A cclaimed Taiwan-born film director Ang Lee (李安) will work on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a consultant, organizers said yesterday.
The Oscar-winning 52-year-old Lee will join American filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Yves Pepin, head of the French entertainment group ECA2, and Ric Birch, director of the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony, as special consultants for the Beijing Games, which begin on August 8, 2008.
Chinese director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) will serve as chief director for the opening and closing ceremonies.
PHOTO: AP
James Joseph Dresnok, the last US defector to North Korea still living in the isolated nation, offers no apology for slipping over the Cold War frontier more than four decades ago.
None is needed, he says in a British-financed documentary film in which he finally gets the chance to tell his tale. “I really feel at home. I wouldn't trade it for nothing.”
Narrated by Hollywood actor Christian Slater, the documentary Crossing the Line had its world premiere at the Pusan International Film Festival here.
Its executive producer Paul Yi went into the festival hoping to spark some interest in the work, but after Pyongyang carried out its first ever atom bomb test Oct. 9, sparking global outrage and UN Security Council sanctions, it quickly became one of the most-talked about at the festival.
The film uses archive footage interspersed with interviews with Dresnok to explain his life-changing decision to cross the no-man's land between the two Koreas one day in 1962.
Steven Spielberg presented a documentary about the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine, several weeks after Ukraine marked the 65th anniversary of the tragedy.
The film by Ukrainian director Serhiy Bukovsky, Spell Your Name, for which Spielberg worked as co-executive producer, contains the testimony of Jewish survivors who escaped brutal execution and those who rescued friends and neighbors during the Holocaust.
The massacre began in late September 1941 when Nazi forces occupying Kiev marched Jews to the brink of the steep Babi Yar ravine and shot them. More than 33,700 Ukrainian Jews were killed over 48 hours. In the ensuing months, the number of people killed at Babi Yar grew to more than 100,000, and included Roma, or Gypsies, as well as other Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners.
In a follow-up to his recent 9/11 drama World Trade Center, filmmaker Oliver Stone plans to direct a movie about the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Paramount Pictures said on Monday. The film will be based in part on Jawbreaker, a recent book chronicling the US-led assault on the al Qaeda stronghold in eastern Afghanistan's Tora Bora region, a spokeswoman for Paramount, the studio behind the project said.
Helena Bonham-Carter will star as the diabolical meat-pie manufacturer Mrs. Lovett opposite demon barber Johnny Depp in a movie version of Sweeney Todd.
The British actress was tapped for the role by partner Tim Burton, who will direct the movie version of the famous Stephen Sondheim musical.
Bonham-Carter has been a regular collaborator in Burton's movies before, starring in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish and Planet of the Apes as well as providing the title voice for Corpse Bride.
Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston are still a couple despite tabloid press reports to the contrary and recent photographs showing the comic actor kissing a mystery blonde, a London lawyer said on Tuesday. The lawyer, Simon Smith, said he had been instructed by Vaughn to sue Britain's Sun and Mirror newspapers and the New York Post for publishing a photo of the actor “kissing a mystery blonde whilst attending a charity event ... at London's Old Vic theater.”
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby