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.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
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