THE PROMISE IS TOXIC

As if there wasn't enough PROMISE-hating in the Chinese blogosphere, now there comes an investigative report from Nanfengchuang Magazine about the damage THE PROMISE wreaked on the environment when it shot in Shangri La, in Yunnan Province an area often described as "Paradise on Earth" and a gorgeous and fragile place of great natural beauty.

The house that Cecilia Cheung and Hiroyuki Sanada live in was built near a lake in Shangri La, and the exteriors were shot there. However, shoddy construction made the house unsafe, and the cast and crew were withdrawn almost overnight when this was discovered. Later, the house was constructed elsewhere and the shooting took place there.

When a reporter visited Shangri La recently, a year after shooting concluded, he noted that the 300 crew members had descended on Shangri La like a horde of locusts, leaving garbage, unfinished construction projects, and abandoned materials all over the place. Worse than that, some cows ate their plastic tarps and died, leaving locals flummoxed over how to claim compensation.

Despite the fact that other film crews have shot in this location before, and paid a lot of attention to clean up, Chen Kaige is (apparently) such a bigtime player that his crew cleared out overnight, a month ahead of schedule, made no provisions for clean up, and no one in the government thinks he should.

The Shangri La government officials replied that they are paying a high degree of attention to this problem. They said "after the film crew of The Promise left, the government had an unavoidable responsibility to care about and solve this problem in a timely fashion." As to the question about whether the responsibility should belong to the local government or Chen Kaige and the film crew of The Promise, the officials said that they will not be talking to Chen Kaige about that. Instead, they will try to demolish the Flowery Golden House and other structures as quickly as possible and clean out all the trash at the site.

Brought to you by the invaluable EastSouthWestNorth blog where you can read the entire, lousy story.