E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I know it's hard to believe, but Hollywood once made good films. Even great ones. The one that the blowhards in North Korea apparently blew their tops over would not have qualified as either, but that, it seems, is about as good as it gets any more in that self-absorbed town that still fancies itself as the entertainment capital of the world. What Hollywood still has--Sony Studios or no--is an archive, a repertoire if you will, of great films, from over the last century. And believe it or not, as I witnessed first hand and played my own small part in making it happen, it was those films that carried out the real revolution in China: the post-Maoist, post-Communist revolution that made the people (if not yet the government) of China want to join the rest of the world--really for the first time in it's 7,000 year history. It wasn't intentional--far from it. And Hollywood moguls still fret about how the Chinese 'stole' all their movies. But the point they miss is t...

With all due respect to the FBI, The New York Times , and President Obama, there is more to this picture than meets the eye, and more to this story than we've been given. In my previous posts I've defended China and dismissed North Korea. As to the latter, I am forced to retreat from my dismissal of their involvement, but not surrender.  if it was NK after all, it was a blanket hack and they released everything, since they wouldn't know one person from another (apart from major stars) and certainly would not have grasped the jargon. In which case it was the media who picked and chose which emails to release, and explain who was who. And I very much doubt the Chinese were involved. There are North Koreans in China, and they could have orchestrated this, but the Chinese have no motivation to help NK commit a major international crime like this. Helping a bad nephew because he's your nephew is not motive enough. Somebody, I still think, played into Kim's hands who ...

I stand by my prior position, that no one in North Korea has the sophistication to pull off that successful cyber attack on Sony Pictures and cancellation of their Christmas release "The Interview." (On a separate matter, why exactly, was Christmas Day chosen to release a movie about a political assassination anyway? Not that North Korea would care). They either had an insider, or someone capable of straddling both worlds (the Communist Far East and 'decadent' West) simultaneously. That would be the Chinese. I know this because I spent 30 months there teaching American English and using Hollywood movies as a basic teaching tool. So, could one of my students have done this? I hate to think so, but yes, in theory that would be possible. My students were smart, sophisticated, eager to communicate with and learn about the West (not just the U.S. but also Europe and Latin America) and most certainly had the skills. But someone beholden to Kim Jong Un? I don't think...

One has to wonder: how could such a good company go so bad? No, wait. I was thinking of the old SONY. The one that made all those great electronics. The New SONY is in the movie business, and to call a film studio a good company is an oxymoron. I should know, I've worked for several of them, and in order to be at the business end of that business one has to be morally immune. That said, all the finger pointing is going so far afield as to be ludicrous. I'm talking about North Korea. The notion that North Korea is somehow behind the hacking of SONY Pictures is about as rational as the notion that North Korea invented the Peace Corps. To back up a little, I spent 30 months working inside North Korea's only friend and sponsor on the planet: the People's Republic of China, which really ought to know better by now. North Korea to the Chinese is like a really bad nephew who, on account of a common uncle or grandpa still skulking around, must still be regarded as 'fa...