Every once in a while, I receive a press release and think, “Wow, you’re really just begging me to make fun of this, aren’t you.”  This was one of those times.

DMG Entertainment has secured the romantic action comedy “Killers” as the closing film at the 2010 Shanghai Film Festival, it was announced today by DMG Entertainment CEO, Dan Mintz.

“Killers is a coup for the Shanghai festival.  By understanding Western and Eastern culture, DMG understands what resonates with the Chinese people,” says Mintz.  “’Killers’ has two popular American stars in Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl and the tone of this romantic action comedy has just the sort of identifiable traits in American projects that can be appreciated and enjoyed by the Chinese people.”

Mintz added: “The Chinese love American movies. However, it’s a tough market to break into and Hollywood needs to understand the subtleties of how to do business with China. We’ve spent 17 years perfecting the art of East West relations and we’re part of the cultural fabric, which mean we get things done.”

“We’ve spent 17 years in China and we know better than anyone that the Chinese will absolutely LOVE this Katherine Heigl Ashton Kutcher abortion that’s currently running 0% among top critics on RottenTomatoes. You think they care?  These people will eat sparrow eyes boiled in ox vomit and then smoke cigarettes made from rat turds.  That’s a delicacy here.”

2008: China tries to send tainted milk to America.  2010: America sends Killers to China.  Your move, China.

Metro UK today has a great article about Chinese knockoff toys, which are supposedly a £300 billion industry.  More to the point, the descriptions of the products are priceless.  Haha, I love you, cheap, strangely-translated knockoffs.

As well as giving their creations ridiculous names, the counterfeiters play fast and loose with some of science fiction’s epic creations.
Darth Vader might have been the embodiment of evil in the Empire but nowhere in the Star Wars films does he moonlight as a traffic cop. The Joker and The Penguin can sleep more easily now that the Caped Crusader has been forced out of his traditional Batmobile and instead arrives at crime scenes on a pony with a pink mane (and he’s now called SilverBat). [Thanks to Charlie Bronze for the tip]

They also mention the Spider-Man knock off “Spader Man”, the Superman clone “Specialman”, and my favorite, Robocop’s brother, Robert Cop (I’d buy that for a few cents on the dollar). You may have noticed that I didn’t focus as much on the story’s money/industry angle, and that’s because I’ve always felt it’s not the job of government to police this stuff.  It’s the responsibility of the popular kids to ruthlessly tease the poor ones whose parents can only afford fake Air Jordans.  See, China?  That’s what we call progress.

Then again, I could just be saying this to protect my own livelihood.  I moonlight as a designer of Spader-Man toys.

He fights crime with passive-aggressive elitism.

The new Karate Kid trailer has arrived. My favorite part is when Jackie Chan tells Will Smiff’s son, “I will teach you real Kung Fu.”  And the next three shots are:

A guy doing the splits on a railing with a giant fan:

A guy levitating Indian-style in the rain:

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Oh China, you silly little kingdom, you. I feel a burning desire to berate you like a puppy that just dumped ass on the carpet, and yet I can’t help but admire your absolutely insane antics. In what can only be described as “something the Chinese would definitely do”, officials Monday renamed the Southern Sky Column in Zhangjiajie (gazuntight) as the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain.

Local officials said photographs of the mountain had been used as the basis for Avatar’s fictional world of Pandora.

…a photographer from Hollywood had visited the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, the location of the mountain, in 2008.[BBC]

Well I guess that makes sense, if you think about it. It’s essentially the same as when Bells Beach in Australia changed its name to Point Break Keanu Water, in 1991.

Oh, and let us not forget the amazingly blatant whoring:
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(…I don’t even know, dude.)

Despite being China’s highest-grossing movie ever, Avatar has been pulled from 2D screens in China by the state-run movie distributor, the China Film Group (incidentally, the same people helping finance Will Smith’s son’s Karate Kid movie).  There are conflicting reports as to why, ranging from a desire to reduce competition for local films, to a sensitivity to a plot that parallels a government policy of forced evictions to make way for development. Meanwhile, the government says everything is perfectly normal, and offered free truncheon massages to the head if you’ll just relax for a second (you may feel a slight bump).

Critics claim the film’s plot parallels the removal of millions of residents to make way for property developers. The government has also denied reports that a decision was made to reduce competition for home-grown films [such as Chow Yun-Fat's Confucius, opening next week].  Writing in English-language newspaper China Daily, columnist Huang Hung [Hee hee!] said the smash-hit film mirrored China’s rules on forced eviction.
“All the forced removal of old neighbourhoods in China makes us the only earthlings today who can really feel the pain of the Na’vi,” she wrote. [BBC]

However, David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia, a media consultancy based in Beijing, said the decision to pull “Avatar” had more to do with the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday.  “There’s certain windows in the year that are held for domestic films,” Wolf said. “We’re coming up on Chinese New Year, so this can be expected.” [LATimes]

Meanwhile, the folks from the Avatard forums, offended at the implication that they wouldn’t understand the Na’avi’s struggle, have taken to cutting themselves just to feel alive and performing strange sexual acts in which they get naked and pull their cats’ tails through the crotch, then touch them together and pretend to read each other’s thoughts.  Sources in Asia called the practice “perfectly normal.”