Cognition Differences between Chinese and Foreign

Audiences on Ethnic Minority Movies

-- A Case Study of Everything Everywhere All at Once

Student Name: Tuo Boyuan

Student ID: 56770068

Supervisor Name: Dr. MA Chen

Introduction

Research Background: In recent years, there have been numerous films depicting the

life of minorities in the United States. One of the most famous and successful film is

"Green Book", who was highly regarded in the American society and won the best

film of the 91st Academy Award and was highly. Meanwhile, "Green Book" in

Douban got 8.9 high point, ranking 48th among all films, indicating a high level of

recognition from Chinese audiences. However, regarding this year's new film of the

same genre, " Everything Everywhere All at Once", there are some inconsistent and

even diverging views on mainstream forums at home and abroad. In the United States,

everyone seems to nod to the Chinese family said in the movie and compassion; but in

China, in addition to goodwill and family love, there is also a considerable part of

people make the different sounds. This is quite interesting topic, which may be caused

by the different cultural backgrounds of Chinese and American audiences.

Related work:

Cultural Differences

Chinese and American cultures are significantly different in nature. One of Hofstede's

(1980) methods of cultural separation, individualism-collectivism, represents the

cultural images of The United States and China in the long-term cognition; One

advocates materialism, while the other advocates tradition, community, and

benevolence. People's attitude is closely related to their cultural background.

Birnbaum & Benne (1983) pointed out that behavior is the result of the interaction
between attitude and environment. Therefore, it can be classified as a model in which

cultural background influences its behavior, that is, different comments and attitudes

are reflected in film reviews, and these differences in turn reflects the cultural

differences between China and the West.

However, the cultural differences defined by Hofstede are not absolute in modern

society, nor are they applicable to every research object. At present, there are few

articles that explore trans-racial films. Koh et al. (2010) found that online reviews in

China are more authentic than those in the United States when studying the credibility

of online review surveys across cultures; Extreme ratings and under-reporting are

more common in the United States, and they attributed this difference to social norms

and cultural differences. This paper attempts to reshape the background of the original

stereotype of Chinese and American cultures, to view the differences in the evaluation

and opinion of a special interracial film between China and the United States from the

perspective of cultural inclusion, and through which to re-explore the reasons behind

the differential evaluation of interracial films.

Film Reviews

Film is the product of social culture and the miniature of each country's historical

development. Film criticism is the audience's most authentic feedback on a film,

which is always expressed in the form of text description and rating of a film. Even if

Koh et al. (2010) pointed out that consumers with extreme views are more likely to

report their opinions online than consumers with moderate comments; however, as

China's largest film rating channels Douban and America's hottest movie database
IMDb, their online film review is still a good source for us to probe into a movie in

the audience feedback of China and the United States.

There have been many studies on film reviews, most of which are emotional analysis.

Pang and Lee (2002) used three machine learning methods (Naive Bayes, maximum

entropy classification and support vector machine) to compare film reviews in

emotional classification. Kennedy and Inkpen (2006) upgraded Pang by combining

two methods; First calculating positive and negative words, then using machine

learning (ML) to determine the emotions of film reviews, which greatly improved the

accuracy of sentiment analysis. Wollmer et al. (2013) not only limited on written

comments, but also turned to voice and facial expressions in more realistic YouTube

videos, so as to develop a text-based sentiment classification method combined with

audio and video features to more comprehensively analyze the emotions of movie

reviews. In addition to emotional analysis, Joshi et al. (2010) established a regression

analysis model based on the data of text and non-text film review and predicted the

revenue of opening week. It follows that film reviews have a lot to explore.

Different from other critical analysis of certain kind of film or the analysis of the film

as a whole, this paper decides to take the recent controversial film "Everything

Everywhere All at Once" as the research object to conduct text mining and sentiment

analysis on its reviews. As it is an interracial film about Chinese Americans in the

United States, it born to be special. According to the preliminary investigation, there

are significant differences between Chinese film reviews and American film reviews,
both in terms of topic discussed and film scores. Therefore, this paper will focus on

the text of film reviews and make comparative analysis of them.

Research Overview

Research Setting: Workplace at Douban and IMDB

For Douban, I collected a total of 3,519 reviews from Douban, including 1,860 short

reviews and 1,659 movie reviews, all written by users who have watched the movie.

Douban short comment is composed of user name, rating star, evaluation date, number

of supporters and comment content. Douban Movie Review consists of username,

rating star, review date, number of people who support it and number of people who

disagree, and the content of the comment. The difference between short reviews and

movie reviews is that most short reviews can more directly reflect the user's emotions

about the movie, while most long movie reviews require users to have a certain ability

to appreciate the movie, and usually need to conduct a more rational analysis of the

movie's plot. Sometimes it is necessary to compare the current movie with other movies

to draw relevant conclusions, so movie reviews can better reflect what Chinese users

are concerned about. When conducting data analysis, sentiment analysis is carried out

for short reviews. For film reviews, firstly, they are sorted according to their influence,

and then the top-ranked film reviews are selected for LDA analysis, which can more

accurately reflect the parts that Chinese audiences pay the most attention to.

For IMDB, I collected 1500 user comments from the IMDB website. Since the

comment mechanism of the IMDB website is different from that of Douban, there is no
distinction between short and long comments based on the length of the comments.

IMDB reviews are composed of rating stars, title, username, review date, review

content, number of people who support it, and number of people who disagree. The title

of the comment is usually a sentence. According to my observation, this sentence can

well reflect the emotional polarity of the relevant comment content and is similar in

structure and content to the Douban short comment. During data analysis, to compare

with Douban comments horizontally, in sentiment analysis, the title of IMDB comment

was selected as the data source of sentiment analysis. When analyzing the data of

comments, sorting them according to their influence, and selecting the top-ranked

comments for LDA analysis can more accurately reflect the parts that foreign audiences

pay the most attention to.

Study1: QUALITATIVE STUDY OF MOVIE REVIEWS

In study1, I address RQ1: What are the similarities and differences between Chinese

and foreign audiences' attitudes towards the values conveyed by this film? To do this,

I need to collect the most critical positive and negative reviews from Douban and

IMDB and use the LDA to analysis what Chinese audiences and foreign audiences

pay attention to.

Method:

Data resource: Douban has the highest score of five stars, five stars correspond to

strong recommendations, four stars correspond to recommendations, three stars

correspond to average, two stars correspond to poor, and one star corresponds to

extremely poor. Consider five and four stars as positive reviews, and two and one

stars as negative reviews. According to the screening mechanism, the top 30 film

reviews with the impact factor were obtained from the five-star and four-star film

reviews respectively, as 60 Douban positive reviews. Similarly, the top 30 film

reviews with the impact factor were obtained from the two-star and one-star film

reviews respectively, as 60 bad reviews on Douban.

The highest IMDB rating is 10 stars. I take the set of 8 points, 9 points and 10 points

as good reviews, and the set of 1 point, 2 points and 3 points as IMDB bad reviews.

According to the screening mechanism, the top 20 film reviews with the impact factor

were obtained from the film reviews with 8 points, 9 points and 10 points

respectively, as 60 IMDB positive reviews. According to the screening mechanism,

the top 20 film reviews with impact factors were obtained from the film reviews with

1, 2, and 3 points, respectively, as 60 IMDB negative reviews.

Data preprocess: The data I got from Douban's official website is stored in csv

format. First, I use Jieba word segmentation to segment Chinese text. Jieba word

segmentation can work in three modes, including precise mode, full mode, and search

engine mode. Compared with the search engine mode, The results of the exact mode

do not include repeated words. Compared with the full mode, the results of the exact

mode do not include redundant words, so I choose the exact mode for word

segmentation. The obtained word segmentation results include nouns, verbs,

adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech. In order to get the parts that users pay

attention to, the part-of-speech tagging function that comes with the Jieba library is

used to filter out the noun results. Because users will have Internet terms with special

meanings when commenting, before removing stop words, use the self-built

dictionary function of the Jieba library to input these Internet terms into the dictionary

to prevent them from being deactivated by Jieba. After removing the stop words for

the first time, I found that some words related to this movie have not been stopped,

but they have no actual meaning, so I use the extended stop word thesaurus that

comes with Jieba, and input these words into the dictionary in advance, and then

remove the stop words again.

The data I obtained from the IMDB official website is stored in csv format. Due to the

characteristics of English text, word segmentation of the text is not required. First use

the simple-preprocess function that comes with the gensim library to remove

punctuation from the text. Then use the stop-words function that comes with the

NLTK library to remove stop words, which is like the preprocessing of Chinese text.

For the first time, after removing stop words, it is found that some words related to

this movie have not been stopped, so stop-words. extend is used. The function

expands the stop word database, input these words into the dictionary in advance, and

then perform the operation of removing stop words again. In order to more clearly

find the parts that users pay attention to, before performing part-of-speech restoration,

the nouns are filtered out through the NLP function that comes with the spacy library.
After preprocessing the Chinese and English texts, use the dictionary function that

comes with the corpora library to build a dictionary, and then use the doc2bow

function that comes with id2word to convert the dictionary into Term Document

Frequency. Then use the LDA model that comes with gensim to get the results.

Influence Assessment: In the original data, we found that the degree of influence of

comments is different. The number of people who support, the number of people who

oppose, and the number of people who respond can reflect the influence of a

comment's mass media communication. In this paper, I will discuss the two

dimensions to reflect the influence, one is the degree of recognition, the other is the

degree of attention, the degree of recognition indicates the degree of support of other

users for this film review, the more people support, the higher the degree of

recognition, The degree of attention indicates the degree to which this film review is

responded to by users in the same type of film review, the more people respond, the

higher the degree of attention.

LDA analysis of the film reviews with the highest recognition and attention can

better dig out the part of the film that the group pays attention to. For Douban movie

reviews, first delete the comment information in the document with the number of

opponents greater than the number of supporters, and at the same time delete the

information of the film reviews with the same number of opponents and supporters

(including couples with 0 number of opponents and 0 supporters), so as to avoid the

analysis of unsupported or unsupported the film review information you care about
and avoid making a lot of noise. To quantify the approval and attention of the group, I

use the ratio of the number of supporters to the number of evaluations (the sum of the

number of supporters and the number of opponents) to describe the group's approval.

Compared with support or opposition, the reply below each film review means further

communication needs, so the maximum number of responses within the star range of

each film review is used as the base of the range, and the ratio of the number of

responses to the base is used for each film review. to describe the degree of attention,

so that we can get the user's degree of attention to the movie review among all the

movie reviews with the same rating scale. Assign a weight ratio of 5:5 to recognition

and attention, and then add them to get the final impact factor. In different evaluation

star ranges, select the top 30 film reviews with impact factor, and analyze these film

reviews. For IMDB film reviews, since the film review itself does not have a reply

function, it only includes the number of supporters and opponents, so the ratio of the

number of supporters to the number of comments is used as the recognition degree.

For the degree of attention, the maximum number of evaluations in each evaluation

interval is used as the base, and the ratio of the number of evaluations to the base of

each film review is used as the degree of attention. Assign a weight ratio of 5:5 to

recognition and attention, and then add them to get the final impact factor. In different

evaluation star intervals, select the top 20 comments in the impact factor, and analyze

these comments. Through this method, we can find out the similarities and differences

of the parts concerned by Chinese and foreign users with high ratings, and at the same
time, we can also get the similarities and differences of the parts concerned by

Chinese and foreign users with low ratings.

Before performing LDA on long texts, Chinese texts are segmented, stop words

removed, self-built dictionaries, and part-of-speech tags. Lemmatization of English

text, removal of stop words, self-built dictionary, part-of-speech tagging. The text is

then vectorized for LDA analysis.

Topic Modeling: In order to find out which aspects of the movie Chinese audiences

and foreign audiences pay attention to, we conduct topic modeling on Douban

reviews and IMDB reviews and adopt an unsupervised learning algorithm LDA.

Several types of topics are summarized in the long text of the set label, which can

highly summarize what these long texts mainly want to express. The reason for

choosing LDA is that for topics derived from quantitative analysis and these long

reviews, I can manually label the meaning of the topics according to relevant

sociological theories. Compared with SVM, which must be pre-set with labels and

then trained, the results obtained by LDA are more in line with the characteristics of

long texts with unknown topics, rather than being limited to existing common topics.

Result:

In Douban positive reviews, the coherence score is used to judge the effect of

classification as Fig. 1 shows. I found that dividing the text into 6 categories has the

best effect. The results of LDA analysis of 60 Douban positive reviews are as Fig. 2
and Fig. 3 shows. Three of these categories are related to the themes conveyed by the

film, such as the first category includes meaning, family, relationships, children, the

second category includes husbands, parents, family, themes, and the third category

includes children, love, energy, spirit, the fourth category includes definition, fetters,

essence, children, and the other category is related to the plot and expression of the

movie, including kung fu, stone, and imaginative. The last category has to do with the

race of the characters in the movie, including Asian, bagel, question, laundry.

Fig. 1. Coherence score of Douban positive reviews

Fig. 2. Text result of Douban positive reviews

Fig. 3. Intertopic Distance Map of Douban positive reviews

In the IMDB positive reviews, using the coherence score to judge the effect of

classification as Fig. 4 shows, I found that dividing the text into 6 categories works

best, and the results of LDA analysis of 60 IMDB positive reviews are as Fig. 5 and

Fig. 6. All topics mainly discuss the basic elements of the film, including the way the

film is shot, the actors themselves, and the location of the film, such as the first

category includes the way, theater, performance, setting, and the second category

includes the way, action, idea , actors, the third category includes scene, character,

year, actor name, the fourth category includes reality, version, divorce, storyline, the

fifth category includes location, process, sound, effects, and the sixth category

includes time , end, experience.

Fig. 4. Coherence score of IMDB positive reviews

Fig. 5. Text result of IMDB positive reviews

Fig. 6. Intertopic Distance Map of IMDB positive reviews

In Douban negative reviews, the coherence score is used to judge the effect of

classification as Fig. 7 shows. I found that dividing the text into 5 categories works

best. The results of LDA analysis of 60 Douban negative reviews are as Fig. 8 and

Fig. 9 shows. There are 4 categories of topics that all mention family. This noun, such

as family, problem, parent in the second category, family, Chinese, relationship in the

third category, family, child, father in the fourth category, female, family, emotion in

the fifth category, and the first category is mainly It is related to the racial positioning

of the characters in the film, such as Asians, female protagonists, values.

Fig. 7. Coherence score of Douban negative reviews

Fig. 8. Text result of Douban negative reviews

Fig. 9. Intertopic Distance Map of Douban negative reviews

In IMDB negative reviews, using the coherence score to judge the effect of

classification as Fig. 10 shows, I found that dividing the text into 5 categories works

best, the results of LDA analysis of 60 IMDB negative reviews are as Fig. 11 and Fig.

12 shows, all the topics are mainly related to the basic Elements are related, such as

idea, plot, waste, drugs in the first category, evaluation, rating, shock, confusion in the

second category, ratings, time, plot, characters in the third category. Action,

production, combat, travel in category 4, character, fight, commentary, actors in

category 5.

Fig. 10. Coherence score of IMDB negative reviews

Fig. 11. Text result of IMDB negative reviews

Fig. 12. Intertopic Distance Map of IMDB negative reviews

In the analysis of Douban movie review scores and IMDb movie review scores, I

found that compared to Douban, IMDb users are more inclined to choose between 1

star or 2 stars, 9 stars or 10 stars, while Douban users are more inclined to concentrate

In the upper-middle range, such as four or five stars.

x
Fig. 13. Douban Long Reviews Ratings
Fig. 14. Douban Short Reviews Ratings

Fig. 15. IMDb Long Reviews Ratings

Fig. 16. IMDb Short Reviews Ratings

Study2: Qualitative research from cultural background

In study2, I address RQ2: Is the difference in attitude related to the cultural

differences between Chinese and American audiences? To do this, I combine

sociological findings with LDA thematic results, popular film review texts, and

analysis of rating distributions to explore the reasons for these differences.

Discussion

1. Culture Differences: Confucianism and Liberalism

Through the data analysis of LDA, it is found that the focus of Chinese and American

audiences is very different, and Chinese audiences care more about the values

expressed in the film, such as education methods, parent-child relationship patterns,

relationships between family members, and the after-immigration of Chinese groups,

psychological and living conditions, while American audiences discuss more about

the artistic effect of the film, including the setting of the plot, the performance of the

actors, the audio-visual effects, and so on. This may be influenced by Confucianism.

Chinese people value a person's character, morality and values very much. This kind

of thinking and concept of judging a person also applies to various cultural products

created by people, such as novels, movies, dramas, songs. So when commenting on a

movie, Chinese audiences care more about the connotation of the movie. And the

American society that advocates equality for all, freedom and democracy, and respect

for everyone’s individuality, this value is also reflected in the appreciation of the film

- American audiences have shown great interest in how this film is different from

other films.

By comparing the positive reviews on Douban and IMDB, it can be found that when

Chinese audiences recommend this movie, apart from a small amount of discussion

on the basic elements of the movie, most of them are discussing the values and

meaning of the movie, such as family relationship, mother-daughter relationship , the

meaning of life, and although foreign audiences will also discuss these parts of the
film, they are still more concerned about the content of the film itself, such as the way

the film is shot, the vivid plot, as well as the exaggerated expression techniques and

the acting skills of the actors.

By comparing the negative reviews on Douban and IMDB, it can be found that when

Chinese audiences express their dissatisfaction with the film, they still care about the

values conveyed by the film, and they care more about the roles of everyone in the

family. For the men in the film, for example, they are both husbands and fathers, and

even grandfathers. For the heroine, is she a qualified mother? At the same time, for a

film that is interracial, especially a film that describes the life of a Chinese family in

the United States, as a Chinese, no matter whether it is good or bad, they will think

that they belong to the same race as the protagonist in the film. In Chinese society,

family relationship is an eternal topic, and the communication between parents and

children is the hottest topic in family relationship. As foreign audiences on the

receiving side, they did not discuss immigration too much in their reviews. This may

be related to the fact that American society itself is a multicultural society, and they

have become accustomed to the topic of immigration.

2. The educational roles of "protectors" and "facilitators": parent and child

perspectives

In the film, the protagonist Evelyn disregarded the extreme opposition of his father

when he was young, and ran away from Hong Kong to the United States with her

boyfriend Waymond (future husband), and opened a Chinese laundry there, and
settled down as a Chinese immigrant. The father has always been dissatisfied with this

matter, and even said at the time that he would cut off the relationship between father

and daughter with Evelyn. Decades later, Evelyn brought her dementia-stricken father

to the United States to be taken care of with her husband, but the two were at odds

because their previous conflicts had not been resolved. At the same time, Evelyn's

daughter Joy plucked up the courage to introduce her girlfriend Becky to her, but she

did not get Evelyn's understanding and approval. When introducing Becky to his

family, Evelyn lied that Becky was Joy's friend, which caused Joy to leave in

frustration, and the conflict between the two intensified.

From the data displayed by LDA, in the high praise of Douban, the keyword “family”

appears in every topic, and the weight is the highest in the first four categories of

topics, while in the high praise of IMDB, the family Keywords only appear in the

sixth category, and the weight is not the highest. This shows that relative to

Americans, Chinese people have a positive focus on family-related plots in movies.

Compared with American society, in China, parents have a stronger desire to control

their children. The research of Pomerantz et al. (2014) shows that compared with

American mothers, Chinese mothers are more inclined to establish their own values

on their children, and Chinese mothers' sense of value depends on their children's

performance. A high degree of psychological control over child rearing. The original

motivation of Chinese mothers’ stems from a desire to help their children maximize

socially recognized success. Tan et al. (2006) believe that compared with Western

parents, Chinese parents are more inclined to act as a "protector" in the parenting
process in terms of role-playing in the parenting process, they are responsible for

meeting their children's needs and cultivating their children's self-esteem. This also

means that Chinese parents are obliged to make decisions for their children so that

their children are not harmed in the environment. Western parents, on the other hand,

tend to play a "facilitating" role, helping children experience their feelings and

expressing their needs to others. In terms of their parenting philosophies, Chinese

parents judge the success of their children's education by their academic performance,

while Western parents pay more attention to cultivating children's self-esteem and

social skills. Therefore, when Evelyn and her father as Chinese parents, in the process

of getting along with their children, the parent-child relationship was broken because

the children made decisions against the parents' wishes.

This phenomenon, which is more common in Chinese households, has resonated with

the younger generation of Chinese audiences, who posted their views on Douban and

received above-average likes and comments. The long film review——The daughter

of an East Asian family, who cried for most of the movie, received 2,710 likes and

153 retweets on Douban. This review mentions:

I come from an unhappy family of origin with typical East Asian problems:

an arrogant but incompetent father; a weak mother who was belittled and

ordered; a grandfather who had a successful career and was strict and unkind.

Husbands and wives who have been in a divorce; parents complain about

their children and attack family members; children are kidnapped by filial

piety and must "submit" to grandfathers who have little love.

The author's parents and grandparents are very traditional Chinese parents. Because

his father has never been recognized by his grandfather, he has become arrogant and

sensitive. He transferred his anger to the author and implemented strong thought

control and verbal violence against the author. The resistance was subdued each time

by the violence of the father. After each quarrel, her father would stress that he loved

the author deeply and doing so was educating her for the society. The author achieved

financial independence as an adult, but still yearns for the care and understanding of

her parents, but her parents cannot give her what she wants. In the end, the author

chooses to escape and block all the contact information of her parents. This is a very

typical parent-child relationship in Chinese society. Parents strictly control their

children from childhood, and children choose to stay away from their parents when

they become adults. This film review received the largest number of replies among all

film reviews: 481. Most of the reviews expressed their empathy for this mode of

getting along. Some people said that they understood the kindness of their parents

after they had children, forgive parents for the trauma they have inflicted on children.

The Short Comments named The most beautiful reconciliation an East Asian family

could imagine. This Douban short comment has the most likes, with as many as 7,000

users saying this comment is helpful to them:

Love is not blindly grasping, love is accepting chaos, learning to let go, "I

will give you freedom / I will give you the last tenderness", this sentence

should be recited in a deep breath, regardless of love or family.

This shows that most Chinese audiences who have experienced Chinese-style

education hope that their parents can respect their own thoughts and understand their

own thoughts.

On IMDb, the most popular film review-Fantastic, mentions:

If only we could accept our kids for who they are and say supportive things

from the heart instead of trying to mold them.

This suggests that American audiences have reached a certain level of consensus on

this educational psychology.

In the movie, Joy, as the second generation of Chinese-American immigrants, did not

get the care and love from her parents when she grew up. Her mother, Evelyn, was

always busy running a laundry, ignoring Joy's psychological needs during her growth.

Joy slowly became estranged from her parents and became rebellious, and when she

finally found her partner and plucked up the courage to introduce her to her mother,

her mother denied their relationship because of traditional sexuality, which led to the

complete breakdown of Joy's relationship with her mother. Since Joy has not been

able to understand from the family, he has a nihilistic thought that everything in life is

meaningless, so he creates a bagel black hole and invites Evelyn to end it all together.

Judging from the data displayed by LDA, “Bagel” appeared in multiple themes in the

praise of IMDB, while bagel did not appear in the praise of Douban. This shows that

compared to Chinese audiences, American audiences have a positive focus on bagel-

related plots in movies.

Research by Tafarodi & Swann (1995). shows that because Chinese society is a

highly collectivistic society and American society is a highly individualistic society,

compared with Chinese teenagers, American teenagers are more likely to do things

that go against their parents' wishes and It's easier to follow and find yourself in the

process. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, American parents pay more attention

to their children's mental health and the cultivation of self-esteem. Joy, who was born

in the United States and was educated in American schools, was deeply influenced by

American society, so when she returned to her family and faced the training methods

of her Chinese parents, she must have been uncomfortable. At the same time, she

must persist in herself and follow her heart, so extreme ideas are born. And this kind

of behavior of daring to challenge authority, following one's own heart, and having

the courage to express one's own will is exactly in line with the individualism

advocated by American society. So American audiences were able to resonate and

understand that Joy created the Bagel black hole to destroy everything.

3. Collectivism and Individualism: Scoring Morphology of Hills and Depressions

In a collectivist society like China, to gain collective approval and not be regarded as

alien by the collective, the public will consider the consequences of their speech when

they make their speech, so the public's speech will reflect the aggregation. For movie

ratings, the displayed state is clustered in a specific scoring interval.

In an individualistic society like the United States, the public respects every

individual's opinion, so it is easier for the public to express their true feelings, which

may be the reason for the large number of negative ratings from American audiences.

Conclusion

From this article, by studying the reviews of the same movie by Chinese and

American audiences, I found that there are differences in the focus of the two groups.

Chinese audiences have a very strong resonance on topics such as education methods

and parent-generation relationships. At the same time, some American audiences

mentioned the values conveyed by the film, but the emotions expressed are mostly

positive. American audiences were more active in plot setting, actor performance, and

audio-visual effects, saying that the film brought a very fresh and distinctive viewing

experience. At the same time, some Chinese audiences were discussing the film and

television effects of the film. But the emotions expressed are mostly negative.

At the same time, for the plot of family education in the film, Chinese audiences pay

attention to the harm caused by parents to children, while American audiences pay

attention to the changes and resistance that children make in the face of parental

control.

In addition, by studying the ratings information of Chinese and American audiences

for the same movie, I found that there are certain regularities and differences in the

ratings of the two groups. Most of the ratings of Chinese audiences are concentrated

in a certain area, showing the shape of a "hill", while the ratings of American
audiences are concentrated at the two ends of the negative and favorable reviews,

showing the shape of a "depression".

From the perspective of cultural background, I have explored the reasons for this

difference, which can be mainly attributed to three reasons, the first is the influence of

Confucian culture and liberalism, the second is the influence of parents on their

children's education methods, the third is the third is the influence of collectivism and

individualism. Confucian culture has led the Chinese public to judge a person by

paying more attention to his character and morality, while liberalism has led

American audiences to respect each person's personality development and value the

characteristics of a person that are different from others. Collectivism makes the

words and deeds of the Chinese public more vulnerable to external discussion.

Therefore, the Chinese public will consider the impact of such activities on their

status and relationships in the group before engaging in social activities. The public

tends to do some conforming behaviors, and the American society, which advocates

the liberation of individuality, respects the right of every individual to express their

opinions, so the American public is more willing to express their true thoughts. This is

one of the reasons for the difference in the scores between the two groups.

In terms of education for their children, Chinese parents tend to play the role of

"protectors" and believe that they should make decisions for their children in

everything to avoid harming their children from the outside world. At the same time,

due to the cultural influence of a collectivist society, Chinese parents long for the

success of their children's social recognition but ignore their children's personality
development. This educational model can easily lead to children's psychological

problems. American parents tend to take the role of a "facilitator" to participate in

their children's growth. American parents respect their children's nature and focus on

exercising their children's independence and social skills. This is one of the reasons

for the differences between the two groups in the review section.

Limitation

Since the protagonist of this film is of Chinese descent, Chinese audiences may have a

sense of substitution when watching, and this sense of substitution may produce a

certain degree of cognitive bias. On the bad side, many Chinese audiences who gave

one or two stars thought that the director deliberately exaggerated the shortcomings of

Chinese education at the time of filming. This kind of plot setting further deepened

the audience's bias in other countries or regions. On the bright side, many viewers

who gave positive reviews felt that the plot depicted by the director was similar to his

own personal experience, and the director gave a solution to this problem in the film,

as a mother Evelyn finally understood how to love , no longer pursue control of his

daughter Joy. The beginning of the movie is to control because of love, and the end of

the movie is to let go because of love. This transition and ending is exactly what this

segment of the Chinese audience needs, so they tend to give higher ratings for that.

In this film, the story takes place in the United States, and it was shot by a director

deeply influenced by American culture, so there are many laughs in the film that only

Americans can understand. This may also be the reason why American audiences
have more discussions about the film and television effects. For example, the hot dog

culture, bagel black hole, chef raccoon and other plots in the movie are more likely to

resonate with American audiences.

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