Rev. Danny Fisher

Santa Claus at the Burmese Vihar, Bodh Gaya, India, in 2006.
Photo by Pierre Rene Bouchard.

Stand Up to Cancer is soliciting videos from supporters. I made one this afternoon. You can watch it here (below), at iTunes, at Switchpod, or at YouTube.

According to a report today, this year’s most successful film stateside, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (which I reviewed for the Journal of Religion and Film) will not be released theatrically in China. Warner Bros. Pictures explained the decision by citing “prerelease conditions” and “cultural sensitivities.”

Studio execs were undoubtedly wary of offending the communist government’s touchy Ministry of Culture, which has to approve all films for release in the country.

In particular, The Dark Knight features some pretty intense action sequences set in Hong Kong—the Caped Crusader kidnaps a Chinese executive to circumvent extradition laws and hauls him back for a little Gotham City justice.

There’s no word exactly what “prerelease conditions” Chinese censors demanded from the studio. But it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest they wanted Warners to dramatically alter the sequence, which could be deemed an affront to national pride in suggesting that Batman operates above Chinese law.

And that would have been a nonstarter, since the studio and director Christopher Nolan felt the rendition scenes are integral to the film’s plot.

Of course, the “suggestion” that Batman operates above Chinese law is the point: the film is a scathing, post-9/11 contemplation on rule-bending/breaking. (In fact, in the film, Batman’s decision to commit this act of rendition is what inspires the mob to “let the clown out of the box” in the form of an anarchistic terrorist known as “The Joker.” So the act is not treated in a cavalier manner; rather, it is shown as having terrible consequences.) But China is famously touchy about depictions of itself on film. The Walt Disney Corporation’s decision to produce and distribute Martin Scorsese’s Dalai Lama biopic Kundun, for example, had major effects on plans the corporation and the country had together.

[Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures.]