The term “dog eat dog” applies to brutal office politics or cutthroat competition. When director Soi Cheang set out to make his new film, he took its meaning literally.
Dog Bite Dog is one of the grittiest, bloodiest Chinese-language movies released in the past year, in which men sink to the level of dogs and, yes, bite each other.
Hong Kong films are known to be violent, but when Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) goes all guns blazing against his enemies there is a certain elegance to it.
PHOTOS: AFP
There's limited gunplay in Dog Bite Dog — it's simply nakedly primal wrestling with no inhibitions whatsoever.
Hong Kong heartthrob Edison Chen (陳冠希), due to appear in the upcoming sequel to The Grudge alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar, plays Pang, a Cambodian killer raised as a freestyle combat fighter who takes a hit job in Hong Kong.
A team of police officers led by hotheaded Wai (Sam Lee) pursues him doggedly but proves no match for the vicious Pang.
The plot takes several bizarre and far-fetched twists, capped by an utterly over-the-top ending.
As many as 12,000 people, many of them Hurricane Katrina survivors, jammed the New Orleans Arena late Wednesday for the premiere of filmmaker Spike Lee's four-hour documentary about the deadly storm.
The free showing of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts took place just a stone's throw from the Louisiana Superdome, which became a sweltering pit of human misery after Katrina, and which figures prominently in the film's first hour.
The outspoken director, whose credits include Do the Right Thing (1989) and this year's Inside Man, was in a jocular mood during his brief introduction, despite the documentary's serious subject matter.
“I hope you went to the bathroom, because there's no break,” Lee told the crowd.
When the Levees Broke begins with the days leading up to Aug. 29, 2005, when Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,300, rendering tens of thousands more homeless and inundating 80 percent of New Orleans with fetid floodwater.
Told almost exclusively through interviews with hurricane survivors and the officials charged with rescuing them, Lee has said his documentary was an effort to give a voice to the people most affected by the storm.
Actor Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton, known for their offbeat films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, will team again to make Sweeney Todd, based on Stephen Sondheim's award-winning stage musical, the DreamWorks movie studio said on Thursday.
Depp often brings an eccentric edge to his roles, like the swishy pirate captain Jack Sparrow in current hit Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and director Burton has created some of the movies' strangest characters like the shrub pruning monster in Edward Scissorhands, played by Depp.
In Sweeney Todd, to be released in late next year, Depp will play the murderous barber of the same name who seeks his own brand of razor-slashing revenge against a judge who wrongfully imprisoned him.
American actors Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson will play brothers on a spiritual trip to Asia after their father's death in a comedy to be filmed in India late this year, a Hollywood industry publication said Wednesday.
China unveiled plans to make a movie about the 1937 Rape of Nanjing in an announcement on Monday.
The movie of the massacres of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops will be based on Iris Chang's best-selling account, The Rape of Nanking, Xinhua news agency said, adding it would involve a US production company and British investors.
China actress Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) and Malaysia's Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊), were on the investors' wish list, the news agency said.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built