The homemade, downloadable-for-free Star Trek/Babylon 5 parody Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is officially the most successful Finnish film ever. The creators say they’ve been careful about the legal issues that can arise when you’re dealing with parody -- mockery can be a powerful weapon, one that the powerful don’t generally appreciate.
As one mocker in China is discovering:
BEIJING – An underground video sweeping Chinese cyberspace has half the country cracking up.Titled "A Murder Caused by Mantou," the video is a spoof of a new film, "The Promise," by famed director Chen Kaige.
Using satiric elements similar to Monty Python and the Simpsons, the spoof has flooded cyberspace in unanticipated and unstoppable waves. And in a culture where there is scant public lampooning, the video has brought intense debates, smiles - and serious threats of legal action.
[from the Christian Science Monitor]
The whole story is well worth a read: it details how a young geek named Hu Ge turned his disappointment -- which apparently many Chinese share -- over expensive flop The Promise into a wicked lampoon. But:
Because China does not have much tradition of humorous give and take, "Mantou" was a terrific affront to Chen.
It’d be nice to think that something so simple as a geek being a geek might be the leading wedge of a cultural revolution -- a freeing one, that is, for the clamped-down Chinese culture. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if this goes anywhere...
