Empty Mind Films

Cannot avoid talking about Olympics when you talk about Beijing and China recently.

On August 8, the opening ceremony of Beijing 29th Olympics finally uncovered its veil after so many political issues and disasters and safety concerns before this.

The ceremony undoubtedly won a lot of WOWs and applause all over the world with its dazzling lights and colors and loads of people with uniform movements. Till now, almost the Chinese and foreigners i’ve asked used words “fabulous”, “amazing” “fantanstic” ect. to describe the ceremony even many foreigners cannot understand some parts at all. Many people can even foresee there will be a hot China wave after the Olympics. It is regarded as the best artwork of General Director and China’s most famous film director Zhang Yimou, whose early movies are all about people’s hard lives in rural area and were regarded to paint a distorted picture of Chinese people, and late movies are all scolded by superficial effects but hollow contents. Even so, his movie always made profits for the investors, and after the opening ceremony, it is easy to imagine how many investors would sworm to invest for his new movies.

He likes using loads of people to create very impressive visual effects. he used it a lot in his former movies, and shadowed them in the opening ceremony as well. The difference is that in the movies, he seldom gave the close shots to anyone in the group, but this time, from CCTV’s live show, we could see a lot of close shots of the nervous and stressed faces in the crowd. It is understandable since some of the performers were require to stop their work and spent one or two years wholly for the opening ceremony, how dare they make any mistakes? After Beijing won the bid of 2008 Olympics in 2001, as long as Olympic requires, nobody dares say NO. People, money, facilities, as long as you need, we can provide enough. On the night of opening ceremony, it was quite hot and humid and a heavy rain seemed to come soon. The meteorological bureau thus launched 1,104 rockets to stop the rain. So if there is any method they can use to make the weather cooler, they would use it without hesitation to avoid people waving fans heavily in the Bird Nest. Everything paves way for Olympics. That might be one of the important reasons for the final success of the opening ceremony.

Considering this, there are also some different comments on the opening ceremony, although the voices are much weaker than those praising ones. Ai Weiwei, one of the designers of the Bird Nest, wrote on his blog expressing his strong criticism for the ceremony, saying it is a quite fake cultural show of China and it is just a political task to please the government leaders. If this comment sounds a bit radical, here is also another funny comment from Hong Huang, the Chief-editor of a fashion magazine in Beijing, and also the step-daughter of former Minister of China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, “I think no opening ceremonies can surpass the one in Beijing, those richer countries have no so many people, those more populous countries have no so much money, even if there is a richer and more populous country, the people might not be so tamed.”

Anyway, the Olympics finally opened and it is raining heavily outside now, the rains stopped by the rockets finally kiss the ground with dazzling lightnings and drumming thunders.