‘Ne Zha 2' Just Set A Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score Record
As it stands, Ne Zha 2 is the highest audience-scored animated film of the decade. Since 2020, its 99% on Rotten Tomatoes tops every other animated film you can think of. Here's a list of some of its top rivals:
It's also above the first Ne Zha from 2019, which had a 98% audience score and an 89% critic score. And Ne Zha 2's score is a full thousand reviews in, so it's not just a small handful.
Ne Zha 2 will be out in the US on August 22, a lengthy two hours and 23 minutes for a family feature. How it performs here is unclear, but it essentially doesn't matter as this is…a movie that has already made $2.1 billion worldwide. The first movie made exactly $3.6 million in the US, 0.5% of its total.
Yes, of course, Ne Zha 3 is in development, but reports are that it may not be released for another five years or so given production time and that it is 'even more ambitious than its predecessor.'
This whole thing is a reminder that the world does not always revolve around the US, and absolutely enormous theatrical hits can come from other regions, especially the hugely populous China. It's also worth noting the recent rise of Korean content in the US, and the dramatic increase in anime interest over time, much of that Japanese. So, bring the kids to Ne Zha 2 soon and see if you agree with the consensus so far.
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Yahoo
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- Yahoo
'We were never friends': A massacre on the eve of WW2 still haunts China-Japan relations
Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato's 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years. But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one. "I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre," he said, referring to the Japanese army's six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped. Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history - often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger. Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China's domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: "People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother's arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground." He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. "If we deny it, this will happen again," he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and "Iearn about the dark side of their history". The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks. But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: "We are not friends. We never were." For China, Japan's brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound. What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves "comfort women" - the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation. In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it's not a subject of conversation in Japan: "Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them." When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called 'gwangbokjeol', which translates to the return of light. "While the military war has ended, the history war continues," says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood - the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery. "People I know in Japan don't really talk about it," says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous. "They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn't really commemorate it - because they also view themselves as victims." He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn't made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they "avoid such sensitive topics". "Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order - with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion." China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time. Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan's work. That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: "national rejuvenation" is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy. Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict. Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square. Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria. That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance. And they seem to be striking a nerve. "That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs," a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads. "We are not friends...", the now-famous line from the movie, "is not just a line" between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo. It is "also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They've never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends", the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures' dismissive remarks. Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough. "Japan keeps sending a conflicting message," Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan's wartime history. For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan. This wasn't always the case, though. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong's Communist Party forces. That war ended with Mao's victory and the Kuomintang's retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party's victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan's support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime. It wasn't until the 1980s - after Mao's death - that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy. As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US. "After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism," she told the BBC. "Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that's the most recent external [aggressor]." She describes a "choreographed representation of the past", where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan's official stance on its wartime actions. What hasn't helped is the denial of war crimes - prominent right-wing Japanese don't accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery - and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals. This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks - Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other's countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year. China's economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer - has passed, Prof He says. "They simply said, let's forget about that, let's set that aside. They've never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again." Japan's 75-year pacifism hangs in balance as new threats loom China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness Disfigured, shamed and forgotten: BBC visits the Korean survivors of the Hiroshima bomb Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past
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Released in February, Alex Warren's "Ordinary" took a few months to take off, becoming a bona fide commercial juggernaut by June, when it ascended to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It's remained atop the all-genre chart for nine weeks so far, and continues to dominate Billboard's Songs of the Summer chart, where it hasn't budged from its No. 1 position since Memorial Day. Though it makes every attempt to sound momentous, "Ordinary" is a love song that's true to its name. Dedicated to Warren's wife, Kouvr Annon, the song uses vaguely spiritual lyrics to describe their connection. His vocals backed by hymnal echoes and a pounding drum line, Warren insists "the angels up in the clouds are jealous" of his marital bliss and compares his wife to a sanctuary, a vineyard, and a sculptor. 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Call it the home court advantage: As a former YouTuber who joined Hype House, a flashy collective for big-name TikTokers, in 2020, Warren learned and then perfected the art of getting engagement. He and Annon briefly lived in the Los Angeles mansion together, constantly creating content, orchestrating David Dobrik-style pranks, and sharing glimpses of their lives together; Warren described the experience as "college, but for social media." "It helped me learn how to create content that resonates with an audience and can captivate people," he told Variety. Warren's self-conscious positioning as America's top new "wife guy" offers the media a tidy narrative to push while reporting on the song's success — and helps cement "Ordinary" as a favorite song choice for romantic montages and relationship content across the internet. But the differential between the song's commercial utility and its artistic value has perplexed critics and fans alike. "Genuinely WHO is listening to this," reads a recent tweet with over 27,000 likes. Even r/popheads, a Reddit community for recreational pop scholars whose self-appointed mission is to take the merits of the genre seriously, is full of cold contempt for the song's dominance. "I don't think you can deeply hate the song by itself," one commenter wrote, "because it's so fucking boring." Rolling Stone's Larisha Paul coined the phrase "'The Voice' Audition Core" to characterize the musical formula that "Ordinary" follows: ideal for soundtracking a throwaway emotional moment on reality TV, but devoid of any real personality. Indeed, Warren performed the song on the "Love Is Blind" season eight reunion special, slotting easily into a generic vision of happily ever after literally accompanied by a montage of couples. Still, there's no denying that "Ordinary" is the summer's defining hit. 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Care for something a little less personal, a little more irreverent? Tinashe and Disco Lines have you covered with the freshly remixed "No Broke Boys." And forget song of the summer, Haim's "Relationships" may be the song of the year. Danielle Haim and her sisters manage to spin the agony of indecision into flippant, funky magic. As the season winds down, a new Taylor Swift album draws closer, and the charts begin to change shape, may "Ordinary" serve as a reminder that summer trends may disappoint or underwhelm — but they never last forever. Read the original article on Business Insider
Forbes
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Kendrick Lamar's Streaming Smashes Return — But Which One Is More Impressive?
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