Chinese streaming platforms have pulled down the films and video content starring Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves.
At least 19 films starring Reeves were removed from the Chinese Video platform, Tencent, according to Los Angeles Times.
Among the 19 deleted films, “The Matrix” trilogy, “Speed,” “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and romances including “Something’s Gotta Give” and “The Lake House” were also there.
Earlier, in January, Chinese social media users criticized Matrix actor and called for the boycott of his work in China after the reports broke out that the actor would participate in a benefit concert on March 3 for Tibet House, a New York-based nonprofit affiliated with the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.The film company, Warner Bros’ representative and Reeves declined to comment, according to Los Angeles Times
Meanwhile, China on the pretext of internal and external security threats is upgrading its military infrastructure along the western frontier in Tibet and Xinjiang.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) walks near what state media said was a new inter-continental ballistic missile STR KCNA VIA KNS/AFP
Seoul (AFP) – Leather jacket, sunglasses and a gigantic missile: North Korean state media announced the launch of Pyongyang’s largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile with an attempt at old school Hollywood flair on Friday.
Leader Kim Jong Un walks towards the camera, flanked by generals, as they prepare to fire the giant Hwasong-17 missile — Pyongyang’s first ICBM test since 2017.
Over suspenseful music, the camera cuts between two generals and Kim checking their watches, before, in slow motion, Kim whips off his sunglasses and gives a nod, prompting soldiers to move the enormous missile into position.
The footage — swiftly remixed into parodies on social media — also focuses on the missile itself. A dramatic countdown scene leading up to the launch shows soldiers shouting “fire!” as the button for the test is finally pressed.
Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute, said the style of the video shows Pyongyang’s increasing confidence in its military capabilities.
“They have gained confidence in their military power to the point where they feel comfortable making it into a movie and enjoying it,” he told AFP.
Illustrated by Justin Metz instagram.com/just.metz
Have you heard about Aperture 2025?
It may sound like a Roland Emmerich sci-fi movie, but it’s actually more frightening. And much more controversial. It’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s latest initiative to make Hollywood more equitable and diverse—more woke—by changing the rules by which films are eligible for Best Picture nominations. Here’s how it works: Starting in 2024, producers will be required to submit a summation of the race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status of members of their movie’s cast and crew. If a particular movie does not have enough people of color or disabled people or gays or lesbians working on the set—and what is “enough” will be determined by a knotty tangle of byzantine formularies—then that movie will no longer be eligible for an Oscar.
Not surprisingly, the plan is not being universally applauded in Hollywood. Critics say it’s invasive, anticreative, opens the door to privacy issues, and is spectacularly unfair to actors and crew members, who may want to keep their sexual orientation or health profiles to themselves, not to mention to producers and directors who have enough to worry about while shooting a movie than to be saddled with the thankless task of tallying up the identity markers of their creative partners.
“I mean, why aren’t animals in this?” sneers one industry insider. “What if the main character is a horse?”
Unfortunately, Aperture 2025 isn’t the only Academy initiative to recently raise eyebrows in Hollywood. In February, Oscar organizers triggered a civil war in Hollywood over a plan to pretape many of the below-the-line categories—film editing, makeup and hairstyling, original score, production design, the short-film selections—and roll edits of those awards into the live broadcast. Predictably, many Academy members (especially film editors, makeup and hairstylists, and production designers) balked at the change, but at least that one was designed to address an actual existential threat to the ceremony: that it’s become so long and boring that huge swaths of the audience have begun tuning out.
“The Academy was out of touch with the public when it was mostly white, and it remained so when it became somewhat less white.”
Last year, the Oscars drew an all-time low of 9.85 million viewers—less than what an episode of TheBig Bang Theory used to get. Granted, the pandemic and the resulting dearth of theatrical releases contributed to the decline, but the truth is, Oscar ratings began plummeting long before COVID-19. At its height in the 1990s, the ceremony was pulling in as many as 55 million viewers in the United States. Even into the 2000s, it was drawing at least 40 million. But by the 2010s, the numbers started falling into the 30 millions and, by that decade’s end, had dropped further, into the 20 millions. The audience for the last pre-pandemic Oscars, in February 2020, was 23.6 million, less than half of its one-time peak.
There’s no shortage of theories to explain why viewers are turning off to the Oscars: The shrinking of movie actors as cultural icons (as TikTok and Instagram stars become the ascendant media gods); the reluctance of the Academy to update the ceremony, which has remained substantially unchanged since it was first broadcast in 1953; the growing chasm between the esoteric tastes of the Academy’s voting members (who this year nominated Drive My Car, a Japanese drama about a grieving theater director putting on a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima) and the preferences of the wider theatergoing public (who likes Spider-Man).
Whatever the reason, the conclusion is inescapable: The Oscars are tanking. And no matter how well-intentioned Aperture 2025 may be, the initiative isn’t going to fix that problem. On the contrary, at this rate, by 2025, filmmakers with even the most equitable and diverse sets may not give a damn whether their films are eligible for an Oscar or not because hardly anyone will be watching.
FRONT-ROW SEATS Meryl Streep and other luminaries at the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, where she was up for the 2018 Best Actress award for her portrayal of editor Katharine Graham in The Post. (TODD WAWRYCHUK/AMPAS VIA ZUMA WIRE/ZUMAPRESS.COM)
THE ACADEMY—and Hollywood—has faced existential crises before. Back in the 1950s, when the cathode-ray tube first crackled to life, the industry convinced itself that television would eventually murder the movies. The studios concocted all sorts of wacky gimmicks—CinemaScope and Cinerama, 3-D, even Smell-O-Vision—to keep audiences in theaters and stave off cinema’s seemingly inevitable extinction.
Check out all that went down this week in Hollywood.
Hollywood was seemingly not on its right foot this past week with the inevitable happenings of Kanye West and his escalated drama online which subsequently led to his suspension from Instagram following his and Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson’s text exchanges were leaked online. The whole farce finally reached its climax this week and as most hope its ending too. Besides a truckload of Kanye West headlines, we too had other happenings that shook Hollywood. Scroll down further to get a quick recap of all that went down in Hollywood in the last week.
Kanye West loses Grammy performance slot
Following his use of racial slurs directed at Trevor Noah after he released a segment concerning the problem of women’s safety through the Kanye West-Kim Kardashian online feud, the rapper was not only suspended from Instagram for 24-hours but also dropped from the list of performers on Grammy 2022 due to his “concerning online behaviour” despite being nominated for 5 categories this year.
