The film’s trailer is by all accounts spectacular Zhang is known as one of Chinese cinema’s greatest visual stylists for a reason. Now, less than a year later, the man who lectured the African-American producer Effie Brown over the limits of diversity in Hollywood is the face of a film that embodies all of the industry’s worst tendencies, by yet again putting a white American actor at the center of another culture’s story. The Great Wall is now the most dramatic example of whitewashing: Though it’s rooted in Chinese history and culture, and is made by a Chinese director and studio, the film is already relying solely on the face of a well-known white American actor to sell its story.ĭamon is, by all accounts, a well-meaning guy with left-leaning politics, but he’s already once been embroiled in a debate over Hollywood’s institutional racism after a much-discussed episode of his HBO filmmaking show Project Greenlight. As China becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall box-office market, it makes sense that Hollywood would produce more films designed to appeal directly to the country’s audiences.īut the poster alone has sparked an outcry that the film’s creators should have seen coming from 5,500 miles away-especially given all the recent attention paid to the industry’s lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera. The Great Wall, with a budget of $135 million, is the most expensive Chinese film ever made. The Great Wall may well represent the next step in Hollywood economics: A film made by one of the country’s greatest directors (Zhang Yimou), shot on location in China and telling a story about the Northern Song Dynasty, while starring one of Hollywood’s biggest names.

Eight Ghost Stories in Which the Dead Won’t Go Quietly Colin Dickey

The great wall movie 2014