Poor Hollywood. Tough to make a movie here. Next time they should clean the streets, paint the buildings, remove all ads, the mahjong players, the laundry, etc. And give faster cars to the police. Now read this, you don’t need Gilbert’s sarcasm to have a good laugh. Shanghai Daily is as good.
Source: Shanghai Daily
In trying to sanitize Shanghai’s image, the film censors scrutinizing “Mission: Impossible III” missed a phone number for phony documents that China netizens trumpeted.
But by the July 20 release date, that’s likely to be wiped out by the censors who want to put Shanghai’s best foot forward.
One shot the censors initially missed was a scene of protagonist Tom Cruise running past a wall with a poster promoting sale of counterfeit documents – identification papers, college degrees, business papers, drivers’ licenses – you name it.
It was part of the local color and reality in downtown city streets.
The fleeting scene was an embarrassing reminder of the rampant illegal sales of bogus documents for any underachiever or pretender.
Media reports said other aspects of the film were embarrassing – the police being inept and slow to respond to emergencies, and the common practice of hanging laundry to dry on poles outside of windows.
It was not known whether laundry or police scenes would be cut for not exemplifying cosmopolitan Shanghai.
But local media reports about the illegal document business have created a buzz. The number, a virtual hotline was “live” yesterday – a sign of the demand for fake documents and new identities.
In an early unofficial screening of the action thriller, someone spotted the illegal ad pasted on a wall. On May 28, it was posted on www.tianyaclub.com, showing a scene in which the phone number was visible as Cruise ran past.
Netizens disseminated it widely. The mobile phone number was swamped. One caller to the number told a local newspaper that he claimed he wanted a fake document, and met a low-level worker answering the phone.
The man said he was swamped with calls, many from people who simply wanted to find out if the number was real.