I’ve been planning to show Finding Nemo in my class all week. I watched it ahead of time, taught necessary vocab and cultural references beforehand, and typed up a short list of questions for them to answer during the movie.
I’ve used a bunch of projectors for various presentations throughout college and grad school, so I thought I was giving myself about 12 minutes too many when I started to set up 15 minutes before class. Unfortunately, the sound system here isn’t set up to hook into a computer, so we had picture but no sound. One of the students said he had seen the movie at the Handicraft Center, so I sent him over to borrow the DVD.
They didn’t have it. So we’re watching The Jungle Book instead. Fifteen minutes into the movie, and I’m not happy. Half the characters speak with British accents, the narrators use vocab the students don’t know, and Baloo told Mogli he was “gonna learn him” how to do something. Shoot me now. On top of all that, it’s old Disney, which means it doesn’t have any adult appeal built into the script. I have one 14-year-old student who is laughing a lot, but it’s really too childish for everyone else. It’s a nice break from the textbook though, so we’ll see if they want to finish it during the evening class.
Watching movies here is weird. We got strange looks in Nanchang when we asked a hotel clerk if there was a movie theater nearby, though the next day we saw a big “Cinema” sign about half a mile from there. Mostly you just buy an unauthorized DVD and plunk down at home to watch. My lovely husband has informed me that it is occasionally possible to see a movie in English here in Kunming.
Most big movies are available – you can buy Avatar, The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2012, etc. as well as Chinese movies. I just picked up a copy of The Lovely Bones, and I’m not sure if it’s even available on DVD in the U.S. yet. It’s obvious that it’s not an authorized release – just look at the proof of purchase:
Wait, what did I buy?
Even the Chinese movies have bizarre packaging. The hubs picked up two movies the other day, one of which stars Gong Li, a Chinese actress famous for melancholy historical fiction flicks where she dies at the end. In this one, Raise the Red Lanterns, she’s the 4th mistress/concubine of a rich man. When I was asked to pick which movie we would watch that night, I picked that one based on the English description that it was about a man who returned to his village for the funeral of his father. What?
But what’s interesting to see are the movies in English that we’ve never even heard of.
Our host has a binder full of movies that we flipped through on one of our first nights here, and we picked out a movie called Redacted. We had never heard of it. A quick search revealed that it was a total flop in the U.S. and critics generally hated it, but you can buy it in China! It turned out to be a graphic and disturbing war movie, and while I don’t think it was badly done, I wished I hadn’t watched it.
A more upbeat example is a movie that the hubs picked up in 2006 when we were last here together. I don’t recall if it was made in Australia or New Zealand, but it’s a cute romantic fable called The Price of Milk. If you can dig it up, I would recommend watching it with someone who will snuggle with you.
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