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.
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