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Christian Bale: Hero

post #1 of 8
12/15/11 at 6:57pm
Thread Starter 
I was initially skeptical about Bale's decision to go along with another of these Chinese government funded films, but after this? He is a full fledged hero
 
 
 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/christian-bale-in-china-chen-guangcheng_n_1152624.html?ref=entertainment

 
 
------------------------------
Christian Bale scuffled with guards on Thursday as he was denied chance to meet Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer and civil rights activist who has been under house arrest in China for over a year.
 
Bale, who will star in the upcoming Chinese film, "The Flowers of War," went on an eight hour drive with a CNN crew to visit Chen in the city of Linyi, where he's been held in his own home since September 2010. When Bale approached Chen's house, he was met by an escalating number of guards as he protested his inability to enter Chen's house. Punches were thrown and shoving ensued as he, along with the CNN camera crew, tried to push his way way through to the house.
 
Chen, a women's rights activist, was originally arrested in 2006 and sentenced to four years in prison for "damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic." Video of authorities beating him in his own home leaked to the web in 2010, causing outraged responses from civil rights groups.
 
"I'm not being brave doing this. The local people who are standing up to the authorities and insisting on going to visit Chen and his family and getting beaten up for it and my understanding is getting detained for it, I want to support what they're doing," Bale told the CNN crew.
 
In October, film studio Relativity Media came under fire for planning a film shoot in Linyi, a city in Shandong province.
 
The Chinese government partially funded the production of "The Flowers of War," in which Bale stars as an American who finds himself in the middle of the infamous Rape of Nanking, a mass murder and rape spree carried out by Japanese soldiers in 1937. The Zhang Yimou-directed film hits theaters in America in limited release in late December in a qualifying run for the Oscars, for which it is China's official entry into the Best Foreign Language Film category.
 
 
 
 
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post #2 of 8
12/15/11 at 7:01pm
Thread Starter 

I can't help but wonder if the whole movie shoot was a cover for this attempted BATMAN like extraction 

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post #3 of 8
12/16/11 at 12:29am

Next time bring The Tumbler.

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post #4 of 8
12/16/11 at 10:10am

This raises the question: is there ever a scenario where you would actually engage in fisticuffs with Christian Bale? On one level, you're just doing your job (to an extent), and he's just an actor.

 

On another level... "SWEAR TO MEEEEEEEE!"

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post #5 of 8
12/16/11 at 10:55am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Princess Kate View Post

I can't help but wonder if the whole movie shoot was a cover for this attempted BATMAN like extraction 



If only we cared that much about Chinese dissidents. 

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post #6 of 8
12/16/11 at 10:55am
Thread Starter 

Marty Kaplan sums it all up like I didn't have the energy to last night:

 

 

 

 

Quote:

The only thing the Chinese could have done worse with Christian Bale would have been to pepper spray him.

 
 
China has a lot riding on "The Flowers of War." At $100 million, not only is it the biggest-budget Chinese movie ever, and its entrant for the foreign film Academy Award. It's also China's best hope to crack the U.S. domestic box office, and to demonstrate that its films have global appeal.
 
With a non-Chinese star, Christian Bale, and with about 40 percent of the dialogue shot in English, the fate of the film is also being closely watched in Hollywood, where American moviemakers are looking Eastward with longing. Co-producing with a Chinese studio is a way to end-run the Chinese quota on foreign films, which restricts distribution of imported movies to 20 a year. China is on track to have the most movie screens on the planet -- a lot of yuan for Hollywood to hanker for -- so U.S. producers are searching for the right creative formula to attract both domestic and foreign audiences.
 
"The Flowers of War," starring actor Christian Bale as an American priest attempting to rescue young Chinese women during the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, is being heavily promoted in China. Everyone there knows the star of "The Dark Knight," and everyone there knows about "The Flowers of War." That's why Bale's violent visit to Chen Guangcheng has become a public relations nightmare for China.
 
Chen, a blind masseur in rural China who taught himself to be a lawyer, has been illegally imprisoned in his home in Dongshshigu village along with his wife and child for protesting forced abortions and sterilizations and other human rights abuses by the government. Bale, fresh from the Beijing premiere of "The Flowers of War," traveled eight hours with a CNN camera crew to Chen's home, where he intended to pay his respects. Instead, they were punched, pushed and chased by guards who had cordoned off the village.
 
Now China, which has invested so much of its branding and pride in Bale, has to deal with a CNN video that really puts them in a box. The chances of the government successfully suppressing the viral distribution of the video in China are just about zero. So the more they market the movie, the more they throw a spotlight on their own injustice and corruption.
 
Suddenly, ironically, being a Bale fan can now -- for an ordinary Chinese citizen -- signal opposition to officially-sanctioned human rights abuses and corruption. It's a debacle they designed themselves, which makes it especially delicious, and it's way worse than anything faced by companies who tied their brands to O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods and other endorsers whose messages weren't quite what they had in mind.
 
It can't be long before Internet remix artists will be mashing up the "Flowers of War" trailer with the video of Bale being roughed up. Talk about irony: I can't wait for China to protest to Google-owned YouTube about the infringement on their intellectual property. 
 

This is truly a big deal, and astounding Bale had the courage to go head to head with the Chinese like this. It's such a giant middle finger to them

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post #7 of 8
12/16/11 at 12:15pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Princess Kate View Post

I can't help but wonder if the whole movie shoot was a cover for this attempted BATMAN like extraction 



Remember, they sent Lucius in with a sonar cell phone to do recon first, then Bats went in from the air, escaped via skyhook.

 

So, if Chen is missing tonight, and Bale has no alibi? Mission fucking accomplished.

 

In all seriousness, though, this raises Bale a few notches on my awesome human being list. The more the increasingly oppressive Chinese government looks like complete assholes, the better.

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post #8 of 8
12/16/11 at 12:18pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin Clark View Post





Remember, they sent Lucius in with a sonar cell phone to do recon first, then Bats went in from the air, escaped via skyhook.

 

So, if Chen is missing tonight, and Bale has no alibi? Mission fucking accomplished.

 

In all seriousness, though, this raises Bale a few notches on my awesome human being list. The more the increasingly oppressive Chinese government looks like complete assholes, the better.



 

I was totally going to post a photo from the HONG KONG TOWER RENDITION scene last night, with Bale standing at the broken window about to make his escape, but each new iteration of google for iOS is (I assume deliberately) worse than the last, and I couldn't load the image to save it

 

But know I was very much thinking about it when I read this story : P

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