China Censors Rebuked in Unusual Way Over Skyfall

Chinese censors' license to snip has been challenged: Cuts to the latest James Bond movie proved heavy-handed enough to earn a rare rebuke from state media, the South China Morning Post reports. Skyfall opened in Chinese cinemas this week, but with cuts that highlight the problem with the country's often arbitrary censorship of foreign films, the official Xinhau news service complained.

Among the scenes cut from Skyfall was one where a French hit man kills a security guard in a Chinese skyscraper. Scenes of prostitution in Macau were cut, along with lines in which Bond's nemesis, played by Javier Bardem, spoke of spying in China and of having been tortured by Chinese security agents. "Movie regulators should respect the producers' original ideas, rather than chopping scenes arbitrarily," a Shanghai film professor told Xinhua. Cloud Atlas also opened in China this week—after 23% of it was snipped. (More Xinhua stories.)