It was a big week in the world of film: Hong Kong voted for its industry favorites, the 58th Cannes Film Festival wrapped up and Star Wars broke several box-office records.
In Hong Kong, over 25,000 votes were cast by the public on the Internet to choose Chinese-movie favorites in celebration of 100 years of Chinese film. The poll was Web-based and included a choice from 103 Chinese films picked by filmmakers and experts last March.
Director Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) was voted the most popular Chinese film of the century. The film had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993.
Director Wong Kar-wai's love story Days of Being Wild took second in the poll and John Woo's gangster flick A Better Tomorrow came in third.
Woo, who has also directed Face Off and Mission: Impossible II, was voted the most popular director, followed by Wong Kar-wai.
Favorite actor went to the late Leslie Cheung, followed by Jackie Chan, Francis Ng, Bruce Lee, and Jet Li.
Maggie Cheung was voted the most popular Chinese-film actress of the century.
On the other side of the world in Cannes, the Palme d'Or was presented to Belgian directors Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne for The Child, which tells of a petty thief struggling with fatherhood and was influenced by both Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Robert Bresson's French film Pickpocket.
The Dardenne brothers won Cannes' top prize in 1999 for Rosetta, about Belgium's work and unemployment issues.
The festival's second-highest award, the Grand Prix, was given to Jim Jarmusch for Broken Flowers, about middle-aged Lothario (Bill Murray) who searches for the son he didn't ever know he had.
The honorable mention, the Jury Prize, was awarded to Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams, which tells of provincial China and proletarian unhappiness during the early 1980s.
George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith broke records on opening night, and over the week, it shattered more, setting box-office records in both the US and the UK.
In the UK, it earned ?10.7 million on the opening three-day weekend and beat the previous record-holder, Shrek 2, by ?90,000.
Monster-In-Law, starring Jane Fonda and Jennifer Lopez, came in second; crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven slipped from first place last weekend to third; and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rose one place to fourth.
In the US, Revenge of the Sith, was, of course, first at the box office. It took in US$50 million on opening day and compiled US$158,449,700 from Thursday through Sunday.
The final film in the six-part blockbuster was shown on more than 9,400 screens in more than 3,500 theaters and earned 68 percent of the three-day weekend's revenue generated by the top-12 films.
But the film didn't take the Friday-through-Sunday record set by Spider-Man in 2002. That record holds at US$114.8 million.
And the film couldn't defeat the 13-week slump that has plagued Hollywood. The film brought the box office up from last weekend's earnings by 67 percent, but the weekend's box office was down 3.5 percent from the same time last year.
``It's shocking,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations. ``We really thought this would end the slump.''
It was the other films that kept the US box office down. Second-place Monster-In-Law earned US$14.35 million for the weekend, and third-place Kicking and Screaming took in US$10.7 million.
Usually runners-up in the US box office play more of a contributing role to the total earnings. Last year, for example, Troy contributed US$23.9 million to the box office championed by Shrek 2.
The US box office's top-10 was finished by films that earned US$5 million or less during the weekend: Crash, Unleashed, Kingdom of Heaven, House of Wax, The Interpreter, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Mindhunters.
In other news, actress Renee Zellweger received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday. She stars in the upcoming film Cinderella Man with Australian actor Russell Crowe.
And American Oscar winners Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman visited Tokyo this week to promote Oscar winning film Million Dollar Baby. It opens in Japan on May 28.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
RSS