Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi
Zhang, who is filming director Feng Xiaogang's Ye Yan (literally, The Night Banquet) after finishing Memoirs of a Geisha, will start filming the new movie in April next year.
The flick will be directed by Li Shaohung, and Hero action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-tung will be in charge of its martial arts sequences, the paper said.
The story will feature Kaneshiro as a famous ancient Chinese general who dies of his love for Zhang.
A more controversial Asian movie is being shown at a film festival in Britain which starts today with an Indian film that has been blocked by the courts back home and features a Pakistani star who provoked fury for steamy on-screen scenes.
The 11th annual Bite the Mango film festival in the northern English city of Bradford aims to highlight the problems faced by filmmakers and actors in South Asia's prolific cinema industry, which is seen as conservative and politicized.
The opening movie will be Black Friday, directed by 33-year-old Anurag Kashyap, which centers on the 1993 bomb attacks across Mumbai that killed more than 250 people.
An Indian court has blocked its theater release while a legal case is ongoing, but Kashyap believes there is a wider problem of general unease about hard-hitting, factual films dealing with controversial subjects.
Also crossing boundaries a new soccer movie, Goal! aims to succeed where other films about the beautiful game have struggled -- by scoring in the US market.
The first instalment of a US$100-million trilogy goes on general release next week, and what it lacks in star power its makers believe will be more than made up for by rare access to clubs and players to give it unmatched authenticity.
"The resources we have on this film are second to none," said Andy Ansah, a former professional soccer player who advised the makers of Goal!
Critics, however, are far from certain that Goal! will perform in the United States, despite a storyline that sounds like it was written for Hollywood.
Goal! tells a rags-to-riches tale of Santiago Munez, who grows up in poverty in Los Angeles where he plays local football and is spotted by a retired British scout.
The Oscar-winning maker of films such as Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, is to return to directing after an eight-year break in a big-screen adaptation of a Romanian short story.
Coppola, 66, is set to begin production in Bucharest on Monday on the low-budget Youth Without Youth, based on the novella by Romanian author and intellectual Mircea Eliade, according to an industry magazine.
The director, also famed for films such as The Godfather Part 2, will self-finance the film, that will star actors Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Switzerland's Bruno Ganz and Marcel Iures.
The film tells the story of a professor whose life changes after a dramatic incident during the run-up to World War II that forced him to flee his home as he is pursued through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.
"I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality," Coppola said in a statement.
The film will be Coppola's first directorial effort since 1997's The Rainmaker, as he has focused in recent years on producing and running his hotel and wine estate in California, complaining that Hollywood only offered him gangster pictures, according to Variety.
British film producer Lord Brabourne, whose film credits include Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Passage to India, has died at the age of 80, a spokeswoman said.
He passed away peacefully at his home in Kent, southern Britain, with his wife Countess Mountbatten of Burma and their six children at his side, according to the spokeswoman.
Brabourne began his film career as production manager on such movies as 1956's The Battle of the River Plate. His other films as producer include Sink the Bismarck! and Little Dorrit.
Hollywood sweethearts Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore cemented their two-year romance by tying the knot during a ceremony in front of 100 guests, according to published reports.
Kutcher, 27, and Moore, 42, were reportedly married at a private home.
According to media reports, the wedding guests included Moore's ex-husband, Bruce Willis, and their three daughters, Rumer, 17, Scout, 14, and Tallulah, 11, actors Wilmer Valderrama, Lucy Liu and Soleil Moon Frye; and Frye's husband, Jason Goldberg, who co-produced the MTV television show Punk'd with Kutcher.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and