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.
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