Feng Xiaogang’s new movie 唐山大地震 (Aftershock) is setting all-kinds of domestic box office records this week. I haven’t seen it yet, but good friend and fellow China blogger Modern Lei Feng has reviewed the movie. He said:
When I first heard about the movie, I thought this was Feng’s way of capitalizing off the Sichuan earthquake. Going into the movie, I had low expectations, and when it started and the credits included a minute of producers and executive producers, I sat back and prepared for a movie along the lines of “Founding of the Republic”, where everyone in the Chinese movie industry was falling over themselves to play a role in the CCP’s love letter in film to itself. If not that, it would be an overly contrived attempt to cram history into a movie lacking a story like Summer Palace. Spoiler alerts below (not that there’s a lot that can be spoiled), so if you want it all to be fresh, wait until you’ve watched the movie before reading on.
This is not like either of those, it is definitely a movie with a story to tell and while the earthquake’s “aftershocks” loom large throughout the movie, the actual