So my English tutor took me roller skating the other day. It was pretty cool – there were some high school boys skating backwards, jumping up and down and doing 180 degree turns, all with their ridiculous mid-1980s poof hair. Some of them came and talked to me, and they were pretty funny.

My English tutor happens to be the president of the English Club, and while we were skating she told me that the club will watch the movie “There Will Be Blood.” She wanted to know if I could come, introduce myself, and then introduce the movie. I didn’t bat an eye – no problem.

I told my sitemate Patrick about it the next day, and he flipped. “They want to watch WHAT?” “There Will Be Blood” “Alex that is a really violent movie.” I didn’t really process it at the time. Anyone who knows me knows that I like violent movies. During training, we watched a movie about a 14 year old substitute teacher in the Chinese countryside who has to go to the city to get one of her students who ran away. B-O-R-I-N-G. What that movie needed was car chases and mafia gun fights. Like the teacher has to train in Kung Fu, and then has to fight her way to a drug king pin who has kidnapped the child and brainwashed him into his fighting servant. And so the student and teacher have to fight one last battle – each other – a battle that neither wants, but both know they must fight. All of that, plus a gratuitous motorcycle chase scene with hand to hand combat, would have greatly improved that movie.

So when my tutor tells me she wants to watch “There Will Be Blood,” she gained a whole new level of respect in my eyes. Only later do I found out she has never watched it, and just heard it has won a lot of awards. “Uh Olivia, maybe that movie is not such a good idea” Patrick tells her.

Later on Pat helps pick out a movie. He tells me he picked out “Precious”. Now I haven’t seen that movie, but 1) I knew that it has some pretty harsh “adult content,” and 2) the whole plot sounds depressing. I figure for the first movie, it should be fun.

So today is movie night, and an hour before, I’m going through the movies, and find a good one. “Brothers Grimm”. Now I’ve never seen this movie, but I figure it’s got to be great – the Grimms wrote all of the fairy tales that we know, so it has American culture! It’s educational! And the cover looked pretty cool!

Olivia tells me they can’t watch anything scary, and I’m like “No prob! Dragon Astronaut won’t steer you wrong.” 5 minutes into the movie, there is a scene where they fight a witch and 200 Chinese girls gasp in fear all at once. Olivia whispers in my ear “This movie is interesting.” “Interesting” can be Chinese code for ‘My God, what have you done?’ I cringe a little.

But then I think of the first 15 minutes of There Will Be Blood: strained high pitched violins, no dialogue, and some guy getting pounded to death in a hole while they dig for oil. As scary as it is, it sure isn’t “Will Be Blood”.

In the meantime I am going to have to find some good movies for these girls to watch. As i’m writing this, I’m imagining 200 girls cowering in terror, some lone girl sobbing in the corner, as Rumplestiltskin or some other fairy tale character is on the screen. I’m trying not to think that I’ve destroyed the English Corner club with my one movie suggestion. I am going to have to think of some good movies for these girls – I need to give them a movie education. Maybe we will have to start with Shrek, but by the end my goal is to get them to “Face/Off” or “Mission Impossible III.” English Corner movie night will rock Zhangye to the core.