From coma to a full stop

The effort by major American media empires like Fox and Columbia to get their products on to Chinese screens big and small, probably accounts for this hybrid Chinese-American comedy direct by Feng Xiaogang.

It stars Donald Sutherland as an ageing, hippy Hollywood film-maker who is on the skids and gets fired by his producer (Paul Mazursky) while shooting some Bernardo Bertolucci-style epic in Beijing. He goes into shock-coma.

The cameraman hired to do a "making of" documentary about the movie turns the prospect of a celebrity funeral into an opportunity for product placements, selling off in advance every possible part of the ailing Yank to promote brandmark goods and managing to flog both sunglasses and contact lenses by promising that the corpse will have one eye open, the other one behind shades.

There's a notional comic idea here about deconstructing American capitalism into its sell-off components; but it's done with a laboured, relentless flood of dialogue and declamatory performances from Chinese comics Ge You and Ying Da.

Interesting to see how advertising has penetrated every nook of the last communist empire: also depressing.

Big Shot's Funeral
Cert: certPG