Raymond Chen

When the Japanese, in the movie Inception, said he had bought that airline, the whole theater was filled with laughter. A word came into my mind, Carbonite.

Carbonite is an online data backup service, which I’ve been using for a few months. I hadn’t done much background check of it before I uploaded my personal data. I’m still comfortable with that now. Come on, I never record my bank account pin on my computer. And I’m no celebrity, whose privacy is valuable to paparazis.
The most important thing is, that is an American company. FBI cannot read my files at will like those Chinese secret police do in China. They at least need permission from court. And even they can do that, I don’t mind…
But what if someday Carbonite is bought by a company controlled by Beijing? Would Carbonite issue a warning or something, telling us the new risk we are facing? I doubt that.

Rambo is the collective memory of all those people like us, who were born in 60′s and 70′s.

In the old days, when we were teenagers, the world was simple, black and white. There was a sarcastic truth, the American side was always the right side in imported movies, while wrong side in state-owned TV news channel. But it didn’t bother us at all. We were trained to switch our roles without second thoughts.

I can’t imagine why Stallone can still have the courage to produce such non-mainstreamed movies. Didn’t he know the time had changed? Now there are always hostages and kidnappers. You want to be the good guy, you can’t avoid hurting those hostages. It’ll be much more simple to switch to the opposite side with the bad guys. To make it worse, kidnappers can become hostages, and vice versa. Some hostages are kidnappers at the same time, depending on which view you wanna take.

In 1990, an English teacher, Susan, who was from America, was standing in our classroom, asking which movie is our favourite. Rambo! There was no other option. When Susan finally understood which movie we were talking about, she responded with one word: STUPID. We were all appalled, and langhed. We didn’t know, or care, why she thought so.

Truth is not always the only thing we seek while watching a movie. It could be entertainment, old memory, porn or just a political assignment. In The Expendables, I got the old memory of 80′s back. And we need some indulgent moments to make such assumption: Hell with the reality. Let’s assume all good guys are pure good, and bad guys are pure bad. Just shoot.