Avid viewers will be surprised by this exposé of the seedy partnership between Hollywood and the Chinese government.
How China muscled its way into Hollywood moviemaking from the mid-1990s on to begin directing what America watches.
“By 2020, China would be the number one box-office market world, home to grosses that routinely neared $1 billion—a market that became too big to ignore and too lucrative to anger,” writes Wall Street Journal film reporter Schwartzel. While largely closed to American moviemaking before 1994, China recognized, as indeed Hollywood had learned after World War II, that making movies not only could be America’s No. 1 export, but could also influence the public—and exercise political sway. The growth was slow but incremental, as the author demonstrates, from the creaky opening up to American culture after the death of Mao Zedong and China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1990s to its full-blown censorship efforts under President Xi Jinping “as an essential arm to a recast Middle Kingdom.” Schwartzel’s examples are both fascinating and disturbing—e.g., the ability of China’s behind-the-scenes influence to remove the Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise’s iconic bomber jacket in the remake of Top Gun: Maverick in 2019; squelch the marketing of movies about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun; and vilify and ban publicly pro-Tibetan actor advocates like Richard Gere and China critics like Brad Pitt, as well as Nomadland director Chloé Zhao. The author adds that China finagled a deal at the time of the Beijing Olympics to build a Disney theme park in China, while Hollywood, eager to please, filmed an appalling remake of Red Dawn to please China (“anticipatory censorship”), with North Korea as the villains. As Schwartzel demonstrates, China has the money to demand an entertainment business that will support its new political rise, and Hollywood, aware of the vast Chinese market, is not saying no.
Avid viewers will be surprised by this exposé of the seedy partnership between Hollywood and the Chinese government.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984878-99-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
An entertaining and informative volume that will appeal to general readers interested in military history or high adventure....
Interviews with Vietnam-era Navy SEALs about their elite training and demanding military service.
Drawing on interviews conducted by Bud Brutsman, veteran soldier and experienced military affairs author Dockery (The Teams, 1998) follows up Navy SEALs: A History of the Early Years (not reviewed) with this oral history of the teams’ harrowing combat duties in Vietnam. Loosely organized around the chronology of the conflict in Southeast Asia, the book at its heart is a tribute to the collective spirit exhibited here. Lieutenant Commander Scott R. Lyon introduces readers to the ad hoc nature of early SEAL training, which consisted of qualifying select groups of Navy personnel in any and every military skill that might be potentially useful in covert combat operations. Interviews with other early team members trace the evolution of SEAL training and its effectiveness under the stresses of combat in Vietnam. The same spirit that enabled him to survive Hell Week, Lieutenant Michael Thornton finds, also inspired him to swim his seriously wounded team members to safety during a botched combat insertion. Lieutenant Philip Martin reveals how unsuccessful search-and-rescues of American POWs often turned into important intelligence-gathering opportunities for alert SEALs. A commitment to teamwork and excellence echoes throughout, perhaps explaining how former SEALs from Senator Bob Kerry to Governor Jesse Ventura have continued to serve, lead, and inspire the nation long after they left the Navy. Dockery’s collection captures the SEAL teams’ can-do spirit.
An entertaining and informative volume that will appeal to general readers interested in military history or high adventure. (Maps and photos throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-425-18348-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | HISTORY
These are pieces that bring optimism for the future of journalism if such decent, thoughtful, able writers will be among its...
Recollections and reflections from reporters who covered one or another aspect of September 11, pulled under one roof by Bull (Come Out Fighting, 2002, etc.) and newcomer Erman.
The editors dug for print and broadcast talent to include among these 28 pieces describing so outsized a story. Writers come from mainstream publications (New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer), from smaller ones (the Staten Island Advance, the Stamford Advocate, the high school Stuyvesant Standard), and even from Columbia’s School of Journalism. There is only a smattering of “describing the indescribable” comments, since after all describing is the whole point; and only a few desperately grabby leads (“All I hear is silence”); or moments of self-righteous resignation (“Today, when I return to Ground Zero I see commodities. . . . Tragedy for sale. It’s the American way, I guess”). Mostly, these are crackerjack portraits of what it was like to be at the scene; struggles with the question of intrusiveness and decency in talking with people who lost family members; and examples of the unexpected emotional fallout after witnessing such devastation—the flashbacks and nightmares. Some writers even manage a bright line or two. One young reporter, fielding a call: “ ‘I’m fine, Dad. I’m like a mile away from it,’ I said, slightly annoyed. Didn’t he know I had a deadline?” Another, expressing what it was like to be part of this history: “I cannot think of a way to say this that is not perverse but I felt an intense passion in the hours after the holocaust, an exaltation. I felt alone at the enter of the world; all details became crucial and iconic.” And, typically, the questions: “What was the value. . . . My job seemed ghoulish, feeding on corpses and destruction.”
These are pieces that bring optimism for the future of journalism if such decent, thoughtful, able writers will be among its practitioners.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56025-427-0
Page Count: 404
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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