I haven’t seen the biopic on Confucius, Kongzi yet, but I can already tell it’s going to be a doozy. Chow Yun-fat’s omniscient face looming in the heavens on the film poster, and his self-bemused, wizened sage smirk on the film stills is one hint, and recent dogged attempts at drumming up nationalism through culture and the arts is another.

Since I am not a Chinese, and non-Chinese are simply not allowed to mock things Chinese (especially Kongzi) even in good spirit, I figure I’ll do like other bloggers and just rip off Han Han’s brilliant post this morning, entitled, “Watching Kongzi.” Read the Chinese here: 韩寒： 《看孔子》

“…To tell you the truth, I’ve never thought there was a need to turn these classic stories into films. From a film perspective, the moment such films are born, they become the antithesis filmmaking, strangling creativity. But if you say that China’s movies with classical-historical themes show no creativity, that’s not right either, because those scriptwriters are often writing incredibly counter-historical scenes, the situation is tangled. And thus the reason why a vast majority of big-budget Chinese films are borrowing classical themes and historical figures is because their investors have lack a sense of security, they hesitate to invest such a great amount of money on some plotline dreamed up by some dubious director. Occasionally, there comes along a director who has an enormous investment, and the freedom to write their own screenplay––the resulting films are even worse. And such is China’s tragic history of film. According to Chou Yun-fat, people who watch this movie and don’t cry cannot be human, I can believe this is his delusion, and I’m sure that during the in-house screenings, all of the producers cried. They cried thinking about how many elementary school students and governmental organizations they will have to drag to the theaters just to break even.
Let’s forget about all political reasons and look at the film itself, it is a failure of a film. The sermonizing in the film isn’t infective at all, when Kongzi is talking about propriety and benevolence in the film, the guy next to me was having a ten-minute long conversation on his cell phone. …
…
Finally, I want to say that the film Kongzi, no matter if it’s from the point of view of the significance of film, profits, artistic pursuits, film exploration, educational enlightenment, warning or admonishing the public, audio-visual experience, entertainment, or documentation of history, there is no need for this film to exist. This film could be erased completely from film history.”

Despite all this, I’m still happy that Avatar was pulled from the theaters just to make room for this film.
The illusion of global culture has been shattered by recent events with Google.cn, and Hillary’s speech on the “freedom to connect.” China’s official response to “so-called Internet freedom” makes me shudder, are we truly entering a virtual cold war? At the very least, films like this should prove the national agenda is still filtered through culture, remember Founding a Nation? At the least, its one more attempt by China’s film industry to harmonize ticket sales and pleasing the film censors. Yes, I will see Kongzi, because who can’t appreciate the wry irony of watching the former “God of Gambling” play the sagely man of morals Confucius? It’s like a national face lift. Well, I’ll see in on DVD anyways…

I just saw it yesterday and I agree with Han Han that, even if you exclude its problematic underlying message (be an honorable person; submit to authority totally; don’t get involved in politics) not to mention its blatant misogyny (the only two female characters are a nihilistic temptress and a doting wife who Kongzi abandons and is never heard from again), it is still a childish, discombobulated, and ultimately wack movie.

Han Han’s comments are appropriate to modern historical films in general. The more modern, the more “discombobulated”. It would seem that the modern film industry simply can’t accept the fact that history might contain facts that don’t fit into their invented character developments. So they just change or invent history to make it more convenient for the character development stories they want to portray. Whether any of this stuff ever actually happened is immaterial to the need of the invented stories involving the characters.