The The Da Vinci Code will open the world's most keenly-awaited movie event of the year, the Cannes Film Festival, next week and will hit theaters in Taiwan on Thursday.
US director Ron Howard's US$125 million screen version of Dan Brown's controversial bestseller will ensure the annual orgy of glitz and glamour in the French Riviera resort gets off to an even more frenzied start than usual.
Stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou and the rest of the cast are to arrive in Cannes by train from London for Wednesday's opening, evoking more gentile, bygone days when tourists used to chug down from Paris on the Blue Train.
A glittering bevy of other A-list stars such as Bruce Willis, Halle Berry, Penelope Cruz, Samuel Jackson and Monica Bellucci will be jetting into the once-small fishing village now turned millionaires' playground.
The screening of the third installment in the X-Men trilogy -- X-Men: The Last Stand -- will also keep movie fans glued to the red-carpet events in the resort during the May 17-28 festival.
The real competition starts on Thursday with 20 films from 13 countries officially competing for this year's coveted Palme d'Or to be awarded by a nine-strong jury headed by the Chinese director Wong Kar-wai (王家衛).
Artistic director Thierry Fremaux said this year's competition could be seen as a "renewal" while remaining faithful to the festival's main aims of "highlighting auteur cinema, (and) the search for singular voices in different cultures."
But the 2006 Cannes Film Festival will also showcase some of the movie world's fastest-rising talents, such as Lost in Translation US director Sofia Coppola competing with her new film Marie Antoinette and China's Lou Ye with Summer Palace.
A senior Chinese official has accused the Chen Kaige (陳凱歌) epic The Promise of damaging a scenic area in southwestern China known as Shangri-La, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.
Filmmakers of The Promise, while shooting the movie at Bigu pond in Yunnan province, littered the area with garbage and destroyed a large area planted with azalea flowers, Qiu Baoxing, China's vice minister for construction, said at an environmental management conference Tuesday, Xinhua reported on its Web site.
Xinhua also quoted Qiu as saying filmmakers inserted more than 100 piles in the pond.
The Promise, a US$35 million film that won a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film, is known for its stunning visuals and an international cast that features actors from Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan.
The movie tells the story of a young girl who becomes princess on condition that she never find true love.
Harish Saluja says it may seem odd that an Asian film festival will open this weekend in Pittsburgh, a shrinking, financially struggling city with an aging, overwhelmingly white population. But to Saluja, it makes perfect sense.
If Pittsburgh wants to continue attracting young, highly educated Asians who have been coming here for high-tech and university jobs, he said, it's going to have to show them it's more diverse now and not the smoky industrialized city of old.
Today, Saluja and a host of volunteers will kick off the nine-day Silk Screen Festival, featuring 22 independent films representing nations east of the Bosporus, including India, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea and Iran.
The festival includes Japanese director Shuhei Fujita's debut Quiet Summer, which tells the story of a young man raised in Japan, who travels to Taiwan to bury the ashes of his mother.
Hollywood's Warner Bros studios said Tuesday it had sealed a deal with file sharer BitTorrent, once a key haven for online movie pirates, to distribute its films and television shows.
Taking the attitude that if you can't beat them, join them, Warner becomes the first Tinseltown studio to turn to the previously feared peer-to-peer technology to help distribute their products.
Starting in the middle of this year, more than 200 Warner movies and television shows will be offered for sale on the BitTorrent Web site.
Available titles will include Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, the 1973 classic Dog Day Afternoon, Natural Born Killers, and the 1970 television show Dukes of Hazzard.
Until relatively recently BitTorrent was considered the scourge of the movie industry, which estimates it lost more than US$6 billion to piracy last year.
Under the new deal, the estimated 65 million BitTorrent users will be able to download video-on-demand or for-sale movies and shows onto their computers, but will not be able to copy the files to another computer or burn them onto a DVD.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50