16Blocks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Disney will be trying hard this summer to get Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End into Chinese cinemas despite the fact that the last installment of the franchise was banned by the country's censors. Obviously the studio is aware that many of China's movie fans at least got to see Dead Man's Chest via bootleg, and it understandably wants to profit from those fans' desire to see part three. But this isn't just about exploiting the expectant audiences, and it isn't exactly about fighting piracy. All of Hollywood wants to succeed in the Chinese market because it is a growing source of income for the studios.

What this means for the rest of the world may be nothing. Hollywood studios and distribs will likely start censoring for easy approval by China the same way they censor for the rest of the international markets. As I mentioned recently when The Departed failed with Chinese censors, the best way for a film to meet approval is for it to have no mention of China. However, the Chinese aren't only concerned with references to themselves; Dead Man's Chest was banned because it featured cannibals.

The Chinese version of our holiday season is coming up soon, and the titles looking for big box office are Night at the Museum, which has been performing brilliantly all over the world, 16 Blocks and South Korea's Joong Cheon (The Restless). These will be taking up three of the 20 quota slots that China allows to be filled by imported titles, and the last of these fills one slot that Hollywood missed out on. Following this month's big movie-going time, Hollywood will continue trying to fill in the rest of these slots, and so Chinese audiences may or may not get proper releases of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Pursuit of Happyness, Transformers and At World's End.

Of all the pleasures that movies can offer us, none may be as simple or as pure as watching characters we like run for their lives. 16 Blocks, the latest film from longtime action-hack director Richard Donner, has that kind of elemental grace to it – even if it doesn't have much else. Burnt-out, alcoholic, pot-bellied, limping and wheezing, New York Police Department Detective Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis) is finishing up a night shift that was uneventful at best and, at worst, just another 8-hour span of time in his ongoing slow-motion suicide. Desperate to get out of the building, get a drink and get some sleep at the end of his shift, Jack instead is handed the last-minute short-straw gig of escorting a witness over to the courthouse.

The witness is Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), a nervy chatterbox who's spent half his life in jail – you'd call him a career criminal, but the fact is he hasn't made much of a career out of it. Eddie speaks nonstop in a wheedling, agitated, nasal singsong that makes you kinda want to kill him; the fact that Eddie's testimony this morning will put a ring of crooked high-ranking cops in jail for a long time makes them definitely want to kill him. The grand jury stands down at 10:00 am, less than two hours from now. The courthouse is – you guessed it – 16 blocks away. And Jack Mosely's simple task is going to get a lot more complicated, especially when his partner of 20 years, Frank Nugent (David Morse), is revealed as the top man of the corrupt cops.