Go ahead, make fun of my movie, says blogger

A video film, which has little chance of screening in cinemas, attracted almost 400 people for its premiere in Beijing.

Besides the film reporters, many went to the ceremony just to see the auteur/director Wang Xiaofeng, an award-winning Chinese blogger once chosen as Time's person of the year for 2006. Now a senior reporter for Sanlian Life Weekly, Wang is loved by netizens for his sarcasm and irreverence when commenting on hot social and cultural issues.

The film has a Chinese name Shi Mian Mai Fu, which reads exactly as the Chinese title of Zhang Yimou's House of the Flying Daggers. Literally it means "ambushing everywhere".

Making fun of celebrities and their works is a piece of cake for Wang, who likes to think he looks like Bart Simpson, the boy troublemaker in The Simpsons show. However, he denied his film is a spoof of Zhang's costume epic.

The inspiration came to him when he heard a story on a call-in radio program while taking a taxi last year. The film, he says, boils down relationships among urbanites into a pot of porridge. It tells the story of a woman, who upon suspecting her husband of having an affair, finds all women around her suspicious.

All the actors are Wang's friends. Perhaps the only recognizable face in the cast is Han Qiaosheng, a sports commentator of CCTV, the national TV network.

Wang hates the idea that many people assume he is a film fan after he made the DV. He said he has never seen Cinema Paradiso, a favorite among numerous cinephiles. In his blog, Wang says he only chose the films that film critic friends did not recommend.

"I don't love films, but I love my friends," he says in his blog. "Their life is like a film. Watching their life drives me more than any film to pick up the camera."

Wang spent two weeks preparing for the film, as opposed to his first DV, 2005's A Hard Day's Night (Xiaoqiang Lixianji), which he shot in one day. Wang says he was not making film for art, but just for fun, so he welcomes criticism. He even jokingly says his DV is a training course for those eager to be film critics, because they will probably find a lot of faults.

"I am a total amateur, so I dare to play," he says in the blog.

The 105-minute film is free online.

(China Daily 07/27/2007 page18)