related Posts:

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  Review of Richard Baum’s China Watcher

  Quickly becoming a 2010 must-read, chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Richard Baum’s “China Watcher”–a decidedly non-scholarly work of non-fiction for the Zhongguotong (China Hand) and layman alike.

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  June 4, 1989: Where Were You? What Were You Doing?

  Tiananmen Square June 4th, 1989: Where were you? How old were you? What were you doing? How did you feel? What did you do afterward? What have you done since?

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  The Party: The Secret World Of China’s Communist Rulers

  Book review of the banned book by Richard McGregor that talks about the Chinese Communist Party. What did McGregor write that earned the ire of the Chinese censors? Point-by-point summary of what to expect when you get yourself a copy (if you don’t get arrested for buying it).

CATNAPPING (2009, feature, IndieFlix, runtime: 86 mins., director: Thorsten Chris Gritschke, trailer)

It’s not often I watch a European movie which has the capacity to crossover into the film-going mainstream. You know, a film that tells a story appealing not only to an overly-ponderous serious European crowd, but one which is willing to pony up real money to give the film a shot of breaking even and — G.od forbid — making a profit at the box office.

Yet Thomas Chris Gritschke‘s Catnapping is one clever little tale, and his protagonist Otto, played convincingly and hilariously by American actor Ian Lyons, is a leading anti-hero all of us can somehow relate to.

Set bizarrely in Brussels, Belgium, Europe’s sleepy capital with the decidedly infamous reputation for being Europe’s most mind-numbingly boring city, Otto is set to kickstart a ho-hum internship with his uncle Frank’s (played by the deadpanning Ted Fletcher) video-production company, StarVision. This is Otto’s big break into the local Belgian industrial video market. But poor Otto is a dude without a mission: early on, we’re left wondering why the hell he’s even in this do-nothing town in the first instance, and moreover, what exactly does he plan to do with this idiotic job, a position he appears completely unqualified for although no one seems to notice, least of all Frank?

Otto is a dreamer, but an idle one. For now, he’s content to merely coast along, sailing under the radar, happy to humor Frank during their joint editing sessions as the latter waxes poetically about the old days when he didn’t have to bust his butt to earn his daily nut. Now, as Franks recounts, SuperVision has to work twice as hard to land a marketing account, which is the reason why he’s decided to inject fresh talent in this moribund operation. Ah, so that’s why Otto’s here. Now it all makes sense. Or does it..?

Given that Otto has zero marketable skills, save for spinning some mighty convicing yarns and fibbing the pants off of everyone, can this be the end of our movie? Hardly.

Stuffed at the office and totally clusterfucked in his personal life, Otto dragoons his childhood buddy Lars (Ran Yaniv) into his plan to shoot and cut “the best industrial video ever!” O. cooks up a cockamamie scheme to break into Frank’s Fort Knox-like office to steal a mayonnaise-producing machine that promises to grant him and Lars precisely the corporate advantage they need to kickstart the money flow at the newly christened Atomium Productions. Yet the moment Otto dons his black balaclava and cracks the seal on Frank’s door with his crowbar is the very instant all hell breaks loose in Catnapping.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, and during one of his frequent jaunts into town looking for a bit of excitement in this one-horse town, Otto takes notice of Maria (played by the ultra-charismatic Valérie Muzzi), an underachieving “Madame Pi-Pi” (Belgian washroom attendant) harboring distant dreams of becoming a sophisticated airline stewardess. Fed up with the pittance she earns cleaning human waste off of the latrines, she’s in desperate need of a new gig. Otto has the eye for her so he proceeds to do everything in his power, short of an outright bribe, during his subsequent visits to the toilet to concince her to go out with him. Yet Maria isn’t even budging. In fact, she couldn’t care less! So bribes her (yep!) with the promise of a sweet job offer as he overhears how Frank’s in search of additional hands-on-deck to help SuperVision process their new overflow after fortuitiously landing several hot accounts. When Maria hammers her interview, Otto’s apparently in like Flynn and yet another step in his plan falls into place. Or does it…?

Out of the blue, Frank shocks Otto with the recorded evidence of Otto’s earlier vandalism. Rather than can him on the spot, Frank oddly congratulates his nephew for his brilliant business coup in helping to land one of Frank’s more recalcitrant clients. Not knowing how exactly to react, Otto, aghast, thanks his uncle profusely, vowing to never attempt similar shenanigans again after fobbing Frank off on some silly excuse about testing the security procedures at the office. Frank buys it.

Back and forth, one thing after another, and Otto, in time, succeeds in doing what he does best, which is totally screw up. In short order, he loses his job at SuperVision, compromises his long-standing friendship with Lars after betraying his trust during one of their jobs, and finally destroys any chance he has whatsoever with Maria following a pair of otherwise promising passionate dates over drinks and sultry conversation. Unable to sink any lower, O. begs the assistance of his pot-smoking (and cuckolded) detective friend Karl (the all-too-funny Stefan Sattler) for some work to shatter his bordeom. Karl quickly puts Otto to work surveiling his ex-wife, while Otto uses this opportunity to enact another plan he has in mind, which is to win Maria back and regain his respectability with her, Lars, and Frank.

As for how he fares in this mission, well, that’s what you’ll have to catch the movie for.

What I enjoyed about this film?

Catnapping was unique in that it marked the first time in a while I’ve seen an all-European non-mainstream picture that I didn’t have the sudden urge to want to flip right off after being cheesed right off. The dialogues were snappy and well-penned and I, for one, appreciated the combination of European actors playing opposite American actors in a casting selection that’s not often attempted on the Continent. When’s the last time European actors were permitted to plainly be and sound just like themselves when starring opposite American ones? Think back now, really…

Gritschke does such a marvelous job with his casting that we’re locked into this story from the get-go. The actors do a stellar job in selling us on the plot, one which hardly seems contrived, and — like I said — rare in its compellingness for a European indie flick.

I found both Stefan Sattler and Valérie Muzzi to be extraordinary underdog finds who deserve a chance to portray roles in even larger productions. Sattler’s asides as Karl were so typically phlegmatically Belgian French — as per my personal experience — that I couldn’t help but admire him. Muzzi possessed that hard to find quality of being totally impossible to peg: where is this girl from? What does she sound like? And, haven’t I seen her before? As Maria, Muzzi was more than the girl-next-door and it’s so clear why Otto falls for her like a blathering fool. She’s so lovely and what a casting score for Gritschke.

After 86 minutes of viewing, the Brussels of Catnapping seems so much more beautiful than the city I’d personally experienced many years ago, and therein lies this film’s magic.

Another sensational IndieFlix find.

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Ever wonder what happens to your wayward soul when you die? Many do, but since no one came back to tell us, the concept of the afterlife remains enshrouded in a thick impenetrable fog.

Filmmaker Boris Kievsky seems to have a pretty good idea, though, and shares with us his vision of the proverbial Heaven or Hell as part of his latest cut, Purgatory Inc., starring acting chameleon Konstantin Lavysh across from “straight man” Patrick Cavanaugh.

The film is a tongue-in-cheek dose of smart-as-hell comedy, kitted out with the one-liners to prove it. Yet again, as he’d done in Unbreaking Up, we’re served up another deeply meaningful story line with compelling dialogues that really gets us thinking about our personal lives and place in the world.

In the film, the biblical in-between of “Purgatory” has been recast in the role of a no-nonsense business concern, Purgatory Inc. Purgatory here has the gravitas and solemnity of a buttoned-down insurance adjuster’s office at the turn of the century. Incoming souls, like Cavanaugh’s hapless Christopher McNamee, are”processed, not judged,” while the firm’s “employees,” like Lavysh’s Clerk, are quick to inform us that mere plebes like him are evaluated for the volume of souls they’re able to process through Heaven or Hell. Either way, it hardly matters to the shady powers that be, so long as there’s brisk traffic through the door leading to “the remainder of eternal non-corporeal existence.”

Co-leads Lavysh and Cavanaugh exude great on-screen sympatico, playing marvelously off each other’s particular shtick. Lavysh, as Clerk, is a straight-laced dandy bored stiff with his thankless paper-pushing desk job which he mans around the clock. His boss — an ominous figure we never discover the true identity of though strangely resembling the Devil — is ever-vigilant, keeping Purgatory Inc.’s factory wheels spinning.

In keeping with the storied Purgatory’s apparent indeterminate nature, a soul’s “personnel file” is always left open for re-interpretation. Religious affiliation, while vitally important as a self-identification device during corporeal existence on earth, is a fluid concept during Purgatory’s transitional phase. The Clerk tells us, how, with the mighty stroke of a pen and a soul’s full acquiescence, Catholics can instantly be remade into Protestants, changing theirs (and their family’s) ultimate destinies forever…for a price, of course. I’ll resist revealing the story twist, because it’s just about the cleverest thing about this sweet piece of brilliant thought-provocation.

Here’s the trailer:



Purgatory, Inc. stirs up a hornet’s nest of questions about the nature of faith and human beings’ dogged determination to live out the tenets organized religion’s dogma in the face of a deeply uncertain future or afterlife. If the fabled Purgatory is really as much of a bazaar as Kievsky depicts it to be, I mean, what’s the point?

Pascal’s Wager comes to mind: “If I disbelieve and there is indeed an afterlife, I lose. But if I believe and there isn’t, in fact, this ‘Heaven,’ what I have lost?”

Again, for a short, Purgatory Inc. packs a cognitive wallop. Though I wouldn’t expect anything less from the acid pen Boris Kievsky, a master cinematic conjurer if there ever was one in Hollywood.

If you haven’t yet seen Kievsky’s first work, Unbreaking Up, starring Holt Boggs and Nina Avetisova, it’s right here.

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Jon “The DIY Guy” Reiss recently came out with his second update to his DIY Film Marketing & Distribution Primer: TOTBO (Think Outside the Box Office). It’s piping hot-off-the-press and I just had a chance to cover it.

Here’s an inventory of what’s included in this smashing new cut:

• 2 new online grassroots networks.
• 1 new hybrid distribution entity.
• 1 new content aggregator.
• 1 new DRM (digital rights management) outfit.
• 3 new appendices: 1) The “TOTBO Manifesto,” 2) information on the brand-spanking new UltimateFilmGuides.com, and 3) the “TOTBO Workshops.”

So I thought I’d summarize the content of the “Manifesto” portion since if you’re anything of a Reiss fan (the “Pieces,” as in Reese‘s?)

you’ll likely have heard Jon lecturing about these things in many different places (egs. interviews, blogs, the book).

Declaration #1) Know your film/know yourself:

DIY distribution is indeed a labor of love, but remember that the emphasis is always be on the word, “labor.” If you’re scarcely prepared to slog your way through the daily grind of self-distributing your film, you might want to delegate the job to someone else or reconsider your film’s priorities.

Declaration #2) Change your attitude toward marketing:

You’re an indie filmmaker who loves the art of making moving pictures but absolutely despises the business side of filmmaking? Well then, it’s time to change your attitude. Welcome to the new era!

Declaration #3) Determine your audiences and how to reach them from inception:

Bad news: your target audience isn’t simply “all film-goers in general.” Wrong answer! Good news: your fans are indeed out there, you just have to go out there and find them. Michelangelo’s dictum here applies: “The statue was already in the marble. I just had to liberate it.” Sorry, a loose paraphrasing from the original Florentine.

Declaration #4) When you have finished your film, you are half done:

Closely related to Declaration#1: always make sure to leave a significant portion of the budget for P&A, marketing, and distribution. Significant as in 50%! Most filmmakers are usually elated to have reached the post-post-production “finish line,” but the reality is that when your film’s “in the can,” your work’s just begun. Welcome to what Reiss calls “the new 50/50.” What’s the new 50/50? Google it.

Declaration #5) We must take back the theatrical experience and redefine it as live/event theatrical:

Indie filmmakers, especially, says Reiss, must stop being so doctrinaire about the theatrical experience! Classically-defined, this is what’s known in distribution circles as “four-walling” it. From now on, your new theatrical experience should be defined like so: any screening event which is conducted in front of a live audience. Period. So, yeah, that horror screening you caught the other night at your local graveyard? Yep. Theatrical experience. Having fun yet?

Declaration #6) Create products people want to buy:

The relationship with your audience doesn’t cease when the credits roll. New marketing techniques like transmedia: storytelling extensions via diverse electronic media, will ensure that your audience keeps their memorable experience in their front of mind awareness. For example: rather than screen your picture with its original soundtrack, how about inviting your actors to the next live event and have them read their dialogues live? You heard it here first!

Declaration #7) Digital rights are a minefield — be careful:

DRM is a very tricky area because the DRM field is in constant flux. But the key thing to remember here is this: why give away rights you don’t have to surrender?! Distributors and content -aggregators will always (craftily) attempt to lock down as many rights on your film and ancillary products as possible. That’s just what they do. Makes them who they are. But the truth is that most of them have no clue how to exploit (read: market and sell) your rights profitably, so why should you give them up in the first place? Always be like Scrooge when it comes to DRM!

Declaration #8) Entertainment companies must move beyond old ways of doing business:

Distribution companies and festivals should stop gouging the aspiring talent by penalizing them for mistakes. We’ve already mentioned how the field is in constant flux and how — as Reiss mentioned — staying on top of everything is a right chore. Reiss is not saying companies should tolerate this, but they shouldn’t be so damn cruel, either. Transparency is the “new normal.” Distribution companies which don’t act in good faith will be throttled by the twittersphere and blogosphere. Swindlers and sheysters, your days are numbered!

Declaration #9) Explore new ways to tell stories:

A feature film or documentary is not the only way to tell a tale. Skin a cat by thinking mobile. Think interactive. Think product extensions. Get inspiration from British crimewriter Val McDermid‘s famous Mini Cooper S Barcelona scavenger hunt from 2002-3 as a direct extension of her Mini Cooper S crime novel packaged with Fast Company magazine, a full-on transmedia campaign launched by Mini well before the term transmedia was existed!

Declaration #10) We must support each other as a community:

Reiss talks about the creation of his Ultimate Film Guides as a way to give back to a community that’s nurtured him from his filmmaking inception. It’s not about hoarding in the indie scene, folks. It’s really not. Others will help you shoot stuff. They’ll also help you market your stuff. And they’ll even talk you and your picture’s virtues up online when the time comes. But if you spurn them…

TOTBO‘s appendices and updates are only available to purchasers who get their copy from the TOTBO online store. This isn’t a cash grab as much as it’s your best way of getting full-time TOTBO email support, establishing a relationship with Reiss and his staff, and keeping abreast of all the happenings in the world of DIY/DIWO/DIFY. Just sayin’…

Full disclosure alert: I am not in the employ of Jon Reiss. Jon Reiss did not pay me to say these things nor write this blog. I have also purchased all my TOTBO books and materials independently. However, I do admire Jon Reiss for his methodologies and what I’ve gained from his works, various speeches, lectures, and books. And if that’s a conflict-of-interest, well, I guess I’ll just have to live with it.

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DEAD CAT BOUNCE (2010, OpenFilm, feature short, runtime: 40 mins., director: Daric Gates):

What if you were mysteriously given the key to fame, fortune, and riches with zero accountability to anyone, including your boss?

Would you take the key? Would you cheat? Would you dive in for the filthy lucre and disregard all possible consequences? Or would you think twice?

Dead Cat Bounce is a modern-day techie morality tale about exactly that. Atlas (Joshua Durkin) and Jackson (Nathan Marlow) are a pair of stock trading buds frittering away their careers in front of their ‘puters. In their own words, they’re “bottom-feeding,” whiling away their precious hours until pension time, when, as Atlas deadpans, “their pension will be worth half of their present take-home pay.” Ugh!

Jackson’s marriage is on the skids after his house was put up for foreclosure by the greedy banks, part of the sudden shockwave of 50% of foreclosed homes during 2008′s Great Crash. His wife, Gina (Christina Iannuzzi), furious with her husband’s apparent lack of initiative and breadwinning potential, takes her leave — along with their child — for greener pastures. Atlas, the perennial bachelor and skirt chaser, tries to cheer Jackson up during a few rounds at the driving range. But it does little to brighten Jackson’s lowly spirits.

While puttering around in their golf cart, an unnamed middle-aged character intercepts Atlas to share with him some information — The Code — which promises to change his and Jackson’s professional lives for all time. As the man hands it over, he asks Atlas if “can feel the weight?” Huh?

For now, Atlas can’t grasp the magnitude of what just happened until he reasons it out for himself the next morning over java: if he somehow arranges the series of digits on the New York Times‘ front page, it predicts the precise closing volume of the Dow Jones, effectively making Atlas and his clients wealthy beyond their wildest imaginations. We all know what Atlas is up to…

In time, he brings Jackson in on the scam, reassuring his wingman that this might be the very thing to convince Gina to return and make him a happy husband once again. Jackson listens, though reluctantly, knowing full well that a previous employee at their firm who attempted something strikingly similar ended up in a pool of his own blood after blowing his brains out one fine morning. Jackson is clearly worried about Atlas’ flagrant disregard for the all-too-apparent consequences, of which, Jackson notes, there can be many. Though Atlas’ aloofness is unsettling in the extreme, Jackson eventually caves into Atlas’ dirty deed.

As the hundreds of thousands begin flowing in, the cocksure Atlas — living the life of Riley along with Jackson at some of L.A.’s finest night spots — is beyond convinced that the two of them are “invincible.” Needless to say, all is not kosher.

Atlas is warned several times by faceless forces to get the hell out of the grand game, but he disregards them all and carries on without a care in the world, keeping Jackson in the dark. With their futures ostensibly set in stone, there’s nothing left for this dynamic duo to do but rake in the bountiful haul. That is, until the Powers That Be decide that enough is simply enough and put an end to Atlas’ juvenile charade…

Naturally, the pain hardly stops there, but you’ll just have to catch it in its entirety for yourself. But here’s the trailer, as a sneak preview:



What I enjoyed thoroughly about DCB?

• the writing: while Joshua J. Durkin (Atlas) acted in the same film he wrote, this does little to diminish the deep impact of this story. Just as I’d mentioned in my earlier review of Person of Interest, when the indie writer is the same person as the indie protagonist, who better than that indie scribe to portray his/her lead actor faithfully? This thriller genre all the way, but with a twist. These films are rarely easy to pull off, given how it’s always a challenge to get over audiences’ initial “been there, done that” response. Suffice it to say that Gates, Durkin, and Marlow creatively overcame the crowd’s dissonance in DCB.
• length: 40 minutes for a short is dangerously close to feature territory, but since the story was so engaging it hardly mattered. Like a B-52 bomber, Durkin’s narrative needed a long take-off strip. In fact, Durkin & Gates could have even chucked a few additional plot wrinkles in the mix, but by then they’d have banked themselves out of the competition.
• production value: it never ceases to amaze me how L.A. indies can wrangle down so many key contacts into mounting productions of such tremendously high value. Major kudos to Daric Gates and his loyal posse for making DCB a reality.

And in case you’re wondering how I found out about this film in the first instance? None other than through Karen Worden and David Brainin‘s Film Courage YouTube Channel. Their featured interview with Daric Gates from the HollyShorts festival earned a PMD-For-Hire review.

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UNBREAKING UP (2009, Inmoo.com, short, duration: 13:31, director: Boris Kievsky, watch the trailer here):

We’ve all been there before: manipulative, agonizing, hair-tearing relationships. We all have our share of battle scars, don’t we?

Unbreaking Up is the story of how Alex (Holt Boggs) and Sasha (Nina Avetisova) have dealt with theirs.

Alex, computer programmer by day and art enthusiast by night, is seeking to rekindle his flame with Sasha — an art student in her own right and Alex’s former partner. He thinks that by enjoying a local art exhibit together, they can put the past behind them. As Alex anxiously awaits the final quarter-hour to elapse before Sasha waltzes in the door — knocking back more than a few snifters of moonshine — he contemplates the umpteen ways he might launch into his heartfelt apology.

Iterating like a computer subroutine, our man visualizes the many avenues he might go down in order to correct his many wrongs. Alex seems committed to beseeching Sasha’s forgiveness and reconciling, and his anxiety proves it.

But none of the apologies he envisions are plausible. Alex knows only too well that Sasha is likely going to see through them all. So he “erases” and “restarts” after each failed attempt, confident that in the frantic moments left he’ll land on just the right words.

Alex’s vivid imaginings become full-blown daydream-like hallucinations; the deeper he delves into his thoughts, the faster his heart thumps. In the sedateness of our art gallery, Alex is starting to become a nuisance to the remaining patrons. Man, does this guy have a ton of issues! But which issues? As the plot thickens, we’re beginning to get a better idea…

As he hacks through his angst in the time remaining, Alex rehashes his and Sasha’s would-be reunion to the point where he actually intimidates himself. Frightened at the likely outcome of this ploy, Alex freaks out, just as the flesh and blood — not imagined — Sasha arrives at the venue…

What I enjoyed most about this short:

• casting: Kudos to Boris Kievsky for pairing these two talents together who, I felt, shared tremendous on-screen chemistry. Yum! Avetisova and Boggs will almost make you regret that Unnbreaking Up didn’t last longer than its sub-15 minutes, only to be there in the room when Alex and Sasha’s iron walls come crashing down and reality spills forth. The actors looked marvelous opposite each other and I encourage Kievsky to bring them back for a longer project. Avetisova to Kievsky as Thurman is to Tarantino, kinda thing. Odd thing was that I thought Holt Boggs was actually Kievsky at the start, and — scratching my head — I was complimenting Boggs in his mind on his flawless American accent. Wow! Imagine if Boggs worked on his Russian accent? A film opposite Avetisova in her native tongue with Kievsky at the helm? Hey, sports fans, it ain’t impossible! Cute character names, too: Sasha (for both males and females) is actually the diminutive for Alexander/Alexandar in Russian, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovakian, etc. and all the Slavic saints, baby. Like I said, Alex and Sasha were two sides of a coin in more ways that one.

• dialogue as authentic as it gets: these lines could have been uttered by anyone. What Alex was regretting and what Sasha was traumatized about were as authentic a bunch of emotions as any. We really have it in for Alex by the end of this short. And we feel Sasha’s pain as well. Not easy to do in under fifteen minutes, friends.
• creative editing and CG effects: Schasine Valentine‘s crisp edit was unique for a film of such minuscule duration. You’ll enjoy when Alex “restarts” his various apologies, and how Nina Avetisova seems to appear out of thin air during each go. Also, the clock ticks in a novel way in Unbreaking Up. Check it out in the trailer.

Now, if that’s enough to whet your appetite, I present the full short:

Programmer Alex regrets breaking up with dancer Sasha. He’s invited her to an art show with every intention of winning her back. Showing up for their ‘just friends’ date 15 minutes early, Alex is determined to debug the situation and figure out what he has to say to undo their breakup. What he’s not prepared for is dealing with the issues underneath his actions. Can he admit his true faults, deal with his issues and figure out that conversation to ‘unbreak up’ all in 15 minutes, or will he have to abort his plan?

Short film by Boris Kievsky starring Holt Boggs, Nina Avetisova, Konstantin Lavysh, Yuri Lowenthal, Tara Platt
(c) Matter Door, 2008

• 

GARGOYLE (2009, IndieFlix, short, runtime: 25 mins., director: Kelsey Egan)

You stumble, you fall, but you’ve just got to get up.

If Kelsey Egan‘s Gargoyle was permeated by any sort of theme, this certainly would be it. A quality South African short about crime and ultimate retribution that takes place in the “new” South Africa.

Tara (played convincingly by Jessica Kaye) is an expatriate American educator at a Johannesburg-area middle school, Parkview Senior. Her Grade 7 class size is reflective of the multiracial mosaic which is South Africa’s population, boys and girls who listen eagerly to her enthusiastic descriptions of the beautiful landscapes to be found across their troubled country.

As luck would have it, Tara’s class is planning a short trip to one of these pristine wildnerness idylls, but the trip and its 1000 rand fee (approx. $140) are a problem for the young Vuyo, who lives under his older brother Themba’s roof, the family breadwinner and a part-time hood. When Vuyo arrives home one afternoon to ask Themba for the fee, he dismisses the trip and explodes when Vuyo petulantly insists by taunting him that “I never want to be like you!” Roughing up his kid brother, Themba stops short of outright striking the boy, but then realizes the folly of his outburst. There may indeed be truth in Vuyo’s words. His Robin Hood-like ways are beginning to take a greater toll on him than they do on his various victims.

Meanwhile, Tara is recovering from a vicious beating she received while exiting a local shop one evening.

Under cover of darkness, she was pistol whipped, then mugged, for her valuables by an African thug. When she shows up the next day to class battered and bruised, Vuyo gathers up the courage to ask her what happened. Not wanting to frighten her young charges, Tara fluffs it off as a mere car accident but Tara’s not kidding these seventh graders. They know only too well what most likely happened.

Yet Tara forges on.

Rather than submit to the criminals’ wishes,Tara makes a brave show of it and attends class — scarred and blackened — the very next day. She’s intent on fulfilling her promise to the kids that, despite its many faults and shortcomings, there is ample beauty to be found in the still-teething Rainbow Nation. You just have to go out and search for it.

Despite the thousands of assaults which occur each year in the new South Africa, Tara is one of the fortunate ones. She can be thankful that she’s still alive, and as we’ll soon discover, grateful that she eventually learns the identity of her assailant.

For a glimpse of the trailer, click here. And for Kelsey Egan‘s fulsome Director Statement, click here.

“Hip hop is a consciousness. A behavior. A way to view the world.”

With that bold statement from the sage mouth of KRS-One, filmmakers Sonali Aggarwal and Jonathan Lacocque‘s feature documentary, What Ever Happened to Hip Hop? begins.

The doc charts the evolution of the hip hop movement from its late 1970s origins — when it was dominated by the legendary likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Cool Herc and their various Bronx-area “block parties” — to the 1980s “West Coast-style” rap, to the 1990s “gangsta’ period,” all the way up until our present 21st-century Cristal-drinking, blingin’, gold teethin’, pimped-out era.

Featuring a practical who’s-who of the classical hip-hop era: KRS-One, Cashis, George Clinton, Steve Wallace, Jean Grae, Niki Giovanni, and many more, Aggarwal and Lacocque offer up a series of probing questions as to the future of the global hip hop movement. They ask these artists what would be required to stem hip hop’s contemporary descent to return to its humble street beginnings, when the values of peace, love, unity, and having fun were paramount.

Here’s a sneak peak:

Client: 358inc
Prod Co.: Lacocque.com
Writer/Director/Producer: Sonali Aggarwal
Producer/Editor: Jonathan Lacocque
Co-Editor: Heidi Scheuermann
Sound Design/Mix: Jerry Walterick
Music Supervisor: Ramon Norwood
Intro titles: John Long (wemakeitshine.com)
lower 3rds: Michael Szivos (mikeszivos.com)

As expected, KRS-One was in complete command of his interview, outspoken and on fire about the “founding fathers’” various contributions to the hip hop movement and how brazenly their ideals had been violated in the ensuing years. Waxing eloquently — his signature style on each of the documentaries where I’ve seen him featured (here and here) — KRS-One transported us to the day when hip hop wasn’t as commercialized as today. When the messages emerging from the movement were wholesome and empowering, when hip hop was “its own thing,” self-contained, and a way for America’s impoverished (and mostly) African-American communities in the projects and urban neighborhoods to assert themselves and rise above their squalor.

As Cashis points out several times, situating us firmly in his era, he being one of the originals, hip hop’s emergence onto the national scene came at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement and the winding-down of revolutionary Black Power. Epic poverty was ravaging inner-city neighborhoods and hip hop was the vehicle for these various communities to rise above their misery to promote uplifting messages for the people. Block parties were convened, yet they were hardly safe. Hip hop therefore stayed local. It was a barrier, albeit a temporary one, preventing the movement from going mainstream.

Record companies couldn’t get to the artists, and, besides, their music — during these early days — was still too subversive to make the needed crossover into affluent white communities to make the thing commercial, let alone have hip hop’s message co-opted by these same communities.

Today, there are three companies who distribute over 80% of the music in the United States: Universal, Warner’s, and EMI. What they say, plays.

As Jared Ball — 2008′s Green Party candidate for the US Presidency — states, payola (“pay for play”) and other subversive/persuasive techniques determines what radio stations play; that being, only what the record companies want them to. What it boils down to is hip remaining distinctively gangsta (egs. blaring lyrics glorifying shooting deaths, pimping, and blinging), because this is exactly what the powers that be demand. The only question remaining is why does this persist?

So the filmmakers again turned to Ball.

He claims that when hip hop crossed over into white communities, the record conglomerates were shocked to discover how fluidly black power slogans and messages which were embedded in 1980s-era hip hop lyrics transitioned to the white listening audience. When the labels saw that, their concern that whites and blacks would band together to preach unity, one of hip hop’s credos, was grave. The powers-that-be weren’t about to tolerate that, so record executives decided to co-opt the movement by enticing a core handful of prominent urban artists to sell out and become the companies’ spokespeople. They would dump bucketloads of cash into these artists’ laps, rewarding them for crafting rap lyrics that were to their own liking, thereby keeping the movement in-house and preventing it from spilling out of control onto the streets. Rather than permit the movement to spread on its own steam, the objective was to have the record companies set the tempo of what the market would hear, stymieing the movement stillborn and denuding it of its more activist strains.

Several of the artists interviewed, Kool Keith, Cashis, and Busy Bee, were all quick to dub present-day hip hop as “shit-hop” or “hip-POP,” an indicator of the extent to which the movement had drifted away from its activist origins into bland and more blase territory. Kool Keith even into went into a fake “bubble gum” leitmotif to accentuate how inane contemporary hip hop rhythms were. Anything the record companies deemed to be popular would chart-top these days. Ball even described how twelve weeks at the top of the Billboard rankings would qualify a track for pop status. Since the fastest way is up, the lighter the lyrics, the faster the song would rise. He even went so far as to describe contemporary hip hop as follows: “Serve people dog shit long enough, and eventually they’ll put barbeque sauce on it.” Brilliant!

So what’s the future of hip hop, and where’s the movement headed?

Cashis believes the scene needs to get back to a 3/4 or 6/8 “classic hip hop” tempo. When the rhythm was snappy, it made people bounce. They came out to the block parties smiling. The essence of the movement, he claims, has been adulterated by outsiders with deep pockets that bears little resemblance, other than in technique and style, to the founding fathers’ vision, which included: MCing, DJing, Graffiti, and B-Boying.

Jared Ball reassures viewers that good hip hop is out there, it’s just never going to be played on the radio. They key, he says, is to go out and search hard for it. Like good information, it’s not going to be readily available. Don’t rest on your laurels waiting for good music to land in your lap, Ball claims, because it’s plainly not going to happen.

Certain artists like Jean Grae have even gone to the extent of retreating from the music scene entirely given how far it’s fallen from its humble Bronx beginnings.

Steve Wallace claims that the movement is only a reflection of what’s going in within urban centers. If all is not well within the inner-city, hip hop would reflect that and project the malaise outward. And, he emphasizes, the present movement is robust enough to outlast even this most wayward of present trajectories. Hip hip, he is certain, will make its comeback, given how firmly the scene is entrenched in the global consciousness. The point of no return had been passed a long time ago. Back in 1977, KRS-One reassures us, they were claiming that hip hop only had three years left…and then it’d be gone. Seems almost comic in hindsight, doesn’t it?

What Ever Happened to Hip Hop? isn’t only about the music. Rather, it’s a scathing social commentary about just what happens when the inheritors of a purists’ craft sells out a movement to MNCs that would prefer to maintain their vice-grip on the direction of the movement’s disruptive message rather than permit it the free rein it requires to thrive.

What the above artists seem to be saying — to a man — is that it’s high time to grab back the movement. Things have drifted so drastically out of control for too long.

(catch your copy of What Ever Happened to Hip Hop? on IndieFlix today)

Forty years.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Feast your spherical peeps on a tightly summarized saga of four decades of delicious China watching, courtesy of retired UCLA scholar and eminent US Sinologist Richard Baum.

That’s essentially what you’re getting in this 296pp cut of around-the-horn PRC goodness, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom. Oh yes!

For the writer, it’s a veritable walk down memory lane which began right about the end of the chaotic Cult Rev years. Carrying through to Deng’s Reform and Opening years, it continued into the rip-roaring goodness of the Special Economic Zones/SEZ era.

Baum witnessed the Xidan Democracy Wall protests of the late ’70s, the acorn-collecting, squirrel-like saving eighties, the craven PLA turkey shoot on that enormous square in front of the ochre-colored Imperial complex bearing the portrait of that revolutionary dude (the same dude on the book cover above — and no, I’m not taking any sort of position whatsoever on the law-enforcing slaughter of hundreds of unarmed civilians), and Deng’s famous 1992 Southern Tour.

He wraps things up with China’s “in the wilderness” 1990s, its 2001 WTO ascension, the nation’s mid-naughts economic consolidations, the beginning of the Hu Jintao era, the SARS epidemic, the Sanlu milk scandal, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Tibetan and Uighur riots of the same year, the glorious Olympic Games (China’s neo-adolescent “coming out party”), all the way up to the bright harmonious koombayah future — hexie shehui-style.

Baum, moderator of the famous Chinapol listserv, opted to compile a decidedly non-scholarly work of non-fiction this time ’round tailor-made for the Zhongguotong (China Hand) and layman alike. What an impressive piece of work indeed! If Baum doesn’t publish again for the rest of his academic career, China Watcher will have been a fitting cap on a marvelous career dash. Still, if he’s not into the whole swan song thing, rest assured the author can publish again and I’ll be right back here with yet another snappy review.

The book is organized chronologically and reads for the most part like an autobiography.

While not clinging rigidly to the autobio genre nor being doctrinaire about time lines and similar nonsense, Baum leapfrogs across history, embellishing on lesser-known phases of China’s magical development story for the benefit of readers who aren’t as well-versed in Sinology, writ large .

While you’ll likely have heard of the bulk of events Baum faithfully transcribes, I was grateful for his “five sides of the coin” elaboration on stuff that’s now become lore in the Western contemporary historical canon. Examples? The aftermath of the Shanghai Communique of 1972, the on-again, off-again China-Taiwan kerfuffle, not to mention the months, weeks, and days leading up to that human cull which took place in that square in a certain northern capital on that certain summer day back in 1990 less one year. ;-)

What Baum does excellently in China Watcher is supply a wide-angle lens treatment to the major events of the past four decades, the sorts of things only a person who was actually on the ground at the time can write about credibly. Imagine getting the fly-on-the-wall play-by-play half-an-hour before the recording of the Zapruder film, and you’ll readily realize what I mean.

Rather than replicate Angilee Shah’s stellar June 2010 review at China Beat, I thought I’d do another one of my famous chapter-by-chapter breakdowns for what’s quickly becoming a twenty-ten must-read.

CHAPTER LISTING:

1) The Occidental Tourist: Nice play on words here about the famous 1988 film. Baum describes in this chapter how he actually “fell” into China studies, rather than actively pursuing career Sinology. It all began as a dare to prove to his father wrong that the Chairman wasn’t anything like Stalin, that Mao was up to something better with his new movement. Like a good movie script, this was the inciting incident of Baum’s fateful meeting with noted UC Berkley China experts Bob Scalapino and Chalmers Johnson. Baum would never look back…

2) A Dissertation Is Not a Dinner Party: In 1966, Baum boarded a trans-Pacific flight with his then-wife Carolyn and infant son Matthew in tow, landing on the rainswept island of Taiwan, or what was then referred to as the Republic of China/ROC. As part of his dissertational studies, Baum was obliged to undergo intensive Mandarin training in Taipei as he boned up on his research methodologies. Basically, his writ was to glean as much information as possible about the PRC in the days before free visits to China were restricted only to “friends of China.” Lots of Hong Kong stuff features in this chapter. Baum got close to the People’s Republic, but didn’t get the PRC cigar. Peering over into the fishing village of Shumchun (then-Shenzhen), he longed to see the Chinese up close and personal though it wasn’t to be. For those keen on reading what Taiwan was like under dictatorship (and a KMT/GMD intelligence dragnet), this is your chapter!

3) Confessions of a Peking Tom: A key chapter colored by the backdrop of the higher-level political machinations which took place at the chaotic end of the Mao era. China opens itself to the world with the official exchange of diplomats between the US and China. The Kissinger-Nixon-Mao confabs, the changing of the Zhongnanhai guard, the trial of the Gang of Four (boo!), the Hua/Deng rivalry (yay!), and finally, Baum’s heartfelt admission about his bitter academic rivalries fomented around this time that would dog him for the rest of his academic career. We track with Baum as his renown swells within “China watching” circles, and he peppers us for the first time with his limerick-spinning abilities that were used like poison-tipped projectiles to offend his most stalwart detractors back in the day. Funny!

4) Through the Looking Glass: Baum enters China for the first time, crossing over the Friendship Bridge (HK’s Lowu crossing) in May 1975 along with a delegation of “95 of the world’s fastest, strongest athletes.” Just like that, he was suddenly inside. The delegation visited three large Chinese cities: Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing during the competitions, and it was great to read what those places looked and sounded like back in the late seventies. Communist Party (CCP) political machinations reverberate behind-the-scenes as Baum visits various scenes of past Chinese Cult Rev crimes. There are banquets, social customs, and Maoist political doggerel galore!

5) Democracy Deferred: The death of Mao. The rise of Hua, then Deng. China closes the books on 1966-1976’s Cultural Revolution. The Xidan (Democracy) wall. Democracy posters and placards. Civil unrest. Baum’s second and third trips to China, this time as a full-fledged accredited academic. The arrest of democracy advocates Wei Jingsheng and Fu Yuehua, foreshadowing the more brutal clampdowns that are to come a decade later on that large square at the center of Beijing where students and academics went on long hunger strikes and then built this tall statue thingy to commemorate a certain non-existent aspirational Chinese political ideology and then “taken away.” You know the place I’m talking about, right?

6) Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics: From ‘84 to the late 1990s, Baum lectured aboard a Chinese cruise ship that would ply the country’s eastern seaboard. He was in China often to witness first-hand its workforce’s rapid evolution from a gaggle of faceless employees at state-owned factories (SOEs) to the nascent getihu entrepreneurs. Baum tells of the rabble-rousing CCP reformers Fang Lizhi and Hu Yaobang, and the CCP’s desire to avoid a catastrophic meltdown as had been steadily affecting the USSR. Then…the early days of those fateful big square demonstrations by Chinese students during that year’s spring. You know what I’m talking about, right?

7) The Road to Tiananmen: In February 1989, Baum is hastily flown to Camp David along with several prominent US Sinologists to debrief then-President Bush (I) about the latter’s upcoming China visit. He’s asked about the wisdom of inviting dissident Fang Lizhi to the US Embassy’s sponsored banquet. Baum vociferously advises against it — Fang’s a marked man, he tells the President’s handlers. But to no avail. The White House invites Fang anyways, but he’s prevented from attending the dinner by the Sinostapo. Later in May of that year, Chinese student protests commence in earnest in the Square, heralding worse things to come. Soviet Premier Mihail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing is a pretext for students to clamor for greater political freedoms. The poop is almost ready to hit the Chinese fan. D’oh!

8) After the Deluge: The human cull happens. Fish in a barrel. Blood everywhere. International censure. Hell breaks loose in the PRC. Baum is bravely back in China by August 1989 and the country is under total dissident lockdown. Baum-er can’t get an honest word in edgewise about the spring’s events nor from any of the Chinese academics or CCP members who agree to meet him. They feel compelled to senselessly blather the government line, doing so for the “benefit” of their prominent foreign academic guest. It frustrates him, especially the faux-exhibits to the glory of the PLA he’s taken to during this trip. Excellent p152 breakdown of the various stages of Chinese “friendship or enmity” (friend, friendly personage/youhao renshi, “those who really love China but know all the vices of Chinese communism/not easily fooled,” “those people who love China but hate Chinese communism,” and lastly, “those who either didn’t know or didn’t care much about China”).

9) China Rising: Explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the wake of the month after May on the day after the 3rd, er…Incident (wink, wink). The fall of Soviet and Eastern European “Communism” for all-time. The Velvet Revolution and the bloodless handover of power in in the Eastern Bloc nations. China makes a Faustian bargain with its citizens: we continue to pump through strong economic growth and a life of wealth and privilege for you and your families, but you leave the governing and statesmanship to crooked us. The handover of British HK to China in 1997. Former HK Governor Chris Patten flipping the bird to Beijing. The NATO/US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, 1990. W.’s first Presidential term, and what that suddenly means for Sino-US relations.

10) God in the Machine: The rapidly improving state of the Chinese telecommunication network — especially mobile — and the origins of the Great Firewall of China. Pernicious Internet censorship and the more than 100,000 cops who monitor the Chinese internet daily. Forbidden search phrases, taboo web pages, and restricted foreign sites. Jing Jing and Cha Cha reminding Chinese netizens that certain material is potentially objectionable. The origins of Richard Baum’s Chinapol news group, with more than 900 subscribers in twenty-five countries throughout the Americans, Europe, Asia, and Australasia (and I quote from p178: 397 scholars, 262 journalists, 98 NGO and think tank analysts, 96 diplomats and government analysts, and a scattering of independent consultants, international lawyers, and others). Internet activism, Chinese-style!

11) The Wild, Wild West: In July 2001, Baum casts off for his first trip to Western China. He meets up with Kevin Stuart, who teaches English to a group of upwardly-mobile Tibetans out of his Xining, Qinghai apartment. Stuart is organizing a school for local kids who are game to improve their English speaking skills. Baum returns the following July 2002 “to visit five western Chinese provinces by air, train, bus, boat, taxi, and on foot,” toting along eight UCLA undergraduates, three graduate students, plus three faculty members to man the school in Xining where Stuart has set up shop. Baum witnesses first-hand China’s Great Western Development and how slow the process has been taking to get western Chinese incomes to rise to the level of those in its eastern cities. He’s warmly welcomed by the various Tibetan communities he meets along the way and is dismayed to witness how condescending the Han majority — specifically Beijing — is with its Naxi, Tibetan, and Mangghuer minorities, likening them to “little children needing the guidance of their Han parent.” The first rumblings of the riots which will soon rock Tibet and Xinjiang throughout most of 2008.

12) Beijing Revisited: Baum is back in Beijing during the fall of 2005 to collaborate in the establishment and running of the Joint Center for International Studies (JCIS) at Beijing’s Beida (Peking University) along with Professor Jing Qingguo. He inspires his Chinese students to read material that challenges the CCP line and inspires several of his students — which Baum discovers years later — to think divergently about the events that transpired at the end of the previous century. Baum also witnesses the massive changes which have taken place in Beijing since his last visit during the mid-’90s: the construction boom, the astronomical price of real estate, the hazardous pollution and atrocious air quality, and the manner in which the Party deals with annoying citizens standing in the way of its bold economic plans. The construction campaign for the 2008 Beijing Olympics is now in full swing.

13) China Watching, Then and Now: Admittedly, this was the most boring chapter of Baum’s entire work. Baum goes over the history of “China watching” as a career activity, recalling the centers where China watchers once reviewed the best material on offer about the PRC before free travel to China commenced in the 1970s. He talks about how some former hardcore Maoist ideologues have now recanted their ostensibly erroneous ways and the ramifications it has had for their academic careers and lives. Baum also complains about the current crop of China watching recruits, how they differ from his day and why. He maintains an undecided opinion about the state of contemporary Sinology. You decide.

14) The Gini in the Jar: This penultimate chapter was, conversely, the most interesting of the entire book. In it, Baum discusses the financial and societal costs of China’s sudden explosive growth during Reform and Opening, and selects Shenzhen as a ready example of what he means. Baum also reviews the state of you know what kind of rights legislation in China, and about the legacy of the human cull in that Square from a couple of decades back — you know which one I’m talking about. Bolstering his argument are a range of different statistics which point to the storm clouds gathering on the PRC’s horizon, and what could occur if the economy suddenly tanks and Beijing can no longer fulfill its promises to constituents about their collective future security. Will the whole edifice come crashing down? Will there be massive civil unrest? Baum’s views are worth a read.

15) Loose Ends: Anything which somehow wasn’t resolved in any the previous chapters is dealt with — just as the chapter’s name indicates — here. In case you were wondering what befell some of his colleagues, comrades, and fellow academics over the intervening years, Baum hammers through the list of notable personages we’d read about in previous sections, tying things up nicely. There was the divorce with Carolyn, the arrival of his grandchildren, and his future prospects.

The book’s final paragraph is a fitting bookend to this exquisite chronicle. I’ll quote it here in its entirety in closing (p291):

Blessed with an inquisitive nature, outstanding role models, rich opportunities, and abundant good fortune, as a young man I became powerfully drawn to the lure of contemporary China. Almost from my first classroom encounter with Arthur Steiner, China has been my passion, my calling, my own personal Shangri-la and Chimera rolled into one. Although three decades of economic reform and global engagement have made China’s political and social reality far more accessible — and far less bizarre — then they were in Mao’s time, the People’s Republic remains for me a profound puzzle. Ever changing, ever fascinating, and ever frustrating, it compels my attention even as it stubbornly defies comprehension. I cannot look away.

So what do you say? Will you be acquiring your copy of China Watcher today?

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Matthew Vaughn has really come a long way in this biz.

As Guy Ritche‘s one-time go-to producer, with notable titles under his belt like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, followed by the uproariously hilarious Snatch, Kick-Ass marks the Londoner’s second foray into the wild and woolly arena of Hollywood shooting.

Vaughn really showed off his director’s mettle in 2004′s indie hit Layer Cake, starring Bond-man Daniel Craig (with just about the coolest opening soundtrack a movie can ever want), when the industry finally perked up and paid attention. Not only was Vaughn now a name player who could assemble a film’s disparate pieces way before pre-production — conjuring up the magic which makes “something out of nothing” in the business — but he’d learned a huge amount standing in the on-set trenches such that he could now helm a full unit on his own. Kick-Ass flows in a logical line from where Layer Cake left off…

For this latest picture, Vaughn pressed into service several of his UK film industry buddies — actors like Jason Flemyng, Tamer Hassan, Dexter Fletcher, and Mark Strong, along with a few newcomers with the extraordinary Nick Cage — that helped to round out his cast. Seeing them up on screen spoke volumes about the strong relationships Vaughn’s managed to forge in England while slowly carving out his cinematic niche before making the leap to Hollywood. It also demonstrates the respect they have for Vaughn’s storytelling abilities and knack at closing deals. All in all, Vaughn’s enormous ensemble melded together convincingly in this new action-comedy.

What I enjoyed most about it?

Fight choreography: As is standard in a Matthew Vaughn flick, action is the order of the day and expect plenty of slick fight-coordination. Kick-Ass‘s actors totally sold their scenes as they sprinkled in heavy doses of humor along the way. Aaron Johnson (Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass), Chloe Moretz (Mindy Macready/Hit Girl), and Nick Cage (Damon Macready/Big Daddy) drove the superhero metaphor to the wall, in more ways than one.

Casting: Filmmakers cannot stress this often enough: casting is 90% of your movie! If the right actors aren’t involved, then whatever brilliance was in your script is as good as toast burned to a crisp. Mark Strong seems to enjoy portraying villains (I hope he’s not getting typecast here), and yet again he had foreboding presence as mafia tycoon Frank D’Amico. The “superheros” riffed well off of each other, and those extras — man, those extras! — landed take after take after take. The best part about the film? The teenaged love affair between Aaron Johnson and newcomer Lyndsy Fonseca. Dante hot!

Locations: What more can I say whenever I see a film shot in my native Toronto? Hollywood’s apparent “New York” backdrop worked wonders yet again and there were enough gritty exteriors in the city to add that needed soupçon of tension. Well done location scouts!

Shades of Tarantino?: I wonder how Quentin took to all this? Definitely had his fingerprints all over the thing. Red Mist? Hit Girl? Big Daddy? Kick-Ass? Could this be Kill Bill all over again? Proof positive that “theme and variations” is where it’s at these days in L.A., not necessarily coming out with anything universe-shatteringly original.

You’ll already have read most of the sharp reviews out there, so none of what I’m saying comes as any kind of surprise. But it was good to see Matthew Vaughn thriving in the director’s chair once again. He gets better and better with each subsequent picture.

All we’ve got to now is wait for the sequel.