Going off script, "No Escape" movie banned in Cambodia

[geovalin]

Going off script, "No Escape" movie banned in Cambodia

Film starring Hollywood actor Owen Wilson won’t be screened in the Kingdom’s cinemas

The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts has banned new Hollywood action-thriller No Escape from screening in the Kingdom over its apparent misuse of the Khmer script.

In the trailer for the film – which was originally titled The Coup – actor Owen Wilson plays a US businessman whose family gets caught in the crossfire during a violent uprising in an unnamed Southeast Asian country.

But while the film was shot in 2013 – primarily in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand – riot police seen clashing with a mob use shields emblazoned with upside-down Khmer letters.

read more: http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weekend/going-script

[NickJ]

Nitpicking......

[Jimlove]

Is IQ lower in Asia than rest of the World ... ?

[Tomtomtom69]

Possibly. I don't see any problems with the use of Khmer script as it's a fictional plot anyway nothing to do with Cambodia. If anything the script could almost be a way of promoting the country and it's tourism industry.

[Always18]

No doubt if the Khmer script had been properly rendered, there would have been loud squeals about Hollywood unfairly portraying Cambodia!

[razer]

I recall a U.S. American director's interview when asked about inaccuracies of his film shot in a foreign location.

His response was "The audience doesn't know the difference."

[piersbeckett]

This film is the Bros. Dowdles' first stab at the genre, subsequently it'll need all the publicity it can get and I'd say it's odds on that the 'ban' was either built-in or bought, after all, who's going to watch it in Cambodia anyway!? Cinematography and casting aren't their greatest skills.

Pierce Brosnan and 'an unnamed SE asian country' has to be weighed against over dramatisation and admittedly clever but typically N. American bullshit sensationalism.

[Docno]

Possibly. I don't see any problems with the use of Khmer script as it's a fictional plot anyway nothing to do with Cambodia. If anything the script could almost be a way of promoting the country and it's tourism industry.

Yep, American family caught in the crossfire during a coup while on vacation ... great way to promote tourism.

[NickJ]

Maybe in the film they rent a jet ski and get bit by soi dogs as well.........

[kamahele]

They can't just blur the script like Thailand blurs cigarettes and guns and Japanese blur privates in porn movies???

[Fullstop]

They can't just blur the script like ,,,, Japanese blur privates in porn movies???

What do you mean? That's what Japanese todgers really look like.

[Sheryl]

I suspect the issue wasn't that the script was "misused" but that it gave the impression the "unnamed" country was Cambodia and given the theme of the movie, that isn't an impression they'd like to make.

The country is still living down the bad press that resulted from the violent coup in 1997, which plenty of foreigners did indeed get stuck in.

[jaywalker]

How many theaters are there in Cambodia? One maybe?

I recall not too long ago a friend visited Pattaya and just HAD to go see a movie while there, as there were no theaters in Cambodia.

[timmyp]

It seems incredibly silly to me to have used an actual script and just turned it upside down. Why not invent an imaginary script along with the invented imaginary country? There are loads of invented scripts out there that they could have used for the movie. Tolkien came up with a script for his Lord of the Rings books, the Star Trek folks came up with Klingon. They could have used the Shavian script. It really wouldn't have been hard to avoid the problem with getting banned and appearing culturally insensitive, instead of saying, "Aw, it's just Khmer, people don't know any better, and who cares what the silly people who actually read this script think."

Incidentally, the green text in the Matrix is mostly backwards Katakana, but that wasn't pretending to represent a regional government (even in imaginary).