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I am Jack's Chinese censorship.

Started by Glebe, January 25, 2022, 09:43:19 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

dissolute ocelot

Wikipedia has a list of edited films but most of it seems to be about Kate Winslet's nudity and avoiding crude stereotypes of Chinese people (frequently involving laundry). I think they usually just ban films they don't like: reportedly very opposed to time travel and dystopias.

sevendaughters

surprised that a film reflects the dominant ideology of the prevailing government

Crenners

This is why it's so important and great that a fuck load of HK movies are getting rereleased on Blu-ray before the cunts erase them from history.

Bad Ambassador

The BBC news story on this seems to think the ending of B-movie Blood Debts was also edited, as it ends in a freeze frame and a block of text, despite this obviously being intentional, and in context fucking hilarious.


Mister Six

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on January 25, 2022, 08:10:43 PMThere's a very good reason I haven't gone back to read any of his stuff. I like remembering that "Choke" is a really good book, that "Fight Club" had a better ending than the film version (manifestly untrue), that "Snuff" is a brilliant satire. I know it's not, but are you also going to tell me that my girlfriend at 16 wasn't the most beautiful girl in the world?

I like to think that I'd still enjoy Survivor if I read it now. Obviously I'm not prepared to test that hypothesis.

Quote from: phantom_power on January 26, 2022, 09:09:48 AMI am not sure "the internet" means the same thing in China as it does in the UK. Aren't lots of parts of the internet blocked there?

Yeah, although a lot of people use VPNs to skirt the great firewall.

Sebastian Cobb

There's also a fairly healthy offline bootleg industry.

chveik

what's wrong with the terrorist villains getting caught

imitationleather

Quote from: chveik on January 27, 2022, 07:02:19 AMwhat's wrong with the terrorist villains getting caught

I wonder if the people criticising China here would be happy if some twats blew up all the buildings in their neighbourhood. 🥴

Blumf

Quote from: imitationleather on January 27, 2022, 10:57:30 AMI wonder if the people criticising China here would be happy if some twats blew up all the buildings in their neighbourhood. 🥴

So long as they got proper planning consent.


Mister Six

He's... obviously taking the piss though?

QuotePalahniuk initially responded to reports detailing the change by saying: "This is SUPER wonderful! Everyone gets a happy ending in China!"

He consolidated his thoughts on Substack, calling the incarceration of Pitt's character: "Amazing. I'd no idea! Justice always wins. Nothing ever exploded. Fini."

He added: "My guess is they also omit the flash of penis at the end. And that they pixelate the dildo in Marla's room. Crime does not pay!"

Intrigued, I looked at the blog and he also laughs at a joke about social credit points, so I think he's more amused than supportive of the edit.

In related news, Mrs Six was streaming a Chinese TV show today and a mention of ghosts in dialogue had been dubbed over to make it something about dreams instead. The online chilling effect leads to all kinds of wackiness.

EDIT: It was 2019's Reset, if anyone is wondering. It's not about ghosts; they were just mentioned in dialogue in a metaphorical sense.

popcorn

I am going to hijack this thread to tell a long anecdote about a job interview I had in Japan. Strap in, everyone!!!

The job was at Japanese TV production company that was looking for English-language scriptwriters. They had apparently made a deal with the BBC to co-produce a dramatisation based on the real-life murder of Lucie Blackman.

The main producer on this project, who interviewed me, was a woman called Yuoko. She spoke great English and she had some impressive credits on IMDB.

Naturally I thought the case required some sensitivity. I asked Yuoko what the expectations were about fictionalising it. She said I couldn't play too much with the facts. For example, she told me that "Lucie had a sister, so we cannot say that she did not have a sister," and "Lucie was white, so we cannot say she was black".

I went off and put together a pitch for a TV series of this grisly case. I had no idea what I was doing but I tried my best.



The basic facts of the story are these:

Lucie Blackman was a 21-year-old Brit who went to Japan in 2000. She took a job working illegally at a bar in Roppongi, Tokyo. She was drugged, raped and killed by a wealthy property developer called Joji Obara.

Obara had drugged and raped hundreds of women before Lucie. He probably killed her by mistake — gave her too much sedative, as he had with at least one other woman a few years before, Carita Ridgway. He'd told the paramedics that Carita had eaten bad oysters.

The Japanese police initially declined to investigate Lucie's disappearance, just as they'd declined to act on the reports of several women who had escaped Obara. She'd been working an illegal job of the kind girls ditched all the time. It was only when the British tabloids became interested, and Blair leaned on the Japanese government, that an investigation was opened.

The police found Lucie's body buried in a cave near one of Obara's apartments. She had been dismembered and encased in concrete inside a bathtub. In Obara's properties, the police found sleeping pills and chloroform; receipts for chainsaws, concrete and tents purchased in the days after Lucie's disappearance; a receipt for Carita Ridgway's hospital treatment; and hundreds of tapes of Obara raping unconscious women, though no tape of Lucie.

What the police never got was a confession, which Japanese convictions disproportionately depend on. Obara insisted the women in his videos were consenting sex workers and said he had nothing to do with Lucie's death.

In 2007, a judge found Obara guilty of the rapes of nine women and the manslaughter of Carita Ridgway. (There is no jury system in Japan.) To everyone's astonishment, the judge ruled that the police had failed to provide enough physical evidence linking Obara to Lucie. In 2008, Obara was convicted of her abduction and the dismemberment of her body, but not for murdering her, for which police still lacked direct physical evidence — and a confession.



I tried my best to type this story up into a proposal for a TV drama. Yuoko liked it and invited me for another interview. She also sent me the proposal she'd actually given the BBC. It was titled "Tokyo, Dark River (Never Ceases to Flow): Lucie Blackman's Last 100 Days".

Yuoko's protagonist was Lucie's sister Sophie. In reality, Sophie had no involvement with the investigation, there being not much you can do when your sister is abducted on the other side of the world. But in Yuoko's treatment, Sophie goes to Japan to search for Lucie with a completely invented character, a British private detective, who happens to be Lucie's ex-boyfriend.

This character was called Eugene MacGregor.

Sophie and Eugene MacGregor begin a mad, dangerous romance. Then Eugene MacGregor has Sophie pose as bait for Obara. Obara is about to rape her when the police burst in and shoot him. The twist is revealed: Eugene MacGregor has been working for the yakuza the whole time. He is the real killer; Obara was just a pawn.

After a futuristic motorbike chase through Tokyo, the police capture Eugene. Come the morning he is dead. Suicide? Or something more sinister?

Sophie realises that Tokyo is a "dark and scary river" that conceals a vortex that leads always to Obara. She leaves Japan "with a sense of closure". The synopsis ended on a chilling note, with the Japanese detective's daughter chatting to someone on the computer. I think it was supposed to be Obara, up to his old tricks.



At the second interview, I told Yuoko quite frankly that I was surprised the BBC had gone with her treatment. She couldn't grasp what had surprised me about it. I pointed out that she had attributed the real-life murder of a real-life person to a fictional man, and that she had given me clear instructions not to change the facts of the case.

This devolved slowly into a surreal argument. Yuoko kept saying "The judge found Obara not guilty of her murder. So by definition, we do not know who killed her. By definition, it is a mystery." I kept saying, "But that's not the definition of a mystery." We went round and round like this for about an hour.

Finally Yuoko told me I needed to be humble and, surprise surprise, I did not get the job. I was fine with that as by this point I was persuaded that she was a complete crackpot. Five years later and no dramatisation of the Lucie Blackman case has emerged so far. To this day I'm not sure if the whole thing wasn't just some confused scam.

chveik

Quote from: Mister Six on January 27, 2022, 10:36:30 PMIn related news, Mrs Six was streaming a Chinese TV show today and a mention of ghosts in dialogue had been dubbed over to make it something about dreams instead. The online chilling effect leads to all kinds of wackiness.

i watched a couple detective dee and i'm pretty sure they were ghosts in there

Mister Six

Quote from: chveik on January 28, 2022, 12:40:21 AMi watched a couple detective dee and i'm pretty sure they were ghosts in there

Not clear on when the dub was made - could have been a recent thing. Beijing's been cracking down culturally over the past couple of years.

chveik

i need to watch The Battle at Lake Changjin, it looks wild

kinda sad to see tsui hark making big jingoistic films though

Mister Six

Quote from: popcorn on January 27, 2022, 11:43:10 PMI am going to hijack this thread to tell a long anecdote about a job interview I had in Japan. Strap in, everyone!!!

What a bizarre story. Honestly, you should just make this a new topic rather than burying it in this one.

popcorn

Quote from: Mister Six on January 28, 2022, 04:22:27 PMWhat a bizarre story. Honestly, you should just make this a new topic rather than burying it in this one.

Yeah I probably shouldn't have bunged this thread up with it. CBA to make a new thread but I might type it up properly as another stupid story on me blog. There's a bit more to it than I posted there.

Getting her version of the treatment and reading "Eugene Macgregor" was one of the biggest laughs I've ever had in my life, following the week I'd spent researching the case. I couldn't believe it. Hard to get the reader into the right position to feel the same way though.

beanheadmcginty

Have to admit that I thought the outcome of the anecdote was going to be that due to some mix-up or misunderstanding they ended up casting a black male actor as Lucie Blackman.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: convulsivespace on January 27, 2022, 05:18:20 PMChina keeps winning: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jan/27/fight-club-author-chuck-palahniuk-praises-chinese-cut-super-wonderful
He makes a very reasonable point about his books being banned all over the USA, something that when it gets mentioned is rarely mentioned as much as this has been.

PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on January 26, 2022, 01:42:56 PMThe BBC news story on this seems to think the ending of B-movie Blood Debts was also edited, as it ends in a freeze frame and a block of text, despite this obviously being intentional, and in context fucking hilarious.


Actor credited as

Mark's Wife

Catches me out every time

JamesTC

Love that China has banned Babe: Pig in the City

Glebe