Actors Ethan Hawke, Lucy Liu and Whoopi Goldberg are among the celebrities featured in the final Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) New Yorkers for Marriage Equality campaign.

“Everyone should have the right to marry the person they love,” says hip-hop mogul and gay rights ally Russell Simmons in the one-minute-thirty-nine-second video released Tuesday.

“Fair is fair,” comedian Joan Rivers says.

“I treat everyone the way I expect to be treated and that includes marriage,” says New York Rangers winger Sean Avery, the first professional athlete to join the campaign. Avery was later joined by Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash and former New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan.

“Come on, I’m a New Yorker, you’re a New Yorker, I support marriage equality, where are you?” Goldberg says.

“Because government shouldn’t tell you who to love or who to marry,” says New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the many prominent politicians to record a video for the campaign.

“We are so close to equal marriage rights in New York,” adds actress Julianne Moore, “but we need your help. Please join us.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)

HRC produced 51 videos for the campaign that began last year.

Leaders in the New York Senate continued their foot-dragging on Wednesday, a week after the Assembly approved Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to make New York the sixth state to legalize gay marriage. Passage in the Senate, where the bill faces its final hurdle, remains one vote shy.

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HOLLYWOOD’S reach is wide and its ambition broad, but selling China to the Chinese is bold even by the standards of America’s moviemaking behemoth. Yet the DreamWorks Animation studio has done it with the release of the animated sequel Kung Fu Panda 2. According to Chinese reports, the film, featuring the voices of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and Lucy Liu, premiered earlier this month with the highest opening weekend box office in China of 125 million yuan ($17m).

To be screened in China is an achievement for any foreign film. A Chinese quota system allows only 20 foreign films to be screened there each year.

And yet Chinese authorities embraced Kung Fu Panda 2, says one of its stars, Liu, who has also recently shot a film outside Shanghai, The Man With the Iron Fists.

“The Chinese government embraced the movie itself, which is really helpful,” Liu says. “They may ban one from being shown because it shows negative things that they don’t want to explore in their own culture, so it’s nice they opened the film in China and it was successful there.

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