one of the blurbs for this book said “this is the best type of nonfiction” and i agree! bhattacharya writes an incredible (if beyond extremely depressone of the blurbs for this book said “this is the best type of nonfiction” and i agree! bhattacharya writes an incredible (if beyond extremely depressing) combination of research, reportage, data, and memoir through the ingenious lens of shah rukh khan fandom. what i particularly enjoyed about this book (and what reminded me a lot of one my 2021 favorites, jay caspian kang’s the loneliest americans) is bhattacharya’s choice to focus the book on banal people with banal lives. none of the women featured are overly accomplished #girlboss types and very of few them have their lives ruined by trauma. instead they’re a diverse group of normal people, living a diverse group of normal lives, all with the through-line of lives of either unfulfilled expectations or hard-earned wins related to love, men, career, expectations, etc. extremely well-written, i zoomed through this book and highly recommended to everyone....more
as someone with an interest in both china and hollywood, i thought this was an interesting read and i learned a lot, particularly about chinese film ias someone with an interest in both china and hollywood, i thought this was an interesting read and i learned a lot, particularly about chinese film industry and the rise of chinese commercial cinema over the last decade. the book's a very fair criticism of hollywood's growing dependence on china, and how it, like many other american industries, have sold themselves out to the chinese government for the almighty dollar with the added irony of being an industry based around creativity and free expression kowtowing to chinese censors.
that being said (and it's not his job really, but w/e), idk if schwartzel provides a great alternative for what hollywood should've done in the past wrt its relationship with china. (stand up for its principals is a fair answer i guess, but it doesn't really mesh with the form of capitalism we all live in tbh.) and i think a bit more pertinently - and this is something that just nags at me with all discourse on us-china relations - how much of this is just the result of the major historic shift that comes with there being another country that is as powerful and wealthy as america. while i agree with a lot of the points schwartzel makes in this book, there's some stuff like the chinese market overtaking the american market, chinese cinema becoming increasingly popular domestically and internationally, and some elements of hollywood pandering to chinese audiences (not including the fear of criticizing the ccp here) that i found a bit paranoid because of course that's going to happen if a big country becomes wealthy! what else can you expect?
regardless, a very educational book that needed to be written and i'm excited to see if we have versions of this book come out for other industries in the future. in particular, i'd love to see some sports journalist take a crack at how the nba and other american sports leagues have changed themselves into order to become big china. but until then, red carpet will do....more
the book did what it set out to do and convinced me that there's more merit in reality tv than i originally thought. i still think it's trash with a nthe book did what it set out to do and convinced me that there's more merit in reality tv than i originally thought. i still think it's trash with a net-negative effect on the world, but i'll concede that the writer's correct in that it's exposed us to people living more socially "unacceptable" lifestyles and has given representation to groups which haven't had it yet.
that being said, there are two things the author alludes to which i wish she discussed more: 1) the gendered viewership of reality tv, or at least the shows she discusses. i'd guess that all of the shows she highlights are more viewed by women than men. more discussion on what that's so (or more discussion on the reality tv that men watch) and what we can learn from that would've been interesting. (i'm not the first to point this out, but there's something to be said about pro sports, wrestling, and other entertainment popular with men having strong reality tv vibes.) and 2) i wish she reckoned with the fact that minority groups make up a disproportionate amount of the viewership of the shows she said have negative and stereotypical portrayals of their groups. she discusses it briefly, but it deserves more a place in a discussion about race and media. ...more
Since, I'm not really a big anime/manga guy, I was expecting something more all-encompassing about Japanese pop culture in the US (Murakami, Pokemon, Since, I'm not really a big anime/manga guy, I was expecting something more all-encompassing about Japanese pop culture in the US (Murakami, Pokemon, Battle Royal, etc.), but still a pretty interesting read despite that. I don't know that much about the anime industry has progressed in the last 15 years, but it's cool to get an on-the-ground view of something right as it's about to pop. And as someone was who still a kid when this book came out, it's interesting to see how the machinery behind the content I consumed when I young. ...more
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