Stuff.
I have seen Black Swan and I have to say that I found it...boring? Yes, boring. And predictable, and overwrought. The character of Nina was intolerable, the kind of person I wouldn't be able to spend one minute in the company of in real life. The minute it was over, I dug out my DVD of Robert Altman's The Company, to be transported into a movie that I really love. (Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis were pretty, though.)
Some photos of Tom Hardy on the set of spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He plays Ricki Tarr. The cast of the film also features Gary Oldman, Ciaran Hinds, Jared Harris, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Svetlana Khodchenko. (Coming Soon)
First images from Luc Besson's biopic The Lady, starring Michelle Yeoh as Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy icon in Burma, and David Thewlis as her academic husband, Dr. Michael Aris. Yeoh looks simply lovely. (Collider)
Do yourself a favour, and buy the COMPLETE SERIES of The Wire on DVD for USD$75.
Christian Bale will play an American priest in Zhang Yimou's (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) upcoming film about the Nanjing Massacre, called Nanjing Heroes. The film script will be 60% in Chinese, the rest in English. Other lead roles have yet to be cast. (Slashfilm)
The 1937 massacre of civilians in Nanjing by invading Japanese troops has been the subject of several films in recent years, including the German-made biopic John Rabe, and the quasi-documentary Nanking. To my knowledge, however, Nanjing Heroes will be the first Chinese-told version of the story intended for a worldwide audience. I have no information on how much financing for the film will be of government origin, but given the choice of director (Zhang was artistic director of the Beijing Olympics), I wouldn't be surprised if the Party is a guiding hand behind the project. This to me makes it the next in a string of Chinese nationalistic or "myth-making" films, which includes John Woo's Red Cliff and the biopic Confucius starring Chow Yun-fat, that are being pushed toward an international audience. Does that make Zhang Yimou our next Leni Riefenstahl or something closer to Steven Spielberg? (Is there any difference?)
ETA: I have just realised that this will be the second film starring Christian Bale that is set during the Pacific War (as WWII was known in this part of the world) and the Japanese Occupation of China, the other of course being Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, which starred the then-12-year-old Bale. Empire of the Sun - released in 1987, the year after I was born - was memorable, among other reasons, for being the first American film to be shot in China since the 1940s.
ETA2: According to SMH and Variety, the script is based on a novel by Yan Geling, "13 Women of Nanjing", the title of which refers to 13 prostitutes saved by American priest John Magee (Bale's character) who in turn helped rescue many compatriots from the Japanese troops. Magee himself is also the source of what remains the earliest and most complete photographic evidence of the massacre: several hundreds of minutes of footage recording the atrocities, which were smuggled out of China.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/908216.html and has
comments.
Some photos of Tom Hardy on the set of spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He plays Ricki Tarr. The cast of the film also features Gary Oldman, Ciaran Hinds, Jared Harris, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Svetlana Khodchenko. (Coming Soon)
First images from Luc Besson's biopic The Lady, starring Michelle Yeoh as Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy icon in Burma, and David Thewlis as her academic husband, Dr. Michael Aris. Yeoh looks simply lovely. (Collider)
Do yourself a favour, and buy the COMPLETE SERIES of The Wire on DVD for USD$75.
Christian Bale will play an American priest in Zhang Yimou's (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) upcoming film about the Nanjing Massacre, called Nanjing Heroes. The film script will be 60% in Chinese, the rest in English. Other lead roles have yet to be cast. (Slashfilm)
The 1937 massacre of civilians in Nanjing by invading Japanese troops has been the subject of several films in recent years, including the German-made biopic John Rabe, and the quasi-documentary Nanking. To my knowledge, however, Nanjing Heroes will be the first Chinese-told version of the story intended for a worldwide audience. I have no information on how much financing for the film will be of government origin, but given the choice of director (Zhang was artistic director of the Beijing Olympics), I wouldn't be surprised if the Party is a guiding hand behind the project. This to me makes it the next in a string of Chinese nationalistic or "myth-making" films, which includes John Woo's Red Cliff and the biopic Confucius starring Chow Yun-fat, that are being pushed toward an international audience. Does that make Zhang Yimou our next Leni Riefenstahl or something closer to Steven Spielberg? (Is there any difference?)
ETA: I have just realised that this will be the second film starring Christian Bale that is set during the Pacific War (as WWII was known in this part of the world) and the Japanese Occupation of China, the other of course being Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, which starred the then-12-year-old Bale. Empire of the Sun - released in 1987, the year after I was born - was memorable, among other reasons, for being the first American film to be shot in China since the 1940s.
ETA2: According to SMH and Variety, the script is based on a novel by Yan Geling, "13 Women of Nanjing", the title of which refers to 13 prostitutes saved by American priest John Magee (Bale's character) who in turn helped rescue many compatriots from the Japanese troops. Magee himself is also the source of what remains the earliest and most complete photographic evidence of the massacre: several hundreds of minutes of footage recording the atrocities, which were smuggled out of China.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/908216.html and has
comments.