Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Wrong Relation!

The good news is that the Reuters report by Aung Hla Tun about Michelle Yeoh getting blacklisted in Myanmar and then deported made the crowdsourced “News for You” list this morning.  I am not sure that Yeoh would appreciate the story calling her a “Hollywood actress,” since her Hollywood work makes for a pretty slims portion of her resume.  The reason for her blacklisting has nothing to do with Hollywood.  She was deported because she is starring in The Lady, a film about the personal relationship between Aung San Suu Kyi and her British husband, Michael Aris, scheduled for release this coming spring.  This film is directed by Luc Besson and is being coproduced in France and the United Kingdom.  Suu Kyi may have been released from house arrest;  but the Myanmar government is doing all it can to maintain her “non-person” status.  Those extremes seem to include the effort of an actress to portray her.

Unfortunately, when it came to compiling the “Related Content” list that appears to the left to the report’s lead paragraphs, it would appear that “Hollywood actress” provided the only recognizable search keys:
This excluded more relevant content.  At the top of the list would probably be Suu Kyi giving the Reith Lectures for the BBC.  Then of course there would be the updates on the usual bits that Myanmar tries to conceal from the rest of the world.  Still, I suppose it was because Yeoh once appeared in a James Bond movie that the list turned out the way it did.

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