Hollywood director Steven Spielberg is joining the planning team of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to press reports.
Spielberg, whose last movie, Munich, was based on the 1972 Olympic Games terror attack, will act as consultant to the design team led by Chinese director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), whose best-known films include Raise the Red Lantern and costume epic Hero.
"Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding," Spielberg said. "Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life, we are dedicated to making this the most emotional opening ceremony ever."
The opening ceremony is scheduled to take place in the Chinese capital on Aug. 8, 2008.
The most wanted man in the Balkans is being portrayed on the big screen this month as a vindictive army captain obsessed with gardening in a tragicomic film set during the dying days of Yugoslavia.
Fugitive Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, indicted for war crimes by the UN tribunal in The Hague, has been caricatured as Captain Rade Orchid in the film Karaula (Border Post) by Croat director Rajko Grlic.
The film has attracted attention across the Balkans as the first co-production by republics of the former socialist federation since its collapse in the 1990s.
Newsreels have shown Mladic as the bombastic commander of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 Bosnia war, smiling as he gave sweets to the children of Srebrenica hours before 8,000 of their fathers and brothers were massacred.
Movie-goers in Skopje, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb who went to see Karaula this month saw Mladic portrayed as a neurotic army captain obsessed with gardening, who forces soldiers to tend to his orchids and weed his lawn.
Audiences were unaware that Captain Orchid was based on Mladic until former conscript Jurica Pavicic wrote an article about having to do weeding for the obsessive gardener.
Oscar-winning star Al Pacino is set to play King Herod in a movie version of Oscar Wilde's biblical drama Salome, reprising a role he has played on stage, the enter-tainment press said Tuesday.
Pacino, 65, will also direct the tragi-comedy Salomaybe? while taking on the Herod role he has played on stage in both New York and Los Angeles, according to Daily Variety.
The privately-funded movie to be made this year will interweave behind-the-scenes footage from a current Los Angeles staging of Wilde's Salome with fictional elements.
Top US film director John McTiernan, the maker of such blockbusters as the Die Hard action movies, pleaded guilty Monday in a fast-spreading Hollywood wire-
tapping scandal.
McTiernan, 55, was charged in earlier this month in a snowballing criminal investigation that has threatened to envelope some major stars over alleged phone bugging carried out for Hollywood heavyweights by now-jailed private-eye-to-the-stars Anthony Pellicano.
A federal criminal complaint said McTiernan, the director of 1988's Die Hard and 1990's The Hunt For Red October, lied to investigators about hiring Pellicano to tap the phone of a Hollywood producer, Charles Roven.
"In fact I had ... asked Anthony Pellicano to wiretap Charles Roven in ... the summer of 2000," McTiernan said in court Monday. "I spoke with him about it, I never received a report ... After approximately two weeks, I paid him off and fired him."
It wasn't clear why McTiernan ordered the wiretap on his Rollerball co-producer Roven, who also produced last year's The Brothers Grimm and Batman Begins.
Kate Winslet has come to the rescue of the long-languishing plans for an Elton John movie called Gnomeo and Juliet, according to Variety.
The animated movie will feature a soundtrack by the flamboyant recording star as it transports Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a zany world inhabited by tacky garden gnomes.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist