Page 777 – RADII

New All-Terrain Shared Bikes from Ofo Ensure Gnarly Public Shredding

Would you just look at these bad boys:

The phenomenon of shared bikes (public-access bicycles that can be unlocked with a quick phone scan and left basically anywhere when you’re done) took off at lightspeed in mainland China. People already use their cell phones for everything here, so the cheap, convenient, universally accessible alternative to your moped commute was a no-brainer.

But Ofo really outdid themselves with this one. Look at these things. The newest iteration of Ofo bikes comes equipped with these huge, all-terrain wheels. Who is using these? Who is dipping off the paved streets of the big city on their way to work, to go hit 360 tailwhips at the local BMX park? The world deserves an answer.

Maybe this increased willingness to shell out money on largely useless upgrades is prompted by the recent $700 million in new funds Ofo managed to raise, courtesy of e-commerce giant Alibaba group and Russia’s DST Global investment firm. The neck-and-neck competition between Ofo and its competitor Mobike continues to grow necker and necker, with the other half-dozen competitor brands having been basically edged out of the infant shared bike industry. Looks like Ofo plans to achieve victory by takin’ it to the dirt.

H/T Nathan VanderKlippe

China’s American Beauty: Zhou Xiaowen’s Tragicomic ‘Ermo’

Ermo, Zhou Xiaowen’s 1994 movie, hits all the notes of 1990s China: accelerating collisions between the new and the old, the market’s destructive effects on the “traditional” family structure – especially the division of labor by gender – and runaway consumerism in a globalizing world. The film is undeniably tragic, not unlike many of the widely-known movies by Chinese directors of that time, which canvas the same themes. (Jia Zhangke’s The World in 2004, and of course Zhang Yimou’s contributions, all come to mind as representative of a 5th-generation-esque critical pessimism.)

But it is also a brutally exacting satire, and funny as hell. Ermo, a young woman in a rural Hebei village played by Liya Ai (also known as Alia), becomes obsessed with proving the scale of her own modernization, i.e. she wants to buy a big-ass TV.

It is hardly a theme unique to Chinese cinema. While difficult to imagine suburbanite, Westchester moms pounding noodles in the front yard, or selling them at the curb, the girth and resolution of the Jones’ flat-screen has surely been the topic of hushed and anxious gossip over the garden fence.

Maybe things aren’t so different in Hebei?

I like to think of Xiaowen’s film as a materialist American Beauty. The poverty is real, not spiritual, but the modern market-driven anxiety is the same, like the forlorn gazes of Hebei’s villagers as they peer into a wall of televisions, where a fit-and-trim woman (a Westchester mom, perhaps?) with ceramic white skin flaunts in the water. It is a take on the perverse methods used to export the American dream that seems both cynical and strikingly honest. Xiaowen’s is a humor which cuts to the core of the matter.

Ermo is worth your time for two magnificent scenes which return routinely, almost like chapter-markers: the shots of Ermo in the front yard manufacturing noodles, and those of Ermo-plus-villagers watching the television. In the first, she stomps and presses the dough as she sweats and pants in the pre-dawn dark. It is the hard physical labor which her neighbor (“Fat Woman”), who has the village’s first TV, would never do, and it is work her crippled, anachronistic husband cannot do:

Then, there is Ermo and Co. in the local municipality’s electronics store, where she comes to lust after the 29-inch television for which she’s working herself to death. The “premodern” villagers are packed into the frame, staring right at or even through the television and into the camera (top GIF).

Xiaowen’s particular brand of brilliance is on display as he mines the intersection of consumerism and sexuality, marked by these two recurrent scenes. Ermo’s husband is a former Mao-era village official, called “Chief,” who is impotent in physical and market terms. A nostalgic but useless symbol of the past, he waits at home while Ermo embraces the market and falls in with her rival housewife’s husband, a market-savvy entrepreneur. (He has a truck.)

American reviews of Ermo’s extremely limited North American release, in both the New York Times and SF Gate, seem to miss its tragedy while praising its comedy. In the same way, these reviewers see Ermo’s television but they don’t see what it broadcasts: the American soaps and the white telecasters. When she hears a moment of Mandarin spoken on the broadcast, Ermo’s alarm reads almost like disappointment.

So Xiaowen works more than just a wry plot out of the television’s aura: he allows a moment for the Chinese villagers to look back, staring through the television’s promise of a Western modernity, right into the American cinema. He authors some type of silent critique, perhaps, of the global trends Ermo happily satirizes. It is certainly a shame that the film’s first American audiences missed it.

Director: Xiaowen Zhou
Release Date: June 8 1995 (United States)
Run Time: 98 mins
Source Material: Adapted from Xu Baoqi’s novella.

Awards: One Future Prize, Munich Film Festival (1995), Best Actress and Best Director, Shanghai Film Critics’ Awards (1995), Nominated for Gold Hugo Award, Chicago Int’l Film Festival (1995)

Where to watch: There is a Spanish-subtitled version on Youtube, or you can purchase the VHS (!) on Amazon.

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Check Out This Cute Chinese Girl and Her Most Inappropriate Shirt

They grow up so fast. One minute they’re sweet and adorable, saying please and thank you for the smallest favors, and the next they’re a townbred Southie on a wicked pissah with the Yankees in Fenway. HOW THE FUCK ARE YA GO FUCK YASELF YA FUCK. Go Sawx

Shanghai subway. Picture via That’s PRD.

(H/T Big Sam)

Unmanned, Self-Driving Convenience Store Presents Eerie Vision of the Future

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors hunted and foraged for food, squeezing whatever sustenance they could from the land around them. Later, some clever folks learned to domesticate animals and cultivate crops, bringing the food they needed into their own communities. By the time our grandparents were around, it was easy to walk down the street to the local butcher or baker to make a purchase, and now today every street corner seems to be dotted with 7-Elevens, QuikTrips and FamilyMarts. Strolling through the familiar doors to pick up a Big Bite® and Big Gulp®, you might think to yourself that our species has reached the pinnacle of convenience.

Wrong. What’s that outside the window? You set your lukewarm Buffalo Chicken Taquito back onto its roller and rush over to see a hulking, mechanical behemoth quietly approach the storefront. Completely devoid of life, the machine addresses you in your human dialect:

“Beep, boop, beep. I am Moby Mart. Your human race is obsolete. Please enjoy a fresh-brewed coffee and some goji berries.”

This is (essentially) the narrative portrayed in the Moby Mart promotional video. The concept store is produced by Wheelys, an international chain of bicycle cafés, in collaboration with Hefei University and Himalafy future retail systems. The normal Wheelys model is about empowering everyday people to be entrepreneurs, by equipping them with Wheelys-branded bicycle cafés at low startup costs. But this most recent project sees them cutting out people altogether.

Moby Mart is “the world’s first autonomous, staff-less, mobile store.” You summon it with an app like you would an Uber, and the giant store starts to roll its way over to you. It’s solar-powered, has vending machines on the outside, and stocks pharmaceutical and emergency medical equipment. It can also make deliveries via drone, and even has a holographic store clerk to keep you company while our carbon lifeform civilization crumbles around us. The future is here, and it’s terrifying.

The store is currently beta testing in Shanghai. We’ll let you know if we get to try it out for ourselves. Check out the promotional video and let us know if it’s genius or diabolical.

‘Transformers’ Movie Franchise Flagging in China… Finally

Now that the second full week of ticket sales has ended, critics are faithfully calling Transformers 5: The Last Knight, a Chinese box-office failure. At first glance, their claim may not seem true. After all, this latest installment of Michael Bay’s franchise earned $198 million in China after only 10 days. (The American box office earned only about half that amount after two weekends of robots and explosions, coming to $102.1 million.)

But considering the film had been projected to top 400 million dollars in China, Transformers 5 is nowhere near hitting the mark. And with declines in ticket sales nearing 75 percent last weekend, it’s likely that it never will.

Some believe these are signs that Hollywood needs to import fresher films and storylines if it’s going to survive on the Mainland. As Jonathan Papish of China Film Insider writes:

Fast and the Furious not withstanding, reliable franchises such as Marvel’s Cinematic Universe are starting to see fatigue, and the most successful films in terms of audience satisfaction and legs at the box office have been original films like Zootopia, Hacksaw Ridge, and A Dog’s Purpose.

Despite his theory, we can also admit the obvious. Transformers 5: The Last Knight is an objectively bad film. The storyline could be mistaken for a school child’s first attempt at fiction writing – the plot is full of holes, characters arise and disappear without warning, dialogue is static, choppy, and confusing (yes, we’re talking to you Anthony Hopkins), and by the end of it the only thing you can ask yourself is, What was that all supposed to mean?

As far as Hollywood is concerned, hopefully the takeaway for them will be to stop force-feeding Chinese people bland entertainment with the hopes of turning a big buck. China’s wising up — or at least getting bored.

Rap of China: New Reality Show Stirs Controversy and Memes

Singing competition shows have become hugely popular in China in recent years (the Chinese version of The Voice has set multiple mainland TV records and is coming up on its fifth season). But a new contender has jumped into the mix, and caused significant ruckus in the process – 中国有嘻哈, a.k.a. The Rap of China.

The show is broadcast on the country’s iQiyi web TV platform, sort of like a Hulu over here. It follows celebrity judges and the humble rap contestants who vie for their approval, in hopes of receiving a gold chain that will pass them through to the next round. The judges each select their own teams from the pool of contestants, who will receive guidance from their celebrity mentors throughout. Sound familiar at all? I’d say the biggest difference in format between The Rap of China and The Voice is the absence of enormous, rotating chairs.

The show rolled out its debut to a large audience, easily breaking 100 million views in its first few days. The show’s success thus far in terms of viewer count and social media activity is solid, but netizens have been quick to question the credibility of the show’s judges and producers. The judges are Kris Wu, a pretty boyband member and pop performer; Wilber Pan, who was part of the first wave of Chinese singers to incorporate rapping in the early 2000s; and the two-part judging team of Zhang Zhen-yue, a Taiwanese pop musician, and MC HotDog, the show’s lone rapper judge.

Chinese hip hop fans on the internet are not confident in the judges – and probably for good reason. Their decisions come across as completely arbitrary, and their familiarity with hip hop music appears to be very low. Zhang Zhen-yue was quick to eliminate popular and respected rapper Al Rocco on the basis of rapping entirely in English, giving the comment, “His rap is all in English, but now we are in China.” The internet was not happy.

“Zhang Zhen-yue is not even a little bit hip hop,” writes one user on social network Douban. “He writes one ballad from back in elementary school and now he’s a judge?”

“He’s just dressed up all hip hop,” someone replies, “the rest is all his connections with MC HotDog…”

Meanwhile, another “rapper” performed a verse on the show that was not only entirely in English – and objectively bad – but was a verbatim recitation of Iggy Azalea’s pop hit “Fancy.” Her entire segment revolved around her being physically attractive, and she was still somehow given a chain by Wilber Pan. In a conversation about Al Rocco, one user writes:

“Wilber Pan had that girl in his group do a song entirely in English, that was just a cover, and he still passed her. So is it just that the producers are bad?”

Aside from the general question of the show’s knowledge and competency in hip hop, other problems have begun to come to light. One rumor circulating on Chinese media outlets is that, following the recording process, the contestants were rounded up by officials to have their urine tested for drugs. The show’s judges have stated they have no knowledge of this, but it hasn’t stopped the story from spreading across several online news platforms. Not a good look for hip hop culture, which much of China still views with skepticism, and definitely not a good look for the show.

So the show is off to a flashy, controversial, and rocky start. But it is definitely pulling in viewers. One thing’s for sure – we’ve got some great memes out of it. After the show’s very first contestant finishes his verse, Kris Wu responds with a long silence, followed by the now-iconic “有freestyle吗?” (you got a freestyle?)

The meme took off at supersonic speeds, the internet now filled with dozens of iterations of Kris (who is himself awful at freestyling) asking contestants if they have freestyles. You got a freestyle? Please give me a freestyle. Still no freestyles?

The term “freestyle” was trending on Weibo for several days in a row, with web searches for the term skyrocketing immediately following the show’s debut.