Top Gun and America

The Val Kilmer documentary is sobering look at his life after throat cancer. He goes through his whole career, each iconic movie role and all his personal drama. He has die hard fans for roles in Top Gun, Batman and his most beloved role as Doc Holiday in Tombstone.

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Funny story. My dad thought it was a harmless kids puppet movie. Put my little nephews in front of the tv and went to make dinner. His girlfriend says you won’t believe what is being said in that movie, he goes to turn it off and ofcourse my nephews say they are loving it.

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I think every parent or grandparent since VCR’s going forward to streaming had a story like that one, or if they don’t have one they just don’t have one yet.

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Did his nephews end up seeing the “puppet sex” scene? I hope that it was turned off prior to that!

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Do you have more examples of this great influence they exert on Hollywood movies you speak of ?

“Hollywood is freeing itself from this restrictive influence” ? What sources did you get this from ?
What evidence ?

Only thing I could see how China would be influencing Hollywood, is if they are financing the studios and demsnding script changes that show a glorious side of China. But wouldn’t directors and screen writers and others be speaking out about that ? Or do you see movies about minorities , poverty, gangs, LGBTQ character issues and assume this is evil China infiltrating our movies and showing a non-existent ugly America?

This Heritage Foundation article discusses why they think that is exactly what’s going on
well
you be the judge!

Recent Midway and Abominable Snowman movies popular in the West were Chinese financed.

One good example, according to this discussion, is how the Dr. Strange movie, which was supposed to have a Tibetan character, was apparently changed to have a Celtic character instead, so that it would not go against official Chinese policy that says that there’s no such thing as Tibet/Tibetan identity/Tibetan nationality, etc.

Even if he did, I personally think it makes a better story of he had to rush in and cut it off mid scene. That’s how I would tell it if I wouldn’t get called out on the story.

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He is sick

I can guess how you vote, lol

Well, if I’m producing a movie I wouldn’t want to limit my market to 50% of what it could be
over a minor thing. Profit is profit. So you avoid the 3 Ts to get market share. Does that significantly
change the movie ? Two thoughts on this, 1) movie makers by choice choose to avoid the 3 Ts
to make money. Artistic product is not really compromised. 2) the more nefarious position, China
is actively engaged in producing movies that portray American in some negative light. I can see

  1. being good business and I see 2) more as the conspiracy theorist believers.

Seems to be an ebb and flow around what American movies China allows in, and has been since
post WWII. Nothing really new here, but we may be heading back to stricter times.

GONZALEZ: Well, it’s had its ups and downs obviously under Mao Zedong, which was the man who imposed Marxism and Communism in China in 1949. It was truly horrible. Then there was an opening in '79 after Mao’s death, and it lasted until '89, lasted about ten years, until the Tiananmen massacre. Then again, there was a tightening of the screws, and then back in the 1990s there was a bit of an opening again, economic opening. The worrying part is that Xi Jinping, the new Chinese leader, earlier this year changed the Constitution so that he does not have to rotate. Every leader pretty much since Deng Xiaoping died in 1996, I believe it was, that China has had rotating leaders. Hu Jintao, Jian Zemin, but now Xi Jinping looks like he wants to revive some aspects of Maoism.

But the heritage.org is right lean bias , so they produce for their readers too ! Just like Hollywood.

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There is so much money in the China market. So this is just Hollywood being capitalistic just like the NBA. Why take a stance that removes your product from the market. Is it spineless, sure but the motivate is dollars.

Along those lines, the recent Chinese produced “Midway” movie, which I thoroughly enjoyed, did not by any means portray the USA in a negative light. Far from it, actually.

OTOH, I think that it was primarily designed by the Chinese to portray Imperial Japan in a negative light.

That, it did.

But given that Japan is one of our five treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps we should be leery of any Chinese funded film that portrays an ally in a negative light.

I’m finding this a very entertaining topic ! In the link Uhlaw97 provided there
are even more gems. Now we know why Richard Gere disappeared from movies !
China did it.
:wink:

GONZALEZ: Richard Gere who was Hollywood’s biggest draw, Hollywood’s biggest draw until he disappeared from sight. Why did Richard Gere disappear from sight? Because, he was pal-ing it around with the Dalai Lama, the religious leader of Tibetans. He was promoting the cause of the Dalai Lama, and of Tibetan independence, and of the Buddhist religion. So, any movie that Richard Gere makes is not going to be shown in China, denying hundreds of millions of dollars to Hollywood studios. So, guess who’s not in a major Hollywood blockbuster, and hasn’t been in the last 20 years? Richard Gere.

And from wiki , here is his take :

Gere has expressed a belief that his politics regarding China, an important financial resource for major Hollywood studios, have made him unwelcome within Hollywood.[24] He embraced his apparent exile from Hollywood and instead appeared in independent films that garnered some of the best reviews of his career.[16] He was notably singled out for portraying businessman Robert Miller in Arbitrage (2012), earning his fourth Golden Globe Award nomination. Among many positive reviews,[25] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone cited Gere’s performance as “too good to ignore” and “an implosive tour de force”.[26] Lou Lumenick of the New York Post further wrote that he “gives the best performance of his career”.[27][28] Also in 2012, he received the Golden Starfish Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Hamptons International Film Festivaland the Career Achievement Award from the Hollywood Film Awards.[29][30] He had earlier received an award from the 34th Cairo International Film Festival in December 2010.[31]

It’s just a bunch of brainworms.

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Producers, directors, and actors can make choices. The NBA has sold out harder to China than any movie studio, yet they get very little blowback. Let the markets operate. Let the artists and athletes choose to compromise for money (like on the LIV Tour). “Control” is too strong a term. Companies and individuals bend to varying degrees to get access to another billion people.

Their getting called out on it is just part of the price.

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Gang,

Here is a list of popular movies in which the “China Film Group Corporation” has been involved as a production company.

It includes some recent Star Wars, Mission Impossible, and Jurassic franchise installments.

Now, to be fair, Hollywood has sometimes thumbed its nose at China.

A good example is the movie adaption of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” by Steven Spielberg.

It features China’s two most popular actresses (Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li) playing Japanese geishas in what was, on balance, a fairly pro-Japanese WWII period piece.

Of course, it was BANNED in China.

But I think we’ll see less of that over time as China’s market for Western movies grows.

In the updated red dawn chiiina made director tchange the enemy to North Korea instead of the original china.

The financial incentives to make the changes are high. I’m okay with it, so long as everyone’s eyes are open to it. Everyone doing business with China makes some concessions. No judgment (except on NBA), just business. The World Cup is in Qatar, so media companies aren’t alone in looking the other way.

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