“Christianity has just begun its move into [popular] culture here,” says Pastor Enoch Lam. “The hostility and the misunderstanding have softened – but a lot of people have very sensitive nerves.”
The story’s in Weekend Standard, “China’s Business Newspaper.”
… Just as born-again fervor gripped Hollywood in the form of Mel Gibson’s visceral – and very profitable – The Passion of the Christ, Hong Kong has its own unlikely box office hit with The Days of Noah, a film about close encounters of the supernatural kind during a search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. Made by two Hong Kong evangelicals, Andrew Yuen and Yeung Wing-cheung, it was produced by a local group called Media Evangelism and distributed by Golden Scene with support from local churches and schools. Its aim is to convert people to Christianity.
Claiming to be the first locally made large-scale documentary – and an evangelical one at that – Noah has set Hong Kong box office records alight. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was screened at seven cinemas last year, Noah is shown six times a day in 27 mainstream theaters.
Wow. I had no idea this kind of thing was going on in Hong Kong.
I wonder if Hong Kong has Christian film critics. I’d love to read the Hong Kong equivalent of Steven Greydanus or Peter Chattaway!
Well, the fact that Liam runs blue is not a surprise. I guess neither is the fact that I was blocked from reading that article by my blocker, which is too vigilant at times.
At one point for about a week, it wouldn’t open up any images on this site. Apparently, you run a lot of soft-core pornography when I’m not looking, Jeffrey. (Just how close should we look? Hmmmmm?)
I guess I should read the other article before I make any rash assumptions about long-term effects, blah, blah, blah…
Alas, “www.billboard.com could not be found”, at least not at the moment, so I have not read the article in question …
… but would it be overly churlish of me to express some token skepticism regarding the whole Live 8 enterprise? I understand it’s still open to question whether Live Aid did any good (or harm, for that matter), and it is not yet clear to me whether the newly promised aid will go to the NGOs and other groups who know what to do with it, or whether it will merely go to the “WaBenzi”, a Swahili term that was coined to signify the “big men of Africa” who use government funds not to help their people but to buy Mercedes-Benzes for themselves.
Plus, as some commentators have noted, there is a difference between saying “give us yer fokkin’ money” (as Geldof did in ’85) and saying “convince your governments to give us yer taxpayers’ fokkin’ money” (as Geldof essentially did last week).
Yep. Some really cool posturing and self-congratulating, though. Not that I should complain. I mean, who else has done more to raise awareness of the plight of African nations in insurmountable debt – at least in America – than Bono.
Peter,
I don’t know what help this may be, but I recall reading an article that talked of the progress and steps a nation and region had to go through (in terms of corruption and accountability) in order to receive the debt-relief promised – and received in gradual payments – by the World Bank. Hopefully, it should alleviate us all. (That sounded sarcastic. Boy, I’ve got so much work to do in terms of language and action.)