Jakob Montrasio’s Net.

John Rabe - Little Report, With Video!

// February 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Shanghai, Videography

When Ben commented to my last post about the pictures from the movie John Rabe, I just headed over to YouTube to see if anything had been released there - officially or not. Sadly, I found no trailer - but a little report! DW, Deutsche Welle, was on the set reporting and seemed to have been allowed to capture some stuff with their cameras.

Now the bad side: The video is almost half an hour long and over 60 megabyte big.

But I watched through it and the John Rabe part is right at the beginning! So just watch it until the report of John Rabe is finished, the rest has nothing to with it anymore.

Here we go:

iPhone soon cheaper?

// February 15th, 2008 // No Comments » // China, Technology

Good news, I hope - maybe I’ll get it soon in Shanghai for less than 640 dollar?
Chinese Theft o’ the Day: Stolen iPhones, Plans

Another headline that made me smile while going through Google reader:
Fireworks warehouse explodes in Guangdong

I actually saw scenes from that explosion on some chinese news channel earlier. Hilarious!

WARNING! Do not buy The Sims 2: Pets (if you have a wife)!

// August 13th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Technology

After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the game store lady told us she would have new ones in last week. And she did! But damn, a controller costs almost a quarter of the whole console set, a whopping 450 kuai. At least we bargained in some games with that price - one of them being The Sims 2: Pets.

Now after we bought the Wii my wife told me that she’d like to have some ‘real life’ game, and I guess no other game than The Sims comes near that request. I played the very first one a couple of years ago quite heavily for about two weeks, but when I’d realized that there was no ‘end’ of the game in that sense, I got tired of it and never touched it again. You just keep on playing The Sims, there will never be any end-boss or something else - that’s weird and fascinating at the same time.

Saturday afternoon we launched the game - and from the second the game started, my wife was hooked. We (actually: she) didn’t stop playing until the middle of the night! It’s quite more complex than the first Sims game, you have much more choices, but the concept is the same: live. Your Sim needs to eat, sleep, shower and sh*t. At the same time, you have one or more pets to take care of - you can create a family, and then add cats and / or dogs. The pets require attention, too: They also need food, and you can teach them tricks, you can scream at them when they dig around in your garden, and, and, and… What’s completely new is the ‘town center’, where you can go with your pets and get them washed, buy them cakes and meet other Sims.

The game is really great, so why not buy it? Because you (the man) will not be able to touch another game again. I wanted to finally finish Resident Evil 4 so bad, I wanted to continue saving Hyraule with my Zelda hero, I wanted to try out the insanely funny Wario Moves… But that all had to wait. I could have glued the controller to my wife’s hands, it wouldn’t have mattered - she didn’t let go anymore, until late that night.

And I can hardly blame her, having experienced exactly the same with the first part some years ago! So do yourself (and your action game needs) a favor, and never ever buy The Sims 2: Pets (if you have a wife). Trust me on that one…

Buying a Nintendo Wii in Shanghai.

// August 6th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // China, Technology

I wanted a Xbox 360. But then I saw that the prices for HDTV’s didn’t drop that much and that we probably weren’t going to buy one anytime soon. No HDTV, no Xbox 360 necessary. I don’t wanna play Halo 3 on a 21 inch screen TV. Who would? So I thought, this might be a good time to buy something to get rid of all the fat I accumulated during our wedding: A Nintendo Wii! Every time I went into one of these electronic places, I saw people jumping and moving spastically around, must be really good for health that thing. While it doesn’t train every part of your body, your arms will ache rather fast - especially after 3 rounds of ‘Wii Sports - Boxing’. Typing this entry is not very comfortable, let me tell you…

So there are probably hundreds of places where you can buy a Wii. I recommend you to buy one inside a big mall, because the shops there tend to stay open longer than small local shops. You don’t wanna find out that the store closed just a week after you bought your console, believe me… So head over to the Hong Kong Plaza or like us, to the big electronic place near Dongchang Lu in Pudong. Game shops are usually on the second or thrid floor, so head up. There will be at least 10 shops selling exactly the same, and it’s not really important to go to everyone asking for the price - the maximum difference you’ll find is like 50 kuai or something. But you can eventually bargain that away. You will have to buy a japanese Nintendo Wii with japanese menus, so don’t even think about using the internet on your machine. My Wii had also a crack chip installed, called the ‘WiiKey’ or ‘Wii key’. It allows my Wii to run fake games. And you can buy lots of them for 10 kuai each. After some time, we had worked out a fair deal with the game store lady: We got a modified (or cracked) japanese Nintendo Wii, a memory card, 10 games and a adapter (because the japanese Wii runs on 110 volts while we have 220 in China) for a round 2.000 kuai. Just the Wii alone costs in Europe 2.500 kuai, so that seemed like a good deal to us. Of course there a people who read this and argue that you can bargain two more hours to get it another 100 kuai cheaper, but if you have that much free time, you should better start looking for a job.

Back home, after setting the Wii up, connecting it to my amplifier, I got the first shock: The Wii Remote didn’t work. Since the Wii menu was in japanese, I didn’t know what to do. So we called the shop lady (ALWAYS take a business card!!!) and she failed to explain to us that you need to ’sync’ the remote to your console when you start it for the first time. Open the front of the Wii, open the battery case of the remote, and push the two red buttons at the same time. Then it worked fine! After that you need to set the time, the date… It’s all chinese, but easy to understand anyway. After all, this thing was designed for children, I guess.

The first game we tried was ‘Wii Sports’. There’s tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing. It’s spectacular how good the remote understands your movement. I especially liked the baseball and golf modes - they are so much fun. The I tried all the other games, if they worked at all, and they did. The Godfather is sure a cool game, make sure to buy a copy of that. But what kept me away from sleeping all weekend was Resident Evil 4: by far the best title in the series. Not only are the graphics insane, but the feeling is so great, the way you have to play and shoot, it’s almost flawless. So cool. It’s pretty hard, too, and I didn’t manage to finish this game yet. I didn’t even start with Zelda yet, who knows how long that will take…

Anyway, the Wii is a fine console with a great new mode of playing, thanks to the creative new controls. Buying a Wii is heavily recommended, at least until the HDTV’s are cheaper and Halo 3 is out.

Insane rain in Pudong!

// August 2nd, 2007 // 1 Comment » // China, Videography

I just had left my home to walk to Longyang road to grab a subway to go downtown for lunch with a friend, when a insane rainstorm started. In the last days it had rained here every once in a while, mostly for about 5 minutes. So I thought ‘let’s wait’, which was a big mistake. 3 minutes later I was completely wet, from up to down. If you watch the video, the moment where I use the f-word, that’s when the rain changed direction and hit my body completely. A thunderbolt every 20 seconds or so. Insane. Of course a cellphone camera (here: Nokia N93i) can’t really capture the forces of nature, but you get a idea of what was going on. Or is still going on. While typing this entry, it’s still raining outside…

Old Shanghai in Ang Lee’s new movie.

// July 31st, 2007 // No Comments » // China, Trailer, Videography

Lust, Caution is the new movie from Ang Lee. Most of the story seems to take place in ‘occupied Shanghai’, so I am guessing in the late 1930’s? The story is about a ‘ordinary’ girl who has to make a dude fall in love with her, then kill him. That bitch! Just kidding, the story seems way more deep than my words could ever describe it… But that’s what you would expect from a director who can turn cowboys gay, isn’t it? Anyways, there are only very few shots of old Shanghai in the movie, it must be more difficult with each day and every new skyscraper to ‘turn back time’. Most of the shots are pretty dark, which is clever, so the removing of the skyscraper-lights gets kinda easy… I know video editing, just believe me. Still, there are some day shots like in the image above. So check out the trailer if you’re into Shanghai’s history look. The trailer is, of course, available at apple.com in 25 different HD resolutions. Check it out.

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Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.

// July 18th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // China

Warning! The following post is rather… ‘rough’ and makes multiple use of the s-word. And the d-word. Now you’ll probably want to read it even more, huh?

So this whole mess started almost a month ago, but I didn’t want to write about it before it was over. Now my stomach is back in order, I can eat whatever I want whenever I want without having to run to the nearest toilet within minutes after shoving food down.

I think it was June 26th. I woke up with a stomach ache that made me think that somebody cut out some of my internal organs while I was sleeping. Diarrhea followed eventually, and, obviously, I thought the meat from the muslim where I often eat 8 kuai noodles was a sick dog or something else then whatever is normal. Stomach ache in China is not uncommon, especially if you live on a budget and don’t go to fancy clean restaurants every day. So I ate nothing but rice, manto (this disgusting chinese bread) and salty crackers for three days. Didn’t help, stomach was still moving a lot, diarrhea was still there, too. So I made quite possibly the worst decision in my whole life: I went to a chinese hospital from the government. NEVER! AGAIN! It is called the ‘Shanghai Oriental Hospital’ in Pudong.

This is probably worth a article itself, but needs to mentioned: When you go to a hospital, you buy in advance the ticket for your doctor’s check. In advance! What! How the hell are they going to know how much time I will use, how difficult it will be to treat me - in advance? Are you kidding me! That’s how they treat you there, like you buy your ten minutes of care and then they send you to do something. It’s really like on a farm there, the customers are cows and the doctors the farmers. Horrible.

Then it got worse. They gave me a small cup, like twice the size of a Maotai cup, and told me to shit in there. Of course they didn’t have western toilet seats but these horrible old ones where you have to bend down in order not to shit on your pants, so I was looking like a chinese acrobat, trying to aim for the cup and not falling backwards into the shit-hole at the same time. After minutes of pushing and keeping the balance I managed to fill it. So I went back out, hiding the cup with my hands. Why would I hide it? Because it was friggin’ transparent and I felt horribly embarrassed to show my diarrhea shit to the other sick people in the waiting room. I headed straight back to the people who gave me the cup and wanted to give it to them. ‘You need to buy a ticket for the shit-checking analysis.’ What! YOU TELL ME THAT NOW?! If my wife wouldn’t have been there with me, I would have had to run back to the counter in the main entrance hall to buy that ticket - with my shit in a cup! INSANE!

So my wife went instead, came back 10 minutes later, and they finally took that cup away from me. Goddamn you! I went there for getting better, and the more time I spend there, the worse I felt. After they analyzed my shit and my blood they told me that I’d need a injection of some salt-water or whatever that was. Also, they made me buy medicine for 80 kuai. Later on I would find out through a german doctor that one of the medicine tablets they gave me was antibiotics and completely wrong, only worsening my diarrhea. They thought I had salmonella but I didn’t! All I had was some sort of stomach disorder. You can imagine that over the next two weeks I didn’t get better at all, only worse. So I googled up a german doctor who actually took the time to check me out with her hands, trying to see if one of my organs hurt. Nobody even dared to touch me in that messed up hospital. The german doctor also took a look at the shit analysis from the chinese hospital and started wondering why they would give me antibiotics - the analysis showed perfectly clear that I had no bacteria at all in my stomach!

In the end, I got medicine for 6 kuai, 6 kuai! from the german doctor. That was all that I needed. Not a injection with salt water, not 80 kuai antibiotics, just some stomach-calming pills, that’s all. But I guess it’s better to f*ck up the complete system with antibiotics then to actually use a brain. Thank you again, chinese hospital, I’ll never see you again! FYI: The german doctor’s office name is ‘Body and Soul‘.

SIFF: I just don’t want anymore.

// June 19th, 2007 // No Comments » // China, Videography

I went to the Shanghai Film Art Center on friday for accreditation, like I posted earlier. On saturday the horror started: I went first to the press conference in Pudong, where I managed to take some pictures of Michelle Rodriguez (’LOST’) and Nathan Fillion (’FIREFLY’, ‘SERENITY’). Michelle Rodriguez told the journalists that she loved ‘CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON’ while Nathan Fillion stops zapping the television as soon as he encounters the great ‘KUNG FU HUSTLE’ from Stephen Chow on a channel. That was all fine, no problems. But what do you want to do at a Film Festival as a journalist? Watch as many movies as possible and write one review after the other. So after the press conference I headed to the Film Art Center in Puxi, by taxi to save time, I wanted to see the screening of MAPADO 2 at 1:30 p.m.. But I couldn’t get in. I had a press badge alright, but no one told me that the journalists can only see some movies. I started reading through the ‘Guide For Journalists’ that I got when I accredited, and damn, it said there that journalists can only see movies for the ‘JinJue Award competition’. So I went to the press office to figure out which movies I could see since the movies where not marked as JinJue or not at all. 15 minutes later a woman printed me out 3 pages of movies that I would be able to see. None of these were interesting, so I asked if I could get tickets for the movies that I wanted to review. 90% were sold out already. Nice!

So I said to myself, forget the festival, make some pictures from the red carpet ceremony and that’s it. No, sir, not without invitation. So I went back to the press office to get a invitation for the red carpet ceremony. I sat there for 45 minutes and waited like they told me, when finally a guy showed up and told me that I can’t go there since I ‘only’ work for a magazine and not a daily newspaper. Great!

Here’s some advice for you, dear SIFF organizers. I have been to the Festival de Cannes and many other ones in Germany. You give the journalists one card that allows them everything. You don’t mess around with your best friends like that. We had planned to publish more than two full pages of my coverage from the festival, now there won’t be anything in it at all. Get rid of this stupid bureaucracy and make sure journalists enjoy the festival rather than to send them around and make them wait for hours. You want to become the chinese Cannes, SIFF? You have a damn long way to go. I’ll try again next year.

Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF): Day 1.

// June 15th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // China, Videography

In the picture above you see that I eventually got a press card for the SIFF, the 10th Shanghai International Film Festival. But what a hussle! When I went to the Festival de Cannes two years ago, they asked me for a bunch of stuff that I had to submit there - by mail, printed out! It seemed much easier for the SIFF - from the website at least - until I stood in front of the accreditation table and was asked for a chinese press card. A what? I got a german one, but not a chinese one. Knowing the chinese bureaucracy, I almost gave the festival mentally up, knowing that it would probably take months to get one. But thank god the guys there were cool, and after a small talk with the boss including a small presentation of my previous work that they really didn’t seem to care about they allowed me to register anyway. Lucky me! After I got my badge I headed with two guys from New York to the International Conference thing in Pudong, where we attended the SIFF press conference. There I learned that a word doesn’t make something international since the whole conference was in chinese and without translators. But a friendly journalist told me every once in a while what they were talking about while I was playing around with my camera: That they invited Julia Roberts but that they don’t know if she really comes since she is shooting at the moment and other stuff. Not that interesting. Tomorrow things get hotter when the stars finally show themselves. So let me get my sleep now and check back tomorrow for nude pictures of Sharon Stone walking the red carpet. Here’s one more pic to prove that I really was at the press conference:



Good night.

Back in Shanghai, at last!

// June 11th, 2007 // No Comments » // China

That have been two damn long weeks since my last post. In the meantime I married (well, officially, with a party and stuff), traveled with 20 friends and family members to Xi’An to celebrate my wedding, after we had spend some days in Shanghai that is, then we flew from Xi’An to Beijing for some more sightseeing and partying. Sounds like fun? No, sir, sounds like stress. I’ll never ever play the tour guide again. Especially in Beijing, where the taxi drivers might very well drop you off at the same place, but within a mile of everyone else. It’s really no fun to take 5 taxi to the same place. Also, while Shanghainese taxi drivers make it very clear where to take you, Beijingnese drivers tend to say ’sure’ but don’t really know where they have to go. Nightmare! Now I’m back at work, and after reading about 250 emails of which 200 were spam, about 1000 feed entries and three coffees I finally have a free minute to tell everyone that I am still alive. Since next week I am busy with the Shanghai International Film Festival, I won’t even start now to deal with the marriage pictures and video… Please, give me some time, people! It’s also good to be back in Shanghai because it’s like 300 degrees less warm here. Beijing is like a hotpot for people! Gotta run to dinner now, then to a business meeting, and tomorrow I gotta visit a exhibition. I need a vacation, damn it!