Nice Guys and movie sequels

Yesterday, I was linked to this, which is essentially a breakdown of why the Nice Guy phenomenon is so incredibly creepy and...not nice.

It also explains why I shuddered and ran away to watch wuxia yesterday when I tried to watch the Bollywood movie U Me Aur Hum.  (Lest anyone think I am bagging on Bollywood, I have watched and liked several Bollywood films over the last few months.  I just haven't posted on them yet.)  The setup for UMAH is that this young guy likes this girl and talks to his dad about it while they're out eating, and they end up making a bet that the dad can win over any woman in the restaurant that the kid chooses in just a few minutes. (Notice how it's already set up as charming and appealing for men to harass women minding their own business.)   The kid chooses a woman minding her own business, reading a book, so the dad walks up to a complete stranger and starts talking about how it's his favorite book, and sits down at her table.  She, of course, is wigged out but suppresses it, because women aren't supposed to say "dude, I don't know you and was reading and you're being creepy, go away" unless they want to be thought of as rude or "bitchy."  Unless, of course, they're already there with another man the guy didn't see.  Then they're justified in not letting other men force their presence on them.  Anyway, she gets up to leave and he protests, prompting two guys nearby to ask her if she's ok.  At that point, the man pulls the passive-aggressive "I'm not bothering you, right?  If you leave or say yes, then you'll make all these people think I'm harassing you.  You don't want to make me look bad just becaue I wanted to talk to a pretty lady, do you?" bit and she sits back down, successfully pressured into letting a man force his attentions on her so that he won't look bad.

I turned it off then and went to watch a wuxia movie, so I don't know how it played out, but that scene is just so incredibly common that it was almost downright creepy, even though it wasn't meant to be.

On a completely unrelated note, has anyone heard anything about Painted Skin 2, a Chinese movie due out in 2011?  Apparently Donnie Yen is signed on, and it's a sequel to the 2008 movie.  I haven't found out anything else about it though, and while I like Donnie Yen a lot asnd liked his character, I'll be really miffed if Betty Sun's demon huntresscharacter isn't also back, especially if it has him taking over the demon hunting, as that was kind of her hereditary thing.
 

cdrama: Fairies of Liao Zhai/Liao Zhai Qi Nu Zi eps 29-39 (Xin Shi Si Niang)

This is the last storyarc of this series, and probably the one with the simplest plot. Xin is a fox demon trying to earn her way into heaven by performing good deeds in a nearby town while living in the forest with her father and sisters. Along the way, she meets and falls in love with a scholar named Sheng, and the two take in a waif named Lu Er. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, Xin was opposed to admitting her feelings for Sheng, resulting in her sisters and Lu Er concocting all sorts of schemes to get them together. (My favorite was when one sister, Hu Mei, who had previously tried to eat Sheng, forced him to pretend she was attacking him so Xin would run to his rescue.)

This is one of those stories that starts all light and fluffy and then sideswipes you with torture and angst and people dying right and left. At one point, I was pointedly reminded that this came from the person who decided that Chinese Paladin, which basically started out a wuxia RomCom, should end with an angsty and broken Hu Ge wandering ancient!fantasy China with everyone he knew dead except for his newborn daughter, after he spent a while wandering through a garden, cradling his wife’s blood-drenched corpse. I’m happy to report, though, that this never reaches those depths, and actually ends happily.

I liked all the stories in this anthology series, but if I were to rank them, I’d probably go: Xia Nu, Lian Cheng, Huan Niang, and then Xin Shi Si Niang.