2-D Avatar To Be Pulled From Theaters In China 344
SimonTheSoundMan notes that Avatar is being pulled from screens in China for being too successful, and too provocative in its anti-authoritarian message. (The 3-D and IMAX versions will remain.) "The communist nation's state-run movie distributor China Film Group is unexpectedly yanking the James Cameron-directed blockbuster Avatar from 1,628 2-D screens this week in favor of a biography of the ancient philosopher Confucius starring Chow-Yun Fat. ... According to a report in the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, the move was made at the urging of propaganda officials who are concerned that Avatar is taking too much market share from Chinese films and drawing unwanted attention to the sensitive issue of forced evictions."
even if Avatar is out of the theaters... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just means it'll spread all the more fervently via sneakernet. That we're doing business with this government while calling Cuba an international pariah is all the more disgusting. Maybe if the Cubans had oil or massive quantities of cheap labor rather than cigars and a nice view....
Sure the MPAA wasn't worried about piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Avatar is a fairly simplistic (but very well animated) tale of the good guys and the bad guys. Even if the direction hadn't been so heavy handed, the good guys would have been obviously in the right and the bad guys obviously in the wrong. One side was on the other's planet, busy machine-gunning them for their resources. They didn't even have a sincere-to-them-but-monstrous-in-retrospect motive along the "saving the heathens' souls" lines.
Given that, asserting that "OMG, Avatar hates China" or "OMG, Avatar hates America" is basically equivalent to saying "OMG, the policies of the national entity I support could plausibly be seen as being allegorically represented by the cartoonishly evil bad guys in this sci-fi movie!". Why would you admit something like that? Why not just say "Eh, nice pictures, should keep the kids happy, pity the plot was shallower than a wading pool" and keep conversation from drifting in unfortunate directions?
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, shallow simplistic plots are sometimes necessary for shallow simplistic leadership to see themselves in the mirror. Even the leadership that thinks themselves so special and smarter than the rest of us.
A movie like Avatar can help people form more complex thoughts and ideas, such as respecting people's "religious" views even if you think they are silly.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just considered it a movie. No more. There are a lot of people drawing parallels between the RDA and $group_in_authority and the Na'vi and $persecuted_group. However, I'm sure with any popular movie which isn't using the same stale IP as before, this could be put into place. People alluded the Empire in Star Wars to groups in real life when that debuted.
"Avatar" is a movie, a piece of sci-fi. No more. The RDA doesn't symbolize US marines any more than the UAC space marines in Doom: The Movie.
To me, I was more puzzled by how a race of hunter/gatherers have absolutely perfect teeth to a person, than seeing that fictional sides in a sci fi movie related to real life groups.
Re:Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gee thanks China. (Score:5, Insightful)
Viewing Avatar is a civil right (Score:3, Insightful)
Communist logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember that those theaters belong to "the people" and the representative of "the people" decided it would be a good idea if they were used for something else. There are only 4,000 screens making them a limited resource, after all, and they must be used efficiently. This is strictly an economic decision.
Hey, big Chinese brother is only looking out for you.
Cuba vs China (Score:5, Insightful)
Cuba is small and within our sphere of influence. Therefore, it can be abused as much as we like, maligned, embargoed, scapegoated, and even invaded. After we tried to turn it into a puppet state, the local population revolted and threw us out. It continues to remain a symbol of successful resistance to American control. (Critics will point to it's economic failures, which have almost everything to do with the results of our desire to crush it.)
The West tried to the same intervention in China, and the result was the Boxer Rebellion. If China were smaller and closer to the United States, there would be no difference in the way they are treated. Now China has money and a manufacturing sector, so they are "worthy" of being dealt with. So much so that even the hardline nationalists don't dare to insult China and publicly restate their support of a "One China" policy, so when Beijing absorbs Taiwan, America will be able to save some face.
Decades later we are still somehow surprised by the ferocity of indigenous revolt to foreign rule. Though we can turn to romance when it's our ancestors who are doing the revolting. [wikipedia.org]
Twas hard the woeful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen
I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold United Men
While soft winds shake the barley"
Re:even if Avatar is out of the theaters... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Cuba, I guess it's the same thing on our part. Our pride can't tolerate Cuba's defiance. Look at Vietnam, and how long that dragged on even though the outcome was more or less certain, because each President knew the American people would hate a "loser" President. Quite a few people consider national pride alone enough of a reason to keep sending people to their deaths, rationalizing that weakness invites aggression.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Na'vi would be a lot less lovable if they strapped suicide vests on their women and children and sent them toward the nearest Terran checkpoint.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I never understood why people compared star wars to WWII. I mean, sure, the "bad guys'" troops are called storm troopers [wikipedia.org], and Darth Vader orders acts of genocide.
That's clearly nothing like Nazi Germany, which also coincidentally had troops called stormtroopers (in English), while Adolf Hitler ordered acts of genocide.
How could anyone possibly compare the two? ...Damn near all themes in science fiction are drawn from present day events, or history. As a child, I too liked to see sci-fi as stories that had no meaningful connection with real life. As an adult, I now see the connections everywhere.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Avatar is a fairly simplistic (but very well animated) tale of the good guys and the bad guys. Even if the direction hadn't been so heavy handed, the good guys would have been obviously in the right and the bad guys obviously in the wrong. One side was on the other's planet, busy machine-gunning them for their resources. They didn't even have a sincere-to-them-but-monstrous-in-retrospect motive along the "saving the heathens' souls" lines.
It started out being more sympathetic than it ended up. Specifically, the idea at the start of the movie was "if we give them enough of [something they want], they'll agree to relocate peacefully, we mine the minerals, everyone is happy." The Avatar program was started to find out what [something they want] was. So.. it started out positive and it turned into warfare when the Avatars figured out there really was nothing they could give the Na'vi so they would agree to move. So then the statement became: "If we give them enough of [bombing their asses], they'll agree to relocate." The military even started out in an almost-humane method: use tear gas to get the natives to leave the area while it was cleared. Then, no tree = no home = no reason for the natives to stick around.
Re:even if Avatar is out of the theaters... (Score:3, Insightful)
that's pretty much the difference. when people talk about US/Cuba relations without acknowledging it, it's pretty safe to assume they don't really know anything about the situation.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Na'vi would be a lot less lovable if they strapped suicide vests on their women and children and sent them toward the nearest Terran checkpoint.
Oppress them for long enough and they might yet get desperate enough to do it.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
A movie like Avatar can help people form more complex thoughts and ideas, such as respecting people's "religious" views even if you think they are silly.
It's one thing to respect religious views and opinions.
It's another thing entirely to respect the retarded public policy conclusions that they lead to.
Re:Viewing Avatar is a civil right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Error (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gee thanks China. (Score:5, Insightful)
BSG bombers (Score:1, Insightful)
The Na'vi would be a lot less lovable if they strapped suicide vests on their women and children and sent them toward the nearest Terran checkpoint.
Like the suicide bombers in Battlestar Galactica?
Tooth decay. (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a very odd thing to be puzzled about. Presumably, being in harmony with nature, they have a very good diet and look after their bodies. Do you also wonder why animals have such good teeth, even though they don't have toothbrushes?
Is it? A friend of mine is an archeologist, she has spent a lot of time studying human remains, she told me that ancient people on average generally had excellent teeth. Their teeth would sometimes be worn down by things like softening leather by chewing it, by grit in their grain due to the way they made flour by grinding grain rather than crushing it or they'd have starvation markings on the teeth but since ancient people rarely had any large amount of sugar in their diet they often had teeth in better condition than those of most modern humans. It was mostly the aristocracy that suffered from tooth decay on anything like the scale that modern humans do.
Re:This seems stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:even if Avatar is out of the theaters... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Violating their WTO obligations (Score:3, Insightful)
Kicking China out of WTO or banning their imports and starting a trade war over trifles isn't useful or smart. There would be no benefit to doing it.
Other than that, great idea.
Re:Cuba vs China (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:even if Avatar is out of the theaters... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of things ARE America's fault. Cuba is a case of both sides being wrong.
When your government is some crazy military who has remained in power by force for 50 years and has isolated the country from the rest of the world
In case you forgot, America has had an embargo on Cuba for decades, which has only recently been relaxed. Cuba never isolated itself from the world; America imposed that isolation because it didn't want a communist country sitting off its coast.
Communism is certainly a crappy form of government, but that doesn't give America the right to try to force its preferred form of government on foreign, sovereign countries. If the Cuban people want to try communism, that's their right.
The other big reason America was so oppressive towards Cuba is because American corporations owned a lot of land in Cuba and used it for sugarcane farming. When Castro took power, he seized all this property and nationalized it (just like Venezuela nationalized their oil industry under Chavez). American corporations whined and the American government acted as their enforcement arm, and tried to oust Castro.
From an objective, moral viewpoint, America is completely in the wrong. That land belonged to the Cubans, not American corporations who had somehow bought it up, and it was the Cubans' right to take it back. There's a simple lesson here: if you're not a citizen of a foreign country, then you don't have any rights there, especially when a new regime takes over. Stay in your own country. If you want the same rights and privileges as citizens of another country, then emigrate there and apply for Citizenship. Otherwise, don't act surprised when they change their minds one day and kick you out.
Cuba is just another example of America's imperialism throughout the 20th century. If we really believed in freedom, we would leave other sovereign nations alone to do what they want, and stop trying to control them with military power, bribes, etc.
If America had had a "hands-off" policy towards Cuba under Castro (i.e., no embargo, no assassination attempts, no invasions, etc.), and people were still trying to escape by homemade raft, then you could rightfully criticize that nation for not working very well. But you can't screw around with another country and then criticize them too. It's like tying one of a boxer's hands behind his back and then making fun of him for boxing poorly.
America is the main reason crazy leftist leaders like Castro and Chavez have been able to come to power and stay in power in Latin America. When the locals of these smaller countries are faced with a choice between exploitation by American corporations, or leadership by a nutcase who'll at least provide for them better than what they were getting, they'll choose the latter. It's not too different from Germany in the 30s: they were being oppressed by the Allied powers under the crappy treaty terms set down at the end of WWI, so in comes Hitler who turned them back into a major power, though he was a nut. If countries would stop screwing with each other so much, and mind their own business, we wouldn't have all these problems.
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:3, Insightful)
I am pretty sure an open cuba with free trade would immidiately transform the regime. The embargo stabilises the regime in its niche.
Avatar was a mash-up movie (Score:3, Insightful)
Every kid of a certain age who has seen "Avatar" correctly notes that it's a mash-up of "Fern Gully" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104254/ [imdb.com] and the Disney version of "Pocahontas" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114148/ [imdb.com].
The plot of Avatar is hardly new. It was an entertaining movie, but let's not pretend any of this was a new idea.
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many things wrong with your post, I don't really know where to begin. First, Communism is not a form of government, but an economic system. Unlike Capitalism however, communism only tends to survive when supports by an authoritarian regime, and normally they tend to be more totalitarian than anything. This is because economics permeates everybody's day-to-day lives, and dictating how the economy works requires dictating how day-to-day lives work.
On another note, you mention that it is IMMORAL for a corporation or any foreigner to own land in another country, and yet, you blame the US for the embargo.... This does not compute. First, the whole premise of free trade essentially requires that foreigners can own land, or own "something" in another country. Otherwise, why would they trade with the other country? What would they get back in return. Currency needs to be backed by something, and normally it is based on the countries economy, and being able to buy things from the economy. By your own logic, China is an evil immoral country, not because of their human rights violation, but because the government and the people/corporations in the country own huge chunks of land in the US, as well as trillions of dollars in government debt. Do you think the US should be allowed to write off the debt, never paying it back because they don't want another country to own so much of our country? In my view, that is stealing (what a government does best), and is immoral. It would also likely result in a huge war with china.
I agree that many US policies were constructed in fear, but I don't think we're the reason cuba is a disaster. Unlike Cuba, China threw away much of their communist control over the economy, and has reaped the rewards. If China was still a highly communist country, the fact that they are pulling Avatar wouldn't surprise anyone. It would have been more surprising that Avatar was played in their theaters in the first place.
Also, your argument of: "If the Cuban people want to try communism, that's their right." implies that the Cuban people wanted the system Castro through in place. Like many communist revolutions, the Cuban people wanted changed from Batista, as he was doing some bad things. Many of them desired freedom, and a free form of government, and Castro, at the time of the revolution praised those ideals. Batista got toppled, and Castro took control with an iron fist, quickly jailing many of the same people who helped put him into power because they wished for a limited government, and the freedoms associated with that. Some of the people may have wanted what Castro wanted, but I doubt the majority of those who fought for the revolution would have if they realized that A) Castro would retain power for the next 50 years or so, and B) the ideals of freedom would quickly be dropped, etc. This is a case of people making a bad decision, acting rashly and making a bad situation much worse. Governments are quite good at doing that.
Phil
What do you think "free" means? (Score:5, Insightful)
the whole premise of free trade essentially requires that foreigners can own land, or own "something" in another country... Do you think the US should be allowed to write off the debt, never paying it back because they don't want another country to own so much of our country? In my view, that is stealing (what a government does best), and is immoral. It would also likely result in a huge war with china.
If China demanded all of their money back and collapsed the American economy, could we then write off the debt? If the American economy completely collapsed and China bought nearly all of our arable land, kicked out the agribusinesses that were running them, and then exported most of the food back to China, would you support nationalizing our farmland? We have done similar things to a dozen countries.
The premise here is that we never asked Cuba if they'd like to trade with us without showing them the gun in our other hand. We said, give us everything we want, or we will take everything that we want. We said, we are going take all the land that belongs to local farmers, kick them into the cities to drive down wages for manufacturing, and then turn the whole country into a profit center for sugar producers, and send all of the profits back to the US. That's not free trade. It's thinly veiled colonialism.
Stop jumping through mental hoops to protect your belief system. It's slightly pathetic at this point.
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not seriously stating that communism is purely a form of economics are you? Really? Interesting. All economic systems are inexplicably intertwined with politics and state vision. Always. Trying to separate them is like trying to separate hot from fire.
As for whether we're responsible for Cuba's current situation. Not directly. However, our stance enables their state to easily promote an us vs. them propaganda and makes it significantly easier to create a closed society. Our embargo policy doesn't work. It doesn't help Cuba and it doesn't help us. The best way to change Cuba is to welcome it to the modern world with open arms and give them a big, fat hug. Anything else is childish, ineffective, and a waste of time. Our policy cements their current state. Isn't it interesting after all these years that we still embargo them? Ever wonder why?
Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score:2, Insightful)
Currency needs to be backed by something, and normally it is based on the countries economy, and being able to buy things from the economy
That's not true. Since the fall of bretton woods, America hasn't had any backing for their currency other that pure confidence. that's what economists have been calling, since the 90's, "the grey matter" that keeps america financially backed when it comes to treasury papers. Read some Modigliani and Miller for capital costs and risk assesment. It's kind of old, but still will give you a pretty good idea about why currency doesn't need to be backed by anything but trust.
Some of the people may have wanted what Castro wanted, but I doubt the majority of those who fought for the revolution would have if they realized that
that's a no-no in any college paper or reasonable discussion. if you don't show credentials, citations, quotes, etc. you don't get to say what you think and expect people to take you seriously.