Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

I must say, I’m a little disappointed. I’m back in America and for some reason, NBC decided to have a 15 hour tape delay for the Opening Ceremony. By the time I was actually began to watch it, I was filled with all these high expectations from checking out the pictures and reading positive articles describing it as the greatest opening ceremony of all time.

When the thing began, I must say the drums were pretty cool with the lights flashing with each hit. Even cooler was the light show count down thing. That was bloody awesome. I was pretty excited at that point. And then… yeah. There was some kind of weird ballet dancing-calligraphy mountain-ocean painting thing that was happening. And then there was a bunch of people doing martial arts while kids sat around and did something. There were a bunch of oars being waved around. Yeah, there were a bunch of people.

So they were going through Chinese history and culture, and my crude guess would be that the theme is ‘openness’ (which is a good thing since China was always in much better shape when they were open to the world). The artsy stuff and weird costumes weren’t really my thing (though I thought it was cool when all those people jumped out of the printing press blocks). The ending was awesome though. I mean running around the top of the stadium like it was a Hong Kong kung fu movie? That was cool.

However, it was very Zhang Yimou-ish (Here’s a link to CDT writing about Zhang Yimou’s tastes). I really liked ‘To Live’ and I heard that ‘Dream of Red Whatever’ was pretty good too, but his later movies all kind of sucked. I mean they were huge movies with a trillion actors and pretty scenery and crazy costumes, but you really didn’t get the feel of the story. Even chick flicks and romantic comedies makes you feel something for the characters. There just really wasn’t any personality in some of Zhang Yimou’s later works.

And I got the same feeling from this Opening Ceremony. I mean it was cool and there was a lot of eye-candy (none of it being large breasted girls which Mr. Zhang is famous for showcasing), but I didn’t get the emotional surge that this is something all of China is proud of and has been waiting five million years for. I mean during the Sydney Opening Ceremony, I really liked how they depicted their history and how they used a single individual to give the whole thing a personal touch.

There’s also a lot of controversy over how much money was blown on this. My dad argues that China has so much foreign reserves that they can afford to buy themselves some international prestige. I argued back that something lower key would be better at showing the world that the CCP is becoming a responsible super power. However, it’s not my tax money so I won’t complain about it.

Oh shit… it is my tax money from when I worked in China for two years. Damn it. Alright, I guess I’ll have to complain. Especially since they didn’t have any pandas doing kung fu.