Haven't had the most productive week- but I suppose that could be said about every week I've lived through this year. I've watched a lot of movies recently, including my first movie theater experience abroad.
Craft Progress
Japanese Progress
Movies (in lieu of reading, ope)
First, I want to talk about seeing WHAM!: 10 Days in China. My partner had a giftcard we'd been sitting on for a while for the theater we went to- I've always been hesitant about going to the movies because I always have the worst luck ever with other moviegoers- arguments over seats mid-movie, phone screens on full brightness, flash photos being taken of the movie screen, but worst of all, my poor back getting kicked to hell. This recent experience was no different. Maybe it's an easy fix, to sit in the back row instead of any other, we showed up kind of early- but that leaves the majority of a theater vunerable to a level of inconsideration I have a hard time wrapping my head around. The experience was not helped by the duo sitting next to me, who talked through the whole thing... On the other side of my partner, a woman had brought a hand fan, which was clacking through the quietest moments of the documentary with every wrist-flick. This woman was on her phone towards the end on full brightness. The people behind us started bickering with her... I was flabbergasterd! It was a point in the documentary where you could clearly tell it'd be over in a matter of minutes- and she had to look at her phone now instead of 5 minutes later?
The only redeeming factor here is I enjoyed the documentary (for the most part). I don't know much about WHAM! besides what I'd looked up on Wikipedia and the small bits of their discography I listened to in preparation for seeing it. We had shallowly chosen to see this documentary because the trailer was interesting, and the 80s film looks so sick. Either way, it's an interesting story.
As far as critiques go, for one, a lot of the theater audience laughed at expressions and reactions made by Chinese people who were filmed during the tour, hearing Western pop for the first time. I think the movie lended itself quite a bit to these reactions- it made me a bit nervous at the beginning of the documentary to see it had been partially funded by BBC & I think I was correct in feeling so. The framing of some of these shots that got laughed at felt very much set up to elicit that sort of response of "I can't believe how different (re: weird and bad) these people are from us." I can understand if this critisism is moot, some of the reactions to the music were genuinely funny- but most were very plain, and those moments where the audience laughed at zooms on blank-faced listeners were confusing to me. I wonder if it's even something I would've noticed had I been in a different crowd, or in no crowd at all. There were a few stray laughs as well when both George's and Andrew's names get mispronounced by a Chinese diplomat, which is something I'd never think to react to (the true offense to me is not the Chinese man's pronunciation of their names, it's how British people pronunciate Chi-ner- yuck!).
The other critique is in the shallowness of it all. The premise (spoilers ahead) of the documentary is WHAM!'s manager convinced Chinese officials to let the duo play two concerts over there as a means to break into an American market, with the Chinese simply being a stepping stone in the operation. I didn't really know anything about mid-80s China before entering the theater, and I still don't, but the whole idea is they're doing these concerts solely for the American press to catch on to because China had been previously closed off to other Western-isms before their visit. But they don't reckon with this idea whatsoever- they're doing interviews with a now quite aged Andrew Ridgeley & it all still seems like a big joke to him. I guess it's that they wanted to keep the documentary under a certain time limit and only wanted to focus on the feelings of the two members, and I think I expected them to be a bit more introspective than they ended up being. I also think the audience I was with would not have enjoyed that sort of angle focusing on the colonial, indifferent types of feelings they had towards an entire country full of people ready to become fans of them & of Western music more broadly. Like, who cares about Chinese people, right? They never revisited the country because WHAM! broke up the year after their visit, and as the documentary says, George never revisited China (maybe coming out had something to do with that, too? I don't know) & I don't think Andrew did until they were filming the documentary. In the truest way, they were unashamed of their view of China as completely secondary to the States.
Like, I don't think their aim should've been cornering the Chinese market, right, but there's not much care given to the diplomacy of it all. The excuse is how young they were, and I don't think either had particularly great educations(?), and it's obvious they were given very little preparation before they traveled over. They don't seem to have prepared any phrases in the language, they don't learn gestures, it seems? Maybe it's something that got glossed over, but it's a bit frustrating they don't seem to prepare for the tour outside of performance rehearsals. They go do a press conference after their first concert, where the Chinese police told the audience not to dance or to respond to stage cues to much. Their response to questions about whether or not the audience should've been allowed to dance were completely indifferent. I'm not sure if that was the right thing to say, I don't know what would've been the right thing, but we don't know if either of them had any deeper feelings about the situation back then or in the years following. That question isn't acknowledged or answered in the interview with present-day Ridgeley or by any management/crew member.
Anyway, those are my flimsy thoughts about WHAM!: 10 Days in China. Interesting but shallow. I'd really like to know if anyone is reading this having seen the documentary for themselves, & what their thoughts on it might be. I also think I'm happy to have gone into the theater, because I think this wouldn't have gotten nearly as much thought as if I'd watched it at home. Being surrounded by people who made me feel such pessimism about the world compelled me to actually find critiques I might not have felt otherwise.
Miscellaneous
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