These foreign films have found extremely receptive audiences, both because of and despite the fact that the mass media has chosen to administer the Hong Kong films from the hopper of entertainment. The modern American viewer is thus posited with a sense of nostalgia for the good old days. This is not an uncommon perspective for those who come to be entertained. However, it is extremely uncommon for an American film audience to seek and find satisfaction for such a perspective of homesickness in a Chinese-language foreign film from Hong Kong. However, the notion of entertainment is pivotal in understanding the peculiar situation of American cross-cultural consumption of foreign Hong Kong film product, revealing both what is really being consumed and what is not.
Entertainment seems to be served easily, consumed readily, and accepted casually.
The notion that entertainment is such an obvious, self-evident, commonsense idea has encouraged Hong Kong films to slip easily into our mainstream spectatorship without much scrutiny. Thus the notion of entertainment is at once a channel that opens up accessibility and allows viewers to willingly receive a product, and a force that binds the product and acts as a protective barrier, resistant to probing. The Hong Kong film is easily administered to and accepted by the mainstream audience, not only because it is bound by entertainment, but because it is gagged by it. Thus serious questions about the individual Hong Kong films have been as seemingly inappropriate 3 and absent as serious examinations of notions of entertainment. The East Is Red .