Chinese films laud communism

China, which pulled “The Da Vinci Code” last week, is planning to release 26 films to mark the 85th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday.

Those include “The Forest Ranger,” featuring a ranger who dies protecting a state-owned forest, and “The Backbone,” a documentary about past generations of Chinese communists, such as revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

“It is the CPC [Communist Party of China] that turned China’s filmmaking around as it was neglected and weak before new China was founded in 1949,” Xinhua quoted Tong Gang, director of the administration’s film bureau, as saying.

Among other films to be shown were “Legend of Seasons,” about a college graduate who volunteers to teach in the countryside, and “Endless Love,” about a party bureaucrat who “wholeheartedly helps the public solve problems.”

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FINALLY

Humor prize: Playwright Neil Simon will receive the Kennedy Center’s humor prize on Oct. 15, for more than four decades of Broadway hits, movies and TV shows.

In recovery: Comedian Jerry Lewis, 80, is recovering in a San Diego hospital from a minor heart attack he suffered Sunday near the end of an airline flight en route home from New York.