Chinese director Feng Xiaogang (馮小剛) will start shooting next month for his new movie, about a Chinese soldier who seeks honors for his fallen comrades, his assistant said.
The assistant said the film's Chinese title is Jijiehao but that the director hasn't decided on an English name.
He said it's budgeted at about US$10.1 million and that filming will mostly take place in China's northeast.
Zhang said the movie, adapted from a short story, is about a Chinese soldier who seeks recognition for his fallen comrades during the Chinese civil war between the communists, the eventual victors, and the Chinese Nationalist Party, which retreated to Taiwan.
The soldier “tries to track down the remains of his fellow soldiers to prove they were sacrificed in battle,'' Zhang said.
He said the cast won't include any stars and that Feng will cast newcomers.
Feng recently directed the ancient Chinese drama Banquet (夜宴), a story inspired by Hamlet and starring Zhang Ziyi (章子怡).
In a different military movie, a US soldier who defected to communist North Korea more than 40 years ago will finally get to tell his story to the world in an upcoming film, executives said.
Crossing the Line covers the stories of four US army defectors to the North, including the last one known to be still in Pyongyang -- Private First Class James Joseph Dresnok.
It will have its world premiere at South Korea's Pusan film festival next month.
Dresnok crossed the heavily fortified border from South Korea to the North in August 1962 at age 21.
Fellow defector Charles Robert Jenkins, who was allowed to leave the North in 2004 with his wife Hitomi Soga, a Japanese who had been abducted by the communist state, also appears in the film.
The two other defectors are now dead.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon are in final negotiations to star in the espionage thriller Rendition, it was reported Wednesday.
Gyllenhaal, nominated for an Academy Award for playing a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, will star as a CIA analyst based in Cairo who witnesses the interrogation of a foreign national by Egyptian secret police.
Witherspoon, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Johnny Cash's wife, June Carter Cash, in Walk The Line at this year's Academy Awards, will play the pregnant wife of Gyllenhaal's character, the respected movie industry daily the Hollywood Reporter said.
Julie Andrews is to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award when the Screen Actors Guild hands out its annual honors next year, the prestigious acting body said Monday.
The 70-year-old British star of musical classics such as Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music will be given the award on Jan. 28 in recognition of an entertainment career that has spanned six decades.
Andrews won a best actress Oscar in 1964 for her famous role as the flying nanny in Mary Poppins but is best known for playing Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
She first rose to prominence after a dazzling performance as Eliza Doolittle in the original stage production of My Fair Lady.
Australian star Russell Crowe has angrily denied reports that he is set to play crocodile hunter Steve Irwin in a movie immortalizing the daredevil naturalist.
Crowe, a good friend of Irwin who was killed by a stingray barb in a freak accident earlier this month, said he was appalled at suggestions that he was planning to star in a biopic, just weeks after the Australian's death.
“It's appalling to me,” Crowe said in an interview with television show Extra.
“(It) offends me very deeply, so awful that I have to deal with millions of people thinking I would dance on my friend's grave,” Crowe added.
Reports said Crowe was already in talks with Universal about playing Irwin. One story cited an anonymous “insider” who said Crowe once told Irwin that he wanted to play him in a movie version of his life.
Oscar-winner Crowe made a recorded tribute from New York for last week's memorial service for Irwin in Australia that brought the nation to a standstill.
“We have lost a friend, a champion. It will take some time to adjust to that,” Crowe said in the tribute.
Almost 170 old films from the Japanese colonial era have been preserved and repaired, and are currently being digitalized. The collection is expected to serve as an invaluable resource in historical research, the Council for Cultural Affairs said Wednesday.
A team from Tainan National University of the Arts (TNUA) spent three years repairing the 168 films -- released during the 1930s and 1940s when Japan ruled Taiwan. The collection includes documentaries, dramas, and animation, and are being restored under a program sponsored by the National Museum of Taiwan History.
The 70-year-old films were obtained from an antique collector in the southern city of Chiayi in 2003, with each film undergoing a complicated and time-consuming process of examination, repair and digitalization, said TNUA professor Ray Jiing, who headed the special team.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s