Leng Feng: Wearing the flag on his sleeve.

I have another piece up on Salon. Apologies in advance for all the ads on the site. 

The piece is about the massive box-office success of “Wolf Warrior II,” a Chinese production that opened July 27 and has thus far grossed more than $850 million worldwide—good enough to become the first non-Hollywood movie to break into the top 100 movies in terms of worldwide box office. It's 57th with a bullet. And almost all of it ($848) from China alone. It hasn't traveled well but it hasn't needed to. 

My piece is about why it might have gone into the box-office stratosphere the way it did. Was it word of mouth or was it a presidential loud mouth? Our president, not theirs. It's actually fairly intriguing and required a bit of digging. 

I‘ll have a review of the film up in the next week. Basically “Wolf II” is a not-bad version of a kind of movie I don’t like: It's “Rambo”ish. Its slams at America are interesting to watch but its portrayal of local Africans is beyond problematic. You have work to do, China, particularly if you want to rake in the money internationally.