The John Woo (吳宇森) epic Red Cliff (赤壁), dubbed the most expensive movie made in Asia, enjoyed record takings for a Chinese film in its opening weekend in China, the movie's distributor said on Wednesday.
The film, which depicts events in the ancient Three Kingdoms period, made US$16 million in China in the four days after its debut last week, said a China Film Group spokesman.
The box office takings beat other previous domestic blockbusters such as Curse of the Golden Flower (滿城盡帶黃金甲), directed by Olympic opening ceremony mastermind Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), as well as Taiwanese director Ang Lee's (李安) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍), Xinhua news agency said.
PHOTO: AP/TULSA WORLD
Woo, a Hong Kong film director and producer, rose to international prominence with Face Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in 1997.
He was also the director of Mission: Impossible II starring Tom Cruise.
Oscar-winning Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki releases his first full-length film in four years this weekend, dropping computer graphics for his pencil to tell the story of a fish-girl and the sea.
PHOTO: AFP
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which the reclusive 67-year-old both wrote and directed, will hit screens at cinemas across Japan tomorrow after weeks of intense media interest.
Inspired by the 19th-century fairy tale The Little Mermaid by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the story centers around a tiny fish-girl, Ponyo, who rides a jellyfish to escape her home in the sea.
She meets a five-year-old human boy, Sosuke, who vows to protect her, but Ponyo is taken back to the sea. Desperate to be a human and live with Sosuke, Ponyo heads to land again with help from her sisters.
Miyazaki is one of Japan's biggest cultural exports. His last film, Howl's Moving Castle, broke opening box office records at home in 2004 before winning a cult following in Western and Asian nations.
Miyazaki, who had used computer graphics since Princess Mononoke in 1997, decided to shun hi-tech effects in his latest film.
"Our experience told us that what you can do electronically doesn't impress people much. We decided to go fully with pencils ... That's our strength," he said in a recent interview with Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
The film used 170,000 hand-drawn pictures to animate characters and objects, a record number for a Miyazaki production.
It took one and a half years for 70 staff to draw the pictures, according to Studio Ghibli, which has released his works.
Sony Corp will increase the storage capacity of its PlayStation 3 video-game console starting in September, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this week.
The storage space on Sony's console will double to 80 gigabytes, Jack Tretton, head of Sony's US games unit, said on Tuesday. Sony also will offer movies from major studios for sale or rent through its PlayStation 3 and PSP video-game players, Tretton said.
The Class, winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, will open the 46th annual New York Film Festival.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the festival, announced on Tuesday that it will give the opening night honor to Laurent Cantet's drama about classroom life at a French junior high school.
The docudrama was shot with real students and teachers in a raw, improvisational style to chronicle the drama that unfolds over one school year. The Class (Entre les Murs) was unanimously selected for the main prize at Cannes by a nine-member jury headed by Sean Penn.
It's the second film by Cantet to play at the New York Film Festival; his acclaimed Time Out was shown in 2001.
"Laurent Cantet has pioneered a new kind of social cinema,'' said selection committee chairman Richard Pena in a statement. He continued that it is a style "that explores the key issues of our day, from contemporary labor struggles to First World/Third World relations and now to education.''
This year's festival, which runs from Sept. 26 through Oct. 12, will be held at the Ziegfeld Theater due to ongoing renovations at the event's traditional home, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under
RSS