NO MORE CHINESE VILLAINS — NOT ONE — IN MOVIES

There are no longer any Chinese villains in movies, and film producers are going to great lengths to include positive portrayals of Chinese characters in their films, the Los Angeles Times observed today (Wednesday). The newspaper noted that when Sony released Men in Black in China last month, it was forced to remove or shorted several scenes that depicted Chinese characters unflatteringly, including one scenes in which Chinese restaurant workers were portrayed as alien monsters and another in which Chinese characters had their memories erased. However, the newspaper noted, U.S. filmmakers are going out of their way to court the expanding Chinese film audience — and Chinese investors. “Hollywood these days is sometimes better at carrying water for the Chinese than the Chinese themselves,” Stanley Rosen, director of USC’s East Asian Studies Center and an expert on film and media, told the Times. The end result, the newspaper commented, is that the “suppressive tendencies of a foreign nation are altering what is seen not just in one country but around the world.” An unnamed Hollywood producer underscored that observation: “It’s a clear-cut case — maybe the first I can think of in the history of Hollywood — where a foreign country’s censorship board deeply affects what we produce.”