Photo from danwashburn Way back in '04, when we were young(ish) and brazen, we declared that Da Marco on Yandang Lu had the best pizza in Shanghai. "I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life," is what we said. It was easier to be so sure-minded about pizza back then, because there were very few reasonable options Shanghai. Are there more now? We think so. But perhaps, after nearly six years, our......

The Italians are famous for their invention of romance and pizza. The Chinese are famous for expertly copying the Italians. And now along with Dolce and Prada, romance and pizza have been copied in time for Valentine's Day. Perusing the delivery menu of Deli Roma Pizza, you will be delighted to discover the 10" Love Pizza–heart-shaped and extra cheesy for 98 RMB (buy-one-get-one-free, in case you don't like sharing, also comes with chicken wings and......

So the movie did finally get made after all. Last Thursday evening at the Paramount was the premiere of Milk & Fashion, touted as the first film to feature "non-Asian actors speaking Chinese in lead roles of a feature film for the first time ever". The crowd gathered as early as 7 pm to feast on the buffet. The room was packed with a diverse population of foreigners, Shanghainese ladies and numerous dubious characters. The......

Troubling news has emerged over the last day regarding the tragic killing of a man in Tianmen, Hubei province. Clashes started last Monday over a failed promise by the city government to move a garbage dump away further away from a residential area. About fifty or so chengguan (城管) or 'city managers' were called in to control the crowd. Wei Wenhua, a manager at a local government-owned construction company with no apparent connection to the......

By JFK Miller So it’s Huckabee and Obama in Iowa. Clearly it’s early days, and neither candidate is a certainty for their respective parties’ nomination for the November presidential election. But it’s worth looking at what both candidates have had to say on the record about China. First Huck. Huck is a Baptist minister turned Republican politician who wrote a best-selling book about his fat-shedding experience entitled Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and......

If you've been in China for a while, you will more likely than not have been a witness to the frequent scuffles between street sellers, store owners and the guys from the city cops, or the 城管, who are technically not "police" but rather "city administration" and "street management" guys. Most illegal street sellers and hawkers like your DVD salesmen and lamb kebab guys will typically just pack up their stuff and make a quick......

With the holiday season in full swing things usually slow down in the music scene. But this weekend there are a few shows that should get us through to the New Year. On Saturday Live Bar is holding a show that we are pretty excited to see. Voodoo Gongfu from Beijing will be on stage. Shanghaiist happened to pick up a copy of their DVD in Beijing and with all the costumes and addition of......

We seriously LOVE some of the things we hear about going on in our city. Yes, some of the people we meet here can be harsh and mean, but this story goes to show that humanity still exists in Shanghai. Two weeks ago, Rebekah Pothaar, an executive with Ctrip.com, found that her ayi's husband was in a serious motorbike collision. They went with her to the hospital and found that surgery was going to cost......

Heres' a public service announcement to (illegal) satellite TV users from Shanghaiist: Don't put stuff on top of your satellite receiver box. We had gotten in the habit of placing the occasional DVD or DVD sleeve on top of our satellite box, which is covered by a bunch of small vents. Not long ago, while working at our computer (surprise, surprise) at around 1 am, we heard a popping noise coming from near the TV......

If you've been browsing the DVD shops lately, you might have already come across Nanking, a documentary—of sorts—about the Nanjing massacre of 1937. The film consists of three elements: first-person accounts from survivors and eye witnesses, including Chinese civilians and soldiers as well as Japanese soldiers. These are all real people, telling their stories on film. Then there actors portraying some of the people, mostly Europeans and Americans, that played a role in setting up......

Southeast Asian pact exposes rifts [NY Times] Southeast Asian leaders signed a charter here today that was drafted as a watershed document to bind the region together as a European-style economic community but has instead exposed the sharp divisions over Myanmar and other issues among the signatories.Malaysia busts DVD lab in its biggest raid in 2007 [Reuters] Malaysia has raided a laboratory capable of churning out $52 million worth of pirated DVDs a year in......

A quick note to interrupt your last-minute Halloween costume shopping (we made our costume yesterday ... you'll definitely hear us coming) to let you know what films we plan to show at the big Shanghaiist Halloween Party on Saturday night. If you haven't been to Shanghai Studio, it's a spooky maze-like place that occupies an old bomb shelter. So if music and dancing are your things, we've got rooms for that. If chatting and drinking......

Via China Net Investor, this interview of the founders of Shanghai-based dot.com Tudou.com, Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs, serves up one very juicy tidbit of information — that Tudou.com is already streaming more minutes of video content every month than YouTube (15 billion minutes per month versus 3.5 billion)! Then in a self-deprecatory turn, Wang turns around to say that those numbers are never really accurate. Those numbers should really be cause for......

Well, at least Puxi appears to be safe. Thank god for the Huangpu! When we first saw this at our Kunming hotel, we figured it was just a complementary bootleg DVD of UltraViolet II. But we were excited to discover it was really an XHZLC 40 FIRE ESCAPE MASK! Just in time for the Shanghaiist Halloween Party ... where perhaps the theme should be "Pudong is burning"? If you would like your very own XHZLC......

People who have made the news this week Zhang Huimin, 8, runs her way to the Olympics 2016 Little Zhang Huimin, who stands at just 1.25 meters tall and weighs a mere 20kg, has run from Sanya, Hainan all the way to Beijing, wearing out 20 pairs of shoes and covering a staggering 3,560 km in 55 days. That's an average of 1.5 marathons per day! Her goal is to win the marathon at the......

Not long ago, we asked when our local DVD shop would have decent bootlegs of The Simpsons Movie. The answer: Now. And it was probably here a while ago (we were out of town). We haven't not watched the whole thing yet, but the quality of this camcorder version seems to be passable. Who is to thank blame for this intellectual property violation? Someone in Germany, it would seem. Screen shots to the right. Any......

As we get closer to July 7, the day of Al Gore’s Live Earth concert, more info has popped-up on the official artist line-up in Shanghai: RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS KANYE WEST BON JOVI ARCTIC MONKEYS JACK JOHNSON DAVE MATTHEWS BAND BEASTIE BOYS …will not be playing at Shanghai's Pearl Tower. Instead, we get to rock out to the sounds of 12 Girls Band, Sarah Brightman, Eason Chan, Evonne Hsu, Anthony Wong Yiu Ming, Huang......

Hollywood is a new DVD shop just a few doors away from Oscars (nee Ka De Club) in Taikang Lu. This new DVD emporium stocks an amazing range of new and old American, Chinese and international titles. It is very similar to its neighbour, but with more choice and better merchandising. All of the films are boxed in hardcases on tall shelves along wide aisles. Hollywood is spacious and the layout makes it almost possible......

Yan Feng's Shanghai Wedding: Photos and video A great glimpse into a suburban Shanghai wedding. Dozens of photos and a montage of video clips. Wal-Mart recalls lead-laced baby bibs from China "The bibs, sold under the Baby Connection brand name, came in packs of two to seven bibs, with embroidered prints or images of Sesame Street characters. Some were sold as long ago as 2004. The bibs were made by Hamco exclusively for the......

If you get a strange feeling of deja vu as you watch the next Spider-Man movie, the chances are you have already seen it. Reuters have reported Sony's claims that there are no genuine fake copies of Spider-Man 3 floating around the Internet or among pirate vendors. The disks you see on the streets of Shanghai these days will probably be Spider-Man 2 in disguise as the latest movie. The real fakes should be......

Shanghaiist was delighted to learn that there is finally an environmentally-friendly way to get rid of the contents of her "electronic junk and bad DVD drawer of death." The newly opened Xin JinHua Recycling Center is the first of its kind in Shanghai to offer professional and green recycling services for e-waste. You can call them to arrange collection of everything from paper, plastics, and glass to home appliances, electronics, furniture and office equipment. As......

Well, opening today in France, at least. We first told you about Summer Palace, the controversial film from Shanghai-born director Lou Ye, last May. Since then, the director of Weekend Lover (1995), Suzhou River (2000) and Purple Butterfly (2003) has been banned for five years from making films in China for submitting Summer Palace to the Cannes Film Festival before it was approved by government censors. This was Lou Ye's second ban — Suzhou River......

Are we ethically conflicted but entertainment starved residents about to see a yet another assault on our beloved, pirated copyright-challenged DVDs? According to Yahoo (quoting Xinhua, but we couldn't find it anywhere on their website), the Supreme People's Court decided yesterday to widen their net in their attempts to curb this country's rampant movie and music piracy: The court, in an order Thursday, cut in half the number of counterfeit DVDs, CDs or other audiovisual......

It's possible that we just caught the recently opened Piccone Live Music Bar on a bad night, but honestly the most interesting aspect of our experience was the toilet in the men's bathroom. We checked out Piccone (we're not sure where the name comes from ... perhaps the owner's last name?) because it pitched itself as a live music venue, and it came along at time when other supposed music bars and legit live venues......

On Sunday we spent the afternoon at Glamour Bar. No, not to drink cocktails, but for a much more noble purpose: to attend Dai Sijie's session at the Shanghai International Literary Festival (SILF). The session was in French only, and Dai talked about "la part personnelle d'implication dans l'écriture" (to what extend one can use one's personal experiences in one's writings). Dai Sijie (戴思杰) is obviously the ideal guest to talk about this kind of......

But they only get RMB 25,000 in damages. The movie companies involved in the suit were New Line Productions, Walt Disney, Warner Bros Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. The defendant was listed as Shanghai Leying Audio Visual Co. Ltd, but this story tells us the company also went by the name "Kadi" and was " well-known to many expatriates in Shanghai for selling pirated products." We think it might......

The Blood of Yingzhou District, a film tha follows the lives of childen in Anhui who have lost their parents to AIDS, won the Oscar for best documentary short earlier today. We haven't seen the film, and doubt it will be showing up in Shanghai theaters ... well, ever. Doesn't seem like the type of thing our friendly local DVD vendors would carry either, although we have been surprised before. Has anyone seen it? YouTube......

The Washington Post reports that the former next president of the United States, Al Gore, is going to put on some massive live shows to help persuade the world to take global warming and climate change seriously:At the news conference Thursday announcing this summer's ambitious "Live Earth" concerts -- designed as an exercise in "mass persuasion" about threats of global warming -- Al Gore described his vision: a 24-hour musical extravaganza across seven continents, featuring......

Last August you might have read Howard French's New York Times article on Chinese subtitle teams, which explains who these seemingly anonymous people, who offer Chinese viewers timely, subtitled versions of popular TV shows such as "Desperate Housewives," "Prison Break," and "Lost." The NYT article got a lot of attention from Chinese netizens as well as the media, for example in this recent Chinese article delves further into this subject and works as a good......

Although we haven't seen the double-decker bus in real life, we assumed that it was a tourist bus until we read that it only travels on Huai Hai Lu and only costs 2 yuan per ride. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the number '911' on the front—which is no coincidence, because the bus runs along the 911 route. It's basically a fancy version of the 911 bus. In addition to......