Less than a month after airing this commercial featuring Richard Gere driving the new Fiat Delta from Hollywood to Tibet, Italian automaker Fiat has been forced to withdraw the ad, and issue a statement extending its "apologies to the Government of the People's Republic of China and to the Chinese people". Readers of this blog (a group which no doubt excludes anyone from Fiat or their agency) will be aware that Richard Gere is a......

Despite some unfavorable reviews, Jackie Chan is currently riding high on the success of his mega-blockbuster Forbidden Kingdom. As such, many are overlooking his brilliant work currently gracing the international satellite television waves. But no longer. This clip comes from a recent ad campaign by the Hong Kong Travel Association (HKTA), a push to bring more attention to the city hosting the Olympic Games' ever-popular equestrian events that will no doubt help to revitalize the......

UPDATE: We're actually having some trouble getting these videos to play here on our Shanghai ADSL connection. Anyone (in China) having any luck? OK, it works when we have our VPN turned on. Try that or maybe a proxy. Happy Super Bowl ... Monday, everyone. We hope you are well into your third beer and/or breakfast burrito when reading this. We have a confession to make. We haven't seen a Super Bowl commercial for......

Last week we were coasting on Shanghai Metro Line No. 2 when our attention was suddenly seized by this new Adidas ad displayed on the LCD next to the exit. We were so awestruck by the concept and grandeur of the commercial that we momentarily lost all of our cynicism about big corporations pushing merchandise...and almost missed our stop. Then, as we got on the escalator off the Huangpi Lu exist, we noticed the entire......

One of the things that makes being on the tube during rush hour even more miserable than we had previously imagined possible is the "film" made by Starbucks and Pepsi showing on the subway TV. Titled 晴天日记 (Qingtian riji), the film is about a young man and a young woman, blah blah blah. Of course the film takes place in Shanghai but most of the scenes take place in Starbucks. We think the whole rationale......

We told you about the Made-in-China scare that is happening outside of China, but let's take another look at what's happening right here right now. A CCTV program (click link for video in Chinese) has investigated a herbal weight loss patch (美国七点瘦) which its manufacturers claim to have helped Chelsea Clinton shed 12 kilograms in less than a month. Users are instructed to stick the patch to the area of the body where they want......

We know you're probably tired of hearing about Valentine's Day, but we just discovered on mop.com the existence of a group called the "Go Die Club" (死死团), whose members are on a mission to eradicate love, or at least the mawkish, sugar-coated thing that passes for love and romance in a consumerist society such as today's China. All the information and links are on this main page, including a history of this group. Word has......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

This has nothing to do with Shanghai, or China for that matter. But we can't get enough of these Japanese television commercials for Suntory Boss coffee drink featuring Oscar-winner and Harvard-grad Tommy Lee Jones. Jones has been appearing in Boss ads for a year now, we think, but we first learned of the campaign recently after a friend returned to Shanghai from Japan confused about the billboards he saw all over the place featuring huge,......

We just saw a commercial for Wang Wang coffee-flavored jelly drops (咖啡果冻) that made us pause and think. It featured a Caucasian man speaking Chinese. If you've seen these types of commercials, you probably know that the voices are dubbed over, and that the accented Chinese you're hearing most likely a Chinese person faking a non-Chinese person's accent. The man says excitedly, "Wang Wang coffee-flavored jellies, we don't have these in America." (旺旺咖啡冻，我们美国没有!) He then......

The basic premise of this film is the love triangle -- married couple and a lover -- that leads to murder. You don't know who does it, and many of the pieces of the puzzle are only filled in via flashback from the point of view of other characters. Of course, if you've seen one of these films you've seen them all -- you know there's going to be a twist in there some where,......

Unfortunately, Shanghaiist didn't make it to the actual track meet, the main attraction of which was the 110m men's hurdles, where Liu Xiang narrowly beat out American Allen Johnson, clocking in at 13.07 to Johnson's 13.09. You can read about some of the other results here. We heard from someone who attended that the musical performers, which included Karen Mok, Lee Hom Wang, and Macy Gray, were lackluster. We didn't make it to the......

Recently, Shanghaiist was at McDonald's, where, to our dismay, they were out of Big Macs (or were making some in the back), so they tried to pawn off a new burger to us. It was some name we didn't recognize, and so we opted to wait for the Big Mac. Little did we know it was the "Royale with Cheese", aka the venerable Quarter Pounder, making its debut in China. The Wall Street Journal tells......

This is the question that Bing Feng Tea House asks about the wave of e gao (恶搞）satires that use existing materials (mostly audiovisual -- photographs, movie clips, commercials, TV shows) and strings together with voice-overs. The idea isn't new -- we're reminded of Woody Allen's What's Up, Tigerlily? (OK, that's kind of different, but similar techniques are used) -- but it's become a recent hit in China thanks to DVDs, video cameras, nonlinear editing programs......

We understand it's kind of sad, but we have to admit to getting a little excited when we learn of new foreign beers arriving on the Shanghai market. So we read with curious interest these two stories about two New Zealand beers that have washed up on our shores. The brewery is DB Breweries, a big outfit that owns the likes of Heineken and Amstel. The beers they are sending to Shanghai are Tui and......

Shanghaiist wants to know: Is anyone else planning on looking like an idiot Friday night? Not that it will stop us -- we're actually strangely excited about reliving fashion nightmares of our youth -- but we just want to be emotionally prepared. For those who have no idea what we are taking about, Shanghaiist is having an 80s-themed Happy Hour this Friday at Freelance. All are welcome. There will be cheap drinks, free food, 80s......

Not unlike theologians of the European middle ages, we've been pondering intractable, almost philosophical problems: For example, is it worse to put prophylactics in your hair or drink water from the Yangtze River? First, about the hair issue: A Hangzhou woman, surnamed Wang, found a box of prophylactics [in this story prophylactics means birth control pills] in her daughter's room. The girl, whose anonym is Xiao Wen, is only a senior high school student, so......

Shanghaiist just read a recent newspaper article about China's premiere and largest pod/videocasting website , Toodou.com. Our interest piqued, we went over to the site to see what we could find -- and find stuff we did! First off, here's the CNN special on bloggers and podcasters where they interview the founder of Toodou, the US educated Gary Wang. Wang and his Dutch co-founder started the site "out of boredom," which is what cool internet......

The most popular photo booth makers in the world, the UK based Photo-Me, have already set up a few of their booths in some of the ritzier areas of Shanghai, including the Jin Mao building and Jing An's "Email Plaza" (home of the stickiest bar in town -- Windows), Carrefour and other such places. They're planning on installing more of the booths around town, especially in subway and long-distance bus stations. We don't know if......

We hate to speak ill of the dead, but Chen Yifei, who died before finishing The Music Box might not be the one to blame for how badly this movie sucked, since it was finished by someone else. We had entertained thoughts of seeing this in the theater, but decided to wait for the DVD "release", and thank the lard we did! This wasn't so much a movie as it was a filmic sketch of......

In a society where the socioeconomic structure is becoming worryingly pyramid-shaped when everyone had hoped it would become olive-shaped, there is a glimmer of hope: Women are becoming increasingly S-shaped. The Shanghai Daily reports: The chest circumference of Chinese women increased by nearly 1cm in the past 10 years, the Beijing College of Clothing Technology said in a recent report that studied changes in figure for Chinese women in the past decade, China News Service......

The Associated Press brought us a heartwarming story last week -- a story of overcoming adversity, of the importance of family, of the singular stupidity of one man and the two-bit writer who dared to sensationalize the tale. The story, ladies and gentlemen, will shock and dismay, awe and inspire. Shanghaiist is proud to summarize, as well as offer choice selections from, "Flight Across China Leaves Man Stranded". Eugene Nelson, who works for Intel in......

Stirred by the unprecedented success of Super Voice Girls for Hunan TV, Zhejiang TV and Yahoo are jumping on the bandwagon. Yahoo -- or should we say, Yahoo! -- is duking it out with Baidu and Google, and their latest ploy is this contest, which involves three famous directors: Feng Xiaogang, Chen Kaige and Zhang Jizhong. The contest is called Sou Xing ("searching for stars"), and it's subtitled 让你红的发紫, which literally means that you'll be......

This hilarious post is from Danwei (or is it now called "Asianizm"?). Apparently, Adolf Hitler is trying to get an English teaching job for kids that don't read good and want to learn other stuff (bonus points, readers, if you got that reference) in Beijing. The former Fuhrer wrote this: "I am a 117 year old German expat who is looking for a teaching job in das Chaoyang District. Preferably in ein Kindergarten. I have......

Shanghaiist is happy to live and work in a four-story building: "Nearly all of China's fast-rising number of skyscrapers are filled with excessive air pollutants that could cause serious harm to office workers, state press said."Looking for a reason to go to Shantou? Try China's Cultural Revolution museum.Shanghai is cracking down on misleading commercials: "Advertisers whose fraudulent ads cause 'serious consequences' will be taken to court, while carriers of the ads will also be investigated,......

For most of you who read Shanghaiist, there is really no reason to worry about actually being in any situation where you are likely to catch bird flu from a sick bird of some type. You are lucky enough to be able to just follow some basic common sense guidelines: don't eat raw poultry products, wash your hands regularly and don't keep close company with bunches of birds. (Shanghaiist wishes such simple statements would suffice......

Researchers at the University of Michigan (Go blue!) thought it would be useful to find out who can see the forest for the trees, or literally, the grasslands for the tiger. Why they weren’t finding the cure for cancer, we’ll never know -- but they proved, once and for all, that Asians and Americans see things differently. Then, they went ahead and got their findings published by the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. The......

Jim Gaffigan is not a name that registers with most people. But when you see his face, it's "Oh yeah, I know that guy" (WARNING: This reaction may only occur in Americans). Shanghaiist can confirm that Gaffigan is a legitimately funny guy -- and we don't just say that about anyone. He's appeared in 31 movies and is a regular on the American late night talk show circuit. In 2000, David Letterman handpicked Gaffigan for......

The Shanghai Summer, once again, is nigh, and one of the most obvious (and frequently overlooked) symbols of the China's urban-rural divide emerges. We are not talking about the hordes of migrant workers dozing off in the gutters on sweltering street corners, but about the ubiquitous parasol. Turn on the TV in China and virtually all the commercials at a particular time in the afternoon deal with products aimed at whitening the skin. The parasol......