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Battlestar Galactica: Season 2 — Bigger, Bolder, Feature Style VFX

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:50:18 GMT

Battlestar Galactica: Season 2 — Bigger, Bolder, Feature Style VFX

http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=57c5ed8a&atype=articles&id=2751#

Tara DiLullo follows up last year’s report on Battlestar Galactica with a look at the uniquely creative and chaotic method to the madness surrounding the much-anticipated second season.

A lot has happened since Battlestar Galactica premiered as a series on the Sci Fi Channel last year. It’s become a ratings hit and helped solidify Friday night as the genre’s appointment TV night, along with winning placement on a host of TV critics’ lists as one of the best shows of 2005. Meanwhile, the winter premiere of season two began airing this month, with the climactic “Resurrection Ship, Part 2,” bowing on Friday.
Behind the scenes, it’s been business as usual, which means barely controlled chaos for one of the most unusually crafted television series in production today. Visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel and his team of vfx artists and collaborators from Vancouver’s Atmosphere and L.A.’s Zoic Studios are still creating the impossible in record time, helping to achieve exec producers Ron Moore and David Eick’s exacting mandate for a science fiction show that surpasses the boundaries and quality of other TV shows. What does that mean? “No prisoners taken on this show,” Hutzel laughs. “We joke in the office that the producers are like kids and we are all in this wooden, rickety cart being pushed down a hill at high speed and we are just dying for one of the wheels to fly off and it never quite does. They make it to bottom and push us back up again, but at some time we all know the wheels are coming off, but it’s a thrill ride until then.”

With the producers having established a very organic and some might say, dizzyingly unstructured production cycle during the first year, Hutzel says the second season is following the same model with even more challenges. “Season one was a short season of 13 episodes. Going into season two, we are going to do 20 episodes in very nearly the same amount of time with an extra month or two thrown in. It’s really 50% more shows in nearly the same amount of time.” The specific visual effect hurdles come from the way Battlestar is post-produced. “We started out season one by approaching it in a traditional fashion, having the usual visual effects and finals meetings. What we found was that after the first few episodes, we discarded that because of the sophistication of the show. In order to address all the ideas being expressed with the visual effects, the meetings would go on for three or four hours! Even that was fine, except the shows had a tendency to not lock. There are no traditional vfx locks on any of our shows, so the elements of post-production, which you are used to, the lock dates, the meeting dates, none of those things apply. There is literally no schedule. We just know when they air!

“It starts with the fact that David Eick has always insisted the directors get a cut of the show. On any TV show, the director has a cut, but it’s really just a cursory nod because the directors on a one-hour show have four days to cut and they often don’t have time to get through it. On a sophisticated show like ours, it’s absolutely inadequate. But what David said early on was that the directors get their cut and we may not like a lot of what they do, but it’s worth going through it all for just one fresh idea. It means, quite often, the directors don’t have their cuts for weeks, so that immediately blows the schedule out of the water. Normally, if the director isn’t available when he is scheduled, then he forgoes his cut. Not on our show. If he’s unavailable, we wait for him to come back to do the cut. He does his cut and at that point the producers tag team the show. They go through and take up to two or three weeks to completely change the show to their liking. Then at that time, they pass it to the next producer and he has his pass on the show. Then they get together and argue about what they liked and didn’t like and generally do a third or fourth producers pass and only then do we get a show in a form we can work on… It’s a show that is done spontaneously and [that’s] what gives the show its form.”
In theory, it’s a refreshingly open and creative way of producing a series outside of the standard, cookie-cutter production cycle. In practice, especially for the visual effects team, it can be hell. “It defies all of the ideals of how you get a TV show done,” Hutzel agrees. “It’s very much more like a feature where people get a say because it’s politically their option to have a say, and they take as much time that they need to get it done. On a feature, if the screening date shifts three months, it’s pretty standard procedure. On our show, there is no shifting. It was easier last season because the delay in airdates was so incredible. In this new season, the task has become as demanding as we can possibly get. We are delivering the whole second half of the season on a one-week per schedule. It would have been different if they hadn’t gone into episode 11 [“Resurrection Ship”] and decided to turn it into a two-parter, but, the truth is, that isn’t unusual for our show...”

All of that open-ended production just means Hutzel’s team has to step up and rise to the challenges of each episode with speed and creativity. “Clearly, it falls on the vfx department that is on the end of that chain to deliver in record time on every show,” Hutzel admits, “but the whole point of Battlestar is to avoid any kind of streamlining of the process. By the choice of the producers, they want the show to be full of bumps in the road. They want it to be shaken up every time we go to produce another episode. They want to have curve balls everywhere. It’s not by happenstance, but by design. Consequently, for the visual effects, there is no pattern. For instance, today [Dec. 29], we just went through what will be the season opener, which will air Jan. 6. This is the first time that David has seen the finals for the show and. of course, there is a list of revisions. Now, it’s not about the visual effects at all. We have no option. They continue cutting the show until the 11th hour and we have no locked cut on the show at all. We just started on the effects when we ran out of time and we adjust to the cut on the fly,” he chuckles.
And that doesn’t mean Hutzel cuts any corners to get the job done either. He insists there are no stock shots and the idea is to push it so there is never the same thing twice. Occasionally, at the 11th hour, they will grab a shot from another show when they can’t afford to do another one for an action shot. “Star Trek is a great example, in that it was all structured. Every show had five stock shots in it. It’s the absolute opposite of what we are doing.”
Yet, with that kind of oppressive turnaround, can they truly be satisfied with the work they are able to produce, when time is always of the essence, but never in spare? Hutzel says: Yes. “We are maintaining the quality of the show and we are delivering the kind of entertainment I want to do. I’m very pleased with Atmosphere and Zoic. We are also doing a certain number of shots in house. One of the things I developed this season was that I built our own render farm. We have our own capability and we have two fulltime artists working with us in Vancouver, which allows us to respond to these last minute demands. It’s been very helpful and made a big difference. And if it sounds as if we are taking work away from the facilities, that’s not really the case. We are picking up additional shots that we would not have been able to do and taking some shots to a different level when we can. It takes the onus off the facilities because their capabilities would be strained, because we are delivering everything in two to three weeks. Normally, a show would have 10 to 12 weeks. We also do some R&D in the office too.”
Hutzel says his initial system choices are also helping the process this season too. “We use LightWave [3D] and composite either in Digital Fusion or Combustion. I designed the show originally on LightWave and as far as compositing, the tools have kept up with the times. I pat myself on the back for using LightWave. In our local render farm, we are running full 64-bit. We are the only facility doing that and since we are the beta-testers, we were crazy to jump in on that. We have a great IT guy and we kept things up to date. We anticipate that render times will drop to nearly a third of what they were last year. It means that we can turn in a lot more sophisticated stuff and tools much faster. LightWave has been rebuilding their software from the ground up and it turned up as we needed speed increases, so LightWave has grown with the show.”

With the rest of the season still spread out in front of him, one has to wonder if burnout is imminent. Hutzel laughs and says, “Burnout is all relative. I’ve been burnt out and it’s like running marathons — you get tired and get your second wind and keep going. A lot of people see the kitchen is hot and they don’t want to go in there, we just jump into the fire and keep going and I have a team of people willing to follow me. I’ve collected a bunch of terrific artists that say if this is how you want to lead us, this is the way we’ll go. I don’t have anybody digging in his heels and anyone saying it can’t be done. I have a team of great people who stay on top of it and recognize what we are doing and that it’s demanding but unique and worth spending time on.”

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI-FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.

source:
http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=57c5ed8a&atype=articles&id=2751#

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MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA: An Interview with Director Rob Marshall

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 04:40:28 GMT

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA: An Interview with Director Rob Marshall

By Wilson Morales
http://www.blackfilm.com/20051118/features/robmarshall.shtml

With the success of his Oscar winning film, "Chicago", Director Rob Marshall will be watched very carefully as he chooses his next film, which he already has. Rather than play it safe and do another movie musical, Marshall is taking on one of the best selling books in recent years, "Memoirs of a Geisha". Not only is directing the film a challenge itself, he has to deal with the onslaught of questions that every journalist will throw at him if he gets it wrong such as the casting of Chinese women in Japanese roles amongst other things. In speaking with blackfilm.com, Marshall clears goes over his decision to direct this film and why some changes were best for the film.
Was it difficult - do you realize what you had done to yourself?

Rob Marshall: You know, it was exciting in a funny way it's scary. It was obviously scary. There I was working with an international group of actors, five of who are making their English language debut. It was an amazing experience. I found that something exists between director and actor sometimes that surpasses or transcends language. Sitting and working with them, I'm very lucky that we had the six weeks of rehearsal that we had because it was during that time that we sort of worked out how this would play. I would be speaking English and it would be translated into Japanese and Chinese in front of me. Many times the actors couldn't speak to each other except in the scene in English. It was extraordinary. But we had the luxury of that rehearsal, and so by the time we got to shooting I felt it was - oddly enough -- very natural. I felt we had found our way, and these are the greatest actors really in the world. I have Koji Yakusho, the Al Pacino of Japan, Gong Li, the Meryl Streep of China. I have these great actors and I felt like I was in very safe hands with them.

But after "Chicago", did you feel that pressure or were you just really wanting to bide your time to figure out what would be the best film to see?

RM: That's such a good question because after Chicago I wanted to just sort of think, stop for a moment and think what was next, which is exactly what I did. I didn't jump right into something. I felt like what a great opportunity to be in a position where you can make a choice as opposed to something that's chosen for you, and so I chose Geisha because I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to try something very different. I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to try something that would scare me but that would hopefully be rewarding ultimately at the end of it all, and this came my way. It's funny how it came - I got the call from Lucy Fisher, Doug Wick and Steven Spielberg, our producers, while I was sort of in the throes of the awards season of Chicago, which was such a surprise to me; I wasn't prepared for that at all. And they were asking me, 'Would you take a look at this" And I didn't really want to look at anything then because I couldn't focus, but they kept sending me bottles of sake and antique print of Geisha and beautiful books, and it was really hard to turn away from it because I thought, 'Wow, this is it, isn't it? This is fantastic.' So it was a combination for me of the world of Geisha and also the story. The central story was very moving to me, about the child who is sold into slavery and must surrender to a life that's very difficult and with a great struggle involved and learns to ultimately find love in a world where love is forbidden to her.

Wasn't there a moment there where you were thinking about directing "Rent"?

RM: That was before Chicago. When I went to meet with Miramax about a musical, they had brought me in to talk about Rent. And I said, 'Before we begin this conversation about "Rent" can I tell you what I would do with "Chicago?"' And that turned into a meeting that lasted hours and then I went to Harvey's office and explained how I saw Chicago and that turned into a development deal and into a movie.

Although they are very, very different, both Chicago and Geisha involved rivalries between strong women. Is that a theme you find that you find particularly intriguing or appealing and is it something that we like continue to see as a vocal point in your work?

RM: It's interesting you say that because I remember I was in Japan and we were in a Kaburenjo, which is the name of their theater, the Geisha theater, and I was in the basement and they were showing me how a lift worked. And, of course, I remember immediately Catherine Zeta Jones coming out of the floor and how we've done that, and I thought, 'I've traveled halfway across the world to do something completely different and it just dawned on me that I'm doing a movie about rival women in show business again.' But it was obviously in a very different way. That was really sort of a coincidence, although I have to say that something about the fact that Geisha are artists first. The word Geisha means artist and the fact that dance is the highest art that they perform. It's something that I connect to. And the discipline involved, I get. So there is a connection that honestly I didn't really quite make immediately. To me was a totally different palette, which it was, of course, and is. The thing that I look for when I'm looking for what's next and so forth is great story lines. I love working with actresses; I really do. There's something about it that I have a real connection with. It could easily be that I'll find myself doing it again, but hopefully there will be a little variety as well, thank you.

Do you see Geisha as a form of slavery?

RM: I found it a very interesting profession. To me it's a combination of beauty and cruelty. It really was both, and that's what I think makes it so fascinating. They really are moving works of art. They have to train unbelievably hard, and they work incredible hours. When I was in Kyoto, even today, there are so few left and it's a very different kind of profession, obviously. You're not sold into it. You make a choice to do it as a teenager in high school would choose to go to the School of American Ballet or something like that or become a model. It's that kind of thing now. But then children were sold into these Geisha houses as maids and as slaves, but there was a reward for that ultimately at the end of it if they were able to maintain the work and the house and the training and so forth, and they would become Geisha. But to me the movie is about how you deal with this very difficult profession. (There are, in the story) four different Geisha, ultimately. One, Sayuri, survives. Like the water in her eye, she keeps moving forward and ultimately finds love. But Hatsumomo, sort of the tragic villain of our piece, obviously self-destructs, can't deal with the restrictions of being a Geisha. Mameha, the teacher, is a Geisha who is the perfect Geisha and the only way she can do that is really put her heart on ice and remove herself from that. And she has that wonderful line where she says, 'A Geisha has no choice. We don't become Geisha to pursue our own destinies. We become Geisha because we have no choice.' And then Pumpkin, the fourth Geisha, is a failed Geisha and becomes a prostitute. So that's what's to me the movie is about, exploring that.

How can the modern women relate to this?

RM: I think it's fascinating. First of all, you have to remember something: this is a women-run business, even in the 20's and 30's, when this movie takes place. It's extraordinary when you think about. The teahouses are owned by women, and these Okiyas are run by women. All that money was exchanged from women. So there's a sense this is a female business. I think it's fascinating to explore, for instance, Sayuri, whose spirit didn't accept that. To me, she has a modern sensibility in that time; somebody who went against the culture and didn't accept that she could not dream or that she could not love.

Is this why the book and hopefully the movie resonates?

RM: I think it has resonated in terms of the book, for sure. It's a hidden culture. It's a hidden subculture inside Japan. That's what makes it so alluring. For me, even spending two years on it, I'm still fascinated by it because there is no Western equivalent to it. Somebody said to me the other day, 'Is a Geisha a trophy wife?' And I said, 'No, that's not what they are.' People try to equate what they are and that's not what they are. They're artists first and then, of course, there's a danna involved, a patron involved eventually, and in the time of our story a Geisha sold herself, sold her virginity. But it's a peak into a different world, to a different culture, and one of the things I loved about movies growing up for me is being transported to a different world, transported to a different time and place and exploring what that's about and understanding where it came from.

Can you talk about the casting and why go with Chinese actresses and not Japanese?

RM: I have a very simple philosophy when it comes to casting and it really is casting the best person for the role. We had casting directors all over the world and the hope as a director is that when someone walks in, an actor walks in that you work with, claims the role and says, 'This is mine.' Sayuri, for instance, was such a demanding role because not only did she have to be a great actor that could carry a film, but she also had to speak English. She also had to be a brilliant dancer because we had to learn how to become a Geisha in literally six weeks; that's all we had, and she had to do that incredible dance. And it takes a lifetime to become a Geisha. The subtleties are extraordinary. So we had to approximate the idea what that would be. And so a dancer was very key to me. She had to age from 15 to 35, and she had to have that great spirit. For me an actor like Z (Ziyi Zhang), for instance, comes along once in a generation. She's 26 years old and she is extraordinary. She's really extraordinary on every level and there was no question. She was Sayuri, the way Ken Watanabe was the Chairman. I met him the day after the premiere of 'The Last Samurai' in New York. I walked in and I thought he'd be a Samurai, the Samurai, and I walked in and here's this gentle, lovely man with a great humor, great kindness and I thought, 'That's the Chairman.' So it was, 'How wonderful he'll be able to play something he's never played before, ironically, which was something closer to himself.' So that's the hope of the director: they claim the roles. And my job is to choose the best actor for every role, to bring that character to life.

What about the other two actresses - Michelle Yeah and Gong Li?

RM: Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian and she is a dancer as well. I knew that once again with Mameha, who is the tutor, had to be able to teach and become the perfect Geisha. The other thing that Michelle has in spades for me is the incredible elegance, incredible warmth and great wisdom, everything Mameha had needed. So she claimed that role and said, 'This is mine' more than anybody else in the world. I would say Gong Li is probably one of the greatest actors in the world. It's pretty much that simple. The beauty is extraordinary, and I knew with Hatsumomo that it was the hardest role in the movie because it could easily become a one-dimensional character, bitch, who plays evil for evil's sake. And with Gong Li I have a three-dimensional actor. And she helped me enormously, by the way, as we worked on this character to find the reason for why she is the way she is, to make her full-blooded. And for me it was an honor to work with this great actor.

The poster emphasizes the blue eyes and they don't look that blue on screen. Westerners have an idea of the mysterious East. Is this a way to welcome Westerns into the world?

RM: No, this is Arthur Golden's story. That's what we're doing the film version of. Arthur Golden's story is about a girl who stood out from others because she had these remarkable gray-blue eyes and -

Is it possible for a Japanese to have blue eyes?

RM: Yeah, sure. You have to remember this is a fable, I'll remind everybody of that, and a fiction. And in addition to that, (with) our story we even stepped further away from Kyoto. Our story takes place in the fictional town of Miako. I wanted to do that because I wanted to really know that this is a story, a lovely fable, an emotional fable.

Why start with the characters speaking Japanese and then segue into English?

RM: The reason is because I wanted to enter into this world in somewhat sort of an authentic way, like we're appearing into a world. One of the things we did throughout the movie was shoot the movie through materials, through bamboo, through silks, things like that, to give a sense that we're appearing into a unique world, a hidden world. I wanted to start the movie in Japanese so you'd have a sense of disorientation and feel that you're in a place that's foreign and odd to you. And then once the voiceover begins you understand that it's being narrated and being told as a memoir. As soon as the English voice takes over then the rest of the movie is translated to us in English.

This is a fable, not related to the real world now in which you really do have women sold into slavery. But do you think there's a resonance?

RM: I think, obviously, there is a truth to this movie in terms of when it took place. Our movie opens in 1929 and children were sold into Geisha houses. They left their parents and they had a new mother, and that's how it worked. Now, of course, it's completely different. That would never happen. Now, you choose to become a Geisha as a high school student like I said before, and at age 16. In fact they don't start teaching Geisha until they are 16 now. So it's a very different thing. But then that is how it worked. It's funny, I found Arthur's story to be very much like a Dickensian novel in a way, I felt, very much like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. It had that kind of thing, in addition to (resembling) Pygmalion or Cinderella; it has that kind of rags to riches feel. But the Dickensian part of it grabs a lot of people when they read the novel and hopefully when they see the movie because you care about this child, what's going to happen to her, someone who's been taken from love, taken from family.

How do you feel about reinventing the movie musicals?

RM: I'm happy. I'm so happy (if that's true) because I made it so clear when I was promoting Chicago (that he wished it would result in more musicals being made). That's what I grew up watching and loving, movie musicals. They've inspired me throughout my life and so I'm so thrilled that Rent's opening, Producers is opening this season. Dreamgirls, Hairspray is on the way. And if we played a small part in that I'm thrilled.

What are some of your favorite musicals?

RM: The musicals that I loved growing up: many, many. Singing in the Rain, of course, is a classic, I love Meet Me in St. Louis. I love Funny Face, Stanley Donen's beautiful movie. It's really countless for me. Cabaret. What do I love about Singing in the Rain? It's the perfectly constructed musical and it was created specifically for film, which is fantastic. And it's about the film business. Perfect performances. There's not a misstep in the whole movie.

Can you talk about the transition from musicals to something dramatic?

RM: Sure. That was really a wonderful opportunity for me. "Chicago" presents this wonderful thing in your life that you can maybe take a chance or open up or try something different with the success. It's this lovely thing that happens, and it happens rarely in life. Mostly what happens in your life is you're perceived as one thing and that's what you do and that's it. For me, to me, telling a story is telling a story, telling it through dance, telling it through singing is the same thing as telling it through a dramatic piece -- because it's a story. The characters, you have to bring to life. You have to make it feel connected to your emotions in some way; whether it's funny, whether it's sad, whether it's beautiful, whether it's cruel. And I was moved by this and excited to do it, and there's a little dance in it. So there's a little connection to the world for me. I did shoot in a theater and did have a little bit of a safety net there for myself. But I was excited to try something else.

But following that up, you have a knack for doing projects based on existing material. Assuming this is a success and you get that next opportunity, how eager would you be to something original as opposed to a remake or something based on a book, where there are expectations that come with that.

RM: Yeah. That would be fantastic. I'm not a writer, although as a filmmaker you are an author in a certain way. I worked on this movie, for instance, and I started from scratch. I started from the book and I hired Robin (Swicord). Robin and I started working on structuring the piece and pulling directly from the book. Original material is trickier when you're not a writer. When I read and look for things, it's not so much 'Is it from a source? Is it not from a source?' It's 'What is original? What's moving? What's different?' I think that movies sometimes suffer from the cookie cutter syndrome. I've seen the same thing over and over and over again, and one of the things that exited me about this is I haven't seen this movie before, so I thought, 'Well, let's do something new.'

You have both in Chicago and Geisha you have established yourself as the - an author. All of the actors that we've spoken with today have acknowledged that this is Rob Marshall's vision. So as a film director who is acknowledged to be an auteur, who is working with material that is not original, how responsible do you feel to that original material?

RM: Thank you very much. I feel a great deal (of responsibility). Specifically with Memoirs of a Geisha, it was such a beloved book. I felt a great deal of responsibility to bring it to life in a way that would honor the book and honor this great novel. I sat with Arthur Golden for quite a long time talking to him about the novel and how he got there and everything about it, about the characters. And he was part of the process for me, which it was important to me. He dreamed this up and I wanted to make sure his dream -- although in a different form, of course, it has to become something else; it's a two-hour and 17-minute movie, not a 400-page novel -- but I wanted it to have the same feel, the same beauty that he captured and that captured the hearts of his readers. So he was involved quite a bit.

What's next?

RM: It's funny. I'm so bad at developing something while I'm working on something. I'm terrible at it. I didn't do it in Chicago, either. I'll probably stop now, breathe for a little bit and start reading, and something will happen, I hope.

http://www.blackfilm.com/20051118/features/robmarshall.shtml

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Pathbreaking Comedian Richard Pryor Dies

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 05:14:33 GMT

Pathbreaking Comedian Richard Pryor Dies

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051210/D8EDLL080.html

By JEREMIAH MARQUEZ

(AP) Comedian-actor Richard Pryor is shown as he performs in 1977. Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian whose profanely personal insights into race relations and modern life made him one of Hollywood's biggest black stars, died of a heart attack Saturday. He was 65.
Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.
"We loved him and will miss you," his ex-wife, Flynn Pryor, said from her Florida home.
Pryor lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off.

(AP) In this file photo from CBS, Richard Pryor is shown in this Nov. 2, 1984, file photo on the set of...
Full Image
He was regarded early in his career as one of the most foul-mouthed comics in the business, but he gained a wide following for his universal and frequently personal routines. After nearly losing his life in 1980 when he caught on fire while freebasing cocaine, he incorporated the ordeal into his later routines.
His audacious style influenced generations of stand-up artists, from Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock to Robin Williams and David Letterman, among others.
A series of hit comedies and concert films in the '70s and '80s helped make Pryor one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood, and he was one of the first black performers to have enough leverage to cut his own deals. In 1983, he signed a $40 million, five-year contract with Columbia Pictures.
His films included "Stir Crazy,""Silver Streak,""Which Way Is Up?" and "Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip."
Throughout his career, Pryor focused on racial inequality, once joking as the host of the Academy Awards in 1977 that Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were the only black members of the Academy.
Pryor once marveled "that I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that."
But he battled drug and alcohol addictions for years, most notably when he suffered severe burns over 50 percent of his body while freebasing at his home. An admitted "junkie" at the time, Pryor spent six weeks recovering from the burns and much longer from his addictions.
He battled multiple sclerosis throughout the '90s.
In his last movie, the 1991 bomb "Another You," Pryor's poor health was clearly evident. Pryor made a comeback attempt the following year, returning to standup comedy in clubs and on television while looking thin and frail, and with noticeable speech and movement difficulties.
In 1995, he played an embittered multiple sclerosis patient in an episode of the television series "Chicago Hope." The role earned him an Emmy nomination as best guest actor in a drama series.
"To be diagnosed was the hardest thing because I didn't know what they were talking about," he said. "And the doctor said 'Don't worry, in three months you'll know.'
"So I went about my business and then, one day, it jumped me. I couldn't get up. ... Your muscles trick you; they did me."
While Pryor's material sounds modest when compared with some of today's raunchier comedians, it was startling material when first introduced. He never apologized for it.
Pryor was fired by one Las Vegas hotel for "obscenities" directed at the audience. In 1970, tired of compromising his act, he quit in the middle of another Vegas stage show with the words, "What the (blank) am I doing here?" The audience was left staring at an empty stage.
He didn't tone things down after he became famous. In his 1977 NBC television series "The Richard Pryor Show," he threatened to cancel his contract with the network. NBC's censors objected to a skit in which Pryor appeared naked save for a flesh-colored loincloth to suggest he was emasculated.
In his later years, Pryor mellowed considerably, and his film roles looked more like easy paychecks than artistic endeavors. His robust work gave way to torpid efforts like "Harlem Nights,""Brewster's Millions" and "Hear No Evil, See No Evil."
"I didn't think 'Brewster's Millions' was good to begin with," Pryor once said. "I'm sorry, but they offered us the money. I was a pig, I got greedy."
"I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst," he said in 1995. "In other words, I had a life."
Recognition came in 1998 from an unlikely source: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington gave Pryor the first Mark Twain Prize for humor. He said in a statement that he was proud that, "like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred."
Born in 1940 in Peoria, Ill., Pryor grew up in his grandmother's brothel. His first professional performance came at age 7, when he played drums at a night club.
Following high school and two years of Army service, he launched his performing career, honing his comedy in bars throughout the United States. By the mid-'60s, he was appearing in Las Vegas clubs and on the television shows of Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson.
His first film role came with a small part in 1967's "The Busy Body." He made his starring debut as Diana Ross' piano man in 1972's "Lady Sings the Blues."
Pryor also wrote scripts for the television series "Sanford and Son,""The Flip Wilson Show" and two specials for Lily Tomlin. He collaborated with Mel Brooks on the script for the movie "Blazing Saddles."
Later in his career, Pryor used his films as therapy. "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling," was an autobiographical account of a popular comedian re-examining his life while lying delirious in a hospital burn ward. Pryor directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the film.
"I'm glad I did 'Jo Jo,'" Pryor once said. "It helped me get rid of a lot of stuff."
Pryor also had legal problems over the years. In 1974, he was sentenced to three years' probation for failing to file federal income tax returns. In 1978, he allegedly fired shots and rammed his car into a vehicle occupied by two of his wife's friends.
Even in poor health, his comedy was vital. At a 1992 performance, he asked the room, "Is there a doctor in the audience?" All he got was nervous laughter. "No, I'm serious. I want to know if there's a doctor here."
A hand finally went up.
"Doctor," Pryor said, "I need to know one thing. What the (blank) is MS?"
Pryor was married six times. His children include sons Richard and Steven, and daughters Elizabeth, Rain and Renee.
Daughter Rain became an actress. In an interview in 2005, she told the Philadelphia Inquirer that her father always "put his life right out there for you to look at. I took that approach because I saw how well audiences respond to it. I try to make you laugh at life."

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The Year of Michelle Yeoh

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:39:41 GMT

The Year of Michelle Yeoh
Source: Edward Douglas
December 5, 2005
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=12215

If you're a fan of martial arts films, you already know Michelle Yeoh (pronounced "yo") from her long line of Asian action films dating back to the mid'80s, and if you're a James Bond fan, you may remember her from the movie Tomorrow Never Dies. The rest of the world quickly caught up and saw both Yeoh's skills as an actor and martial artist in Ang Lee's epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which pitted her in an unforgettable fight sequence against the Chinese ingénue Zhang Ziyi.

Now, Yeoh is reunited with her young costar from that film, this time playing her matronly mentor Mameha in Rob "Chicago" Marshall's adaptation of the Arthur Golden bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha.

During her recent visit to New York, ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk to the gorgeous 40 plus actress about what went into becoming the perfect geisha, her thoughts on the general concept of geishas, and more.

CS: When you arrived on set and saw Zhang Ziyi, did you two restart your great battle from "Crouching Tiger", just for old time's sake?
Yeoh: No, we've done that before and we've moved on to do other things. We weren't like "Did you bring the hammer this time?"

CS: What was the attraction of playing this character to you?
Yeoh: First of all, I think the greatest attraction to this movie was Rob Marshall. I had been a big fan of the book initially. I guess there wouldn't be a lot of people who had read the book and who hadn't loved it, and in their mind, they had already visualized what each character and the place looked like. When I heard it was Rob Marshall going to direct the film, I really felt that he was the perfect guy, because he had that sense and sensibility, the masculine and very feminine side of him. What appealed to me tremendously was because he came from a dance background--he was a choreographer--and it felt like this movie really needed that fluid side of the rhythmic dance to where the geisha really had to flutter about. As far as why Mameha appealed to me was because it was one of the biggest challenges to date as an actress, not purely just on the physical side, because I had been trained for years to be a dancer and a martial artist, so moving from one movement to another, it was a familiar background. Still, it was a very specific style of movement that I had to learn from scratch. Mameha is the sensei and she was the epitome of the geisha. I had to teach on-screen Sayuri (Zhang Ziyi's character) what to do, how to bow correctly, how to kneel, how to get up, how to walk, everything, and if I didn't do it well, it would be a disaster. I think Rob would have drawn me out and shot me on the first day.

CS: What kind of geisha is Mameha?
Michelle Yeoh: The best. Yeah. The only kind there is. I think she was too hard on herself a lot of the times, and I don't think she allowed any sidetracks. There was none of that. You have to know why you're here, how you got here and then know that this is a privilege that you're in this position right now and you should do the best that you can and there's no second best in her eyes. Geishas had very strict rules that they lived by, and Mameha followed those rules religiously. It was like during the times when we were putting each layer of the kimono, the hair was going up, the make-up was being put on, I felt all those restrictions come on. There is no love; you do not talk about love. You only think of yourself as the artist, your music, your dance, your calligraphy, your rituals, all those kind of things. You're not a wife. There are so many rules to obey and to observe. What I think was the most difficult was Mameha really, truly denied herself all that. In the movie, love is the biggest theme and love is a theme that we all live by and we passionately need and want, and it was very hard as a woman, and then as a character to say "No, does not happen" even though she wanted it and had it deep inside her, it was that sheer "I am the perfect geisha and it's not there." I think that to me, was the most difficult part.

CS: Having worked with Ziyi before, did you two have a shorthand that made it easier to play two different characters?
Yeoh: It definitely makes it much easier, because when we did "Crouching Tiger", that was at least four or five years ago, and from then, we already had this bond. I think in my eyes, she's always going to be my little sister and in her eyes, I am the big sister. I think Rob saw that right away and it's very important that these two characters have that bond. You know what sisters are like--it's that love/hate relationship.

CS: Was it a challenge getting into the mindset of a Japanese character, because you're Malaysian-Chinese yourself?
Yeoh: I think once you approach a film, you know very clearly what you're going to be playing. At the end of the day, I hope that we're good professionals. Once you attach yourself to that and have the mindset, I am playing a Japanese geisha. At the end of the day, the most important thing for me was that I'm playing the vision of Rob Marshall. He is celebrating what it is like to be a geisha, and I think it was very important for us to have that mindset, and to play with him and to realize his vision. And I think he has an amazing vision.

CS: Was Rob Marshall surprised by your work ethic?
Yeoh: I think Rob Marshall didn't look at any of us where we came from, different cultures or whatever it was. Rob Marshall, from the very first stage, said to us, you are the people that I have chosen, because I believe that you are the character I have chosen you to play, and when he spoke to us, it was purely about how we could make his vision come true. He was relentless. It was very clear in his mind, and we needed a director like that, because you're talking about a big ensemble cast. You're talking about two of the best Japanese actors around, then there's Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang and myself, and everybody wanting his time and energy. But he was very, very focused. He would remind each and every one of us, because our paths diverged, but it still had to converge and meet correctly at the right time. I remember I had this scene with Sayuri after when I felt very betrayed and he would come up to me and say, "Remember, you are Mameha". And all he had to do was say that, because it means that "You're not Michelle Yeoh, the actress, or a woman trying to express your feelings, how you would feel in a situation like this. You are my Mameha". And that was it. I'm Rob Marshall's Mameha.

CS: But some have made an issue that three world-famous Chinese actresses are playing Japanese geishas.
Yeoh: I sincerely hope that's not an issue, because this is a fairy tale, and an amazingly beautiful love story. I hope that we have done a good job, that we take you into this world where you're breath will be taken away and you will appreciate what we have done in there. Honestly, in Asia and in Japan, it's never been an issue, so I don't see why it should be made an issue and take away from the greatness of the film itself. Maybe we should hope there will be more movies that allow us these wonderful, amazing Asian actresses to have bigger participation. Seriously, I think it's been a long time coming, that it's come to this. Hollywood America is the biggest market, and you have movies that cater to your own stories, and your own lifestyles and your own culture, and it's taken a long while where you suddenly realize, "Hey, guess what? In your society, there are so many of us Asians." We're here. But in a lot of the stories, it seems like it's an afterthought that we should have that. Thank God on TV now you have the newscast reader who is Asian, and then on TV, you see more Asian faces, but it's taken time, and thank God that Sony said "We have to be the leaders in saying we are confident enough that an all-Asian cast can do very very well in the American market" then it's really good for us, because you know, we seriously need this. I mean, our world is not that big.

CS: What was the vibe like with all these well known Asian actresses from different countries on the set?
Yeoh: We had great interpreters on set, but Gong Li and I just hit it off from the first day. It was so funny. By the end of the day, after rehearsing, she just stepped up to me and said "I really like you" and I was like "Girl, guess what. I really like you, too!" Rob has immense patience. When you have a room full of girls, it's not easy. So there's me, Ziyi and Gong Li going "ninininininininin" in Mandarin, there's Kaori Momoi, Youki Kodoh and interpreters going on at full speed in Japanese, and then we'd turn to each other, and we'd be talking. I'm not sure what language we were talking in, but we knew exactly what we were saying and Rob would just stand there and let us have our moments, and go "Girls, director here. Talk to me now" So we had a great time, and it was one of those things where we truly loved being there on set and we loved we were given the opportunity to do, so we had a really fun time. We worked together really well. We all threw things at each other and said "What if you did this and I did that and how do we work it out?" and we watched each other's backs, basically.

CS: What was the most difficult part of learning the geisha movements?
Yeoh: We used to laugh about this, but it's actually not that funny. We called them the 7 Rooms of Torture. During the practice, rehearsal period, we had a room very specifically for learning how to do the shamisen [ancient Japanese lute] because that is a musical instrument that to be a true geisha, you had to do that perfectly. And to be Mameha, I had to play that for Sayuri when she did her performance at the teahouses. Then, the second room was where we learned how to do all the rituals of pouring sake, handing the cup…it was very specific, and I think we needed to do that so that it was second nature to us, so that by the time we got onto the set, we put on our kimonos, we've done this millions of times, but it was not easy to do. Everything had its own particular place and we had to do it effortlessly. Then, the other room was when we had to learn the dance. Just walking in kimono was a different thing, because once you had the kimono on, you had to make the tail flutter, and you had to glide across the room, so to first learn how to walk, we had to tie our knees together, and put a thin slip of paper in between, so that if the paper fell, you failed, and you had to get to the back of the class. It was embarrassing, because there were a lot of us and we were trying to outdo the other one. We had an amazing geisha consultant, Liza Dalby, who was there. I think the essence of being the geisha is her understanding her place and what a geisha is about. That she believes that a geisha is about truly being an artist, so that's why she spends her entire life, all her time, practicing her skills, so that when she's out there, she is on show. She's literally a moving piece of art with her kimono, the way she is dressed, her make-up, her hair, so when she dances or even she talks to you, it is a moving art form. For me, it was not just the mental side, but also the physical side that embodies the different parts of being a true geisha.

CS: Did you get to keep any of your kimonos?
Yeoh: At that time, we were thinking wouldn't it be great if we could? You know what was the most difficult? Deciding which one we wanted to keep. For the life of me, I couldn't decide and that was horrible. But you know what? It will always be immortalized on film, so sometimes it's much better that way. You don't have to keep the physical thing. It will always be there, and it's fantastic. What it's really taught me is like the kimonos, they're so precious but then after that, they're kept in their boxes, and they're put safely away. For every movie that I've done, they're like a kimono. I packed them very neatly and very preciously in a box but they're kept in my mind, and I really don't need a physical thing to say "Hey, remember this time when you did this?" It will always be here (points to head) and here (points to heart).

CS: Do you have any opinion about the sexism that underpins the concept of the geishas?
Yeoh: Honestly, doing this movie was already such a privilege and an honor, and I think what we tried to do was try to celebrate a culture that we really are learning about. It's not so open that we can say this is right or wrong or this is black or white. Also, you know, this culture descends from a period of time when parents were trying to do the right thing for their kids and people were trying to survive. I think it's also a culture that's been elevated to an artform, so for me, I don't look at it that way. I look at beautiful side of it. I come from a dance background. When I first learned about geishas, it was about their dancing. It was like seeing this amazing doll that had this white face, and all their movements were so exquisite and it was almost unreal, very, very mythical. That was what I wanted to portray, even though there are so many different interpretations of how it's going to be. I hope that people will go in and just really have their breath taken away and for a moment have a glimpse into a part of a world that we don't really know that much about.

CS: But what about the very real situation of Asian girls getting sold into slavery like what happens with Sayuri?
Yeoh: I think everything should lead you to that, and let you have a moment where you think about that. Unfortunately, to think that in this century, in the affluent life that a lot of us have, that this still happens very randomly in Burma, in Vietnam, and in Thailand, it's horrifying. I see that because I live in Asia, and it's terrifying that that still happens. I don't know whether they're just doing it because they thought that the kid would have a better life and there are some really people, whether it's the Triads or the Mafia that are doing it for all the worst possible reasons, so in a way, you can't really compare the destitute that was then and now on the same level, because times have really changed. You know, I'm a great fan of Jackie Chan, and in China they revered the son, because he is the heir. When he was a very young boy, he was sold to the acrobatic house, because his parents believed that if he went there and trained, he might have an opportunity to be an acrobat. And look where he is today. But if his parents said "Oh, no. I can't sell my child. I'll just keep him at home." Where would he be? So we have to take a step back and say "I see there is something there" but not to just lump it all together and say "This is bad" or ‘This is not right". There is a different way of approaching it.

CS: Where do you see your career going from here?
Yeoh: From the looks of it, it looks like it's very bright and shining. (laughs) I think when you're an actor, your dream is to be able to reach out worldwide internationally, and at the present moment, it seems like to be a Hollywood actor, that would be the fastest way, that would be the surest way that you do reach out to the most people. I hope that in time, the Asian productions or the Chinese productions will catch up, but until our markets are as sophisticated as the American market, it will take us a lot of time. It's like India has an amazing, huge, film market, but it's really basically for themselves, because they make movies very close to what they like and they don't have the illusion that they can export it outside because they don't have that kind of contacts, but I find with the Asian films right now, they are crossing. Even whether it's just remakes or coming across here or getting straight into DVD, but it is reaching out. It's no longer just the people who have the interest in watching European films or Asian films. It's more general right now, so hopefully, as an actor, yes, if it's to be working in Hollywood films that I get to show my work to the world, then yes, I would do it. Absolutely. Honestly, I don't choose the place that I work; I really choose by the character and the director. The director, for me, is very important, because I really truly believe that he's the soul of the film. You can have an amazing script, but if you don't have a director that has the passion, the dedication and the vision for that, it would go a little soft, and I think a lot of you could understand that, and I don't choose to say that I'm only going to concentrate on working in America or just in Asia. I hope to find a balance where I can go where the best character and the best director is.

CS: Speaking of great directors, you just finished working on the new Danny Boyle film, "Sunshine", right?
Yeoh: Yes, and it was such a contrast, because at the beginning of last year, I was the geisha, right? Four hours of make-up and every day walking around like a supermodel. This movie, I'm the astronaut fifty years ahead in time, fifteen minutes in hair and make-up, and I'm like "Wait a minute. What about my eyebrow?" and [the make-up girl is] like "No, you're a real character, you're an astronaut, you're a physicist, you're a scientist. Get back to your lab." It's fantastic. That's where Danny Boyle is amazing, because if you look at his films, you don't know what to expect from him. Just like his movie "28 Days Later." There are so many zombie movies out there, so why did he make it different? Because he had an edge. Yes, this is eight astronauts going up to save the world, which we've heard that so many times before, but you have to see it. It's got an edge. I loved it. The first week of filming, he said to me "You know this is not a family movie, right?" "Danny, I know your films, it's okay."

CS: Any chance of working with Ang Li again?
Yeoh: I hope so. I'd do anything to work for that man.

CS: I'm sure most women will want to know what your secret is for looking so amazing.
Yeoh: Oh, thank you! I was thinking that I was jetlagged and blurry eyed, and you guys are going to see through me right away. I think it's just trying to be happy, cause with our kind of work, sometimes you take things personally, and you never should, but then at the end of the day, you think that you did your best. You had a really good time, and today is such a gift.

You can see how great Michelle Yeoh looks as a geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha, which opens in select cities on December 9 and everywhere else on December 23. Check back over the next few weeks for interviews with Ziyi Zhang and director Rob Marshall.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=12215

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Dave McKean On Directing Mirrormask from AVClub.com

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 18:38:49 GMT

Dave McKean

Reviewed by Tasha Robinson
September 28th, 2005
http://avclub.com/content/node/41034/1/2

Like his frequent collaborator Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean made his name in comics, but has worked in a wide variety of media. Though primarily a visual artist who got his start doing CD covers and commercial work, he's also co-founded his own jazz label (Feral Records), made short films, composed music, and written and illustrated his own massive comics series, Cages. He's also illustrated Gaiman's scripts for the graphic novels Violent Cases, Signal To Noise, Mr. Punch, and Black Orchid, as well as Gaiman's children's books The Wolves In The Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Most famously, he created the complicated collage covers for Gaiman's long-running cult series The Sandman.

Fans of those covers will recognize McKean's signature style in his gorgeous feature directorial debut Mirrormask, which arrives in theaters September 30. McKean recently spoke to The A.V. Club about the filmmaking process, his work on Broadway's Lestat and the Harry Potter films, the appeal of comics, and the purpose of fantasy.

The A.V. Club: What was it like translating your art style to film?

Dave McKean: Pretty straightforward, really. I've made a couple of short films, and a couple of music videos, and things like that. I've worked closely with a CG supervisor, and we've done everything just together. And I found it relatively easy to find a sort of 3D moving-picture equivalent to my... My stuff is generally quite collage-y anyway. So it's sort-of suited to gathering raw materials like shooting actors, then making stills or animating characters, then just bringing them all together in a 3D space. That process is very close to my 2D work anyway.

AVC: Did you face a technological learning curve in getting it to film, or did it all just follow naturally from what you learned on your short films?

DM: All the films I've done have been huge learning curves. I've learned so much in the last few years with this new medium and making this film. Certain parts of it, like working with actors for the first time, was a huge learning curve. But actually making pictures to look like my pictures, I've done it for so long, I'm kind of used to it now. So at the beginning of the process, designing and storyboarding everything, I sort of did all that. And then designed the characters, and doing the textures for the characters, and the texture maps to cover all the animated characters and the sets, I did those, because that's where my sort of coloring and textures get imprinted on the film. But then after that, the animators were free to play and add to the sets, experiment with the animation, and push and pull the characters quite a bit. It was very open, very free, and very improvisational. Then right at the end, once we'd worked on everything together, they rendered everything in many, many layers. And then I could bring all of those pieces together. So I got the final word on the coloring and the look, and everything that makes it look like my images.

AVC: Are your short films ever likely to be commercially available?

DM: Yes, we're putting together a company called New Video in New York. We're going to release all of the short films. It's over two and a half hours of shorts and a few music videos, a couple of very short features, commissions for the BBC, things like that. And they're all going to be together on a DVD, probably in the new year sometime.

AVC: What was it like integrating the way that you had learned to work from short films with the Henson Laboratory experience?

DM: It was the best collaboration, really. They were all my little team, which is 15 men and women fresh out of art school. They were all ex-students, and this was their first job. The great thing about that was, they brought all of their art-school enthusiasm and personal ways of doing things that they'd been experimenting with at art school, and that sort of arrogant feeling that they can do anything, which was fantastic. And they had not worked in the industry for a long time, and felt like there was one set way of doing anything—they were still very open. So it was a nice meeting of minds, really, because I did have to convince them of my worldview, my way that I wanted the images to look, and my view of what the film should be. But they were really very open to that. Also, the workflow was very unusual. Usually, you get to do one small job on a film like this. My idea was, I wanted each one of them to do their short film within my whole film. So they would do a whole chunk themselves. They would create the characters and the sets. They would light it, they would map it, and then we'd go through the camera moves together, and they would put it in and render it all the way through. So when it came up on the screen, that was their bit, they did that whole chunk. And that seemed to be great, most of them really responded to that, and it went well.

AVC: Apart from the live actors, how much of the film is CGI rather than puppets or other physical models?

DM: There are no puppets and no models. The actors are shot against blue screens, and there are two small sets—Helen's bedroom, and Mrs. Bagwell's bathroom. That's it. Those are the only sets we made, and then everything else is computer-generated.

AVC: What was the most difficult effect for you to achieve?

DM: God, there were many, and in fact, to be honest, some of them... Most of the ideas that we had worked out okay. And some were a bit of a push, but worked. There were a handful of little ones, they were very small throwaway things that tended to get left to the end of the schedule and weren't really allotted a lot of time, and we ended up just dropping them because they proved just too tricky to do. Usually, the most difficult thing to do is photo-real stuff. Something that has to actually look like the real world, because it's just so difficult to do that. We're just so used to looking at the real world, our brains instantly see when something is not quite right. So that stuff was difficult.

AVC: In the kinds of complicated multimedia, multi-layer artwork you normally create, have you ever run up against the limits of technology, or found things you just can't do the way you see them in your mind?

DM: I haven't found that. I think the reason is that I kind of enjoy the limits. If you've got no limits, you can do absolutely anything, it's very difficult, actually. I always enjoyed working with machines like color photocopiers and letter-pressing type settings, things where the limits are very apparent. You push the machine to do something, and it tries to do its best, and it usually has wonderful qualities all of its own. Then you get a sort of dialogue going, and the limitations become qualities. So I've never really found that a problem. PhotoShop is a program I use all the time with my 2D stuff. And that's an extraordinary program—you really can do anything there, and I've never hit my head on the ceiling. The 3D stuff is incredibly complicated, monstrously complicated, but for the things that I want to do, I've found very simple and interesting ways, I hope, of making images without getting tied up too much in the maps and technicalities.

AVC: Did anything in particular surprise you about the process of going from directing short features to directing full-length features?

DM: Nothing was quite how I expected. Working with actors obviously wasn't what I expected, because I didn't know what to expect. I have worked with actors before, but they'd been sort of puppets for me. They'd been masked, and they haven't had lines, and they'd really just done what I asked them to do, then the image is created around them. I've never really had to work with an actor to build a character, so that was fantastic. That was the area of the film that exceeded what I had in my head completely. All of the animation and everything, to be honest, is pretty close to what I had in my mind. But to have actors bring the lines to life... At one point, we had a scene on a rooftop where Stephanie Leonidas, the young girl central to the story, breaks down and bursts into tears. Well, that wasn't actually in the script, but our actress completely burst into tears and was very emotional, and all of that was absolute revelation, really wonderful.

AVC: Speaking of people in masks, that's been a very central theme in your work, and particularly in Mirrormask. What fascinates you about the symbolic value of masks?

DM: I've always used masks. I think it's a lot about the fact that masks often reveal a sort of subconscious element to a character. The mask is carved and given an expression or markings to reveal something, even though it's shielding the face. Even though it's hiding the face, it seems to reveal something underneath. And I always loved that, the root of a lot of African and Japanese masks. But it wasn't until I made a short film that I really understood why I love masks so much. I made a short film called The Week Before, and I had a character in it playing God and a character playing the Devil, and I gave them both very, very simple masks. Just little eyeholes, a line for the mouth, and small line for the nose, no expression at all. And there were no lines, it was all silent cinema with music. And then all of the body language in the characters created expressions, and you could swear that these masks changed expressions. Sometimes they looked angry or confused or upset or a bit tired, and you were absolutely positive that the expressions were changing. And I thought this was absolutely magical. So that's why I've continued looking at masks. I suppose I wanted masks in the film as a bit of a safety blanket, masks were just one element out of hundreds that Neil and I talked about, but slowly they became central.

AVC: Neil has discussed how developing Mirrormask was an unusually contentious process for the two of you, given your long history of collaboration. What was it like from your perspective?

DM: It was strange—we've never written together before. Neil's obviously written far more than I have, so I think he's just very confident. I think he's very happy just firing up his computer and starting to write something, not really knowing what it is or where it's going to go. I just can't do that. I really need to know that the film or the story's about something, and that I know what it is before I can really start writing. And I think that was the root of the tension, really. In the end, we just kind of muddled through. I continued making notes and trying to decide what on earth we were doing. And Neil just wrote stuff, and some of that stuff was used and some of it wasn't. But actually, in the end, we met in the middle. Neil had a pile of stuff written, and I had a pile of ideas on paper, and about halfway through the process, we sort of knitted them together and it all seemed to make sense. So in the end, it was fine. I never really intended to be writing. I just wanted to be in the room when Neil was writing, to make sure that he wasn't writing something that I couldn't make on this very low budget. But as we got into it more and more, ideas got passed around. And some of my ideas I'm kind of happy with, so I was happy just to write the odd scene. And that all seemed to work quite well.

AVC: He said that one of the things that you wound up discussing quite a bit was the nature of fantasy, because he believes that you're only comfortable with fantasy in allegorical forms. Do you think that's accurate?

DM: Yes, it is, really. I love fantasy stories, and I love other genres as well. I love horror stories and science-fiction stories, but only at the point where they're about people. When you just get fantasy stories that are about fairies or goblins, I just don't care. I'm never going to meet a goblin, it doesn't mean anything to me. So my definition of fantasy is very broad, it's anything to do with memory, or dreams, or ways of interpreting or making sense of the world. And I love all of those stories. And I like stories about people's need for fantasy, and people's need for escape or release, or to look at the world in a different way. I love things that are about real people and the way their brains work, and the way their minds and relationships work. So that's what I'm interested in: people. I love looking at people from a slightly different angle. So I do like fantasy, I just don't like it when it's sort of pointless and inhumane.

AVC: Where do you draw the line? Humans play a very small part in The Lord Of The Rings, for instance, but the story deals with real human emotions. It's just coming through non-human avatars.

DM: Well, it's all very personal, you know. The thing about Lord Of The Rings is, it's a seminal bit of writing, because it came out of a very real fear of fascism and totalitarianism. But my problem with Lord Of The Rings is the baddies, the orcs or whatever, never get to be anything other than evil. I mean, they just stomp around being evil all day, and that's rubbish as far as I'm concerned. I like—for example, a fantasy story that I thought I would hate, that I finally read and just adored, was the Philip Pullman books, His Dark Materials. Because it seems to me that everybody in that story, you identify with utterly. There is nobody who is good or bad, it's just not like that. They all are complex individuals. They all see the world in their own way that makes complete sense to them. Nobody goes around feeling that they're evil—they think that they're doing the right thing. And so that seems to have something really important, big, and deep to say about human beings. Whereas Lord Of The Rings to me is goodies and baddies in the end, and so it's less interesting. But it's a very personal thing.

AVC: Given Mirrormask's strikingly unique visuals, it seems likely that you're going to be hearing from Hollywood art directors asking you to give their films a similar look, or at least an unusual look. Are you interested in outside film projects like that?

DM: I've thought about that a bit, because I did some work on the Harry Potter films. And it's a pretty thankless task, really. If there's any point of view that I've got at all, or uniqueness in this particular line, I think I'd rather try and pursue my own films. Rather than dilute it and spread it around a bit, I'd rather just concentrate on my own films and try and get those made.

AVC: You were credited as a conceptual artist on Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. Did you work on others in the series?

DM: Yeah, I did some work on the second one that for some reason went uncredited. I did the same job—I designed some of the characters and created images for them to work with. I didn't do a lot of work on either, to be honest. On one of them, I was starting Mirrormask and writing it, and in the middle of other stuff. And then I was right in the middle of Mirrormask, so I didn't get to do a lot, but I did the same job on both. You know, it was okay, but you're just a sort of hired hand, really. Some of your ideas get used and others don't, which kind of means that it all becomes watered-down. It's okay, though—it was interesting seeing filmmaking on that scale. Particularly on Azkaban, because the director was wonderful. Alfonso Cuarón was a real ball of energy. Great fun.

AVC: If fans of your work were watching those films to see something you designed, where would they find your strongest imprint?

DM: Well, on Azkaban, I designed the, um... What were they called, the floaty screamy guys? The dementors. And I did a bit of work on the hippogriffs, trying to convince them to get the legs to bend a certain way. And then on Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, I did the spiders. But the dementors came out very, very close to my illustration.

AVC: Is the film adaptation of Signal To Noise your next project?

DM: Well, at the moment, I'm working on film design for the Broadway musical Lestat, based on Anne Rice's vampire books, and then I'm finishing up the script for Signal To Noise.

AVC: Are you primarily doing art design for Lestat, or are you involved in other ways?

DM: I'm designing the stage for every scene. And there's 44 scenes—it's a very, very big production. It's Warner Brothers' first foray into theater. They're very complex stages, so my images are embedded in the scenery, in the sets. But also, the sets are described and allotted with photographs, collages, and projections, so I'm doing all of that. But then every time a vampire bites another, they receive the memories and life story of that person. So we're doing that with film, and I've made several films for those. Some of them are live action, some are computer-animated.

AVC: Have you been involved with stagecraft before?

DM: Nope.

AVC: So this is an entirely new experience?

DM: If you're going to do it, you might as well jump in and do Warner Brothers.

AVC: How does Lestat fit into your feelings on fantasy?

DM: That's a strange one, really. I mean, the stories are interesting. They're great, long, kind of unyielding epic novels that take in three continents, and all kinds of stuff. So to do them in a book or a movie is difficult, but to do it onstage is just crazy. So it's been very interesting to try and nail down. I'm not the director, Rob Roth's the director. But I've obviously been working with him all the time, and I've been trying to help him tell the story, which is very unyielding, and really try to nail down what this thing is about. I think what I decided it was about, in the end, was the conclusion that the main character comes to. The fact that he's in the position of living forever, which is a fantastical conceit, but what makes it bearable for him in the end is this feeling of a bloodline, a line of people in his life. So at least that's a kind of interesting little central thing. Because that's what I think people hope for. An answer for the afterlife or religious belief. A need for some greater truth for our little lives.

AVC: Signal To Noise is a significantly less fantasy-driven story than Mirrormask. Are you interested in moving in a more mainstream direction, with more realism?

DM: I'd like to do an adult film next. I've spent over two years now amongst Mirrormask, and doing a couple of children's books, and I'd like to do an adult film. The film now is greatly expanded from the book. The stuff that's in the book accounts for only about an eighth of the film, and the rest of it is all new material. And some of that has a fantastical or allegorical side, and it certainly has some generally bizarre digital imagery. But it is a very different piece of work. And I wanted to do something digital, but not just to make pretty pictures. To try and get down to a new language. I think there's a new language of how to tell stories, and how to get inside people's heads, and how to show what people are feeling using these tools.

AVC: Artistically speaking, what's your process like? When you sit down to create a collage like your covers for Sandman or Cages, where do you start, and how do you put the pieces together?

DM: I doodle in little sketchbooks, so I always have a sketchbook with me. So I draw everything. I don't like working everything out on a computer, particularly. I like working things out just very simply on paper, with very simple drawings and indications of type and compositional lines. Then I try and find an image that's right. Sometimes it's just a feeling, sometimes it's an idea—usually I try and find an idea. And then if I'm expected to show roughs, I try and come up with a bunch of ideas, between three and 12. And I do very, very, very simple, skimpy doodles, nothing too committed. Because people tend to fall in love if they like it—if you color it in and they like it, then they want exactly those colors, even if they were just indications. You really have to do it as simple as possible so they can concentrate on the idea and composition. And then all of the energy goes into making the final piece. And the final piece can be anything—it can be a drawing, a painting, a collage—and usually, it's obvious what that should be. Usually, the idea dictates what medium you use. Then I just go about collecting those raw materials.

AVC: Do you think you're ever likely to return to comics on the scale of Cages?

DM: Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to do another sort of novel like that. I've had one in mind for a few years that I'd love to do at some point. I can't imagine going back to doing straight-ahead commercial stuff for DC, but another book like Cages, or Pictures That Tick, which is a collection of short stories, that I will definitely do. I can't imagine not having a comics project of some kind on the back burner, or actually doing it. At the moment, it's just finding the time, because I really want to crack this film thing. I really want to do a film that I'm proud of. And trying to get used to the language, because it's so complicated and there are just so many opportunities to screw up and make mistakes, it's so difficult. And I want to try and at least get more comfortable with that.

AVC: Did anything in particular draw you to "straight-ahead commercial stuff" like DC's Black Orchid or Arkham Asylum, apart from the need to break into comics at that point in your life?

DM: Yeah there was, really. I had just met Neil, and we were both trying to break into comics—he was working as a journalist, and I was fresh out of art school. And it had a lot to do with—with Black Orchid, I suppose there were two appeals at the time. I wanted to do something that had an ecological story in the backbone. I'd be happy doing an ecological story somehow—I wasn't planning to dress it up in a superhero costume, but that seemed the thing to do at the time. Initially, I suppose the idea was this general feeling that comics had become sort of homogenous, and all the people were insane, and there is a specific way of drawing comic-book people. They all moved the same, and talked the same, and had the same expression. And I just wanted to scrape all that away and get back to what real people would like. So I decided to make Black Orchid very, very photographic, so you'd concentrate on what real people look like, real expressions. I never intended to do more than one book like that, but that was the idea, to try and get back to human beings again, rather than some strange fighter people.

And Arkham Asylum I thought was good fun. I met Grant Morrison and really liked him—he'd just discovered Jan Svankmajer, and I'd pretty much just discovered him as well. We both just had a lot in common, we both loved Dennis Potter. And Grant had written the script, and it had a lot of elements that I liked, and a lot that I didn't. It had Robin in it. Batman dressed up in his daft costume, and a lot of characters that I didn't understand. A lot of basic superhero stuff, because he had just written it on spec, he certainly hadn't written it for me. So we talked about it, and he was really keen to rewrite it, to make it much more symbolic, much more like some strange Alice In Wonderland story. And that was just perfect timing for where his head was at. So that's what we did, and I think probably on reflection, the Batman story weakened it. But there were a lot of things that I had great fun playing with.

AVC: What drew you to comics in the first place?

DM: I just love the medium. I love telling stories. I love narrative art. I never really got into gallery painting, putting on gallery shows or that sort of thing. I love telling stories. And even in single images, I tend to have stories inside them. I've always loved film, but I was making drawings and paintings and photographs. And you put art and narrative together, and that really is comics. I've always read comics as a kid, and growing up and going through art school. And the comics I've read have always changed. I've sort of jumped around. That's it, really. I love the feeling of a book, and you open the book, and it's full of images. It has this sort of intimacy of a novel, but you open the pages and you have this wonderful visual intimacy as well. At its best, I think it's sort of like a handwritten note, like music or something—it goes straight into you. When it's working really well and really personally, rather than these big superhero things. The small, introverted, voice-in-your-head stories, I think they work brilliantly as comic books. It's a unique medium.

AVC: You've worked as a composer, performer, photographer, fine artist, screenwriter, director, and a comics writer/artist. Are there any media left that you want to explore?

DM: Certainly at the moment, you could easily spend several lifetimes trying to master film. It make very good use of all the things that I love. Narrative, image-making, also sound and music. It's so full that I can't really imagine getting tired of it. Or getting to the point like I feel like I know it. Before doing Mirrormask, I was starting to feel a little comfortable. The books that Neil and I have done have been doing very well, and I was feeling much more comfortable in comics. It was very easy for me to feel okay with doing CD and book covers. So I really love this very difficult feeling of being completely out at sea. I don't know what I'm doing, and I kind of like this feeling. So I think for the moment, I'm going to continue to try and nail film down in some sort of shape where I'm happy with it.

source:
http://avclub.com/content/node/41034/1/2

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Exclusive Interview: Jason Statham "The Transporter 2"

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 03:32:39 GMT

Exclusive Interview: Jason Statham
"The Transporter 2"

Posted: Tuesday, August 30th 2005 4:44PM
Author: Paul Fischer
Location: Los Angeles, CA
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/transp1.php

Jason Stratham is one of these actors who clearly relishes what he does. The working-class Brit who was discovered by mentor Guy Ritchie, has rapidly become one of Britain's favourite young actors, something that the star of the new Transporter 2 action film smiles at, considering that he stumbled onto acting and never expected to be here talking about his latest film. "I fell into it and it was a complete sort of 'right place, right time', lucky bastard kind of thing," Statham laughingly recalls. "Guy Ritchie was looking for someone that had experience selling street corner merchandise - you know, jewellery and perfume - and I was the one that he was looking for, the authentic man for the job. So it was just being in the right place that Guy Ritchie was fortunate enough to give me my first ever acting gig. Then again he gave me another part in his next movie and then all of a sudden you've got a career kind of thing."

That was some 18 films ago, and since then, the 33-year old Londoner hasn't looked back, with such films as Snatch, Mean Machine, Cellular and the upcoming Revolver and Pink Panther to his credit. For a lad who never set out to act, he admits to being surprised that he's still doing it, and successfully no less. "I feel like I know what I'm doing now and what it takes to make a good movie, so I feel more educated. I have a lot more knowledge on the whole process of how a movie gets made and the process of that."

Statham's masculinity, charm and good humour attracted Iconic director Luc Besson to cast him as the lead in The Transporter. The film's success led Statham to do a sequel, in which the driver for hire is protecting a young boy, whose kidnapping leads him on his unique rescue mission. His initial attraction to the character, he says, "was the opportunity to play a leading man and to display a bit of physical sort of martial art skills," he says, somewhat modestly. "As a kid I wanted to be like a stunt man, throw myself around and kick myself up but I never kind of fulfilled that. I went years and years without even pursuing that any further and then a few years ago I had a chance to do it in a movie."

Those skills are further put to the test in the action-packed sequel, a film that Statham jumped at the chance of doing. "As soon as we came up with the idea, we knew we could succeed what we did in the first one in a lot of areas," he says, referring to himself and Besson, who returns as co-writer and producer. "We sort of filled in the blanks from the first one but we kind of lost a little bit as well," he admits. "So it's hard to kind of get the perfect recipe for the perfect meal. We're getting there slowly but possibly we might have reached it an even better stage if we do another one."

Not that he means that there's be a Transporter 3 any time soon. "Don't take this the wrong way. You learn so much when you make a movie and when we went into Transporter 2 we thought: well what we missed out where we could improve from the first one we would. So we tried to make the best attempt to make that happen and there are certain things that suffered but there's certain things that came out much better."

While the first film was shot at the south of France, this time around, the film's action is in Miami. The actor says that might not have been ideal in retrospect. "One of the things we learned in making the film, was never to make a fucking movie in Miami during hurricane season," he says, laughingly. "I also learned that was a massive, massive headache for us. I mean we made Transporter 2 in, God knows, probably, I think 50 days, where the first one was like 75 days. It was almost like a rush job, so given the time and the prep, I think we could do an even better job."

Yet Transporter 2, Statham says, has all the elements that he loves, including this interesting character, set within an action genre. "For me, character is the most important thing, because we get so many poor quality action movies on a weekly basis, which is just action for the sake of action. I mean, at least initiate some kind of a motivation for some guy to run around doing what he does, so we feel that these two movies have enough of a reason to motivate this guy." Statham says that he likes the fact that this is character "is a man of his word. And that's not a usual common trait in this day and age, but here's this guy who couldn't let this kid down."

In this film,. The stunts seem far more complex and adventurous than in its predecessor, but Statham says he didn't do too much that different in preparing for the sequel. "The physical prep was the same, except I had to learn to drive again the Lamborghini. They had to calm me down on burning the rubber tyres off," he recalls laughingly. "I also had to learn to do some nifty Jetski jumping. and some wakeboarding which we never used it in the movie. But it's always good to be over-prepared than under."

As successful Statham is rapidly becoming, he says nothing much has changed in his life and both professional and personal perceptions have remained the same. "I'm still doing the same things and have the same friends. Nothing will change in my lifestyle or me in any way. I mean some people come out in the street and they're, expressing how much they like the films and stuff but that's cool." Statham reunites with Guy Ritchie in this winter's Revolver, world premiering at this year's Toronto Film Festival. "I play Jake Green, who's this kind of gambler." Beyond that, Statham remains as busy as ever. "We're developing a couple of projects to take place early next year that I'm very excited about with a great director to direct one, and the other one is still being sort of developed in terms of the screenplay. So there's a couple of projects that we can control and hopefully keep some kind of quality control on."

And Statham hopes to extend himself beyond acting, possibly direct. "I'm a keen sort of photographer and I take a lot of pictures nowadays. I bought myself a nice camera and I compose nice photographs, but as to whether I've got the capability or patience that a director needs, I don't know. You need to be very good with peoples' personalities and be able to adapt to many different situations as a director. I don't know if I'm capable right now to do that. At the moment I've got my hands full with trying to work out this acting stuff." And he would be more than happy to return to Transporter territory if the sequel ended up a huge success. "I'd be more than happy, as long as people don't get bored of seeing the same thing, as long as we can make it interesting and different enough."

For this accidental actor, young Jason is doing rather nicely, as his feet remain planted on the ground.

source:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/transp1.php

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Top Hollywood studios agree on standards for digital films

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 18:06:31 GMT

Top Hollywood studios agree on standards for digital films
By David Lieberman, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2005-07-27-digital-usat_x.htm

NEW YORK — Digital cinema, the long-awaited technology to make movies in the theater more vivid and versatile, took a big step from fantasy to reality Wednesday.
All of Hollywood's top studios endorsed a set of technical specifications defining how sharp digital films must be and creating mechanisms to fight piracy. They vowed to begin using them to offer digital versions of their new productions to theater owners as early as this year in some cases.

"It's a giant leap forward for those of us who create movies and ... for everyone who sees them," Star Wars director George Lucas, a longtime digital cinema advocate, said in a statement. "Digital cinema will increasingly become the standard and will change the way movies are made, seen and experienced around the world."

Unlike celluloid, movies in digital form won't scratch or smudge. They can include multiple soundtracks in different languages, and can easily project 3-D images.

Supporters say digital theaters will be able to offer ticket-buyers a viewing experience superior to what they can get at home with high-definition TVs.

The new specifications, from studio-backed consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), require digital movies to have at least twice as many lines of resolution as a high-definition television — and clear the way for an alternative that's four times as sharp.

HDTVs "give most of the colors of the rainbow, but not all of them," says DCI Chief Technology Officer Walt Ordway. "There is no color that appears in the spectrum that cannot be digitally represented" in the files studios will use.

The big concern, though, has been security. About half of DCI's 176-page specifications describe ways to prevent the keys that decode encrypted digital films from falling into the wrong hands.

"It's about the production of the keys and how they're used," Ordway says. "There was a lot of feedback and fine-tuning. They're comfortable now."

The deal nearly clears the way for studios, theater owners and equipment makers to begin the $3 billion transition from analog. The remaining hurdle is ongoing negotiation between theater owners and the studios about who pays how much. Digital movies — which can be transmitted via satellite or high-speed lines, or shipped on a hard drive — will slash much of the $1.2 billion a year studios spend making and shipping celluloid prints.

"For the industry to flourish and to provide a smooth transition to an all-digital future, it is essential there be one digital distribution and exhibition format. That format is the DCI specification," Twentieth Century Fox's Bruce Snyder and Paul Hanneman said in a joint statement. Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, Paramount and Universal also expressed support.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2005-07-27-digital-usat_x.htm

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The Short Life of Domino Harvey from LATimes.com

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 07:26:52 GMT

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-domino22jul22,0,7399675.story
MOVIES

The fall of a thrill hunter

Jet-set daughter Domino Harvey aspired to be a legend. In death, she may achieve it.

By Chris Lee
Special to The Times

July 22, 2005

The day Domino Harvey died, she called her former partner, Ed Martinez, to reminisce about old times — the three violent, thrilling years they spent together as bounty hunters in South Los Angeles.

Harvey, daughter of the late British actor Laurence Harvey and supermodel Paulene Stone, had led a tormented, eccentric existence. She ran a London dance club, worked as a ranch hand in San Diego, then became a "bail recovery agent," hunting fugitives and carrying a shotgun she called Betsy.

A statuesque, 5-foot-9 blond, she seemed addicted to excitement, to adrenaline, as much as to cocaine and heroin.

Now, at 35, she was facing federal drug trafficking charges that carried a possible 10-year prison term. Word of her arrest had blazed through the British tabloids, infuriating her.

"She was telling me she was set up," Martinez said.

Then there was the movie. "Domino," an action comedy based on her life, was due in theaters soon. The film, starring Keira Knightley, took the usual Hollywood liberties with Harvey's life, depicting her as a European fashion model who becomes a bounty hunter and goes on to have her own reality TV show.

Harvey told Martinez that she wanted to make a documentary about her life to set the record straight. All of her life, other people had defined her. Now, she wanted to do so.

That evening, June 27, friends visited her at her West Hollywood cottage. Around 11 p.m. everyone had left, except a live-in "minder" that Harvey had hired to help her stay clean. Harvey went into the bathroom and closed the door. Seven minutes later, she was found dead.

Warwick Stone, Harvey's uncle, said she finally got what she wanted, if not in the way she would have wanted.

"She didn't want to be an ordinary person," he said. "She wanted to be a legend. I would like Domino to have a decent legend." Domino Harvey was born in London in 1969. Her father, born Laruschka Mischa Skikne, had transcended an impoverished Lithuanian-Jewish background to star as an English dandy in movies such as "Life at the Top" and "Darling." He played an American in his celebrated role in "The Manchurian Candidate."

Domino's mother was a Vogue cover girl who embodied Swinging London in the 1960s.

Laurence Harvey died of stomach cancer in 1973, when Domino was 4. He left a sizable inheritance, ensuring that she would be financially well off. It did not fill the void created by her father's death. By her teens, Harvey had been kicked out of four elite boarding schools.

At 16, she settled down at the Dartington Hall School in southwestern England and cultivated a skill that would prove useful later. "I spent my time making canoes and studying martial arts," she told London's Mail on Sunday newspaper in 1994. "It was really relaxed."

In the early '80s, her mother married Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Café and Hotel chain, and moved to Los Angeles. Harvey, a teenager at the time, stayed behind, moving into an apartment in London's Notting Hill Gate neighborhood.

"It was a rough area," remembered Warwick Stone, former creative director for the Hard Rock Hotel franchise, who now lives in Sylmar. "Bloody policemen, race riots, bottle throwing."

A mythology grew up that like her mother, Domino was a model and that, unlike her mother, she had turned her back on the glamour of the runway for a fringe existence. But according to several family members and friends, Harvey never worked as a model.

She did show an entrepreneurial spirit, designing a funky clothing line and selling it at the Kensington Market. "She also ran one of the first clubs in London to do with the dance music scene," said Michael John Galvin, a British attorney who was a friend of Harvey from her London days and now lives in L.A.

Even then she was battling drug addiction. At 17, she visited her uncle and aunt in Israel, seeking to get to know members of her father's family. While there, she sneaked away to score drugs, recalled Nachshon Sneh, an Israeli cousin.

'Complete remake'

At 20, she moved to L.A. and into her mother's house in the Hollywood Hills. Two people who knew her then said her drug problem quickly landed her in rehab. By 1992, she was building a new life in San Diego.

Just as her father had, she began to create an image for herself. "He came across as a very fey, elegant dandy. In fact, he was anything but," said Domino's godfather, Peter Evans, a British journalist and author. "He eventually became what he had created. I think that quality — that complete remake — was in Domino."

She worked briefly as a ranch hand, then became a volunteer firefighter at the Boulevard Fire & Rescue company near the Mexican border. "She said she loved rescuing people," said one of her defense attorneys, Michael Mayock.

Two years later, she returned to L.A. intent on becoming a firefighter but was rejected by the Los Angeles Fire Department. She took courses as an emergency medical technician but never found work as a paramedic.

After reading about a two-week, $300 class for bail enforcement agents, Harvey decided to become a bounty hunter.

Martinez, a Vietnam veteran and gang member turned bounty hunter, was the teacher.

"She was young — maybe 22 or 23 at the time — tough and blond," he recalled. "She had on camouflage pants and a camo tank top and a big knife on her belt. She stood out."

Martinez introduced her to his boss, Celes King III, a legendary bail bondsman and civil rights activist who ran the Celes King Bail Bond agency in South Los Angeles. As Martinez's partner, Harvey embarked on a high-risk career as one of the only female bounty hunters of the time.

Harvey helped captured about 50 fugitives, Martinez said. He remembered 10 of those as "dangerous situations." Their work often took them out of state. He said Harvey took part in an armed stand-off in Texas, among other tense situations. In addition to her shotgun, she carried a 9-millimenter Browning pistol.

"She had money. She could afford good guns," Martinez said.

And she continued to use drugs on the job.

"Mostly coke, sometimes speed," Martinez said. "I did heroin with her occasionally. There was so much opportunity. You break down the door, arrest someone, they've got drugs. Well, you're going to get paid there too."

Again and again, Harvey tried to kick her habit. She became friends with Steve Jones, lead guitarist of the punk rock group the Sex Pistols — and a former junkie and alcoholic who has been drug free for almost 20 years. A mutual acquaintance had asked the rocker to help her.

Jones remembers hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains with Harvey one afternoon about 10 years ago when she collapsed. He attributed it to a drug reaction. "I was very angry actually ... I had asked her beforehand and she had sworn to me she was straight."

Beneath the tough exterior, Jones saw an insecure woman. "She was very shy and didn't have a lot of social skills," Jones said. "Whenever I took her out to meet friends, she wouldn't talk."

The Tony Scott connection

Word of an English rose trolling the streets of South Los Angeles for fugitives made its way to Britain. In the mid-'90s, a London tabloid profiled Harvey — and a business manager for Tony Scott, the director of films such as "Top Gun" and "Beverly Hills Cop II," sent the article to the director.

"I tracked her down, dug her out and that's where it all began," Scott said.

Captivated by Harvey, whom he remembered as "a fascinating little thing," the director seized upon the idea she would make a great movie subject. Scott began taping interviews with Harvey. They would form the basis of a script.

"One of her quotes — and this made it into the movie — 'Heads you live and tails you die.' That to me encapsulates how she lived her life," he said. "There was nothing as intoxicating, not even drugs, as actually kicking down a door and wondering what was on the other side."

She sold her life story to Scott for $360,000 in 1995. Around that time, Martinez left L.A., effectively ending Harvey's bounty hunting career. At some point in 1997 or 1998, Harvey's mother enrolled her in the Habilitat rehabilitation clinic in Hawaii, a long-term residential program.

"She was very unhappy about the whole thing," said Evans. "It was a very strict regime."

Part-time DJ

Harvey returned to Los Angeles in 2000 and enrolled in computer classes at Santa Monica College and UCLA. She did odd computer graphics jobs and occasionally served as a DJ at nightclubs in West Hollywood, including Louis XIV on La Brea, where she "loved to play early '80s hip-hop," recalled club owner Jean-Louis Bartoli.

A year earlier, Paulene Stone bought Domino and her sister, Sophie, a West Hollywood cottage on a tree-lined street a block from the Pacific Design Center. Sophie, an architect and interior designer, is Stone's daughter from an earlier marriage.

The sisters lived together in the cottage, and Domino continued to meet with Scott every six months or so to talk about the movie.

In 2003, Domino was arrested for possession of crystal methamphetamine. As a first offender, she was allowed to avoid trial and enter a treatment program.

Around that time, Sophie Harvey married Aspen businessman and philanthropist Richard Butera. Domino was introduced to Butera's son, Thomas Richard Butera Jr.

According to a family member, the sisters began to grow apart. But Harvey and the younger Butera became friends. At one point, she visited him at his home in Gulfport, Miss.; another time, he visited her in West Hollywood, said Anthony Salerno, one of Harvey's attorneys.

By 2004, "Domino" was moving into production. In October, Knightley signed on to play Domino for $2 million. The $60-million film began a 62-day shooting schedule using locations in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It is due to open Oct. 14.

Harvey was often on the set, serving as a technical consultant. Although it was widely reported that she was upset with her portrayal and with the liberties that screenwriter Richard Kelly, the writer-director of "Donnie Darko," took with her story, family and friends say Harvey was delighted with the movie.

"She was not happy about those reports," said her friend Galvin. "She really liked Tony Scott. There was no conflict there whatsoever. I would know about it: I was on the set with her many times and went to the wrap party with her."

In January, Butera Jr., 41, was arrested in Gulfport on charges of possessing methamphetamine and conspiring to distribute it. He pleaded guilty to one count of possession of less than 50 grams of methamphetamine on June 7 and remains in jail while awaiting a Sept. 13 sentence, which could range from five to 40 years, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of Mississippi. Calls to Butera's attorney and family were not returned by press time.

In May, Harvey was arrested at her home on a warrant issued in Mississippi after a federal indictment charged her and a co-defendant named Eric Pae with conspiring to possess and distribute more than 500 grams of methamphetamine. "She was very adamant that she did nothing wrong," Salerno said.

The last days

At a bail hearing in May, the judge deemed Harvey a flight risk. She had to put up the deed for the cottage she and her sister Sophie owned — now worth $1.2 million — and a $300,000 bond. The judge ordered her to surrender her passport and be confined to house arrest with an electronic anklet.

In Domino Harvey's final days, she girded herself for fights on several fronts. Stone, her uncle, said she was considering suing several publications for describing her as a lesbian and was also considering suing one of the rehab facilities.

And she had arranged to have her beloved pit bull, Blue, travel to Mississippi with her for a court hearing in early July.

"The major thing in Domino's life was her dog," said defense attorney Mayock. "That's what she talked about in jail. She didn't miss anybody else."

When she finally returned home, Harvey arranged to have four "minders" she had met at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings move into her house to keep her off drugs. Four days before she died, she called Jones. "I hadn't seen her for a long time but she started calling me, telling me she's straight now, can I take her to [12-step] meetings," he said. "I thought, 'Here we go again.' "

Although she had been out of touch with Martinez for nearly a decade, she tracked him down so Scott's production company, Scott Free, could pay him for including Martinez (Mickey Rourke plays the "Ed" character) in the film.

She also talked about the documentary she wanted to make.

"At the same time, she was asking me about another [bounty hunting] case I was working on," he said. "I was going to build her up and get her back in the business."

The Sheriff's Department said officers arrived at Harvey's house a little after 11 p.m. on June 27 and found her unconscious. She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 11:28. A department spokesperson later said she had died in the bath.

The cause of death will not be determined until toxicology tests are completed, officials said.

Among those who attended Harvey's funeral on July 1 were Rourke, Scott, Peter Morton and Steve Jones.

"I think as the song goes, she was looking for love in all the wrong places," said Jones. "Another lost soul who couldn't find her way."

source:
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-domino22jul22,0,7399675.story

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Tim Burton almost grows up

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:44:46 GMT

Tim Burton almost grows up
But are his recent movies someone else’s dreams?

COMMENTARY
By Erik Lundegaard
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 2:25 p.m. ET July 14, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8564591/

The prevailing theory is that Tim Burton’s movies are about brooding loners because he’s a brooding loner. He may be but his protagonists are decidedly not. They have boundless enthusiasms; their optimism is supercharged. When Pee Wee Herman wakes up after dreaming of winning the Tour de France there’s not a flicker of disappointment on his face, because his reality is as magical as a dream. When Ed Wood’s play is savaged by a critic, Ed remains upbeat because of a throwaway line about costumes. What lingers from “Big Fish,” Burton’s most mature (if not his best) film, is the sunny, can-do smile of Ewan McGregor. Even Edward Scissorhands (in Burton’s best film) is an optimist, despite his ailment. He’s smart enough to be wary of people, yet optimistic enough to trust them with an open heart.

Burton’s a conundrum. His films are ambiguous about fundamental aspects of life — usually a sign of maturity — but both sides of this ambiguity tend to be adolescent. Communities are stultifying, monochromatic traps ... but the only safe place. Families suck ... but I’m so, so lonely. He gives us moments of pure cinematic magic ... and then blows the story. Nothing has changed my original thought about “Big Fish”: It’s a movie about a great storyteller told by a lousy one.

Cryptic things
Burton is a lousy storyteller because he invariably sacrifices plot and character and probability for imagery. Batman in his bat-plane strafes the Joker on the ground and misses, while the Joker is able to pull a very long gun from his trousers and shoot down the batplane? With one shot? That’s gotta be the worst bat-equipment ever. Ed Wood suddenly can’t deal with backers messing with his vision and needs a drink in a bar in the middle of the day? What happened to his supercharged optimism? And what exactly is the point of the town of Spectre? What does it represent? Why doesn’t it resonate?

In the commentary track to “Ed Wood,” Burton talks about his affinity with the world’s worst director. “Nobody had his style,” Burton says, and then talks up the little things Wood included that made his films his own. “That’s something I try to do in my films,” Burton says. “You have your own kind of cryptic messages in there — cryptic things that most people wouldn’t understand but are important to you. Things that kind of keep you going through the process.”

What are Burton’s cryptic messages? There’s the obvious: The acute angles, the bizarre hairstyles, the world tilted slightly on its Seussian side. Recently I was walking along Wacker Drive in Chicago with my brother-in-law, Eric, and we came upon a bizarre piece of public art: Three small, silver heads on wire sticks.

“Creepy,” I said.

“Reminds me of Tim Burton,” he said.

He was right, and it’s worth contemplating. I doubt people say of anything: “It reminds me of Tony Scott.” Or James Cameron or even Steven Spielberg. Nobody making movies today — except Terry Gilliam — has as defined a visual style. Burton is a recognizable original. It’s why he seems perfect to re-make “Willie Wonka.” If, that is, you want to re-make it.

Less obviously, Burton is in love with bad stuff. He grew up on comic books and B-grade horror films and he’s never really grown past them. His main characters are often painted a deathly white: from Pee-Wee Herman, Beetlejuice and the Joker to Edward Scissorhands, Bunny Breckinridge and Willie Wonka. There’s a love of death in his movies. In the upcoming “Corpse Bride” he finally gives in to necrophilia.

He loves bad puns. “I am not a human being, I am an animal!” the Penguin says in “Batman Returns.” “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down,” Ichabod says in “Sleepy Hollow.” In back-to-back movies (“Mars Attacks!” and “Planet of the Apes”) we get variations of Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” line. “Extremism in the defense of apes is no vice!” You begin to groan under their weight after a while. Or just groan.

He loves fakery. In the commentary track to “Sleepy Hollow,” a cardinal alights on a branch and Burton tells us: “The fake cardinal. Which I ... love, actually.” In his heart of hearts he wants to be a B-picture director but he’s stuck with A-list stuff. He’s too talented to be as bad as he wants to be.

We are family
The overwhelming concern in Burton’s movies is generally this: What replaces a corrupt or non-existent nuclear family? In “Beetle Juice,” two dysfunctional families, one dead and one alive, learn to raise a child together. Ed Wood surrounds himself with a family of misfits who help him make his bad, bad movies. This theme is at its most adolescent in “Mars Attacks!,” when two dysfunctional families, a trailer trash family and the First Family, blow up, leaving behind a pretty adolescent girl (Natalie Portman) who gives a gawky teenaged boy (Lukas Haas) a medal and asks, “Do you have a girlfriend?” Gorsh!

One reason why “Big Fish” is his most mature film is that it concerns the healing of, rather than the dismissal of, a nuclear family. The father isn’t a martinet (“Sleepy Hollow,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”) or benevolently dead (“Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman”). He’s a charmer. The son has grown up in reaction to the father — needing facts the way his father needed fiction — but he’s a recognizable man rather than one of Burton’s skinny, gawky boys. In the end the son becomes more like the father, as we all do. We fight our fathers only to become them.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” sees, unfortunately, a return to his man-boy protagonists — but with a difference. In his early films the world learned from these gawky boys (like Pee Wee and Edward Scissorhands); now these gawky boys (like Ichabod and Wonka) learn from the world. That’s progress of a kind.

Someone else’s dreams
The real shock with “Charlie” is that it’s as ordinary as it is. Some sets — the chocolate river, the super-white TV room — look the same as in the 1971 original. Where’s the spectacular vision? In “Ed Wood,” Burton suggests that a crappy, personal vision trumps an okay, corporate vision — that you shouldn’t spend your life making someone else’s dreams. But Burton’s recent re-makes feel merely okay. They feel like someone else’s dreams.

“Big Fish,” for all its faults, is the hope. It’s mature and personal and gives us moments of cinematic magic: Time stops for Ewan McGregor; Jessica Lange climbs into the bathtub with her drying-out husband. In one shot, Helena Bonham Carter’s face lights up as her new house is revealed to her. I remember when Tim Burton’s movies made me feel the same way. Here’s to supercharged optimism.

Erik Lundegaard thinks the perfect Joker for the Batman sequel is Michael Keaton.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8564591/

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'Galactica' Changes Sci-Fi "Ron Moore's Deep Space Journey"

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:36:58 GMT

July 17, 2005
Ron Moore's Deep Space Journey

By JOHN HODGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17GALACTICA.html?8hpib

The interior of the Battlestar Galactica is a warren of shadowy, angular hallways and spare functional chambers split over two sound stages situated on the semi-industrial fringe of Vancouver, British Columbia. The Galactica is a spaceship, but it does not feel particularly space-age. The communication panels on the walls were scavenged from a Canadian destroyer; the desk lamps are from Ikea. If you have seen ''Battlestar Galactica,'' which began its second season on the Sci Fi Channel on Friday, you will know that this Galactica only vaguely resembles the ship that previously bore that name, when ''Battlestar Galactica'' first flew on prime time in 1978, square in the shadow of ''Star Wars.'' And it certainly does not resemble the Enterprise, the ''Star Trek'' vehicle that has defined the visual and thematic vocabulary of television science fiction for four decades. On the Galactica, there is no captain's chair; there are no windows full of stars. The command center is busy and dark, protected deep within the ship the way it would be on an actual military vessel. As the actors move from room to room, hand-held cameras swoop behind them, closing in on them claustrophobically. The characters do not travel heroically from planet to planet, solving the problems of aliens. There are, in fact, no aliens at all.

To be fair, though, there are androids. As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica's commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within -- between the military and civil leadership of the fleet -- as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ''The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.'' Moore, who is also the show's head writer, put it more simply: ''They are us.''

It is sometimes jarring to watch ''Battlestar Galactica,'' for it is not like any science-fiction show on television today. Science fiction is a genre that, for all its imaginative expansiveness, tends also to be very conservative; its fans sometimes defend its cliches fiercely. ''Battlestar Galactica'' upends sci-fi cliches. The show is jarring also because it is, after all, ''Battlestar Galactica,'' which in its original incarnation was seen even within the world of science-fiction fans as something of a sincere but goofy oddity -- a mere 24 cumulative hours' worth of television that, like some bit of shrapnel from the ''Star Wars'' explosion of the 70's, lodged in our consciousness but had been largely forgotten.

How Moore and Eick came to transform that show into one of the most original and provocative programs on television is strange. What is stranger is that there was a small but very dedicated group of ''Battlestar Galactica'' fans who didn't want them to succeed.

The Galactica was not the first spaceship that Ron Moore had a hand in building. A quiet man with shoulder-length hair whose profound thoughtfulness and patience sometimes borders on the unnerving, Moore, who is 41, grew up in rural Chowchilla, Calif., a high-school quarterback and a ''Star Trek'' fan. ''Star Trek'' appealed to Moore's fascination with both naval history and the exotic-seeming Kennedy-era progressivism the show surreptitiously broadcast -- the original liberal-media conspiracy. In grade school he built models, including an extremely detailed miniature of the Enterprise, which he still has today, and wrote stories about dinosaurs fighting in World War II. He went to Cornell to study political science on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. Though he flunked out of college and never ended up joining the Navy, he still has a deep affinity for the institution and its rituals and still subscribes to the Navy journal Proceedings (''Much to my horror,'' says his wife, Terry, who grew up in Berkeley). In his office in L.A., Moore has a complete set of Samuel Eliot Morrison's multivolume history of the Navy's World War II campaigns, a model of the U.S.S. Utah and an actual ship's binnacle (as well as a rather vicious-looking bat'leth, the ceremonial sword of the Klingon empire).

In 1989, when he was in his mid-20's, he managed to sell a spec script to ''Star Trek: The Next Generation,'' which was still in its infancy. Titled ''The Bonding,'' it told the story of a boy on board the Enterprise who is suddenly orphaned when his mother is killed on a routine mission. (Do not fear -- he is later semi-adopted by Worf, the Klingon security chief.) Soon, Moore became a staff writer for the show, then graduated to helping to produce its darker spinoff, ''Deep Space Nine.'' As a writer, Moore became a fan favorite, known for his thoughtful scripts that revered yet challenged the long-established mythos of ''Star Trek.'' He also became known for killing people. He would go on to kill the mother of Worf's biological son; in the movie ''Star Trek: Generations,'' written with Brannon Braga, he managed to kill Captain Picard's young nephew, as well as Captain Kirk. It was this latter death that changed his status slightly among the fan community, to the tune of death threats.

He told me that he wept as he worked on the scene in which Kirk falls to his death. ''But I was really driven to do it,'' he said. ''I wanted to do this story about mortality, and how mortality comes to even the greatest hero, and what happens when Kirk dies.'' He paused. When he is asked a question, Moore often replies with a calm, unsettling candor bespeaking long reflection. ''It's weird,'' he finally said. ''He was my childhood hero, and I killed him. What does that mean? What does that say about me?''

It all came to an end with the third spinoff, ''Voyager.'' Moore had been intrigued by its premise: a starship and its crew are left to fend for themselves in deep, unknown space (a premise not unlike that of ''Battlestar Galactica''). He had hoped it would be a new direction for the story he loved -- setting ''Star Trek'' loose from the moorings of its old cliches and letting it explore new, more realistic territory. But as he watched the show develop, Moore grew disenchanted. No matter how many times the bridge of the ''Voyager'' was destroyed, the ship was always spic and span by the next episode. ''How many shuttle crafts have vanished,'' he later said in an interview posted on a science-fiction Web site, ''and another one just comes out of the oven?'' But no one at ''Voyager'' seemed to share this frustration, and after he joined the show in 1999, at the beginning of its fifth season, his attitude left him isolated from the rest of the staff. Within months he quit. ''It was very difficult,'' he told me, his eyes locked sadly on an empty space somewhere between us. ''I didn't want to leave the nest.'' It was the first time he had been outside the ''Trek'' universe in 10 years.

Shortly after Moore left ''Voyager,'' Richard Hatch was in the San Diego convention center, receiving a standing ovation. Hatch had been the star of the original ''Battlestar Galactica,'' playing the idealistic Captain Apollo opposite Dirk Benedict's roguish Lieutenant Starbuck. Together they had been on the cover of People; their faces served as the models for countless lunch boxes and T-shirts. But then it was all suddenly over.

The original ''Battlestar'' was often dismissed as a ''Star Wars'' rip-off, but it was always stranger and more ambitious than that. There was an element of 70's-era ''Chariots of the Gods'' crackpot-ism to it. (''There are those who believe that life here began out there,'' spoke the tweedy voice of Patrick Macnee at the opening of each episode, and proof of this common ancestry was provided weekly in the King Tut-style space helmets Apollo sported.) But that was blended in an intriguing way with late-cold-war anxiety over Soviet appeasements and an openly biblical story line, widely considered a tribute by its creator, Glen A. Larson, to the parables of his own Mormon faith. Twelve colonies of space-faring humans, survivors of slaughter driven away from their home planets, had set off through space in search of the mythical 13th tribe that, legend tells, settled a promised land called ''Earth.''

Yet ''Battlestar'' could never fully escape the orbit of its time. The most expensive-to-produce program of its day, at $1 million per episode, it kept drifting to the security of ''Love Boat''-style prime-time conventions: feathered hair and a fondness for weekly guest stars, including Fred Astaire as Starbuck's con-man father and Macnee as, well, Satan. After the show's initial great success (the premiere drew a reported 65 million viewers), the audience quickly dwindled, and it was canceled after eight months.

Dirk Benedict went on to star in ''The A-Team.'' Richard Hatch did soaps and TV work and started a business leading seminars in personal communication. In 1995, his girlfriend at the time persuaded him to do a signing session at a ''Star Trek'' convention in Pasadena. He agreed, but he wasn't sure if anyone would come. By that point, ''Battlestar Galactica'' had virtually disappeared. There had never been a complete video release, and with only a single season's worth of programming in existence, reruns were few and far between. So Hatch was nervous before the signing session, clutching his handful of photographs, watching the long lines of fans waiting to meet their favorite ''Star Trek'' actors, wondering if he would be sitting at his table out on the edge of the convention for hours by himself. Then his name was announced on the P.A., and he heard the crowd roar. One by one, they came to him, the fans, with their memories of ''Battlestar Galactica,'' emotionally recounting what the show had meant to them, how it helped them through difficult times in their lives.

''With all its flaws and imperfections, 'Battlestar' had somehow connected,'' Hatch told me recently, recalling the convention. ''I think that archetypal, very powerful story -- Moses and the Israelites journeying across the farthest reaches of space in search of a new homeland -- there's something epic in that.''

After the signing, Hatch registered the Web site battlestargalactica.com. (Neither Universal, which had produced the original show, nor Larson had ever bothered.) And so began his campaign to find and bring together fans of the original series and lead them to a new homeland, a resurrected ''Battlestar'' TV show or movie modeled on ''Star Trek: The Next Generation'' -- one that would continue the journey to Earth and would star several of the original actors, with Apollo as one of the leaders.

The journey took many turns. As Hatch continued to call and meet with executives from Universal, trying to convince them of the viability of his idea, he was approached to write new comics set in the old ''Battlestar'' universe, and then to share writing credits on a series of novels that would outline his vision. The first, ''Armageddon,'' was published in 1997. Six more followed. Universal seemed content to let him work within these media. But when it came to a new TV series, Hatch says, the executives he met with in the ''black tower'' building at Universal just didn't get it. They couldn't get past the original failure of ''Battlestar.'' So he decided that the best way to spark interest in a revival was to shoot what he called a ''proof of concept'' -- in effect, a trailer for a film or television show that didn't yet exist, based on one of his own books and starring him. He shot it using his own money, mortgaging his home and maxing out his credit cards. He relied on volunteer help from actors and cinematographers he knew around town and from fans he met on the Internet.

Compared with the thriving ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Wars'' franchises, ''Battlestar'' fandom was marginal -- the province of a few diehards making Web sites and sewing Colonial-warrior costumes. But these diehards rallied around Hatch, donating the costumes and props they had fabricated or volunteering to do the computer graphics for the space battles. And as they did, Hatch became for most of them the face of the fight for the new ''Galactica.''

In 1999, at the San Diego Comic-Con, he showed his completed trailer, titled ''Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming.'' He reports that it received a standing ovation. I can report that it looks remarkably professional and engaging and certainly faithful to Larson's original story. But you will probably never see it, because Hatch spent somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 of his own money to create a film within a franchise in which he owned absolutely no rights and which, for this reason, as well as actors' union regulations, he can never show or distribute for money.

But that was fine. Because for Hatch, it was always about convincing the world that it made sense to bring back ''Battlestar.'' And in fact, soon Universal would indeed be relaunching the Galactica -- although Richard Hatch would not be on board.

In December 2001, David Eick, who was behind shows like ''American Gothic'' and ''Xena: Warrior Princess,'' got a call from David Kissinger, president of the media conglomerate Studios USA, which controlled the Universal library. Over the previous year or two, the idea of reviving ''Battlestar'' had been floating around Universal. Now, Kissinger said, there was some new interest at Studio USA's sister company, the Sci Fi Channel. Would Eick be interested? Eick had his misgivings about the idea. But he had some experience sending out secret, under-the-radar cultural messages through pulp entertainment (in Xena's case, a nascent lesbian chic). He saw an opportunity -- what he called ''a great potential for irony.'' As he told me, ''If you could do a show called 'Battlestar Galactica,' with that title, that would harken toward the kind of sincere, dimensional, textured, emotional drama of '2001' and 'Blade Runner' -- oh, my God. You could blow everyone's mind.''

Eick met Ron Moore a few years before, when Moore was consulting on ''Good vs. Evil'' for the Sci Fi Channel. But even though Eick didn't know ''Star Trek'' particularly well, he knew that ''Star Trek'' was exactly what he didn't want this new series to be. And he knew that ''Star Trek'' was not and would never be a subject that was close to Moore's heart. And so he called Moore and asked him if he was interested in bringing a second big spaceship show back to life. Moore knew the original ''Battlestar,'' and after talking to Eick, he watched Larson's original three-hour pilot again. It surprised him. Here was a deeply somber story about a civilization that had basically endured genocide, and for the first hour it was elegantly told and strangely affecting. ''They were trying,'' he told me. ''It took a hard left turn to insanity when they reached the casino planet, but they were really trying.''

Moore said he would do it, but he wanted to make some changes. After numerous meetings and a full script treatment, he wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new ''Battlestar Galactica'' would eventually become. ''We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required,'' it began. ''Call it 'naturalistic science fiction.''' There would be no time travel or parallel universes or cute robot dogs. There would not be ''photon torpedoes'' but instead nuclear missiles, because nukes are real and thus are frightening.

''To this day,'' Eick says, ''I don't think either of us could have anticipated how valuable the memo would be.'' It would repair everything that had been worn down to convention in a genre Moore had once loved. But ''Battlestar'' would be more than just an opportunity to do ''Voyager'' correctly.

''When I watched the original pilot,'' Moore says, ''I knew that if you did 'Battlestar Galactica' again, the audience is going to feel a resonance with what happened on 9/11. That's going to touch a chord whether we want it to or not. And it felt like there was an obligation to that. To tell it truthfully as best we can through this prism.'' In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new ''Battlestar,'' the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore's version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?

For a genre often derided as escapist, science fiction has a long tradition of social commentary, no small part of which comes from ''Star Trek'' itself, which embraced race and gender equality on the bridge of the Enterprise at a time when it was still largely being rejected in real-life America. But Moore wanted a show that would move between the idealistic fantasies of ''Trek'' and the hard moral pragmatism of the military -- that would embrace both the binnacle and the bat'leth, if you will. He listed for me some of the thornier questions the show evokes: ''What does it mean to be free in a society under attack? What are the limits of that freedom? Who's right? Who's wrong? Are you rooting for the wrong side?''

Like Richard Hatch, Moore and Eick were taking ''Battlestar Galactica'' more seriously than it had been taken in a long time, though in a very different way. And for this reason, Moore thought he would be a hero to those who had rallied to Hatch's cause. At last there would be someone who would get a new ''Battlestar'' made and, what's more, who would be faithful to the original story's dark premise -- perhaps even more faithful than the original had been.

As production progressed on the miniseries, details of the changes Moore and Eick had in mind for ''Battlestar Galactica'' began to circulate on the Internet, and to many fans they were deeply disturbing. The Cylons would look human, and they would be sexy. Even more troubling: Moore had killed the idea of any ''continuation story,'' as Hatch had long been championing. All of the characters would be recast, including Hatch's own Apollo, and the story would start over.

Things had not gone easily for Hatch and his followers since that great day in 1999. Two attempts to revive or create a new series based on ''Galactica'' -- one by its original creator, Glen Larson, the other, for Fox, by the film director Bryan Singer and his producing partner Tom DeSanto -- had seemed imminent and had then fallen apart. Both had been continuations. The failure of the Singer-and-DeSanto project was particularly heartbreaking for Hatch. He had thrown his support behind DeSanto's proposed pilot, and the fans followed. But Singer left the project to complete ''X2,'' and Fox subsequently let it drop before it could go into production.

So among the hope-dashed fan community, which had come to see the issue of a continuation as sacrosanct, Moore was regarded with some suspicion, his ''Star Trek'' credentials aside. Then, when they learned that he intended to recast Starbuck as a woman -- it was too much.

''Starbuck is a guy. A GUY. A GUY!!!'' posted a fan named Rhonda on the forums of battlestargalacticaclub.com in December 2002. Moore was accused of bowing to political correctness, of dishonoring the memory of the original actors, of requiring a beating. One original-series fan called him ''the Paul de Man of current science fiction,'' accusing him of casually deconstructing the story that had been so close to their hearts for so long, only in order to ''make his mark.''

''I started a Yahoo group called 'Ron Moore Sucks,''' John DiPalermo, a New York-based old-series supporter, told me recently by e-mail. ''I proudly take credit for starting to refer to him as the MooreRon right after the script was first made available.'' (Someone leaked the script on the Internet.) ''In every 'Battlestar Galactica' Yahoo group, I would call him the MooreRon, and it became very popular.''

As for Hatch, he had been approached about doing a cameo in the miniseries, which, if he accepted, would, in effect, give the new show his blessing. Hatch declined. In an interview on the Web site ''Sci Fi Pulse'' in August 2003, Hatch conceded that Moore's ideas were interesting, but, he said, ''what angers me is the fact that they have disregarded the polls and most if not all of what fans have said they liked about 'Galactica.''' And Hatch was right. The fact was that the active fans of the old series, pro-continuation or no, represented a tiny percentage of those who might come to Moore's show out of curiosity and stay if it was good.

But Moore understood fans from his ''Star Trek'' days. He had been a fan and had gone to conventions, and he remembered what it was like to feel that devotion to a fictional world, and what it could make you do. And so when he was invited to appear at Galacticon, the convention Hatch was helping to organize to mark the 25th anniversary of the original show, Moore said yes.

It was held in October 2003, two months before the miniseries was to go on the air, at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City. Moore took video clips from the miniseries that no one had ever seen. ''I really had this blind faith,'' he told me. ''All the way through it, I always had this faith that they just have to see it, and then they'll see that it's actually pretty good.''

The audience was tense and angry. Apparently a coordinated plan had been circulating to pelt Moore with popcorn. He took the stage and showed his clips. And the crowd booed. (''They booed,'' Moore recalled, with a kind of cool, blinking amazement. ''And hissed.'')

The popcorn didn't come, but the questions did.

''I know it must be uncomfortable to be here,'' one audience member began. ''Not to patronize you, but we owe Richard so much. . . . Ron, it's a slap in the face that he was not taken into consideration.'' The room grew quiet. ''And when this miniseries fades away, and if it becomes a series, and when that series fades away . . . I hope you will consider what some of us said here today. That there could have been a correct way to making this happen.''

Moore nodded understandingly and said a few words in his own defense. ''I was asked, 'What do you want to do with 'Galactica'?'' he told the audience. ''I said, 'This is what I want to do' . . . and I did it. And I don't make any apologies for that. . . . I have nothing but good things to say about the original show. I have nothing but good things to say about Richard Hatch. . . . But I'm the guy that's doing the show, and this is the choice that I made, and I stand by it.''

A boo began to form in the room again, and people started to yell things, and then, in the back of the room, Hatch stood up. He wore a black T-shirt, and he raised his hand to calm his people. (If you are curious, there is a commemorative DVD of Galacticon 2003, and at this moment, the camera swings wildly around to quick-focus on Hatch.)

''Ron,'' Hatch said, ''I just want to say, No. 1, that it takes incredible courage to stand there and listen to people express their emotions and feelings, and I just take my hat off to you, No. 1.'' He then said he didn't blame Moore for anything. ''You had the boldness and strength to actually commit to that vision,'' he said. ''Whether it stands or falls will be up to the wide audience of this world. But just even from this, I can see that you have a bold vision, that you're an incredibly talented man and you have a lot to say. And I honor that.''

"Enterprise,'' the most recent tv series in the ''Star Trek'' franchise, was going off the air as I was visiting Moore and Eick in Vancouver. The week I saw Moore in L.A., the most recent ''Star Wars'' movie, ''Revenge of the Sith,'' was opening up at the CityWalk in Universal Studios. I saw it there, not far from where the old ''Battle of Galactica'' display on the Universal Studios Tour used to be, before they replaced it in the 80's with a mock earthquake, not far from where Moore and his writers meet now.

When I walked out, those two sagas were finished (at least for now) for the first time in almost 40 years, and it was difficult not to appreciate the strange journey ''Galactica'' had taken to outlast and, at the end, outshine those sagas it had once been accused of ripping off. Having made its debut first as a miniseries in late 2003 and then having its premiere as an original series this past January, ''Battlestar Galactica'' is the most successful original program in the Sci Fi Channel's history. Meanwhile, many of the fan sites that had originally opposed Moore and Eick's vision now actively or passively support it. Discussion of the show has migrated somewhat, from the fan boards to political blogs, where the issues it raises about security, religion and the ethics of android torture inspire heated debate, as well as praise from conservatives and liberals alike.

But there are some remaining diehards. ''I will never support the MooreRon,'' John DiPalermo wrote to me. ''Maybe I'm stubborn and pigheaded, but . . . Starbuck is a MAN!!!!!'' He said he prayed every day that Moore would lose his job, and he said he had also felt angry at his former rebel leader, Hatch. Because after the miniseries was a success and the first season was green-lighted, Moore e-mailed Hatch and again offered him a new role. And this time Hatch accepted.

The day I left L.A., I called Hatch and met him at the apartment complex where he lives, not far from the ''black tower'' of Universal he had fought for so long. He was friendly and gracious. He said he had gained some perspective on the cause that had taken up so much of his time. ''Looking back,'' he said, ''it's hard for me to believe I did what I did.'' He never intended to become so emotionally involved, he said. ''I just felt there's something powerful here. And I just found myself taking a series of small steps that turned into big steps.''

Things changed, he said, when he saw Moore defend the miniseries at Galacticon. ''I just had such great respect for him up there,'' he told me. ''I realized I was no longer thinking as the idealist. I could respect somebody else's vision for something, even something I had fallen in love with.'' He said it was sort of like falling in love with another man's wife. ''Eventually you had to realize she's married. And not to me.''

And it was hard to turn down the part that he had been offered, which was a wry and inspired matching of role and actor. Hatch now plays a former terrorist who leads a band of malcontents in the fleet, all the while striving for rehabilitation. Needless to say, the casting was Moore's idea.

John Hodgman is a contributing writer for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17GALACTICA.html?8hpib

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Who's the next great film superhero?

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:23:52 GMT

Who's the next great film superhero?
Look to the movies to make -- or break -- comic book champs

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/14/film.thenextsuperhero.ap/index.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- "I want suit approval."

Who can blame Vincent Chase, the movie-star character on HBO's "Entourage," for his Aquaman ultimatum? He understands that superhero films teeter on a precarious edge between laughable ("Catwoman") and arguably brilliant ("Spider-Man").

There's no current plan for a King of the Seven Seas flick, but this year has already seen "Fantastic Four," "Batman Begins," "Sin City," "Constantine" and "Elektra." And waiting in the wings are dozens of superheroes, each poised to either make movie history ("X-Men") or get ridiculed into oblivion ("Daredevil").

On Thursday, tens of thousands of comic enthusiasts began descending on San Diego for the annual Comic-Con convention, where movie adaptations are among the hottest topics. But with so many cartoon superstars like Batman, Superman, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four already gone Hollywood, who's left?

"Ha ha!" laughs Marvel Studios chief Avi Arad. "You know we have 5,000 characters?"

Next up for Marvel is "Ghost Rider," in summer 2006, with Nicolas Cage as a possessed motorcycle rider hellbent on justice.

"For the hardcore group, 'Ghost Rider' is probably the most anticipated one," Arad says. "I think once the world gets to meet him, it will extend this community."

In various stages of development, Arad says, are movies for Thor (the hammer-welding Nordic hero), the Silver Surfer (who rides a flying surfboard), Captain America (the most patriotic hero, fashioned during WWII) and Namor the Sub-Mariner (one of the oldest superheroes -- think a more cranky Aquaman).

Also in the pipeline is Iron Man (who's protected by a suit of armor, to be directed by Nick Cassavetes), Doctor Strange (a sorcerer of the mystic arts), Nick Fury (a James Bond-like spy) and Black Panther (the first black comic book character, although he was beaten to the big screen by "Spawn").

Sexy, sacred ... and ridiculous
DC Comics -- like CNN, a division of Time Warner -- is similarly situated, with thousands of their own characters.

"Our properties span a really wide range of style and themes," says Paul Levitz, president of DC Comics. "We turn to them and look at what's new and what's in the stack and think how we can take advantage of it."

Queen among them is "Wonder Woman," which is still several years off. Joss Whedon, the brains behind "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," will direct -- though the super-heroine may need some updating.

"The costume works phenomenally well in the comics, but is it going to work so well in a live-action film?" wonders Johan Weiland, executive producer of www.comicbookresources.com. "We know Linda Carter looked sexy (in the TV version), but she also kinda looked a little ridiculous."

Coming this November is "V for Vendetta," starring Natalie Portman (with shaved head) and Hugo Weaving. It's written and produced by the Wachowski brothers, who made the "Matrix" trilogy.

Set in the near future, "Vendetta" is a series created in the '80s by Alan Moore, one of the most respected writers in comics. Moore's previous forays to the big screen haven't gone well, with duds like "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and "Constantine." He has already been very critical of the Wachowski brothers' script, calling it "imbecilic."

A delay on the release date of "Vendetta" also seems possible given that the hero, V, blows up London's Parliament and subway system.

Moore's "Watchmen" is also in early preproduction, with Paul Greengrass ("Bourne Supremacy") to direct. The landmark graphic novel takes place in an opposite world where President Nixon enjoys extreme popularity as he leads the U.S. to victory in Vietnam. Superheroes are real and must register with the government.

"As sacred as 'Spider-Man' is, 'Watchmen' is even more sacred," says Weiland. "It's probably the one all comic fans want to see made, but it's also the one we dread the most. If they screw that one up, big trouble."

Another classic, the Flash, is also in the incubator. After penning the screenplays for "Batman Begins" and "Ghost Rider," David S. Goyer has been tapped to direct the speedster.

Closer to fruition are "The History of Violence" and "Aeon Flux," both out later this year.

"Violence" stars Viggo Mortensen, is directed by David Cronenberg and comes from the same publishers of "Road to Perdition." "Aeon Flux" stars Charlize Theron as the futuristic secret agent. It will get a sneak peak at Comic-Con Saturday.

It doesn't end with movies, either.

Stan Lee, who created so many Marvel heroes, has formed his own company, Pow! Entertainment. Aside from films, Pow! is currently creating an "urban superhero" for Vibe magazine, developing the animated show "Hef's Superbunnies" for MTV (which he says "will finally reveal the true secret of Hugh Hefner's existence") and has a reality TV show in the works that will be titled something like "So You Want to be a Superhero?"

Will comics remain popular long enough for all of these projects to flourish?

"The whole trick is taking a story that has a fantasy angle of some sort, but doing it as realistically as possible," says the 82-year-old Lee. "Saying, what if a fellow really could shoot a web and crawl on the walls? What would his day-to-day existence be?"

Whether the films in the superhero assembly line can achieve that balance won't be clear until each hits theaters. For now, they might as well be "Aquaman" -- which, as "Entourage" creator Doug Ellin says, "could be a really bad movie or a really good movie."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/14/film.thenextsuperhero.ap/index.html

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Depp by Chocolate [Interview with Johnny Depp]

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 05:39:36 GMT

Depp by Chocolate
Source: Edward Douglas
July 11, 2005
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=10312

Edward Scissorhands. Ed Wood. Ichabod Crane. Those are the three characters played by Johnny Depp in the movies of his long-time friend and collaborator, director Tim Burton. Now you can add Roald Dahl's outrageous chocolate factory mogul Willy Wonka to the list, as Depp reunites with Burton for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For the duo best known for the strange characters they've created for their movies, Wonka may indeed be the strangest, probably even more so, because this is meant as a movie for kids.

Since Depp was down in the Bahamas shooting the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean, ComingSoon.net joined him there to talk about possibly his most outrageous character yet.

CS!: What was the appeal of playing Willy Wonka and were you a fan of Gene Wilder's version of the character?
Johnny Depp: Well, I was definitely a Gene Wilder fan but that's not what drove me to this. Initially, the material was one of the seductive elements certainly. Even though I love Roald Dahl's works, more than anything it was the fact that it was Tim (Burton) asking me to do it. As luck would have it, this material and that character was a great opportunity, and I knew that as soon as he mentioned it and as soon as I said I'm in, I knew there were great risks involved. I could have very easily blown it. But it's exciting for an actor. It's a challenge.

CS!: What kind of risks did you feel that you were taking by playing this role?
Depp: To the fans of the book and the fans of the 1971 film, it's a very well loved character, both the book and Gene Wilder's brilliant performance in the film. I knew that I would have to take it somewhere, far away from Gene Wilder and the area that he had stomped. Having that amazing material by Roald Dahl and taking that and trying to interpret what he might have liked to seen in terms of cinema. What kind of character would he have liked? There's such dark and light in that story in such a subversive kind of undertone and a twisted perverted kind of side to the character that I ran into the direction that seemed right to me.

Did you enjoy playing a character with no social skills?
Depp: Yes, I did enjoy playing someone with slightly twisted social skills. It's a bit fun playing these characters that for whatever reasons can do things that I would never dream of doing or speak to people in a way I couldn't bring myself ever to do. There's great fun in that, and once you have learned to talk like them or be them, there's great safety in it.

CS!: You've been very open about your influences for Captain Jack Sparrow. Was there anyone who was your model for Wonka?
Depp: On this, there wasn't specifically any one or two guys that were models, but there were memories that I have as a little kid, when I was like 5 or 6 years old, watching children's shows and children show hosts like Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood or local guys like Uncle Al. I remembered thinking, even then, how really odd it was the way they spoke; that kind of bizarre musical rhythm cadence to their speech pattern like "Good morning children, and now today we're going to …" I made that speech pattern one of the main ingredients for Wonka and stretched it out a bit. I was also thinking about game show hosts that I remembered on television growing up and that kind of perpetual sort of grimace on their face. I kept thinking that they can't be like that at home. That led me to believe that they put on a mask with that all important positive smile. Those two things became the basis, and then doing stuff for the look of Wonka was incredibly important. To put that costume on and click those veneers into my mouth for the teeth which actually changed the shape of my face a little bit.

Who came up with the idea for him to have sort of a Prince Valiant haircut?
Depp: That is something that came to me early on when I was making little sketches of what might be right for the character and that was it. I just did this strange, almost like a Brian Jones kind of bob and super short bangs, cause I was thinking about the guy in terms of having lived in this self-induced isolation. He's removed himself from the modern world, so therefore his line of reference would be very, very dated. I thought that maybe he had locked himself in a room with a stack of Herman's Hermits records or something. That also became part of his speech pattern, which would be very, very dated. He talks jive to one of the kids.

CS!: Why are you and Tim drawn to such quirky characters?
Depp: One thing that Tim and I share is a fascination with the human animal, and we also share the idea that most people in life, especially the ones who are considered super normal, if you really take a step back and observe them, you'll realize that they're actually completely out of their minds. Most people are really nuts and that's fascinating to me. I think that Tim feels the same way. I just love and respect Tim so much that I would do anything with him. The thing that I most enjoy about our relationship, our friendship, is that there's a lot of trust. One minute he and I are talking very deeply about Captain Kangaroo and then the next thing I know, we're doing impersonations of Sammy Davis Jr. and Charles Nelson Riley. We can go anywhere.

CS!: Did you talk a lot about the script with Tim or ask for many changes?
Depp: Yeah, Tim is very good about stuff like that, and John August, the screenwriter, was great about it as well. I can't help myself. I need to do it; otherwise I'd feel like I'm held captive or something. There are times when you know that you are doing it too much and you can stop yourself, but there are times when I feel strongly about adding something, and the trick is that you can always try anything; do a take of anything and then go back to the page. Tim was great about it and always has been.

CS!: What did you think of their decision to add some flashbacks to Wonka's childhood to add depth to the character?
Depp: The first thing I thought was that it was very brave of [screenwriter] John August and Tim to make that decision, but still be able to keep it in the spirit of Roald Dahl's intent. That was no small undertaking and in terms of cinema, that's a great tool. It's a beautiful luxury that you have as an actor because it explains a lot of where Wonka comes from. But for an audience it gives you a bit more insight to what this guy is and how he's become what he's become.

CS!: How was it working with the different kids in the movie?
Depp: Freddie [Highmore] is pretty impressive. The first thing that struck me about Freddie when I met him on "Finding Neverland" were his eyes. It wasn't just because they're these beautiful piercing blue eyes, but there's a purity in Freddie that is astonishing. It's mesmerizing, and it is like he's incapable of lying or telling a lie. Then you get to work with him and you see what his abilities are as an actor, which are endless. Beyond all of the great things that Freddie is, he wants to play football. He goes on vacations with his family, and he's just a really normal, very well grounded kid.

CS!: And how did the other kids in the film react to you being on the set?
Depp: They were great. For about the first ten days, you get these kinds of looks, and they sort of check each other out. They weren't quite sure how to deal with it, but then they caught on and started to enjoy it. They were great. I remember one scene with Jordan, who played Mike Teevee. I had this idea that [Wonka] should speak jive, so we were doing a rehearsal, and I walked up, put my hand on him and said "Slide me some skin Daddy-O." He tilted in a backwards angle, looking at me saying "That's not in the script." (Laughs) It killed me, and I just burst with hysteric laughter

CS!: Which of the children do you think you were most like as a child?
Depp: I'd like to think that I was like Charlie, but I don't think I was, because my mom uses the term "hellion." I wasn't obnoxious or precocious, but I was curious. There were a lot of practical jokes and things like that. I got on her nerves basically. I pissed her off quite frequently.

CS!: Do you think that kids might find your character to be a bit dark?
Depp: When I'm by myself going through the script, I would be mortified if I found myself reading and be the character. I could never forgive myself for that so what I did with Wonka is that I tested it on my daughter Lily Rose to see if I was going in the right direction. A lot of times what happens is that you come up with these ideas and you never get to try them until maybe a read-through, but if you aren't ready to expose the guy, like with the read-through for Wonka, I read just like me. I was just talking to [Lily Rose] one day, and I started to do the Wonka voice and she kind of lit up a little bit and gave me this "Where's that coming from?" I thought I was on the right track.

CS!: Do you allow yourself to stay in the character between scenes?
Depp: No. I've never bought into that. What kills me is the image sticks in my head of a guy playing Henry the VIII, for example, walking over to the craft services table, and grabbing a hand full of Fritos instead of some big chicken leg. It's that kind of thing. I think that once you have got the character and once you have known the guy, at least for me, it's pretty simple to slide in and out.

CS!: Of course, we have to ask about the everpresent Michael Jackson comparisons. Did that ever come up while you were making the movie?
Depp: It actually never crossed my mind, oddly enough. Michael Jackson was not an ingredient or inspiration for the character at all. A few people have mentioned it, and it kind of took me by surprised because I really didn't expect that. I guess on some level I can understand. There's a little bit of a look, but you can easily think of some other recluse like Howard Hughes as well. Roald Dahl wrote this book and wrote this character, and it was published in 1964. Michael Jackson was a wee lad then, so I don't think he was inspired by him either.

CS!: Did you get to spend a lot of time with the Oompa-Loompa man himself, Deep Roy?
Depp: He's a ball, and a real force to be reckoned with. I started calling him the hardest working man in show business. I'd see him on a Tuesday, and he'd be in his red outfit and then on the Wednesday he'd be in his blue outfit and then on Thursday the white one and then on Friday he's dressed up as like this 80's metal star. He was all over the place and just incredible.

CS!: As an actor, are you able to appreciate the fact Tim Burton decided to use real sets rather than a lot of CGI backgrounds?
Depp: It makes all the difference in the world between standing in the room of blue screen, because everything was there. For me, it's amazing and a great gift, especially for kids. A couple of them had never been on a movie set before, and to have all that stuff available to you. To see, to touch, in the case of the chocolate river, to actually smell--it smelled bad after a couple of weeks, it really got funky. I appreciate that, because that's how movies were done a long time ago and that's how movies should still be done. I also appreciate that there are times when you must use CGI.

CS!: You've now received Oscar nominations two years in a row. Would you like to get another one for this film?
Depp: It's not something that I think about everyday because I try not to think about that kind of stuff. I'm really flattered and honored that I've been able to get the nominations and various awards that I ended up getting. That was like totally unexpected and shocking to me. In fact that's sort of enough for me. The nominations are fine. I don't need more. I don't really want to go up in front of all those people and say thanks. That just scares the sh*t out of me. It would be nice, but I don't need it.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=10312

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Hollywood Movie Studios See the Chinese Film Market as Their Next Rising Star

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 04:39:22 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/04/business/media/04film.html?ex=1121400000&en=1b49c54d46311e2a&ei=5070&pagewanted=all

July 4, 2005

Hollywood Movie Studios See the Chinese Film Market as Their Next Rising Star

By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, July 3 - Snow White and the seven ... monks?

Like the rest of American industry, Hollywood has seen the future, and it is China. Some of the biggest movie studios are now scrambling onto the mainland and planning to invest more than $150 million over the next few years in China's burgeoning film industry.

Walt Disney Pictures may even spend part of its legacy, with a plan for what some people involved say is a live-action martial-arts remake of "Snow White" that would be shot in China and replace the dwarves with Shaolin monks. The director is expected to be Yuen Woo-Ping, the Chinese director and choreographer who arranged the fight scenes for Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series, as well as "Kung Fu Hustle" and the "Matrix" movies.

Other studios intent on China include Sony's Columbia Tristar Pictures unit, which is already producing and financing feature films here. Time-Warner's Warner Brothers studio recently formed joint ventures to make films in China. And Merchant Ivory Productions' latest film, "The White Countess," set in 1930's Shanghai and starring Ralph Fiennes, was filmed on location here last year.

A few weeks ago, Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of Miramax Films and one of Hollywood's biggest producers, told a gathering at the Shanghai International Film Festival that the company he will run once he leaves Disney's Miramax will also produce and finance feature films in China.

Drawn by China's fast-growing economy, inexpensive film production sites and its increasingly popular martial arts and feature films - most notably "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000 - Western studios are stepping up their presence here and looking to eventually turn China into a major film production base.

"China is going to grow, so a lot of companies want to come in here and produce films," said Li Chow, the general manager of Columbia Tristar Film Distributors, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. "Chinese films have done well internationally, ever since 'Crouching Tiger' came out. So this is a trend."

The moves come as Hollywood officials are still fighting to get their own American-made movies shown here. And they are also putting greater pressure on the Chinese government to crack down on rampant film and DVD piracy, which costs Hollywood millions of dollars every year. But Hollywood executives also say they are making plans to produce and invest in movies with a Chinese theme or Chinese language movies that could later be exported to the rest of the world. And American studios are laying the foundation to produce movies solely for China's domestic film market.

China's box office receipts are still small compared with ticket sales in the United States, where box office revenues were a record $9.4 billion in 2004, according to Exhibitor Relations. But analysts here say affluent Chinese are becoming avid movie-goers, particularly in big cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. The domestic market is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2007, from about $500 million in 2004, according to China E-Capital, a private investment bank in Beijing.

Hollywood is also coming here to tap into China's growing television, Internet, gaming and mobile phone markets, which producers see as new and potentially lucrative outlets. A few weeks ago, Warner Brothers Online announced that it would team with Tom Online, an online and wireless service based in Beijing, to distribute Warner Brothers film content on the Internet and to mobile phone users across China.

Perhaps more significantly, Hollywood executives recognize that China now has a collection of talented film directors who are breaking box office records at home and selling well overseas.

Over the last year, for instance, two movies from the acclaimed director Zhang Yimou - "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" - have together grossed more than $190 million outside China.

And this year's "Kung Fu Hustle," a comedy produced by the Hong Kong actor and director Stephen Chow, has already pulled in more than $54 million overseas.

The biggest Chinese language hit so far was Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which in 2000 introduced American audiences to the Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi and went on to earn $128 million, making it the highest-grossing foreign language film ever shown in the United States.

But Chinese directors are doing far more than martial arts pictures these days. Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine"), Feng Xiaogang ("Cell Phone") and Wong Kar Wai ("In the Mood for Love") are considered established storytellers who can appeal to broad audiences.

"We now have a group of world-class actors and directors," said Ren Zhonglun, president of the Shanghai Film Group, which produces movies and has also formed a joint venture to operate cinemas in this country with Time-Warner. "These people can attract investment from all over the world."

Disney's "Snow White" remake, which is still in development and subject to change, will be in English. But the Hollywood studios hope to produce a mix of Chinese and English-language films.

"There are going to be a lot of American films with a Chinese component," said Dede Nickerson, a producer who has handled Miramax's Asia operations for the last four years.

So far, Sony Pictures' Columbia TriStar film division is probably the most aggressive Western film company operating in China. It has already financed, produced and distributed Chinese-language films that include "Kung Fu Hustle," and "House of Flying Daggers" and the "Road Home." In August, the company will release Wong Kar Wai's latest film, "2046," a Chinese-language feature starring Zhang Ziyi, in the United States. TriStar is also planning to finance a Chinese-language sequel to "Kung Fu Hustle."

Time-Warner is investing in China as well. Through various joint ventures, the company is putting money into more than 70 cinemas around the country in preparation for a potential theater-going boom.

And its Warner Brothers unit has said it will form a partnership with the state-owned China Film Group of Beijing and the privately owned Hengdian Group, one of China's largest film companies, to co-produce mostly Chinese language movies here. One advantage in forming such a venture is that any film produced in China is exempt from the country's quota of 20 foreign films a year.

Then there is the powerful producing tandem, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the brothers who founded Miramax Films.

Last month, at the Cannes Film Festival, the Weinsteins said that their new business, the Weinstein Company, had already acquired the distribution rights to Chen Kaige's next film, "The Promise," which at $35 million is one of the most expensive Chinese language films yet made in China. The Weinsteins and the IDG New Media Fund, an investment vehicle controlled by the giant technology publisher, the International Data Group, purchased the North American, England, Australia and South African distribution rights to the film, which is expected to be released in December.

It is not Mr. Weinstein's first foray into China. During his time at Miramax, Mr. Weinstein signed deals that brought Chinese language films to the United States, including "Farewell My Concubine," "Chungking Express" and "Hero."

And Miramax produced Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series, much of which was shot in Beijing, as well as the forthcoming "The Great Raid," which was also shot largely in China.

In June, Harvey Weinstein appeared at the Shanghai International Film Festival with a group of financial advisors from Goldman Sachs and a team from IDG Films. The group is believed to be looking to produce or acquire the rights to additional Chinese films.

"This can be a major production base," said Steven Squillante, a former Miramax executive and independent producer who is now a partner at IDG Films. "L.A. has doubled for everywhere in the world. And so can China. They have high-quality crews, stunt men and good facilities. Backlots are backlots, and sound stages are sound stages. And the construction costs are manageable."

Hugo Shong, a senior vice president at IDG who grew up in China and invests heavily in technology companies here, recently set up the company's New Media Fund with $150 million in startup capital. IDG also formed a film and content production unit, and hired several film executives including Mr. Squillante and David Lee, a former Sony executive.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the movie world's interest in this country has been the appearance of a Chinese language version of Variety magazine, published here by IDG, and the opening of a new Beijing bureau of The Hollywood Reporter.

"Why am I here?" Jonathan S. Landreth, the new Beijing bureau chief of the Hollywood Reporter, asked rhetorically. "Because everyone else in Hollywood is."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/04/business/media/04film.html?ex=1121400000&en=1b49c54d46311e2a&ei=5070&pagewanted=all

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May The Force Please Go Away

Thu, 26 May 2005 18:05:28 GMT

May The Force Please Go Away
13 reasons to be hugely grateful that "Star Wars," the king of adolescent space epics, is finally over
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 25, 2005

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/05/25/notes052505.DTL&nl=fix

Can we just say it? Can we admit it now? Is it finally time?

Here goes: Thank the great Sith Lord above that the massive computer-driven marketing hellbeast that is the overblown "Star Wars" epic is finally over.

There I said it. Can we agree? Because the truth is, this most bloated of megamovie franchises hasn't been a certifiable cultural phenom, something to get truly excited about, for over 25 years. Admit it now, get it over with, move on to pretty happy things like puppies and porn and sunshine.

Look, I'm sorry, but I don't care how many gazillions the last three flicks have made at the box office from ubergeeks too old to get "Harry Potter" and too emotionally immature to graduate to real movies. Episodes I-III are mostly one thing and one thing only: huge exercises in CGI acrobatics, manic video games writ large, numbly awful movies full of fine actors reduced to stiff mannequins in bad monk robes and uncomfortable headpieces delivering stone-cold line readings seemingly written by that slightly twitchy tin-eared dweeb who sat next you in fifth-grade algebra, sweatingly.

It's all just a little -- how to put this carefully -- it's all just a little embarrassing.

Here, then, are 13 reasons to celebrate the end of the cute, overblown SW monster. Reasons for normal people to get back to caring about decent movies with subtle dialogue and true character development and nuanced plot lines not revolving around a monochromatic good/evil dialectic executed by barely emotive cartoon characters who have somehow been brainwashed into thinking they're making art. Admit these now, get it over with, move on to happy things like wine and sex and pleasures that have absolutely zero to do with whooshing lightsabers. OK?

1) Begone, Star Wars ubergeeks. Begone, terrifically strange and tragically lonely fan boys who camp out, weeks and months in advance, for SW tickets, even at the wrong theater. Drink the Kool-Aid if you must, boys. Your 15 minutes are way, way up. Never has a culture wished so deeply for a group of people to get deep into online porn and pop more Ritalin and stay the hell home.

2) Unfortunately, now the media coverage of such geeks will simply switch over to sad psychochristian fanatics who are already lining up for Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" sequel, "Dead Things I Pulverize with a Cuisinart and Then Smear All Over My Hairy Catholic Chest."

3) Poor Ewan McGregor. Poor Natalie Portman. Poor Liam Neeson. Fabulous actors so completely drained of nuance and character you are left wishing Obi Wan would shoot heroin and dive into a toilet and have a deformed religious experience, and that Neeson might veer off and start asking Princess Amidala what her favorite sexual position is and how many orgasms she has in a month and what she really thinks about when she sees Vader's throbbing red lightsaber.

4) Farewell, the odd and recurring hype that claims, every few years, that George Lucas might, in fact, be one of the truly great, visionary directors of all time. He isn't. Not by a long shot.

5) Darth Vader choking a giant red M&M candy. Darth Vader staring down that creepy Burger King mascot thing. Darth Vader hawking cell phones and Energizer batteries and floor cleaner and breakfast cereal and who the hell knows what else. Good riddance, odious sea of SW product tie-ins. Like the goddamn franchise needs more cash? Like seeing Darth Vader hawking tampons and aspirin and Darth Vader-branded bunion pads is in any way necessary? Please.

6) Let's just say it outright: Harrison Ford carried the first three movies, period. Carrie Fisher was amusing enough, the droids were cute and infinitely annoying, James Earl Jones' Vader voice work was nearly a character unto itself. But no one topped Ford at delivering a cynical line or expressing incredulity or offering up that famous "Who, me?" look that would later come to such wondrous fruition with Indiana Jones. "Star Wars" without Ford's dry humor and bewildered mug is like a cheesy pinball machine without the ball: all bells and whistles, few genuine pleasures.

7) Two words: Jim Henson. Next to Ford, Henson's astonishing Creature Shop gave the first movies brilliantly wacky life, silly and tangible and honest. The last three flicks are just painful reminders of how much he, and his entire Muppet universe, are missed in this world, and how much computers have drained many movies of their soul.

8) Did I mention Chewbacca? Did I mention that maddening commercial where Chewbacca is in the booth recording sounds for the new series of "Star Wars" cell phone ring tones and oh my freaking God let's just imagine that for a moment, the pale little sexually denuded dude sitting next to you in the café who gets a call on his Nokia and when it rings it sounds like that weird famous Chewbacca howl, and you turn and look at him and wonder what he might look like if he exploded into a million bloody little geek-boy pieces like, right now.

9) Enough with the dissecting of SW plot lines. Enough with the seeking of deep mythological parallels. Despite all those blogs and articles insisting SW is some sort of modern iteration of "Crime and Punishment" crossed with "Dr. Spock's Guide to Parenting," there is little of true intellectual substance to speak of in any of the SW flicks, and say what you will about old-time '60s radical Lucas' commendable desire to criticize current rabid right-wing ideology via his simple good/evil allegories, the overarching plot of SW is so basic and the execution so orthodox, you might as well be watching "The Bad News Bears," stoned. It's true.

10) The late, great master of myth Joseph Campbell loved the first three "Star Wars" movies. He saw in them a wonderful modern-day example of his favorite allegory and recurring cultural theme, the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell is dead now. Even he was ready to move the hell on.

11) This is from the recent Rolling Stone interview with Lucas, with Lucas examining a plot thread: "Is Anakin a product of a super-Sith who influenced the midichlorians to create him, or is he simply created by the midichlorians to bring forth prophecy, or was he created by the Force through the midichlorians? It's left up to the audience to decide." Note to George: You are 61 years old. Stop speaking like this before you hemorrhage something. And see item No. 9, above.

12) Raise your hand if you love the concept of prequels. Ten years of crappy CGI and 10 years of lumpy stiff acting and 28 years of waiting and you watch "Sith" where only the last 30 minutes really finds any sort of cinematic footing, and after all that screaming and all the cheeseball animation and all the slaughtered Jedis and the stilted, lifeless dialogue and heavy Vader wheezing and Yoda's irritating speech impediment, where do we finally end up at the end of Episode III? That's right: 1977. And who the hell wants to be back there?

13) I'll happily admit that the first three films were breathtakingly rich allegories for their time, landmark filmmaking, funny and quirky and cutting edge and cute fun for the kids, full of wry characters and state-of-the-art special effects saddled to a rather generic, by-the-numbers hero's journey sprinkled with the occasional subreference to Buddhism or the fine art of egolessness.

But.

But it must be stated and cannot be repeated enough and we have to admit it once and for all: The "Star Wars" films, each and every one of them and it feels like there are about 127 of them now, they remain, always and forever, movies for anxious, easily stupefied 10-year-old boys.

There I said it. Can we all just go outside now?

source:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/05/25/notes052505.DTL&nl=fix

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Director Louis Leterrier on Unleashed

Wed, 18 May 2005 06:20:02 GMT

Director Louis Leterrier on Unleashed
Source: Edward Douglas
May 17, 2005
http://comingsoon.net/news.php?id=9639

French filmmakers tend to be unfairly judged by American movie fans (and Hollywood) as being too arty or non-commercial for U.S. sensibilities, something that may have been exacerbated by the failure of movies like Catwoman last year and Bruce Willis' Hostage earlier this year. Both movies were first time English feature directors by established French filmmakers.

Like Pitof, director Louis Leterrier is a prodigy of Luc Besson, one of the few French directors appreciated by American action lovers, thanks to groundbreaking films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional. Although Leterrier is equally as good at mixing action, drama and humor, he's looking to break out of the stereotypes of being a French filmmaker, something he has already done quite adequately thanks to his 2002 feature film debut The Transporter, starring Jason Statham. (He just finished editing the much-anticipated sequel, which comes out here in September.) But before that, he returns to the States with Unleashed, starring a prestigious cast that includes Jet Li, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, which he talked to ComingSoon.net about during a recent visit.

CS!: Where did the idea for Unleashed originate?
Leterrier: I think Jet came to see Luc, because he wanted something different for himself. He wants to move into more conventional cinema. He's 40 something, so his fighting skills are slowly fading away, and he wanted to become a real actor. He had so much fun on 'Hero' and all those previous movies, so he said "I'd love to do a film where I'd play a simple man that was raised in violence and through love will turn into a regular normal human being" much like Luc's 'The Professional'/'Leon'.

CS!: You've been working with Luc Besson for quite a few years now. How did that relationship come about?
Leterrier: I was his Assistant Director (A.D.) for a long time. I started on "Joan of Arc", and we became friends. I was the worst A.D. in the world. I was a really nice guy, and you don't want this as an A.D. He was nice enough to want to keep me on his crew, so he asked if I wanted to be an artistic director on a film called "Transporter." I studied as an artistic director, and I was prepping the film for the other director, Corey Yuen, but he didn't direct the film--he just did the fights--so I ended up directing the rest of the film. That's how the relationship started. You do two kinds of films with Luc Besson. You do films for Luc Besson, like 'The Transporter' is a film that I did for him. That's not my kind of movie, but he knows exactly how to do the typical action with funny jokes and one-liners, stuff like that. He rehearses the actors and I just direct. Then you do film with Luc Besson like 'Unleashed' where he calls you up, and he says "Well, I got this weird little film. Would you like to take a look at it?" He gives you this film, because he believes that you will add a little something extra to the film, and I loved it. That's the interesting part with Luc. Now he's got Europe Accord, which is like a big American style studio but he controls everything. Everything goes through him so he's exhausted, but everything looks like what he's got in mind.

CS!: How much easier was it to work with a martial artist like Jet Li as opposed to working with an actor like Jason Statham, who needs to be trained?
Leterrier: Jason is also a martial artist in a sense, but he's not as good as Jet, so it was much easier and much more interesting for the fight sequences working with Jet, because we could do twelve to fifteen moves or shots. With Jet, you can do different camera moves and you can really tell the story through the fighting. You don't have to rely on just cutting, cutting, cutting, so we could use cranes to shoot the fight choreography, which is very different. Normally, you're never able to use complicated crane movements when you're fighting. Jet is so funny. He sips his tea and watches his stunt double--not a stunt double, but a guy who rehearses prior to shooting so Jet doesn't get hurt--Jet doesn't rehearse. He sees the thing and does 12-15 moves. Jet is always perfect. We only did several takes, because of the other guys or because of the camera, but it's so amazing to watch him do it.

CS!: But you said that you thought his fighting skills are fading away now that he's getting older?
Leterrier: No, no… I mean at 50, I don't see him doing all that kung fu anymore. That's it and he knows it. And he's weird, because he knows that his audience still sees him as a martial artist so he says "I think I will never do a conventional movie. Even when I'm 70, I'll have to throw a punch, because I respect my audience and that's why I am who I am." He's so humble.

CS!: How did you work with Master Wu-Ping before you started the shooting to make sure that your choreography was very distinctive and how much input did Jet have?
Leterrier: Wu-Ping did 'Matrix' and 'Crouching Tiger', and we all know what his choreography style looks like and I love it. I just didn't think it was right for this movie. Prior to the shoot, we all met, but it was it's hard for me to communicate with these guys because they speak Chinese and nothing else. So I used little action figures and go "this is Jet Li" (pretends to play with action figures). For a couple of days, I was playing with Star Wars action figures and they were really funny, since they are typically Chinese. One guy is like bald and he's got a long white beard (does an impression of the guy from 'Kill Bill Vol. 2'). At the beginning, they were a little bit thrown off with what I was asking them to do. I wanted street fight violence. I wanted Jet Li to take the guy and punch him until the guy faints or dies, but they normally would just do one punch and then cable him out. I wanted him to really fight, and they were a little thrown off. After I choreographed with them the first action sequence, I let them do what they wanted to do, and they then knew what they wanted. Jet's input is always good.

CS!: Can you talk about choreographing Danny's non-fight movements because they were very specific to his character it seemed.
Leterrier: We sent a coach to L.A. to rehearse with him for a couple months prior to shooting and they went to zoos and orphanages. They studied dogs, they studied kids and everything. He created his own character based on this and I think that's the way to do it.

CS!: Was it interesting to find out that he could actually act, too? Did you always know he could pull off the dramatic scene and the comedy?
Leterrier: Well, I didn't know him before we started shooting this movie, so I met maybe a couple weeks prior to shooting the movie. When you see him, he's got so much soul in his eyes that you know that he's a genuine person. He's not a movie star, so you know you can bring something out of him. The only problem with Jet is that thick shield he has in front of himself to protect him from the rest of the world. Once you break this shield or make him lower his shield, then you get great stuff, but the problem is to get him to stop being so protective.

CS!: What do you mean?
Leterrier: It's just that he's very introspective. He's Buddhist, almost monkish, with his beads. In the French cut, he cries at the end, but in the American cut you don't have it. The last shot in the American cut is the shot within the piano, but we don't have this in the French cut. We just have a close-up on his face and we finish on a tear, which was extremely hard for me to get out of him. He said that no director has ever gotten him to cry, but I did!

CS!: Were there a lot of differences between the French and American versions of the film?
Leterrier: It could have ended the same way, but the studio wanted the piano shot. In my version, it was like tear and then piano but I couldn't do both. On the DVD, we'll do either. I actually prefer the American version, because in the French version, the middle part where he's normal is a little too long. There's like one montage too many so it's too sappy.

CS!: And the title is also different.
Leterrier: I don't like the American title. I prefer 'Danny the Dog' because everything is "Unleashed". I saw the Star Wars poster, and it was "unleashed".

CS!: What was the hardest challenge in directing this film?
Leterrier: Well, I was 28 or 29 when I started directing this film, so when you have Jet Li, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins in front of your eyepiece, you're like "Phew! My God! I have to pretend to be a real director!" It was really tough to direct these guys, but I quickly understood that it's not to direct them. You don't make them act. You make them react off of each other's reactions. We started shooting with Morgan, so it was very good that he set the tone. In the beginning, none of them trusted me, because they were like "Who's this guy? He never did anything." I had to prove to them that I could direct first of all, and I could do my technical things. I love actors. I really love them. I'm not the kind of director that runs away and hides behind his monitor and yells "Action!" I'm really with them. Every morning, I'd clear the set of all the crew, and I'd really rehearse with the actors. We directed the film together, and that's really the only way to do it. I mean, you don't direct Morgan Freeman; you just let him do what he does. The weekend before we started shooting, Morgan decided to become blind on film, which threw off all my shot lists. That was his decision. In France, there's a school of blind piano tuners. He learned about this and said it would be very interesting so I said why not?

CS!: How is it different working with Bob Hoskins?
Leterrier: Bob you can direct much more because Bob gives you small, he gives you big, and he gives you in the middle. You don't want him to overact, but he could have been Roger Rabbit's Bob Hoskins or "Long Good Friday" Bob Hoskins. I wanted a cross between the two of them. My biggest accomplishment is to have gotten these three guys to work together and to get them to be happy with this film, because they've done so many. I was very happy, because the French press said that this was the first film where Jet Li really acts and he's really good. For me, that is an accomplishment because that's direction.

CS!: Can you talk about casting Kerry Condon as Morgan's daughter?
Leterrier: We were looking at your typical little American girls. We wanted a cute girl, but not a beautiful girl, but all the little American actresses are so pretty and beautiful. I was not so happy with the choices we were offered, so I said let's try to see unknowns in England, and she came in and she was amazing. She is the character. She's very unaware of her beauty and I needed someone like this. I couldn't get a super model actress in front of Jet Li, because in order for Danny to fit into this family, she had to be a little freakish. Morgan Freeman was a little off and it's like the little girl and the blind man in Frankenstein. That's what I needed. These people are the only people that see Frankenstein this way.

CS!: What were some of the technical complications that were involved with all of the swinging camera shots?
Leterrier: It was very simple. I wanted to make a super-David Fincherish kind of movie with lots of effects and stuff and then we lost 30% of the money halfway through the film. The problem with American studios were that they couldn't put it in a box. You have to either be an action film, or a drama or something, but this one had everything, so the original studio ran away after they saw the dailies. We really loved the movie, so we all gave back part of our salary so that we could finish the movie. We couldn't get that extra cherry on top of the cake, you know, the visual effects, but that didn't matter actually, since I started working with the actors. I therefore simplified my camera direction in the beginning to let them act. I think it's for the better, because it makes it a little different.

CS!: Did you have any concerns about the amount of violence that was shown in the film?
Leterrier: I'm not so concerned about the violence. Especially in America, people are used to seeing violence, not on the movie screen, but on TV. I'm horrified when I watch the news here, so I was not so scared. But violence is a good way to put young people in the theatre seats. That's why we started the film extremely violent so we could get their attention, and then you can take them on the ride. You can tell them a story and that's why the movie becomes nicer. And I think it's always weird to watch this movie with like urban audiences because in the beginning they're like (makes cheering sounds) and after they're watching and some cry at the end. It's very funny to watch this movie with like your urban audience.

CS!: Can you talk about how you ended up getting Massive Attack to do the soundtrack?
Leterrier: Well, they're my favorite band. I didn't know them personally before but their last album, "The Hundredth Window", came out when I was shooting in Scotland, so it was the soundtrack of my shooting experience. I came back to Paris and edited the film. I thought that they would never accept, because their music is so cinematic that I thought the entire world has asked them to do soundtracks for their film, so I asked everyone else--Aphex Twin, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers--but I was asking all these guys to do Massive Attack style music. Not like this, though. I told them I wanted something organic, something deep moody and trip-hoppish, and then none of them wanted to do it. I came back a little depressed, so I said let's shoot for Massive Attack. Maybe they have like unreleased tracks they want to give us. We sent them a 9-minute edit we did for Cannes a couple years back, and they watched it and they liked it I guess and they said to come over. They live in Bristol, in England, a small little town, and I went there. We were supposed to meet for 20 minutes and this meeting lasted 2 days. We were talking about anything but the movie. We talked about movies in general, comic books, books, arts, music, stuff like that and I became friends with them, but at the end of the weekend, I didn't know if they were going to do the soundtrack and they said "well, come back whenever and let's do the movie." Normally, in a heavily scored movie you have 15 minutes worth of soundtracks. In this one, you have 85 minutes of pure, new Massive Attack material, so I was extremely happy with this. I didn't want to do a rap-fu movie, and I wanted something different.

CS!: In the notes, you described this film as a big risk. What did you mean by that?
Leterrier: It's a big risk because it's neither an action film nor a drama. When the action audience comes and sits down in the theatre, they might get extremely bored in the middle section, and for the people that come to see Morgan Freeman being nice, the first six section with all the violent fights, they might get really freaked out. So that's the risk. I wanted extreme violence, not cartoon violence, but like real violence, street fight violence, to shake the audience up, and then to get them to react to realize that you know, having dinner at a table with a nice man and a nice little girl, eating soup, that's normal and that's nice. People that have that should appreciate it.

Unleashed is in theatres now.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news.php?id=9639

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The Man in the Gorillaz Mask [NY Times article about Gorillaz]

Mon, 16 May 2005 03:31:32 GMT

May 15, 2005
The Man in the Gorillaz Mask

By JON PARELES
LONDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/arts/music/15pare.html?ex=1116820800&en=57fd7dc6f66d19cc&ei=5070

ON the wall of his recording studio, Damon Albarn has written "Uncertainty Leaves Room for Hope" in large black letters. Nearby, the phrase "Dark Is Good" has one "O" crossed out, making it "Dark Is God." These messages loomed directly in front of the mixing board as Mr. Albarn was working on the second album by his alter ego Gorillaz, "Demon Days" (Virgin). "I quite like the idea of covering the walls with the conversation," he said as he showed a visitor around the studio. "Then, having transferred that conversation to something permanent or impermanent, you just whitewash over it and start the next one."

After a decade as the leader of Blur, one of England's most celebrated bands of the 1990's, Mr. Albarn started a new, plural identity, as Gorillaz. Usually, Gorillaz present themselves as a two-dimensional band: four cartoon characters drawn by Jamie Hewlett, who created the punky, unstoppable comic book and movie heroine Tank Girl. Now and then, however, Mr. Albarn can be persuaded to drop the mask and admit that, yes, he is the mastermind of Gorrilaz, an invented band whose debut album has sold six million copies worldwide.

"They helped sidestep the inevitable problem of being an aging art-school rocker," he said with a chuckle. "They solved one identity crisis but helped create another one."

Blur helped define the pomp and swagger - at once nostalgic and defensive - of Britpop in the 1990's, then turned scruffier and stranger as Mr. Albarn fell in love with American indie rock. He was swept into a music-press rivalry with Oasis, as he watched his Britpop get misinterpreted, he said. He wanted to recognize a vanishing English culture, not to tout British chauvinism or turn back the clock. The high visibility of pop stardom soon lost its charms. "You get sick of your own voice, you get sick of seeing yourself on covers of magazines," he said. "It's just like: 'This is uncivilized. I'm just a product here. I'm not in control of it and I'm not really saying anything either.' You turn into, well, a cartoon."

He also spent time traveling and soaking up music in Mali, Trinidad, Morocco and Nigeria, where he has recorded material for Blur's next album. "Something happened to me which just made me realize that the whole thing was a con," he said. "My love of music is much stronger than my love of my own image. I had to separate the two quite dramatically. When I went to Africa for the first time, I got down to playing with musicians and closing my eyes and listening and just not being worried about people looking at me. I lost my self-consciousness somewhat. And now that I've lost it, I really don't want to acquire it again."

Gorillaz got started when Mr. Albarn and Mr. Hewlett shared an apartment after each of them had a longtime romance break up. Mr. Albarn started knocking together music on drum machines and analog synthesizers, and Mr. Hewlett devised characters: the band as an alliance of subcultures. There's square-jawed, Satan-touting Murdoc on bass; a laconic, spiky-haired lead singer called 2D; a young Asian girl named Noodle on guitar and the hefty African-American Russel on drums. They have adventures in the band's video clips, and are about to be marketed as toys. Gorillaz also made a development deal with Dreamworks for a movie spinoff, but abandoned it after three years.

When Gorillaz toured, Mr. Albarn and other musicians performed behind a screen while video projections were shown. After two decades of music video, no one complained about a concert with an unseen band. "With something like Daffy Duck you can feel the soul of the writer behind it sometimes, making some odd, very strong comment," Mr. Albarn said. "I suppose that's what I tried to do."

"Demon Days" is the successor to "Gorillaz," released in 2001. Mingling rock, reggae and hip-hop in songs with a low-fi charm, the music on "Demon Days," as on the previous album, is sparse and shifty. Loose-limbed beats from cheap drum machines, the blips and swoops of old synthesizers, distorted guitar and Mr. Albarn's bleary voice can suddenly make way for orchestral strings, a gospel choir, or a swerve into a different style. The album hints at late-1970's reggae and early hip-hop; its first single, "Feel Good Inc.," harks back to Rick James's "Superfreak." But where "Gorillaz," which was recorded before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, had the spirit of a hazy late-night party, "Demon Days" merges its casual grooves with minor-key melancholy. "It's meant to be night music," Mr. Albarn said. "But it was made during the day, which I suppose destroys the myth in one sentence. You don't need to be in the dark to make dark music. And in fact, if you did you'd probably go completely mad."

Song titles like "Kids With Guns," "Last Living Souls" and "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead" spell out the album's pessimism. In the song "Demon Days," the London Gospel Choir sings, "It's so hard for your soul to survive, you can't even trust the air you breathe." More than one track is punctuated by ominous sirens. "All the songs are like episodes of my worst fears," Mr. Albarn said. "Maybe, hopefully, I've got them out and they're not going to come true."

As on "Gorillaz," there are plenty of guests: the rappers De La Soul, Booty Brown from the Pharcyde, and MF Doom along with Ike Turner on keyboards, the singer Shaun Ryder from Happy Mondays and the actor and director Dennis Hopper, who narrates a parable about innocence, greed and retribution set to a droll reggae bounce. That song leads into a stretch of ethereal vocal harmonies in a clear homage to the Beach Boys. Mr. Albarn said he couldn't make the vocal parts sound right until he had a minor revelation. "If you've ever seen the Beach Boys in footage, they're all smiling, desperately keeping the upbeat Beach Boy thing alive, while Brian Wilson is just absolutely glum as hell. So I did three harmonies smiling with my face. And then one just being really miserable, which was Brian. Now it's got that vibe."

"Demon Days" was produced by Danger Mouse, the alter ego of Brian Burton. His reputation was made by "The Grey Album," which backed up Jay-Z's raps from "The Black Album" with samples from "The Beatles," or "the white album." Although he already had a cartoon name, his musical instincts were his qualifications.

"I construct and deconstruct and reconstruct," Danger Mouse said by telephone from Los Angeles. "We see what you have and we go as far as you can, and we see what tangents you can go on, and then you basically take the best part of all those tangents when you reconstruct. The cartoon thing is a great concept to enable you to be more creative, because it doesn't have to fit into the real world. It just has to fit into what you create."

Mr. Albarn is working with Danger Mouse on the next Blur album, and after that, he plans to write music for London's National Theater, moving completely behind the scenes. "The further I can retreat the better," Mr. Albarn said. "Something happened to me which made me distrust the cult of the personality in music. I don't for one second think that realistically I can completely and utterly become anonymous, because people like to know who's doing what they're doing. But when you look in a kind of book of folk music or written music, and the personality of whoever wrote it comes through in the music, there's not a picture of them next to it, is there? There's just the notes. That's the reason for music."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/arts/music/15pare.html?ex=1116820800&en=57fd7dc6f66d19cc&ei=5070

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With Li on attack, 'Unleashed' no dog [review BY ROGER EBERT]

Sat, 14 May 2005 16:27:14 GMT

Unleashed
With Li on attack, 'Unleashed' no dog

Release Date: 2005

Ebert Rating: ***

BY ROGER EBERT / May 12, 2005
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050512/REVIEWS/50504006

The story is familiar. The dog has been raised from infancy as a killer, obedient to its master. When it wears its collar it is passive. When the collar is removed and an order is given, it turns into a savage murder machine. Then a confusing thing happens. The dog experiences kindness for the first time in its life. Does this mean its master is wrong, and must be disobeyed?

Luc Besson has produced or written some of the most intriguing movies of the last 20 years ("Le Femme Nikita," "The Fifth Element," "Crimson Rivers," "Ong-Bak"). He takes this classic animal story and makes a simple but inspired change: He turns the dog into a human being. Jet Li stars in "Unleashed" as Danny, a lethal martial arts warrior who has been raised in captivity since childhood and is used by Bart, a Glasgow gangster, as a fearsome weapon. Danny lives in a cage under the floor of Bart's headquarters, travels quietly in the gangster's car, and, when his collar is removed, explodes into violent fury and leaves rooms filled with his victims.

This is a story that could have made a laughable movie. That it works is because of the performances of Jet Li and Bob Hoskins, who plays his master. "Danny the Dog" is fearful of his owner, passive in captivity and obedient in action, because he has been trained that way for his whole life. Bart the gangster is another one of those feral characters Hoskins specializes in, a man who bares his teeth and seems prepared to dine on the throats of his enemies. Hoskins, who can be the most genial of men, has a dimension of pitiless cruelty that he revealed in his first starring role, "The Long Good Friday" (1980).

But "Unleashed" would be too simple if it were only about Bart and Danny. Besson's screenplay now adds the character of Sam, a blind piano-tuner played by Morgan Freeman. Sam lives in a gentle world of musicians and pianos and his beloved stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). Danny falls into their lives by accident, after running away from Bart, as a dog is likely to do when it becomes fed up with its master.

In Danny's early memories, a piano figures somehow. A drawing of a piano triggers some of those old shadows, and when he hears piano music with Sam and Victoria, and when they give him his first simple music lessons, a great cloud lifts from his mind and he knows joy for the first time. He also begins to recall his mother, who was a pianist, and remembers fragments of the events that led to him becoming Danny the dog.

The film is ingenious in its construction. It has all the martial arts action any Jet Li fan could possibly desire, choreographed by Yeun Wo-ping, who is the Gerald Arpino of kung-fu and creates improbable but delightful ballets of chops and socks, leaps and twists and kicks and improvisations. Everything happens in a denatured sepia tone that is not black and white nor quite color, but a palette drained of cheer and pressing down like a foggy day.

Because Hoskins is so good at focusing the ferocity of Bart, he distracts us from the impossible elements in the trained-killer plot. Because Morgan Freeman brings an unforced plausibility to every character he plays, we simply accept the piano tuner instead of noticing how implausibly he enters the story. Freeman handles the role in the only way that will work, by playing a piano tuner as a piano tuner, instead of as a plot device in a martial arts movie. His stepdaughter Victoria is invaluable because, as Ann Coulter was explaining when she was so rudely shouted down the other day, women are a civilizing influence on men, who will get up to mischief in each other's company; Victoria's gentleness stirs Danny's humanity more than it inflames his lust.

So many action movies are made an autopilot that I am grateful when one works outside the box. Luc Besson, here as producer and writer, almost always brings an unexpected human element to his action stories; "Crimson Rivers," for example, remains an overlooked triumph in the police procedural genre, taking a murder investigation to a bizarre conclusion.

"Unleashed" ends with a confrontation between Bart and Danny in which Bart reveals the truly twisted depth of his attachment to the "dog." They say dogs and their owners eventually start to resemble each other, but in this case an actual transference seems to be going on.

Cast & Credits

Danny: Jet Li
Sam: Morgan Freeman
Bart: Bob Hoskins
Victoria: Kerry Condon
Righty: Andy Beckwith
Infirmier: Christian Gazio
Wyeth: Michael Jenn
Maddy: Carole Ann Wilson

Focus Features presents a film directed by Louis Leterrier. Written by Luc Besson. Running time: 103 minutes. Rated R (for strong violent content, language and some sexuality-nudity).

source:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050512/REVIEWS/50504006

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Li Unleashed

Wed, 11 May 2005 20:05:40 GMT

Li Unleashed
Source: Edward Douglas
May 11, 2005
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9544

In Zhang Yimou's Hero, Hong Kong action star Jet Li played a steely warrior hired to assassinate a king. For Unleashed, known at one point as Danny the Dog, Li takes on an even more dramatic and challenging role as a young man named Danny, raised like a dog by a brutal UK gangster, played by Bob Hoskins, to take down his enemies with the simple unleashing of his collar. When Danny has a chance to escape, he meets up with a kindly blind piano tuner played by Morgan Freeman, and his daughter Victoria. The two of them teach him about family and life to the point where he wants to give up the violent life of fighting

Jet Li talked to ComingSoon.net about why he wanted to do this very different film and take a role that might finally change perceptions of what is a "typical Jet Li" movie. (Note: English is Li's second language, so some of this interview has been edited for grammatical purposes in order to make it easier to read.)

CS!: Were you happy to show that you had some depth that maybe you haven't been given credit for in the past?
Jet Li: Yeah, that's why I make this film. A few years ago, I talked to Luc [Besson], and he gave me some idea about making another action film, because it had worked before. I didn't like all the ideas, because I said that they sounded familiar. I wanted to do something I never had a chance to play. I had one idea: a message that said "violence is not the only solution." Then two days later he gave me the idea, and said to me "How about you play a dog who is saved by music?" Then we start working on writing this movie and I liked it very much.

CS!: This being your second movie with Luc Besson, did you have more input on the script or were you able to collaborate more on it?
Li: We're like brothers when we work together. I say that he's my personal computer, because every button I push, he comes up with a lot of ideas. Whatever idea I put, he receives. I hope I can work with him again. When I started working on this movie, I already said that next step is a family movie for children, a light comedy. I saw the script. It's finished and pretty good.

CS!: Can you talk about Danny's non-fight movements, and how you choreographed that when he wasn't fighting?
Li: First of all, I found a wonderful acting coach from London. She's a professor who flew over here and worked with me two months before the shooting. We needed to study to forget who Jet Li is, because Danny is only mentally around 8 or 10 years old, so we need to forget a lot of information in order to find empathy. We spent a few weeks to find that empathy and try many ways to put the mask on yourself. Then we did research and watched a lot of different kinds of dogs to start building up Danny's world. We watched different kinds of dogs. When the collar was on, we tried to find puppies and what was their reaction, or the collar off, like a really wild dog. Then we told Wu-Ping what kind of person Danny is and asked what kind of martial arts we can use to help him, because different personalities use different kinds of martial arts. When I play a bad guy, I have a bad guy style, and cop has a tough cop style. Usually, I have a Jet Li style with signature moves, but this time we tried to do just like a dog in the beginning. Dogs, they don't talk a lot; they only use their eyes to show emotion, so when they fight it's very concentrated and simple. Punch! Punch! Punch! And then go to the second one. That's how the martial arts were designed for this person.

CS!: How was it different filming these violent action scenes compared to those for Hero, which were more artistic?
Li: We needed to find a different choreographer that had the special ability. We have three good guys--Yuen Wu-Ping, Corey Yuen and Tony who did Hero--so when we did this film, we called Wu-Ping and convinced him to do it. The martial arts you use in the film is the best way to help the story and the character. In the beginning, Danny just fights like an animal but once he grows up and understands a little bit of life through Morgan's character, he can control his body slightly. By the end of the movie, he's totally in control. He knows he doesn't want to hurt people. He wants to stop the fights.

CS!: In the martial arts movies of the '60s and 70's, it focused on different fighting styles, but in contemporary movies, it's more about an actor's style. Why do you think that is?
Li: A lot of people ask if Jet Li creates some new movements in new films, but to tell you the truth, every human being has two legs and two arms. I can't create more than this. A lot of movements we already did, but the new thing for an action film is the drama, the story, and the character. If you like the character and the story, you think that the same punch is different. Like a love story. You make a thousand love stories with man and girl, so it's how to make it touch your heart, that's the power of the story. I think with martial arts, the best way to use it in the film is the material, how to help the character and help the story.

CS!: Do you foresee a time when you do a film that doesn't have any martial arts or action at all?
Li: This is the kind of question [I've been asked] ever since the first day I started making action films. The reality is that whether the studios are in Asia or America, they are a business. They look at you and you've already proved you can do action films, so you do action films until one day you prove that you can do more than action, then they will give you a different role to play. Myself, I want to do a film without action, that's the dream. But if I'm the studio president who's in charge of the studio, I'd give drama to Tom Hanks and comedy I'd give to Jim Carrey…why take the risk? Until one day you need the proof. That's why I always try to prove myself. This movie didn't work in the States. When we sent it to the studios, nobody wanted to make it, so that's why I brought it to Europe to make this film. To try to find a little bit of opportunity to prove I can do more than just fighting.

CS!: You've been talking more and more about producing your own films. Will you be producing more?
Li: If I want to say something from my heart. When I come here and I start making a lot of English films, the audience, especially the younger audience, they think "Jet Li kick ass!" At the beginning, I was very happy, but a few times later I consider that that's the only message I can give to young kids? So I hope that I can give more than just that. That's why I want to make this film, so that younger people see violence is not the only solution. Look at Danny. He's physically very strong — he can knock out 20 people in a few seconds — but he's an animal. He doesn't care about the others in the beginning. The animal is different from the human, because humans care about the others. That's the difference. Animals are selfish. They only think about themselves.

CS!: Morgan told us that he didn't really help you that much with the acting, but that you may say otherwise. Is this true?
Li: He told me I should say that! I never want to make a movie with him again! (laughter) He didn't tell me the details on how to act, but he made everybody on the set believe Danny's world. Usually, on a movie set, people are joking around about sports and politics, but when he comes in, it got quiet right away! It gave me the chance to concentrate that I'm not Jet Li, I'm Danny. There were just a few people there, and I think it helped a lot. He made me believe every day I saw him that he was my uncle or father. I wanted to hug him. I feel that's the way I can breathe and take some risks. Yeah, he showed me everything.

CS!: How about working with Kerry Condon, who played his daughter? Did working with her in the more touching family scenes help you find a different side of Jet Li?
Li: Yeah, she's very genuine. She just has the truth coming out from her heart, so I think that helped a lot. Everybody tried their best, except for Bob, who behaved very bad. (laughter)

CS!: It's a bit surprising that there wasn't more romance between you and her character.
Li: I had a lot more romance but they cut it! (laughs)

CS!: Have you seen Ong-Bak? I was wondering what you thought about new generation of martial artists like Tony Jaa.
Li: Luc [Besson] bought the rights, so he showed it to me two years ago. I think he did a wonderful job but it's not new! In 1980's, Sammo Hung started that kind of action films, just kicking people's heads and right away, you see the power. You feel sorry for all the stunt men, because they show the power. They show they try really really hard. In the 1980s, all the Hong Kong movies look like that, but in the 1990's, we don't want the stunt man to get hurt and then we grow up and do different kinds of styles. Because people in the past fifteen years didn't have the chance to see that kind of hardcore fight, suddenly this guy come in and show all the powers and all the genius move.

CS!: Do you see him as someone coming up who might be able to take over when you decide to stop doing martial arts?
Li: Honestly, I hope he's successful in the future. I like him, and he likes me too. He's very good, but I don't want the stunt men to get hurt or injured. We can use technology to help show the same power, and we don't want to really see the stunt men stand there while you kick them in the head and punch their nose. That's too hard for the stunt men. I do all those stunts and I know they get injured and get hurt.

CS!: Stuff like that was very common in the '80s?
Li: Yeah, if you find some old tapes of Sammo Hung. He shot a movie every day where the ambulances would be there taking people to the hospital every day. That's the Hong Kong action movie in the 1980s. All the actors want to show that they can do this—jumping from building to building and punching you with no cut until you hit the ground. That was the 1980s!

Unleashed opens everywhere on Friday. Check back later for an interview with director Louis Leterrier.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9544

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In the Future: Unleashed

Wed, 11 May 2005 20:04:36 GMT

In the Future: Unleashed
Source: Edward Douglas
May 9, 2005
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9509

While in New York to talk about the upcoming action drama Unleashed, the film's stars Jet Li and Morgan Freeman and director Louis Leterrier talked to ComingSoon.net about their upcoming projects.

2005 was a good year for Li, as his historical epic Hero was finally released to critical acclaim and commercial success. Unleashed continues his run trying to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor. In the film, written specifically for him by French action film maven Luc Besson, Li plays Danny, a young man who has been trained from youth to be an obedient dog-like assassin for a tough mobster (Bob Hoskins)

Li's currently shooting a movie in China with directors Ronny Yu and Yuen Wo-Ping. As a producer on this untitled project, Li had a lot more at stake with it, but essentially, it's about the son of a world-class Chinese fighter who disappears after a personal tragedy and then returns for a big tournament. Li waxed philosophical on the questions he asked himself while making the film. "Through my life experiences like learning martial arts for more than thirty years and making movies for more than 25 years, [I wanted to ask] what is martial arts? What is Wu Shu? What is Kung Fu? Why learn martial arts and what do you want to do? I just discovered a lot of personal stuff."

Last time Li was in New York, he told ComingSoon.net about another project he's wanted to do in which he plays a monk in New York, so we asked for an update. "I'm still working on that," he told us, "and tonight, I will meet with the director Wong Wing. A lot of studios want to buy it, but I make the movie from my heart. I don't want to sell it and change it to an action action film. In the beginning, the studio bought it and saw that there was no action and then they don't want to make it, so I bought it back."

"Next, maybe I will make a studio movie," he said when asked about his other ambitions. "I want to make a family light comedy, to prove that I can do comedy. To make a movie for children, my daughters." Li mentioned that he has given Luc Besson the challenge of writing such a movie for him, and joked that his four daughters helped him prepare for his recent appearance on the estrogen-laced daytime talk show "The View."

After winning an Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby, Morgan Freeman was looking for something different, but his turn as the blind piano turner Sam in Unleashed was not too much of a departure. On the other hand, Freeman will branch out a bit by playing an assassin in The Contract, from Bruce Beresford, who directed Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy. "I'm a little concerned," he told us. "There's going to be a lot of action in this and I remember remarking when I did 'Robin Hood' that they would wait until I got gray hair before they started giving me action roles and there was something unfair about that. Now, I'm in the gym and I'm doing yoga to get myself physically prepared to go through this without hurting myself. I'm a little excited, but scared. I know that Bruce is going to protect me though." Freeman also joked that after playing God, the President and an assassin, the only thing left for him would be to play a woman.

Unleashed director Louis Leterrier's claim to fame was his 2002 film The Transporter starring Jason Statham, which did well enough to warrant a sequel, due out September 2. He told us a funny story about how the film's cult success has helped his status with people he meets. "It's great for me because as a Frenchman, I get stopped at the American customs. They don't like the French anymore, because it's worse than being a terrorist," he joked. "They stopped me and said "So, you come here on business. What do you do?"…"I'm a filmmaker"…"And what did you direct?"…"Something called The Transporter"…"Oh! Welcome in, sir!"

"It's a fun little movie," he said when asked what fans should expect, "but it's a simple movie. If I was to do an action movie, I didn't want [it to be] a stupid action movie. I wanted something very human; that's the important part of the movie. So 'Transporter 2' will be the same thing, more human and more action. It was shot in Miami, where Frank Martin is protecting the son of a drug czar. Jason is back, as is François Berléand's French cop." He figured that Qi Shu's character died in the trunk because she's not in the sequel.

When asked about his favorite sequence in the sequel, he told us "I choreographed one sequence, because Corey Yuen couldn't be here for the final sequence, which is a fight with a firehose where he ties six people up. That's a funny sequence. There's also a fight sequence within a falling jet with Zero-G fighting. It's pretty funny." Though finished with the editing, Letterier is having some problems with the film's rating. "I shot a hard R movie, but Fox came back and were like ‘We did a test and I think we want to make it PG-13 now.'"

Unleashed opens on Friday. Look for more with Leterrier, Li and Freeman this week. The Transporter 2 is scheduled to open on September 2.

source:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9509

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Chan promotes AIDS awareness in Vietnam

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:21:41 GMT

Chan promotes AIDS awareness in Vietnam
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-04-23-jackie-chan-vietnam_x.htm?POE=LIFISVA

HA LONG CITY, Vietnam (AP) — Action film star Jackie Chan took time out from jumping off buildings and beating up bad guys to play with children Saturday while promoting HIV/AIDS awareness in Vietnam, where health experts warn infection rates are on the verge of exploding.

Hong Kong action film star Jackie Chan visits a communal health care center in Ha Long City, Vietnam.
By Richard Vogel, AP

Chan, 51, was in the communist country for the first time as a United Nations goodwill ambassador. He visited a communal health center and a support group session for people caring for family members with HIV/AIDS in northern Quang Ninh province, which has some of Vietnam's highest infection rates.

A dozen expectant mothers were waiting for prenatal checkups at the clinic in Uong Bi district when Chan walked in, telling one woman, "Don't worry. The doctor (will) take care of you."

Expectant mothers will be given counseling and information on preventing the disease at the center under UNICEF's first such program in Vietnam. They will also have the option of being tested.

Later, children on bikes chased after Chan as he strolled through the small town, calling out his name in Vietnamese and greeting him with "Chao Bac!" or "Hello Uncle!"

Chan repeatedly urged them, "Wear a helmet. You have to keep safe."

At the support group session, Chan played with children who had lost a parent to HIV/AIDS and some youngsters who were battling the disease themselves.

He said more has to be done to get affordable treatment to those infected in poor countries like Vietnam. He also stressed the importance of eliminating discrimination and social stigma attached to the disease.

"Twenty years ago, I'm the one who was scared about HIV ... but from the education I learned that's wrong," he said. "Otherwise, (victims) cannot go to work, they cannot go to school and they would be hiding in their houses."

His four-day trip will also include visiting a Buddhist pagoda in Hanoi where monks help counsel young people infected with HIV/AIDS, along with a sunset cruise on picturesque Halong Bay, dotted with thousands of limestone islands.

The Hong Kong native and martial arts expert, well-known for his Hollywood hits "Rush Hour," "Rumble in the Bronx" and "Shanghai Noon," had flown in from Cambodia where he was raising awareness about land mines prior to visiting neighboring Vietnam.

Health experts have warned that Vietnam is on the cusp of an explosive HIV/AIDS epidemic. Last year, U.S. President George W. Bush selected the country as one of 15 in the world — the only one in Asia — to receive emergency funding to try to control the disease.

Injection drug users and prostitutes still make up the bulk of Vietnam's HIV infections, but pregnant women have become a growing risk group, with infection rates increasing tenfold over the past seven years.

Since Vietnam's first HIV/AIDS case was detected in 1990, the country has recorded nearly 85,000 cases. However, some health officials believe the actual number of infected people is closer to 245,000.

source:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-04-23-jackie-chan-vietnam_x.htm?POE=LIFISVA

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A Star the World Over but Almost Unknown Here [Amitabh Bachchan]

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 08:00:44 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/movies/15indi.html
April 15, 2005

A Star the World Over but Almost Unknown Here

By RACHEL SALTZ
Correction Appended

If globalization has whetted America's appetite for the exotic - Jackie Chan and Hong Kong cinema, Japanese anime and manga - wide swaths of the world's pop culture have yet to pique our imagination. Consider, for example, Amitabh Bachchan, who has appeared in more than 150 movies since 1969 and was voted "actor of the millennium" in a 1999 BBC online poll, but is still charmed to find that he has an audience in the United States.

"I'm wonderstruck that my films should be here," he said in an interview this week, having arrived for a 12-film series, "Amitabh Bachchan: The Biggest Film Star in the World!," at the Walter Reade Theater. He also appears tonight at Alice Tully Hall. "It endorses the fact that people want to take seriously cinema in other parts of the world."

The undisputed king of Indian cinema in the 1970's and 80's, Mr. Bachchan (pronounced BUH-chun) is a megastar not only in his homeland but also in places like Nigeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. "Amitabh was the star who really internationalized Indian cinema," said Richard Peña, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and an organizer of the retrospective. "When Amitabh became really big, in the 1970's, that's when Bollywood went to Africa and other parts of Asia and the Middle East."

Mr. Bachchan, now 62, has a commanding physical presence. His intense brown eyes, ringed with blue, can stare down a miscreant or disarm an audience with their sadness. And at 6 foot 3, he seems bigger on screen than everyone around him, with long, long legs that serve him equally well in his kick-heavy fight sequences and in dance scenes, where he has a playful charm - part clown, part dandy, part patrician on a romp. The patrician part is not surprising: his father was a famous Hindi poet and his family was close to the Nehru-Gandhi clan.

He created his most important screen persona in films like "Zanjeer" (1973), in which he plays a police inspector who seems to dispense justice single-handedly, and "Amar Akbar Anthony" (1977), in which he plays a Christian outlaw who in a wonderful statement of Indian secularism has a Hindu and a Muslim brother. Those characters are almost always spoken of and written about collectively as the Angry Young Man, but Mr. Bachchan does not think that is a good fit.

"These are wonderful epithets that journalists coin because it makes their writing easier," he said. "You have somebody going against the system, somebody taking on the establishment, and suddenly he's dubbed an Angry Young Man."

The characters resonated, he said, because they reflected a moment "in the political life of the country when it was felt by the common man that the state and the establishment were unable to perform their duties to the level desired by the people."

"When you have someone taking on the system," he added, "you begin to admire him, adore him, hero-worship him. It makes a good drama. And it makes good storytelling and great screenplays."

After a period in the 90's when he was given weak parts in weak films, Mr. Bachchan finds himself in the midst of a career renaissance, thanks to the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," of which he was the host. Everyone advised him against doing it, he said, but "I gave it a shot, and suddenly it became so big." So big that he was again offered good roles in good films.

In "Dev" (2004), one of the best of the new bunch, Mr. Bachchan plays a police commissioner, a version of that young man who took on the system, but who has himself now taken on gravitas and moral weight. He fights corruption, and above all wants to uphold the Indian Constitution and find equal justice for Muslims and Hindus.

Does Mr. Bachchan, with all his status, feel a responsibility to take on roles like this? "As actors we must do what is asked of us to do," he said. "If perchance it happens to be representative of something that is moral and good for society, then we suddenly seem to take the credit. But it's just another role."

"Amitabh Bachchan: The Biggest Film Star in the World!" continues through Tuesday at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Tickets $10; $7 for students; $6 for Film Society of Lincoln Center members; $5 for 65+ at weekday matinees and for children 12 and younger; information, (212) 875-5600. Mr. Bachchan is appearing tonight at Alice Tully Hall at 7:30. Tickets $60; information, (212) 875-5050.

Correction: April 16, 2005, Saturday:

A picture caption in Weekend yesterday with an article about Amitabh Bachchan, an Indian movie star who is the subject of a film series at the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan, misidentified the actress shown with him in a scene from the 1973 movie "Abhimaan." She was Jaya Bhaduri, his wife. (Subeer Kumar is the name of the character Mr. Bachchan played.)

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/movies/15indi.html

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By Playing at 'Rage,' China Dramatizes Its Rise

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 07:57:56 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/international/asia/21letter.html?hp
April 21, 2005

LETTER FROM ASIA
By Playing at 'Rage,' China Dramatizes Its Rise

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, April 19 - The banners had been carefully printed, the slogans memorized, and the students and young unleashed onto the streets of China's largest, most sophisticated city, where they were to speak sacred truths and make the enemies of the people tremble.

Chinese today have little experience of mass organized protests, so when the Government tolerated - some would say encouraged - a huge anti-Japanese demonstration here that flirted with turning into a riot over the weekend, for many it bore echoes of the mass manipulation of students of another era, the Cultural Revolution.

For hours on Saturday, thousands of Chinese, from teenagers to people in their 30's, lay siege to the Japanese consulate in this city, smashing its windows and defacing its walls with a copious rain of rocks and bottles. But for all the expressions of anger against Japan by people far too young to have memories of China's brutal subjugation by its neighbor, at its most basic level this was a festival of runaway nationalism, of a government-nurtured Chinese-ness.

Declaring themselves to be all one people, the demonstrators proclaimed their love of the police who escorted them as they marched to the consulate, smashing Japanese shops along the way. Banners extolled Chinese greatness, in contrast to little Japan, chanters called for their homeland to stand tall, and talk was dominated by Chinese "feelings," a word repeated over and over, as if no other feelings counted.

Revealingly, people who had lived through the real Cultural Revolution, not the sanitized one taught in China's history books, watched from the sidelines with looks of amazement and worry. They were old enough to remember just how badly things can go when intoxication is the order of the day, and laws are swept aside by feelings.

"I watched the police cars escorting the demonstrators and felt this all looked familiar, like an official event in the Cultural Revolution, but those drew bigger crowds and were more emotional," said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University who emerged from a public library to watch the march go by. "I observed it as a bystander, and the people observing around me looked indifferent, seemingly full of reservations."

Shanghai is the most dazzling symbol of a China that has changed so much since the Cultural Revolution as to be almost unrecognizable. But in some important ways, most notably the government's will to control information and through it people's minds, the events of the weekend here and their aftermath show that this country has barely changed at all.

The Maoist slogans of 40 years ago have been replaced by anti-Japanese watchwords, and then as now, few of those caught up in the excitement paused to examine the relationship of today's slogans to the truth. Here were students mouthing such claims as "Japan has never apologized to China," or "Japanese textbooks whitewash history." Many Japanese textbooks have recently de-emphasized atrocities committed in China, and some have been widely distributed. But in China, the most tendentious of them is the one cited as a representative sample, although it is used by less than 1 percent of Japanese schools.

Others said, trembling with conviction, that Japan wants to keep China down, or even instigate the country's breakup. Never mind that for over two decades, Japan has been a leading source of development assistance for China - to the tune of $30 billion in low interest loans - helping build everything from Shanghai's futuristic airport to expensive highway and water systems in the country's vast, impoverished west.

Few in the Chinese crowds, including many educated in the country's best schools, seemed aware of facts like those, or of any other side to the story save what could be fit into the dichotomy of a China that is essentially good and a Japan that is predatory, evil, conniving or, in a word heard over and over, "disgusting."

Like anything that involves information in China, this ignorance seems the result of careful planning. Since diplomatic relations between the two countries were normalized in 1972, for example, Japanese officials have apologized numerous times to China for the suffering their country inflicted in the 20th century. In 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the war's end, for example, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama spoke of the " tremendous damage and suffering" his country had caused, adding, "I regard, in a spirit of humanity, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology."

But China's state-controlled media have usually focused on finding fault with each Japanese pronouncement, sustaining the belief that Japan has indeed never apologized.

The largest question, perhaps, is why China would so carefully sustain anger at Japan.

One possibility is that in recent years, the legitimacy of China's leadership has rested on few things so much as the idea of inevitability - a destined ascension of the country to prosperous world-power status and a return to the unquestioned pre-eminence in the East that it enjoyed before the 20th century. In this picture there is little room for Japan, a country that has derailed China's ambitions before, and suddenly seems unwilling to fade.

This could help explain China's reactions to Tokyo's bid for a United Nations Security Council seat and discussions under way in Japan about revising the country's so-called peace constitution, as well as Chinese nervousness about Taiwan, which Japan, together with the United States, recently called a joint security concern.

By midweek, signs were multiplying that China's leaders were rethinking their confrontation with Japan, at least at the level of public relations. With the ugliness toward their neighbor threatening a loss of international sympathy on other issues, China first reportedly made a quiet offer to repair Japan's damaged consulate, and on Tuesday urged an end to demonstrations.

Left aside in the weekend's atmospherics in the effort to dispel them was the question of whether China has done a better job teaching history than its neighbor. In the West, it is accepted as fact that more Chinese were killed by the policies of Mao Zedong than by the Japanese, including many by summary execution and other atrocities that are glossed over in Chinese textbooks. In those books, Mao is still treated with reverence.

China also claims never to have seized territory from a neighbor, but China attacked India by surprise in 1962 and the details of other campaigns, from Korea and Xinjiang in the north to Vietnam and Tibet in the country's south and west, are also absent from textbooks.

More remarkable than any glance at the receding past, however, was the way news of the anti-Japanese demonstrations has been treated in China in the here and now. Chinese authorities televised notices that the protests had not been approved on the eve of Saturday's anti-Japanese demonstration, which served as much as anything else as an announcement of the event. The news the next day avoided all mention of disorder. Similarly there were no images of young people pelting the Japanese consulate at their leisure, within arm's reach of paramilitary police.

The seeming contradictions in all of this were not lost on all Chinese, however. Discussions have raged all week on the Internet, with many questioning their countrymen's behavior and the government's permissiveness toward anti-Japanese violence. "How shameful is it that to release our emotions we damaged the property of our countrymen and bullied the weak," wrote one forum participant? "You call yourselves patriotic? Patriotic what?"

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/21/international/asia/21letter.html?hp

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Jamie Foxx Oscar Speech and Press Room video clip

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 20:20:27 GMT

Jamie Foxx
RAY

NOMINATED ROLE
Jamie Foxx plays singer Ray Charles, who overcame both blindness and drug addiction to become one of the music business's leading artists.

Check out the Press room interview:
http://www.oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/win_34451.html

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
I guess we got to do it again. "Oh, Ah!" Yeah, you're ready. That's for Ray Charles. Give it up for Ray Charles and his beautiful legacy. And thank you, Ray Charles, for living.

I got so many people to thank tonight. First I want to start it out with Taylor Hackford. Taylor, you took a chance, man. I mean that love for Ray Charles was deep, down in the earth. It's cracked open. And it's spilling. And everybody's drowning in this love. I thank you for taking a chance on this film. And thank you for waiting 15 years to get me to do it. I want to thank you.

I want to thank Crusader. I want to thank my agents. I want to thank Rick Kurtzman. I want to thank Kim Hodges. I want to thank Steve Smooke. I want to thank my managers, Jaime King and Marcus King. Let's live this African American dream. It's beautiful. I'm glad I'm with you. I ain't never leaving you. I'm glad I'm with you.

I got a chance to meet a whole lot of people, experiencing this. And other people I want to thank, I want to thank my sister. Four feet, eleven inches of nothing but pure love. I want to thank my daughter for telling me just before I got up here, "If you don't win dad, you're still good."

I'm just ... I see Oprah and I see Halle. I just want to say your names. I want to talk to you later. Both of you. Because Oprah got -- allowed me to meet somebody by the name of Sidney Poitier. And, yes, Sidney Poitier said, "I saw you once. And I looked in your eyes and there was a connection." And he says, "I give to you responsibility." So, I'm taking that responsibility tonight. And, thank you, Sidney.

This is probably going to be the toughest part of this speech. My daughter shares my grandmother's name, "Marie." My grandmother's name is Estelle Marie Talley. She's not here tonight. And this is going to be the toughest part. But she was my first acting teacher. She told me to stand up straight. Put your shoulders back. Act like you got some sense.

We would go places. And I would wild out. And she would say, "Act like you've been somewhere." And then when I would act the fool, she would beat me. She would whup me. And she could get an Oscar for the way she whupped me because she was great at it. And after she whipped me, she would talk to me and tell me why she whipped me. She said I want you to be a southern gentleman. She still talks to me now. Only now, she talks to me, in my dreams. And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight because we got a lot to talk about. I love you.

SPECIAL ONLINE THANKS
The Academy

RELATED WINS
Sound Mixing

NOMINEES IN THIS CATEGORY
Jamie Foxx - RAY (Winner)
Don Cheadle - HOTEL RWANDA
Johnny Depp - FINDING NEVERLAND
Leonardo DiCaprio - THE AVIATOR
Clint Eastwood - MILLION DOLLAR BABY

source:
http://www.oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/win_34451.html

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Mad Max

subfab — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 15:37:45 GMT

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=679517

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Moviegoers trapped by pre-show ads

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 02:44:32 GMT

MSNBC.com

Moviegoers trapped by pre-show ads
Advertising puts a damper on the theater experience
COMMENTARY
By Andy Dehnart
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 3:56 p.m. ET April 13, 2005

A new attraction is coming to theater multiplexes across the country.

Regal Cinemas calls their version of this feature “The 2wenty,” named so because it runs during the 20 minutes before the advertised start time of feature films, and because replacing letters with numbers in names is witty and cute. Regal says “The 2wenty,” which is shown with digital projectors, is “a larger-than-life pre-show adding unique and special entertainment to the REG movie-going experience.” The country’s largest theater chain refers to it as “quality entertainment supplied by our four content partners.”

To understand what this is really about, replace “entertainment” with “advertisements” and “content partners” with “companies that are paying for these advertisements.” Essentially, movie theater chains have found a way to give us even more advertising: by running pre-show ad films while the lights are still on and audiences are finding their seats.

In addition to Regal's pre-show film, AMC has a version called the “Pre-Show Countdown,” and Loews Cineplex is working on something that will similarly occupy those 20 minutes.

Regal’s “2wenty” is not boring. In fact, it’s well-constructed and engaging, a series of entertainment-related infomercials and featurettes. If all advertisements were like this, they’d be significantly less annoying. The problem is that “The 2wenty” starts 20 minutes before the film is supposed to start, and thus it completely changes the nature of the film-going experience as we know it.

No way to tune out ads
Perhaps the slide-show advertisements that used to be shown before the actual film began were outdated and ready to be retired. Static images and hokey puns aren’t exactly in step with this high-speed, digital era. And their introduction years ago probably irritated some people who preferred to stare at a blank screen before watching a movie.

But the slide-show ads were easy to ignore. These new pre-show advertising films are not. Most significantly, the sound is loud and overbearing, preventing the quiet conversation between audience members. The noise from the pre-show may obscure the awful sound of popcorn being chewed by the halfwit sitting behind you, but talking while it plays is nearly impossible.

Worse, some people are beginning to watch these pre-shows with such rapt attention that finding a seat increasingly means irritating those who are deeply absorbed in this new advertising-watching experience. Everyone, suddenly, becomes that annoying person who shows up five minutes after the film has started. And if people really start showing up 20 minutes early just to watch these new advertisements, as the chains would undoubtedly love, finding a seat closer to the official start time may become even more difficult.

Of course, the actual time a film starts is generally a solid 20 minutes before the beginning of the feature. In advance of the film, we’re generally treated to a series of commercials, followed by trailers, followed by a digitally animated intro for the theater chain that involves flying around larger-than-life 3-D versions of branded soft drink cups and candy bars.

A prison of advertising
These advertisements alone are so annoying to some movie-goers that an entire organization exists to combat them (and now the new pre-show films). The Captive Motion Picture Audience of America exists to “[convey] the clear dissatisfaction audiences have with the movie viewing experience” and “to show TV-like advertising before movies is well past the line of ‘ad-creep,’ is unprofitable, and will lead to a consumer backlash.” Among other things, the organization has produced signs for audience members to leave on their seats. They say, “RESERVED. This patron is avoiding cinema advertising and will return when the feature begins.”

Are we really to the point where we need to stake out territory in a theater and then flee until the beginning of the actual feature? Are we really trapped in a prison of advertisements?

Apparently so. National Cinema Network, AMC theaters’ subsidiary that produces its “Pre-Show Countdown,” pitches its services to advertisers by noting that the content is shown “in a captive environment.” The Cinema Advertising Council admits as much: “Advertising at the movies reaches active and affluent consumers in a uniquely captive setting.” In other words, since we’ve paid and are waiting to see the film, theaters can do whatever they want to us.

Late last month, AMC and Regal announced that they are combining their cinema advertising divisions into one company, which will produce a shared pre-show. Loews Cineplex also recently announced plans for its own advertising-filled pre-show. While advertising before films has been around for a while now, they’re clearly on the verge of tragically dominating the movie-going experience, as chain theaters now dominate the cinema landscape.

It’s somewhat surprising that a company like AMC, which has done quite a bit to improve the film-going experience — by creating multiplexes, designing stadium seating that makes the people in front of you truly invisible, adding cup holders to armrests, and constructing “love seats” where the armrests move out of the way — would damage that experience with a pre-show. And it really does damage the experience, as these pre-shows fundamentally alter the dynamics of movie-going.

No socializing, no relief
Movie-going is often described as an antisocial activity. In fact, for those who see films with others, it's the opposite.

Although staring forward in a darkened room does not, on its surface, appear to be a communal activity, what occurs before and after the film is quite social. Seeing a movie is a shared experience that occurs in real-time; it’s like reading the same novel simultaneously and being able to discuss it after only a couple of hours have elapsed. And now we can't enter a theater and have a conversation with our friends.

Seeing films in theaters is about transition. We break from one part of our lives and settle into the lives of others. With pre-show films, there’s no time to make the transition, to settle into the semi-darkened room. One of the major reasons to see films in theaters, besides being able to watch on a large screen with surround-sound, is to be in an isolated environment that allows total immersion in the on-screen action. Films viewed in theaters are removed from everyday life, whereas DVD viewing can be interrupted by the telephone, a hungry cat or any number of other distractions. The quiet time before the film begins — even if it is preceded by commercials and trailers — allows us to shift into a mode that we don't normally experience in everyday life.

Entering a theater that’s overwhelmed by cacophonous advertising doesn't allow us to leave one world behind to enter another. The traffic on the way to the theater; the noisy, popcorn- and children-infested lobby; the pre-show ads; the trailers and commercials that begin at the advertised time; and the film all become part of the same thing, a giant blur of noise and sound.

We may watch these new ads, but somehow, that doesn’t seem like the best way for advertisers to get our attention.

Andy Dehnart is a writer and teacher who publishes reality blurred, a daily summary of reality TV news.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7465822/page/2/

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Doing the Kung Fu Hustle with Tommy Tom [vfxworld.com article]

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 08:19:55 GMT

Visit this article online at (http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=2453)

Doing the Kung Fu Hustle with Tommy Tom
Visual effects producer Tommy Tom tells Tara DiLullo how Hong Kong’s Centro Digital Pictures raised the CGI bar for Kung Fu Hustle.

http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=57c5ed8a&atype=articles&id=2453&page=1#

Hong King cinema is getting a makeover at the hands of writer/director/actor Stephen Chow. The Shanghai-born filmmaker and self-professed martial arts addict is one of the hottest names in Hong Kong cinema, having starred in more than 50 films and directed seven. Chow’s name in the west is only just getting mainstream recognition from the success of Shaolin Soccer in 2001. The quirky action-comedy film mixed kung fu, soccer and outlandish visual effects, producing what might best be described as Shaw Brothers meets The Matrix by way of the Looney Tunes. Soccer made important ripples with critics and enthusiastic cult audiences, creating enough buzz to open the door for his new follow-up film, Kung Fu Hustle (Gong fu in Asia, opening April 8 on a limited basis).

With Hustle, Chow again goes back to classic Asian martial arts films for his basic inspiration, but then twists expectations by taking his signature, skewed use of visual effects and humor to an even more heightened level. In the film, he plays Sing, a small time thief yearning to join the ruthless Axe Gang. Looking to become worthy, he attempts to extort the residents at the apartments known as Pig Sty Alley. He accidentally kicks off a turf war between the residents and the Axe gang, leaving him stuck in the middle of an outrageous battle of legendary martial art proportions. In helping him achieve the film’s distinct look and visual effects sequences, Chow returned to Centro Digital Pictures in Hong Kong, the vfx house that helped him create Shaolin Soccer. Visual effects producer, Tommy Tom says they happily accepted the challenge of collaborating again with the filmmaker to bring his gravity defying ideas to life.
“Four months before the shooting, Centro’s vfx team started pre-production meetings with Stephen Chow,” Tom explains. “Stephen was confident that Centro could bring the visual effects of Kung Fu Hustle to a new level, so we discussed the concept and possibility of the vfx during those meetings. After we had a rough idea of how Stephen would like the vfx to be, concept artwork was developed by Centro Creative Art Department. We also started to develop our software for creating certain effects and animation tests.” Having worked together before, Tom says Hustle was easier to develop from the start. “One advantage of working with Stephen on this film from Shaolin, was that he understands what effects can and can’t do now. We worked with him on Shaolin Soccer and we think he’s a very talented director and a really fast learner when it comes to special effects. When he was shooting Shaolin, I feel that he didn’t feel as safe and as confident in using effects. Now, I think he has confidence with us and in using effects as well. Also, when he would suggest what he wants to do and we think it was quite impossible to achieve, we would talk to him and he would listen. He’s the smartest director that I’ve ever worked with and he actually listens to us!” he chuckles.

Due to the intense visual effects sequences blocked in the film, Tom and other Centro colleagues made sure they were present on set during the shoot so they could help facilitate the post-production process as early as possible. “We did read the script before the production began and we had many meetings before the shooting to discuss about the treatment of the visual effects. He will always listened to us whenever there was an effects shot. When there was an effects shot, we would have a meeting first and we would suggest to him how we needed him to shoot the effects shot. Sometimes, he even asked our opinion with other shots. He will not always accept our opinion and he would always make the final decision, but he would digest our input and listen. Stephen was also filled with creative ideas during the shooting, so there were visual effects shots that were improvised along the way. He loves to improvise, not even just on effects, but also with the script… He’s a thinker.”
While Hustle is primarily a martial arts film, Chow also introduces a myriad of other styles and a strong comedic tone that meant Centro had an equally diverse array of visual effects to create. “There’s a lot of wire work, CG stunts and effects sequences. We shot some scenes in chroma key and composited it with a live background. There are some shots that are 100% CGI, like a shot in the casino where Stephen wanted us to break all of the casino up with a kind of kung fu, called Lion Roar. It’s almost like a sound effect. He wanted us to break all the walls, so we had to create the scene totally with CGI. The main difference between this one and Shaolin Soccer, was that this one is full 2K resolution, Cineon tech scan. This is one is a step higher for us. We did work like it on Kill Bill, but this one has a lot more effects shots compared to Kill Bill. We did a lot of preparation for this one and revised the pipeline in order to work in a 10-bit film. We also did the digital intermediary for this movie, so the whole movie was scanned using a Thomson Spirit Datacine scanner and it was color corrected in Quantel IQ.”

The comedy also meant that Centro was given the opportunity to create effects that really broadened the humor and sometimes became the visual punch line for many of the jokes.

“We enjoyed working this way,” Tom says. “In Shaolin Soccer, it was kind of the same, in that the effects brought out the comedy, so with this one, we had done it before. When Stephen is working he is always thinking about how he’s going to shoot it and how he can make the scene funnier, but he doesn’t talk much on set. He’s not as funny as he is in the movie,” he laughs.

Asked to detail one of their most challenging sequences, Tom thinks for a moment and offers, “I think every shot in the movie is a challenge, but in one of the scenes Sing (Stephen Chow) attempted to kill the Landlady (Yuen Cha), but Sing ended up being attacked by snakes. Some real snakes were used in filming this scene, CG snakes were created that had body contact with Sing. In one shot, Sing was bit on the mouth by two snakes and he tried to pull them off. In the shoot, we put two clips on his mouth and a rope was tied on the clips. The clips were use to simulate the mouth deformation and the rope was to simulate the snakes. In the shot, Sing pulled off the rope and ran away. In post-production, we replaced the rope and clips with two CG snakes. To create a photorealistic CG snake, we collected extensive video footage of snakes performing a complete range of actions. After much micro study of snakes, we then started to develop software for creating photo realistic snakeskin. A real snakeskin was also digitally scanned that was later used as texture mapping for the snake. The keyframed animated snakes were composited into the live plate with Sing holding the rope. Re-touch of the clips and rope in the live plate was also needed. We had three artists spending nearly two months to complete this scene.

“I also especially like the scene in the middle of the movie, where there are two assassins using a piano-like instrument to attack the good guy, with sound effects,” he continues. “The weapon is like music and it turned out pretty good. The original idea was from a very old black-and-white Hong King movie from like 50 years ago. It was very a simple effect in that film. Stephen’s idea was to update that idea with CGI. Locally in Hong Kong, when people saw that scene, it reminded them of those movies. It turns out to be most people’s favorite scene in the movie. It’s not technically the most difficult, but the final outcome I think is the best scene. When they see it, they know what it is, just not like they’ve seen it before.”
Despite their presence on the set for principle photography, Tom admits Chow did spring a few post-production surprises on the team. “There are a few shots that after shooting, Stephen came back to us and wanted to add things into the scene. There is a scene in the movie where Stephen is looking for a kung-fu master called The Beast. He goes into a hospital and the master is looked behind a door. Later when Stephen came back, he wanted to add frogs on the floor. The shots are all handheld and it’s like in a tunnel and nothing to track. It was a hard time to track those cameras and put those CG frogs into it! But it turns out pretty good and not many people notice the frogs are CGI.”

Tom explains that the Centro team employed 60-plus full-time CG artists on Hustle, with an equivalent of 110,000-plus man-hours. “For CG, we used Maya, 3ds max and LightWave. The renders were accomplished using mental ray, Brazil and V-Ray. For the digital composition, we used After Effects and combustion. We used a lot of third party and in-house plug-ins for Maya and 3ds max. I think there are 560 effects, but on some shots, Stephen would change and change and change, so some shots we did five times altogether. But we had eight months for effects and the DI was about two months. We needed that time to do it and I’m glad we had the time. In Hong King, it’s very rare they give you eight months. Shaolin we only had five months and it was a nightmare. This one was more reasonable.”

Pleased with the overall outcome of Kung Fu Hustle, Tom says he and his team are excited about the wider release in the U.S. for the film. With greater mainstream success, that means they will hopefully have the opportunity to work again with Chow. “I think the movie is a new level for Hong Kong movies, with all the effects and the post-production.”

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.

http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=57c5ed8a&atype=articles&id=2453&page=1#

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Foxx Makes Time's Most Influential List

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:05:54 GMT

Foxx Makes Time's Most Influential List

Jamie Foxx, Martha Stewart Make Time Magazine's List of World's 100 Most Influential People

The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=657755

Apr. 10, 2005 - President Bush, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx and domestic diva Martha Stewart have all made Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

The eclectic list, which hits newsstands Monday, ranges from the Dalai Lama to the inventors of the Blackberry, and from terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela.

Hailing from 31 different countries, and including rappers, designers, world leaders and a tsunami survivor, the listed newsmakers have shaped the world in some way, according to the magazine's editors.

"It really shows the breadth of human endeavor," Time's managing editor Jim Kelly said. "Influence can be defined in a myriad of ways."

Those named were profiled by people who have themselves been in the spotlight.

Democratic strategist James Carville discusses Karl Rove, architect of George Bush's re-election campaign; director Oliver Stone praises Academy Award-winner Jamie Foxx; celebrity CEO Donald Trump weighs in on celebrity CEO Martha Stewart.

Henry Kissinger, writing about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, says Rice is handling her job "with panache and conviction."

Sean Penn calls Clint Eastwood "cinema's Mount Rushmore." NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw calls "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, "the citizen's surrogate" who "spoke truth to power."

Other honorees include North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, talk show host Oprah Winfrey, actress Hilary Swank and rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z.

source:
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=657755

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INTERVIEW: STEPHEN CHOW

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 03:11:41 GMT

INTERVIEW: STEPHEN CHOW

04.05.05

By Devin Faraci
http://chud.com/interviews/2337

Stephen Chow is just about as big as you can get in Hong Kong. The guy's films rake in the dough and win all the awards - his latest film, Kung Fu Hustle - just split a ton of Hong Kong film awards with Wong Kar Wei's more serious minded 2046. His last film, Shaolin Soccer, was his first to get a big release in the US. A wonderful comedy, Miramax buried it, so while the film was a huge hit in most parts of the world, it flopped in the US.

Now with Kung Fu Hustle Chow is away from Miramax, and he's got a bigger, more crowd pleasing film. Last week I had a chance to do a roundtable with the auteur - the guy's a writer, director and actor in his films. Chow answered most of the questions on his own with his very passable English, although he did sometimes turn to his interpreter for help. What was interesting was that the guy who is so silly on screen is sort of straight faced and soft-spoken in person, and getting an answer out of him was often tough.

By the way, I usually don't talk about who else is at these roundtables, but the last questions, about Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, were all Ed Douglas of Coming Soon. If Chow makes a Shang Chi film (and he got very interested in it- he asked Ed to write down the name of the comic for him), Ed should get a producer credit!

Q: Is it hard to do something with humor rather than making a regular kung fu film? Is it more fun? Or more difficult?

Chow: Directing a kung fu film?

Q: Well, y'know, like the standard action/adventure ...

Chow: So you don't think I directed a regular kung fu film?

Q: Well, no I don't.

Chow: It's a special kung fu film. Yes, I think so. And of course, it's more difficult.

Q: In what way?

Chow: How? Hmm. The difficulty in this film is just ... yeah - just like what you say: how to make it different from any other. Because there's already a lot of different kind of kung fu films in the past. So how you make it different?

Q: You brought up making it different from the past, but you brought a lot of the kung fu stars of the past into this film. What inspired you to do that?

Chow: I just try to find some actors who looked great. [Laughs] And were suitable to play the role in the movie. The first thing that I consider is is it the right person to shoot the role, instead of are they famous enough. I have all this kind of concerns for the casting.

Q: How were you able to convince them, though? Because obviously they haven't made a movie in over 20 years?

Chow: I know them quite well, because I am a fan of them. They are all very much stars a long time ago, like the Beast [Leung Siu Lung]. I think he is one of my favorite kung fu stars. The other thing is how to find them! because they are retired. It takes time to find out where they are.

Q: You were friends with them? How did you convince them to make your movie?

Chow: Just talk to them. With my sincerity, you know. Yes.

Q: Did anyone get hurt during the filming?

Chow: No. Not yet. I have a very good choreographer, Yuen Woo-Ping.

Q: Can you talk a little about working with him?

Chow: Of course, there is no need to say, he is one of the best action directors in Asia - in the world, I think. He looks so like the old style and looks so traditional Chinese style, but actually he is a person with an open mind, who can accept different kind of opinions. No matter how crazy it is, he will accept it.

Q: Does he get involved in camera decisions?

Chow: Yuen Woo-Ping? Yeah, sometimes.

Q: How has using computers changed the way you work?

Chow: I think in Shaolin Soccer, that was the first time for me to do a stunt with a lot of CGI. I'm lucky because that was my first time to do the action with a lot of CGI, so I really get used to a lot of CGI. So in Kung Fu Hustle, I'm quite familiar with all that kind of thing.

Q: When you're on the set, doing a stunt, do you kind of know you're going to have a computer to work later, so you don't worry so much about the stunts on the set?

Chow: Actually it is quite complicated. Everything is shot, like some of them involved CGI and sometimes it's not necessary. Overall, it is a very complicated work that takes a lot of time to do and there are a bunch of people involved, with the team from the choreographer and another team from the CGI company and my team, you know? Three teams of people get together and try to do it better!

Q: I loved the homage to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, with the blood coming from the doors. What made you do that?

Chow: Oh, in that sequence I like to have a horrify atmosphere in that scene, to try to build up something really scary. And of course, The Shining, for me is one of the most scary, horrifying movies. So that's the idea. And all this blood rushes out. I think it's just perfect for that scene. [Chuckles]

Q: You've conquered Hong Kong cinema, you're as big as they get. Are you interested in coming to America and making Hollywood films?

Chow: Yes.

Q: Has anyone contacted you? Do you have any potential things coming up?

Chow: No.

Q: Do you see yourself more of a director and less of a star if you were to do a Hollywood film? Or do you want to be as much the star of the film as the director.

Chow: Well, actually, what I would like to do is direct. I would like to focus on this more. But that doesn't mean that I don't want to be a star in any movie! I still would like to have change, but more of a director.

Q: Are you interested in doing more action films?

Chow: Well, I want to stay away from the action because it's really tough. And it's difficult.

Q: What's the hardest part?

Chow: What's the hardest part? You have to wear a wire shirt all the time and you're punching and kicking all day long, for 42 years old, old man like me ... [laughs]. Yeah, but on the other hand, I - actually, I love kung fu very much and I'm still practicing myself.

Q: You still practice?

Chow: Yeah, I'm a real kung fu practitioner.

Q: Could you explain how working with Wong Jing gave you an opportunity to direct? I heard that he would not be on the set, because he makes five movies at once ...

Chow: Oh yeah, yeah.

Q: And that gave you the opportunity to get behind the camera.

Chow: And there's a horse racing game on the radio. So he was listening! Actually, he is very clever, I think. And very smart. He has a lot of crazy ideas.

Q: But would you direct scenes when he'd run to another set to make a movie?

Chow: Yes. Sometimes. Not all the time. I would say thanks to him for giving me a lot of opportunity to direct - I mean, to assist him with the directing role.

Q: Jackie Chan says that he thinks martial arts cinema is dying out because the younger stars don’t do the kind of training did when he was with the Seven Little Fortunes. Do you think that's true?

Chow: Actually, the potential for the stars of the future are around everywhere. But you have to search for it. You have to have people interested in looking for them.

Q: Would you work with people coming from other disciplines, like Thai boxing?

Chow: Thai boxing. Tony Jaa! Great example. I think he - it saves money to have Tony Jaa, because you don't need any CGI. He just does it!

Q: You're one of the great kings of comedy: Are you interested in doing horror films, science fiction, crossing over into other genres.

Chow: Anything but horror films. I want to, but I'm unable to do it, because I'm scared of ghosts. [Laughter]

Q: You've never done a sequel. I'm sure a lot of people want you to do another Shaolin Soccer - do you always move onto another film?

Chow: So, I actually, I don't know at the moment what I'm going to do in the future, for the next project. It could be a sequel to Kung Fu Hustle, just because I never did a sequel before. So that's why I want to try and do one.

Q: So you're not against sequels.

Chow: I'm not against sequels.

Q: Can you talk about where you got the idea for both Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle? What started them?

Chow: In Shaolin Soccer it comes from a Japanese comic! Japanese cartoon. Yeah, like long, long time ago - over ten years ago. A Japanese soccer cartoon. It's very popular. At that time, the idea was like soccer in my mind. Like soccer ... if everyone - it's spread through the whole world. Is it possible to make a soccer movie? But for the track record… The last soccer movie was by Stallone, I think. The Victory, which is not quite a big hit everywhere. So, actually it's so difficult, but what if I make a combination of martial arts and soccer? Then I go and make up a script with my team and then I have my script in my hand and try to send the idea to certain financers. The reaction was not that positive, because there's no track record. They always talk about, "Gimme some examples. What does it look like? Like what? Which kind of movie are you talking about?" But I believe - what I mean is No, it's totally different from any other. It's nothing like anything you have seen before. Then I'm not interesting anymore, because I don't know. There's no guarantee. That's how they think.

Q: How did you convince them?

Chow: How? The only way to convince them was a low budget. [Laughter] I need so little! Okay, okay, okay - that sounds good.

Q: What made Kung Fu Hustle happen?

Chow: Oh, Kung Fu Hustle? After Shaolin Soccer, I think I had more confidence to handle action kind of things and then the real kung fu films, I loved kung fu films all the time, so I would like to make it.

Q: Can you talk about how you designed Pig Sty Alley?

Chow: The Pig Sty is exactly what I lived in the past. Not the same label! But the same shape, same kind of building, same similar situations. A lot of people living together.

Q: Can you walk around Hong Kong and be a normal person, or are you usually mobbed by fans?

Chow: No.

Q: You're not mobbed?

Chow: It doesn't matter at all.

Q: So you can just lead a normal life?

Chow: Yeah, because the Hong Kong people, they treat me more like a director, like a producer, like a filmmaker. If they recognize me, they treat me as a producer, more than a star. And also, I now make one movie in three years and somehow I think they already forget who I am, because I've been away too long!

Q: What was the first movie that you remember seeing as a child and what kind of impression did it leave on you?

Chow: Charlie Chaplin. The Lights of the City.

Q: City Lights? What was your favorite part of it as a child.

Chow: Is that the one that he tries to eat the shoes?

Q: That's The Gold Rush.

Chow: Oh, it is another film. Yes. So City Lights is the young girl and him.

Q:The blind girl.

Chow: The blind girl.

Q: Have you ever thought of doing a superhero movie?

Chow: Spider-Man. I want to do Spider-Man.

Q: Have you ever heard of the comic Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu? They’re making a movie out of that – it’s a good kung fu comic.

Chow: Shang Chi – that’s my name in Asia, did you know that? Shang Chi Chow.

source:
http://chud.com/interviews/2337

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Excuse Me While I Kiss the Buddha in the Sky [By DAVE KEHR NY Times article]

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 19:42:37 GMT

April 3, 2005

Excuse Me While I Kiss the Buddha in the Sky
By DAVE KEHR

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03kehr.html?

PREVIOUS generations of Hong Kong action heroes have flown through the air with the aid of hidden wires and trampolines. But now, Hong Kong filmmakers are following Hollywood into the digital age, using computer technology to manipulate images and make the feats of their protagonists seem even more otherworldly and astonishing. One of the comic (and even poetic) highlights of Stephen Chow's new film "Kung Fu Hustle" finds Mr. Chow leaping so far off the ground that he encounters Buddha in the form of a cloud formation, before he plunges back to earth to deliver a devastating coup de grâce to an opponent.

In the normal course of events, Mr. Chow should be settling into mid-career complacency right about now. At 42, he is East Asia's most popular comedy star, having appeared in more than 50 films since his big screen debut in 1988, sometimes at the rate of six or seven a year. Several of those films, including "Fight Back to School" (1991), "The Royal Tramp" (1992) and "God of Cookery" (1996), have become local classics; nearly all have been box-office hits.

But instead of making "Fight Back to School IV" (he has already made Parts II and III), Mr. Chow is looking for new worlds to conquer, both creatively as a writer and director and commercially as a box-office name in the Western hemisphere. His 2001 "Shaolin Soccer," about a soccer team made up of misfits and losers who start to win when they bring their kung fu skills to bear on their sport, broke out of the Asian market and became a major success in Europe (in the United States, Miramax belatedly distributed a cut, dubbed and retitled version, "Kung Fu Soccer," that failed to catch fire). Encouraged by "Shaolin Soccer" and by the vogue for Chinese-language features in Western art houses, Columbia Pictures contributed $20 million to the budget of "Kung Fu Hustle," which Mr. Chow wrote, directed and stars in. It will open in New York and Los Angeles on Friday (then nationwide April 22), backed by an extensive publicity campaign.

"It's always about balance," said Mr. Chow, speaking by telephone from Chicago, where he was midway through an old-fashioned, 10-city publicity tour. Where much of Mr. Chow's earlier comedy was verbal - he is an advanced practitioner of a Cantonese brand of nonsense speech, called mo lei tau, that relies heavily on inventive slang and outrageous puns - he has in the last few years transformed himself as a physical comedian, developing a precise and innovative directorial style.

"Of course," Mr. Chow said, "I would like to make something that would go international, that would be suitable for audiences in different countries. But meanwhile I would like to keep my own style. In 'Kung Fu Hustle,' I'm not giving up the slang, but if I can present something through action or something through dialogue, this time I think I would like to do the first."

"Kung Fu Hustle" is set in Shanghai in the 1930's, where the members of the sinister Axe Gang have managed to terrorize most of the population into paying protection money. The one area the gang hasn't conquered is Pig Sty Alley, a crowded apartment complex in a poor neighborhood. Enter Mr. Chow as Sing, a gangster wannabe who strides into Pig Sty Alley, claims to be a representative of the Axe Gang and demands payment. Instead, he, along with a large group of Axe Gang foot soldiers who happen to be in the neighborhood, is trounced by three of the Alley's most seemingly benign residents: a coolie (Xing Yu), a noodle maker (Dong Zhi Hua) and a tailor (Chiu Chi Ling). Pig Sty Alley turns out to be populated by several other "hidden dragons" as well - martial arts adepts who step forward when necessary to protect their homes and families.

Although Pig Sty Alley is situated in Shanghai, its atmosphere and architecture strongly suggest the poor neighborhood in Kowloon where Mr. Chow grew up with his three sisters. "It's exactly like where I was living in the old days," Mr. Chow acknowledged. "Too many people staying in one small place." Like a lot of disenfranchised children of the 1970's, Mr. Chow strongly identified with Bruce Lee, and fantasized about becoming a kung fu master himself.

"One day," he recalled, "I found out that the old man who lived next door to us had been a famous martial artist."

The discovery, Mr. Chow said, made him realize that heroes could also exist in the real world. "I put this idea into 'Kung Fu Hustle,' " he said. "A lot of people can't be judged by their appearance. They look so ordinary, but actually, they have their strengths."

Like Jacques Tati in his late masterpiece, "Playtime," Mr. Chow consciously plays down his stature as the center of his own comic universe, and, for a large part of the film, disappears into the background, turning the stage over to the other actors. Several of the players are veteran martial arts performers of the 70's whom Mr. Chow tracked down and coaxed out of retirement.

The landlady of Pig Sty Alley, a loving caricature of a loud-mouthed, chain-smoking Hong Kong harridan (transplanted to Shanghai, it seems), is played by Yuen Qiu, one of the few women to do stunt work in Hong Kong films. "She was like a big sister to Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung," said Mr. Chow, explaining that Ms. Yuen had also been a member of the legendary Seven Little Fortunes, the children's Beijing opera troupe that produced Mr. Chan, Mr. Hung and Yuen Wo Ping, the celebrated martial arts choreographer of "The Matrix" (and now, parodying his "Matrix" style, of "Kung Fu Hustle"). "She's now a grandmother with two grandchildren," Mr. Chow said, "I'm happy she agreed to come back to movies and back me up."

Chiu Chi Ling, whose long, mournful face and infectious giggle make the tailor a particularly memorable creation, is a well-known martial arts instructor who trained many Hong Kong stars in the 70's and 80's and now operates his own academy in Alameda, Calif.

"I met Stephen Chow more than 14 years ago," Mr. Chiu said by telephone from his school. "He's one of the new generation, but he is very interested in the old styles."

The casting, Mr. Chiu said, was meant to represent the range of kung fu methods. Mr. Chiu, who fights with iron rings on his arms, stands for the southern Hung Ga style; the coolie for the jumping and kicking northern Shaolin style; and the noodle maker for the pole-fighting style.

The already amazing athletic feats in the film are exaggerated and, at times, poeticized by Mr. Chow's extensive use of computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I. "The C.G.I. involvement is unavoidable in modern times if you are doing action," Mr. Chow said. "But it should be an accessory, not the main theme of the movie."

Still, it is Mr. Chow's imaginative use of C.G.I., both in "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Hustle," that has allowed him to stake out his new comic turf. "Kung Fu Hustle" is a film in constant mutation, in which a parody of the beaver-hatted brawlers in "Gangs of New York" suddenly shifts to a cartoon chase out of a Chuck Jones "Roadrunner" short.

The digital technology gives Mr. Chow a freedom of invention and fluidity of form that propels the film into a new category, something like the live-action cartoon dreamed of by Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis in the 50's and 60's, but with seamless transitions and a range of possibilities limited only by the filmmaker's imagination.

"I used to make my films in three or four weeks," Mr. Chow said, "but for 'Kung Fu Hustle,' I spent more than one year to complete every shot with C.G.I., so that's quite a long time for me. The C.G.I. people need to be on the set every day, even when there is no C.G.I. effect scheduled, just in case any ideas come up. Whenever C.G.I. is concerned, it takes longer and there are more people involved."

But doesn't all that heavy lifting - the need for extra planning, extra technology, extra hands on deck and extra time in post production - inhibit the spirit of spontaneity that's so essential for comedy? How does a director keep the comedy alive through all of that?

"Actually," said Mr. Chow, "by that point, the comedy is already dead." He then laughed the high, raucous laugh that much of Asia knows - and America may soon know, too.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/movies/03kehr.html?

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Kung Fu Hustler [Interview with Stephen Chow]

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 04:36:59 GMT

Kung Fu Hustler
Source: Edward Douglas April 2, 2005
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9027

Stephen Chow may not be as well known in the United States as Jackie Chan or Jet Li, but back home in China, he's a huge comedy star, having directed and starred in two of the country's biggest blockbusters ever. After his 2000 film Shaolin Soccer became one of China's highest grossing films, he is as famous back home as Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler are here.

Many thought that Shaolin Soccer would help break Chow out in the States, but the movie was fumbled by its US distributor Miramax, who dubbed it in hopes of getting a younger audience and then repeatedly delayed it, before finally releasing a subtitled version in only a few cities.

Undaunted, Chow returns to the States with his latest action-comedy, Kung Fu Hustle, in which he plays Sing, a bumbling gangster wannabe, who inadvertently starts a war between the deadly Axe Gang and the impoverished town of Pig Sty Alley. But before you put your money on the axe-wielding gangster mob, you should know that Pig Sty Alley has three kung fu masters living there in hiding, taking on rather unassuming roles as tailors and bakers.

The film was inspired by Chow's love of martial arts films as a kid, a legacy that he hopes to carry on with this movie. "The difficulty in this film is just how to make it different from any other," he told ComingSoon.net recently, "because there's already a lot of different kinds of kung fu films." He said that it's common in these types of stories for the underdog to turn into a hero.

Ultimately, the feud in Pig Sty Alley leads to some amazing over-the-top action sequences, for which Chow enlisted the very able aid of action choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix) and the legendary Sammo Hung. "Of course, there is no need to say that Mr. Yuen is one of the best action directors in the world," Chow said. "He looks so old style and so traditional, but he actually is a person with an open mind. He can accept different kinds of opinions. No matter how crazy it is!"

It also continues Chow's use of computer-generated effects to enhance the action, something that allowed him to create amazing scenes unlike anything seen before on film. "Shaolin Soccer was the first time for me to do stunts with a lot of CGI. I'm lucky, because I already got used to a lot of CGI being involved, so in Kung Fu Hustle, I'm already quite familiar with these kind of things." We asked him to talk a bit about how he combined the practical on-set stunts with the computer-generated stuff. "Actually, it's quite complicated work," Chow confessed. "Every different shot—some of it involves CGI and in some, it's not necessary. Overall, it takes a lot of time to do and there are a bunch of people involved—there's the team from the choreographer, another team from the CGI company and my team—trying to stick together and trying to do it better."

The film's setting, the slums of "Pig Sty Alley," makes for an amazing background to the modern action scenes. We asked Chow what the inspiration was for the village, which Chow actually had his crew build as a full-scale set. "The Pig Sty is exactly where I lived in the past--the same shape, same kind of building, same similar situations, with a lot of people living together."

To make sure the film maintained the kung fu traditions that Chow loved as a youth, he recruited three of China's legendary kung fu stars of the ‘70s, all of whom were Chow's heroes when he was growing up as a kid. Two of them, Yuen Qui and Leung Siu Lung, had not appeared in a movie, let alone in a martial arts role, in over twenty years, so it's surprising to see them resurface in such active roles. We asked Chow why he picked them. "You just try to find some actors who are great and suitable to play the role in the movie," he responded. "It's always the first thing that I consider: is it the right person to suit the role, instead of is he famous enough? I don't have these kinds of concerns for casting. I knew them quite well, because I was a fan of theirs. They were all famous a long time ago. [The guy who played] the Beast (Leung Siu Lung), he's one of my favorite kung fu stars of the ‘70s. The only thing is how to find them, because it takes time to find out where they all were."

Chow also had some nice things to say about the younger generation of movie martial artists, most notably Ong-Bak star Tony Jaa. "I think it would save money to have Tony Jaa, because you don't need any CGI," he joked. "He just does it!"

Although no one has approached Chow to make American movies just yet, he admitted that he wanted to direct more than anything else, not that this might dissuade him from starring in a film if given the option. As a lark, I mentioned to Chow that there may be Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu movie in development. I was surprised to hear that he not only had never heard of the Marvel Comics character, but that "Shang-Chi" is his actual birth name. Maybe this coincidence would make that the perfect role for Chow to make his possible entry into the American film scene.

He does hope to get away from the action though, since it's so difficult having to "wear a wire shirt all day long." He thought at 42-years old, he might be too old to keep doing it, even though he still practices his kung fu regularly. That said, he thought he might want to try to do a sequel to Kung Fu Hustle as his next film, because he's never tried to do a sequel before.

In the meantime, Kung Fu Hustle opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday and rolls out nationwide on April 22.

source:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=9027

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Shaolin Soccer is imdb's movie of the day

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 04:38:56 GMT

IMDb Movie of the Day
What follows is the strange story of Shaolin Soccer, a CGI/wire-fu sports comedy starring Stephen Chow (who also directed) and Vicki Zhao. A box office phenom in its native Hong Kong, Soccer broke domestic box-office records in 2001, and was subsequently picked up by Miramax for U.S. distribution late that year. After making festival rounds and enjoying release throughout Europe and Asia, a fantastic trailer began to tease U.S. audiences in early 2002; meanwhile, chat rooms and web sites spread the news that the film was going to be trimmed and dubbed in English (and the import DVD was available from any number of overseas retailers). The U.S. premiere date was announced: April 5th, 2002. It was moved to late August, and moved again to the first quarter of 2003. Then April, 2003. Then that August. A wide release was changed to a platform rollout; the dubbed version was scrapped for the original dialogue with subtitles. Finally released in April, 2004 (to 6 theaters, just before Kill Bill: Vol. 2), Soccer managed to make nearly a half million dollars despite never being shown in more than 14 locations, proving that plenty of people had already seen the film on bootleg or import DVD (or downloaded in from the web). And while they're not exactly comparable, it's worth noting that, a year before Soccer hit screens, Bend It Like Beckham made over $32 million over 7 months and was nominated for a Golden Globe. It's a pity, as SS is one of director Chow's best films to date -- a messy triumph where the forces of good do battle against Team Evil; where a shy, acne-ridden girl who makes steamed buns for a living is transformed into a goalie of great power and incredible skill. Now widely available, the U.S. DVD includes both the original Hong Kong cut and the inferior English-dubbed edit for people who want to see Miram-ax in action.

source:
http://imdb.com/ on march 23, 2005

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Biopic 'Ray' Wins Four NAACP Image Awards

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:32:03 GMT

Biopic 'Ray' Wins Four NAACP Image Awards

By LYNN ELBER, AP
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/special3/article.adp?id=20050320030209990001&_ccc=2&cid=445

Foxx adds another outstanding actor trophy for 'Ray' to his armful of honors from the past year.

LOS ANGELES (March 21) - The biopic "Ray" about the life of legendary singer Ray Charles won four NAACP Image Awards, including an outstanding-actor trophy that added to its star Jamie Foxx's armful of honors.

"Ray" was nominated for a leading seven awards, including outstanding motion picture and outstanding actor in a motion picture for Foxx, who received the best-actor Oscar at last month's Academy Awards.

Foxx exchanged long embraces Saturday night with presenters Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll as he accepted his NAACP trophy.

The 36th annual Image Awards, which honor films, television, literature and music by and about people of color, were handed out at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The ceremony, hosted by actor Chris Tucker, was scheduled to air Friday on Fox.

"This has been an absolute wonderful ride," said Foxx, who also won a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for his portrayal of the music legend.

It was the second year in a row that Ray Charles loomed large at the Image Awards, which honor works by and about people of color. He was inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame in 2004, three months before his death at 73.

Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys also was a multiple winner, taking home a pair of trophies for outstanding song and music video for "If I Ain't Got You."

Winners were chosen by members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Other honors for "Ray" included: Kerry Washington, outstanding actress in a motion picture, and Regina King, outstanding supporting actress in a motion picture.

In her acceptance speech, Washington said the country needs the NAACP's activism more than ever.

Speaking at a ceremony that, unlike most other awards shows, eagerly blends politics and entertainment, she warned that the rights of people of color, women and the poor are "in danger of being stripped" away.

Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman won the Image Award for supporting actor in his role in the film "Million Dollar Baby."

Freeman and Foxx made Oscar history earlier this year. For only the second time in the ceremony's 77 years, blacks earned two of the four acting awards. Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won in 2002.

Kanye West was named outstanding new artist for his album, "College Dropout," while Grammy-winner Usher was honored as outstanding male artist. "American Idol" winner Fantasia was named outstanding female artist.

West was humble in his acceptance speech.

"I made some mistakes and I learned from those mistakes," he told the audience, characterizing the past year as "a trip."

In the new category of outstanding independent or foreign film, the award went to Bishop T.D. Jakes' drama about abuse, "Woman Thou Art Loosed." Jakes' novel, from which the movie was adapted, also was named best literary work, fiction.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., received the Chairman's Award, while the Vanguard Award went to pop star Prince. Talk show host and entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey also was inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame.

"There is an element of show business to politics," Obama said. "But I think it's important to remind ourselves that what's at stake in our politics is more than just image."

Serious problems exist, he said, including a lack of health care for all families, children who are unable to read and a lack of attention to the African continent.

3/21/05
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/special3/article.adp?id=20050320030209990001&_ccc=2&cid=445

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Tartakovsky on Clone Wars Volume II

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:26:23 GMT

Tartakovsky on Clone Wars Volume II

Source: Kevin Rubio

March 21, 2005
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=8864

Tonight, Cartoon Network premieres the long awaited second volume of the "Clone Wars" saga (check local listings). Last Saturday night fans were treated to the (not quite fully completed) world premiere of the animated film, The American Cinematheque Society's two-day long salute to the man behind the animation, multiple Emmy winner, Gendy Tartakovsky.

The packed house was not disappointed. A screening of Gendy's earlier CN interstitials kicked off the night, followed by the last episode from the first installment.

Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume II picks up right where we left off in the last series, with the rescue of the Jedi Knights on the planet Hypori. We are then treated to a series of montages that include the knighting of Anakin (by Yoda - no less) his new scar and cool 70's hair style. The remaining four, twelve-minute episodes then leap three years ahead, and we jump back and forth between two stories: Anakin's final (slightly unorthodox) Jedi trial, and The Siege of Corescant, leading to the capture of Chancellor Palpetine.

Like it's predecessor, Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume II is an incredible accomplishment in television animation, especially given the relatively little time the team was given to pull off such a feat. And the extended twelve-minute format gave the creators more time to explore character relations and even add some humor, which (unlike the humor in Episodes I & II) does not seem entirely out of place. In addition, Gendy and his crew have laced the dialog with lines/phrases that the Star Wars fans will appreciate, including lines from Anakin that will later become familiar Darth Vader lines.

Gendy told the crowd Saturday that his reason for coming back to the project was because George had requested it. "We were talking about projects and he asked about some more Star Wars." The less-then-enthused Tartakovsky told use he changed his mind when George said, "well, why don't you guys do the scroll from the upcoming 'Episode III'? So now this was truth - part of the Star Wars universe. This was coming from him, not a toy company, or someone just looking to make money back, so I got all excited," Gendy later said. He also reported that the amount of latitude and trust afforded the crew was at time both a blessing and a curse. The knighting ceremony comes directly from Gendy's team. When asked "So what's the knighting like?" George's "Oh…I don't know" reply was…well very "George."

All in all fans of Star Wars, and animation in general, will love this new mini-series, and with one being shown each week up until May, it should make the wait for the final installment a little easier.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=8864

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: PAUL GREENGRASS, PART 1 [Watchmen 2006]

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 02:23:38 GMT

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: PAUL GREENGRASS, PART 1

03.15.05
http://chud.com/interviews/1914

By Devin Faraci

Paul Greengrass can talk.

The director of the smartest action film of last summer, The Bourne Supremacy (read my review right here) as well as Bloody Sunday, a devastating masterpiece about the massacre at a civil rights march in the Irish town of Derry in 1972 (a must see - buy it from CHUD.com here), Greengrass is now in England getting ready to make a movie many of us anticipate and fear in equal measure: Watchmen.

An adaptation of the seminal 1986 Alan Moore graphic novel (which you must own, and can buy from CHUD.com here!), Watchmen has been in the process of becoming a movie for almost as long as the book has been in print. At one point Terry Gilliam was set to helm it, with a truly horrendous script by Sam Hamm, the man who wrote the first Tim Burton Batman. Thankfully that project fell away, as did one a couple of years ago with Requiem for a Dream's Darren Aronofsky attached.

Now it's all in Greengrass' hands, and he knows the responsibility. Last week I was able to have a phoner with the director. Many phoners only last a few minutes, so I was going to use the tail end of a tape which had another interview on it to record the conversation, but at the last minute I opted for a fresh tape. Thank god - Paul Greengrass and I spoke for nearly an hour and a half.

Over the next couple of weeks we're going to bring you that conversation, which should set a lot of minds at ease. Paul Greengrass is serious about Watchmen, he's excited about Watchmen, and he loves to talk about Watchmen.

Q: You’re working on pre-production right now?

Greengrass: It’s gearing up now. It’s sort of about two months in now, about six weeks in.

Q: What are you working on at the moment? Costumes and sets?

Greengrass: It’s a bit like how do you fit fifteen people through a small door simultaneously. That’s what pre-production is like in the early stages. How do you fit an American football team through a door that’s about two feet wide and three foot tall. You have to crew up first of all – not first of all, these are in no order of priorities, these are just the things you have to do. You have to start designing sets and wardrobe. You have to start really analyzing how you’re going to make the film. You have to start working on the screenplay. You have to start thinking about casting. You have to start thinking about budgets. We’ve made a good start.

It’s interesting the kind of issues that first raise their head, really. How do you deliver the Citizen Kane of comic books to screen? That is basically the problem. It’s a bit intimidating to be honest. I believe two things, really: I do believe, obviously because I am here, that you can make a film based on Watchmen the novel that is both truthful to the novel and also works in two hours. I really do believe that, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.

The second point is that I believe in an odd kind of way that it’s twenty years since Watchmen, give or take a year or two – certainly twenty years since it was set – and I think in many ways a lot of what Watchmen was about is very, very relevant to today.

I think that those are the two things that beat most passionately inside me.

Q: How did you first become aware of the novel, and how did you become involved with this project?

Greengrass: I was going to say that the interesting thing from my point of view – I got a call in November or December, not that long ago, saying had I heard of Watchmen and was I interested in doing a film. I said are you kidding, of course I had heard of Watchmen. But the interesting thing from my point of view is that I’m not a person steeped in comic book lore. That’s not where I come from. It wasn’t something that – I didn’t sit as a child and read millions and millions of comics.

I’m a Brit, as Alan Moore is, and Watchmen I read at the time that it came out. The reason I read it is because at the time there was a lot of pieces of work done in this period of the mid to late 80s that were, due to the state power, sort of dark and conspiratorial and reflecting the acute paranoia of the late Cold War. I was very involved in doing different sorts of work then, but one of the things I did at the time was a book called Spycatcher [available at Amazon.com here], which at that time caused a lot of stir because it got banned by the British government. It was a kind of book about spies and I actually wrote it with a guy who was inside our MI-5, which is like our version of the FBI sort of CIA type of thing. It was really an expose of what was going on. At the time that that came out, there was a kind of fantastic prolonged twelve month period where it was a court case and it became a great set piece encounter – conflict, really – trying to define where the boundaries lay between the government’s desire to protect national security and our right as citizens to know what is done in our name.

The whole Spycatcher affair became a great controversy over here. At the time there was a lot of work done that reflected that kind of paranoia. There was a lot of drama done, there were films done, Spycatcher – and Watchmen. They were often linked together in the press, the zeitgeist was paranoia. That’s really where I come to Watchmen. That is why I am convinced I can make the film, because I understood from personal experience the milieu that gave rise to Watchmen. I understood a lot of the references that Alan Moore used. He just happened to be expressing that paranoia in the medium of the graphic novel, the comic book, where I and others were working in different mediums. But we were all part of reflecting the same mood.

Q: So that means you’re not going to be shying away from the political edge.

Greengrass: No, not at all. I think it’s very, very important. One of the things that distinguishes Watchmen is that it’s about the way we live today. At that time it was about the way that we lived then. I think that we need to make a film of Watchmen that reflects the times we live in. What’s interesting to me is that Watchmen, when it came out, reflected late Cold War paranoia, and what was really interesting about it is that it was an incredibly bold kind of allusive, allegorical, dense, rich story that involved the collision of two elements: a real world running towards Armageddon – which is something at that time we thought was liable to happen, with the great arms race of the 1980s – so you have at the back of Watchmen this ticking clock, which is these footsteps to Armageddon, which is really a Cold War formulation. The Soviet Union invades Aghanistan –

Q: And they move the clock ahead one minute. The nuclear clock.

Greengrass: Exactly. And yoked together with that was this murder mystery involving generations of caped crusaders. It was the collision of those two elements that created the really great originality of Watchmen. What’s interesting today is that we live with new paranoias, but they are paranoias. We are once again in very paranoid times, in a way that we haven’t been I think – I’m talking about the post-9/11 world – we have been in levels of paranoia that we last experienced at the time of Watchmen.

Q: That’s interesting because at the end of the 90s Watchmen seemed like it might be a relic from another time. But like you said, 9/11 made it relevant again. But on the other hand many people have said that they think 9/11 makes the movie impossible to make because of the way the novel ends.

Greengrass: I don’t agree. I think it’s completely possible, and here’s the reason why: I think paranoia is driven by the circumstances of the world. In the mid to late 80s, particularly young people at that time, of which I was one, felt that the world was spiraling out of control. That there was going to be a sequence, a dance, a series of footsteps that were going to walk off over the edge into some cataclysmic event. The structures of the world were designed – were so intractable, were so locked in a sequence – that we couldn’t escape that. I think that today a lot of people feel the same thing.

Now it’s not going to be the Cold War prism. The world is no longer a bi-polar world divided between the USA and the USSR. We live in a unipolar world. But the dangers, the nuclear dangers today, are profound and very real. They’re to do with nuclear proliferation, the spread of these weapons. How do we deal with a world where these technologies spread? How do we keep the peace? That’s what drives us. We fear Al Qaeda, we fear terrorists, but I think underneath that is a much deeper fear. It’s a fear that, in a way, the bi-polar world offered us curiously some security, where now we feel that these weapons are spread, that creates challenges. How do we keep peace in a world where these technologies are spreading? That’s what I think we have to use Watchmen to address. I think it’s really important.

And I think that what it means is – and we’re engaged in a debate at the moment in this production on how to do it – you have to take the chronology of Watchmen, and by chronology I mean what I call the “footsteps to Armageddon” part of the machinery of Watchmen. You’ve got these two pieces of machinery, the first of which is the murder mystery with the caped crusaders and the various generations thereof, and the other is the footsteps of Armageddon. What you have to do is take that chronology as it’s given to us in Watchmen and try to update it. You don’t replace it, you just say “What would have happened if that chronology continued?” One of the most exciting things that I remember distinctly when I read Watchmen when it came out was this idea of a world that was our world but that had taken a slightly different course. Nixon had served three or four terms. Woodward and Bernstein had been assassinated. G Gordon Liddy had become the trusted advisor to the president. It was a kind of world turned on its head. What we have to do is imagine what would have happened to that Watchmen world if it had continued, rather than say let’s start with a new paradigm. It’s about building on what’s there in the spirit of the novel. That’s what we’re going to try to achieve. So you feel that it’s addressing our world, but you’re not losing the world Watchmen gave us. Which is the Nixon four terms world.

Q: Concretely speaking, is Nixon going to be president in this? Or would it be Bush Sr still in charge?

Greengrass: I think you can’t assume that Nixon would have served twelve terms! You need to push it beyond there. We’re not at the stage yet of having decided that, but the methodology is clear. You’ve got to build on that scenario and develop it. One of the interesting things about the projects is reading the threads online. Seeing what the Watchmen community feel and revere. What’s important to them.

Q: You just launched a message board on the Watchmen site, right? [Check out those boards here]

Greengrass: Absolutely. Last night, I think.

Q: The Watchmen fans can be very vocal. Are you going to pay attention to what they’re saying or do you have to ignore them to follow your own vision?

Greengrass: It’s very important to listen, hence this being a very important dialogue to begin with. The reason for that is this: We’re trying to make a film. It’s got to carry a broad audience. It’s got to take Watchmen in a sense back into the world again. But we have to carry with us the Watchmen community that has loved and found depth and to whom Watchmen has spoken for all these years. When you make any movie you have to ask yourself hard questions, because you’re going to be eating, eating, breathing, living and sleeping the thing for the best part of two years. You have to ask yourself some hard questions about what’s bringing you to the project, what you can give, in a sense. One of the things I said very early on to Larry and Lloyd, who are producing, is that trying to carry the Watchmen community is very like problems I faced in a very different area in various films that I have made. In particular I made a number of films in Ireland, about the troubles. One called Bloody Sunday and one that I wrote and produced but didn’t direct – Pete Travis directed, very wonderfully – Omagh, which was the terrible bomb that killed many, many people in the small community in Omagh.

In both those films - in many ways I made them as bookends to a 30 year conflict that, prior to 9/11, was probably the most important thing if you were either British or Irish; it was central to your experience of the last thirty years. Bloody Sunday was an event that really propelled the North of Ireland into conflict. Omagh, thirty years later, really marked the moment when the conflict became untenable. I wanted those two films to bookend this tremendous tragedy. Both of them involved different communities in Northern Ireland. One, the city of Derry for Bloody Sunday and the city of Omagh. In both those films, terrible tragedies had engulfed those communities. Different tragedies – in Bloody Sunday the shooting of innocent people by the British Army and in Omagh the killing of innocent people by a Republican breakaway group. In both those films the communities felt that they understood the story; they had a vested interest, they had a huge interest in the making of the film.

Q: You actually had some survivors and witnesses of Bloody Sunday in that film, right?

Greengrass: Correct. And for me it was central to making those films. Absolutely central that as a filmmaker and as a production we built bridges to the people who felt they owned that story. In the telling of it we sought to carry them. That’s not to say that the films that I produced reflected every jot and comma and nuance as they saw it. You’re making a film and you’ve got to speak to an audience beyond. But I always saw it as absolutely critical to both those films, the success of both those films, the integrity of both those films that we carried the communities that had lived through those events. It was profoundly at the heart of everything I did. I can’t speak to the quality of those two films, it’s for others to judge, but one thing I do believe is that those communities felt that those films reflected their struggle, reflected their understanding of what had happened. And they felt they owned them. Yet in a way those films also spoke to them and showed them new ways of looking at these terrible events.

In a funny way when I looked at making a film of Watchmen, I felt that the problem was analogous. Here you have a community – a much bigger community – who feel they have a stake, in a sense, in this film before you even start. Because of the love they have for the graphic novel, for the fact that they feel very strongly, I suspect, about the integrity and authenticity in the making of this. I think it’s absolutely part of our purpose that we strive very, very hard to carry that community with us on our journey. You begin that by entering into dialogue with that community. By trying to understand what Watchmen means to them. What it meant to them when it came out, what it means to them today. To understand what they may feel are the opportunities for the film and conversely what are the pitfalls for the film. You have to listen, you have to understand, you have to engage in dialogue.

Of course in making a film you have to go on your own journey. You have to expect judgement. But at the heart of this process is going to be that dialogue. Will we succeed? I don’t know. It’s a journey. We’re at the very early stages. But what I want to convey is the seriousness of my purpose in listening to people and engaging in dialogue, explaining how we’re trying to move forward.

Central to that is for me to explain to that community, “Hey, you know what? I don’t come to Watchmen in the way that maybe many of you do – from a lifetime of studying comic books and graphic novels. But I do come to it having been involved in the zeitgeist that gave rise to Watchmen in my way. I was doing my pieces at the time Alan Moore was doing his. I understand the world very well, from a personal point of view, that gave rise to Watchmen.” That’s really important to me, because that’s what gives me the confidence to take on this tricky and bold assignment.

Q: Are you going to be interacting with fans on the Watchmen message boards? You’ll sign up and post?

Greengrass: Absolutely. I can’t tell you when, but I definitely over the next few days make sure I make contact, and make sure I say to people that I want to find ways of having dialogue. I want to come to events and meet people. We have had a number of meeting on this film from the word go – and I mean from the word go. Paramount and Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, who have been producing this picture, have been absolutely fantastic about nurturing, supporting, filling with enthusiasm this concept. This is how we’re going to build this film, with dialogue at the heart. We may not always agree – you have to go on your own journey as a filmmaker, but you have to try and carry people. The first stage is to try and understand. I have to find forums where I can hear what people expect, fear and hope for, and where I can explain what I’m trying to do and the solutions I’m trying to get.

And hopefully it lives beyond the film, where that community can have the experience together with the film. And one day the film becomes just part of the Watchmen journey. It’s one of those texts, those iconic texts. It’s going to live for a very long time.

Monday: Part 2, where we discuss how you make a movie featuring a 100 foot tall naked blue man as a lead.

source:
http://chud.com/interviews/1914

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Pan-Asian casting for 'Geisha' sparked some debate

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:31:55 GMT

Pan-Asian casting for 'Geisha' sparked some debate

Saturday, March 05, 2005
Los Angeles Times
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05064/466485.stm

KYOTO, Japan -- The decision to cast Chinese actresses in the main roles of "Memoirs of a Geisha" was widely debated at Sony Pictures -- a Japanese company -- and by the movie's producers, including Steven Spielberg. In a movie without a big-name male lead, Ziyi Zhang's rising star power in the West had appeal. She is already a superstar in Asia and is well-known in Japan.

She even does a Japanese shampoo commercial, although she doesn't try to pass herself off as Japanese. The product is called Asiasense, and the marketing promises to give Japanese women a pan-Asian look.

"We talked about it at length and we said, 'What about this or that Japanese actress, would she work?' " director Rob Marshall recalls of the casting discussions. "And I said: 'Yes, but you know what? She's not as good.' And everybody agreed." Marshall, a Pittsburgher, directed the Academy Award-winning film, "Chicago."

Unlike "The Last Samurai," which was well received in Japan and used Japanese extras, casting calls for extras in "Memoirs" asked only for "light-skinned Asians." Asked if there were any limits to nontraditional casting, Marshall replies: "None." Asked if there were any roles that might be sacred to a culture, making nontraditional casting inappropriate -- such as hiring a Palestinian actor to play an Israeli political hero -- he again responds that he isn't a political person. "That's another world for me," he says.

Some of his cast members had doubts, however.

Marshall says he could tell that Japan's Ken Watanabe, who plays the leading male role of the Chairman, was "reticent" about the casting. He says Watanabe was won over seeing rushes of Ziyi's performance.

At least one Asian actor balked at taking part.

"Since it is a film by Steven Spielberg and Rob Marshall, I first thought maybe I should just close my eyes tight and just do it," said Kim Yoon-Jin, a Korean American actress now starring in the U.S. TV drama "Lost," who says she was offered -- but turned down -- a supporting role in "Memoirs."

"Even if it is Hollywood, I don't want to start by playing a Japanese geisha," she told the Korean media. "It's a matter of pride."

Marshall says he was encouraged by the reaction of the Japanese media to the movie after he and some of the cast gave a news conference in Tokyo at the conclusion of filming. He showed a few clips from the movie and described the reaction as "unbelievably supportive."

But there was some grumbling about the preview clips in Japan's combative large-circulation weekly magazines, whose reviewers picked apart "mistakes" they said damaged the film's authenticity. In particular, they complained about a scene where a young girl is whipped by a geisha, something experts say never happened during that period.

"Well, I'm doing a version of the book," Marshall says. "And in Arthur [Golden]'s book, they were whipped."

****************************************

Japanese, Chinese cultures have troubled history

KYOTO, Japan -- Cross-cultural casting is nothing new to Hollywood.

After all, Al Jolson was not just a white man in blackface. He was a Lithuanian Jew. Director Rob Marshall of "Memoirs of a Geisha" points out that the coveted role of Scarlett O'Hara went to English rose Vivien Leigh, Egyptian Omar Sharif played the Russian Dr. Zhivago, and American Johnny Depp was credible as Scotsman J.M. Barrie last year in "Finding Neverland."

But the Chinese-Japanese relationship is significantly more fraught than the one between the United States and Scotland. The Asian neighbors share a history of invasion, occupation and brutality over the past century that has left millions dead and memories scarred.

source:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05064/466485.stm

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Japan looks uneasily to its laurels as old rival steals several long marches By Richard Lloyd Parry [Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)]

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:27:46 GMT

March 07, 2005

Japan looks uneasily to its laurels as old rival steals several long marches
By Richard Lloyd Parry
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1514084,00.html

Tokyo is watching with alarm as an expansionist China looks set to take its place as Asia's superpower

WHEN Sony Pictures said that it was making Memoirs of a Geisha, it must have seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for Japan’s actresses.

A Japanese-owned Hollywood studio, with Stephen Spielberg as executive producer, was filming a bestselling American novel set in the ancient capital of Kyoto.

Auditions were held to find the best actresses to play the roles of the protagonist, Sayuri, her geisha rival and the mistress of her geisha house. Yet when the cast was announced, there was a surprise: the three starring roles were to be played by non-Japanese.

The parts went to Chinese actresses: Zhang Ziyi, star of House of Flying Daggers, Gong Li, made famous by Raise the Red Lantern, and Michelle Yeoh, the former Bond girl who is an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia.

There was no doubting their experience and box office appeal and precedents for trans-national casting can be found from Laurence Olivier’s Othello to Renee Zellweger’s Bridget Jones.

Nevertheless, the casting of Memoirs of a Geisha is a symbol of changes in the relationship between China and Japan, which has had profound effects on Asia for 110 years.

As Chinese actresses have won the key parts in Spielberg’s film, so Chinese businesses, Chinese diplomacy and Chinese military power threaten to seize the position that Japan regarded as its own — that of Asia’s first superpower.

With the world’s largest population becoming increasingly affluent and hungry for cars, mobile phones and computers, China has unmatched economic potential. If Chinese leaders achieve their ambitions, then the country will have equalled or overtaken Japan as the world’s second-richest nation by 2020.

Japan, by contrast, has a declining birth-rate, an ageing population and an economy still faltering after its collapse in the early 1990s. Furthermore, in the past four years the countries have been at loggerheads over Japanese attitudes to its prewar invasion of China.

Public sniping has focused on the annual visits by Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of the war dead, including executed war criminals, are venerated as Shinto deities.

Yet this squabble is exceeded in importance by a dispute over something more tangible — fuel. China and Japan are uncomfortably reliant for their vast energy needs on exports from the volatile Middle East; both are interested in finding oil and natural gas within their own maritime borders. The problem is determining where those borders lie in resource-rich areas.

A chain of islands 1,056 miles south of Japan and east of China and Taiwan, is known to Japan as the Senkaku and to China as the Diaoyu. The islands are insignificant, except as markers for the extremes of Japanese and Chinese territory, and the potential riches that lie around them.

A typical argument has raged over the character of Okinorijima, a rocky outcrop owned by Japan, which regards it as an island, bringing with it access to the sea around it.

China, however, insists that it is merely a “rock”. On this semantic disctinction depends the right to 163,000 miles of maritime territory.

Last year, China carried out energy exploration near the disputed islands and says that it will begin drilling this spring. Tokyo insists that the gasfields in question straddle the dividing line between Chinese and Japanese territory.

“If China removes gas from that area, then it is stealing from Japan,” a Japanese official said. “We will regard it as extremely serious.”

Just how serious things could become was suggested last November, when a Chinese submarine was spotted nosing around the disputed islands. Beijing said that it was there unintentionally.

The next month, for the first time, Japan published defence guidelines naming China as a regional power to be “watched”.

Like its actresses, China is set to play a starring role in 21st-century Asia — but whether as hero or villain, in a love story or war film, no one in Japan can tell.

source:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1514084,00.html

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Marshall defends controversial 'Geisha' casting decision

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 21:25:30 GMT

Marshall defends controversial 'Geisha' casting decision

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Monday, March 7, 2005
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/entertainment/movies/reviews/s_310544.html

KYOTO, Japan -- Every move Komomo makes is rooted in Japanese ritual.

The way her body sinks to kneel, or how she uses just the fingertips of her right hand to slide open the wood-framed Japanese doors. The way she moves like smoke across the room on her dancer's toes.

Inside this cramped "okiya," a household where aspiring geishas such as Komomo study the way dance, music and conversation can spin an enchanting mood, every action is a piece of performance art based on Japanese tales whispered down through generations.

"The dances are not just action; they are stories from our history, and you have to know that history to express it," says Koito, a retired geisha who owns the "okiya" and watches over Komomo with a mentor's possession. "You really have to understand Japanese culture to understand geishas."

Bottling the Japanese essence is the challenge facing American film director Rob Marshall and producer Steven Spielberg as they try to bring Arthur Golden's best-selling 1997 novel, "Memoirs of a Geisha," alive on screen. Marshall, of "Chicago" fame, and also a former resident of Penn Hills and Squirrel Hill and a graduate of Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University in Oakland, recently finished shooting and has begun editing the estimated $85-million-budget movie, now scheduled for Christmas release.

But long before audiences have even seen a trailer, "Memoirs" has generated an underground controversy over the director's decision to cast non-Japanese actresses in the three leading geisha parts. From the opaque alleys of Kyoto's geisha districts to Internet movie chat rooms and the cast of the movie itself, the decision has created unease over what kind of footprint Hollywood will leave on this iconic element of traditional Japanese culture.

Declaring that "my only criteria was who's the best person for the role," Marshall chose China's Ziyi Zhang ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") to play Sayuri, the fictional Japanese girl snatched from her humble fishing village and taken to a Kyoto "okiya" where she becomes the most celebrated geisha of the 1930s.

Marshall then cast Gong Li, perhaps the most recognizable international Chinese star of her generation, as Sayuri's conniving rival, Hatsumomo. He picked Malaysian Michelle Yeoh, also of "Crouching Tiger" fame, to play the guiding mother figure, Mameha.

And he salted his vision of Japan's imperial age with supporting actors and extras from a multitude of Asian ethnicities.

The choice of a pan-Asian cast raises hard questions about the way Hollywood views the world outside America. By using Chinese actors in quintessential Japanese roles, has Marshall become the Quiet American director, an innocent abroad, shaving the edges off human diversity to produce an imagined Japan for an American audience that doesn't know the real thing?

Or is it a progressive act, as Marshall says, nothing more sinister than hiring the best-qualified actors, regardless of ethnicity, to do what actors do: act?

"Geisha is a part of Japan's eternal culture," leading Chinese director Chen Kaige ("Farewell, My Concubine") said at a symposium on Asian values at Japan's Kobe University last November. Chen has directed Gong in three movies, but he sharply criticized Marshall's decision to cast her and other non-Japanese actresses as geishas.

"Every action you make, how you walk, how you use a Japanese fan, how you treat people and what kind of facial expressions you have when you talk is going to be expressed based on your Japanese cultural sophistication. ... For Hollywood, however, this does not matter. For them, there is no difference between Japanese and Chinese."

The studio responded to Kaige's comments by pointing out that he once expressed an interest in directing the film. Golden, the author, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Marshall counters by saying that he is proud of what he calls "nontraditional casting."

"I'm not doing a documentary of the geisha world -- this is a fable," the director says. "I'm very proud of an international cast. It is a celebration of the Asian community. I think it brings the world together."

"Memoirs of a Geisha" is set during the 1930s imperial period in Japan, when Japanese troops were marauding across Asia, conscripting tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean men into slave labor and forcing "comfort women" to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.

Ironically, the military government used geishas as a propaganda tool to spread the notion that Japan had united the countries of Asia in one happy pan-Asian family. In the late 1930s, Kyoto's annual springtime Miyako Odori dance celebrated such monstrous events as the Japanese conquest of Nanking, where thousands of Chinese civilians were killed in a slaughter that is still a pulsing wound between the countries.

"That's something I can't speak about because I don't know the relationship there," Marshall says. "That's not what I'm doing. I'm re-creating a work of fiction as a filmmaker ... my focus is bringing this to life."

Others argue it is critical that Hollywood pay attention to the subtleties of history and politics. The rest of the world is judging American values, they say, and one of the criteria is whether Americans can see foreign cultures as something more than a pretty backdrop, more than an exotic stereotype to be appropriated and marketed.

"Americans are too often oblivious to distinctions between Asian cultures, and Hollywood should not be encouraging that," says Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University who was a consultant on Golden's book. "History has to be recognized. The world is watching us, to see how we see them."

Marshall acknowledges that casting a movie of mixed cultural complexion was not his original preference. The director says he spent a year searching for a Japanese actress with the combination of dancing skills, beauty and English proficiency to play Sayuri.

"She also had to be someone who could hold a movie, carry it on her back," Marshall said. "I felt like I was casting Scarlett O'Hara."

source:
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/entertainment/movies/reviews/s_310544.html

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How the Tumultuous Marriage of Miramax and Disney Failed By LAURA M. HOLSON

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 20:03:55 GMT

March 6, 2005

How the Tumultuous Marriage of Miramax and Disney Failed
By LAURA M. HOLSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/movies/06miramax.html
Correction Appended

LOS ANGELES, March 5 - Partygoers in elegant evening wear scurried to take their seats at tables decorated with delicate white orchids in the grand hall of the Pacific Design Center here. It was the night before the Academy Awards, and perhaps the last affair that Harvey and Bob Weinstein would throw for the 25-year-old Miramax Films.

"No event or person will ever break up the brothers Weinstein," Bob Weinstein declared to the assembled glitterati, dismissing critics, he said, who now believe that the Weinstein era is over. Sitting in somber silence, among the nearly 600 guests, were Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett and Martin Scorsese.

It did not go unnoticed that Michael D. Eisner, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, was not among them. The Weinsteins, who are based in New York, were in Hollywood negotiating the final points of a separation agreement from Disney, which had acquired their film studio in 1993 for $80 million. What is clear is that the Weinsteins will have to leave behind the Miramax name and the company they founded.

While with Disney, Miramax released more than 300 movies that generated $4.5 billion in American ticket sales and tallied 220 Academy Award nominations and 53 wins, including best picture Oscars for "Shakespeare in Love," "The English Patient" and "Chicago."

But the Weinsteins had many low moments at Disney, too. They argued bitterly over huge losses from Talk magazine, now defunct, as well as over the ballooning size of movie budgets and Disney's refusal to release what would prove to be one of the Weinsteins' most profitable acquisitions, "Fahrenheit 9/11."

The story behind the Disney-Miramax breakup, on one level, is about money and ego. The 12-year relationship went the way of many famous Hollywood marriages: infatuation, then betrayal and, expected soon, a divorce with a rich settlement.

But it is also a morality play with important lessons. It was not enough for the Weinsteins to make great movies - Disney wanted those movies to reap lots of money, too. What bothered Mr. Eisner most, said representatives from both sides, was that Disney had unwittingly put together a deal that, in later years, so richly compensated the Weinsteins at Disney's expense.

Disney and Miramax had other substantive disagreements, including over how much autonomy the brothers would have. And in the tug-of-war between art and commerce, Mr. Eisner's seeming inability to manage creative, sometimes temperamental, moviemakers was just as important as mastering the bottom line. At one point, Disney offered Bob Weinstein a contract that, in essence, would have treated him almost like any other Disney employee. He considered it an insult, a negotiator involved in the discussions said.

The terms of the breakup are expected to be revealed in the coming week, though with the volatile nature of the talks, either side could yet walk away from the table. When a breakup is finalized, both Disney and Weinsteins are sure to claim victory.

Neither, though, will emerge as a clear winner. The Weinsteins will be leaving behind the comfort of a corporate parent with deep financial pockets. For Mr. Eisner, whose brusque management style has been widely chronicled, the departure will be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as yet another incident where he clashed with associates who were then compelled to leave.

People who know both Mr. Eisner and the Weinsteins say it did not have to end this way.

"It should never have reached the level of acrimony and bitterness that it did," said Hal Vogel, a media analyst who has followed the careers of both parties. "Both sides benefited. The Weinsteins earned a lot of money and a reputation bordering on legendary. Disney got a lot of movies it would not have otherwise had."

Contentious Personalities

Representatives for Disney and Miramax declined to comment on the split. But several people involved in the negotiations between the companies agreed to be interviewed, while insisting on anonymity because of the delicate nature of the talks and the contentious personalities involved.

Few in Hollywood know that the breakdown can be traced to simmering tensions following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to those involved in the negotiations.

Disney's fortunes were in a tailspin then, brought on by a lingering recession and a decline in attendance at its theme parks as potential visitors were reluctant to travel. The company's ABC network was lagging in the ratings. And investors were beginning to pressure Mr. Eisner to improve Disney's financial performance. As a result, all of Disney's divisions were forced to cut costs.

The lone exception was Miramax, which had a strict autonomy provision that shielded it from corporate interference. In 2000, the Weinsteins renegotiated their contract with Disney and were guaranteed a yearly budget of $700 million along with a promise that they would run Miramax until September 2005, with an option to extend until 2007.

They quickly flexed their newfound muscle, expanding into books, television and Talk magazine. Miramax began making big-budget movies, too, drifting from its independent roots, although Disney capped Miramax's per-movie investment at $35 million.

But Miramax's expansion delivered mixed results, causing resentment at Disney's headquarters in Burbank as other divisions were cutting back, according to current and former Disney executives. Two expensive movies produced by Miramax that were released in December 2001, "Kate and Leopold" and the Oscar hopeful "The Shipping News," bombed at the box office.

Talk magazine was a bust; publishing executives estimate it lost $54 million, half of which came out of Miramax's pocket. Miramax's staff had ballooned to more than 450 employees. And in fiscal 2001, according to the executive who reviewed Miramax's finances, the division lost $37 million, although some at Disney suggest it was more than twice that.

That gave Mr. Eisner pause. In early 2002, Peter Murphy, Disney's chief of strategic planning who negotiated the Weinsteins' contract in 2000 and who often carried out Mr. Eisner's plans, told the Weinsteins that Disney was losing money on their deal, another executive involved in the negotiations said. The Weinsteins' bonuses were not tied to their operating profit and Mr. Eisner wanted Miramax to show more restraint, the executive said. That year, Miramax laid off 15 percent of its staff, the first layoffs in its history, and closed Talk magazine.

Mr. Eisner's criticism stung. "They went out of their minds," said a Hollywood executive who talked to the Weinsteins then. The brothers saw their successes a different way: They believed they were building a valuable library with films like "Pulp Fiction," "The Piano" and "Good Will Hunting."

And the Weinsteins believed Miramax's movies were generally more financially successful than Disney's own live-action movies, according to the executive who reviewed Miramax's finances. But what upset them the most was that Mr. Eisner criticized them after he rejected some ideas that turned out to be huge hits. Among the projects Mr. Eisner had vetoed financing was "The Lord of The Rings" series, which made New Line Cinema a fortune. Instead of cutting back, the Weinsteins sought money elsewhere with Disney's permission, said several people close to Disney and Miramax. Mr. Murphy told the brothers in May 2003 that Disney would consider increasing Miramax's budget if they could attract outside investors. The Weinsteins immediately contacted Goldman Sachs, and, within a matter of weeks, investment bankers there proposed raising $450 million to $500 million in an equity offering that gave a financial edge to Disney because its return would not be limited.

'A Fundamental Lack of Trust'

But after several presentations, Mr. Murphy rejected the proposal, saying it had a debt component that made the cost of capital too high, according to a negotiator involved in those discussions. (Disney had nixed a similar financing for its Touchstone division.)

The decision was not without consequence. After that, the negotiator said, "there was a fundamental lack of trust between the Weinsteins and Disney."

That summer, a Hollywood lawyer, Bertram Fields, who represented former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg in a contract dispute with Disney in the 1990's, sought an audit on behalf of the Weinsteins of Disney's records related to charges Miramax paid for home video distribution.

The situation deteriorated the next year. In May 2004, it emerged that Disney had refused to distribute "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Michael Moore political documentary financed by Miramax, fueling a controversy that Mr. Moore and others at Miramax fanned to generate publicity for the film. (The movie, which cost $7 million to make and was distributed by Lions Gate, earned $119 million at the domestic box office.)

At the time, Disney executives said the controversy was embarrassing to Mr. Eisner, who was coming off a shareholder revolt that cost him his chairman's title. And it was ill-timed for the Weinsteins, who were in the midst of contentious negotiations over whether Disney would extend their employment contracts past September 2005.

As one Disney executive explained, "The relationship could have been salvaged up until then."

In a quarterly earnings call on May 12, Mr. Eisner lobbed a grenade at Miramax, telling analysts that the unit had made money only two out of the last five years.

"Can you believe this?" a negotiator close to Miramax recalled Harvey Weinstein saying after hearing Mr. Eisner's comment. According to the executive who reviewed Miramax's finances, the studio had an operating profit every fiscal year from 1999 to 2003, except in 2001. The total profit over the period was $395 million.

Those yearly numbers, though, according to Disney, did not include the cost of overhead it charged Miramax. In fiscal 2002, for example, Miramax showed operating income of $48 million. But with a $50 million charge for overhead, Miramax showed a loss of $2 million.

The Weinsteins disputed Mr. Eisner's numbers. Miramax, in its own accounting under its agreement with Disney, already included overhead costs, and what Disney charged was additional, according to the executive who reviewed Miramax's finances. But even after subtracting Disney's numbers, Miramax still showed an operating profit of $154 million for the five years, the executive said.

In Mr. Eisner's view, however, that amount was unacceptable because it was less than the $162 million bonus the Weinsteins were paid under their contract from 1999 to 2003.

"The bottom line is, deals that are too good to be true usually don't last," said a Hollywood executive who knows both the Weinsteins and Mr. Eisner.

At a dinner in New York in late May, Mr. Eisner told friends he was ready to sever the relationship, according to a person who was there. By June, relations between the two sides were at a low. At a star-studded Los Angeles screening of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Harvey Weinstein joked that he and his brother had taken out newspaper ads: "Two executives looking for a company to run. Resumes on request."

Even the most mundane exchanges took an air of pettiness. On a trip Harvey Weinstein made to Disney's headquarters in Burbank last summer, an employee called Disney's fire marshal, who asked Mr. Weinstein to stop smoking after seeing his lighted cigarette, a Disney executive said.

Miramax had bigger troubles, though, as it had by then spent most of its $700 million for the year. Mr. Eisner was not inclined to give the Weinsteins more.

While many at Disney were happy to sever ties to Harvey Weinstein, others wanted to keep his brother Bob and his family-friendly, highly profitable Dimension Films in the Disney fold.

So in early August, the Weinsteins sought a compromise. Under terms proposed by Skip Brittenham, the Weinsteins' negotiator, Bob Weinstein would stay and have an annual budget of $300 million and a small development staff. He agreed to cut his profit sharing in half. Harvey Weinstein, for his part, would become an independent producer and secure financing for movies to be distributed by Dimension.

Disney declined, one negotiator said, because the terms were too similar to the previous deal. ("Half a bad deal is still a bad deal," the negotiator argued.)

But the counter offer was dismissed as insulting by the Miramax team. Mr. Murphy offered Bob Weinstein a cut of a movie's profits only after all other costs, including distribution, were taken out. (Other successful Hollywood producers earn as much as 5 percent of a movie's revenue upfront.)

On Aug. 24, 2004, Mr. Murphy informed the Weinsteins in a letter that their contract would not be extended past September 2005. Two months later, the Weinsteins threatened to take Disney to arbitration. According to two negotiators, David Boies, the famed litigator hired by the Weinsteins, called Mr. Murphy and told him the brothers were prepared to file a preliminary injunction against Disney if Mr. Eisner or others interfered before the contract expired.

Any court battle was sure to be as embarrassing for each party as the lawsuit over the 1995 hiring and firing of former Disney president Michael Ovitz, which was then being played out in a Delaware courtroom. With the two sides at a standstill, Richard Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, agreed to meet with Harvey Weinstein two days before Thanksgiving in a conference room on the second floor of Disney corporate headquarters in Burbank.

"It would be in the best interest of all us to settle this amicably," Mr. Cook told Mr. Weinstein as Mr. Cook settled into a chair at the head of the table, according to a person who attended.

Mr. Weinstein, who friends say only days earlier came to grips with the relationship's demise, calmly agreed. And during the next several hours - without tantrums, threats or the glare of public scrutiny - the two men hammered out the general framework of an agreement.

Looking forward to another 25 years in the business, the brothers have already sought backing from several Wall Street firms. Of course, they will have to find a new name, as Miramax, which is derived from those of their parents, Miriam and Max, is being kept by Disney. But the often-volatile Harvey Weinstein is again thinking big. At the pre-Oscar party, he ended the evening by saying, "We've just begun to fight."

Correction: March 7, 2005, Monday

Because of a production error, a Page 1 article in some copies yesterday about the breakup of the business relationship between the Walt Disney Company and the founders of Miramax Films omitted a passage at the continuation. The affected section should have read:
"The story behind the Disney/Miramax breakup, on one level, is about money and ego. The 12-year relationship went the way of many famous Hollywood marriages: infatuation, then betrayal and, expected soon, a divorce with a rich settlement.

"But it is also a morality play with important lessons. It was not enough for the Weinsteins to make great movies - Disney wanted those movies to reap lots of money, too. What bothered Mr. Eisner most, said representatives from both sides, was that Disney had unwittingly put together a deal that, in later years, so richly compensated the Weinsteins at Disney's expense."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/movies/06miramax.html

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Famous Firsts by African Americans

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 08:02:54 GMT

Famous Firsts by African Americans
by Borgna Brunner
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmfirsts.html

African-American Firsts: Government

Local elected official: John Mercer Langston, 1855, town clerk of Brownhelm Township, Ohio.

State elected official: Alexander Lucius Twilight, 1836, the Vermont legislature.

Mayor of major city: Carl Stokes, Cleveland, Ohio, 1967–1971.

Governor (appointed): P.B.S. Pinchback served as governor of Louisiana from Dec. 9, 1872–Jan. 13, 1873, during impeachment proceedings against the elected governor.

Governor (elected): L. Douglas Wilder, Virginia, 1990–1994.

U.S. Representative: Joseph Rainey became a Congressman from South Carolina in 1870 and was reelected four more times. The first black female U.S. Representative was Shirley Chisholm, Congresswoman from New York, 1969–1983.

U.S. Senator: Hiram Revels, became Senator from Mississippi from Feb. 25, 1870 to March 4, 1871, during Reconstruction. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.) became the first African-American Senator since Reconstruction, 1966–1979. Carol Mosely Braun became the first black woman Senator serving from 1992–1998 for the state of Illinois. (There have only been a total of five black senators in U.S. history: the remaining two are Blanche K. Bruce (1875–1881) and Barack Obama (2005— ).

U.S. Cabinet Minister: Robert C. Weaver, 1966–1968, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Lyndon Johnson; the first black female cabinet minister was Patricia Harris, 1977, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Jimmy Carter.

U.S. Secretary of State: Gen. Colin Powell, 2001–2004. The first black female Secretary of State was Condoleezza Rice, 2005—.

African-American Firsts: Law

Editor, Harvard Law Review: Charles Hamilton Houston, 1919. Barack Obama became the first President of the Harvard Law Review.

Federal Judge: William Henry Hastie, 1946; Constance Baker Motely became the first black woman Federal judge, 1966.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice: Thurgood Marshall, 1967–1991. Clarence Thomas became the second African American to serve on the court in 1991.

African-American Firsts: Diplomacy

U.S. diplomat: Ebenezer D. Bassett, 1869, became minister-resident to Haiti; Patricia Harris became the first black female ambassador (1965; Luxembourg).

Nobel Peace Prize winner: Ralph J. Bunche received the prize in 1950 for mediating the Arab-Israeli truce. Martin Luther King became the second African-American Peace Prize winner in 1964. (See King's Nobel acceptance speech.)

African-American Firsts: Military

Combat pilot: Georgia-born Eugene Jacques Ballard, 1917, denied entry into the U.S. Army Air Corps because of his race, served throughout World War I in the French Flying Corps. He received the Legion of Honor, France's highest honor, among many other decorations.

First Congressional Medal of Honor winner: Sgt. William H. Carney for bravery during the Civil War. He received his Congressional Medal of Honor in 1900.

General: Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., 1940–1948.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Colin Powell, 1989–1993.

African-American Firsts: Science and Medicine

First patent holder: Thomas L. Jennings, 1821, for a dry-cleaning process. Sarah E. Goode, 1885, became the first African-American woman to receive a patent, for a bed that folded up into a cabinet.

M.D. degree: James McCune Smith, 1837, University of Glasgow; Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first black woman to receive an M.D. degree. She graduated from the New England Female Medical College in 1864.

Inventor of the blood bank: Dr. Charles Drew, 1940.

Successful open heart surgery: Daniel Hale Williams, 1893.

Astronaut: Guion Bluford, 1983, became the first black astronaut to travel in space; Mae Jemison, 1992, became the first black female astronaut.

For a list of the first black Ph.D.'s in the sciences, see "The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences."

African-American Firsts: Scholarship

College graduate (B.A.): Alexander Lucius Twilight, 1823, Middlebury College; first black woman to receive a B.A. degree: Mary Jane Patterson, 1862, Oberlin College.

Ph.D.: Edward A. Bouchet, 1876, received a Ph.D. from Yale University. In 1921, three individuals became the first black women to earn Ph.D.s in the country: Georgiana Simpson, University of Chicago; Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, University of Pennsylvania; and Eva Beatrice Dykes, Radcliffe.

Rhodes Scholar: Alain L. Locke, 1907.

College president: Daniel A. Payne, 1856, Wilberforce University, Ohio.

Ivy League president: Ruth Simmons, 2001, Brown University.

See also Milestones in Black Education.

African-American Firsts: Literature

Novelist: Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (1859).

Poet: Lucy Terry, 1746, "Bar's Fight." It is her only survivng poem.

Poet (published): Phillis Wheatley, 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Considered the founder of African-American literature.

Pulitzer Prize winner: Gwendolyn Brooks 1950, won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

Nobel Prize for Literature winner: Toni Morrison, 1993.

Poet Laureate: Rita Dove, 1993–1995.

African-American Firsts: Music and Dance

Member of the New York City Opera: Todd Duncan, 1945.

Member of the Metropolitan Opera Company: Marian Anderson, 1955.

Principal dancer in a major dance company: Arthur Mitchell, 1959, New York City Ballet.

African-American Firsts: Film

First Oscar: Hattie McDaniel, 1940, supporting actress, Gone With the Wind.

Oscar, Best Actor/Actress: Sidney Poitier, 1963, Lilies of the Field; Halle Berry, 2001, Monster's Ball.

Film director: Oscar Micheaux, 1919, wrote, directed, and produced The Homesteader, a feature film.

Hollywood director: Gordon Parks directed and wrote The Learning Tree for Warner Brothers in 1969.

African-American Firsts: Television

Network television show host: Nat King Cole, 1956, "The Nat King Cole Show"; Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman television host in 1986, "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Star of a Network Television show: Bill Cosby, 1965, "I Spy"

African-American Firsts: Sports

Major league baseball player: Jackie Robinson, 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers.

NFL quarterback: Willie Thrower, 1953.

NFL football coach: Fritz Pollard, 1922–1937.

Golf champion: Tiger Woods, 1997, won the Masters golf tournament.

NHL hockey player: Willie O'Ree, 1958, Boston Bruins.

Tennis champion: Althea Gibson became the first black person to play in and win Wimbledon and the United States national tennis championship. She won both tournaments twice, in 1957 and 1958. In all, Gibson won 56 tournaments, including five Grand Slam singles events. The first black male champion was Arthur Ashe who won the 1968 U.S. Open, the 1970 Australian Open, and the 1975 Wimbledon championship.

Heavyweight boxing champion: Jack Johnson, 1908.

Olympic gold medalist (Summer games): John Baxter "Doc" Taylor won a gold medal as part of the 4 x 400 meter relay team.

Olympic gold medalist (Summer games; individual): DeHart Hubbard, 1924, for the long jump; the first woman was Alice Coachman, who won the high jump in 1948.

Olympic gold medalist (Winter games): Vonetta Flowers, 2002, bobsled.

Other African-American Firsts

Millionaire: Madame C. J. Walker.

Billionaire: Robert Johnson, 2001, owner of Black Entertainment Television; Oprah Winfrey, 2003.

Portrayal on a postage stamp: Booker T. Washington, 1940 (and also 1956).

Miss America: Vanessa Williams, 1984, representing New York. When controversial photos surfaced and Williams resigned, Suzette Charles, the runner-up and also an African American, assumed the title. She represented New Jersey. Three additional African Americans have been Miss Americas: Debbye Turner (1990), Marjorie Vincent (1991), and Kimberly Aiken (1994).

Explorer, North Pole: Matthew A. Henson, 1909, accompanied Robert E. Peary on the first successful U.S. expedition to the North Pole.

Explorer, South Pole: George Gibbs, 1939–1941 accompanied Richard Byrd.

source:
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmfirsts.html

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Black Actors Have Historic Night at Academy Awards

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 07:09:47 GMT

Black Actors Have Historic Night at Academy Awards
By Bruce Britt, Special to BET.com

Posted Feb. 28, 2005 --
http://www.bet.com/Entertainment/oscar2005.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic&WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished&Referrer=%7B03CE5360-2620-42CB-AD7E-77E4249C5FB7%7D

HOLLYWOOD - “It’s a great night tonight!,” host Chris Rock chuckled Sunday in that sandpaper howl of his at the 77th Academy Awards. “We have four Black nominees! It’s like the Def Oscar Jam!”

Well, not quite. Russell Simmons’ Def Jam crew would never put on a show as sedate as Sunday’s Oscars gala, but Rock’s point was well-taken. Forget blockbusters; this year’s Academy Awards presentation was a “Blackbuster,” featuring the highest concentration of nominated African-American talent in the Academy’s history, including bids for Don Cheadle, Sophie Okenedo and two nominations for Jamie Foxx.

Some notable Black presenters and guests were also on hand, including Halle Berry, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Samuel L. Jackson and a rakish-looking Prince. Whoopi Goldberg was the sole featured commentator in a filmed tribute to Johnny Carson. Meanwhile, Jay-Z, Spike Lee and Oprah Winfrey were spotted in the wings, observing the spectacle like royalty.

Oh, and Beyoncé sang … and sang ... and sang.

Not one, not two, but an unprecedented three songs during Sunday’s event. Though she comported herself well on “Believe” (from “Polar Express”) and “Learn to be Lonely” (from “The Phantom of the Opera”), the Destiny’s Child diva delivered her most impressive performance during the classical-tinged ballad, “Vois Sur Ton Chemin (Look To Your Path).” Singing in a flawless French accent with subtle R&B undertones, Knowles solidified her stature as the hip-hop age Diana Ross.

As expected, Jamie Foxx nabbed the Best Actor award for his masterful performance in the Ray Charles biopic, “Ray.” Accepting his trophy, Foxx led the Oscar audience in a rendition of the call-and-response chant from Charles' 1959 hit "What'd I Say." Then the comic-turned-actor delivered the most moving speech of the night, urging the audience to “give it up” for Ray Charles and recalling the night Oprah introduced him to a pioneering Black actor.

“Sidney Poitier said to me, ‘I saw you once, and I looked in your eyes and there was connection,” Foxx recalled, performing a spot-on impersonation of the first African American to win an Oscar. “And (Poitier) says, ‘I give to you responsibility.’ So I’m taking that responsibility tonight.”

Foxx choked back tears as he remembered his late grandmother, who raised him as a child and supported his acting career.

"She talks to me in my dreams," Foxx said, his voice faltering with emotion. "And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight, because we've got a lot to talk about."

Foxx also received a best supporting actor bid for his role in the hit man thriller “Collateral,” but Morgan Freeman took the prize for his portrayal of a world-wise former boxer in the Clint Eastwood tearjerker, “Million Dollar Baby.” The award was Freeman’s first Oscar win and his fourth nomination.

The wins for Freeman and Foxx made it only the second time Blacks won two of the four acting prizes (the previous time being 2002 nods for Denzel Washington for “Training Day” and Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”

"It means that Hollywood is continuing to make history," Freeman said backstage. "We're evolving with the rest of the world."

While Don Cheadle and Sophie Okenedo failed to nab their respective Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress nods for “Hotel Rwanda,” their nominations alone were viewed as a triumph since the limited-release film wasn’t one of the most widely viewed movies of the year. Indeed, their performances were so powerful, the Academy simply could not have ignored them.

So the good news Sunday night is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences came correct and gave respect. The bad news is that the actual ceremony itself was anti-climactic. Faced with tumbling ratings, no huge hit movies among top nominees, and a Federal Communications Commission eager to assess fines after Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl performance, Oscar organizers were faced with a near-impossible challenge -- create a parent-approved show with an injection of digital-age freakiness.

Producers hoped the presence of first-time host Rock might boost ratings, particularly among younger viewers weaned on the much racier MTV Video Music Awards (indeed, Rock’s wild-card hosting turns at MTV award shows probably netted him the Oscar gig).

It was a brilliant move. Rock is so righteously unpredictable, you dare not touch the remote for fear you’ll miss something. You can bet many viewers tuned in Sunday just to see if Rock would cut Hollywood’s elite down to size.

Unfortunately, viewers hoping for some MTV-style jonin’ were probably sorely disappointed. After delivering a serviceably funny opening monologue in which he invoked the names of relative lightweights like Nicole Kidman and Cuba Gooding, Jr., Rock pretty much stuck to the sanitized script. He wasn’t whack; he just never caught fire.

Rock entered the theater Sunday to a standing ovation -- a clear show of support after weeks of media attacks. When a conservative Internet blogger called attention to an Entertainment Weekly interview where Rock commented that few heterosexual men cared about the Oscars, the right-wing media implied Rock was a homophobe. Rumors spread that the Academy was ditching Rock for a more politically correct host.

But the smear campaign eventually sputtered. Judging from the adoring response Rock received Sunday, it downright backfired.

As we like to say in the ‘hood: “Don’t hate.”

source:
http://www.bet.com/Entertainment/oscar2005.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic&WBCMODE=PresentationUnpublished&Referrer=%7B03CE5360-2620-42CB-AD7E-77E4249C5FB7%7D

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Clint Eastwood Quotes

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 08:06:18 GMT

Clint Eastwood Quotes
http://imdb.com/name/nm0000142/board/nest/15014376

Since several of you suckers seem to be deeply misinformed about Eastwood's politics, I thought that I'd quote the man himself in an effort to set the record straight.

“The only time I’ve been associated with anything political is by innuendo or by people’s assumptions that I have certain political aspects. Probably—actually—I’m the most moderate person, politically. After Watergate, I’m like everybody else—thinking, Oh Jesus, politics, keep me away from it—I’m reticent. I’ve supported Democrats and Republicans in California. It depends on what the guy stands for at the moment.”

—interview with Patrick McGilligan, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Focus on Film,” no. 25 (Summer-Fall 1976): 12-20. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 36).

“I’m not pro-business. I never have been. The only person who says I am is my opponent. I want to help build bridges.”

--interview with Robert Lindsay, “As Clint Eastwood Runs for Mayor, Small-Town Race Hangs on Big Issue,” “New York Times,” March 25, 1986, A20.

"I don’t know why anybody would want to look for political ramifications in any film. After all, if you love making pictures, if you like doing the whole spectrum, no particular picture has any bearing on what you feel in you own life.

“I’ve always said, for instance, that Adolf Hitler must be a fascinating character to play in a movie. The role is probably an actor’s dream. That doesn’t mean the actor is a fascist.

“I’m just a filmmaker. ‘Bird’ does have roots in my own experience though. I was raised in Oakland, California, around this kind of music. A lot of it is out of the black experience, and I feel I know it as well as any white person around.”

“Nobody understood what I was doing at the beginning and some of them still don’t understand me now. Some people, for instance, still cling to the idea that the Dirty Harry films are some kind of right-wing statement. You can look at those pictures that way if you’re looking to pigeonhole somebody. But you can interpret them as other things too. If you want to take the time to think about it. You can certainly interpret Dirty Harry as an individual going against the system.”

—interview with Nat Hentoff, “Flight of Fancy,” originally published in “American Film,” September 1988, 24-31. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 154, 157).

“I’ve been a Republican because I chose that party at the time of my military service at the beginning of the fifties, and I voted for Eisenhower, but I have a tendency to consider myself more of a ‘free thinker.’ My political choices don’t really fit in with any of the camps, and actually I feel myself to be something of a libertarian, in the sense that I think you have to let people live in peace, respect individual freedoms.”

—interview with Thierry Jousse and Camille Nevers, “Clint Eastwood,” originally published in “Cahiers du cinema,” no. 460 (October 1992): 67-71. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 178).

“I think what the ultra-right wing conservatives did to the Republicans is really self-destructive, absolutely stupid.”

—interview with Peter Biskind, “Any Which Way He Can,” originally published in “Premiere,” April 1993, 52-60. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews.” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p. 204).

“I’m not in any of those camps. I’m not in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and I’m not in the Republicans’ camp. I became a Republican only because when I turned twenty-one, Eisenhower was running and I wanted to vote for him, as opposed to Stevenson. So I did that. And also, the Republicans were a minority and it’s fun to part of a minority. At that time, they were outnumbered three-to-one in California. So I just became that. But actually, I would say that my views are probably leaning towards sort of a libertarian point of view.”

—interview with David Breskin, “Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation.” New York: Da Capo Press, 1997 (p. 390).

“I guess I was a social liberal and fiscal conservative before it became fashionable.”

—interview with Anne Thompson, “The Filmmaker Series: Clint Eastwood,” “Premiere,” March 1999, 52.

“I don’t see myself as conservative, but I’m not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

[On same-sex marriage]

“From a libertarian point of view, you would say, ‘Yeah? So what?’ You have to believe in total equality. People should be allowed to be what they want to be and do what they want—as long as they’re not bothering other people.”

—interview with Dennis McCafferty, “American Icon Series: Clint Eastwood,” “USA Weekend,” January 25, 2004.

[On Korea and Vietnam]

“When I was in the Army I was against the Korean War, and I’m against the war in Vietnam.”

——circa 1969, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.103).

[On gun control]

“I think there should be a mandatory sentence for crimes committed with handguns. The law isn’t tough enough. My name has been on some of those lists against gun control, but it’s been done without my permission. People in those groups don’t support prosecution hard enough. There’s no way to outlaw handguns, because our society is so inundated with them; it would be impossible to stop criminals from getting them. But there shouldn’t be any plea bargaining for crimes with handguns. Maybe it’s too simple—maybe it’s too conservative, too cut and dried—but it works in other countries.”

—circa the early-to-middle 1970s, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.124).

[On censorship, ratings, Watergate, and his 1973 film, “Breezy”]

“I don’t think it deserves to be R-rated at all, but it is because twenty-some states in the Union have statutes that say showing the nipple on a woman’s breast is obscene.

“I understand that in Texas there was a move to give ‘Paper Moon’ an R instead of a PG because an under-aged girl is swearing and kind of pimping for a hotel clerk in one scene. You could argue that the local community has the right to set standards, but if you accept that, you could argue that the community has the right to impose segregation. That’s the long-range implication of something like the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity.

“[Censorship] can be dangerous. If the press had been censored, we’d never have found out about Watergate, which needed to be exposed. As far as films are concerned, I think adult human beings ought to be able to see what they want to. I’m too much of an individual to think otherwise.”

—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p. 135).

[On Watergate and his 1973 film, “Magnum Force”]

“If nothing else, Watergate was the dumbest handled thing in the world. I’m glad it was exposed, for the sake of turning off what might have been a dangerous trend. I’d hate to think that our intelligence forces around the world were operating as clumsily as that group; leaving money in telephone booths. It was like a poor man’s James Bond movie.

“I’m sure that right now a lot of people are asking why President Nixon didn’t check further into former Vice-President Agnew’s background, or why there are so many people around him who seem to be of questionable honor. You’d have to say that he’s a very poor judge of character. And on the other side, a lot of people are wondering why Senator McGovern didn’t check out Senator Eagleton.

“‘Magnum Force’ is all about that, about what happens when the law decides it’s above the law. Pretty soon, everybody’s burglarizing. If breaking and entering are considered legal under any circumstances, I think pretty soon we’ll all just go breaking into a neighbor’s house and lift whatever we happen to want or need. Maybe information, maybe his wallet.

“There’s a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it’s very important and one of the things that makes our system great. But there are also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley. The symbol of justice is the scale, and yet the scale is never balanced. It falls to the left and then it swings too far back to the right. That’s the whole basis of ‘Magnum Force.’ These guys on the police force form their own elite, a tough inner group to combat what they see as opposition to law and order. It’s remotely based on that Brazilian police death squad. It’s frightening.”

—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (pp.137-8).

[On George McGovern, Harry Truman, and political naturalism]

“When Senator McGovern told that jerk who was harassing him to ‘Kiss my ass,’ I started thinking, ‘This guy is all of a sudden sounding good to me.’ Not because he used profanity but because he had a human reaction: he was tired of being bugged. When Harry S. Truman told off that critic who said his daughter couldn’t sing, and called him a stupid son of a bitch or whatever the hell he called him, it was the natural reaction of a father expressing resentment at somebody attacking his daughter. I think that appealed to a lot of people.”

—circa 1973, quoted in Michael Munn, “Clint Eastwood: Hollywood’s Loner.” London: Robson Books, 1992 (p.141).

[On political categorization]

“I’m a political nothing. I mean, I hate to be categorized. I’m certainly not an extremist; the best thing you can say about extremists, either right or left, is that they’re boring people. Not very flexible people. I suppose I’m a moderate, but I could be called a lot of things. On certain things I could be called very liberal; on others, very conservative.

“... I’m liberal on civil rights, conservative on Government spending.

“... The Government has to help people, to some degree, but it should be encouraging people to make something of themselves.”

—interview with Arthur Knight, “Playboy,” February 1974, p. 170, col. 1.

[On what advice he would offer Ronald Reagan]

“I could suggest some better places to go than that cemetery in Germany.”

—interview with Tim Cahill, “Clint Eastwood: The Rolling Stone Interview,” originally published in “Rolling Stone,” 4 July 1985, 8-23. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (p.128).

[On music, race, and his adolescence]

“I think I was really a black guy in a white body.”

[On drug use and his 1988 film, “Bird”]

“I didn’t want to make a propagandistic movie about drugs. ‘Just say no’ and that kind of thing is terrific, but nobody wants to see a movie and have that jammed down their throats. Why Bird resorted to drugs and others didn’t, no one really knows. So I present it and let people make their own judgment. This is what it felt like to live with a genius.”

—quoted in Jack Kroll, “Clint Makes Bird Sing,” “Newsweek,” 31 October 1988.

[On violence in the entertainment industry, politicians’ responses to it, and the nature of the American legal system]

“Actually, I’m beginning to annoyed by politicians who suddenly start blaming television, the movies, and so forth. You can call TV too violent, or movies too violent. You could just simply blame bad television and bad movies. But when a politician get involved in this kind of diatribe, I never know whether he’s doing it to serve his country or to serve himself. When you’re looking for scapegoats, the movie and television industry make a choice target: they never fight back. Television puts up its umbrella and Hollywood beats its breast ... Janet Reno is probably trying to get herself forgiven for the enormous fiasco of Waco, which is the most violent thing I’ve seen on television lately! And I don’t know very many TV programs that display as much violence as the television newscasts.

“Recently, a man was arrested in Northern California for kidnapping and afterwards murdering a young girl. As it turned out, he had already been convicted on two occasions for the same offense! The state of Washington is considering passing a law according to which the third conviction for a major crime will condemn you to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. But how many people will have to die before this third conviction? All the values in this country have changed so much.

“I was raised with the idea that crime doesn’t pay. But the legal system has become unbelievably devious, and the average conviction for murder today is five and a half years in actual fact.”

[On the Brady Bill and gun use in America]

“I was always a backer of this bill.

“It establishes a Federally mandated waiting period of five days between the application for the purchase of a handgun and its transfer to the purchaser. In California, however, the waiting period is already fifteen days. On the other hand, almost all Swiss families with a family member in the national guard have assault weapons at home. Simply put, Swiss society doesn’t encourage people to use them. Could that be because, in our society, the guilty pass through the system so quickly that nothing is taken seriously any more?”

—interview with Henri Behar, “America on the Brink of the Void,” originally published in “Le Monde,” 16 December 1993. Reprinted in “Clint Eastwood: Interviews,” Eds. Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (pp. 219-20).

source:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0000142/board/nest/15014376

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Chris Rock: The William F-ing Buckley of stand-up.

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 22:00:30 GMT

Chris Rock
The William F-ing Buckley of stand-up.
By John Swansburg
Posted Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 8:35 AM PT
http://slate.msn.com/id/2113952/

Will Chris Rock upstage Oscar?

On Sunday night, Chris Rock is slotted to host the Academy Awards, to the displeasure of two people: Matt Drudge and Chris Rock. Drudge thinks Rock is dangerous. Rock wants people to think that he is.

In two postings, Drudge warned that Rock's selection promised to throw the broadcast "into complete chaos." He hyperventilated about Rock's foul mouth—"One audio recording captures Rock firing off more than 35 F-words per minute!"—and told Fox's Hannity and Colmes that the comedian's off-color repertoire would tarnish the last remaining Hollywood institution where you can "go for class, for a night of celebration where everybody cleans up." (Presumably what he meant to say was "everybody but Peter Jackson.")

What really bugs Drudge isn't the F-words, which thanks to a several-second broadcast delay you're no more likely to hear at the Oscars than a Mike Leigh acceptance speech. It's Rock's politics. In particular, Drudge objects to a stand-up bit in which Rock announces that "it's beautiful that abortion is legal" and says that he likes to pick up women at abortion rallies. "'Cause you know they're"—well, here Rock uses one of those words Drudge doesn't think very classy. Because he knows they're sexually active.

That's some tasteless "S," no doubt about it. Drudge's selective quoting, however, doesn't do justice to the joke. Putting the bit in context doesn't make it safe for the hallowed red carpet (whose purity is defended by the chaste, bare-breasted goddess Jennifer Lopez), but it does affect the meaning. Far from an encomium to fetus killing, Rock's abortion bit is an attack on women for the frivolous manner in which they decide whether or not to keep a child. "When a woman gets pregnant, it's a choice between the woman"—here Rock pauses, a mischievous grin barely restrained—"and her girlfriends." From there: "One girlfriend goes, 'Child, you should have that baby—that man got some good hair…' And the other girlfriend says, 'Child, why we even talking about this—ain't we supposed to go to Cancun next week? Get rid of that baby!' " And that, Rock says, "is how life is decided in America."

The assumption is that women who get abortions are frivolous and irresponsible rather than poor and desperate, as a liberal might have it. Not much there to offend a conservative's sensibilities. Though Drudge claims the academy "went to the gutter" by picking Rock, where it actually went was to the right. Rock may speak the irreverent language of blue comedy, but more often than not, his ideas are red-state red.

Take, for instance, the opening numbers in Bigger & Blacker, the HBO special Rock did in 1999. He begins with a discussion of the Columbine shootings, then recent, dismissing attempts to examine the shooters' psychology. "What ever happened to crazy?" he demands. He next turns to gun control, which he's against, and single mothers, whom he also doesn't like. "If a kid calls his grandma 'mama' and his mama 'Pam,' he's going to jail," Rock explains. To all the women who leave their kids at home so they can pop some bubbly at the club, Rock has this advice: "Go take care of those kids before they rob me in 10 years."

Sub a few $10 words for some F bombs, and this material could almost have come out of the hallowed jowls of William F. Buckley Jr. Obviously not all of Rock's material has this bent—no decent comedian would limit himself to ribbing one side of the aisle. Rock has joked that joining a political party is like joining a gang; of his own political beliefs, he says on crime he's conservative, on prostitution he's liberal. But at bottom, there's no denying the right-leaning strain underlying his social commentary. Even his economic outlook is Republican: Black people, he says, would do well to take their money out of rims and put it into stocks.

Drudge can perhaps be forgiven for missing the message. Even as Rock's comedy has spoken up for tax cuts, Rock himself has cultivated an image of recklessness. But he's really no more a loose cannon than he is a flaming liberal. His behavior since accepting the Oscar's gig is a case study. From the moment he was announced as emcee (the first in 15 years not to be Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, or David Letterman, who took one crack at it and flopped), Rock has taken every opportunity to claim that he's an unlikely and dangerous choice for so staid an institution. The awards, he told Entertainment Weekly, reduce to a fashion show that no self-respecting straight black man would deign to sit through. "They don't recognize comedy, and you don't see a lot of black people nominated, so why should I watch it?" he asked. Giving awards for art, he said, was F-ing "idiotic" (though if the academy is going to give them, he prefers the un-nominated Bourne Supremacy to Finding Neverland).

These remarks predictably caused a stir everywhere from Daily Variety to the Daily News, solidifying Rock's status as a live wire. But Rock has protested too much, and the academy too little, for this to be a real controversy. The show's producers have stood by their man from the beginning, even copping to the show being "stuffy." That's because they know they've got nothing to worry about. Rock's pre-show antics will only boost the show's ratings among the people he says don't usually watch. And when the cameras go up, Rock will stalk the stage as hungrily as he always does—but also walk the line between racy and indecent with care.

In part that's because he has more to gain from knocking 'em dead than mortifying 'em. With the exception of his dramatic turn as a crack addict in New Jack City, Rock has never enjoyed Hollywood success (sorry, Pootie Tang fans). He has two films slated for release in the spring, however, and he's poised for a breakout that the right kind of show-stopping performance on Sunday would help along.

Rock also won't burn down the academy's house because he's not that kind of comedian. In Raw, Eddie Murphy's feature-length stand-up film, Murphy opens by describing a phone call from Bill Cosby, who has called, Drudge-like, to complain that he swears too much. Nonplussed, Murphy calls Richard Pryor for advice. Pryor says tell Cosby to have a Coke and a smile and shut the … well you get the idea. The point of the bit is to establish where Murphy aligns himself in the stand-up canon—with the irreverence of Pryor, not the tamer stuff of Cosby.

Rock's breakout 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain, on the other hand, opens by flashing a series of album covers on the screen: the seminal works of Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Cosby and Murphy and Pryor. Rock has always striven for range. He can do a bit that's as raunchy as Pryor but he is also as spot-on about family as Cosby. Indeed, his recent material has increasingly focused on the rigors of marriage and the challenges of raising a daughter (specifically, the challenge of not raising a daughter who becomes a stripper). "I can play the Apollo, and I could play the Senate," Rock bragged to Charlie Rose last year. "In the same day. And have great shows at both." He's probably right.

source:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2113952/

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Worldwide, Asian films are grossing millions. Here, they're either remade, held hostage or released with little fanfare.

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:27:09 GMT

Worldwide, Asian films are grossing millions. Here, they're either remade, held hostage or released with little fanfare.
- G. Allen Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, February 3, 2005
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/03/DDGHFB40EG1.DTL

One of the best suspense thrillers of the year opens today, a police action film boasting top stars and exotic locations -- a real blockbuster worthy of any Cineplex.

Trouble is, it's not opening at the Metreon or the AMC 1000 Van Ness or any other venue where it can slug it out in the marketplace. And while it is one of the best suspense thrillers of the year, that year was 2002.

"Infernal Affairs" is opening at the Balboa, nearly two months after the Hong Kong movie, distributed by Miramax, was released in the United States on home video (the cheesy DVD cover features a gun-toting hot babe who's not in the movie). In fact, the Hong Kong DVD has been available since February 2003 at Bay Area stores specializing in Asian movies.

The plight of "Infernal Affairs" -- a movie so good that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are remaking it -- exemplifies a growing trend among American distributors: They seemingly don't know what to do with the Asian films they buy. Ironically, this comes as Asia's directors -- from Hong Kong to Japan to Thailand and all points in between -- are creating some of the most exciting, energetic cinema in the world.

And those distributors are buying a lot. A floodgate opened when Sony Pictures Classics decided, in a bold move that many thought was pure folly, to open its specialty art action film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" like it would open any Jerry Bruckheimer action behemoth: wide, in practically every multiplex in the country whether it was in Omaha, Neb., or San Francisco. Audiences made "Crouching Tiger" the first foreign- language film to break $100 million at the U.S. box office, topping out at $128 million. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture. Since then, however, a glut of product is either not being marketed properly or is still sitting on distributors' shelves, leaving the filmgoer out in the cold. If you live outside the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, the situation is particularly dire.

After any major international film festival -- Cannes, Toronto, Berlin -- the top-quality European entries will be seen, almost without exception, on American art-house screens within a year. The best Asian films at the same festivals, even those that take top prizes, may take a year or two to reach U. S. theaters, if they do at all. Miramax is said to have the rights to nearly three dozen Asian movies it has not released, and it is not alone.

"The American public is really interested in Asian culture, interested in experiencing Asia (through films)," said Michael Barker, a co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics from his office in New York. "But there are cultural barriers. ... (Distributors) need to understand the Asian communities better and market to them, as well as trying to appeal to the Western psyche."

Some of the most head-scratching moves, or lack of moves, have come from Miramax, one of the distribution companies that has been bringing quality Asian film to U.S. audiences since the early 1990s ("Farewell My Concubine," from China, and "Shall We Dance?" from Japan), and its parent company, Disney.

Some examples:

-- In 2002, Disney acquired the rights to "Spirited Away," an animated movie by the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. The highest-grossing movie in Japanese film history, "Spirited Away" became the first animated film to win the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and the first movie to have earned $200 million at the worldwide box office before opening in the United States.

Yet Disney, which reportedly had bought the picture at the urging of Pixar director John Lasseter, dumped an English-dubbed version into theaters without much of an advertising campaign, effectively killing any chance at the U.S. box office. The lack of promotion prompted an open letter of protest to Disney from Newsday critic John Anderson.

When "Spirited Away" earned a surprise Academy Award nomination for best animated film, Disney declined to mount the usual Oscar campaign or rerelease it because it was up against two of the company's own movies: "Lilo & Stitch" and "Treasure Planet." After an even bigger surprise -- "Spirited Away" won -- Disney dropped it back into theaters for two weeks before the DVD release. Without marketing, "Spirited Away" struggled to gross $10 million.

-- Miramax purchased the rights to "Shaolin Soccer," the top-grossing Hong Kong film of 2001. The initial strategy was to dub the film by comic master Stephen Chow as Miramax and its partner company Dimension had done to great success with Jackie Chan movies in the mid-'90s. "Rumble in the Bronx" made $32 million in 1996.

But an Internet campaign by fans of Asian films who demanded a subtitled release caught the studio by surprise, further delaying the movie. Finally, after more than two years, Miramax released a re- edited, rescored and subtitled version of "Shaolin Soccer" complete with digitally inserted English-language billboards and newspapers. The movie opened in April to strong reviews, but without much advertising power it failed to generate even a half-million dollars. To appease fans, Miramax included the original Cantonese cut of the film as an "extra feature" on the DVD release.

-- As mentioned in Peter Biskind's book, "Down and Dirty Pictures," Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein plopped down $20 million for "Hero." A martial- arts picture directed by Chinese master Zhang Yimou, it starred Jet Li, who had become a star in his own right in the United States.

According to Biskind, Weinstein had hoped for "Hero" to become the next "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," yet the natural window of opportunity, when "Hero" was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in February 2003, came and went with the epic sitting on the shelf. And there it stayed as fans of Asian movies mounted another Internet campaign to urge the film's release; Miramax's only official response was to obtain a court injunction against video stores that were selling the imported Chinese DVD version that came out the same month "Hero" was nominated for an Academy Award.

Enter Quentin Tarantino. An avowed Asian film fan, Tarantino had previously championed Wong Kar-Wai's "Chungking Express" and Takeshi Kitano's "Sonatine" to art film success on home video, and "Iron Monkey," a 1993 martial-arts movie, to a surprise $14 million gross in 2001.

Tarantino had trailers for "Hero" attached to release prints and DVDs of his "Kill Bill" films, and even did a whirlwind press tour to promote it. The result: "Hero" was released on Aug. 27 and became the first Chinese-language movie to place No. 1 at the American box office (where it stayed for two consecutive weeks ) and went on to earn $53.6 million, second only to "Crouching Tiger" as the highest-grossing Asian film of all time in the United States.

Miramax had fumbled the movie, but thanks to Tarantino, the studio was able to recover and score a touchdown. (Miramax executives declined to be interviewed for this story.)

So, where should Asian film distribution go from here? Ask Sony Picture Classics' Barker, and the sport that comes up is baseball.

"Too many companies are looking for the home run," said Barker in a thinly veiled dig at Miramax. "We're very happy with a base hit or a double."

Barker insists that "House of Flying Daggers" is a home run, despite earning a disappointing $10 million or so since its wide theatrical release late last year. He points out it will still be the third-highest-grossing Chinese-language film released in the United States. He did admit, however, that the delayed release of "Hero" may have diluted the box-office impact of his product -- "It didn't help" -- and that Zhang Ziyi is not yet the star in America that Jet Li is.

However, Sony Pictures Classics seems to be a company that does it right. Like distributors in the 1950s and '60s that filled major city art houses with films from Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Nagisa Oshima, Barker's company feels it needs to be director-driven.

Sony Pictures Classics has released eight Yimou films and has signed on for a ninth. It is following South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk's "Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall and Spring," an art-house hit last year, with "3-Iron" in March. And, it will wait only two months -- not two years -- to release "Shaolin Soccer" director Chow's "Kung Fu Hustle," which is the highest- grossing film of 2004 in Hong Kong, where it is finishing its theatrical run.

"You have to think long term; you want to still be making money on video and TV years from now," Barker said. "That's why you have to shoot for quality, and that's where some of these companies that overpay films get into trouble, because they can't transcend the moment."

Perhaps as a result of some of the missteps by bigger distribution companies, smaller companies like Kino, Strand and a new one, Tartan USA, see an opening, especially with edgier fare.

Tartan USA is releasing "Old Boy," a South Korean blockbuster that placed second to "Fahrenheit 9/11" at Cannes, in March; Magnolia Pictures' "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," a 2-year-old Thai film that harkens back to the tough hand- to-hand combat days of Bruce Lee, rides a wave of positive buzz from its New York release into Bay Area theaters on Feb. 11.

Unfortunately, it's too late to save "Infernal Affairs."

"We were hoping for a breakthrough," co-director Andrew Lau said. "It would have been good for Hong Kong."

And film fans in America, too.
Delayed in translation

Four notable Asian international hits fumbled by their U.S. distributors, and four we'd like to see soon:.

MISHANDLED

"Infernal Affairs": Made in Hong Kong in 2002, it spawned two sequels, but Miramax is keeping it low profile even though Martin Scorsese signed on for the remake.

"Hero": An unexpected hit a year and a half after receiving an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film because Quentin Tarantino rescued it from the Miramax scrap heap.

"Shaolin Soccer": Asia's box-office champ in 2001 that Miramax almost dubbed, then dumped.

"Spirited Away": First film to open in the United States having already grossed $200 million worldwide, but Disney dropped the ball..

ON THE SHELF

"2046": The latest Wong Kar-Wai film awaits a U.S. release date after its premiere at Cannes in May.

"Old Boy": The South Korean sensation was a runner-up to "Fahrenheit 9/11" at Cannes, but tiny Tartan USA has distribution rights.

"Kung Fu Hustle": Hong Kong's 2004 box-office champ by Stephen Chow, the director of "Shaolin Soccer," is just finishing its theatrical run at home.

"Jasmine Women": Joan Chen and Zhang Ziyi star as a mother and daughter in a multigenerational Chinese saga -- how can it miss?

-- G. Allen Johnson

E-mail G. Allen Johnson at ajohnson@sfchronicle.com.

source:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/03/DDGHFB40EG1.DTL

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Chinese geisha give slanted view of Japan's oldest professionals

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:25:27 GMT

Chinese geisha give slanted view of Japan's oldest professionals

By Ryann Connell
Staff Writer
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/face/0502/0204geisha.html

February 4, 2005

[image]
Rob Marshall, left, stands with cast members Gong Li , Kaori Momoi, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho and Yuki Kudo at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel.

Geisha given a sneak preview of parts of the film adaptation of "Memoirs of a Geisha" have savaged the show, according to Shukan Shincho (2/10).

"Sayuri," as it appears the cinema version of the bestseller will be called in at least Japan, has been plagued with problems as initial director Steven Spielberg handed over the reigns to Rob Marshall and casting directors couldn't find Japanese actresses to play the geisha who make up the movie's main characters.

Controversially, Chinese stars Michelle Yeoh, Ziyi Zhang and Gong Li were given the plum roles playing geiko, the Kyoto version of geisha -- women who are living symbols of Japan's ancient arts and traditions.

Yeoh and Li joined Marshall and Japanese cast members Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho, Yuki Kudo and Suzuka Ogo to plug the movie at Tokyo's posh Imperial Hotel on Jan. 31 before about 1,000 reporters, who were also given a glimpse of "Sayuri."

"They played a few minutes of the movie on a large screen. There was fat-necked futozao shamisen plucking along in the background the whole time, sounding as though it was tsugaru jamisen (a type of shamisen from the bucolic Tohoku region). The movie tells the story of a young girl from a poor fishing village sold into an okiya to grow up and become a geiko," a movie critic who isn't identified tells Shukan Shincho. "People are worried about whether the Chinese actresses could adequately play the role of a Japanese geiko. As far as I could tell from what I saw of the movie, the director seems to be aiming at expressing his version of 'Oriental exoticism.'"

Authenticity doesn't seem to have played a prime concern in filmmakers' eyes, with the actresses playing geiko decked out in long-sleeved furisode, a type of kimono worn exclusively by young women and never by one who has reached adulthood.

Shukan Shincho says "Sayuri" appears to be more concerned with the esoteric view Marshall picked up from the novel than getting it right as far as the history and tradition involved in the movie are concerned.

"What was most shocking was the scene where Kaori Momoi's okami (teahouse mistress) whips the little girl," the pundit tells Shukan Shincho.

Geiko from Gion, the Kyoto geisha district where the major part of the movie is acted out, haven't reacted too kindly to what they've heard about "Sayuri."

"You'll never hear a fat-necked shamisen being played in Gion, nor will you see an over-the-hill geiko prancing around in furisode," a miffed geiko tells Shukan Shincho in a lilting Kyoto accent. "Even before the war is was unthinkable for an okami to whip one of her charges. This movie is a real pain for us. We've got absolutely nothing to do with that movie. It's going to create the wrong impression about what this town is really like."

source:
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/face/0502/0204geisha.html

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The Realm of the Unreal (Appleseed 2004 Review)

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 17:56:26 GMT

The Realm of the Unreal
The bad seed: All bods and borgs, snazzy but derivative anime is a ghost of its predecessors

by J. Hoberman
January 11th, 2005 2:42 PM
http://villagevoice.com/film/0502,hoberman,59959,20.html

Appleseed
Directed by Shinji Aramaki
Geneon
Opens January 14

Several years back, The New York Times' Arts & Leisure section emblazoned its front page with a garishly colored and extremely busy cartoon street scene to herald the dawn of Japanese cinema's "Second Golden Age." Anime auteurs like the moody philosopher Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell), the self-reflexive genre modifier Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress), and the eccentric fantasist Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) were, so critic Dave Kehr argued, the contemporary equivalent of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa.

Oshii, Kon, and Miyazaki have all released impressive new anime since then—Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers actually made a few 2004 10-best lists. Pixar may rule the earth, but so far as audiences and even cinephiles are concerned, anime remains largely the province of its devoted hardcore fans. Few things would please me more than to predict video game designer Shinji Aramaki's mondo elaborate Appleseed as the breakout breakthrough that the mode deserves, but unless banality turns out to be the secret ingredient in the soufflé of its success, it's not going to happen.

Adapted from Masamune Shirow's bestselling mid-'80s manga, Appleseed opens in the standard-issue post-apocalyptic future with the big-eyed blonde action babe Deunan fighting a robot tank in the streets of some blasted metropolis. Before long, however, the winsome woman warrior is captured by a mysterious SWAT team and whisked off to the capital of the new world order—a high-tech, totally controlled "utopia" known as Olympus and administered by a cheerful council of lovably floating Yoda clones in consultation with the supercomputer code-named Gaia. (Greek mythology provides a constant, if largely inconsequential, point of reference.)

Shirow is also responsible for the Ghost in the Shell manga, and Appleseed is populated by a similar mix of humans, genetically engineered "bioroids," and all manner of cyborgs—including Deunan's newly reconstituted and fearsomely metallic ex-boyfriend. (As usual, the humans are the most belligerent and least sympathetic life-form.) But mainly,

Appleseed is characterized by its female protagonists, whose physical attributes are not restricted to their Lara Croft buff bods but include great hair and indelible lip gloss. How is it that outsider artist Henry Darger's innocently kinky Vivian Girls have never been given the anime treatment? The transposition of that enigmatic mythology might yield a bizarro world or a nursery school version of demonlover's anime porn.

Despite a mildly impenetrable plot and the confusion produced by the sudden materialization of Deunan's repressed cyber-memories, Appleseed will seem less than novel to anyone even slightly acquainted with anime. Carefully rendered reflections and svelte machines clanking through the misty weather notwithstanding, there's not much craziness here. Much of the movie is dull, and as it has been dubbed into English, the blah-blah is impossible to ignore. It's not just that Appleseed is a remake—a mediocre version of Masamune's manga was released in the late '80s—the movie feels like a Canal Street copy of its own ancillary merchandise. The filmmakers might have been transported 15 minutes into the future to crib the rock-scored car chases and catapulting kick fights of the upcoming Appleseed video game. (On the other hand, the urban sniper scenes seem very nouveau Falluja.)

Appleseed's animation is some sort of technical advance. In a bit of retro jujitsu, three-dimensional computer-generated images are here reprogrammed to resemble old-fashioned cel animation. This "toon-shading" adds a sense of volume to the characters but no soul. For all the movie's impressive figure and facial modeling, as well as the superfluid humanoid motion, any depth is purely an illusion.

source:
http://villagevoice.com/film/0502,hoberman,59959,20.html

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Stuntmen Petition for New Oscar Award Category

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:10:54 GMT

February 16, 2005

Stuntmen Petition for New Oscar Award Category
By SHARON WAXMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/movies/oscars/16stun.html?

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 15 - The people who leap from tall buildings in a single bound, or - as in last summer's "Bourne Supremacy" - drive faster than a speeding bullet through downtown Moscow, are tired of being ignored when the Oscars roll around.

With attention focused on the Academy Awards, less than two weeks away, an alliance of four stunt organizations is petitioning the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a new Oscar category, that of best stunt coordinator.

At a time when computer effects make ever more outrageous stunts possible, the stunt groups say, recognition is long overdue for the men and women who design and carry out some of the most thrilling moments on the big screen.

"Stunt performers are the only faction of the movie industry that must literally risk their lives for the sake of their art," the groups wrote in a joint statement they will release next week. "The talent and expertise that is required of a stunt coordinator to be both creative and safe is enormous and highly deserving of academy recognition."

The four groups are the main men's stunt organizations in Hollywood: Stunts Unlimited, Brand X, the Stuntmen's Association of Motion Pictures and the International Stunt Association. Jane Austin of the Stuntwomen's Association of Motion Pictures, said her group supported the effort, but that stunt coordinators were almost exclusively men.

But the road to the Oscars is long and arduous. Stuntmen, led by the industry veteran Jack Gill, have been lobbying the motion picture academy for a category since 1990. They have been backed by luminaries (and academy members) like the directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and the actors Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, who in the early 9o's all signed a petition in favor of the move.

But even with such support, "it takes a long time," said John Pavlik, a spokesman for the academy. He added: "Stunt groups have asked for categories in the past. The board of governors has looked at it in the past, and is reluctant to add categories."

Mr. Pavlik said the board would look at the request again, though not until after this year's Oscar ceremony on Feb. 27.

The most recent new Oscar category is best animated feature, added in 2002.

Mr. Gill, who has a titanium plate in his neck from too many years of jumping cars, says he has been waiting too long as it is. "When I first started out I thought it would take at most two to five years," he said by telephone from the set of a Lindsay Lohan movie in New Orleans. "I knew I couldn't get it in a year, but this is longer than I expected. Other categories were being added and deleted as the years went on, and we couldn't even get in the door. Now everyone is on the bandwagon saying this is ridiculous. If everyone else has one, I still can't answer the question why we don't have a category."

But Mr. Pavlik said other movie categories have been proposed and rejected over the years, including best choreographer and best casting director. Some of the technical categories, including visual effects and sound effects, started out as awards that were given periodically and made permanent over time, he said.

The academy has only once recognized stunt work. The legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt won an honorary Oscar in 1967 for his pioneering stunt choreography, like creating the chariot race in "Ben Hur." In 1993 the stunt coordinator Ken Bates won a special scientific and technical award, not a statuette, for designing a "decelerator system" that safely halted stunt people in freefall, like the one he created in "Die Hard" (1988) so that Bruce Willis could jump off a building.

The academy began admitting stunt coordinators as a result of Mr. Gill's petitions in the early 1990's.

But members of the tight-knit stunt community say they have traditionally been overlooked and that the attitude is antiquated. "In the old days stuntmen weren't supposed to exist," said Conrad Palmisano, who heads the Stuntman's Association, the largest and oldest of the four groups. "Actors were supposed to be doing their own stunts. But today audiences are so sophisticated, they know that they're doubling stars. There's an old mind-set we're trying to break free from."

The job of stunt coordinator may seem to be an obscure one lost in the lengthy crawl of screen credits after action extravaganzas like "Spiderman 2" or "Troy." But stuntmen say the job is more complex than merely taking a fall in place of a $20 million actor. The coordinator must devise and choreograph elaborate stunts and execute them safely, often from one or two-line descriptions in a screenplay. The job tends to stay within a closed community of a few dozen experts, many of them stunt people who have slowed the pace of their activities with age or injury.

The expertise involved in stunt coordination, they say, is both an art and a science. They point to the work of Dan Bradley, who devised a hair-raising car chase sequence in "The Bourne Supremacy," and also coordinated with computer effects supervisors in devising stunts like the runaway L train in "Spiderman 2." They noted other worthy work in 2004, like the stunts in the global-warming thriller "The Day After Tomorrow" and the fight sequences in "Kill Bill Vol. 2" and "Blade: Trinity."

While those blockbuster action films are not usually those nominated in the best picture category, they often do qualify in categories like sound, visual effects or editing.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/movies/oscars/16stun.html?

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A Notorious X-Rated Phenomenon Revisited, and Debated By CHARLES McGRATH

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 05:50:22 GMT

February 9, 2005

A Notorious X-Rated Phenomenon Revisited, and Debated
By CHARLES McGRATH

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/movies/09thro.html?ex=1108789200&en=b2078dc9d1526853&ei=5070

History, Karl Marx might have observed had he been more savvy about public relations, repeats itself first as documentary, then as a panel discussion.

On Monday evening, at the New York premiere of "Inside Deep Throat," a movie about the making of the groundbreaking 1972 adult film, the guests - who included Claire Danes, Dana Ivey, Ron Silver, Kurt Andersen, Tina Brown, Erica Jong and Brian Grazer, the documentary's producer - strode boldly into the Paris Theater. They did not hide their faces behind newspapers, as viewers of the original film did until people like Jacqueline Onassis and Truman Capote made going to watch "Deep Throat" chic and almost respectable. Nor did they resort to the old porn watcher's strategy of circling the block a couple of times before sidling into the lobby when no one was looking.

They watched the documentary intently, laughing several times and clapping at the end, and then listened as some experts, including the book publisher Judith Regan and the law professors Catharine A. MacKinnon, of Michigan, and Alan M. Dershowitz, of Harvard, got up and talked about the "Deep Throat" phenomenon, without coming to many conclusions about what it might or might not mean.

Neither Ms. Regan nor Mr. Dershowitz, it turned out, had ever seen "Deep Throat." Mr. Dershowitz, who defended the movie's male star, Harry Reems, in a prosecution for obscenity, said he had not needed to see the film to know that an important First Amendment issue was at stake. And though Ms. Regan had presumably been invited on the panel as a "pornocrat," to use a term that came up a couple of times - as the publisher of both "The Surrender," Toni Bentley's memoir of anal sex, and Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" - she claimed not to be an expert.

As a young woman, she said, she was not one of the thousands of sensation-seekers who dutifully lined up at the World Theater, on West 49th Street, where "Deep Throat" was first shown. She added that she learned about Ms. Jameson from her son, who dropped out of his M.I.T. fraternity because Ms. Jameson's videos were all the fraternity brothers were interested in watching.

Ms. Regan proved a surprising ally, moreover, to Ms. MacKinnon, who for years represented Linda Lovelace, the other star of "Deep Throat," after Ms. Lovelace claimed she had been coerced into appearing in the film and sought to have it suppressed. The new documentary, she said, told only part of the truth. And by focusing on censorship, she went on, it failed to address the fact that pornographic films not only are sexually exploitive of the women who made them but also tend to employ women, like Ms. Lovelace, with a history of being sexually abused.

Ms. Regan reminded everyone that "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" is subtitled "A Cautionary Tale." She said she thought that despite all Ms. Jameson's financial success, the author was "miserable," and that the writing of the book had caused her to realize how much she had been exploited. Though she was not averse to selling a few copies, Ms. Regan added - which is why "How to Make Love" had a suggestive cover and some topless photographs inside - part of her reason for publishing the book was to encourage Ms. Jameson and women like her to begin exploring their own stories.

The other big issue of the evening was whether watching porn is bad for you. Absolutely not, said Mr. Dershowitz, who cited evidence showing that as pornographic films become more and more available, the incidence of rapes is actually declining. Ms. MacKinnon had some studies of her own, and also some meta-studies - that is, studies of studies - showing that consumption of pornography "does increase acts and attitudes of violence against women."

This was not the first time these two have sparred, and they now appear to have their roles down pat. She discreetly rolled her eyes while he delivered a line so good that it might have been prepared beforehand: "Michigan thinks that everything Harvard can do, it can do meta."

On the evidence of "Inside Deep Throat," which includes scenes from the original and is itself shot in a way that suggests the grainy, lurid look of porn films 30 years ago, the making (if not the watching) of pornographic films may have a strange aging effect. In interview segments, the director, Gerard Damiano (whose oeuvre also includes "The Devil in Miss Jones," "Meatball," "Manbait" and "Manbait 2"), the production manager, Ron Wertheim, and Count Sepy Dobronyi, in whose wine cellar some of the action was filmed, all seem a little raisiny - shrunken and overly tanned. Even former Damiano stars like Andrea True and Georgina Spelvin are, sadly, showing their years.

The one exception is Harry Reems (a k a Herbert Streicher), who, after years of alcohol and drug addiction, pulled himself together and - now trim and silver-haired - works as a real estate broker in Park City, Utah. He was at the premiere, smiling and shaking hands and looking like a guy who never watches anything racier than "Wall Street Week."

"I haven't seen an adult film in 25 or 30 years," he said. "I don't need to. I'm happily married now."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/movies/09thro.html?ex=1108789200&en=b2078dc9d1526853&ei=5070

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Through a Lens, Darkly: Shopping for Bootleg DVD's By NATHAN LEE

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 05:41:11 GMT

December 19, 2004
Through a Lens, Darkly: Shopping for Bootleg DVD's
By NATHAN LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/movies/19lee.html?ex=1108789200&en=fbbe84bbf12ba91b&ei=5070

AN anonymous bootlegger enters a multiplex and takes a seat at the back of the theater. He mounts a small digital camcorder to a tripod and plugs a microphone into the hearing-impaired audio jack. With a more or less unobstructed view, from a more or less straightforward angle, he records the movie and will later burn it onto blank DVD's. Packaged in plastic sleeves with photocopied cover art prepared beforehand, the pirated discs are rushed to street vendors, who sell them for half the price of a movie ticket.

I found out on Dec. 4 just how quickly pirated movies hit the streets. That was the day I spied a pirated copy of "Closer" for sale on West 125th Street in Harlem, one day after it had opened in local theaters. This wasn't an entirely innocent observation; I was shopping for bootleg DVD's.

No, my family isn't getting video coal for Christmas. But other families are, and I was on a quest to find out exactly what they're getting. It's an unavoidable fact that a large number of people now experience movies through the illicit medium of pirated DVD's. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry "loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue due to piracy," according to the association's Web site, mpaa.org, and that doesn't include illegal downloading from the Internet. While consumers are developing ever more sophisticated tastes in their home viewing experience (as in the preference for widescreen DVD's and enthusiasm for flat-screen televisions), the black market for cheap bootlegs is flourishing.

"Some people get a kick out of owning a copy of, say, 'The Incredibles' before anyone else," says John Malcolm, director of worldwide antipiracy operations for the movie industry association. "They want to show their friends they have a copy while it's still in the theater. They don't care about who gets the money, and they don't mind the quality of what they pay for."

Pirated movies come in many forms, including the grubby camcorder copy, the low-resolution digital file for downloading, and the relatively high-quality version duped from official DVD's. "The experience is incredibly inconsistent," says Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide antipiracy operations for Warner Brothers. "In some cases you don't get what you think you've paid for."

Ms. Antonellis recalls the time a Warner Brothers sales employee went to buy some of the company's new releases on the street. "But when he got back to the office, there was nothing on the discs," she said. "He went back to the vendor and asked for a replacement. He refused and offered his money back. Eventually the vendor confessed that everything he was selling was blank."

From a strict intellectual-property-rights standpoint, a blank DVD is preferable to an actual bootleg, but in the eyes of studio executives, it's still part of an enormously vexing problem. To the antipiracy executive, a faux fake is just one more example of the bootlegger's implacable greed. As for the unethical consumer who finds contraband sans content, it's five bucks down the drain, an irritating trip to the video store and a smudge on the conscience.

But that blank DVD is something else to the film critic, particularly one versed in other marginal kinds of cinema. By a mischievous twist of logic, couldn't that blank Warner Brothers DVD be thought of as the most avant-garde movie ever "released" by a major studio? Isn't that shady street vendor also an inadvertent artist of site-specific dada? You imagine that the Andy Warhol who made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building would have appreciated the blank bootleg as an endless portrait of the video void.

From a purely ethical standpoint, the bootlegging of movies is in no way justifiable. But from a disinterested, purely aesthetic point of view, bootlegged pseudo-movies reframe the art form in interesting ways. In the spring of 2003, the artist Jon Routson installed his own covert recordings of movies at Team Gallery in Chelsea: a classic gesture of postmodern appropriation. Examining the phenomenon in the pages of Film Comment, Edward E. Crouse imagined the contents of a bootleg holy grail, in which "the surreptitious camcordist is recording at the moment that he's busted by a multiplex security guard and kicked out of the theater - an inept studio movie that abruptly shifts gears to become a first-person surveillance documentary."

Tantalized by the possibilities for slipped meanings and strange new content, I began my investigation of the bootleg at the Union Square subway station, a major nexus of transportation in downtown New York. On an underground platform patrolled by the police, you can buy three churros for $1 or five DVD's for $20. After I had made my selection, the vendor nervously offered a black plastic bag to conceal the sale, but as bootlegs are slimly packaged in about half the plastic of a store-bought DVD, I slipped the small bundle into my shoulder bag and rode home to Brooklyn.

First, "Team America: World Police," the most outrageous parody of a Hollywood movie ever made in Hollywood and surely the nastiest puppet show of all time. Officially released in October, the film was widely available for sale as a bootleg throughout November.

Appropriately enough for a movie featuring superhuman acts of projectile vomiting, this was the messiest bootleg I watched. The right-hand third of the image was blocked by some dark, curving object (a finger?), and the tinny soundtrack was full of static hiss. The bootlegger shifted the lens a couple of times, clearing the first blockage but introducing a smaller one on the upper left. From beginning to end, the image was swarming with digital fuzz and fat, square pixels, and everything seemed covered in a scrim of chunky dust.

These defects undermined one of the most subtle aspects of the movie's subversive humor: its ingenious mimicry of the slick, corporate cinematography of a blockbuster action film. Watching the bootleg, you wouldn't know "Team America" had been photographed, quite beautifully, by Bill Pope, cinematographer of "The Matrix" films. In fact, with its illogical blockages, spontaneous glitches and overall look of having been dragged through an alley, "Team America" played like nothing so much as a film by Guy Maddin, the idiosyncratic Canadian experimentalist who specializes in deranged pastiches of crusty old movies ("The Saddest Music in the World," "Cowards Bend the Knee").

About 30 minutes into "Team America," I had my first close encounter of the bootleg kind. Dressed in a hilariously inept "Arab" disguise, an American undercover agent is trying to infiltrate the Egyptian terrorist hideout and comes face to face with a pair of Somali thugs. As he nervously stutters his introduction ("My name is Ahmed. I'm a terrorist."), the words "no card" flash over the agent's face in red. While the bootlegger's camera is signaling a technical problem, the bootleg movie seems to be commenting on Gary's lack of proper identification.

No such meta-commentary could be found on my copy of Oliver Stone's new epic, "Alexander," although for a minute I thought the squiggly lines of static might be part of the movie's laughably animated credit sequence. Sitting through one legitimate screening of "Alexander" was chore enough; I confess to scanning past innumerable Colin Farrell wig changes in search of weirdness. Pausing to watch the climactic charge of the elephants, I found myself captivated by an intense psychedelic distortion. In the original version, Mr. Stone digitized the sequence in violent shades of red; on the bootleg, it looked as if some crazed toddler had mashed radioactive cranberries all over the action.

The chromatic distortion in "House of Flying Daggers" was less enjoyable. Discreetly bought in a Canal Street phone booth, my bootleg was copied from what appeared to be a semi-official Chinese original. But while the framing and sound were acceptable, the image suffered a decline in contrast. Deadly dull but glorious to look at, this Zhang Yimou martial arts extravaganza is nothing but color, so when reduced to soap-opera size on television and drained of visual information, there wasn't much to hold my attention. In the bamboo thicket chase, a marvel of green-on-green photography, the bad guys skipping overhead lose definition and blend into the foliage as if trying to go invisible, a supernatural skill they have yet to master.

My bootleg of Mr. Zhang's "Hero," however, turned out to be a minor masterpiece of chop-socky kitsch. Movie buffs frustrated by the delayed release of this 2002 film have long been able to find imported Asian discs before the official American release. My version was a street copy of one such import, whose original manufacturer decided that the American viewer would be happier if the dialogue were dubbed: everyone in this "Hero" sounded like the Kim Jong Il puppet from "Team America." Better yet, the first kung fu sequence was full of the silliest possible grunts and squawks, a cornball symphony of "yee-chaws!" "hee-yahs!" and what I can only transcribe as "heeee'yeeeeeee-yuh eeeeeeeYEEE-WAAAH!" The whole scene takes place in the rain, which the overdubbers approximated by sticking their microphone near a dripping faucet.

On West 125th Street in Harlem, the bootleg superstore, I chose from thousands of discs the only one I hadn't previously seen in the theater, "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie." I don't think that the pirated version was much spongier than the original, but it was definitely squarer. With varying degrees of success, all my other bootlegs had replicated the widescreen ratio of theatrical projection, but "SpongeBob" filled the whole screen. Did the bootleggers think children might have more fun if it looked like the TV show? In any case, what was lost from the edges of the picture was made up for by the irrepressible zaniness of everything else. You could watch "SpongeBob" through a damp sweater and still get the giggles.

"The Incredibles" was also full-frame, but whereas the flat, 2-D animation of "SpongeBob" played O.K. in degraded form, the more sophisticated art of the Pixar movie suffered terribly. Gone were the deep, voluptuously modeled spaces, the exquisitely tactile textures, the handsome harmonies of color. For the first time in my study of bootlegs, I found myself unable to watch, and I felt bad for anyone unlucky enough to have "The Incredibles" ruined this way.

Personally, I'll take "The Incredibles" looking incredible, my "Hero" with subtitles and "Alexander" - well, you can keep that one. I already own three copies of "Team America" on DVD, but I'll buy one more when it's officially released, especially if the notorious X-rated sex scene is restored.

Though I never did come across one of those minimalist masterpieces, let alone Mr. Crouse's hypothetical holy grail, my peek into the bootleg underground was not without its peculiar charms: it's amusing to watch such obsessively controlled entertainments slip into total aesthetic chaos.

Nathan Lee is the chief film critic for The New York Sun.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/movies/19lee.html?ex=1108789200&en=fbbe84bbf12ba91b&ei=5070

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Simon Pegg Up for Watchmen Role?

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:48:36 GMT

Simon Pegg Up for Watchmen Role?

September 27, 2004

In an interview with UGO, "Shaun of the Dead" writer and star Simon Pegg says he may be up Rorschach in director Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, written for the big screen by David Hayter. Here's the interview clip:

SIMON: Yeah, I've just read a book called Blankets [by Craig Thompson], and I just reread Watchmen because I got sent the screenplay.

UGO: Did they send it to you to maybe play a part?

SIMON: We know the producer, Lloyd Levin, and I told him I was interested, so he sent it along as something to think about. I would just love to play Rorschach.

UGO: What superpower would you want to have?

SIMON: Flight.

The full interview is available at the link above.

Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead (Rogue Pictures) Interview:
http://www.ugo.com/channels/filmTv/features/shaunofthedead/simonpegg.asp

Simon Pegg and his cricket bat are about to the hit the shores of the US, so all zombies better watch out. Pegg is very well known overseas from his sitcom, Spaced. Now, he is teaming up with some of his Spaced co-stars, such as Nick Frost and the director, Edgar Wright, for the new zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead. Pegg plays Shaun, a young man working in retail who must take charge of his group of friends in order to survive a zombie invasion.

UGO: You've co-written the two projects that you're best known for. Did you ever find it difficult to find lead roles for yourself?

SIMON PEGG: I don't find it difficult to find lead roles, but I prefer to be the writer as well.

UGO: These are the George Romero zombie rules in Shaun, but is it the Romero universe?

SIMON: It kind of, it is. We wanted it to be a kind of companion piece to the Romero movies. There is a big twist with our film as compared to the Romero films.

UGO:Shaun of the Dead gets so heavy at the end. I didn't expect that. What was the reason for that?

SIMON: Well, in Shaun of the Dead, people die, and we wanted the others to react as they would in real life. We wanted to keep it naturalistic because we thought it would do a disservice to the characters if death was treated flippantly.

UGO: Did you pick this pub we're doing these interviews in? It reminds me of the pub in the movie.

SIMON: No, I don't think there is a pub in America that looks like an English pub. Even the English pubs aren't like English pubs. Too many tourists.

UGO: I describe Shaun of the Dead as being like a Romero movie, except the characters aren't smart enough to go to a bunker or the mall.

"I don't think there is a pub in America that looks like an English pub. Even the English pubs aren't like English pubs. Too many tourists."

SIMON: It's not that they aren't smart enough. But they figure the pub is well protected and can be locked up. In England, pubs are like banks; when they close for the night, they really lock down.

UGO: Have people taken you to task for the mother scene at the end?

SIMON: Some people have. We always expected and intended it to be a shocking moment. You can't have an easy time doing that sort of thing. We wanted people to go through an emotional journey. Some have said it was a bit too much.

UGO: Did you work on the editing of the film at all?

SIMON: After shooting, my job as an actor was finished. I didn't have much to do with the editing, but I did go in and watch it. But I left that to the editor and to [co-writer/director] Edgar [Wright].

UGO: What part still makes you laugh?

SIMON: I love the bit in the garden, and Nick Frost's performance as Ed. My favorite thing in the film is when we wake up on a Sunday morning and everything is changed. I walk to the shop and back again.

UGO: Do you know if Danny Boyle [director of 28 Days Later] saw it?

SIMON: The producer of 28 Days Later, Andrew Macdonald, saw it and really liked it. George Romero saw it and loved it. Greg Nicotero from KNB FX loves, and Ken Foree from the original Dawn of the Dead has seen it twice. Peter Jackson has given us a quote for the poster.

UGO: What was the Winchester pub based on?

SIMON: It's based on a pub called The Shepard, which is where we used to live.

UGO: Would it be the best place to go?

"The word zombie comes from 'somnambulist,' which means sleepwalker. They're creepier when they're are slow, plus when they're fast, you can't share any screen time with them because you're always running away."

SIMON: I don't think so. Shaun's plan is actually terrible and he kind of gets everyone killed, but it seemed like the best idea at the time.

UGO: I read that you and Nick were going to do a sitcom about a quiz show.

SIMON: Yes, it's about a pub quiz, which is also set in The Shepard. We don't have that much imagination.

UGO: Have things changed much for you since Shaun of the Dead has become such a hit overseas?

SIMON: I'm not sure what the future holds.

UGO: I read you might do an action comedy next.

SIMON: Yes, the next film project is definitely going to be a similar spin on a different genre, like possibly the action or police film. We want to a British action film, which there hasn't really been before.

UGO: Would it be like Schwarzenegger, or a satire on Die Hard?

SIMON: It would be kind of a like a cross between John Woo and the more parochial English comedies. It should be another clash of styles.

UGO: I spoke with Stephen Fry [director of Bright Young Things] recently, and he is very popular over in the UK. He always seems to work with the same group of people, and comedians in the UK always seem to create almost their own troupe of actors. Are you guys doing that?

SIMON: It's nice to, with a repertoire of people. I personally come from a generation of comedians. There are a lot of other shows like Father Ted, Black Books, League of Gentlemen and The Office. It's a whole load of shows that these comedians come from, and we all work together, which is great because it's fun to work with people you know. Of course, when new people come along, you want to work with them, too.

UGO: Already, I'm sure there are American critics and fans who are calling this a Month Python-esque take on the zombie film. I love Monty Python, but does it ever feel like a yoke around British comedians' necks?

"We watched a lot of siege movies like Straw Dogs, Assault on Precinct 13 and a lot of well-structured films like Back to the Future and Raising Arizona. Then, we literally wrote out scenes on index cards."

SIMON: That's the only British comedy reference people here have. But when it is said, it's just lazy journalism. It's not our problem, because Python is brilliant. It's nice to be compared to them, but it's a different kind of humor. Because something is British and a bit silly, they immediately think of Python.

UGO: Was there much improvisation in Shaun of the Dead?

SIMON: Not really. We were very particular about the way the script should be performed because certain references and lines repeat. There are only a couple of scenes where we did improv, like the scene in the pub where we are all eating peanuts, and I sort of try to cheer everyone up.

UGO: This came out at the same time as the remake of Dawn of the Dead in the UK. Now, it's coming out in the US close to the release of RESIDENT EVIL: Apocalypse.

SIMON: Yeah, it's great. It means it becomes a reaction to a current. I was worried about coming out the same time as Dawn, but it worked out really well. Their film is very different from ours; they are updated and upgraded.

UGO: What do you think of the trend towards fast moving zombies?

SIMON: I think it's kind of pointless. For me, zombies are supposed to be slow. The word zombie comes from "somnambulist," which means sleepwalker. They're creepier when they're are slow, plus when they're fast, you can't share any screen time with them because you're always running away.

UGO: What was the process for you and Edgar?

SIMON: We watched a lot of siege movies like Straw Dogs, Assault on Precinct 13 and a lot of well-structured films like Back to the Future and Raising Arizona. Then, we literally wrote out scenes on index cards.

UGO: What's your favorite of the Romero zombie movies?

SIMON:Dawn of the Dead. I think it's fantastic.

UGO: What about your favorite non-Romero zombie film?

SIMON: Well, Romero nailed it. Return of the Living Dead is a lot of fun, while the [Lucio] Fulci ones are kind of exploitative and they kind of missed the point of Romero's thoughtful film. I guess The Beyond is pretty good in places.

UGO: You started as a standup comedian in the UK. Have you seen much American standup?

"The first time I ever did a scene with lots of zombies was when I tried to get them all to follow me and then I disappear. The first time they all turned towards me, I had to call cut because it was just too weird and slightly frightening."

SIMON: Yes, a few times. I was lucky enough to be at The Comedy Cellar when Jerry Seinfeld showed up for a surprise set. I love Chris Rock, and Bill Hicks when he was alive.

UGO: Was Shaun a difficult movie to make?

SIMON: It was fun, but it was hard work. The first time I ever did a scene with lots of zombies was when I tried to get them all to follow me and then I disappear. The first time they all turned towards me, I had to call cut because it was just too weird and slightly frightening.

UGO: There is really good comic book about zombies right now.

SIMON: Yeah, The Walking Dead [written by Robert Kirkman].

UGO: Are you into comics?

SIMON: Yeah, I've just read a book called Blankets [by Craig Thompson], and I just reread Watchmen because I got sent the screenplay.

UGO: Did they send it to you to maybe play a part?

SIMON: We know the producer, Lloyd Levin, and I told him I was interested, so he sent it along as something to think about. I would just love to play Rorschach.

UGO: What superpower would you want to have?

SIMON: Flight.

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Clint Eastwood, Still Fighting for the Green Light

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:00:29 GMT

February 13, 2005

Clint Eastwood, Still Fighting for the Green Light

By DAVID CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/movies/oscars/13carr.html

BURBANK, Calif.

FIVE times in a dozen years, Clint Eastwood, director, has given Warner Brothers, a studio otherwise short on Oscar winners, a ticket to the Academy Awards. He directed a best picture, "Unforgiven," in 1993 and two years ago delivered a best picture nominee, "Mystic River." Meryl Streep received an acting nomination for his "Bridges of Madison County," a 1995 Warner film. Even "Space Cowboys," the old-guy space romp he made for the studio in 2000, picked up a nomination for its sound effects.

But the green light still doesn't come easy for a 74-year-old pro who has called the Warner lot his professional home since 1975, and has now produced, directed and/or starred in some 30 pictures for the company since "Dirty Harry" in 1971. When Mr. Eastwood proposed his "Million Dollar Baby," the studio balked, citing audience aversion to boxing pictures, just as it had first turned down "Mystic River," a crime-and-friendship story that was first deemed too dark. Warner executives only budged when an outside financier, Lakeshore Entertainment, agreed to share the cost.

In the shadow of a large sign boasting of the picture's seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director, the studio president, Alan F. Horn, is more than happy to eat some crow. "If I were sitting here talking about how I let 'Million Dollar Baby' go to another studio, I would be more than chagrined," he said. "In retrospect, his instincts were right, stunningly right. At the end of the day, and sometimes these are very long days, we did the pictures."

Never simple, often tested, sometimes downright tense, the marriage between Mr. Eastwood and his home studio has ultimately proved to be an astonishingly productive relationship in an industry that defines a three-year contract as a long-term deal. To Warner, the aging Mr. Eastwood - who started in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and became embedded in American consciousness as Dirty Harry - has brought unexpected cachet, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the years. The actor-turned-filmmaker and Warner have not always been on the same page of the script. But with the kind of bumps and pushback one comes to expect from a lifelong mate, the partnership has somehow wrung the best from a blue-collar auteur who, well into his 70's, makes good to great movies with the constancy of a factory worker.

Asked about Warner's reluctance over "Million Dollar Baby," Mr. Eastwood sounded crusty but not bitter. "I explained to them that it wasn't a boxing movie, it was a love story," he said, "but I must say, other studios had the same opinion, although many of them had expressed interest in working with me. I told them, 'Hey, I'm not the kind that looks good in tights or can play a superhero,' and if they don't want to do this, and they don't want to do dramas, why are they even in the movie business?"

By and large, the Warner-Eastwood relationship operates on a handshake. Mr. Eastwood has no overriding contractual commitment to the studio, but works picture by picture, and will do his next, "Flags of Our Fathers," for DreamWorks SKG, with some Warner backing. (DreamWorks owns the rights to the story.)

But the comfort of Mr. Eastwood's connection to Warner's sprawling Burbank lot was apparent in a recent visit to Mr. Eastwood's office on the lot, the bungalow once used by Harry Warner and now home to the filmmaker's Malpaso Productions, even amid the slight buzz of Oscar electricity. His wife, Dina Ruiz Eastwood, stopped in and quietly giggled with the staff about what clothing and jewelry she would wear to the Oscars while Mr. Eastwood took press calls in his office. She turned down the $10,000 loaner watch in favor of her own $60 watch that keeps time just fine: understatement is one of the cornerstones of the Eastwood franchise.

After a few minutes, Mr. Eastwood emerged from his office in the back of the bungalow and his wife asked him if she should pick up anything at the market. "Let me see - Viagra, Levitra and, yeah, some Cialis," he deadpanned to shrieks of laughter from the staff and Ms. Eastwood. He can make that kind of joke, not just because he has seven children, including an 8-year-old daughter, but also because he is not given to anxiety over his image. He has no press agent. "At a certain point, you are who you are," he said, smiling. As an actor and a director, he has conjured up many men who seem imprisoned by regret, but he seemingly has none.

Mr. Eastwood sank into a couch sideways and immediately stretched his feet to reach a table, appearing to have all the time in the world. And 34 years after directing his first film, "Play Misty for Me" - for which Universal Pictures paid him nothing, but gave him a percentage - he talked straightforwardly about the process, his Warner relationship included.

"On the one hand, it's nice that people think enough of the movie to nominate it, but on the other, we never started out with that thought in mind," he said of "Million Dollar Baby," fishing out a pocketknife and extracting a pick for his teeth.

With a Directors Guild award for his work on the film and momentum going into the Academy Awards, Mr. Eastwood is in the midst of some sweet revenge on his home studio. It put him through the wringer before signing off on "Mystic River" several years ago, although he is far too courtly to say as much.

"In the end, they said we will give you so much money and pay you a percentage," he recalled. "I had to laugh. I told my agent I was right back to where I was 36 years ago when I did 'Play Misty for Me.' I'm more than 70 years old and I'm still out there selling."

"I don't blame them and I didn't want to talk them into anything because I would have felt terrible if it were a huge turkey," he said. In addition to bringing Oscars to a studio that is a bit short on them, "Mystic River" brought in more than $150 million worldwide at the box office.

Having been right about "Mystic River," Mr. Eastwood was surprised when Warner once again demurred when he brought them "Million Dollar Baby," citing the poor performance of recent boxing movies. But he seems rankled more by the industry's gigantism - the search for the world-slaying mega-movie, to the disadvantage of more intimate projects - than by Warner's reservations, and said his relationship with the studio was "just fine."

John Calley, the former chief executive of Sony Pictures and an executive at Warner during many of Mr. Eastwood's years there, nonetheless said he was "startled" that Mr. Eastwood had had to beg for financing after the success of "Mystic River." "He has one of the highest batting averages around," Mr. Calley said, adding that Warner owes Mr. Eastwood a significant debt.

"He carried Warners around on his back for many years and he was honored in return for the kind of man he was and the kind of work he did," Mr. Calley said. "Clint is unlike other filmmakers. He is a real artist. He doesn't present himself as an artist, but he never varies from what he is trying to do."

In the half-light of the dark, wood-paneled confines of the bungalow, Mr. Eastwood looked old - 74 is 74 - but time has been kind to his visage. And no one said a filmmaker had to be able to do 100 push-ups to get behind the camera, though Mr. Eastwood looks as if he could pull it off. John Huston was 79 when he made "Prizzi's Honor," Akira Kurosawa was 75 when he made "Ran," and at 73, Mike Nichols just made a movie, "Closer," that crackles with contemporary resonance.

"If you look at the last eight years, you'd have to say that getting older has improved his work," said Steven Spielberg, who will be producing Mr. Eastwood's next picture. "At his age, he still has the ability to surprise, in part because his tastes are so eclectic. He has blindsided all of us with his last two movies by coming up with such exceptional work."

In truth, Warner had to wait for that exceptional work, riding with Mr. Eastwood through years when he appeared to be overreaching with poorly received films like "Bird" and "White Hunter Black Heart." Yet Mr. Eastwood is now enough the director to talk of acting as a thing of the past. "I had such a good time working on 'Mystic River' that I thought I had officially retired from being an actor," he said. "But then this role in 'Million Dollar Baby' came along, and I had to play it because it allowed me to reach deeply into a character and I did it. But now I'm retired as an actor again. I'm doing that Frank Sinatra thing - I'll just unretire when I feel like it."

The actress Hilary Swank, for one, says she is glad that Mr. Eastwood is still willing to hit his marks in addition to pointing other actors toward them. "He is astonishingly good as an actor," Ms. Swank said. "When I met him, I was completely speechless. I am standing there, and in walks this 6-foot-3 icon of cinematic history. But he sits down and puts you at ease immediately."

Again, that sense of ease is possible because Warner over the years has tolerated Mr. Eastwood's loose-jointed directing style. He is not one to shoot a scene to death, and there is no video playback when Mr. Eastwood makes a movie.

"You go by feel and when you know things are right," Mr. Eastwood said. "You should know what you are looking for from something and know when it happens. Otherwise, you shouldn't be doing it."

The actor Kevin Bacon watched Mr. Eastwood closely while making "Mystic River," and came away convinced that it was time to direct his own movie. "Frankly, it's inspiring to watch somebody who is playing the game by their own rules," said Mr. Bacon, whose film "Loverboy" had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year. "Clint makes the movies he wants to make and makes them his way."

That Mr. Eastwood appears to do exactly what he wishes may be part illusion. The Hollywood system, where even a "small" picture like "Million Dollar Baby" can mean tens of millions of dollars at stake, gives no one carte blanche. Yet Mr. Eastwood has managed to find the best in that system even as it found the best in him, and the process looks effortless, even when it was not.

"Everything with Clint was very easy," said Terry S. Semel, the Yahoo chief executive who was co-chairman of Warner Brothers in the years when Mr. Eastwood's output was less impressive than it is today. "With Clint, there were never 14 people you had to talk to. You only had to talk to Clint and whatever he said, he did. He worried about Warner Brothers' money like it was his own."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/movies/oscars/13carr.html

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MOVIE REVIEW | 'ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR'

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:52:53 GMT

MOVIE REVIEW | 'ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR'
A Hero Whose W.M.D.'s Are Knees and Elbows

By A. O. SCOTT
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/movies/11ong.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1108571955-MSR8SzidYzO6RT/jzw5PzQ

Ting (Tony Jaa) is a simple country boy who happens to have been well trained in Muay Thai, a martial art also known as Nine Body Weapons - though the principal weapons seem to be elbows and knees. Upon completing his apprenticeship, Ting promises his teacher that he will never use his deadly skills, a pledge that holds for about the first 10 minutes of "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," a lively, bone-crunching action movie from Thailand.

After a drug dealer named Don steals the head of the village Buddha (a crime that recalls Bart's desecration of the statue of Jebediah Springfield in a classic episode of "The Simpsons"), Ting sets off for Bangkok to bring it back. Once there, he runs into George (Petchthai Wongkamlao), a fellow villager who has succumbed to the dissolution of the big city, dying his hair blond and scratching out a living as a gambler and petty grifter. George may be dishonest, but he has a good heart, evident in his protective, big-brotherly relationship with a tomboyish street urchin named Muay (Pumwaree Yodkamol).

With George and Muay as sidekicks - forgive the pun - Ting confronts various bad guys and their minions in a series of hand-to-hand (and elbow-to-head and foot-to-neck) set pieces that are the picture's real reason for being. The director, Prachya Pinkaew, is an eager choreographer of mayhem and a connoisseur of the venerable traditions of martial-arts filmmaking. He is something of a purist, filming his fight sequences without the aid of wires, computer-generated imagery or digital tweaking. (And sometimes, unfortunately, without very much light.) Often, Mr. Pinkaew seems so proud of a particular leap or blow that he will show it three or four times in instant replay, like a Super Bowl broadcast producer savoring a touchdown pass.

And fans of this genre will find much to appreciate in "Ong-Bak," a symphony of flying limbs, breaking bones and elaborately staged chases and confrontations. An early broken-field pursuit on foot through the crowded alleys of Bangkok has a slapstick kineticism that honors both the early work of Jackie Chan and the even earlier silent two-reelers that Mack Sennett used to make. A later chase involving three-wheeled, brightly colored, low-horsepower taxicabs reminded me of the tippy, rickety old cars that used to spin across the cobblestones and disgorge Keystone Kops.

Not all of the action is so innocent or imaginative. There are some bloody fights in an underground boxing club, in one of which Ting must fend off a demented, refrigerator-throwing Australian. But Ting is one tough Buddhist, and the assorted lowlifes of the Bangkok underworld are no match for him. Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and "Ong-Bak" feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.

"Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has violence and profanity.

source:
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/movies/11ong.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1108571955-MSR8SzidYzO6RT/jzw5PzQ

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Tony Jaa: Thai Warrior An interview with the star of Ong-Bak

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 20:26:55 GMT

Tony Jaa: Thai Warrior
An interview with the star of Ong-Bak

Source: Edward Douglas
February 9, 2005
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=8295

On Friday, America will finally meet the latest contender to the martial arts crown previously worn by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. This time, the new blood comes from Thailand in the form of 29 year-old Tony Jaa, the prodigy of Phanna Rithikrai (Born to Fight) who stars in Prachya Pinkaew's action film Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. In the movie, Jaa plays Ting, a young villager who must travel to the big city of Bangkok to retrieve the head of Ong-Bak, the village deity, which has been stolen by drug dealers. Jaa's distinctive moves, combined with Pinkaew's vision, builds on Thailand's current reputation of having a burgeoning supply of new cinematic talent.

Jaa made his first trip to New York to promote the film, giving a first-hand martial arts demonstration of Muy Thai, the fighting style used in the film. He began with a graceful dance showing off some moves before progressing into an elaborate fight sequence where he took on multiple attackers.

The actor born Panom Yeerum told ComingSoon.net about his history and the training that led up to the making of "Ong-Bak". "At the age of 10, I started watching films by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and I was inspired by them," he told us. "When I watched those films, I would come home and practice the moves, but I didn't go into it more extensively until was 15 years old. I told my father that I wanted to study with my master Phanna (Rithikrai), and both of them agreed that I should go back and finish school first. During the summers, I would work behind the scenes on the set--working the dolly, getting drinks for everybody, working with the cameramen-until I finally became an extra. After I finished high school, I had the opportunity to study at a physical education academy, where I learned all the different forms of martial arts-Muy Thai, Muy Thai Boran, Tae Kwon Do-and I worked my way into becoming a stuntman. I auditioned for 'Mortal Kombat 2', which was filming in Thailand, and I became the stunt double for Robin Shou. After that, I realized that as a stuntman, you are only in the shadow of the actor, and you don't really get to be seen. Your true abilities are not really portrayed. I put together a project with my master Phanna, presented it to ['Ong-Bak' director] Prachya and that became 'Ong-Bak'."

What makes Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior so distinctive from the Chinese martial arts films that influenced it is Jaa's unique fighting style: Muy Thai, an ancient form of Thai boxing. "What makes Muy Thai different from other forms of martial arts is that the elbows and knees are used," he explained, going on to tell us about the three different versions. "There's Muy Thai Boran, an ancient form used during wartime that has a lot of culture and tradition involved with it, the kind of fighting you see in 'Ong Bak'," Jaa said. "Then there's a form of stage boxing when it becomes a sport, where the culture and tradition that comes from the various moves disappears because of the rules that become involved with it. There's also an amateur type of Muy Thai."

Getting a chance to see Jaa's Muy Thai moves in action is a great reason to see "Ong-Bak," but there are also a lot of amazing stunts, something which took four years of preparation. "In choreographing these scenes, we created a storyboard of sorts. We took a video of the various action sequences and did various cuts to see what would look best on film," he explained. "We also thought of ways to make this film different from other films you've seen in the past. This is the first time Muy Thai is presented on film, so there is a lot of use of the elbows, like the elbow to the head. We would keep practicing these scenes to see how they'd come out on film."

Because of this preparation and planning, there were no stunts they wanted to do that they couldn't accomplish, and it insured that Jaa's stunt men were never injured on the set. "There was no danger involved because we had safety precautions--just the shock when they got hit or kicked in the face," he joked, "As for me, the worst was that I tore a ligament on my ankle and was out for a month, and I burnt my eyelashes during the fire scene."

Jackie Chan's Drunken Master was the first martial arts film Jaa ever saw, inspiring him to go home and practice Jackie's moves. He used some of those moves to dodge the question when asked about rumors that he might collaborate with Jackie Chan on a new Drunken Master film. Although talks for something like that may happen in the future, Jaa has not even had the chance to meet his hero yet. "I had the opportunity to go visit Jackie Chan on set, but he was busy, so we didn't get a chance to talk. He invited me to dinner, but I had already gone back to Thailand."

Jaa also chose to remain fairly mum about his other upcoming projects, including the oddly named Tom Yum Goong, Pinkaew's follow-up to "Ong-Bak". Named after the spicy shrimp soup you would find on the menu at a Thai restaurant, Pinkaew and Jaa have been filming both in Thailand and Australia and are 70% complete. "There is definitely something different and new, because there's a bigger production and an international cast, but how different and new, you'll have to wait and see, " he teased. Jaa didn't have much to say about the possibility of him appearing in any Western films, but he also refused to comment on the Hollywood tradition of using wirework and camera trickery to make non martial artists do some fancy moves on screen. "It's really up to the viewers what they want to see."

While his main inspirations come from Bruce Lee, Jet Li and Jackie Chan, he said he finds inspiration in a variety of places. "All films are inspiring to me, even Charlie Chaplin, because he would do things back then even before Jackie Chan, and you would wonder how he could do them."

The ever-so-diplomatic Jaa also refused to take sides when asked who he thought might win in a fight between his two idols Jackie Chan and Jet Li or whether he would be willing to take either one on in a fight. "They're both good in their own ways. They wouldn't fight each other, and I wouldn't fight with either one because they're like my inspiration, my heroes and my masters. I keep them in my heart." With that sort of respect and reverence to the past, Jaa is destined to go very far.

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior opens in select cities across the nation this weekend.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=8295

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Jamie Foxx SAG acceptance speech for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:24:40 GMT

Jamie Foxx SAG acceptance speech for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

11th Annual SAG Awards ™Acceptance Speeches
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

Photo of Jamie Foxx at the 11th Annual SAG Awards:
http://newyork.tribe.net/template/pub%2CViewPhoto.vm/context/tribe?page=27&currentoffset=161&parentid=465194e2-2e80-4616-a2e1-d5009bb9002a&sortby=oldest&rows=6&r=10352

JAMIE FOXX: We have to do it for Ray. [singing] Ohhhhh"...

AUDIENCE: Ohhhh...

FOXX: Ah-h-h...

AUDIENCE: Ah-h-h...

FOXX: Yeah, you're ready. [laughter] First of all, I just want to say thank you to SAG Awards, my peers, to everybody that voted for this. Thank you, for Ray Charles, for just living so complex and so interested in making us just come together as everybody. I watch - I tell you this story, I was in D.C., and it was for the Black Caucus, and we screened this film. And a young black kid stood up, and he had a jersey on, and he had his bling-bling on, and everybody was wondering, "What is this kid gonna say," 'cause it was like the question and answering.

And he said, "Foxx, do you think this might like give you a nom, or somethin' like that?" And he said, "a nom," and he was talking about the Oscar nom, or Screen Actors Guild, and it was beautiful to see the education that's going on with this film, because everybody's getting on board with this. So, thank you for that. [applause]

Thank you for Taylord Hackford, for taking the chance with an African American film - Taylor you're my director of the year, man, no matter what. [applause] Thank you for that beautiful cast that's sitting right over there on that table, that can go with anybody. You guys are incredible to me, and I split this up and I share it with you - right there at that table. Yeah. [applause]

Jamie and Marcus King, my managers, CAA my agents, Kim Hodges, Rick Kurtzman, Steve Smoot, everybody, and to all the actors that I'm looking at in this crowd that I'm going to get autographs from, and pictures and everything. [laughter] And so I can put 'em up on my wall, so I can front and say, "Yeah, those are my good friends." [laughter]

And Denzel Washington - when I saw Denzel Washington, he was such an ambassador, as an actor. And I met Denzel Washington a long time ago, and I hope he never ever remembers how I met him. [laughter] Because I wasn't Jamie Foxx at the time, I was Eric Bishop, I was just a young comic in LA trying to come up, and the Roxbury was going off at the time. I don't know if anybody ever been to the Roxbury, but I could not get in for nothin'. And I see Denzel come out. And I don't know if you know, but Black people march when they get excited. [laughter] And I saw Denzel and I said, "Denzellll!" [laughter/applause] And he took his elbow and stuck me right in the throat and said, "Hold on. Hold on. What's goin' on? What's goin' on?" And told him how much I... [laughter]

And I'm sittin' there with his elbow on my throat and I'm trying to tell him that "I really love what you do, dog." And from that moment, all the way up to being in Venice, Italy, when Denzel calls me out of the room and says, "Come down to the front, I need to talk to you." And he said, "I've been hearing some things. I've been hearing some things. I don't want to scare you, but just keep doin' what you're doin'. If you win or if you lose, keep walkin' in the same direction."

I'm walkin', D. [applause]

source:
http://www.sagawards.com/11_awards_accept.htm

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Jamie Foxx Snags Golden Globe Award For 'Ray'

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:21:44 GMT

Jamie Foxx Snags Golden Globe Award For 'Ray'
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art27872.asp

"I'm having the ride of my life" -Jamie Foxx @62nd Annual Golden Globe Awards

image:
http://newyork.tribe.net/template/pub%2CViewPhoto.vm/context/tribe?page=27&currentoffset=160&parentid=465194e2-2e80-4616-a2e1-d5009bb9002a&sortby=oldest&rows=6&r=10352

Actor/Comedian Jamie Foxx took home the 2005 62nd Annual Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his role in “Ray”, the biographical film about the late Ray Charles. While his performance in the movie is amazingly memorable, it is his acceptance speech that I now, can’t forget.

A sincerely appreciative Foxx took the stage and crooned a little Ray Charles (“Baby What I Say”) as the audience followed. On a night celebrating Hollywood, there was nothing “Hollywood” about Foxx. He thanked/credited Ray Charles for his inspiration. He thanked his management. He thanked his publicist, even jokingly referencing the New Orleans Casino scuffle with police that took place during the shooting of “Ray”.

The most moving part of his speech was when he mentioned his grandmother, who raised him. She passed away this past October. He was choked up & brought to tears as he stated how he used to think it was “corny” when people would say that people where looking down on them (from heaven). He continued, “….I didn’t believe it. But I got a feeling.”

The longstanding belief is that a Golden Globe win is a pre-cursor to an Oscar win. From the time Jamie Foxx donned the Ray persona, the Oscar buzz was swirling.

Foxx was up for three Golden Globes this year for “Ray”, his role in “Collateral” and his role in “Redemption”.

Jamie's upcoming movies include "Jarhead" (filming) and "Stealth". He has also been announced to play the role of 'Ricardo Tubbs' in the big screen version of the mid 80's hit TV show "Miami Vice".

source:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art27872.asp

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Singing in the Rain (car commercial) (2005)

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 23:40:55 GMT

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-video/Media/video/2005/01/27/golfgti.mov

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What does a producer do, anyway?

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 20:16:26 GMT

What does a producer do, anyway?

Academy trying to settle battle over credits

Thursday, February 3, 2005 Posted: 12:25 PM EST (1725 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/03/film.whos.a.producer.ap/index.html

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- In an industry where the egos behind the camera can be as big as those in front of it, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is settling a dispute over who deserves "producer" credit for films.

The academy said it will announce its decision Thursday on who will be awarded Oscars if one of three nominated films -- the Howard Hughes biopic "The Aviator," the boxing saga "Million Dollar Baby" and the Ray Charles portrait "Ray" -- should win.

The academy stepped in after the studios behind the films failed to pare the long list of producers credited on each film down to the maximum three allowed under academy rules.

Why limit the number of producers who can take credit for an award-winning film? And what do producers do, anyway?

Those questions came to a head in 1999, when five producers, including Miramax studio chief Harvey Weinstein, took the stage to accept the best-picture Oscar for "Shakespeare in Love."

The spectacle rankled those angered by "credit creep," the tendency of filmmakers to massage the egos of actors, directors, studio executives -- even talent managers and agents -- by giving them on-screen credit for jobs they did not perform.

"The title of producer has in the last 20 years become a bargaining chip, a negotiated perk, given to those who can extract it from the studios," Kathleen Kennedy, president of the Producers Guild of America, said last year when introducing a new program designed to limit credits.

After the "Shakespeare in Love" flap, the academy adopted its rule limiting each nominated film to three producers.

In October, the guild began a "Truth in Credits" campaign, which included advertisements featuring such prominent producers as Jerry Bruckheimer and "Star Wars" creator George Lucas.

"Even in science fiction, the fiction should end when the credits roll," the Lucas ad read.

According to guild guidelines, a producer exercises decision-making authority in one or more of four areas of filmmaking -- development, pre-production, production and post-production/marketing.

Snickering and dickering

Most moviegoers have no clue who produced a movie. Directors, such as Martin Scorsese or Clint Eastwood, and the stars themselves carry more clout with audiences.

Vance Van Petten, the guild's executive director, says audiences snicker when they see a dozen or more names of "producers" scroll by at the end of a film.

And he says moviegoers should care when hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent to pay people who do not directly contribute to the making of a film -- money that could have been spent improving the movie's quality.

Those arguments fail to persuade Chuck Binder, a talent manager who's credited as a producer on several movies starring ex-client Sharon Stone.

"If you have talent that the buyer wants, they are going to give you a producer credit, they are going to do whatever it takes to lock somebody up," Binder said. "People knew that if you wanted Sharon Stone you were getting Chuck Binder as a producer."

Producer fees can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The norm for managers and agents is to demand 10 percent of their actor's fee, Binder said.

Binder dismisses claims that long lists of producer credits hurt audiences or constitute false advertising.

"That's a bit of a reach," he said. "What about people who sit in the seats and watch Ford commercials? Seeing one more name flash up on the screen for 20 seconds isn't really going to harm the viewer."

Since the academy is expected to use the Producers Guild criteria on who should receive credit for producing "The Aviator," chances are good the list will not include Charles Evans Jr.

In a suit against fellow producer Michael Mann in 2001, Evans said he was responsible for developing the idea and persuading Leonardo DiCaprio to portray Hughes.

Eventually, Evans claimed, Mann cut him out of the deal altogether, taking DiCaprio and the project to another studio.

The lawsuit was settled, and Evans was listed as a producer on the final film. Then Martin Scorsese was hired to direct.

Mann and fellow producer Graham King were recognized when the movie won this year's Producers Guild award. But Evans was left out because, according to guild guidelines, he had no decision-making authority over the final film.

The decision has already created one awkward moment, when Evans forced his way into a photo backstage at the Golden Globes ceremony.

Binder, for one, thinks Evans deserves as much credit as anyone.

"Even though Michael Mann and Marty Scorsese are much more powerful than Charlie Evans Jr.," Binder said, "it seems like he was the one who got the train rolling. He really should be considered their equal."

source:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/03/film.whos.a.producer.ap/index.html

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Critics have no right to play spoiler BY ROGER EBERT (re: Million Dollar Baby)

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:54:25 GMT

Some critics have revealed crucial plot points of "Million Dollar Baby," with Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank, because they disagree with its message.

Critics have no right to play spoiler

BY ROGER EBERT / January 29, 2005
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050129/ESSAYS/501290301/1008

If you have not yet seen "Million Dollar Baby" and know nothing about the plot, read no further.

The characters in movies do not always do what we would do. Sometimes they make choices that offend us. That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them. It is not our right, however, to destroy for others the experience of being as surprised by those choices as we were.

A few years ago, I began to notice "spoiler warnings" on Web-based movie reviews -- a shorthand way of informing the reader that a key plot point was about to be revealed. Having heard from more than a few readers accusing me of telling too much of the story, I began using such warnings in my reviews.

In the case of some films, however, even to hint that there is a surprise is to reveal too much. In my review of "Million Dollar Baby," which I consider the best film of 2004, I wrote: "It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death."

I thought that was a good way of approaching the film. Later, after the story was widely known, I intended to come back and discuss it from a different perspective. That's how a lot of critics handled "The Crying Game," which also depended on an unexpected plot development. For that matter, in reviewing "The Year of Living Dangerously," most critics did not reveal that Billy Kwan, the little local man who befriends Mel Gibson, was in fact played by a woman, Linda Hunt. That was not a plot surprise, but an acting choice, and yet to know it in advance was a distraction -- until she was nominated as best supporting actress.

"Million Dollar Baby" raises fundamental moral issues. At a moment of crisis, the characters arrive at a decision. I do not agree with their decision. But here is the crucial point: I do believe that these characters would do what they do in this film. It is entirely consistent with who they are and everything we have come to know about them. That is one reason the film is so good: It follows the characters all the way to the limit, and plays true to them.

Now yet another spoiler warning, because I am going to become more explicit.

* * *

The decision of Maggie and her trainer is not a surprise to the readers or listeners of two right-wing commentators, Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh. They have revealed every secret of the plot. Limbaugh even chortled as he "apologized" for an earlier broadcast. Just as the movie was opening, Medved appeared on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" to describe the plot in great detail. The outcome of the movie does not match their beliefs. They object to it. That is their right. To engage in a campaign to harm the movie for those who may not agree with them is another matter.

The film, as many now know, stars Hilary Swank as Maggie, a female boxer who is paralyzed from the neck down after getting a sucker punch. Clint Eastwood plays Frankie, a veteran trainer who becomes her best friend. Maggie is a semiliterate waitress whose family is stupid, cruel and selfish. She saw prizefighting as her only way to free herself from "waitressing for the rest of my life."

Some days after Maggie learns she is paralyzed, she uses a word such a person might use: She is "frozen," she says. She asks Frankie to assist her in dying. After some thought, and after consulting his parish priest (who advises against it in an eloquent speech), Frankie does. Is this the right decision? Maggie and Frankie agree that it is. I do not. But I believe it is what Maggie honestly desires, and that Frankie respects her wishes. Similar choices are explored in another good current film, "The Sea Inside," which stars Javier Bardem in the true story of a Spanish man who arranged for his own assisted death after some 30 years in bed.

(Hot Type columnist Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader fueled the right-to-die debate this week when he weighed in on the "Million Dollar Baby" controversy and took sides: "Thanks to the star power of Swank and Eastwood," Miner wrote, "the film was an endorsement of Maggie's death.")

I have known people in wheelchairs all of my life. I have dated one. I was an assistant in 1962 on a tour of University of Illinois wheelchair athletes visiting southern Africa. The first movie in my Overlooked Film Festival was "Dance Me to My Song," where we welcomed onstage Heather Rose, its author and star, who had command of only one finger of one hand, but had heart and courage without limit.

I am in frequent correspondence with Jeff Shannon, a film critic in Seattle. Until "Million Dollar Baby" become an issue, I didn't know he was a quadriplegic. He is writing an article about the movie from his point of view; he thinks it is a great film and takes issue with those in the disabled community who attack it. Shannon has chosen life, and leads a full and productive one.

Ramon Sampedro, the character in "The Sea Inside," refuses to be supplied with a chair he could control by his head and breath. He has given up. Jeff Shannon wrote me about the movie: "Despite considerable pain and anguish for a variety of quad-related reasons, I agree with Ramon Sampedro's cause, but I cannot share his attitude for one simple reason: I look at life the way I look at a good movie -- I can't wait to see what happens next."

I believe the character Maggie is such a fighter that she could learn to deal with her disability and enjoy her life. But here is the important point: She doesn't believe that. Yes, it is true, as critics have charged, that she receives inadequate counseling. That the care in her hospital is not good, and the security is laughable. But the screenplay by Paul Haggis and Eastwood's direction make that clear -- they know it, too. It is not movie criticism to say Maggie needed better counseling. We might as well say Hamlet needed a psychiatrist.

Most movies have no issues and inspire no thought. A movie like this forces you to think about its issues. If you leave it and discuss what Maggie should have done, what you would do, and what you would wish for your loved ones, then the movie has served a purpose, whether you agree with it or not. A movie is not good or bad because of its content, but because of how it handles its content. "Million Dollar Baby" is classical in the clean, clear, strong lines of its story and characters, and had an enormous emotional impact.

Medved feels moviegoers deserved to know what the movie is about, and that critics have been dishonest in not telling them. Medved has for a long time been a political commentator, not a movie critic, but he must remember from his earlier days that moviegoers do NOT want to be informed of key plot surprises, and write enraged letters to critics who violate this code. He says the studio concealed the ending because "no one would come" if they knew how it turned out. In fact, the movie is a great success because of word-of-mouth praise from people who have admired it and urged others to attend.

I have here two recent messages. One is from a woman who read a Medved essay in USA Today which seemed to be about another topic, and then, without warning, bluntly revealed the secret of "Million Dollar Baby." She is enraged at him. Another is from the mother of a quadriplegic who was injured in 2003. She wrote to the national spinal cord injury association (NSCIA), in response to an NSCIA press release warning that the movie ’s final act could have potentially harmful effects on people with similar disabilities, depending on their state of mind. Her son became a quadriplegic after a 2003 accident, she writes, and they were looking forward to seeing the film, but "after learning here of its content, I now feel I must find the way to distract him from watching it; it would be too damaging."

Groups like the NSCIA have a responsibility to the people they serve, to address issues which, for them, transcend the need to keep a plot secret. The mother got the information she needed, and is acting on it.

But to actively attempt to sabotage a movie with its intended mainstream audience, as Medved, Limbaugh and others have done, is not justifiable. They have a moral objection to euthanasia. Very well, but should no movie be allowed to consider it? The separation of church and state in America was wisely designed to prevent religions from dictating the personal choices of those who do not share the same beliefs.

At Sundance last week, I saw a great documentary named "Murderball," about quadriplegic wheelchair rugby, a full-contact sport in which jocks actually try to knock one another out of the game. In the discussion afterward, All-Americans Mark Zupan and Joe Soares say they hope the film will help people understand that those in wheelchairs are, in all other respects, just like themselves. People are often awkward around a disabled person, they said, and don't know where to look or what to say. Solution: Look at the person, and say whatever you'd say if they were standing up.

By the same token, it is no solution to look away from Maggie in her hospital bed. "Million Dollar Baby" is a great film that has convinced us of her character and worth. She makes a decision that I believe is inevitable, given her specific personality and worldview. It may be the wrong decision. She could have received better advice. The Eastwood character might have delayed his action. All true in another world, or another movie. Here is this movie, about these people, and by experiencing it, we are put in closer contact with our own feelings, whatever they are.

What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?

source:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050129/ESSAYS/501290301/1008

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Spider-Man 3 Villain Locked

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 21:54:20 GMT

Spider-Man 3 Villain Locked

Written by Scott Collura
Wednesday, 02 February 2005
http://www.nowplayingmag.com/content/view/772/2/

Sam Raimi has been promoting the DVD release of his Ghost House Pictures’ The Grudge this past week, so of course while talking with him Now Playing snuck in a few Spider-Man questions as soon as the webslinging director let his guard down. And while Raimi’s spider-sense was tingling – keeping him from revealing too many details about the next Spidey film – he did confirm for us that a villain for Spider-Man 3 has been settled on.

“Alvin Sargent is writing the screenplay right now,” Raimi says. “I’m not supposed to [talk about the villain]. When Sony Pictures decides to release the villain they do it in conjunction with Marvel Comic books. Avi Arad is the president there and my producer, and they’re really the ones that decide how they’re going to present this to the fans of the comic and they love doing it with a lot of drama and a big splash. So they consult with me, but it’s really something… they really want to please the fans and do it in a very particular way.”

Raimi comes across as a nice enough guy, so it’s easy to let such doubletalk pass, but a bit more persuasion from Now Playing’s editors did get the filmmaker to discuss how he decided on the villain for the next film – whoever that villain may be.

“What I did was, when I worked on the story with my brother Ivan, I determined what journey I felt was most important for Peter Parker to take,” he says. “He’s a young man so this is a coming of age story and he’s on a journey to becoming a more responsible adult – in each of the movies. And I tried to determine with my brother which human faults would be displayed in this particular story that Peter Parker would have to exhibit, and then recognize that he had that fault, and then try to grow and develop as a human being as somebody who could overcome that fault. So once [we] determined Peter Parker’s journey, we tried to determine a villain that best presented some aspect of that fault so that he could literally stand in the way of the growth of Peter Parker.”

A lot of fans have high hopes that the villain in Spidey 3 will be Venom, a more modern foe for the wallcrawler than the first two films’ Green Goblin and Doc Ock. Of course, Raimi isn’t saying whether we’ll see the symbiote-suited Venom in the next film or not, but he does explain that the choice of villains also comes down to a balance between character and the cool visual aspect that modern special effects allow (and that would surely make for an amazing Venom, by the way).

“Absolutely we wanted to have a villain not only who would fulfill the character needs but somebody who could entertain the audience on a visceral level and provide great visuals, something we haven’t seen before, and create a real challenge and great foe for Spider-Man and his unique spidery, spider-like powers,” says Raimi.

Spider-Man 3 is currently targeted for a May 2007 release.

source:
http://www.nowplayingmag.com/content/view/772/2/

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In Suspended Animation, in Limbo, in Japan (NY Times article)

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 05:28:17 GMT

In Suspended Animation, in Limbo, in Japan
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Published: January 30, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/movies/30raff.html

THE Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda makes movies about people whose circumstances are tenuous, unresolved, perfectly ambiguous - people who are in the profoundest sense neither here nor there. So it seems fitting, somehow, that I'm meeting Mr. Kore-eda in a small conference room, with no view, in a blandly modern Upper East Side Manhattan hotel. In this nowhere place (which feels a little like the featureless, impersonal anteroom to eternity depicted in Mr. Kore-eda's 1998 "After Life") we talk about his new film, "Nobody Knows," which opens in New York on Friday. The story - based on an actual case - is about four children, aged 5 to 12, who have been abandoned by their flighty single mother to fend for themselves in a tiny Tokyo apartment. The siblings live in a kind of suspended animation, awaiting their mother's promised return - in a state of permanent, agonized irresolution.

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When I asked Mr. Kore-eda why he wanted to make this picture, he doesn't respond for about a minute, and finally says (through his interpreter) "I'm not sure"; and then favors me with an even longer, more suspenseful pause before going on. "Certainly I feel an empathy for the character of the oldest boy, Akira," he says. "The Tokyo he sees is something I felt I also knew, the indifference and coldness people in the city have towards their neighbors, and towards strangers." When he was Akira's age, he says, "I was a latchkey child. Both my parents worked, and we lived in a housing project; I would go home and let myself in and spend a lot of time alone. Not a terrifically unique childhood - many people of my generation grew up that way."

But unlike most others of his generation (he's 42), Mr. Kore-eda found in the odd, anticipatory solitude of the latchkey kid a source of creative inspiration. All his films are distinguished by an extraordinary stillness, the fierce quiet of a lonely child looking out the window and imagining the world outside. His first feature film, the gorgeous, hushed "Maborosi" (1995), consists to a remarkable degree of compositions in which the darkness of rooms contrasts starkly with the brightness visible through their small windows. The heroine of that picture, the puzzled young widow of a suicide, mostly stays in the dark - sometimes gazing out, sometimes not, and often simply oblivious to the light pouring in. Even when she has remarried and moved with her small son from the city to a remote coastal village, she seems always to be waiting for something, an existential clarity that stubbornly eludes her. She's neither fully here, in her apparently happy new life, nor there, in the old life that ended - abruptly, incomprehensibly - with her first husband's death.

That uneasy feeling of in-betweenness, of incomplete transition, is the dominant tone of Mr. Kore-eda's films. (Or, I should say, of the three I've seen; a fourth, "Distance," made in 2001, hasn't had a theatrical release here.) In "After Life," a friskier, more crowded film than "Maborosi," dozens of the recently deceased spend a week in a bureaucratic/metaphysical limbo, where counselors help them select the one memory that they want to take with them to the next life; the counselors, we gradually learn, are dead people who were unable, or unwilling, to isolate such a defining moment from their own lives. The picture ends, not with the ascent to heaven of that week's graduating decedents (Mr. Kore-eda wisely declines to follow them into the great beyond), but with the continuing quasilife of the counselors as they prepare to help yet another batch of the freshly expired figure out what their time on earth was all about, and so move on.

Mr. Kore-eda's sympathies, in "After Life" and elsewhere, are obviously with those who through choice or necessity find it tough to move on. Three of the four unfortunate siblings in "Nobody Knows" are actually forbidden by their mother to leave the apartment (because she has told the landlord that shy, well-behaved Akira is her only child), and even after she's been gone for months they continue, touchingly, to obey her. Later they do venture warily outside, but in the larger sense they remain immobilized, unable to contemplate any alternative to staying in their increasingly squalid digs and hoping for Mommy to come back: Akira won't go to the police or social services because he knows, from bitter experience, that the state will separate the kids from one another. And Mr. Kore-eda, after nearly two and a half hours of immersing the audience in the minute particulars of this excruciatingly static situation, refuses, audaciously, to resolve it. He ends (as Truffaut did in "The 400 Blows") with a freeze frame: here a long shot of the children's backs as they vanish into the anonymity of the city.

Near the end of my conversation with Mr. Kore-eda I begin to understand that his fascination with immutable-seeming in-between states is more than just a matter of temperament: that it reflects his most deeply held ideas about the society he grew up in. He mentions, for example, his excitement at discovering, while he was at university in the early 1980's, the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kurosawa. "When I was in school," he says, "there weren't many contemporary Japanese movies that inspired me, and from that perspective the films of the 1930's and 1950's looked really shimmering."

It is true that the kind of Japanese film that was a staple of American art houses in the 1950's and 1960's has largely gone missing in the last couple of decades or so; Mr. Kore-eda's films are among the very few we Western moviegoers see that seem to belong to the great tradition. He warns that comparing today's movies to those of "the golden era" is "irrelevant," and insists that "there's a real, robust sense of activity once again." But the fact remains that Mr. Kore-eda's defiantly serious, sometimes difficult movies are anomalies in a Japanese cinema whose most marketable international commodities are, by and large, cult directors: filmmakers like the gangster-movie specialist Takeshi Kitano, horror masters like Hideo Nakata and Takeshi Shimizu and animators like Hayao Miyazaki.

Mr. Kore-eda, that is, is making movies at a time when his country's cinema is in a sense on hold: freeze-framed. Although his goal was always to make feature films, he found his first work in television documentaries. "As I made more and more of them," he says, "I realized that this was an incredibly stimulating way to be involved with the world. So I still make them." In fact, he has been using film festival appearances and promotional jaunts for "Nobody Knows" as an opportunity to gather footage for what he calls "a personal documentary essay" about Article 9 of the Japanese constitution: the so-called "peace clause" by which Japan, after World War II, renounced war forever. "I could go on and on about this," he says. And true to his word, he does, musing out loud about the "passive antiwar feeling" of his generation, about the culture's inward-turning escape into "hermetic worlds of fantasy," about the national preoccupation with "wealth and personal possessions" and about Japan's tendency to be "incredibly vague and obfuscatory about war responsibility." What he's presenting is a wide-ranging vision of spiritual and cultural paralysis: a meditation on his nation's inability to define itself clearly and move on.

"I don't know if I can pull this off," Mr. Kore-eda says; it's early January, the film is set to be broadcast on Japanese television in March, and he's still shooting. But he says it with a big grin, maybe because he is at this moment in exactly the place where he feels most at home: looking out the window, watching and waiting for something he can't quite see yet, but can imagine. All his films seem to take place in a no man's land of perpetual anticipation. And I suspect that for Hirokazu Kore-eda they are, like his country and his country's cinema, most alive to him - most irreducibly themselves - as works in progress.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/movies/30raff.html

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Off to the Races: Eight insights and observations about this year’s field of Oscar nominees

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 04:48:56 GMT

Off to the Races
Eight insights and observations about this year’s field of Oscar nominees

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Devin Gordon
Newsweek
Updated: 4:05 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6867635/site/newsweek/

Jan. 25 - In 2004, the morning on which the Academy Award nominations were unveiled was high drama—and the actual ceremony was like a tall glass of Benadryl. Everyone knew that “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” was going to win everything; the only exciting part was finding out exactly who Peter Jackson was going to stomp into the dust. In 2005, it looks like we might enjoy the exact reverse: the nominations yielded very few surprises—and, with just a few exceptions, the statues will be up for grabs until the moment the envelopes are opened. And that’s great news for Oscar buffs: after all, a race without a true thoroughbred is usually more fun to watch.

Still, predictable as it was, the announcement of 2005 Oscar nominees had a few things worth noting. Here are the eight most interesting things about this year’s list—or, at least, the most interesting things to me:

1. There wasn’t a single obvious travesty in the bunch.

I love Paul Giamatti, and I thought he deserved a best-actor nomination for “Sideways,” but it’s hard to make the case that his absence is as great an oversight as, say, Bill Murray’s for “Rushmore” in 1998. I love “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and I think it might be the only future classic released in 2004, but I can’t say I’m surprised the Academy passed over such a quirky, complicated film. (And they did honor Kate Winslet and the film’s ingenious screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.) So whose omission am I supposed to get worked up about? Julie Delpy for “Before Sunset”? Liam Neeson for “Kinsey”? Uma Thurman for “Kill Bill Vol. 2”? “Hotel Rwanda”? “SpongeBob SquarePants”? All great, sure. But there’s nothing criminally wrong here. For the most part—and for the first time I can remember—the Academy mostly got it right…

2. …Or did they?

People in the film industry, and folks like me who cover it, weren’t too shocked by the nominations this morning. But most American filmgoers will surely be stunned that neither “The Passion of the Christ” nor “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the two most talked-about movies of the year, earned a single major nomination. Mel Gibson’s biblical epic did manage consideration for a few technical awards—best cinematography, best score, best makeup—that were token almost to the point of hilarity. Best makeup? (“I hated that movie, but I have to say, it really did look like his flesh was falling off his bones.”) As for Michael Moore’s documentary hit, it’s hard to believe he would’ve been shut out if (A) he hadn’t pulled his film out of the best doc category to “give someone else a chance” or (B) Bush had lost. Then again, after Moore’s ill-timed acceptance-speech rant at the 2003 Oscars, maybe the Academy just didn’t want him around. In any case, I’ll bet there are a lot of Christians out there who are convinced that the Academy is filled with nothing but heretics, and a lot of liberals who think the Academy is nothing but a bunch of sissies. Hey, for once, can’t you both be right?

3. If five best picture nominees fall in the forest and no one sees them, do they exist?

As I type this, the most profitable film among the five best picture nominees right now is “Ray,” which has made a "whopping" $73 million at the box office. The next biggest, “The Aviator,” has made just $58 million. Most Americans don’t live within 50 miles of a theater playing “Sideways,” “Finding Neverland” or “Million Dollar Baby.” Now, rest assured, in the next four weeks leading up to the Oscar broadcast, all five nominees will get a second theatrical push. But it’s hard to remember a year when the best picture field didn’t include a single bona fide box office hit. (Last year’s winner, “The Lord of the Rings” made over $300 million in the United States alone.) The smallness of this year’s group surely hurt NBC’s ratings for the Golden Globes; ABC has to be worried about a repeat on Oscar night. And when it happens, naturally, they’ll blame host Chris Rock. Great.

4. And the winner is … black actors.

This year, five performances by black actors were honored with nominations, out of 20 total nominations. That’s 25 percent of the field. I can’t say for certain, but I’ll bet that’s a first. Eagle-eyed readers can check me on this, but I’ll bet there’s another first: Jamie Foxx is the first black actor ever nominated twice in the same year. Any other year and we’d probably be complaining much louder about how Kerry Washington and Regina King, Foxx’s masterful costars in “Ray,” got snubbed in the supporting-actress category.

5. “Shark Tale” is an Oscar nominee? Are you serious?

The best animated feature film category is a good idea, if only because it throws a bone to some great movies unfairly hurt by the Academy’s bias in favor of, you know, real people. But this category needs some re-evaluation if it only contains three nominees and one of them is derivative junk like “Shark Tale.” One gets the sense that most Academy members didn't actually see any animated films and just nominated the three most profitable. In years past, this category included some terrific, gutsy picks, like Japan’s “Spirited Away,” which won in 2003, and France’s “The Triplets of Belleville,” which was nominated and lost in 2004. But they whiffed this year. Where was “SpongeBob”? Or the critically-adored Japanese anime “Ghost in the Shell 2”?

6. “The Phantom of the Opera” is an Oscar nominee? Now you have to be kidding.

I feel like I write this every year around this time: just because a movie has lots of art direction doesn’t mean it’s good art direction. The sets in “The Phantom of the Opera” look like what Liberace would do with the Playboy Mansion. It might the tackiest movie of the last decade. And yet it’s an Oscar nominee—in a category picked by the practitioners of the trade! It’s a real puzzler because they clearly don’t all have bad taste. The same group forgave “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” for being a mediocre movie and rightfully rewarded the film’s dazzling production design. With any luck, “Lemony Snicket” will win.

7. The race is over in just two major categories: best actor and best adapted screenplay.

Jamie Foxx will win for best actor unless he runs over a guy with his car, then gets out and kicks him. He’ll probably still win if he doesn’t kick him. I guaranteed a few weeks ago in my report on “Oscar's Burning Questions" that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor will win for best adapted screenplay; now that the nominations are out, I’m re-guaranteeing it.

Other than that, every race is a too-close-to-call showdown between at least two, often three, nominees. If you ask me, that includes the best actress race, which many people are conceding to Hilary Swank for “Million Dollar Baby.” She is unquestionably the frontrunner. But she's nowhere the runaway favorite that Foxx is. But I remember in 2002 when then-unknown Adrien Brody went up against Jack Nicholson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Caine and Nicholas Cage—four flat-out acting studs, all of them previous Oscar winners, all nominated for great work and not just on reputation—and Brody beat ’em all. I’m not saying Catalina Sandino Moreno (the first-time actor and star of “Maria Full of Grace”) has Swank and the rest of the field right where she wants them. I’m just saying, ya never know. Swank will probably take home the statue, but I won’t be surprised if Annette Bening or Imelda Staunton wins instead. OK, I admit it, if Moreno wins, I’ll be pretty darn surprised.

After the Golden Globe nominations came out, I predicted that Martin Scorsese would finally get his long-awaited best director Oscar. Now I’m not so sure, and it’s not just because he lost the Golden Globe to Clint Eastwood. Looking at the nominees for best director, it seems to me that the chief yardstick the Academy used to narrow the field was the performances that each man got out of his actors. Taylor Hackford was nominated for “Ray” even though the film’s screenplay wasn’t—a tribute to his cast and, especially, to his work with Foxx. Mike Leigh, beloved among actors for using improvisation to build his screenplays, is the only directing nominee whose film (“Vera Drake”) isn’t up for best picture. Eastwood and Payne were nominated for films that are essentially chamber pieces driven by three or four characters.

“The Aviator,” meanwhile, got plenty of acting nominations, but Scorsese’s film is the least soulful, the least human, of the bunch. It’s a big, rousing epic crafted in a classic Hollywood style. Initially, I thought that would help Scorsese: he’s honoring his forefathers and that, historically, is a smart path to Oscar gold. But judging from this year’s other nominees, I wonder if Academy voters are picking up something else from the film: Scorsese’s ego. It’s no secret that his over-campaigning in 2003 with “Gangs of New York” may have cost him an Oscar. Perhaps, by nominating a handful of directors whose films are noteworthy for their cinematic modesty, the actor-heavy Academy is sending him a message again: we’re the stars here, not you.

I still have a hunch that Scorsese will get his reward at least, but I’m not gonna bet any money on it. Sorry, Marty. The wait might have to go on.

source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6867635/site/newsweek/

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What’s the worst movie month? Something rotten in the state of Hollywood Taking statistical measure of the year in movies COMMENTARY By Erik Lundegaard

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 21:12:47 GMT

Something rotten in the state of Hollywood
Taking statistical measure of the year in movies
COMMENTARY
By Erik Lundegaard
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 12:14 p.m. ET Jan. 27, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6835822/

What’s the worst movie month?

Let’s consider the question logically first. If a movie tests well it’s going to be released when people have money and time, which is during the summer months or winter holidays; and if a movie is award-worthy the studios will push it into theaters before December 31st. The holidays for Hollywood are like the holidays for you and me. They have to entertain a lot of people and by the end their cupboards are bare. What’s left? Just dusty stuff on the back shelf that never looked particularly appetizing in the first place. That’s what they serve in January. January, for moviegoers, is dried onion soup mix month.

Of course some people actually like dried onion soup mix. So is there any way to back this up statistically? Is there a way to quantify quality?

The closest thing we’ve got right now is rottentomatoes.com, a Web site which gathers movie reviews (100 or more for wide releases), assigns a thumbs up or down if the critic already hasn’t, and tabulates the results. If 60 percent or more critics like a film, it’s considered “fresh”; if 59 percent or lower don’t, it’s considered “rotten.”

There are obvious problems with this strategy. The “fresh” and “rotten” numbers are arbitrary. “I Heart Huckabees” got a 60 percent rating, so that’s considered a good movie. “Ocean’s Twelve” got a 58 percent rating, so that’s considered a bad movie. One or two percent, apparently, can make all the difference.

The site also includes too many online and marginal critics. (To my mind, you shouldn’t be included unless someone hires and pays you for your opinion.) Then there’s this thumbs up/down business. Most publications employ a four-star system or a letter grade. But what about those awkward B- or two-and-a-half star movies? Someone at rottentomatoes has to point our thumbs one way or the other, and, for me anyway, it’s often not the way I would point it. Did I really recommend “The Medallion,” for example? I wrote, “As special effects reveal how super Eddie Yang is, they also reveal how ordinary Jackie Chan has become.” That’s a recommendation?

Brother, can you spare a theater
Still, the site can tell us a lot about the recent year in movies. According to my calculations, 157 movies were released at least marginally in 2004. (A marginal release, for the purposes of this article, is 500 or more theaters; a wide release is 1000 or more theaters; a very wide release is 2000 or more theaters.) Of these 157 movies, 44 managed a “fresh” rating.

The best month was July, in which seven of 13 films were considered fresh. The worst month? A tie, between our old pal January, and (surprisingly) May, both of whom went one for 10. The good news for May is that its one hit was a grand slam, “Shrek 2,” with a 90 percent rating and $436 million U.S. box office, while January managed only a bloop single, “Disney’s Teacher’s Pet,” with its 76 percent rating and $6.2 million. So, yes, even statistically, January gets the worst movie month award. Congratulations.

But February can’t exactly pat itself on the back either. It went two for 13 (“Barbershop 2” and “Miracle”), while both August and September had just three winners each. March was the first of four months (April, October, and November were the others) to give us four good movies, while December had five, and June went six for 12. Add it to July’s totals and it’s obvious that summer ruled in 2004.

If these overall numbers seem low to you (44 for 157 is just a .280 batting average), please don’t assume movie critics are being elitist here. Among their recommended films? “Starsky & Hutch” (62 percent), “Hellboy (78 percent), “I, Robot” (61 percent), “The Terminal” (63 percent), “Wimbledon” (62 percent) and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (73 percent).

No, the numbers are low because many of the better-reviewed movies don’t manage even a marginal release and so haven’t been counted. Stuff like “Garfield” (13 percent), “Catwoman” (9 percent), and “Taxi” (9 percent) get dumped into over 3000 theaters opening weekend, and even middling fare like “Paparazzi” and “Wicker Park” (19 percent and 22 percent) will see 2000 or more theaters; but movies that critics rave about barely play.

In its best week, Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset” (94 percent) was seen in only 203 theaters. “Touching the Void” (93 percent)? 137. One of my favorite movies of 2004, the surfing documentary “Riding Giants” (91 percent), had a high of 64 theaters one week. That’s it. Even the best week for the best-reviewed movie of the year, “Sideways” (96 percent), saw just 497 theaters, or about one-fifth of the theaters “Wicker Park” saw its opening weekend.

None of this is news, particularly, but it is a reminder of how marginalized quality is. It also raises a variety of complex issues. Do the majority of Americans go see crap because they like crap, or because it’s the only thing playing at the local cineplex?

Looked at one way, the stats blame the public. For 28 weeks last year, the number one movie in America was a rotten one. Looked at another way, the stats blame the movie distributors. For 29 weeks last year, the most widely distributed movie in America was a rotten one. Want to hear the scary part? Eleven of these weeks don’t match. That is, distributors blanketed America with a rotten movie, which America smartly side-stepped…only to go see a different rotten movie. It’s no wonder I’m cynical.

Wanted: The Bill James of movies
Twenty-five years ago Bill James helped create a revolution in the way we look at baseball statistics by asking simple questions. What’s the point of baseball? To win. How do you win? By scoring the most runs. How do you score runs? By getting on and moving around the bases. He concluded that the best measure for a hitter was not the traditional one — batting average — but on-base and slugging percentage. Eventually the baseball world agreed with him.

The movies need a Bill James. Every Monday we get a list of the Top 10 movies in terms of box office, but it only says what Hollywood wants to know ($$), not what we need to know. Which movie has the highest per-theater average? Which has the lowest? Are these films popular because people like them, or because they’re being pushed on us?

Sometimes you wonder if distributors even know what they’re doing. The most likable, date-friendly romantic comedy of 2004 was “Garden State” (88 percent), but it didn’t even earn a wide release (1000 or more theaters), let alone a very wide release (2000 or more theaters). Yet it still pulled in $26.7 million.

How many 2004 movies earned a very wide release and didn’t earn that much? Thirty-five: “Chasing Liberty,” “Disney’s Teacher’s Pet,” “Torque,” “Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!,” “The Perfect Score,” “The Big Bounce,” “Catch That Kid,” “Eurotrip,” “Welcome to Mooseport,” “Twisted,” “Havana Nights,” “Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London,” “The Alamo,” “The Whole Ten Yards,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Godsend,” “Laws of Attraction,” “Envy,” “New York Minute,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Two Brothers,” “Sleepover,” “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” “Thunderbirds,” “Little Black Book,” “Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie,” “Paparazzi,” “Wicker Park,” “Mr. 3000,” “Wimbledon,” “First Daughter,” “Raise Your Voice,” “Surviving Christmas,” “Seed of Chucky,” and “Alfie.”

So why didn’t “Garden State” earn a wide release let alone a very wide release? Was its star, Zach Braff, too unknown? Too Jewish? Was the film too slow? Too quirky? Did it test poorly? Are these tests accurate? (Initially, remember, “Seinfeld” tested poorly.) By the way: Of the aforementioned 35 films, only four were considered “fresh” on rottentomatoes.com, and none of these came close to “Garden State’s” rating. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

What’s the point of movies? To entertain us with stories. Is this being done? Well, 44 for 157 would indicate…not particularly.
Critic Erik Lundegaard agrees with the Tomatometer 66 percent of the time.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6835822/

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Is SpongeBob, Like, Gay? from E!Online

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 02:49:49 GMT

SpongeBob's Recruitment Drive?

by Joal Ryan
Jan 21, 2005, 1:15 PM PT
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,15756,00.html?tnews

Barney, Big Bird and Clifford the Big Red Dog are in cahoots with reputedly flamboyant sea creature SpongeBob SquarePants to promote the "pro-homosexual" agenda to children.

So goes the accusation from James C. Dobson, the popular radio commentator and founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family.

Addressing members of Congress at the "Values Victory Dinner" in Washington, D.C. Tuesday night, Dobson asked the power brokers, "Does anybody here know SpongeBob?"

Dobson went on to decry a toon-town remake of the 1979 Sister Sledge disco hit, "We Are Family," in which the frolicsome Bikini Bottom dweller appears alongside Barney, Big Bird, Clifford and other fictional stars of children's TV.

The music video, produced by the non-profit We Are Family Foundation, is to be distributed on DVD to 61,000 public and private elementary schools on March 11. Its stated aim is to promote diversity; its stated agenda is to have future March 11s declared National We Are Family Day.

But according to Dobson, his remarks recounted by the New York Times, what's unsaid is that the "We Are Family" project is a "pro-homosexual video."

Dobson based his charge on a "tolerance pledge" found on the We Are Family Foundation Website. The two paragraph statement seeks "respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."

"...Their inclusion of the reference to 'sexual identity' within their 'tolerance pledge' is not only unnecessary, but it crosses a moral line," a statement from Focus on the Family says.

To the Times, Paul Batura, an assistant to Dobson, was even more scathing: "We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids. It is a classic bait and switch."

An attorney for the We Are Family Foundation, Mark Barondess, labeled its critics "insane," per the New York Post.

The group, founded by music industry veteran Nile Rodgers, who wrote "We Are Family," said the offending "tolerance pledge," which it stands behind, won't even be included in the DVD package mailed to schools.

Actor Tom Kenny, who gives high-pitched voice to SpongeBob, told his hometown newspaper, New York's Syracuse Post-Standard, that producers merely wanted to "make a video that [says] it's a positive, good thing to be respectful of people different from you."

"I could maybe see it their [critics'] way if this was a video with Barbra Streisand and Madonna and Judy Garland," Kenny told the Post-Standard.

While Focus on the Family insists it's not picking on SpongeBob ("...This issue is not about objections to any specific cartoon characters..."), it was SpongeBob, not Dora the Explorer, who was singled out by Dobson's speech.

"By picking SpongeBob, [Dobson's] going for the biggest name, the most recognizable one," says Alonso Duralde, deputy arts and entertainment editor of The Advocate, the gay and lesbian newsmagazine. "...It goes along with the religious rights' ongoing task of trying to make gay rights look awful by somehow suggesting that we're out to get the children."

In 1999, the Rev. Jerry Falwell warned followers that The Teletubbies' Tinky Winky was the same shade (purple) as "the gay pride color."

SpongeBob was outed by friendlier fire in a 2002 Wall Street Journal profile on the toon star's supposed status as a gay icon. At the time, Stephen Hillenburg, creator of the Nickelodeon series, said he thought of his characters as "being somewhat asexual." And rather than gay, Hillenburg described SpongeBob as "an oddball."

Mr. SquarePants also has been defined as "infectiously optimistic and carefree," interestingly enough in a largely positive review of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie on the Focus on the Family Website.

SpongeBob controversy or no, Pamela Roberson, a spokeswoman for FedEx, one of the corporate partners on the "We Are Family" video, said Friday there had been no change in plans to take the DVD to schools.

source:
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,15756,00.html?tnews

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On-Set Interview: Gary Oldman "Batman Begins"

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 03:45:01 GMT

On-Set Interview: Gary Oldman
"Batman Begins"

Posted: Wednesday January 12th, 2004 1:46pm
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/batman3.php
Author: The Silent Type
Location: Bedfordshire, England

As police Lieutenant James Gordon, actor Gary Oldman is perfectly cast. It feels as though his role in this film fits nicely between incredible character performances is THE CONTENDER, JFK and MURDER IN THE FIRST and his more mainstream work in AIR FORCE ONE, LOST IN SPACE and more recently HARRY POTTER.

The first question obviously, is why Batman? "I have to say, I'm not a comic reader. I never read comics as a kid. Chris Nolan really. What he might do with it and the opportunity for someone like Chris to put to Batman franchise back on track really. To pull it back from where no man had gone before."

Oldman agrees that after previous films, this seemed a very interesting choice for Christopher Nolan. "It is a surprise that he'd wanted to do something on this scale. My sources tell me that he really wanted to do this, and really courted it and went after it with a great passion. I don't know if you direct MEMENTO and INSOMNIA, you just get [given] BATMAN, I don't think they just come knocking. I think you really have top have a vision for something like this and go after it. But I think it is surprising and that'll make it interesting...hopefully."

There were of course different challenges for Oldman here, as he was not the first actor to portray James Gordon. "No-one had been Sirius Black, so it was there for me to create it, and y'know hopefully make it wholly original". Usually this character has been played by an older, and let's face it, fatter actor. As Oldman laughs at the thought, he shrugs "He had to start somewhere."

"I was surprised, cos I went online and there's an enormous amount of stuff written. I was amazed at how detailed the bio is on Gordon. So I kind of went there, and then you're pretty much working to the script. I mean, in a way its like any script, you have to stay within the framework of what is there. He's pretty much there on the page".

Taking the role at face value, Gary tried to keep it simple "This is Lt. Gordon in Chris Nolan's BATMAN, and that's my map. That's the road map I take so doing a great deal of work outside of that to an extent is kind of redundant because there's only so much that you can draw from that and apply it to what is on the page. Ultimately I'm playing Gordon in 'BATMAN BEGINS'".

The characters of Batman and Gordon have a very interesting relationship and chemistry is important if they are to be portrayed believably on screen. Oldman commented on this on screen partnership "We didn't have a great deal of rehearsal or any time to cement it. Christian and I luckily hit it off and we enjoy working with one another and like one another so that's primarily what we've taken and used and tried to infuse the script with. We enjoy one another's company and hopefully that will translate and come through."

When he discusses what we had previously seen on the live feed from the set, Oldman explains how difficult it is to act in these types of films. "This morning was hard because it felt a little cardboard, a little cartoonish, comic book, but that's our source material, and were in a world y'know [where a] batmobile pulls up and out jumps a guy with a cowl and a big black cape and I'm taking it seriously."

He says the role is surprisingly non physical. "It's just a lot of questions (adopts Lt. Gordon persona) 'Why did you want to do that? When are they gonna do it? How do you know? Really? God, that's interesting. Do you think we'll do it in time?' (laughs) I catch keys, [I] catch a few bad guys. I mean it's been quite a challenge. It's nice to be a good guy for a change y'know? I'd normally be the guy that Batman's after so it's nice to be.....I'm Batman's buddy in this (laughs)"

Oldman even lets slip that Gordon has a chance to do something that characters in this series don't usually get, to drive the batmobile. "Only with the green screen, but I think I'm one of the few characters [who gets to drive it] so it's a coup to be able to drive the batmobile. They may let me take one home."

source:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/batman3.php

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Donnie Yen on 'SPL' and 'Seven Swords'

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:48:22 GMT

Donnie Yen on 'SPL' [Sha Po Lang] and 'Seven Swords'

by Jean Lukitsh
http://www.kungfucinema.com/news/2005/011301.htm

2005.01.13 - It’s hard to catch up with Donnie Yen these days. After Hero took off like a late summer rocket and he wrapped Sha Po Lang, a martial arts/police action drama co-starring Sammo Hung and Wu Jing, he was off to Chengdu and the set of Tsui Hark’s new wu xia epic, Seven Swords. During a recent visit with his family, he talked about these two new projects.

KFC: Early last year, there were rumors that you and Jackie Wu Jing were going to make a swordplay movie together. Instead you both teamed up with Sammo Hung and made Sha Po Lang (SPL) instead. How did that project come together?

DY: At first Abba Movies wanted a traditional film. They went scouting for a director and script, and eventually picked Wilson Yip and Carl Chang to work on it. I had a good experience working with them before. We decided to make a modern story instead of a traditional one. They wrote a script, and then Sammo signed on.

KFC: Wilson Yip and Carl Chang wrote the script?

DY: Yes, with another writer, a guy who works with Johnny To.

KFC: You were the action director on the film, right? I understand the choreography has been called a combination of “jiujitsu, wrestling, and wushu."

DY (laughs) I don’t like to break things down into categories, but that sounds about right. Some of my Japanese assistants are trained in jiujitsu. And I used grappling techniques in Twins Effect. I’ve discussed it with John Salvitti (stunt actor, Tiger Cage II) - he’s been studying grappling for a few years, and I always say the movement, the real movement, is too small, too subtle, to register onscreen. It ends up looking like a documentary, one of those UFC bouts.

KFC: Like when one of the Gracie family fights?

DY Yeah! If you just watch a video of their fights, you can miss the details. Or you can show a real technique, but it doesn’t look cinematic, or dramatic. It’s hard to be real and dramatic.

Since I was making a movie about cops, I wanted to go back to the kind I used to make, like In The Line Of Duty or Tiger Cage. There hasn’t been a good modern action film made in Hong Kong for a while. Grappling is modern, something new for the audience. I just put in what I think will work. In Twins Effect, it was still exaggerated, because I was working with vampires. In SPL, in a cop movie, it has to be realistic. When you come back to basics, it has to be scientific, physically capable for humans to accomplish. But I hope it’s also dramatic and good to watch.

KFC: Just to change the subject for a minute, I have a question about a grappling stunt from Twins Effect. Did I see the same stunt in House of Flying Daggers?

DY (laughs) I know the one you mean! All I can say is that Zhang Ziyi’s stunt double in House of Flying Daggers worked with me on Protégé de la Rose Noire and Twins Effect.

KFC: And did she double for Josie Ho in the opening fight? I thought that was Kenji!

DY No, her name is Cheung Lan. She’s one of the top stuntwomen in China. I shot some commercials in China recently, and she stunt doubled for the model in the commercials. We did an action sequence together.

KFC: Kenji Tanigaki worked with you on SPL, right?

DY: Yeah, but when I run my show, I pretty much run my show. Kenji says I keep advancing my style and he’s always learning. I always have a theory about what I want to create going into a film. In Black Rose, I thought, “I’m not going to use slow motion, I’ll use more telephoto lens, and I’ll set up more realistic shots.” In Twins Effect, it was more glamorous, more Hollywood-style, lavish. But Black Rose was shot in a more traditional Hong Kong style.

In SPL, I played with similar ideas. In my fight with Wu Jing, I went back to basics. Old school kung fu movies weren’t made with sophisticated equipment. You didn’t have wide-angle lenses. You just showed the fight. My idea was to show the real dynamic, the real technique. You see all the punches and kicks. No slo-mo. There’s one shot, a single shot that’s about 40 seconds long, with about 60 movements in it, continuously, no cuts, no editing. I hope people see it and say, “Wow, that’s the real stuff!”

KFC: That’s the advantage of having three real martial artists doing the onscreen action. I understand that the action got a little too realistic during your scene with Sammo.

DY: I was very respectful of him, but I was really focused and I picked up the speed a little, and I accidentally hit him. That can happen. We don’t really try to hit each other.

KFC: Let’s move on to Seven Swords. Has shooting wrapped on that?

DY: No, I’m going back after the Chinese New Year. I think Tsui Hark will get an Oscar for this film. It will outshine the other recent wu xia films. The depth and richness of the story is unbelievable! I compare it to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Hero was a beautiful film, but the message was simple: Peace! But the character development and storytelling are so sensitively done here.

It’s based on a famous novel, but Tsui Hark changed everything. I play a Korean. I didn’t read the novel - he told me not to read it. In the original story, I turn into a bad guy right away. But in Seven Swords, I’m a good guy, and powerful. If the series continues, maybe by the fourth movie I’ll gradually turn into a bad guy.

It doesn’t even look like a Tsui Hark film. It’s totally different from anything else he’s made in the last decade. It’s slower, sensitive - a masterpiece! Tsui Hark is back!

KFC: Was this the first time you worked with the legendary Lau Kar-leung?

DY: Yes, the first time.

KFC: I see that he credited you with contributing to the movement choreography.

DY: He’s very gracious. I always develop my own movement, adapt it to my style.

KFC: There are seven different kinds of swords used by the heroes of this film, so I assume we’ll see plenty of variations on Chinese swordplay technique. Are the characteristics of the weapon an indicator of the character of the one who possesses it?

DY: It’s something I had to pay attention to in the development of my own character. I don’t know about the others. So far, I’m more excited about the drama than the martial arts.

KFC: The rest of the cast is mostly non-martial artists, right?

DY: Yeah, that can make it hard. But SPL will really meet expectations! And Seven Swords will win lots of awards!

source:
http://www.kungfucinema.com/news/2005/011301.htm

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Exclusive Interview: Don Cheadle for "Hotel Rwanda"

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:15:19 GMT

Exclusive Interview: Don Cheadle
"Hotel Rwanda"

Posted: Monday December 27th, 2004 6:47AM
Author: Paul Fischer
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news04/cheadle.php

Location: Los Angeles, CA

This may well be Don Cheadle's year, but as huge as Ocean's 12 is at the box office, critics are raving over the actor's groundbreaking performance as French Rwandan hotelier in Irish director Hotel Rwanda. As clearly irresistible as it was to play this character, the Golden Globe nominee knew nothing about Paul prior to being offered the film. " I had cursory knowledge about the massacre and I think like most people I became mostly aware of it when there were two million refugees in the camps with some of the militia sprinkled among them. But I knew nothing about Paul until I read the script."

In Rwanda, Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, who, in 1994, sheltered and saved many lives in Rwanda during the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis. As tragic as these events were, Cheadle says that he is not surprised that the American media ignored the Rwandan catastrophe. "Look, we had OJ going on, we had apartheid abolished in 1994, so there were other events that sort of took precedent and I think there was no political upside for the western powers, because I think they found Africa was just black killing black and their attitude was: we will get to it when we can."

Cheadle is unconcerned that films such as this have a tough time finding an audience, and that he doesn't think about such issues when choosing a project. "I don't know who the audience is but as an artist that is not my purview. What I do is go 'this is amazing, this is fascinating, I think there is a compelling story here, I hope it touches somebody and they will be moved by it' and then I go forward. What comes out afterwards, is a marketing issue." But Cheadle wants to make it clear, that while Hotel Rwanda has political overtones, there is far more to the film than mere politics. "I think mostly what the movie is, is a kind of thriller and at its centre it's a story between this man and his family."

Cheadle is that rare actor who can effortlessly slip between the Indie films on the one hand, and the likes of After the Sunset and Oceans 12 on the other, and is happy to strive for that perfect working balance. "I want to do both and try to do both. I'll do Brett Ratner's movie, that are not the small independent films and make money on those that hit a main stream audience, and those are the ones that allow you to eat while you are doing these others that don't pay anything that you really care about, really love and really want to put all you power behind. I mean, there is nothing wrong with popcorn films, and pure entertainment is fine, but that is not what is driving me, what inspires me, nor what makes me go this is why I want to be an actor."

Yet Cheadle's popcorn choices are as diverse as his choices that are non-mainstream, and so he tries to be selective when it comes to choosing the bigger Hollywood movies. "It has to be good popcorn! I don't want some stale fuckin' popcorn," the actor says laughingly. "I think Oceans is popcorn, but it is great popcorn. I think Steven is a genius so he's going to pull it off in a way that is surprising and I think Oceans 12 is head and shoulders above Oceans 11, I really do." That is confirmed by its box office success, with Cheadle adding that Oceans "is such a throw back movie. It is like a 1970's travelogue, I mean we go to Paris, Denmark, Italy, Sicily, Como and you know you see it all. It is not like you are shooting you know New York for Paris or Chicago for Amsterdam. He really uses the topography and uses the architecture, taking advantage of that, shooting the film in such a way that it is still felt really organic."

Having worked with Soderbergh and a plethora of great directors, will prepare Cheadle to take on directing duties on Tishomingo Blues, an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. While not giving much away, the actor says he is still figuring out how to direct his first feature. "I haven't determined exactly how I am going to direct it; but it will be a mix of things, you know?" He says he will use all that he has learned being an actor, to fortify his vision as a director. "Being an actor on a set, you get to see what the director's doing, what the AD's doing, what the DP's doing, what the costumes what the production design, you get to see what everybody does. Oh you get to see how he said that to her, she didn't understand what he said and now she said that to him and he is about to fuck it up, because he doesn't know that that is what he meant, and you get to see how all of it works, if you are observant. I mean you do 25 movies like I have done you are prepped and you are ready." So no wonder, Cheadle has little time to concern himself with Oscar talk, talk that has been generated since the film's world premiere in Toronto.

"It would kill me if I kept on thinking: this is my Oscar movie. On Rwanda, I had to be there everyday on the set fighting the light, knowing we didn't have enough days, doing the work and keep my focus on that. Again this is the kind of question that piggy backs on when the movies comes out that has so much to do with campaigns, marketing, pressing the flesh and going to the retirement home and shaking hand with all those voters. I mean it is a political process that A) I am not thrilled to be doing and B) It's the studios' preview if there going to spend that kind of dough and do that kind of campaigning."

While all the buzz centred around Rwanda, Cheadle is part of the ensemble that makes up a Crash, an impressively dark pastiche of the cultural divide that is Los Angeles. Cheadle plays a cop investigating a murder, that is linked to a series of events and characters. From the white middle class, to the African American, Hispanic and Asian communities, Crash reflects the diversity of a culturally divisive city. Cheadle says he is unsure how realistically reflective of LA, Crash ultimately is. "LA is so huge, sprawling and disparate, so it is very accurate of a lot of people's opinion of LA no question that is why I love the script so much. "

36 films and a career that has defined Cheadle as one of America's most regarded actors, the actor reflects on a life in film that began, he recalls, with the films that influenced his desire to act. There was not a singular film by any means, he says, but "a collective sort of all the movies I had seen that made me think: wow this is a great way to make a living. It is more often changed over the years, because at first I want to do just make believe and get paid to just pretend all the time and then it was just I wanted to have sex with a lot of girls," says Cheadle, laughingly. "Then it became: no this is a craft and you can potentially effect a large number of people."

Over the years, Don Cheadle has done precisely that, and based on what is still to come, audiences will continue to be effected by his artistry for years ahead.

source:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news04/cheadle.php

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Creative Human Character Animation: The Incredibles vs. The Polar Express By Isaac Kerlow

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:45:48 GMT

Creative Human Character Animation: The Incredibles vs. The Polar Express
Isaac Kerlow looks at recent human 3D character animation developments in The Incredibles and The Polar Express.

By Isaac Kerlow
[ Posted on November 29, 2004 ]
http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=2306&page=1

The Incredibles and The Polar Express are two recent animated features that achieve remarkable creative results using different styles of human character animation. The Incredibles is an example of first-class keyframe cartoon character computer animation that integrates 2D traditional styles with the 3D computer style that we have come to expect from Pixar projects. The Polar Express offers an innovative approach that animates computer-generated virtual characters by applying realtime human performances and keyframe touch-ups.

Comedy and Action Through Squash-and-Stretch
Two aspects of The Incredibles represent significant departures from the topic and style of earlier Pixar movies: the human characters are central to the storyline and they are animated with considerable squash-and-stretch. To make the later possible the technical character team and the animators joined forces to develop new tools for animating squash and stretch humans in real time. The design and ease of use of the character setup rigs was driven by the animators' needs, and keeping the overall look-and-feel similar to earlier versions of Pixar animation software was an important consideration.

One of the main characteristics of the software tools used to animate The Incredibles was the layering of two key stages in the animation process: the bone and muscle calculations, and the squash-and-stretch system. Without the layering of these two stages it would have been difficult to provide animators with realtime feedback. In simple terms, the first stage of this layered process started by running the bone and muscle calculations through all the character's positions in a shot. Using statistical analysis the software determined the most significant changes in the character's skin throughout the shot, and "baked" those deformations into the model so that they could effectively be used as blend shapes. (Without the baking animated models played back at rates of eight to 10 frames per second.) After doing the first pass animation the animators saw the baked geometry and did not have to deal directly with the bone and muscle system. The second stage of the layered animation process consisted of applying the squash-and-stretch to the baked geometry as a post-process, and animators were able to visualize this in realtime.

Geometry decimation was another technique used to keep the playback as close as possible to 24 frames per second. Animators were involved in the process of hand-crafted decimation that brought some meshes to about 25% of the full geometry but kept, for example, the full and decimated silhouette shapes of each character identical. Each character had a decimated version, with most of the savings occurring in the body geometry and not the face. Decimated models did everything that full models did, and the deformation hierarchies remained the same but with much less overhead. Shots got finalized during the animation stage using the decimated version but the final rendering used the full geometry.

The approach to facial animation in The Incredibles followed the Pixar tradition of allowing animators direct control of all parts of the face. Facial animation was done with a multitude of deformers tied to macro-controllers, and without using blend shapes. Compared to the facial animation tools used in Finding Nemo these had more and better features, nothing groundbreaking but many incremental advances, for example: a greater number of controls to allow for squash-and-stretch, a new eyebrow package with spline-based controls, and the ability to do wild cartoony distortions of the face including the eyeballs – something that Pixar animators traditionally did not distort.

The implementation of referencing across models was another animation tool in The Incredibles that broke with past practice. This standardization of a basic common rig structure for all characters made it easier for animators and TDs to share poses and facial expressions between characters. Some characters, however, had multiple rigs. The standard rigs were limited to "normal" squash-and-stretch articulation, but a few special-case rigs were developed for complex distortions. For example, Helen (Elastigirl) in her stretchy suit, or the transformation of baby Jack Jack into a monster. There were also at least two versions of the rig for Bob the Dad: one for the fit superhero version, and another one for his fat version with a gut and shorter legs. Switches inside all models were used to preserve old behaviors by linking different rig versions for each character. A lot of the character articulation work in The Incredibles was done by new employees at Pixar, and the passion for their work and talent are a testament to what the computer animation industry is all about.

Performance Capture and Emotion
From the animation point of view, the initial intent in Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express was to create computer-generated human characters that were not keyframe-animated cartoons. The scope and the scale of the technology assembled and developed at Sony Imageworks (called ImageMotion) to make this task possible is impressive. The Polar Express' production teams used motion capture technology in an innovative way and developed a unique production pipeline.

Unable to use keyframing as the primary animation technique, motion capture remained the obvious choice for animating the somewhat realistic-looking human characters of The Polar Express. Fortunately, the teams understood what we have learned after years of capturing motion: that there is big a difference between plain motion capture and performance capture. While motion capture seeks to record a cold sequence of moves (ideal for a fast-paced computer game fight or sports competition) performance capture seeks to record the emotion and the intention contained in the way an actor moves and pauses.

The Polar Express uses the later approach, and for that they assembled one of the most complex capture systems ever: four Vicon systems linked together, with 72 cameras in an area measuring 10 feet square. This configuration allowed the realtime body and face capture of up to four actors interacting with one another. The capture of facial performance was done with 152 facial markers, each measuring about two mm in diameter. The data obtained from the facial markers was converted to a muscle system custom-designed for this production, and the facial rigging was driven by the muscle compression for each muscle represented in the system. (For those of you who are curious, The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by Paul Eckman and used in Gollum's facial animation system was not employed in The Polar Express.) But in spite of the impressive performance capture setup it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to capture reliable motion data of eyelids, eyeballs, mouths and fingers.

In addition to their performance capture innovations, The Polar Express production teams also came up with a new production pipeline approach to integrate captured data with cinematography and animation. Large scenes, for example, with captured performances were initially created without a specific camera. This was very different from traditional animation where the scene layout and staging is always storyboarded and laid out from a very specific point of view before the animation stage. This initial scene, called "rough integration," contained only body motion and it could be played back in realtime from any angle by a director of photography (DP). This approach allowed the DP to establish shots by using a "wheel" interface for positioning and moving the camera in the scene while the rough capture was being replayed in realtime, in a mode similar to live action. This innovation represents an interesting twist on the traditional animation pipeline.

The shots continued ahead to "full integration" of body and facial capture after they were approved by the director and the editorial team. Once this stage was finished the shots moved on to the animation department, where the original performances were fine-tuned in different ways. Knowing the capture limitations mentioned earlier one would imagine that only eyes, mouths and fingers were keyframed during the animation stage, but in looking at the finished movie I found minor glitches in these areas and overall facial and body motion. This, in my opinion, points to the fact that some of the captured performances were clearly edited, possibly changed altogether. It is difficult to know exactly how much keyframe enhancement actually took place in The Polar Express, but knowing and understanding these facts will certainly help future users of this performance capture system optimize their work.

When judged from a strictly traditional animation point of view, I think that the style of many of the performances is a bit too straight-ahead for the stylized look of The Polar Express models. A few more keyposes, motion holds and clearer silhouettes might have helped make some of the action read better. Perhaps this is a matter of opinion and stylistic preference, but the lack of consistent emotion in most of the characters' faces is not. While the overall quality of the body performance capture seems consistent and believable, the same cannot be said of the eye animation, in particular.

As mentioned earlier, eyelid, eyeball and mouth animation, all crucial components of facial expression, were keyframed during the animation stage and not captured from the actors' performances. All throughout the movie the motion of the eyelids is minimal, giving some characters a flat look, and too many eyeballs seem focused at infinity. These minor but persistent animation inconsistencies end up distracting, and they represent the weak link in The Polar Express. The odd facial animation style is as if the actors in a live-action movie had a facial twitch every few minutes: no matter how good their performances were, their twitching would surely confuse or dilute some of the emotional intent and take away from the believability of their characters.

Some of the production techniques and pipeline developed for The Polar Express are remarkable, and while the movie was crafted with first class storytelling and rendering, I wish there had been more blending of performance capture with keyframe animation, and I can't help but wonder how this movie would have looked if it had been produced as a live-action movie with human actors and digital visual effects.

Isaac Kerlow is author of The Art of 3-D Computer Animation and Effects and former director of digital production at The Walt Disney Co. He is also a longtime active member of SIGGRAPH and the Visual Effects Society, and currently working on an independent animated feature.

source:
http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=319b255d&atype=articles&id=2306&page=1

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In Films Begin Responsibilities: The actor Don Cheadle has suddenly found himself an emissary for the issues raised by the film "Hotel Rwanda."

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 20:46:24 GMT

December 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/movies/28chea.html

In Films Begin Responsibilities
The actor Don Cheadle has suddenly found himself an emissary for the issues raised by the film "Hotel Rwanda."

By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES - It is high noon during the movie nomination season and a couple of folding chairs in a fluorescent-lit hallway outside a Hollywood screening room will have to do. Inside, members of the Screen Actors Guild are watching "Hotel Rwanda."

Don Cheadle, the star of the film, hunches forward in one of the chairs as he considers, once again, his much talked-about performance as Paul Rusesabagina, the Kigali hotel manager who saved the lives of more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the genocidal rampage by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.

Mr. Cheadle has barely opened his mouth when a young man in a suit, with a shaved skull, stops to interrupt: "My friend was over there with the United Nations," says the stranger. "Thanks."

Mr. Cheadle nods an assent, "Thanks, man."

Long one of the most highly regarded, yet underexposed actors in Hollywood - notable in movies from "Devil in a Blue Dress" to "Boogie Nights" to "Ocean's Eleven" (and "Twelve") - Mr. Cheadle suddenly finds himself the focus of attention not just for his moving portrayal of a real-life hero, Mr. Rusesabagina, but also as an emissary for the issues raised by the film.

That offscreen role has become a mission of sorts, though an exhausting one. A week before this mid-December screening, Amnesty International presented an award to Mr. Rusesabagina at the Los Angeles premiere of the movie, which was followed by a concert for Mr. Cheadle led by the singer Wyclef Jean. Mr. Cheadle has given countless interviews and attended endless question-and-answer sessions for Oscar voters, including the one he is waiting for this evening. He said he planned to go to Darfur, in western Sudan, in January to draw attention to the victims of the fighting there.

It is all worth it, of course. "As tired as you are, it's nice to have people show up," said Mr. Cheadle, who just turned 40. "It means something. It's substantive."

"Hotel Rwanda" represents one of those kismetlike moments when an underappreciated actor (Mr. Cheadle has never played the lead in a feature film) meets an unmakable script (African genocide is not exactly box office magic) and hits the mark.

Critics have singled out his understated performance as a gem - one without the Oscar-reaching moments of scenery chewing that you might expect in a drama about real-life horrors. Instead, Mr. Cheadle's Rusesabagina is "heroic and psychologically complex," John Anderson wrote in Newsday. The actor brilliantly portrays "the transformation of one man, as he moved from servant to saint," Stephen Whitty said in The Star-Ledger of Newark. "In playing an ordinary man who finds a core of heroism he never knew he had, Cheadle looms like a colossus," Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone.

But neither the role nor the movie was a sure thing.

The director, Terry George ("In the Name of the Father"), said he and Keir Pearson wrote the script with Mr. Cheadle in mind, but they warned him that the realities of film financing might make him impossible to cast. If Will Smith or Denzel Washington wanted the role, it would go to one of them.

"There's a wealth of black acting talent," Mr. George said. "But of those actors who can disappear into a role - Jeffrey Wright, Harry Lennix - with Don you get a plus of charisma and personality. We talked and got along great, but I had to caution him, 'If someone wants to fund this with another actor, I'm going to have to give that consideration.'

"I'm sure he's heard that a few times in his career."

Mr. Cheadle, who is slight and not movie-star handsome, said he wasn't offended by the qualified offer. "I said, 'If you have to go with someone else, I still want to be involved. I would love to play Paul. But it's more important to make this movie.' "

In the meantime, he got to know Mr. Rusesabagina, the soft-spoken former manager of the Hotel des Milles Collines, who bribed and begged his way to securing the safety of Tutsi and Hutu refugees camped at the hotel in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. Mr. Cheadle began questioning Mr. Rusesabagina, who now lives in Belgium, by e-mail: What did he read? What did he eat? What music did he listen to?

"Anything I could think of, without asking, 'When you saw the bodies in a pit ...' " Mr. Cheadle said. "It seemed like an affront to ask him things like that."

By the time Chris McGurk, the vice chairman and chief operating officer of MGM, which had agreed to distribute the film, decided Mr. Cheadle was the right person for the lead role, the actor was mentally prepared.

Mr. Cheadle spent two weeks with Mr. Rusesabagina in South Africa, where most of the film was shot: eating, talking, feeling his way. "I saw him on the set one day, filming," Mr. Rusesabagina said in a telephone interview. "I saw him changing. The way he was talking, his accent, the way of behaving. He took himself and disappeared. He became myself, and did it properly."

Once the producers devised a complex web of financing, production was able to begin, but the conditions were trying. "It wasn't until I got down there that I realized what an awesome task this was," Mr. Cheadle said. "We didn't have enough money, enough time."

The very first day, the financing fell through. "My agent called and said, 'There's no money in escrow,' " Mr. Cheadle remembered. "But everybody felt there was no way we wouldn't push through."

The weather also worked against them. It would rain, then the sun would shine on the same day, making continuous shooting impossible.

Mr. George had worried that the emotions stirred by the story could spill over off the set, and they did. A riot broke out among the extras, he said, over payment and food, and some of the actors were running wild, wielding real machetes. "It got hairy," he said.

One of the most remarked upon aspects of Mr. Cheadle's performance is his depiction of Mr. Rusesabagina's servility to the Hutu butchers who continually threatened to overrun the hotel, while at the same time maintaining his dignity and repressing his horror. It is not a posture that Mr. Cheadle, more accustomed to hip, sharp-tongued Western characters, has often taken.

"When I read the script," he said, "I saw a direct parallel between what Paul had been trained to do, and the situation: 'I appease when I need to. I cajole when I need to. I appear to be weak. Whatever I have to do, moment to moment.' I wasn't trying to play saintly. Paul didn't consider that. I didn't. I liked the foundation of: 'I'm going to take care of my family. Then my neighbors. Then all these people.' He wasn't saying, 'Bring me your tired, your poor.' It was: 'More? You're bringing me more?' "

Asked if there was a moment when he finally felt he had captured the character, Mr. Cheadle laughed for the first time in the conversation. "I don't ever really feel like I got it," he said. "I'm always questioning what I did, thinking I missed stuff." He compared the experience of finding a character to seeking a position of balance that lasts a moment, then vanishes. "Even in great performances you only get a couple of those moments," he said. This time, he admitted: "I visited it. I'm greedy for that."

But the most important thing about making this film, he said, was not the fact that it was the most difficult performance of his career, which it was, or the most prominent, which it was. But rather, it was the sense that he had been part of a worthy enterprise. He recalled that the week before, a friend had come up to him after a screening to offer praise, which at first, Mr. Cheadle said, he had tried to deflect. His friend stopped him short. "He said: 'It's not about you. It's about moving something forward. You should be honored to be a part of it.' "

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/movies/28chea.html

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Spider-Man 2 to Debut in 4K Digital!

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 02:19:34 GMT

Spider-Man 2 to Debut in 4K Digital!
Source: SGI December 21, 2004
http://www.superherohype.com/news/spider-mannews.php?id=2368

On January 13, Sony Pictures will present the first-ever showing of a major studio motion picture using Sony's revolutionary new "4K" digital projection system at a screening of Columbia Pictures' blockbuster Spider-Man 2. The uncompressed "4K" digital cinema content for the projection system will be powered by advanced visualization and shared storage systems from Silicon Graphics.

The special invitation event will be held at the Entertainment Technology Center's Digital Cinema Lab at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre (6433 Hollywood Blvd. Hollywood, Calif. 90028). A panel discussion on the movie's production will begin at 7 p.m., followed by the screening of Spider-Man 2 at 8 p.m.

"A very talented team of people worked incredibly hard to bring these amazingly detailed images to life" said Yair Landau, Vice Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and President of Sony Pictures Digital. "Sony's 4K digital projection system is the ideal vehicle for screening this movie in the most dramatic and visually appealing manner, truly showing off all the care and effort that went into this production."

The new projector uses a Silicon X-tal Reflective Display (SXRD) imaging panel to achieve a 4096 x 2160 pixel resolution, nearly four times the pixel count of current HD displays. The commercial availability of a digital projector with 4K resolution -- long considered an ultimate goal of digital cinema-offers the industry a clear competitive alternative to existing projection technologies.

"We developed the 4K projector to provide movie-goers with a dynamic viewing experience unlike any other they've ever encountered," said Andrew Stucker, general manager of digital production systems at Sony Electronics. "The projector's SXRD technology is poised to become the quality standard in digital cinema, and we've worked closely with companies like Silicon Graphics to further enhance the solution."

Silicon Graphics® Onyx® advanced visualization and SGI® InfiniteStorage RM660 storage systems will power the uncompressed digital cinema content for the Sony projector.

Sony has also incorporated the specifications and guidelines established by Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) into the design of the new projector to fully support DCI's efforts in providing an enabling technology that will allow the industry to move to a digital environment.

The presentation preceding the screening will focus on the sound design, editing and visual effects of Spider-Man 2, featuring the film's editor Bob Murawski, sound designer and sound effects editor Paul Ottosson, supervising sound mixers Greg Russell and Kevin O'Connell and visual effects supervisors John Dykstra and Scott Stokdyk.

source:
http://www.superherohype.com/news/spider-mannews.php?id=2368

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The Art of CG Knife Throwing in House of Flying Daggers

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:11:22 GMT

The Art of CG Knife Throwing in House of Flying Daggers

Tara DiLullo explores how Animal Logic and Digital Pictures handled CG weaponry, complex color palettes, on-set choreographed fighting and wire removal in Zhang Yimou’s acclaimed House of Flying Daggers.

By Tara DiLullo
[ Posted on December 03, 2004 ]
http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=2315&page=1

Animal Logic and Digital Pictures Iloura created 115 vfx shots with a crew of 40 working six months. All images © 2004 Sony Pictures Ent. Inc. Courtesy of Animal Logic. Kirsty Millar (right) of Animal Logic served as co-vfx supervisor on HoFD. She helped to create symbolic visual devices to aid director Zhang Yimou with his storytelling.”

In his acclaimed 20-year career, director Zhang Yimou has evolved into one of the most significant and prolific voices of contemporary Chinese cinema with his lush, historical themed period films, such as Judou, Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad. While his films have achieved praise outside of his native country, primarily in art house circles, the release of his martial-arts epic, Hero, last year launched the director into a new realm of cinematic storytelling, as well as mainstream Western recognition. Hero was already an international phenomenon for more than a year when it finally reached U.S. theaters in August 2004, stunning critics and audiences with its rich, lyrical take on the classic martial arts epic — a genre the majority of American audiences finally became familiar with when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon landed back in 2000. Zhang’s new film, House of Flying Daggers, again revisits the Chinese martial arts epic for a story that challenges tradition by meshing period history, romance and cutting edge vfx into a dynamic film that pushes visual boundaries.

Fluid camera moves and speed ramps allowed the camera to get close-ups of CG weapons, creating a strong visual signature to highlight the power of the dagger-darts. Courtesy of Digital Pictures Iloura.

With the House of Flying Daggers script calling for a more ambitious visual effects agenda than Hero, Zhang collaborated again with his vfx house, Animal Logic, along with adding the services of fellow Sydney-based house, Digital Pictures, to get all of the visual elements created for the film. Andy Brown and Kirsty Millar, both of Animal Logic, worked as the co-visual effects supervisors on the film, overseeing 115 shots, with a total crew of around 40 artists and technicians working in a very compressed schedule, taking only six months from shoot to final visual effects delivery. At the same time, Jane Maguire, the post-production supervisor on the film at Digital Pictures, worked with the Sydney and Melbourne groups on grading, wire removal and a high-end bamboo forest effects shots.

As with all his films, Zhang set about creating a very visually specific look for House that Kirsty Millar explains was key in helping create the foundation for the early effects designing. “Zhang Yimou uses symbolic visual devices, such as a color palette and seasonal changes, as his key storytelling techniques,” she details. “His films tend to contain nuances that are not evident from the script, so they must be demonstrated visually. It follows from this, that he utilizes visual effects in much the same manner — to tell his story.”

That story revolves around Mei (Ziyi Zhang), a blind dancer that is suspected of being connected to a revolutionary faction known as The Flying Daggers. The local police enact a plan to trick Mei into leading them to the group, but in their journey, one of the deputies falls for the young woman and they embark on a doomed love affair against the perilous backdrop of an impending confrontation with the authorities. The focus on the Flying Dagger faction meant that the usage of weaponry was going to be a core element in many of the visual effects featured in the many epic fight scenes staged throughout the film.

The weapons were done in Maya and rendered in RenderMan. Courtesy of Digital Pictures Iloura.

“Upon reading the script, Andy Brown initially storyboarded some sequences to demonstrate the legendary traditional Chinese martial art of flying daggers,” Millar details. “We wanted to show Zhang some ideas about shots with fluid camera moves and the use of speed ramps to enable the camera to get close-ups of the CG weapon. The idea was to create a strong visual signature to highlight the power of the dagger-darts each time they appeared. This could be achieved by allowing the camera to travel fluidly in and around the weapon, in one continuous shot from the moment that it parts from the assailant until it finds its victim. The weapons were ultimately done in Maya and rendered in RenderMan.” Having worked closely with Zhang already, their rapport in developing the right visual look was a truly collaborative process. “Zhang’s directing style on set is both precise and collaborative and his filmmaking process can seem quite fluid,” she says. “He will think up a plot twist and ask the vfx supervisors for ideas on how to visually convey a narrative nuance. Zhang is extremely focused and succinct in his direction, yet he is open to suggestion as to how visuals can be used to broaden the narrative, through vfx or otherwise.”

A hallmark of the film is that it takes place in many natural environments shot on location, which meant the effects house often had to go to the production on numerous occasions. “You have to be prepared for anything on set, much more so than usual,” Millar says. “Animal Logic had shown on Hero that we could respond to this challenge, creating solutions immediately, using the on set resources available at that particular moment to produce high quality visuals. For instance, many of the action stunts are spontaneously choreographed on location. Consequently, the visual effects must also be created in the moment. Andy and I would use our laptops to roughly pre-visualize visual effects concepts while on set in order to communicate them to the director and multi-lingual crew. We knew that time with the director would be scarce after the shoot wrapped, so we wanted to get the animatics well and truly underway whilst on set, so we did bash comps from the video split to mock up shots. This was fundamental to progressing the vfx editing, as we used these bash comps to lock down hero takes with the director.

Zhang put a different spin on the now requisite bamboo forest action sequence, by having the battle happen simultaneously on the ground and up high in the trees. Courtesy of Animal Logic.

“The director’s preference for stunning natural locations can also mean that shooting is often remote in terms of communication and accessibility,” Millar continues. “Internet access on location in the Ukraine was slow and some distance from our accommodation, so we’d phone selects info through to the crew back in Sydney, who’d then start working on some more refined animatics using the onelight rushes. The 3D crew, headed up by Luke Hetherington and Scott Hunter, also began modeling and texturing the CG weapons. Internet communication was much faster in the Chinese locations, so we found that a great way to get a creative brief of a shot across to the crew back home was to do a quick 2D animation and FTP that. So these bash comps that we did while on set served a multitude of purposes — lock down of take by director, brief the Animal Logic crew back home in Sydney so they could commence work and any technical problem solving, and also serve as a first pass animatic for the director and editorial. Also, Zhang was determined to have the film ready for a May 2004 Cannes release, with visual effects shooting commencing early in September 2003 in the Ukraine. This compressed post-production schedule amplified any problems posed by an unpredictable shooting schedule in remote locations, so the director had to be sure that his vision would be translated quickly and seamlessly. Working with a crew who spoke only Chinese and Russian also made for some hectic moments on set. Although the crew were extremely accommodating to the crazy antics of the vfx team rushing around and taking measurements, the language barrier sometimes made for some exciting times. We’d often be shooting reference passes whilst the Ukrainian crew would be busy moving lights for the next set up, so we’d have to quickly find a Chinese person who spoke English to tell another Chinese crew member who spoke Russian to ask the gaffer to please wait until vfx were finished shooting their plates,” she chuckles.

Nature, as usual, wasn’t always cooperative making for even more challenges for the team such as with a complicated snow sequence. Millar details, “The hero and villain of the film, Jin and Leo, have been battling it out with swords in the fields through autumn, then the first signs of snow begin and the season changes to winter as they continue to fight on. This scene was shot in the Ukraine during November, when the weather turned suddenly and unexpectedly. Over a foot of snow was dumped in one night. We’d already shot a wide plate of the two actors fighting with the Carpathian Mountains in the background. After the snowfall, we re-lined up the shot and did another take. Andy shot some extra elements later in the Beijing Studios. Senior compositor Krista Jordan used the artificial snow shot against black and a matte painting by Evan Shipard to transition the two passes and create one shot where the actors are just continuously fighting as the season changes dramatically around them. The unexpected snowfall was one of those curve balls you sometimes get thrown on location, but it turned into a beautiful shot on screen,” she smiles.

Compositing work was done to create one shot in which Leo (Andy Lau, left) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) continue to fight as the season dramatically changes from autumn to winter around them. Photo credit: Bai Xiao Yan.

House also features the now requisite bamboo forest action sequence, but Zhang was very specific in wanting to create his own spin on the sequence by having the battle happen simultaneously on the ground and up high in the trees. That challenge fell to Digital Pictures and Jane Maguire explains DP Iloura’s longform vfx animation team produced the series of shots for the dagger/ bamboo forest sequence. “The daggers had to do quite specific things within the shot. In one shot, the daggers fly through the air in a choreographed motion around the actor’s hands, but the characters hands don’t actually touch them. The same daggers travel on a long trajectory and land in the trunk of a bamboo tree. Both the dagger and the bamboo tree had to be simulated in CG to achieve such a detailed shot. The impact of the daggers involved some extreme close-up detail such as the impact point, the vibration of the trunk and the shards of woody material that fly out of the tree upon impact.”

Aside from the more epic shots, House also features a host of the less sexy but necessary effects work inherent to a wire-heavy film, such a subtracting those wires and other seamless effects in every frame. “We did a lot of work on the bean dance sequence and the fight scenes,” Millar from Animal Logic says. “The bean for the bean sequence were done in 3ds max and rendered with Vray. We did some other ‘seamless’ effects, such as some blood reduction to keep the censors happy. There were also some location fix ups, such as the wide vista where Jin and Little Sis each ride down into the bamboo forest. There was a fair bit of forest extension required, which I shot some extra plates for with 2nd unit.”

Over at Digital Pictures, Maguire adds, “In Sydney, the vfx team completed 70 wire removal shots. Scans were supplied from Atlab at both 4k and 2k resolution. Some of the shots required removing up to 17 wires, making it a complex task. We also completed about 40 minutes of digital grading using the daVinci 2k. Neg Dirt and Data conforming when required was completed using both daVinci ‘Nucleas’ incorporating ‘Revival’ and Discreet smoke. Lastly, we graded the Green Bamboo Forest Fight, the Green Bamboo and the autumn sequences. These three sequences were probably the most intricate as far as grading was required, as it was imperative that the DPS team was able to separate the background color tones (green and yellow) as far as we could without effecting the facial and body skin tones. Multiple power windows were tracked into place and used throughout the grade to achieve this look. At all times both the cinematographer, Xiao Ding and the digital pictures colorist were able to visually see the sequences in context and had full control of the color grade at realtime. The original scans were supplied from Atlab via the CeNTIE fibre network in full 2k log color space — providing all the film information available for grading, giving the colorist maximum latitude when using multiple layers of color correction.”

Despite their accelerated schedules, the balancing of the effects work load allowed Animal Logic and Digital Pictures to get House completed on time and it was screened at Cannes, where it has since garnered acclaim and buzz equaling that of its predecessor, Hero. House of Flying Daggers opens in limited release on Dec. 3.

Tara DiLullo is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Sci Fi Magazine, Dreamwatch and ScreenTalk, as well as the Websites atnzone.com and ritzfilmbill.com.

source:
http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=2315&page=1

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From Bentonville to Beijing and Beyond By CONSTANCE L. HAYS (NY Times Article)

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 23:44:04 GMT

December 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/business/businessspecial2/06walmart.html?oref=login&hp

From Bentonville to Beijing and Beyond
By CONSTANCE L. HAYS

MORE than a decade ago, Wal-Mart set its sights on conquering the globe with a mix of cheaply produced goods, discount prices and aggressive store growth. Using that formula, the company has become the dominant retailing force in the United States, but its experience overseas, which began in earnest in 1991, has been checkered.

Wal-Mart has stores in Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, Mexico and South Korea - as well as a nearly 40 percent stake in Seiyu, a Japanese retailer. It also owns stores in Puerto Rico.

The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., likes to celebrate its international flavor at its annual shareholder meeting by having foreign workers get up and lead the Wal-Mart cheer ("Give me a W!") in Korean, Spanish or Portuguese.

But analysts say there is not always something to cheer about. In some places, Wal-Mart can be called a success story, at least for the time being. In others, the "Wal-Mart way" has barely gotten off the ground.

Cultural obstacles on both sides of the relationship are often the reason; products that sell out quickly in American stores may simply clog the shelves abroad, and there can be built-in resistance to the encroachment of an American company on local business. Also, big, deep-pocketed companies like the French retailer Carrefour can be powerful competitors.

Then there are political and labor issues. Although it is known for being anti-union, Wal-Mart gave way to Chinese pressure - and law - last month and said it would allow its workers in China to unionize.

"It's a mixed bag out there for Wal-Mart," said Steve Spiwak, an economist with Retail Forward, a research and consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio, that counts Wal-Mart among its clients. "Their problems have been trying to transplant their stores without molding them to local customs."

Not surprisingly, the company disagrees with that assessment. "I'd say we have a good story to tell" about international operations, said Bill Wirtz, a spokesman for Wal-Mart. Pointing to economic difficulties in countries like Argentina and Germany, he added, "It's a measure of our success that we've survived." In fact, he said, the international unit has grown more in its 13-year history than the Wal-Mart chain, which began in 1962, grew in its first 13 years. "It's a growing part of the business," he said of the foreign operations.

Mr. Spiwak said that an early miss was Indonesia, where Wal-Mart began trying to build a business in 1996. Indonesians turned up their noses at the brightly lighted, highly organized stores, he said, and because no haggling was permitted, considered them overpriced. A year later, Wal-Mart packed up and left.

In Argentina and Brazil, an apparent ignorance of local preferences regarding cuts of beef alienated many potential customers, Mr. Spiwak added. And in Germany, shoppers gave a cold shoulder to the greeters that Wal-Mart uses to lend a friendly atmosphere to its sprawling American stores. "It was viewed as too friendly and disruptive, invading their space," he said.

International sales made up 18.5 percent of the $256.3 billion Wal-Mart took in last year, and international operating profit of $2.37 billion was 15.8 percent of the total. In general, the discounter has had better luck by purchasing foreign chains and turning them into Wal-Marts than by building a business from scratch.

Growth abroad is increasingly important to Wal-Mart, said Burt Flickinger III, a retail consultant who has followed the company for years. "As efforts to block Wal-Mart stores in the continental United States continue, Wal-Mart desperately needs to be successful in South America and in southern Asia," he said.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/business/businessspecial2/06walmart.html?oref=login&hp

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Glamour Lives, in Chinese Films By MANOHLA DARGIS (NY Times Article)

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 23:29:26 GMT

December 5, 2004

Glamour Lives, in Chinese Films
By MANOHLA DARGIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/movies/05darg.html?oref=login

ONCE upon a time in Hollywood, the stars shone with a radiant glamour; in Chinese film they still do. In movies from Beijing to Hong Kong, actresses like Zhang Ziyi and actors like Tony Leung Chiu-wai fill the screen with heart-skipping beauty and charm. In May at the Cannes Film Festival, audiences swooned for Wong Kar-wai's romantic drama "2046" and Zhang Yimou's latest swordsman epic, "House of Flying Daggers." Although they couldn't be more different in story, sensibility and visual pleasures, what the films share in addition to Ms. Zhang is an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression.

These days no one does glamour better than Chinese filmmakers. In American film, where violence invariably trumps sex, glamour tends to surface in period stories like "L.A. Confidential," where the director Curtis Hanson explored the distance between gleaming false fronts and hard-boiled reality. David Lynch wields glamour to similar if more disturbing effect in films like "Mulholland Drive," while Steven Soderbergh likes to put an old-studio polish on bagatelles like "Ocean's Twelve." Meanwhile, in the major Chinese cinemas - those of mainland China, Hong Kong and, to an extent, Taiwan - glamour is serious business. Much as it was in old Hollywood, glamour in contemporary Chinese film is a device and a disguise, but it's also a luminous end in itself.

American screens are now awash in interchangeable blonds with hungry mouths and empty eyes, but in the 1930's and 1940's movie stars were divine, agleam with enchantment. By the end of the 1950's, glamour was as eroded as the studio system. No-holds-barred rock 'n' roll and foreign-language cinema did their part to kill glamour, as did Dr. Kinsey, by taking the mystery out of sex and leaving less and less to the imagination. By the time Marilyn Monroe laid down her peroxide head for good in 1962, glamour was a goner. Monroe wore it like a mink stole, tossing it aside when it no longer fit. She had searched for another, truer self, but in the end it wasn't the Actors Studio student in glasses who became immortal.

To an extent it was an ideal perfected by glamour photographers, who created the shimmering images that sold the stars and their movies to the public. It's no coincidence that the zenith of glamour photography came at the height of the classic studio system, after the institution of studio self-censorship. With sex banished from the screen, it was left to these photographers to manufacture desire, to turn mortals into deities. In their lustrous images of modern-day Venuses swathed in furs and Achilles in a brilliantine helmet of hair, photographers like George Hurrell sold a suggestion of carnality, a patina of eroticism. Often photographed against dark backdrops, faces surrounded by a nimbus of light and erased of imperfection, Hollywood stars looked like gods because, to us, they were.

There are images of Ms. Zhang in "Flying Daggers" that look as if they could have been shot by Hurrell. With her alabaster skin and dark pooling eyes, her body adorned in rich brocades, and bathing alfresco while discreetly veiled by green woodland, Ms. Zhang doesn't just look bewitchingly lovely; she looks like an MGM pinup.

If she were still on watch, Madame Mao would have had a fit and then probably had someone executed. The future Gang of Four member known as Jiang Qing was a Shanghai movie actress during the 1930's, when she was called Lan Ping. From 1966 to 1976, the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao denounced films that didn't conform to her vision of the Communist ideal, including movies that, like so many recent mainland features, explore individualism and personal longing.

Film production in China was put on hold for several years during the Cultural Revolution, and the Beijing Film Academy ceased normal operations. Two years after the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the academy began accepting undergraduates again. Among the students in that first class were Mr. Zhang, Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine") and Mr. Kaige's childhood friend, Tian Zhuangzhuang ("The Blue Kite"). Among the first films made by this group, known as the Fifth Generation because it was the academy's fifth graduating class, were social-issue stories set in the countryside where all three filmmakers were sent as teenagers during the Cultural Revolution. Following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and facing tough restrictions at home, the filmmakers ventured into more commercial terrain with stories that could travel around the world and often did.

Since he began directing, much of the appeal of Mr. Zhang's films has rested in their bold visuals and his equally bold women. Mr. Zhang helped return sex, or at least its suggestion, to mainland cinema and, greatly aided by his longtime star and lover, Gong Li, a burgeoning glamour. In early 90's films like "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," the color red is inexorably connected with the central female characters. It is a crimson that announces a radically different world - that of pleasure, individual freedom and beauty for beauty's sake - from that represented by Mao's Little Red Book. Given this, it's no wonder that "Ju Dou" and "Red Lantern" were initially banned. (Mainland audiences, meanwhile, would catch banned films on pirated video copies.)

The Chinese censors who nixed "Ju Dou" were, post-Tiananmen, clearly sensitive about the implications of a story about a young couple's rebellion against a decrepit tyrant. But the sight of Ms. Gong's character bound, gagged and violently sobbing in a flimsy top during a prelude to ravishment didn't go unnoticed. The film's relatively tame sex scenes, one censor said, were "a bad influence on the physical and spiritual health of young people." Mr. Zhang, who would have studied 1930's and 1940's Hollywood movies while at the Beijing academy, has always understood the advantages of gorgeous stars. Ms. Gong did more than play Mr. Zhang's muse; she helped establish his brand and, by extension, that of the emerging movie industry. She was a glamorous ambassador for the new China, even if the new China was sometimes uneasy with what she was selling.

Just as Mr. Zhang and Ms. Gong were becoming the toast of international film festivals, Wong Kar-wai began putting his own glamorous stamp on Hong Kong cinema. Working with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle and the production designer William Chang, Mr. Wong has created a sumptuous and much-imitated aesthetics of desire. In films like "Days of Being Wild" and "Fallen Angels," the characters are at once glamorous and isolated, trapped in their gleaming casings like flies in amber. To watch Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung circle each other with adulterous longing in Mr. Wong's 2000 romance, "In the Mood for Love," is to be reminded of a 1930's conversation between the MGM photographer Laszlo Willinger and an MGM publicist, Howard Strickling. "What's glamour?" Willinger asked. "You know," Strickling answered, "a sort of suffering look."

Like Hollywood filmmakers of days gone by and like many contemporary Chinese directors, Mr. Wong tends to express erotic sublimation rather than outright sex in his films. And like Mr. Zhang, Mr. Wong is also somewhat of a fetishist. In several features, including "2046," Mr. Wong lingers on the image of a woman in a tight dress leaning away from the camera, her derrière gently shimmying. In his exacting attention to the appearance of his characters, in how hair can curtain the face, clothes silhouette the body and bodies align inside a film frame, Mr. Wong brings to mind Josef von Sternberg, who created Marlene Dietrich's scorching look. "Her appearance was ideal," the director said of his famous creation. "What she did with it was something else again. That would be my concern."

Mr. Wong's influence has reached around the world, inspiring imitators from Sofia Coppola to Lou Ye, the Shanghai-born director of the visually lush "Suzhou River" and "Purple Butterfly." Even the brilliant Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien seemed to temporarily fall under Mr. Wong's spell a few years ago when he made "Millennium Mambo," about an emotionally adrift young woman. The Wong influence could be detected in that film's techno beats and slow-motion interludes, along with the desultory allure of the star, Shu Qi, a Taiwanese actress who started out by making soft-core movies. Like his fellow Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang ("What Time Is It There?"), Mr. Hou strips the veneer off of beauty, something he does to devastating effect in "Flowers of Shanghai," a masterpiece about a late 19th-century brothel.

Mr. Hou, Mr. Wong and Mr. Zhang could not be more different visionaries, but each in his way reveals glamour to be as much a construction as a movie set is. In Mr. Hou's "Flowers of Shanghai," the glamour of the brothel is a hypnotic lie, a facade hiding a decadent, doomed world. In Mr. Wong's films, especially those set in the 1960's, glamour exalts the characters; it's what makes their everyday reality transcendent. Yet while glamour is a construction for these filmmakers, it's also sincere; there's nothing ironic about the downcast eyes and yearning mouths they immortalize. "There wasn't much laughing in those photos," Willinger said of the photographs he shot at MGM. "You couldn't have happy sex. Sex and earnestness - together those spelled glamour." He could have been talking about "House of Flying Daggers."

The slow sexing up of mainland cinema in the past decade and a half has occurred during what headline writers are fond of calling China's sexual revolution. In 1981, the Communist Party took aim at this nascent revolution, stating that young men and women should control the "sluice gates of passion" until marriage. Twelve years later, the first state-sponsored sex shop opened in Beijing. Thousands of such shops have opened since and Kinsey-style sex reports have hit the country as have sex-related health epidemics, prostitution and Internet porn. And yet in moves that seem to speak to the country's contradictions, earlier this year officials canceled a production of "The Vagina Monologues" and censors deleted some sexually based scenes from the movie "Cold Mountain" for being too "spicy."

China's much-discussed sexual revolution raised the national temperature, but as in this country, it runs simultaneously hot and cold. By contrast, Deng Xiaoping's 1980's dictum that "getting rich is glorious" has taken solid root. One consequence of China's short march toward capitalism is that mainland directors now compete against foreign films, including those from Hollywood. The Chinese movie industry seems to be responding. Some previously banned directors, like Jia Zhang-ke ("The World"), are earning support. And just a few weeks ago the censors gave the thumbs up to "House of Flying Daggers," with its very mildly spiced scenes. That means the movie can now be seen in theaters, not just on pirated DVD's. It also suggests that officials may be more tolerant of sexual imagery if it serves the cause of sanctioned Chinese cinema.

That's good news for Mr. Zhang and mainland moviegoers alike. Still, it's hard not to entertain qualms about this apparently new relaxed attitude, if for no other reason that it might one day put an end to Mr. Zhang's and Mr. Wong's cinemas of longing. Conventional wisdom has had it that Hollywood killed art or at least put a stranglehold on it when the studios instituted self-censorship as a hedge against government interference. The glories of the old studio system tell a different story, as do the past few decades, when relaxed censorship has mainly led to increased graphic violence and a parallel descent into sexual puerility. There may be few movies as violent as those made in Hong Kong, but at least for now over there, the whiff of glamour still mingles with the smell of gunpowder.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/movies/05darg.html?oref=login

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Zhang Yimou: Art in Action (Interview from ComingSoon.net)

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 08:17:16 GMT

Zhang Yimou: Art in Action

Source: Edward Douglas

December 1, 2004
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=7421

Before Hero topped the box office this past summer, few Americans knew the name Zhang Yimou, let alone seen any of his films. That said, the 53-year-old director had already found himself an extensive art house crowd and received Oscar nominations for many of his previous films over the last 17 years.

What made Hero so significantly different was that it was an action film set in ancient China starring two of the country's top martial artists, Jet Li and Donnie Yen, but it also was a love story between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, the stars of Wong Kar Wai's own American breakout In the Mood for Love. Hero received an Oscar nomination in early 2003, but it then wasn't released for over a year and a half. Although he wasn't sure why it took that long for Miramax to release his 2002 film, Zhang chose to leave that side of the business decisions to them and began work on his next film. In this case, it paid off. After topping the box office in August with an $18 million opening weekend, almost double what his previous movies had made in American theatres combined, Hero grossed over $50 million.

Less than four months later, his next film, House of Flying Daggers, is about to be released stateside, and Zhang thinks that the success of Hero will make it easier for him to find an American audience. "I was very surprised, since I never imagined [Hero] would do so well at the box office," the director told us while in town premiering the film at the New York Film Festival. "I think a lot of that has to do with Ang Lee's 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and the opportunities that film opened up for new genres to get into the American film market."

Since he's once again working in the martial arts genre, many will think that the director has a fondness for it or found something lacking in previous offerings. "I was never a huge fan of martial arts films," he confided. "Over the course of my whole life I've seen maybe fifteen of them, but I've read extensively in the genre of martial arts fiction, and that's from where most of my inspiration came. What's different about Chinese martial arts film and similar genres in other cultures is that it's a genre of the imagination. For instance, the samurai in Japan or the cowboys in the West are both based on actual historical figures that existed. In China, there weren't really people like this, at least not flying through the trees in the way that they are imagined in these movies. It's something that's rooted in the imagination and fantasy and dreams, and that was the world that I was trying to project into, rather than basing them on the existing body of martial arts films."

"The film itself is a betrayal of traditional martial arts films, because a lot of the martial arts tradition is based on a code of conduct," he continued. "They have their rules of the game and all the fighting and revenge has to be in accordance with it. However here, we have a girl that betrays her code of ethics for love, pointing to a larger rebelliousness and an individualistic freedom. In the West, when you're watching this, you might not think of it as anything unique or special. In China, it's actually something very different from other martial arts, films because these are values that aren't usually espoused in the genre."

The action in House of Flying Daggers is a lot more violent and realistic than the stylish fantasy-based action in Hero. Zhang explained why he chose to go in this direction. "The screenplays for both 'Hero' and 'House of Flying Daggers' were generated almost simultaneously. In 'Hero', there's a stronger attachment or interest to form, which is very abstract and influenced by Chinese painting. There's an esthetic beauty that's incorporated that is much more visible. We tried to root 'House of Flying Daggers' more in reality and make it more humanistic in dealing with love and people. It's a very different approach. Besides there being blood, you'll notice that in 'Hero', somebody can fight off hundreds of arrows and in the end, they're not even breathing hard. After each fight in 'House of Flying Daggers', even if it's just one-on-one, they're gasping for breath afterwards. It's a lot more realistic and human portrayal of the fight sequences."

Those who saw Hero will have been impressed with the director's use of color in certain sequences. "As a director, I've always paid a lot of attention to the more formalistic elements of my films and color is one of those," he explained. "Another difference between action sequences in Western films versus Chinese films is that in Chinese action films, there's sort of an esthetic beauty that is often inherent in the fight sequences. They're not just fighting, but there's also a state of mind of the characters as they're in this battle. Color is one of the ways that I try to emphasize that and bring that out, as you can see in both my films."

In China, filmmakers have to deal with a lot more than just studio execs, critics, and the MPAA, as the government there gets more actively involved in the filmmaking process right from inception. He told us more about the process. "There is a censorship in place, and you have to submit the screenplay and then the finished film for approval to the government censors. With films like 'House of Flying Daggers' and 'Hero', which are both classical costume dramas set in the past, there isn't much of a problem because there's nothing really dealing with contemporary society that they would deem inappropriate or too sensitive. Usually, these things go fairly smoothly since martial arts films are a very big genre in China with not too many subversive elements."

Despite being steeped in tradition, even Americans may be surprised when the end credits for House of Flying Daggers start rolling across the screen to the tune of "Lovers", a Western style ballad sung in English by opera singer Kathleen Battle. Zhang explained the decision. "The selection of Kathleen Battle was because the composer is a personal friends of hers and he suggested her when we needed a song for the closing credits. Of course, I had heard of her, and she had a beautiful voice, so we decided to go with it. I think it had a really special effect, because she has a very soft voice that really strikes you when you hear it. I thought it was a wonderful ending to the film." He went onto explain how reaction in his native land has been mixed to the decision. "On the one hand, people were saying it was great, and it was this internationalism showing that art knows no boundaries, and then there were those people asking why I was ending a Chinese film with an English song, like I was selling out."

Zhang Yimou got so hooked on opera after staging Verdi's opera "Turandot" in Beijing (as seen in the documentary The Turandot Project) that he decided to do something with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The opera to be staged sometime in 2006 will be based on Emperor Qin. the character from Hero who became the first emperor of China, and the music will be composed by Tan Dun, who did the lush score for the film. To make it even more enticing, Zhang said that it may be noted tenor Placido Domingo's last performance on stage before retiring.

In the meantime, Zhang will be returning to modern China for his next project, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. "My next film is going to be a smaller budget art film, more similar to my previous work," he said. "It's about the relationship between a father and a son and it will be a serious drama, very realistic and very much rooted in contemporary China. But I don't rule out the potentiality that in the future, I'll go back to making another martial arts film."

Having loaded the bases with two jaw-dropping films this year, some people think that it's time Zhang Yimou finally wins his much-deserved Oscar. He takes this sort of thing in stride. "If I were to get it, it would be a nice affirmation of all the work that I've done over the years, but at the same time, I'm not that fixated on it. I've been nominated three or four times-more than any other Chinese director-and I haven't got it yet. We have a saying in Chinese: If you think about it too much, you're not going to get it. So I just don't think about it and we'll see what happens. I think it also depends on luck at the end of the day."

House of Flying Daggers opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday and will open elsewhere in the following weeks. In the meantime, you can watch Hero, which was just released on DVD.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=7421

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Interview with Director: Zhang Yimou By Logan Hill (House of Flying Daggers New York Metro)

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:25:20 GMT

Interview with Director: Zhang Yimou
House of Flying Daggers
Sony Pictures Classics. December 3.

By Logan Hill
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/movies/features/10524/index.html

What’s the classic martial-arts cliché?

Well, these formulas have been around for twenty years or more. There’s a fight and then the two characters step back and they look each other up and down, and maybe they’ll say a couple words and then they go back and fight again for another 30, 40, 50 seconds. And they’ll step back again and look each other up and down and say a few more words and then the fight’s over. We wanted to destroy that mold. For one thing, we have the actors continuing the dialogue throughout the fighting.

You also mix dance.

Yes, it was inspired by a Tang painting of a dancer dancing on drums and a kind of dance performed with long sleeves. In Chinese drama schools, that’s part of the basic curriculum for first-year students—using these sleeves as kind of an emotional extension of the actor in opera, say.

But Zhang Ziyi fights with them!

She spent over two months practicing to really get it right. Shooting that one scene took more than twenty days! By the end, Ziyi could barely raise her arm.

Why work so long for one scene?

Originally, I had planned to do a traditional dance scene—and we spent six months with the dance choreographer. I just felt something wasn’t quite right. So I called up Tony Ching, the action choreographer. I had to tell the dance choreographer and apologize.

The love scenes are also highly choreographed, and sometimes the romance bleeds into the action.

The love story is really pervasive. [In the first fight sequence] they’re actually flirting with each other. Especially in the scene where she uses the sleeve to pull the sword out of his sheath, there’s something very sensual. She kind of caresses him with her sleeves and with the sword and dances for a moment before it strikes.

Then there’s the more classical material, like the bamboo forest.

That setting is used over and over again in martial-arts cinema—just as it is in traditional Chinese paintings. If you are a Chinese painter, you have to paint bamboo.

Is it the same for a director?

Yes. It’s just one of those things. At one point, I thought maybe I shouldn’t set a scene in a bamboo forest, especially after Ang Lee did that great scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But then I went to Sichuan province, and after seeing the rays of light shining through the leaves, I realized this is the land of the warrior, the Xia. It’s not the realm of the normal people. I thought, Now I know why everyone makes fight scenes in the bamboo forests.

House of Flying Daggers
Sony Pictures Classics. December 3.

source:
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/movies/features/10524/index.html

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The minx and the master By REBECCA LOUIE (House of Flying Daggers Daily News article)

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:06:46 GMT

The minx and the master
By REBECCA LOUIE
Sunday, November 28th, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/256515p-219667c.html

Zhang Yimou, director of the sumptuous martial-arts movie "Hero," feels the world needs chivalry, romance and vibrant natural beauty now more than ever before.

"The more developed society becomes, the more industrialized it becomes and the more people long for these types of characters and this type of world," says Zhang, who delivers another healthy dose of fantasy this Friday with "House of Flying Daggers," a martial-arts epic about three warriors torn between love and their political allegiances.

"Amid the social pressures that we are living under, there is less and less freedom and more and more rules to abide by," Zhang continues, through an interpreter. "We increasingly crave that carefree world that is represented by these martial heroes."

Like their Chinese counterparts, American audiences should succumb to their cravings when they see Zhang's latest wuxia pien - to give the proper name to the chivalric martial-arts story set in pre-modern China.

"Hero," which starred Jet Li in a tale of outlaws trying to unify China during the turbulent Qin Dynasty, is the highest-grossing film in China's box-office history. It also broke records for a foreign-language film when it opened in the U.S. last August. "Daggers" is China's second-highest earner.

Rather than emphasize the sacrifice of self for the good of the country, "Daggers" explores the sacrifice of everything for love. Set in A.D. 859, during the decline of the Tang Dynasty, it focuses on Mei, a blind dancer believed to be a member of the rebel House of Flying Daggers. Local government captains Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) execute an elaborate plot to seduce her for information. Dizzying flights - of body and heart - through fields and bamboo forests follow as Mei becomes the center of a tragic love triangle. It culminates in a fight to the death on a snowy mountaintop.

Mei is played by the 25-year-old Chinese superstar Ziyi Zhang (previously known as Zhang Ziyi), who starred in Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and had a key role in "Hero."

"Onscreen, Ziyi Zhang is a minx, someone who is headstrong and empowered, yet at the same time exhibits a streak of vulnerability," says Jeff Yang, author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mainland Chinese Cinema." "Her appeal is that she is a warrior woman with a little girl inside. Even at such a young age, she's been able to carve out a persona for herself. She is good at being petulant."

Ziyi Zhang was recently in Los Angeles learning English and working on Rob Marshall's screen adaptation of Arthur Golden's best seller "Memoirs of a Geisha," in which she stars with Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li. She also appears in Wong Kar Wai's upcoming "2046."

STOLE SCHOOL KEY

As a child in Beijing, she was enrolled in a weekend performing-arts school.

"I was so small, so tiny, and I was so easy to get sick that my mom worried about my health and wanted me to do some exercise," she explains. She went on to study at the China Central Drama College, a place she disliked because of the competition between students.

"We all lived together and the girls were always fighting, talking behind [your back] and running to the teacher," recalls Ziyi Zhang, who once stole the key to the school doors and ran away. "It was like the triangle, and all of the girls wanted to be at the top."

Since her breakthrough in "Crouching Tiger," she has cultivated a devoted following - but the size of the female quotient has caught her off guard.

"In China, a lot of fans are girls. For me, that is quite a surprise," she says. "All of the guys will come to you and say, 'Oh, you're sexy, you're pretty.' But actually, when we walk on the red carpet, it is really all girls screaming.

"I think every girl has a dream to be somebody," she continues. "And girls dream that they can do the same thing that I did onscreen."

"Daggers" is her third collaboration with Zhang Yimou. He directed her as a villager from rural North China who falls in love with a teacher from the city in 1999's "The Road Home," her first film.

"When I first met Ziyi, she was only 19 and a sophomore in college studying acting," Zhang Yimou says. "She didn't know anything, she was very naïve and young. But still, I saw that she had smarts about her, and I could tell that while she wasn't worldly in some ways, she was really very bright."

Though Zhang Yimou became involved with Gong Li, his muse in such films as "Red Sorghum" (1987), "Ju Dou" (1990) and "Raise the Red Lantern" (1992), Ziyi Zhang insists she and the director are not an item.

"I don't have time for a boyfriend," she insists, adding she only recently begun going out to bars and clubs along with friends who insisted she was living too quiet a life.

BANNED IN CHINA

Best known for dramatic features, Zhang Yimou's oeuvre has always been a source of debate in his homeland. He is arguably the best known of the Fifth Generation filmmakers - the first class at the Beijing Film Academy since China's Cultural Revolution - who also include Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang.

"Over the past decade or so, there were two major lines of criticism of my work," says the 53-year-old filmmaker, whose "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern" were banned in China because of their pre-Communist backdrops and explicit sexual themes.

"One is the Orientalist line that I am making films for foreign audiences and selling out. More recently, people say I am selling out to the Chinese government and making films to appease them. Some critics think that it's great that I am doing Chinese films and bringing the Chinese audience back to the theaters to see them. Then there are those who think that I have sold my soul to the devil to do this and it is a mediocre choice."

Shaking his head and allowing a small chuckle, he concludes, "I always thought I was making films for myself. But nobody listens to me, even though that's what I tell them."

source:
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/256515p-219667c.html

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Steamy Times Come to Chinese Films (House of Flying Daggers NY Times article)

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 17:36:00 GMT

Steamy Times Come to Chinese Films
By JEAN TANG

November 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/movies/MoviesFeatures/27dagg.html?oref=login

Early in Zhang Yimou's "House of Flying Daggers," the hero, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), unsheathes a sword to slice the buttons off a showgirl's robe. This scandalizes onlookers despite the setting - a brothel. Later, the drunken Jin pulls the dancer to the ground, flips her over and tears her dress.

The scene is tame by Western standards; not much is revealed beyond shoulders and prettily disheveled hair. Still, Jin's display of lust is an expression of a significant, if subtle change that is starting to brew in Chinese film: "Daggers," which is being released in New York on Dec. 3 by Sony Pictures Classics, may be the first large-scale mainland Chinese movie to assert a frank, liberated approach to sex. And the Chinese government had no objections.

Movies from Chinese directors working outside mainland China - Taiwan's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," for example, or any of Wong Kar Wai's sexy tone poems from Hong Kong like "Days of Being Wild" - tend to depict sexuality in a playful light. Mainland movies, on the other hand, often weigh it down, making it into a historical or political statement. Although fighting forms a backdrop for "Daggers," the political story line is not where the passion is. Martial arts pyrotechnics set among the plains and forests of a make-believe Tang-era battlefield are simply a familiar framework that a prominent Chinese director is using to depict one of the China's most startling social changes: an ongoing sexual revolution.

The "Daggers" plot revolves around the lovely rebel Mei (Zhang Ziyi) and her on-again, off-again affair with Jin, a government spy. The plot twists don't detract from what the director himself called the film's unapologetic hotness: the opening sequence is followed by intense kissing, an impassioned love triangle, a band of women rebel warriors, subtly fetishistic behavior and an attempted rape (although it's one with all clothes on). Then come the themes that are modern for China, including a dating cat-and-mouse game in which a woman chases her playboy lover and then pushes him away. Call it "Sex and the Bamboo Forest."

In a telephone interview from Beijing, Mr. Zhang said he conceived "Daggers" in the late 1990's as a companion to "Hero," his epic about the birth of the first Chinese empire.

The two movies share the theme of sacrifice. In "Hero," Mr. Zhang said, the individual sacrifices everything for an overriding political goal. In "Daggers," the characters give up everything for romantic love.

"For thousands of years, there's been a tradition of teaching us in China to think in terms of the collective experience, so we are rarely able to act in accordance with personal desires or emotions," he said. "Now young people, especially under Western influences, have become much more interested in themselves and their own values."

Wendy Larson, professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Oregon, said: "Sexuality isn't playful in mainland Chinese movies. It's an expression of revolutionary passion, or it's linked to loyalty to your tradition or your martial arts group."

Chris Berry a professor of film and television studies at the University of London who specializes in Chinese film, explained: "The old ethic is towards production. All energy was to be spent with building the country up and not wasted on having sex. Now the idea is that you're a consumer. You have only so much time on this planet and you'd better enjoy every minute of it."

China is a jiggling mass of change that includes a the sexual revolution. A Chinese government survey sited recently by The Toronto Globe and Mail reported that only about 30 percent of Chinese men and women are virgins when they marry, down from 84 percent in the late 1980's; marital infidelity is on the rise; Beijing has about 2,000 sex shops, which the newspaper said was four times the number of McDonald's in the whole country. And "Sex and the City" is a Chinese runaway best seller on DVD.

"It's connected to young people in the city having enough money to live alone," Dr. Berry said. "It's connected to the lack of any kind ofreligious prohibition around sex. If you go back before the 20th century, there wasn't sexual conservatism in China. It's to do with the West, and with missionaries." Now it's the West, with its consumerism and the ever-widening influence of Hollywood, that is helping make sex a fit subject for the arts. "Daggers" earned $20 million domestically, making it the second highest grossing film ever in China. ("Hero," at $29 million, was No. 1.)

"The film attracted a groundbreaking Chinese audience," said Guo-Juin Hong, a professor of Chinese literature and film at Duke University. In contrast, Dr. Hong pointed out, Mr. Zhang's earlier films "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern," were banned at the time they were made.

Mr. Zhang agrees that "Daggers" generates more heat than his past films. " 'Ju Dou,' comes close, but 'Daggers' goes even farther," he said. Thirty years ago you could not imagine seeing a film like this, especially not a martial arts film."

"The character of Mei is modern and unconventional," he said, adding, that the actress who plays her "is liberated, too." Ms. Zhang, a 25-year-old superstar, travels the world and is seen on the covers of international magazines.

In "Ju Dou," from 1990, the virginal bride of an abusive factory owner discovers that his nephew has been watching her undress, and hastens to block his peephole. Later, the two begin an affair, but its illegitimacy parries any feeling of liberation.

In "Daggers," Jin spies on the bathing Mei (A virgin? Who knows?). Mei realizes he is there, and lets him know she knows. And she lets him continue watching, a lead-up to steamy smooching session that made at least one knowledgeable viewer say he wanted to "leave the theater to give them some privacy."

That viewer was Grady Hendrix, a co-founder of Subway Cinema, a group in New York that fosters and exhibits Asian films. Something else surprised Mr. Hendrix.

"Things get downright fetishy when Mei's captors take her to the dungeon and show her the torture device they're going to use," he said. He also mentioned the scene in which the two male costars are tied up in a "Japanese hemp-and-rope bondage kind of way," adding with a laugh, "It should be called 'House of the Flying Fetish.' " And to top it off, Mei is blind.

"China may be one of the only countries that can legitimately balance that line between characters who want to tear each other's clothes off or to do nothing but talk and have it be very sexual," Mr. Hendrix said, mentioning similarities with the 1950's in America.

Summing up this critical juncture in mainland Chinese onscreen mores, he said: "They can walk the line between passion and morality. It comes out of a real place in terms of culture and values. It feels Chinese."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/movies/MoviesFeatures/27dagg.html?oref=login

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Tony Leung Chiu-Wai

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 02:37:08 GMT

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai

Actor : Born June 27, 1962 - Hong Kong

From All Movie Guide: One of the most sought-after actors in East Asia, Tony Leung Chiu-wai made his mark on world cinema for his work with high profile directors like John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. He got his start as a television actor and children's show host, and quickly made the jump into Hong Kong's thriving mid-'80s film industry, where he proved his versatility in a string of movies by Hong Kong heavyweights like Stanley Kwan (Love Unto Waste), Patrick Tam (My Heart Is That Eternal Rose) and Sammo Hung (Seven Warriors). But it wasn't until his first foray outside of Hong Kong's movie industry -- a moving portrayal of a hearing-impaired photographer in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's historical epic A City of Sadness -- that the full range of his talent became apparent.

International recognition began to come Leung's way in the 1990s, thanks to roles in Woo's operatic action thrillers Bullet in the Head and Hard-Boiled, and to a fruitful long-term collaboration with the acclaimed Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai, with whom he has made five films. His gently humorous performance as a lovesick policeman in Wong's international cult hit Chungking Express won him a Best Actor Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards, as did his turn as a depressed homosexual exile going through a stormy breakup in Happy Together. He and Maggie Cheung both won top honors at the Hong Kong Film Awards for their performances as neighbors who suspect their spouses of having an affair in the sumptuous chamber romance In the Mood for Love, for which Leung also won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Leung's relaxed charm and matinee-idol looks make it easy to overlook the complexity of his performances. His most memorable ones are the result of working with directors attuned to his talent for suggesting the conflicted inner lives of his characters through introspective silences and subtle gestures. In Hou's Flowers of Shanghai and Anh Hung Tran's Cyclo, entire scenes seem to revolve around his melancholy, nearly wordless performances. While he is known worldwide for his high-profile work with Hou, Wong, and Woo, he is an even bigger star in Hong Kong, where he continues to star in everything from B-movies to glossy, big studio productions.

source:
~ Tom Vick, All Movie Guide
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=198096

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Asia's Odd Couple: The region's future depends on whether China and Japan can get along. Are the countries' leaders up to the task?

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:16:46 GMT

Asia's Odd Couple

The region's future depends on whether China and Japan can get along. Are the countries' leaders up to the task?

By Hannah Beech
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501041129/story.html

For centuries, Japan was a tribute state of mighty china. But in A.D. 607, Japan's Prince Shotoku sent to Sui dynasty China an emissary, who startled his hosts by addressing the Chinese Emperor as an equal. We come from the land "where the sun rises," announced the Japanese ambassador, while referring to China as the land "where the sun sets." Countless sunrises and sunsets later, Asia is still caught between the orbits of its two great powers, each one now imbued with a renewed sense of confidence about its position in the world.

Last weekend, Hu Jintao, President of the world's presumptive superpower, and Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister of the world's second-largest economy, met at the APEC summit in Chile. Tensions between the two nations had boiled up after a Chinese nuclear submarine veered into Japanese waters for several days starting on Nov. 10. Japan immediately lodged a formal complaint with China, but Beijing remained silent. Finally, Tokyo said it received a brief expression of "regret" from China, instead of the more wholehearted apology Japan surely wanted.

The Santiago summit was a rare meeting between the current leaders of Asia's two powers. Despite a year filled with flash points—ranging from disputes over the ownership of a sprinkling of islands in the East China Sea to the heckling of Japanese fans at an August soccer match in Beijing—neither Hu nor Koizumi has made reciprocal visits to the other's nation. Because of his repeated trips to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where several of Japan's most notorious World War II criminals are honored, Koizumi has been unwelcome in Beijing. Hu has found time to tour Gabon and Algeria but has yet to visit Tokyo.

Economically, the two nations have never been closer. Japan is China's largest trading partner, while only the U.S. trades more with Japan than China does. But politically, the Asian heavyweights are barely talking. Nowhere are attitudes more alarming than among the nations' youth. In China, many young people, primed by years of "patriotic education," feel their island neighbor hasn't done enough soul searching over its brutal war record. In Japan, youngsters are tired of apologizing for what their grandfathers did, and some are calling for their country to emerge from its pacifist shell.

Asia's century—the world's, too—will surely be partly shaped by how the two great East Asian powers get along. It's not too late for Chinese and Japanese politicians to follow the example of many of their business leaders, who have long understood that the interpenetration of the two economies works to the benefit of all. If the Chinese and Japanese political classes fail to live up to the challenge, muscular nationalism will gain strength among those who will one day lead Asia. We may all then find that the path the sun travels has become far more perilous than Prince Shotoku or the Sui Emperor ever imagined.

source:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501041129/story.html

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Making of a Hero: Expectations are sky-high for director Zhang Yimou's ambitious star-studded martial-arts flick

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:22:28 GMT

Making of a Hero
Expectations are sky-high for director Zhang Yimou's ambitious star-studded martial-arts flick
By STEPHEN SHORT and SUSAN JAKES Hengdian

Source: Jan 2002, Time Asia
http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/hero/story.html

Zhang Ziyi rolls across a library floor in a gauzy white tunic, trying to perfect an action stunt and she's in pain. Her forefinger is a swollen lump, bruised from an injury the previous day, and each thrust of her sword sets it throbbing anew. Her instructor lists the problems to work on: straighten the legs, revolve the body faster and finish at a better angle. Ziyi huffs, shuffles her Nikes, then dives again. No good. She squeals in agony. Director Zhang Yimou gives his action director the word: "Simplify it." Cinematographer Chris Doyle heaves a sympathetic sigh, which you can see because it's so cold, swigs spirit from his hip flask and puts the moment in perspective: "You know, if this was America ... well, you wouldn't catch Winona Ryder doing that."

No, and you also wouldn't catch many people attempting what Zhang Yimou, renowned for lush emotional masterpieces like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, has set out to achieve in his newest film, Hero. Flush with Chinese, U.S. and Hong Kong funding, Hero is the most ambitious martial-arts epic since Taiwanese director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won four Oscars in 2001 and broke the box-office mold by becoming the most successful foreign film to hit the U.S. That victory remains both a blessing and a curse for the Chinese film industry: it raised awareness of Asian films tenfold in the West, but has compelled the region's filmmakers to try to duplicate Lee's magic formula.

On the shoulders of Hero ride the hopes of all Asian cinema. Did Crouching Tiger's popularity portend a huge global market for Asian movies, or was it a fluke? That uncertainty—and Hero's $30 million budget—has piled pressure on everyone on the set. It's palpable, but rarely mentioned, like the wire propelling an actor through an action sequence that gets computer-erased in the final print.

Conceived by the 50-year-old director, the plot of Hero offers an unexpected twist on a traditional tale set at the violent dawn of the Qin dynasty, circa 220 B.C. China's soon-to-be first Emperor is on the brink of conquering the war-torn land and three of his most passionate opponents (played by Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi) are trying to assassinate him. The Emperor hires one man (the inimitable Jet Li) to stop them. Love, jealousy, rivalry and a flurry of martial arts vivify this ripping yarn.

When it comes to making an epic action film, Zhang evidently felt: Why have cotton when you can have silk? The unprecedented collection of talent at work on this project reads like an A-to-Z list of the region's most beautiful, bankable and influential. Besides the stellar leads, Hong Kong actor/director Donnie Yen, the high-flying martial artist known for his rhythmic, graceful style, pits his gravity-defying leaps against Li in a scene that will have kung fu fans roaring for more. Working in three languages (Mandarin, Cantonese and English) and vastly different styles, these actors helped forge the martial-arts genre that made Hong Kong film's name.

It's hard to imagine a headier celebrity cocktail. Grand dame Japanese designer Emi Wada, who won an Oscar for Akira Kurosawa's Ran, is doing the costumes. Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger composer Tan Dun has been tapped for the score. But Academy toasts and red-carpet strolls are a long way off, and Zhang's attitude toward his work is decidedly sober. He must lead cast and crew through the grueling 150-day, 7-a.m.-to-midnight production schedule, slated to finish at the end of January. This afternoon, they are filming in Hengdian TV & Movie City—a local entrepreneur's attempt to build a Hollywood of the East, about a three-hour drive from the historic city of Hangzhou. Shooting stops for no one. Lights are rechecked; random crew members scurry out for cups of hot water or to make urgent transpacific calls on their cell phones. Action director Tony Ching shows Ziyi a new approach. He rolls over twice on the floor in his Polo Sport winter jacket, strikes a pose and gives her a self-congratulatory grin. He gets a wry one back. The Burberry scarf wrapped around his neck hasn't moved a bit.

Enter the lethal weapon himself, $10-million-per-movie actor and martial-arts master Jet Li. Engrossed in the Buddhist texts he travels with everywhere, Li has reposed catlike at Zhang Yimou's side throughout Ziyi's ordeal. "Don't worry," he says with an easy smile, "this scene for me is like taking lunch for you." He rehearses once with Ziyi, hand in overcoat pocket, gives her a couple of last-minute pointers, removes the coat, gets a final makeup fix and the cameras roll. The shot is done in the blink of a Jet fighter kick. Li beams and mirthfully shadowboxes with the stunt guys, while Zhang Yimou can at long last call it a wrap. Best case scenario: a sequence that took three hours to make will translate into three, perhaps four, seconds of the final movie.

Despite Zhang's experience and many successes, this is unfamiliar territory: his first action picture. A mainland Chinese director both praised and feared because of his near mania for absolute artistic control and excruciating detail, he is uncharacteristically feeling his way as he shoots the fight scenes. Huddled behind a portable fortress of boxes and monitors, with his Marlboro baseball cap pulled low, Zhang watches Ching direct take after take without so much as a word. In an early morning moment of candor the next day he mulls over the scenes with Ziyi. "Yesterday," he concedes, "I was completely lost. I didn't know where that scene was going. It's hard to invest this fight with the right emotional tone. The actors sense my uncertainty and get frustrated. But," he hastens to add, "that only happens with the action scenes."

Chris Doyle, the Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Australian cinematographer and self-appointed court jester, may have helped blueprint the nihilistic and neon mood that so defines Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's work, but he, too, has never lensed action. Even those working on the movie who are veterans of the genre are feeling the pressure. Action master Ching is expected to exceed the visual pyrotechnics that Yuen Wo-ping created for Crouching Tiger, but he acknowledges their styles are as different as chalk and cheese. Ask him to compare Yuen's work with his own and he parries the question like a judo master slipping a throw: "He's power, I'm beauty."

If Ang Lee's film was ambitious, Zhang's target sounds positively utopian. His goal is nothing short of reinventing martial-arts entertainment altogether. "If you look at the history of Chinese martial-arts literature," he says, "the plot always hinges on revenge: 'You killed my master, now you must die.' It's the same for American Westerns. For years, this has been the only theme in Chinese martial-arts films, whether it's Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. I want to take the genre in a new direction. In my story the goal is the negation of violence. The characters are motivated by their desire to end the war. For real martial-arts masters, true heroes, the heart is far more important than the sword."

In Zhang's work, beauty has always been the hallmark. Hero will be no exception. The film will offer three versions of the story, told from different perspectives and each shot in its own color—blue, white or red—from costume to furniture to bedsheets. As Doyle enthuses, "This film will be a real journey into color."

It will also be a comparatively silent journey. Zhang has deliberately kept the dialogue to a minimum. "I wanted the language sparse and spare to reflect the elegant austerity of classical Chinese literature," he says. "In many scenes the visuals and music will carry the narrative." Such news will be heartening to mainland Chinese ears. One of Crouching Tiger's few blemishes was Hong Kong actors Chow Yun-fat's and Michelle Yeoh's shaky Mandarin. While immaterial in the U.S. and European markets, it didn't go down well in the film's own backyard.

This is also the first time Zhang has worked with Hong Kong actors, let alone two of its biggest stars. Leung and Cheung, more accustomed to the spontaneous riffing of Wong Kar-wai, are struggling to get the gist of Zhang's directorial technique. "He does keep us guessing," Cheung says, with a hint of exasperation, "but then we only do one or two takes for every scene. He doesn't do lots of options." Contrast this with Wong, who might shoot one scene 30 or 40 times, 15 of which are experiments that help shape the final cut in his mind. "Zhang does have a very strong idea of what he wants," says Leung. "It's just that we don't." When told Cheung and Leung are bewildered at how little he seems to direct them, Zhang chuckles. "There's a Chinese maxim that says if you're playing a perfect drum, you don't need to pound it," he says. "The gentlest tap is all it takes to get what I want from such capable actors." That's the single most striking feature of watching Zhang Yimou's work: his selection of the perfect instruments to maximize the tone he wants.

In the new film Zhang is extending this ability to create a new form of action scene: rhythmic, poignant and majestic. Yen, whose working relationship with Li goes back a decade, sees that. He's fresh off success in the U.S. where Yuen Wo-ping's 1993 classic Iron Monkey, in which Yen plays a lead, was rereleased by Miramax and made $10 million at the box office. He applauds Zhang's command of a new style: "For a guy who has never directed action, he's got a nuance for certain pauses, certain breaks. He never stops looking at the bigger picture and perfecting as he sees fit. Me? I'd just get it over with."

Zhang can be patient because he seems to have the master reel already filmed and locked away in his head. "I don't start shooting until I know exactly how every scene will look," he says. And he's not exaggerating. He delights in the minutiae of his vision. The rhythm. The angles. His taciturn bearing vanishes as he pantomimes the way his camera will trace the edge of Jet Li's sword or follow a tear down Cheung's cheek. When Cheung complains that he makes her cry too often, he counters, "Nothing moves me more than the sight of a woman crying onscreen."

In his search for perfection, he'll travel hundreds of kilometers to find the ideal backdrop for each scene. Before the shoot in Heng-dian, the 300-strong crew crisscrossed mainland China from Dunhuang in the northwest of Gansu province to Jiuzhaigou in northern Sichuan. Last year, the company dropped everything to head for an ancient oak grove in Inner Mongolia to shoot a fight scene between Cheung and Zhang Ziyi at the height of the fall foliage. "I had a guy out there specifically to keep an eye on the leaves," says Zhang. "He made videotapes of their progress as they turned from green to yellow. I'd call every day. 'What do they look like?' 'Too green. Still too green.'" As soon as half the leaves were golden, the crew rushed north. Says Zhang: "We used three or four cameras simultaneously at different angles. And the leaves had to be perfectly yellow. We even implemented a leaf classification system. Special-class leaves could be blown in the actors' faces, first-class in front of them, second-class behind them and third-class were scattered on the ground." A mat gathered leaves as they fell so the crew could collect, clean and classify them, then gently send them drifting back down again.

Out of such obsessiveness emerge images of seemingly effortless beauty. Zhang shows us the unedited six-and-a-half-minute sequence from the Mongolian shoot, a scene so breathtaking it will no doubt earn a place in the cinematic pantheon. Dazzling in red costumes against a pale yellow sun, the two women ballet rather than battle it out, leaping over the treetops and chasing each other's dress trains, while leaves, fanned by the wind, drift down like confetti tossed by an admiring god. It's as though Zhang took a French impressionist canvas for a backdrop and spooled it onto the lens—a Monet brought to life by two dancing scarlet brushes.

On our last night, we watch Cheung and Leung play a key love scene. As they lie silently side by side, lost in the folds of meticulously rumpled bedsheets, the status of their relationship is vague. Technique must do the talking. The camera travels tantalizingly to the bed and slowly brings the two characters into sharper focus. Four bamboo blinds, spaced at 1-m intervals, must be consecutively raised as the camera zooms in. The four crew members who are perched on the rafters controlling the blinds like marionettes are getting far more attention than the actors. "Action." The blinds are raised. Zhang hates it: "Too fast. Too impatient, blinds three and four." "Action." "Too messy. Keep your hands steady." And again and again. For more than an hour.

This isn't working. Several times, Doyle opens his mouth as if to offer advice, but keeps silent. The crew looks increasingly baffled, while Zhang, implacable, works to reconcile the chaos before him with his well-ordered mental storyboard: positioning Maggie Cheung's fingers on the bed, adjusting the speed at which the blinds raise, finding the exact camera angle and revelatory moment when Cheung and Leung come into full focus. Finally, as the minutes tick by, he just sits and thinks. The only movement in the room is the gentle swaying of the blinds—four heartbeats. But when shooting resumes, he explodes. "You guys," he wails, looking up at the rafters, "you just don't understand blinds."

The tension pants at this point, so he chooses to break it. "Maggie," he deadpans, "I think you need to cry." She grimaces in mock frustration. Zhang tells the crew to let the blinds swing. "Action." The blinds sway and raise. Seconds slide by on the monitor ... 23, 24, 25 ... but Zhang doesn't call a halt. Finally, everyone understands what the fuss is all about. The scene on the monitor is vintage Zhang, slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call. When he cries "cut!" the crew responds with gasps, sighs and smiles, a collective glow of postcreative consummation. "Let's get a drink," cracks a weary Doyle.

As we prepare to leave, it's well past midnight. The crew is gone but Zhang Yimou is still awake, working alone in his editing-room-cum-dormitory, poring over the day's rushes. For sure he's tired, but the creative fire is still burning bright. Did someone say pressured? You would hardly sense it, to see the way this Hero works.

source:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/hero/story.html

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Leslie Cheung

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 01:38:43 GMT

R.I.P. Leslie Cheung (1956-2003)

Birth name
Cheung Kwok-wing

Born the youngest of 10 children, Leslie's father was tailor to the late William Holden. His parents divorced when he was young, and he claims this is one reason for his disinterest in marriage. Following graduation from secondary school, Leslie studied at Leeds University in Great Britain. Upon his return to Hong Kong, he entered in the 1976 ATV Asian Music Contest, where he took second prize. He went on to perform on stage, television, and in teeny-bopper movies. It wasn't until he was cast in the role of "Kit" in John Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" that his acting career took off; he has since performed in some of the best-known Hong Kong movies of the last decade, working under the direction of such directors as Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Tsui Hark, and John Woo. Leslie emigrated to Canada in 1992, but soon returned to Hong Kong, demonstrating his intention to remain past the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China through his purchase of real estate and opening of a coffee shop in the colony.

Leslie jumped from the landmark Mandarin Oriental hotel in the central business district early in the evening on 1st April 2003, he left a suicide note which was found on the body.

Selected Filmography:

Inner Senses (2002)
Happy Together (1997)
Shanghai Grand (1996)
Viva Erotica (1996)
Temptress Moon (1996)
The Chinese Feast (1995)
The Phantom Lover (1995)
Ashes of Time (1994)
The Bride with White Hair 2 (1993)
The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993)
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Days of Being Wild (1991)
Once a Thief (1990)
A Chinese Ghost Story Part II (1990)
A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)
A Better Tomorrow II (1987)
Rouge (1987)
A Better Tomorrow (1986)

source:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0002000

posted in Archives - 1 reply

"As Years Go By" (VillageVoice article on Days of Being Wild by J. Hoberman)

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 05:03:26 GMT

A very Wong engagement: Time-traveling between an imaginary past and an eternal now
As Years Go By
by J. Hoberman
November 15th, 2004 6:15 PM
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0446/hoberman.php

Days of Being Wild is the movie with which Wong Kar-wai became Wong Kar-wai葉he most influential, passionate, and romantic of neo-new-wave directors. Wong called his second feature "a reinvention of the disappeared world." Like most of his films, Days of Being Wild might be called In Search of Lost Time; in a sense, its belated New York theatrical premiere is time regained.

Arguably this is the key movie in Wong's oeuvre, as startling in its context as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Breathless were in theirs. Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons有eslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Andy Lau, and briefly, Tony Leung預cting like movie stars. Days is also Wong's first film to have been shot by Chris Doyle, and the voluptuous shadows, neon color schemes, and underwater atmosphere of Doyle's cinematography would define Wong's elusive Hong Kong forever after.

Set around the same period as American Graffiti (or Edward Yang's retro youth epic A Brighter Summer Day, made in Taiwan the next year), Days of Being Wild makes similar use of dated cool and old cars. The very first shot smacks your eye with a redder-than-red Coca-Cola cooler. The title evokes the one under which Rebel Without a Cause was released in Hong Kong. But this is an unfamiliar and perhaps imaginary nostalgia. In his film notes, Wong reminisces about 1960: "I used to recall, back in those days, the sun was brighter, the air fresher, with distant noises from wireless sets flowing down the streets. . . . One felt so good it was almost like a dream." For him it was: He was born in Shanghai in 1958 and moved to H.K. with his family at age five.

Suavely achronological, Days opens with a tracking shot through some verdant jungle that cannot be temporally identified until the movie's gangster-flick finale. Everything else is flashback. Moving from small, humid rooms to rigorously controlled exteriors, the principals suggest a group of time travelers transported into a past that can't be inhabited. The empty stadium where Maggie Cheung works the concession counter might be ruins. The youthful demographic further abstracts the universal obsession with personal history. Leslie Cheung's character, a pomaded lady-killer and underworld tough, is the only one with a parent; that she is his adoptive mother only serves to render him more a little boy lost.

Leslie Cheung's character is searching for something unknown left behind in an unknowable time. But those familiar with Wong's subsequent films will find that his preoccupations are all in place要eiled by a delicate fog of fleeting relationships, unfulfilled longings, and missed opportunities. Here too are his characteristic strategies葉he cast of beautiful loners, the memories delivered in voice-over, the abstractly exotic music. (Save for one Django Reinhardt piece, the Hawaiian cha-cha score comes from a compilation album by Xavier Cugat.) In the Mood for Love very nearly remakes Days of Being Wild預nd the as yet unreleased 2046 even more so. In some respects, however, Days is a more radical achievement than those that would come later.

For one thing, there's a headier sense of simultaneity. Difficult to follow on a first viewing (although not thereafter), the movie may feel shifty as smoke, but it's composed entirely of straight cuts. The various flashbacks and flash-forwards are marked by abrupt transitions that give no indication of elapsed time. This succession of privileged moments is less evocation of the past than nostalgia for the present. Time is fragmented in the service of an Eternal Now, and yet there's a Zeno's paradox effect in which that Now instantly evaporates. Clocks are ubiquitous, and the key scene has Leslie Cheung's character seduce Maggie Cheung's by tricking her into spending a minute constructing a memory of those 60 seconds.

Wong originally wanted a Days of Being Wild sequel haunted by its dead protagonist. Leslie Cheung's untimely passing renders that ambition additionally poignant. But as in all of Wong's movies, you can't go home again.

source:
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0446/hoberman.php

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Box Office in a Box: How DVD's are changing everything about Hollywood. By JON GERTNER (NY Times Article)

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 16:25:30 GMT

November 14, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14DVD.html

Box Office in a Box
By JON GERTNER
How DVD's are changing everything about Hollywood.

I. Get Me Gene Hackman

For the past few years, Hollywood's weekend box-office tallies have come to represent a tidy bit of wisdom about American culture -- cold, bare numbers relayed around the world every Monday morning that tell us which stories and which celebrities are resonating with the moviegoing public. There is, however, another set of Hollywood statistics of enormous significance, and Tuesday is their day. How important are these numbers? Every Tuesday at lunchtime, Mike Dunn and Peter Staddon, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of 20th Century Fox's home-entertainment division, take the elevator from ther 25th-floor offices at Fox Plaza in Los Angeles down to their cars in the underground parking garage and from there drive out into the noontime traffic on their way to Best Buy, Target, Costco and Wal-Mart. Tuesday is the day new DVD's are released, the day Dunn gets a sense of whether the discs that his team has worked on for months -- or sometimes years -- will sell as well as planned. So the Fox executives wander the aisles of the big retailers. They eavesdrop. They size up the clientele. They take note of what's moving through the cash registers. Tuesday, not Monday, is their day of reckoning.

And in many ways, the same is true for their parent company as well. From about 2002 on, the larger stakes in Hollywood -- the revenue that enables studios to finance blockbusters and to pay Brad Pitt and to keep the lights on -- have come to ride mostly on those little silver discs that go on sale four or five months after a theatrical release. This year, for instance, 63 percent of studio feature-film revenues in the United States will come from movies sold to retail stores; actual box office will generate only 21 percent. According to Tom Adams, a well-regarded home-entertainment analyst whose firm, Adams Media Research, tracks DVD sales and trends, studios often get twice as much revenue from a big film's retail sales as they do from its theatrical release.

There's a fair amount of disagreement over whether the DVD is becoming the lead in Hollywood or whether it remains a supporting actor. It may well be, as several industry executives told me, that the huge sales of DVD's merely add another variable to the equation for which films get made and which don't. "We factor it in," said Tom Rothman, the chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, "but it's just one of many things." And yet it's not hard to find Hollywood insiders right now who think the movie theater as a communal experience is dying and that big-screen releases have little economic function beyond marketing for DVD rollouts. According to this point of view, the traditional balance in Hollywood -- among money and influence and, at times, creativity -- is shifting toward studios' home-entertainment divisions, which now manage DVD releases (and DVD marketing campaigns) with the same level of care that attends big-screen debuts. The possible consequences are compelling. A studio driven by home entertainment would need to focus less on what kinds of films fill seats at the multiplex and more on what kinds of films sell as DVD's at Wal-Mart. At the same time, in a culture focused increasingly on the DVD, the home theater becomes ascendant -- a familial or even neighborhood gathering spot for new releases, most definitely, but also, perhaps, a venue for character-driven movies or low-budget documentaries that aren't suited for the big time.

The business of Hollywood, driven as much by relationships and celebrity as it is by economic rationality, doesn't necessarily behave logically. Nevertheless, the major studios -- now owned by publicly traded multinational corporations -- are increasingly aware of the fact that even as their theatrical divisions produce the glamour and buzz, their home-video divisions generate an increasing portion of the cash. (At one studio, they call DVD's "the corporate A.T.M. machine.") Like several other home-entertainment executives in Hollywood, Mike Dunn said he is always asked to chime in on the DVD prospects for a Fox film prior to shooting. "While the movie is being green-lighted by my management, we vote with our financial projections," Dunn told me in his office one afternoon in late September. "So before they say 'Go,' we tally up a number. As a result, they know which movies are risky and which movies, if they have trouble at the box office, we can rescue."

In the process, this alternate DVD marketplace seems to be establishing a parallel world -- of movie stars as well as plot lines -- based on what sells best at the big retailers. "You know, if I could make every movie, I'd put Denzel Washington in every one," Dunn said, speaking of what pulls consumers into the stores and to the cash registers. "Will Ferrell is another star like that -- just huge on DVD. And Gene Hackman. Gene Hackman is like the Good Housekeeping seal on a DVD." The executives in Fox's television division, having discovered the tremendous revenue that a season on DVD can bring in, are actually starting to ask for Dunn's input on scripts, he said. But not the movie people. "If they asked for my input, we'd never make a drama," he said. "Nobody would ever die at the end of a movie. Nobody would ever get sick."

Dunn grew thoughtful. "And the dog would always live," he added. Then he grinned at me. "In fact, he'd be a hero."

II. The Meaning of 'Fight Club'

Fox's home-video headquarters, high up in a glass tower in Century City, Calif., fronts the grand expanse of the 20th Century Fox studio lot on the Avenue of the Stars. You can measure the difference between the two locations in distance -- a few hundred yards -- or in time. The lot is a dreamy Art Deco showpiece, covering about 80 acres and several gated city blocks, that houses a cluster of vintage screening rooms, a perfectly rendered Lower East Side stage set and a collection of low-slung beige bungalows from the 1930's and 40's where the stars of the day could take a breather from the world (or worlds) of Darryl Zanuck's manufacture. The home-video domain, on the other hand, with panoramic views of L.A. sprawl, comprises a maze of offices and cubicles overflowing with the paraphernalia of advertising campaigns. Here, in many ways, it's a packaged-goods company where past and present are scrambled together into product. Everywhere you find familiar images -- on desks, on walls, on floors -- not just of this year's DVD's but also of a century of film and celebrities.

At some point in the next three or four years, the VHS cassette will begin to disappear, made obsolete by the DVD; by that time, the number of homes in the United States with a DVD player, now 68 million, will have grown to 100 million. For the consumer, this seems to be a positive example of technology's natural progression: the DVD offers far better picture quality, far more capacity for extra features and greater portability than a videocassette. For the studios, though, the switch from VHS cassettes to DVD's represents something substantially more important: a shift from a rental-model business to the far more lucrative sell-through model. (At the moment, pay-per-view and video on demand are together only a minute part of the home-entertainment audience, probably less than 3 percent.) Meanwhile, the studios have discovered that Americans are increasingly willing to buy movies on disc instead of borrowing them on tape, a commercial evolution that has boosted the potential value of every film. A blockbuster can now generate far more revenue over the course of its 30- or 50-year lifetime, and in certain instances, a box-office laggard can, too.

The oldies have already proven as much. DVD sales in the United States, which will amount to about $15 billion this year, have been a huge source of cash for those studios with an extensive vault -- particularly Warner Brothers and Disney but also Fox. Last year, the success of issuing movies on disc prompted Jessica Reif Cohen, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, to declare that the revenue from DVD's had led her investment bank to rethink the financial prospects of the movie business. Out was the studio as spendthrift; in was the studio as cash cow. Such a view has since become a kind of conventional wisdom. This summer's bidding war for MGM, for instance, tentatively won by Sony, eventually reached the $5 billion mark -- even though MGM hardly makes movies anymore. But MGM has a library, estimated at about 4,100 films, that a new owner will be able to mine for DVD's.

Classic films don't typically sell many millions of copies, as Sony's "Spider-Man" DVD did. But they can sell hundreds of thousands of units and bestow windfall millions on a studio. More lucrative still are various blockbusters from the 1970's or 80's. Two months ago, Fox issued the original "Star Wars" trilogy on DVD for the first time. "It brought in $115 million, worldwide, on the first day," Steve Feldstein, the senior vice president for publicity at Fox's home-video division, told me. Chewbacca -- played by the original actor, the 7-foot-3-inch Peter Mayhew -- had roamed the home-video floors at Fox Plaza in between promotional events. He'd even worn his Wookiee costume.

Feldstein and Peter Staddon often used a word I would hear a lot around Los Angeles: "eventize." As in, "We really need to eventize the hell out of this release." For the "Star Wars" debut on DVD, that meant parties, paparazzi, robots and a red-carpet treatment that mimicked in miniature the fanfare accompanying a big-screen theatrical opening. A boffo event, in short. Such lavish expenditures also apply to the DVD package itself. The forthcoming "Spider-Man 2" DVD, to be released at the end of this month and sure to eventize everything in its path, will contain 10 hours of new content on its two discs, including a 12-part documentary on the making of the film, a featurette on the filming of a single action sequence, bloopers, multiple commentaries and other assorted footage. As a result, the DVD will run about six times as long as the theatrical release. When I asked Ben Feingold, the president of Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, who will actually purchase "Spider-Man 2," he said, "Some are collectors; some are watchers." If past releases are any indication, though, 30 percent will have already seen the movie in the theater and another 30 percent will have seen it on cable; only 40 percent will not have seen it yet. The majority of buyers -- perhaps 80 percent of them -- are likely to watch only the film and leave most of the extras unseen.

You would think, then, that this typical pattern of DVD consumption -- watching the movie, and maybe some bloopers and deleted scenes -- would prompt industry types like Staddon and Dunn to scale back. It hasn't. "It's interesting to watch someone buy a DVD," Staddon said. In observing customers at Best Buy on those Tuesday road trips, he has noted that the first thing they do is check the back of a new release to see what extras they will get. "So they're very important in point of purchase," Staddon explained, even if they turn out to be irrelevant once they are brought home. What's just as important is that directors have come to see discs, and those extra features, as yet another canvas. That idea of improving a film's value, in other words, applies to its content as well as its finances. "They're like, 'This is my movie, and I'm going to premiere it on 3,000 screens, but it's going to live forever on DVD,"' Staddon said of the directors he works with. "They're very conscious of the fact that there are now two different roles that the movie has to fulfill. One is the opening and the theatrical performance, and the other is the archival record of what can be, in some instances, a couple of years' worth of their life's work." If there was a milestone that marks this realization, Staddon and Mike Dunn would pick "Fight Club," from 1999, a box-office disappointment that was packaged afterward with audio commentaries from Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter and David Fincher (the director), explaining the hyperviolent film from each of their points of view.

"Entertainment Weekly gave the 'Fight Club' movie a D and then ranked it No.1 on its list of Top 50 DVD's you need to own," Dunn recalled. Such a rating was good for buzz and sales, but this wasn't exactly Dunn's point. At the time, he explained, the financial possibilities of a DVD sell-through market were already becoming obvious. What the magazine's rating really showed was the aesthetic possibilities. When DVD's first went to market, Dunn told me, directors had little interest in shaping the final product. This disc changed things: a DVD could be a new creative form, an opportunity not just for economic redemption ("Fight Club," incidentally, is now in the black), but for artistic redemption as well. Not long after, Dunn said, even Warren Beatty started returning his calls.

III. How to Make (and Profit From) a DVD

By early autumn, when I visited Fox, the DVD group had already spent six months strategizing for Ridley Scott's next film, an as-yet-untitled epic that was still shooting and probably wouldn't come out on DVD until a year from now. So far, the choices had been considerable: Should it be a one-disc or two-disc package? Should the DVD group send a crew to the set to get its own "making of" footage? What were Scott's own preferences for the DVD? Would the product sell better to the Best Buy demographic (traditionally male, tech-savvy early adopters) or the Target demographic (mostly moms who came late to DVD's)? Ultimately, the questions will be whittled down to the same one that Fox's theatrical division wrestles with: What's the best street date? In a cluttered marketplace, with several dozen new DVD's hitting the shelves every week, a good release date can define a disc's sales and profits.

A studio like Fox usually works on dozens of DVD's at a time -- from minor television shows to $100 million-plus "tent poles" meant to draw everyone in and that entail a marketing blitz mapped out long beforehand. Fox scheduled the release of the "I, Robot" DVD for Dec. 14, for example, in part to avoid the November retail juggernauts of "Shrek 2" and "Spider-Man 2." Work on this disc began nearly two years ago, when Mike Dunn shared his financial expectations for the film with his bosses, the studio heads Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos, who were in the process of green-lighting it. His was a positive assessment; like Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, Will Smith is an enormous DVD star, giving the film a crossover appeal that reaches beyond age, race and genre. Once the film was approved, the DVD team began working with an independent producer, Mark Rance, who was sent to the set for the shoot in Vancouver to gather footage. In-house producers at Fox oversaw Rance's work. Not long after, the DVD team at Fox decided they would issue the film, at least initially, as a single disc.

"I, Robot," which cost about $115 million to make and perhaps more than $30 million to market, opened in mid-July and eventually took in about $145million at the domestic box office. During opening week in the theaters, Julie Markell, the senior vice president for domestic home entertainment at Fox, began working on the disc's exterior packaging. When I met with Markell in her office, she told me she has only three seconds to get a shopper's attention with the cover art. "Here's what we have right now," she said, pulling out a pile of images of Will Smith. She had narrowed the choices down to two. And to ensure that shoppers would look, she had designed a corrugated cardboard display for the DVD -- a robot with flashing red lights -- that Fox will send to retail stores.

Meanwhile, Rance, the producer, had handed in a disc around Labor Day. "With 'I, Robot,' we had 250 hours of footage," he told me. "That was a nightmare." It took him the better part of four or five months, he said, to catalog the extra footage and another few months to edit it down and create menus. His final work was being combined in-house with the main feature, and would soon be sent to a factory in Alabama where the disc would be replicated several million times. Markell's cover art would be printed in Chicago and shipped to Alabama as well. A few weeks later, the package would be assembled there; finally, in early December, the discs will be trucked to retailers around the country.

Like the other studios, Fox won't talk about its financial expectations for forthcoming DVD's. Tom Adams, the home-entertainment analyst, estimated that the studio was likely to sell between 10 million and 11 million copies of "I, Robot," bringing in perhaps $160 million for Fox -- as compared with the more than $70 million Fox received from the film's $145 million take at the box office in the United States and Canada (box-office gross is split with the theater owners). "This is one of those titles that will produce twice the revenue on DVD than in the box office," Adams said.

What is less apparent, yet arguably more important, is what that revenue will do for the studio in general. To see how the DVD has done wondrous things for Hollywood's bottom line, it takes only a sheet of paper and a basic knowledge of arithmetic. Bob Alexander, who runs a New York media-consulting firm that tracks trends in the video industry, took me through the home-video accounting. In the early days of VHS, Alexander explained, many home-video divisions were lodged in the music departments of the large entertainment companies. Eventually, home video grew larger and gained independence; later still it moved into DVD's. Yet the manner in which home-entertainment revenues are contracted and accounted for -- who gets profits and royalties, and how much they get -- harks back to the old record deals that mean large profits for the corporation (which was taking the risk) instead of the artist. In the case of the DVD, this arrangement has made the writers' and directors' guilds unhappy. The studios, on the other hand, have found it pleasingly generous.

"Let's assume the wholesale price of a DVD is $14.95," Alexander began, choosing that number because $14.95 is a typical amount that the studios charge a retail store for a new DVD. Of that $14.95, Alexander explained, about $1.50 covers manufacturing costs and perhaps another $2.50 goes to marketing. "So, roughly, there's $4 of direct costs per DVD sold."

That leaves the studios with about $11 from each DVD. The home-video division then has overhead and a royalty that might add up to $2.50.

"What's left over, nearly $9 per disc, is cash flow," Alexander said. "You can't find it in the statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can't find it anywhere. It's included with theatrical budgets. But this is what pays for all the movies that the studios make.

"Whatever the number, whether it's slightly more or less than the $9, nobody has any question about where it's going," Alexander added. "It's the home-video divisions that are paying the budget of the theatrical side."

IV. The Retailers' Special Effect

To Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the best way to understand what DVD's have done to the marketplace is to go back in time and look at the publishing industry. Until the 40's, Lynton told me, the book business in this country consisted almost entirely of hardcover sales. A big seller sold 100,000 copies. "Along came mass-market paperbacks," Lynton said, "and all at once Americans could buy books in every town in the country. And the numbers reflected that. A big seller in paperback was selling 5 or 10 million, and it wasn't just new releases, it was also back catalog." In his view, the DVD has had a similar populist influence, bringing movies new and old into the farthest corners of the world, all at a modest price.

There are differences, of course, between paperbacks and DVD's. For one thing, as the studios evolve from purveyors of big-screen experiences to manufacturers of tangible products, they have been forced into relationships with the largest retail stores that are arguably more intense than those between publishers and bookstores. They must negotiate directly, and often fiercely, over everything from prices to advertising support to shelf space. And to a surprising degree, home-video executives keep retailers in the loop on pending releases, hoping to stir up enthusiasm and sales. Gary Arnold, a senior vice president at Best Buy, told me he starts talking to the studios about a film as early as 18 months before its DVD release. "With a case like 'Shrek 2,"' Arnold said, "we were looking at bits of the film that DreamWorks had already shot and created 12 months prior, as they were laying out marketing plans and dates. In our meetings with the studios, we also hear about projects that haven't even begun shooting." In turn, the chains share information with the studios -- everything from demographic statistics on buyers of new releases to who, in their opinion, is an up-and-coming star. When Fox's Peter Staddon ventures out on Tuesday, Dec. 14, to see who's purchasing "I, Robot" in Best Buy, his ritual will be more a quest for anecdotal understanding than hard information. The actual sales data filter in automatically during the day. "We know what sells on an hourly basis," Staddon said. "Our computers talk to the computers at all the major retailers so that we will get a read as to how these things are selling. So it's not as if they have to tell us. We can just look at our printouts and see what's happening."

Over the past few years, a handful of big chains have assumed a near-cartel on retail DVD sales; last year, Best Buy, Target, Costco, Sam's Club, Circuit City and Blockbuster together sold about 42 percent of the discs in the United States. And then there's Wal-Mart. One axiom of the DVD business seems to be that no one discusses Wal-Mart's influence or its negotiating tactics. One Hollywood studio agreed to talk with me as long as we wouldn't broach the subject of Wal-Mart; two other studios stopped speaking with me altogether once the subject of retail relations came up. Wal-Mart itself, which has recently touted its willingness to talk to the press in an effort to repair its image, avoided phone contact and communicated through a series of e-mail messages, its spokesmen claiming that they would like to talk, but that my deadline prevented them from doing so. I offered to extend my deadline. My public-relations contact soon wrote to make it clear that cooperating with me about DVD's would be impossible.

Wal-Mart's huge market share and desire for privacy almost certainly go together. At the moment, according to Tom Adams, the Arkansas-based chain alone controls about 22 percent of the overall DVD market in the United States and up to 40 percent on any one hit title. "They have enormous power," Adams said. "They've got the locations, the traffic, the customers. Therefore, how a title does depends on them." Mike Dunn at Fox agreed in large part with this assessment. I asked him whether a film could succeed if it didn't hit big at Wal-Mart. "Not a big film, no," he said. Yet he does believe that a smaller title, for instance one done by Fox's Searchlight division (its most recent release was "I Huckabees"), could succeed through Amazon.

Wal-Mart and Best Buy make for a curious contrast. While the demographics of Wal-Mart shoppers probably reflect the demographics of America's moviegoing audience, that's probably not the case with Best Buy, the Minnesota-based electronics chain that currently has about 11 percent of the DVD market but is known for selling extraordinary quantities of effects-heavy DVD's to men in their late teens and 20's. Tom Adams, for example, strongly believed that Warner Brothers' quick green light of "Matrix" sequels was influenced by the original film's huge DVD sales at places like Best Buy. Several people high up at Fox acknowledged that "Alien vs. Predator" was the kind of film for which the financial upside from a DVD at Best Buy made it a far more appealing studio project. Thus, if the Wal-Mart effect tends to accentuate the retail value of generic blockbuster films that have been propelled through theaters a few months before by a $30 million or $40 million marketing hurricane, the Best Buy effect specifically accentuates the retail value of action-effects films, even if they're not blockbusters at all. "Hellboy," a special-effects-laden adaptation of a comic book, "did only around $60 million in box office," Best Buy's Gary Arnold told me. Then Columbia TriStar released the DVD. "We've had huge response with the consumer," Arnold said. "Now we're releasing 'Hellboy: Director's Cut.' Then we're releasing a 'Hellboy' box set."

Meanwhile, the question of what sells seems to lead to the question of what doesn't sell. Or in some cases, what never even gets distributed to retailers. Bob Chapek, the president of Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment, said that the limited shelf space at the major stores has made it increasingly unappealing for studios to acquire smaller projects for distribution. "You can have a very big appetite for acquiring titles -- independent films, foreign films -- when people are buying everything and can't get enough," Chapek told me early one morning in his Disney office in Burbank. "Now, with the normal output of all the studios together, plus rereleasing old movies on catalog, plus TV shows on DVD, you may acquire a film. But are you really going to find a market for it?"

Less and less, it would seem. Which is not to say that the marketplace isn't voting in other, very specific ways. Fox recently came to the conclusion that there was an enormous untapped opportunity for Christian DVD's. Mike Dunn said that Fox had begun developing Christian-fiction content at the direct-to-video level, which means it will not go through theaters but will instead be distributed nationally to Christian book stores and Wal-Mart. The first project, "Hangman's Curse," based on a Frank Peretti Christian mystery, came out last year. It sold well, and there's more to come. "The only thing that's holding us back now," Dunn said, "is the amount of product we can produce."

V. Coming Attractions

One day in Los Angeles I paid a visit to Warren Lieberfarb, the former president of home video at Warner Brothers who was dismissed two years ago after an acrimonious dispute over compensation. Lieberfarb, who now works as an industry consultant, remains a polarizing figure in the home-video world, both widely liked and disliked; his new job is described by some in the industry as a sad fall from grace, which in Hollywood apparently means that a $10 million severance agreement, a tony office in Brentwood and lucrative advisory relationships with Microsoft, Toshiba, Best Buy and Miramax are the stuff of tragedy.

Lieberfarb's ambivalence about the direction the industry has taken since the DVD arrived on the scene is striking. "I think in Hollywood's search for tent poles -- product that has mass-audience appeal, not only to moviegoers, but perhaps to retail shoppers -- the inspiration to appeal to other audience segments is being neglected," he told me. "Everyone's trying to hit home runs." Lieberfarb has in fact begun to wonder if those smaller films -- what he calls the singles and doubles that appeal to people of different age groups, different educational levels, different geographical areas -- are mostly being left out of the selection process. "What seems to me ironic," he continued, "is that as the baby-boomer generation ages and becomes the empty nesters, that group may find itself without the fare that helped them bring about the renaissance in moviemaking that characterized the late 1960's and 1970's. Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen -- it's not only those directors, it is by definition the subjects and actors they're interested in. They tend to be story-driven and character-driven rather than special-effects driven."

What's surprising here is that the DVD as a medium almost certainly would not have succeeded were it not for Lieberfarb. In the early 90's, Lieberfarb was the main advocate for a format change, believing that the VHS and the movie-rental business, while lucrative for the studios, was also something of a dead end. Thus came the idea of the DVD, with a technology similar in many ways to that of the CD. You can't look at a DVD and CD under a lamp and see a difference. Both have a microscopic, spiral track -- lined with millions of tiny bumps -- that begins at the center of the disc and curls around and around until it reaches the disc's edge. An infrared laser reads those bumps and converts the readings into bits of data, which in turn get converted to a visual signal that is transmitted to your television. But compared with the CD, the DVD can store tremendous amounts of information (it has a thinner track and more bumps) which made its acceptance in Hollywood possible. (A full-length movie, never mind hours of added features, could never fit on a CD.) By the mid-90's there were two similar DVD technologies vying to be first to market: a consortium led by Sony and Philips championed one, a Lieberfarb-led consortium that included Warner and Toshiba backed another. Lieberfarb brokered an agreement between the two sides, so that by the time DVD players and DVD's arrived in stores in the spring of 1997, there was only one format. That was good for the consumer; it was also good for Warner Brothers, which owns nearly a dozen patents on the disc technology. A few pennies on every DVD sold, in other words, still make their way to TimeWarner, a royalty that has probably earned the company tens of millions of dollars over the past few years.

That may not continue. At the moment the studios are divided over the next format, one for high-definition television, that they hope to bring to market by 2005. Sony and Philips have led a group that has created something called Blu-ray discs; Lieberfarb, meanwhile, is consulting with Toshiba on a high-definition disc -- the term usually tossed around is HD-DVD -- that improves upon the present DVD technology. Both sides are trying furiously to recruit as many studios to their side as possible. Michael Lynton, at Sony, aligns with the Blu-ray developed by his parent company. Mike Dunn told me Fox has not officially committed to either side. Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers have not chosen. The same is true for Bob Chapek at Disney. When I asked Lieberfarb whether he was optimistic for his side, he shrugged and threw up his hands. All of a sudden, he said, the studios seemed unable to choose between the two formats.

Several home-video executives think a war is possible, meaning that both formats could go on the market at the same time, with the result of confusing consumers and, quite possibly, sinking the new technology before it ever catches on. Yet assuming that one version wins out (both have advantages), you have to wonder whether it will further redefine the industry as the DVD did or merely pester Americans with another added expense. "There are two camps of people," said Chapek, who in addition to running Buena Vista's home entertainment business is also president of the Digital Entertainment Group, the trade association that promotes digital technology. There are those who think the next-generation format will be the second coming of the DVD, he said, and there's another camp that thinks it will be a niche business. "The conversations we're having now," Chapek added, "are exactly the kind of conversations we were having six or seven years ago with the DVD. We're living through it again."

Chapek, like most of the other video executives I spoke with, has high expectations for what either format could do for the content. The sound and picture would be better, but the new discs would also have far more capacity and be more interactive. The games on current-technology DVD's, for instance, especially those for kids, are rudimentary. That could change. Even more important, a new-technology disc would offer a far better encryption than what currently exists on DVD's. This might not quash piracy completely, but it would be an improvement over the current situation. "We could put the genie back in the bottle," said Fox's Dunn.

I asked Lieberfarb what another new format would mean for the industry's future -- whether he thought it would further change the way Hollywood does business. He waved the question away. In his view, the game board isn't confined to the studios and the films they make, or even to the retailers they wrangle with. A product like the DVD has rippled through the entire computer, consumer-electronics and entertainment industries, he said. Any widely accepted new format hops from one venue to another and defines the way we use those products; in ways subtle and not so subtle, it also defines the way we live.

Lieberfarb allowed that high-definition discs may affect content in some as yet unforeseeable way. "But at the guts of this battle is patent portfolios," he said. "Consumer electronics and personal computers typically find themselves commoditized. But patent portfolios give the patent owner the ability to collect a toll that isn't subject to the marketplace." Or to put it another way, it's not who makes more cars that matters, it's who owns the road. "This is a big-time industrial battlefield," Lieberfarb continued. "It's Silicon Valley, and Seoul, and Tokyo, and Hollywood." And the companies that win the format war, he concluded, will win big. The movies, whatever form they take, will still be the movies.

VI. The Big Picture

It's striking that many of the people who work directly on DVD's -- the home-entertainment producers, directors and marketers -- seem to feel they are involved with something revolutionary and hugely disruptive. On the other hand, the higher up the pecking order you go inside the studios, the more likely you are to hear that the DVD, while making a big difference to consumers and being far more profitable than the VHS cassette, has not fundamentally changed the way the industry functions. Consider the view from the top: the office, in Building 88 on the studio lot, of Tom Rothman, the Fox co-chairman. Rothman has an intense energy and a big resonant voice that gives you the impression that everything he says -- and he says a lot -- could be written in capital letters. He wasted no time in communicating his belief that at the end of the day, it's not the flood of revenue from DVD's, it's not the patent portfolios and it's not Gene Hackman. It's the story that matters. "I'm a traditionalist," he told me, echoing a point I'd heard elsewhere -- that if Rothman discovers a truly exciting script, he and his partner, Jim Gianopulos, will make it. "Here, the culture is still driven by one thing: make hit movies. Make movies that people want to see. Gee, that sounds easy. Well, it's not so easy."

It's not that Rothman feels the DVD hasn't changed some parts of the business; he agreed that the format had emphatically altered consumer behavior and the way we experience movies at home. He also acknowledged that DVD sales are a factor in the green-lighting process and can help boost the prospects of an action-effects drama. But the sales of almost all DVD's, he pointed out, correspond with how well a film performs in the theaters. And how well a film performs in the theaters is still a measure of how much it captivates moviegoers. As Rothman put it: "You still need to make good movies -- to make movies that excite the audience. And in many ways, unlike what you're going to hear in a lot of places, I believe that home video puts even more demand to make sure that we're making good movies. Because now you're asking consumers to buy the movies."

Rothman makes a persuasive case (he happens to be a former entertainment lawyer), yet it contrasts significantly with what people lower in the studio ecosystem told me, both at Fox and elsewhere. When I talked with Mark Rance, for instance -- the "I, Robot" DVD producer who has also produced DVD's for a slew of other big movies, like "Cast Away" and "Magnolia" -- I asked if he thought DVD's had begun to shape the content of films. "I think something interesting has happened," he replied. "I think theatrical died about a year ago. And where you see it is where you always see changes -- in the lesser films, in the films the studio won't back with huge marketing campaigns." With increasing frequency, he said, those smaller movies get a two-week run, then disappear. "What we're used to is the 19th-century theatrical experience: you go to a theater with a large group of people, you see a movie and enjoy it with a crowd," Rance continued. "That's being replaced now by, like, 20 people in your living room, like a book club, watching a film they might not have heard of."

Some positive results may yet come out of this, he added. A film like Fox's "Dreamers" -- a Bernardo Bertolucci project, briefly in theaters last winter, for which Rance produced the DVD -- could easily be rediscovered in this environment. Rance said he also hoped that DVD-based "microcinemas," small independent theaters already present in some cities, could catch on around the country, offering a forum for independent filmmakers to give their films their premiere and get word of mouth going so they can also sell them on DVD. "We're probably at that stage now where the romantic version of the social experience of film is disappearing," Rance said. "I don't think it's permanent, but I think it's going to shift to something that the older generations don't have in their head yet, something they can't imagine."

This shift might be along the lines of what Chris Blackwell -- the founder of Island Records who started Palm Pictures in Manhattan a few years ago -- is already pursuing. Palm acquires independently made features and documentaries for distribution in theaters and on DVD, but the company also finances inexpensive projects by writer-producers who frequently work with digital cameras. The idea here is that digital auteurs can make personal or visionary films, often with a music element or theme. "I want Palm to be in the forefront of marketing and releasing films that are actually made on digital video," Blackwell told me. "What digital video does is sort of democratize the visual business. The costs are so much less." Moreover, the parallels between signing up filmmakers at Palm and signing up bands at Island Records (Blackwell signed U2, for example) are not coincidental. He thinks DVD will soon be a factor pushing handmade digital documentaries and feature films into clubs, as well as theaters, around the country. "The studios wouldn't be interested because it's way below their radar screen," he noted. "It's too small. If something breaks out and has the potential to be successful, it will go to the major theaters. Otherwise it will go to clubs, which have a good sound system."

It seems entirely possible that Rothman, Rance and Blackwell could be right about the future without any of them being wrong. The big-screen-to-DVD apparatus that Rothman commands could well remain intact, shaped by the tension between art and commerce that has always been present in the film industry. And the DVD-small-venue market that Rance and Blackwell foresee -- driven, presumably, by a high-definition disc like Lieberfarb's that would come close to the resolution of 35-millimeter film -- would result from the very same tension that now pushes films without nuclear explosions or intergalactic travel toward the cultural margins. It may also be the case, as Rance argued, that the precursors of such a small-film society are here already. The difference in quality between big home screens and small art-house screens is becoming less and less discernible. Consumers are gathering in private groups to watch the Christian DVD dramas Mike Dunn's team is starting to market. Organizations like MoveOn have distributed political films like "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" for house parties. A more defined marketplace, and a more developed grapevine, for small-venue discs, might not be far behind.

You have to wonder if this would be such an unfortunate turn of events. Large or small, films would still be judged on the same merits that Rothman anguishes over: good scripts, good acting, good execution and excitement. And in the demi-underground of digital film, the world need not freeze over with special effects, as in "The Day After Tomorrow." The dog need not be a hero. And would that, after all, make for such an unhappy ending?

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14DVD.html

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I, Pee-wee By DAVE ITZKOFF (NY Times Article)

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:46:32 GMT

November 7, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/arts/television/07itzk.html?ex=1100667600&en=694bf178781a77e0&ei=5070

I, Pee-wee
By DAVE ITZKOFF

IT was two days before Halloween, and Paul Reubens was one of the few people in Los Angeles without a costume. Seated in his publicist's office, in flannel shirt and corduroy pants too big for his slender frame, the 52-year-old actor and comedian looked like someone without much interest in playing dress-up or pulling pranks. He looked an awful lot like an adult.

It's been more than 13 years since Mr. Reubens last performed in the full regalia of Pee-wee Herman, the manic man-child with the too-small suit and the too-big voice, a character he portrayed not only in stand-up routines, movies and television shows, but in almost two decades' worth of interviews, talk show bookings and public appearances. Even now, as he prepares for the DVD release of his 1980's-era Saturday morning series "Pee-wee's Playhouse," Mr. Reubens had to acknowledge how unusual it was to be playing himself. "It's weird," he said in his normal speaking tone, just a shade above a whisper, "because I had that whole character to hide behind - now I'm kind of like this: putting people to sleep. But that was always the weird dichotomy of it all."

From the time Mr. Reubens created him in the 1970's, as a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, there has been an uneasy duality about Pee-wee Herman. In the 1981 HBO special "The Pee-wee Herman Show," adapted from Mr. Reubens's nightclub act, the character was a stunted adolescent with some very grown-up curiosities, who hypnotized women into taking off their shirts and taped mirrors to his shoes to see up their skirts. But it was a kinder, gentler (though no less hyperactive) Pee-wee whom audiences saw in his film debut, the 1985 "Pee-wee's Big Adventure"; the kid-friendly story of his quest for a missing bicycle (directed by a then-unknown Tim Burton) was a surprise hit that grossed over $40 million.

Even before the movie's success, CBS approached Mr. Reubens about bringing Pee-wee Herman to the network's Saturday morning lineup in a cartoon show; instead, he gave them a live-action series more animated and colorful than anyone could have anticipated. On the air from 1986 to 1991, "Pee-wee's Playhouse" was a vibrant and relentlessly inventive half-hour that was equal parts dollies and Dali, whose every frame was crammed with pop art, vintage toys and talking furniture. In the spirit of "Captain Kangaroo" and "The Howdy Doody Show," Pee-wee and his entourage of humans and puppets spoke directly to the screen; each episode offered simple instructions - how to behave at the breakfast table, why stealing is wrong - tempered with a giddy anarchy that would never fly on "Sesame Street." "I tried to be responsible in teaching kids things I thought were good lessons," Mr. Reubens said, "all in the context of, 'It's O.K. to be wild and have a good time.' "

With a then-unheard-of budget of $425,000 per episode and no creative interference from CBS, "Pee-wee's Playhouse" soon attracted an audience beyond its target demographic, and its cast and crew got swept up in the show's spirit of make-believe. "I would go on commercial interviews and be labeled as a woman over 40," recalled Lynne Marie Stewart, the actress who played Pee-wee's perky neighbor, Miss Yvonne. "Then I would go to my day job, where I got to be a storybook princess."

But the fantasy unraveled in July 1991, when Mr. Reubens was arrested for exposing himself in an adult theater in Sarasota, Fla. By coincidence, the five-year run of "Pee-wee's Playhouse" was ending that month, and many viewers assumed CBS had canceled the series. (In fact, the network pulled just two remaining reruns.) "In my mug shot I had like hair down to here and a big giant beard," Mr. Reubens said. "It was almost two years away from having filmed that show."

For the next few years, Mr. Reubens earned good notices in supporting movie roles: a sarcastic ghoul in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in 1992, a flamboyant hairdresser in the 2001 "Blow." But he was arrested again in November 2002, after a 2001 police raid seized some 30,000 vintage erotic artworks from his Hollywood Hills home. Last March, he pleaded guilty to possessing obscene material and was fined $100 and sentenced to three years' informal probation.

Despite his recent legal troubles, Mr. Reubens still lives in a Pee-wee-centric universe: he is planning a museum show of the "Playhouse" sets and props, which he still owns. He is also pitching two new Pee-wee film scripts, one based on the CBS show and another that could be seen as a satire on Mr. Reubens's own predicament. ("It's about Pee-wee Herman becoming famous," he explained, "and fame, let's say, doesn't agree with him.") And on Nov. 16, all 45 episodes of "Pee-wee's Playhouse" will be released on DVD for the first time. (He is pitching television projects as well, including a half-hour comedy Western and what he described as a "combination variety-talk-Ernie Kovacs show.")

But it is the Pee-wee DVD venture that Mr. Reubens is most excited, and most anxious, about. To produce it, he had to wait several years for the home video rights to "Pee-wee's Playhouse" to revert back to him. (The original company he licensed them to, MGM Home Entertainment, released the show on VHS in 1996 but opted not to publish it on DVD.) He then spent nearly two more years poring over packaging and box art that he felt lived up to the series's eye-popping visual standards.

But Mr. Reubens cannot ignore the fact that the publicity campaign he is planning for the DVD, one that includes bookings on David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and the "Today" show will invite unwanted scrutiny of his private life. Still, Mr. Reubens understands that this uncertainty is the price he will continually have to pay if he wants to keep the legacy of "Pee-wee's Playhouse" alive. "I have a huge stake in this, and it's not back on television, so I love the idea that a new generation of kids and the parents who grew up on it can buy it," he said. And he was guardedly optimistic that there were still enough Pee-wee fans out there who would do just that. "We'll know soon," he said. "If you go to Best Buy and they're marked down two for $2, I think we'll know the answer to that question."

Ms. Stewart, the "Playhouse" performer who has known Reubens since his Groundlings days, said there was a simple explanation for his dedication to the Pee-wee persona. "He had 10 to 15 other characters that also happened to be brilliant," she said. "This one just happened to take off. There's a lot of Pee-wee in Paul, in the fact that he loves gadgets and he loves toys, and he loves anything intricate. That's part of him, and that became part of Pee-wee."

Mr. Reubens recognizes that he cannot live his own life free from judgment, and that he will probably have to face it whenever he tries to express himself. "That is what happens," he said. "But your choice is, do you stop working? No. Then they, whoever they are, win."

Mr. Reubens added: "I remember making 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure,' and reading somewhere, 'It's a five-minute sketch on David Letterman - how's it going to be a movie?' I'm not trying to say everyone's wrong but me." For a moment, the old Pee-wee irreverence crept back into his voice. "But they are."

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/arts/television/07itzk.html?ex=1100667600&en=694bf178781a77e0&ei=5070

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What Is a Foreign Movie Now? By A. O. SCOTT

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:33:53 GMT

What Is a Foreign Movie Now?
By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 14, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14WORLD.html

One night during the Toronto film festival earlier this fall, I slippedinto a buzzing multiplex theater decked out with all the amenities of 21st-century moviegoing -- stadium seating, molded plastic cup holders, digital surround sound, decent concession-stand cappuccino. I was there, along with a gratifyingly large number of curious and enthusiastic Canadians, not to catch an early glimpse of possible Oscar contenders but to see a new movie from China called "The World," directed by Jia Zhangke. I'd seen Jia's two previous films, "Platform" and "Unknown Pleasures" -- films that have won him a devoted following among critics and festivalgoers.

But his name is unlikely to be widely recognized either in the United States, where his films have received only brief, limited releases, or in his own country, where he has, at least until "The World," worked independently of the official state production system, a decision that has kept his films out of most Chinese cinemas.

Jia is the kind of director who tells small stories with big implications, examining the lives of individuals (usually sullen young women and the sullen young men who tolerate their company) in a way that suggests large, invisible forces pushing them through their passive, melancholy lives. "Platform" (2000), for example, is about a troupe of performers in a provincial Chinese city who start out, just after the Cultural Revolution, as the Peasant Culture Group From Fenyang and evolve, by the end of the 1980's, into something called the All-Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band, a mutation that captures, with a deadpan precision at once mocking and tender, China's awkward post-Maoist embrace of Western-style popular culture.

In "The World," which is set in present-day Beijing, that embrace, long since consummated, has taken on the weary familiarity of a long, loveless marriage. The film's title, provocative in its ambition, is at once literal and layered with metaphor. The young lovers, like the consumer goods they covet and flaunt, are products of globalization, and also of China's transformation into a largely urban, fitfully capitalist and uneasily cosmopolitan society. Without lifting his eyes from their modest, hectic daily lives and inchoate aspirations, Jia embeds these elements of experience in a vast cosmos of similar stories. Tao and her sometime boyfriend, Taisheng, the film's ordinary and unheroic central couple, are stubbornly particular and, at the same time, implicitly universal. They are the world.

They are also, more mundanely, the workers of the World, which is the name of a theme park in Beijing whose main attractions are scaled-down replicas of foreign tourist attractions -- the Arc de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. ("Ours are still standing," one character boasts, in a perverse expression of national pride.) Taisheng is a security guard, while Tao is a dancer, shuffling in and out of various garish pseudo-traditional costumes for tacky song-and-dance routines. To an American viewer, the World, with its monorails and loudspeakers, is like a looking-glass version of one of our homegrown theme parks, and like those places it is at once a free-floating, featureless abstraction of what it represents and the peculiar artifact of a particular cultural situation. If "The World" is partly about the loss of a rooted, traditional identity based on kinship and place, it is also about the stubborn persistence of place in the age of telecommunications and transglobal travel. Though Tao spends her days dashing between simulacra of Paris, London and New York, neither she nor anyone she knows has ever ridden on an airplane or visited a foreign land. When she meets Anna, a Russian woman who briefly comes to work at the park, Tao expresses envy for her new friend's freedom to travel, oblivious to the fact that her globe-trotting is part of a grim international traffic in coerced labor. Not that Anna can understand a word Tao says. Since their relationship is one of the few in this bleak landscape that shows genuine warmth and fellow feeling, their mutual incomprehension is another of Jia's double-edged worldly metaphors. We can appreciate each other even -- or perhaps especially -- when neither one of us has the faintest idea what the other is talking about.

That, at any rate, might describe my own response to Jia Zhangke (whom I know only through his movies) -- a mixture of intuitive understanding and obdurate bafflement.

To me, his world, in its various meanings and dimensions, is at once immediately recognizable and emphatically strange. This paradox is part of the structure of human experience, of course -- other people are necessarily both familiar and mysterious to us -- but in its modern incarnation, it is one that film as a medium seems uniquely empowered to illuminate. Because the camera is a surrogate eye, what it captures is immediately comprehensible, even if it is nothing we have seen before. Filmed images do not require translation; we know what we see. Narratives, of course, are another story; even when they seem to be transparent, they come encrusted with local meanings, idioms and references, some of which will inevitably be lost as they move from one audience to another.

Movies, in other words, may be universal, but they are universal in radically distinct ways. Some of them we regard as foreign, a word I use with some trepidation. Though my purpose here is to wave the flag for movies from around the world, it is a banner whose slogans make me cringe a little. The phrase "foreign film" is, after all, freighted with connotations of preciousness and snobbery, and too often accompanied by dismissive modifiers like "difficult," "obscure" and "depressing" (all of which I happen to regard as virtues, but never mind). Our own commercial cinema is increasingly devoted to dispensing accessibility, comfort and familiarity -- which can also be virtues. It is not necessary to rank, or to choose. As Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour point out in their introduction to a new collection of essays and interviews called "Subtitles," "Every film is a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere."

In any case, I am most concerned with American audiences, and in particular with the parochialism that results from living in a country with a film industry so powerful and productive, so frank and cheerful in its imperial ambitions, that it threatens to overshadow everything else. It is not just the setting and content of a movie like "The World" that may seem foreign but also its visual strategy and storytelling methods, and above all its unsentimental commitment to the depiction of ordinary life, to a kind of realism that is in some ways more alien to us than the reality it construes. Hollywood studios, as they try to protect their dominant position in the global entertainment market, are ever more heavily invested in fantasy, in conjuring counterfeit worlds rather than engaging the one that exists, and in the technological R &D required to expand the horizons of novelty and sensation. And while we, along with everybody else, often go to the movies to escape from the pressures and difficulties of the actual world, we also sometimes go to discover it.

Whether it takes the form of armchair tourism or of a harrowing, life-altering philosophical quest, such discovery has formed part of the appeal of movies from elsewhere -- a specialized appeal, to be sure, but also a remarkably protean and durable one -- since the beginnings of art-house film culture just after World War II. In the late 1940's, foreign movies began to arrive on our shores unencumbered by the restrictions of the Production Code, promising a frankness and sophistication, especially in sexual matters, far beyond what the studios were allowed.

Even sober works of Italian Neorealism were sold with a nudge and a wink, their print advertisements featuring suggestive line drawings and breathless exclamation points: Shocking! Daring! Uncensored! There was a degree of bait-and-switch in these come-ons, which were partly a way for the independent theater operators who booked the pictures to fill up empty seats, but there was also some inadvertent truth. Moviegoers who ventured to see "The Bicycle Thief" or "La Terra Trema" would encounter shocking glimpses of urban and rural poverty, the daring use of nonprofessional actors and real-world locations and an uncensored critique of European social conditions.

Not that Italian Neorealism was the only outward-looking, far-seeing lens that curious Americans could peer through. And neither were all the vistas bleak and harsh. In any case, the art involved in capturing those images was at least as fascinating, as seductive and as new as the images themselves. Indeed, it was foreign movies that taught Americans to regard film as an art -- and, eventually, to appreciate the art that had been flourishing in American movies all along. It is hardly accidental that we still use a French word -- "auteur" -- to evoke the creative authority a director wields over his work. The film culture that emerged in the shabby art houses and cinema clubs where dubbed and subtitled prints of exotic movies were shown was organized not around the worship of stars, but around the connoisseurship of filmmakers, who became the objects of a sometimes fiercely partisan critical discourse. Were you for Ozu or Kurosawa? Antonioni or Fellini? Could you reconcile a taste for Bergman with an enthusiasm for Godard?

Why did these names have such resonance? What did these auteurs give American movie buffs -- or cinephiles, if you prefer -- that the Hollywood studios, for all their inventiveness and eclecticisim, did not? What, in other words, made the category of "foreign film" something more than a convenient, catch-all phrase? Or, to echo Egoyan and Balfour, what made these films foreign to this audience? I think there are two answers, which suggest the existence of two linked, occasionally antagonistic cinematic impulses, neither of which has quite taken root in the United States.

On one side you find movies mainly concerned with the lives of the rural peasantry or the urban proletariat, movies that emphasize the social situations of their characters and whose mode of representation is realist. On the other are movies about middle class or bohemian city dwellers, or wandering souls in evening dress with time on their hands and no visible means of support. The emphasis is not on social conditions but on psychological states and existential moods, and the narrative and visual style, in order to capture those moods, dispenses with realism in favor of something more expressive and oblique.

For argument's sake, we can call the first kind of filmmaking humanist, the second modernist. Humanism's great prewar exponent was Jean Renoir, whose example and personal tutelage informed several Neorealists and also the Bengali director Satyajit Ray. Ray's "Apu" trilogy, with its meticulous attention to the details and rhythms of traditional Indian life and its quiet but unstinting concern with poverty and injustice, may well represent the apotheosis of cinematic humanism. Informed by a mild, melancholy form of Marxism, Ray's films are sad without slipping into pessimism or depression. The director and the audience, though not always the characters, are inoculated from despair by faith in the incremental but ultimately benevolent progress of history. This kind of filmmaking is fundamentally concerned with dramatizing, through close observation of individual lives, the process of historical change. Its subjects are at once dauntingly abstract -- the shift from agriculture to industry, the coming and going of colonial powers, the advent and aftermath of wars and revolutions -- and intimately concrete: a family, a child, a village.

In Europe, modernist cinema emerged in the wake of this humanism, and partly in reaction to it. The economic rejuvenation that followed the scarcity and anxiety of the immediate postwar years and the emergence of a generation of younger filmmakers with their own brand of restless cosmopolitanism produced a creative ferment. From the mid-50's to the mid-60s, American audiences witnessed the rise of an extraordinary collection of world-class filmmakers -- including Bergman, Kurosawa, the critics-turned-auteurs of the French New Wave, new Italian maestros like Antonioni, Fellini and Pasolini -- who seemed, with each new film, to expand the formal and expressive possibilities of the medium. Their predecessors' emphasis on social realities could feel a little restrictive when there were other possibilities -- sexual, psychological and aesthetic -- to explore. Like modernist literature, modernist cinema reveled in self-consciousness and reflexivity. Each new film was not just a new window on the world but also, at least potentially, a world of style, sensibility and invention unto itself, with its own rules, its own language, its own syntax. To see a movie like "L'Avventura," say, with its oblique, highly charged eroticism and its gorgeous vistas of alienation, was not to bear witness or to experience empathy -- the ethical and emotional bases of humanism -- but to immerse yourself in a state of altered perception.

Of course, not every foreign film fits neatly into the humanist-modernist schema. Plenty of directors -- Fellini and Visconti, for example -- moved easily from one to the other, and many beloved foreign movies -- costume dramas, action, crime and horror movies, star-heavy international co-productions -- don't fit comfortably within either one. But humanism and modernism together account for the foreignness of foreign films, for the sense of strangeness and discovery that kept both diehard cultists and idle curiosity-seekers lining up at the art house doors through the 70's, when VCR's began to shut the art houses down.

The aftershocks of that golden moment continue to ripple through the world of film appreciation, not least because a number of the old masters, including Bergman and Godard, are still around making movies. But like the period in which it is embedded, and like the Hollywood new wave that followed on its heels, that heady moment in the history of world cinema -- the moment at which it became possible to use a phrase like "world cinema" in conversation -- has become encrusted with legend and nostalgia. Those who witnessed it firsthand look with pity on those who came too late and had to catch it all on DVD instead of at the New Yorker or the Thalia. We can never know an equivalent exhilaration of discovery, the frisson of seeing "L'Avventura" or "Persona" for the first time and trembling in awe and recognition.

Except that we can, if only we will seek it out. The modernist and humanist impulses are both alive and well, flourishing and cross-pollinating on every continent and in new, transnational formations. The world is, if anything, much bigger than it was 40 years ago, even if the audience has shrunk and dispersed. What happened to that audience -- Did it age? Did its attention migrate toward homegrown "independent" cinema? Is it alive and well on the Internet or in the burgeoning DVD culture? -- is a topic of endless concern. But my point is that wherever the audience is, the movies are out there, trickling across our borders in numbers that only begin to suggest the volume and diversity of global film production today.

This may come as news, since the cinematic story that is told again and again is one of Hollywood triumphalism, of a blockbuster globalism dissolving all vestiges of the local, the particular and the strange.

The decline of state-subsidized film industries was supposed to accelerate this trend, but predictions of a cinematic Pax Americana have proved premature, to say the least, since they have failed to take account of the continued vitality of the world's largest popular movie industry -- India's -- or the emergence (and resurgence) of vibrant commercial moviemaking in countries like South Korea, China and Mexico. While it is true that, on a given Friday, most of the world's multiplexes will be playing franchise products from American studios, it is not hard to imagine a future in which an American suburban marquee will boast a Chinese martial-arts picture, a Korean action thriller, a Mexican cop drama and a French romantic comedy.

Among the harbingers of that future are the domestic box-offices successes of movies like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Amelie" and last summer's "Hero." Of course, if you count remakes, homages and rip-offs -- retooled versions of Japanese pictures like "The Ring" and "The Grudge," say, or even Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies -- then that future has long since arrived. What we think of as Hollywood is already a hybrid of influences from elsewhere to an extent not seen since the great wave of emigre talent that was European fascism's inadvertent gift to American culture. Anime, J-horror, Bollywood, telenovelas, chopsocky -- whether or not you are familiar with these terms, the visual languages they represent are already part of the movie lexicon.

But at the same time, just as a lingua franca of reciprocal influences takes over the mass audience, the art-movie traditions of humanism and modernism continue to thrive, perhaps with greater urgency, and certainly in greater variety, than ever before. The humanist belief in dramatizing ordinary lives, in fashioning narratives that follow the quotidian rhythms of childhood, work and domesticity, has been the foundation of the extraordinary renaissance in Iranian cinema in the past 15 years, but it also shows remarkable tenacity in its European birthplace. The flowering of Iranian cinema has produced at least two stars of the festival circuit -- Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf -- but it has also opened Western eyes to a remarkably eclectic national cinema characterized by fierce social criticism and surprising sensual beauty.

Iranian filmmakers have also provided some of the most powerful examples of how to make art that is at once formally innovative and ethically engaged -- movies that alert audiences to the plight of women, the poor, ethnic minorities and refugees without lecturing or preaching, and without denying them worldly pleasures or aesthetic challenges. Similarly, the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne ("Rosetta" and "La Promesse") and the French director Laurent Cantet ("Time Out") have exposed the sorrows and cruelties of the postindustrial economy, bringing a strange, almost spiritual poignancy to naturalistic studies of work, immigration and other persistent social issues.

Humanism, which is rooted both in human unhappiness and the capacity for hope, is an impulse that is unlikely to fade from screens, and indeed it has been showing up, adapted to local problems and traditions, in places as far-flung as South Africa, Brazil, China and Uzbekistan. The modernist impulse has undergone a simultaneous resurgence, in Iran, in Latin America and especially in the work of Asian filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Kim Ki Duk and Hong Sang Soo. They have explored the drift and loneliness that characterizes the lives of city dwellers, who navigate the gleaming world of modern capitalism in a state of moody perplexity.

In the work of these filmmakers, the strains of modernism and humanism have begun to mingle, as the boundaries between individual melancholy and social misery become harder and harder to trace. The cities they depict -- Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, Hanoi -- are at once teeming and desolate, full of the noise of history, commerce and tradition and at the same time governed by the silence of the emotionally stunted. This impression can be gathered from the fractured, sexually anarchic families in Tsai's movies ("Rebels of the Neon God," "The River") and the superficially more settled household of Yang's "Yi Yi." Whatever held people together -- filial piety, cultural identity, religious practice -- seems to have melted away, and they drift toward one another like downcast atoms, piecing their lives together out of stray bits of feeling.

But are they really alone? A defining modern mood -- one that is often evoked but hasn't adequately been named -- is the anxious, melancholy feeling of being simultaneously connected and adrift. In a recent essay in Salon, the film critic Charles Taylor identified this condition -- "being in a world where the only sense of home is to be found in a state of constant flux" -- as a central motif in movies ranging from "Lost in Translation" to the films of cinephile cult figures like Tsai and Wong Kar-wai. Taylor identifies an unstable blend of anxiety, curiosity and longing as the emotional condition that links the solitary, alienated heroes and heroines of the modern cinema of loneliness, among whom Tao and Taisheng in "The World" surely belong. There may be a measure of comfort in joining the international fraternity of the lost -- at least for audiences. The experience of dwelling in these movies is replicated, and to some extent redeemed, by the experience of watching them, of feeling estrangement and disorientation not only vicariously through the characters but also in relation to them as well. They encounter one another, in strange, indifferent cities, by chance, and their relations are at once affectless and charged with latent emotion -- all of which is just how we encounter them, alone in darkened rooms in the midst of our hectic and decentered lives.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14WORLD.html

posted in Archives - 0 replies

Last Life in the Universe (2003)

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:58:41 GMT

Last Life in the Universe (2003)

Directed by
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang

Writing credits
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
Prabda Yoon

Cast:
Tadanobu Asano....Kenji
Sinitta Boonyasak....Noi
Laila Boonyasak....Nid
Yutaka Matsushige....Yukio
Riki Takeuchi....Takashi
Takashi Miike....Yakuza

Original Music by
Hualongpong Riddim
Small Room

Cinematography by
Christopher Doyle

posted in Archives - 3 replies

Holding out for a Hero (Article on HERO (2002))

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:23:36 GMT

Holding out for a Hero
By Michael Bodey
November 04, 2004
http://entertainment.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4459,11282918%255E7485%255E%255Enbv,00.html

TWO years, almost to the day, since martial arts epic, Hero, opened in China before its record-breaking box office run through Asia, Australians will see the film.

In a laboured worldwide release, American distributor Miramax delayed Hero in the hope it could vie for the 2003 Academy Awards.

But this plan was stumped when Hero's producers entered it in 2002 for the Foreign Language Academy Award.

Then a planned August 2003 release was halted by the opening of Jackie Chan's The Medallion.

Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein thought it best to distance

Hero from any other martial arts films. That was a mistake obviously: no one cared for The Medallion.

Then famed martial arts geek Quentin Tarantino offered a solution. He'd attach the Hero trailer to his films, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, giving the Chinese film something of an unexpected leg-up.

But many feared the horse had bolted. Illegal imports of Hero DVDs were freely available in the US and Australia.

Somehow, the bumbling strategy was overshadowed by the results. Hero opened at No.1 at the North American box office in August and has earned US$53 million there to add to the US$110 million it has already taken globally.

Hero's protracted journey to Western screens would hardly rattle its director, Zhang Yimou. After all, he was working on the even better martial arts saga, The House Of The Flying Daggers, while the release saga unspooled.

Before this, the artful director had battled Chinese authorities who banned his early films, Ju Dou and Raise The Red Lantern, which then went on to win Best Foreign Film Academy Award nominations.

And he's managed to keep it fresh by mixing up slow rural Chinese tales with films such as 1995's Shanghai Triad, which felt more like a '40s US gangster drama.

Hero, the tale of one ancient warrior's battles against three assassins attempting to murder the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China, is another big departure for the director.

Yimou contends the scenario alone was three years in the making. "I changed the script several times and at some point it came to my mind that Akira Kurosawa, who is one of my favourite movie directors, did a film (called) Rashomon," he says.

"I consider him my spiritual teacher so why don't I just use that kind of inspiration and try to make the story with different versions."

Rashomon's flashback story-telling device was rare for a martial arts film, "since (Hero) was invented to be different from the martial arts movies that we have seen".

The sheer scope of Hero also distinguishes it from the multitude of Asian martial arts films. Its scale is incredible, its cast daunting and its vision of ancient China breathtaking.

Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon's Zhang Ziyi each can headline a film.

Together, they're a potent force, both to Asian audiences and increasingly to Western audiences.

Yimou tells of two factors behind the acceptance of Asian cinema in the West.

Firstly, Ang Lee's hit, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

"I think Ang really did a great movie because Ang was mainly an artistic director, he is not a professional martial arts movie director like many directors in Hong Kong."

"So he gave martial arts movies a very different approach, so maybe that film conveyed more universally understandable messages."

"The second reason might be for years Hollywood movie directors have the habit of asking Hong Kong martial arts movie directors to work with them to add more different styles of action into their movies," he says.

"So people were already used to seeing this sort of action inspired by martial arts. Maybe the combination of these two factors explains the trend that we see nowadays in the Western world."

Yimou considers himself to have the same approach to martial arts movies as Lee "because I myself am a more artistic-ally orientated director".

"For me, martial arts is not merely about actions and fighting. Martial arts is more importantly about the spirit and aesthetics and beauty of action.

So I want to convey this poetry and aesthetics through the actions you see in my movies.

And in the future, if people want to define what is Zhang Yimou's martial arts movie, I would like them to immediately say Zhang Yimou's martial arts movie is martial arts filled with aesthetics and poetry."

Yimou's approach is further explored in House Of The Flying Daggers, a more emotional epic due in Australian cinemas in January.

Yimou contends he wanted to treat the martial arts' theme from at least two different angles. "Both Hero and Flying Daggers are actually two sides of the same thing," he says.

"Hero was on the concepts and philosophy of martial arts in a more formalistic way whereas Flying Daggers is intimate and personal and it treats the viewer (to) what happens inside the minds of people.

"So one is very ... abstract, very high in the sky and the other is down earth, it's deep in the heart, so they're two opposites."

* Hero opens today; House of Flying Daggers on January 20.

source:
http://entertainment.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4459,11282918%255E7485%255E%255Enbv,00.html

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"Triad and True" review of Jiang Hu (2004)

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:07:54 GMT

"Triad and True"
http://www.nixflix.com/reviews/jianghu.htm
July 17, 2004

Running at a breezy 80 minutes (that is, if you don't count the extensive John Woo-ish slow motion that makes up about half the film), Ching-po Wong's "Jiang Hu" is nothing you haven't seen before. In fact, if you're even a little bit familiar with Hong Kong triad films, you can pretty much predict the outcome of "Jiang Hu" when you first see Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung's characters say hello in the first few minutes. Does this mean "Jiang Hu" is not good? Not at all; but it does mean the movie holds few surprises.

Star and producer Andy Lau ("Running on Karma") is Hung, a mob chieftain who, as the film opens, has just become a father. Hung's criminal organization is made up of long-time best friend Lefty (Jacky Cheung), named such because he lost the use of his right hand during their rise up the underworld ranks, and three untrustworthy capos. It is quickly revealed that one of Hung's underbosses has put a contract out of him, and Hung's men are urgently trying to dig up the would-be killer. Meanwhile, young punks Yik (Shawn Yue) and his best friend Turbo (Edison Chen) are getting ready to make their first kill on their way to becoming gangsters. That is, if they don't screw the pooch and get found out before the night is over.

As mentioned, if you were to take away all the slow motion in "Jiang Hu", you'd be hard pressed to make the running time go over an hour. Even by Hong Kong standards, "Jiang Hu" is a short film, with half of the story spent in a single location -- a restaurant where Hung and Lefty converse in private as a year's worth of plots and counter plots take place around them within the underworld. It quickly becomes clear that not all is what it seems, and Hung's underbosses might not be the only people Hung needs to worry about. Making the situation even more tenuous is that Lefty has just suggested to Hung that he move his family to New Zealand and leave the empire to him.

Even if it doesn't break any new ground, there's still a lot to like about Ching-po Wong's sophomore effort ("Fu Bo" being his first). The first thing is the style, which infuses "Jiang Hu" with a slick look from the opening frame to the final shot. Although the short running time does seem to cut down on characterization, the progression of Shawn Yue's Yik as he goes from wannabe to full-fledged killer is intriguing. While Yik's desires to be a killer isn't readily obvious, his dark personality gives the film the substance that the Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung confrontation lacks. Later, when a young prostitute name Yoyo enters Yik's life, things get even more complicated.

If it seems as if I might be calling "Jiang Hu" old hat, you're not far off. Every genre has its clichés and conventions, and "Jiang Hu" doesn't -- and really seems not to care to -- buck the system. As with the recent "Infernal Affairs 2", the script by Chi-long To is heavily influenced by the narrative structure of the "Godfather", in particular the long sequences where gunmen goes about town "cleaning house" as per their boss' orders. Which leads to this: for a Triad film, "Jiang Hu" is strangely very sterile when it comes to the violence. Even a knife battle in the rain, at the end, is almost entirely devoid of blood.

Although the big name here is Andy Lau, it's young Mister Shawn Yue who really shines. Yue has already shown in the "Infernal Affairs" films that he's got the intensity for movie roles like this, and his brooding Yik is what makes "Jiang Hu" works. Of note is the scene where Yik visits his mother to give her the money he's been paid ahead of time for the night's assassination. We learn that Yik's brother and father were also would-be killers who fell during their first night, and that they, too, had come to Yik's mother with the same bundle of money. It's a powerful scene, played with great affect by all involved.
Toward the end of "Jiang Hu" there's a Big Reveal, but it's nothing to get overly excited about, especially since I guessed the film's big plot twist about 30 minutes in. Am I the most brilliant online movie reviewer ever? Probably. Or maybe it's just that I've seen too many films; and besides, it's not as if "Jiang Hu" tried very hard to hide it. Pay attention and you'll figure it out, too.

"Jiang Hu" will probably be a bit of a letdown to those already familiar with the genre. For everyone else, "Jiang Hu" is an effective entry that warrants a look see. It's certainly visually attractive, and the dead-on performance of Shawn Yue as the doomed killer steals the show.

source:
http://www.nixflix.com/reviews/jianghu.htm

for more info:
http://newyork.tribe.net/tribe/servlet/template/pub%2Ctribes%2CViewThread.vm?threadid=0e083709-de1e-4481-a761-dbeed96d0d12&_message_resource=info.post.created&tribeid=9539ce56-e07e-4156-a3b9-c531d69220ef

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Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:43:45 GMT

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

directed by
OSHII Mamoru

It is the year 2032 and the line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction. Humans have forgotten that they are human and those that are left coexist with cyborgs (human spirits inhabiting entirely mechanized bodies) and dolls (robots with no human elements at all). Batou is a cyborg. His body is artificial: the only remnants left of his humanity, are traces of his brain?... and the memories of a woman called The Major. A detective for the government's covert anti-terrorist unit, Public Security Section 9, Batou is investigating the case of a gynoid-a hyper-realistic female robot created specifically for sexual companionship-who malfunctions and slaughters her owner. As Batou delves deeper into the investigation, questions arise about humanity's need to immortalize its image in dolls. The answers to those questions lead to the shocking truth behind the crime?... and quite possibly the very meaning of life.

Official Japanese Site:
http://www.innocence-movie.jp/

Official English Site:
http://www.gofishpictures.com/GITS2/

Cannes 2004:
http://www.festival-cannes.fr/films/fiche_film.php?langue=6002&id_film=4200520&edition=2004

trailers:
http://www.ultimatedvd.org/en/trailers/Details.aspx?Trailer_Id=1722021190

MovieBox:
http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2004/DEFGH/GhostInTheShell2_Innocence/main.html

stills from Moviefone:
http://movies.channel.aol.com/movie/main.adp?_pgtyp=pdct&tab=photos&mid=19024

posted in Archives - 1 reply

Christopher Reeve, 52, Symbol of Courage, Dies

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 18:31:08 GMT

Christopher Reeve, 52, Symbol of Courage, Dies
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/national/11CND-REEV.html?oref=login

October 11, 2004

Christopher Reeve, 52, Symbol of Courage, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Christopher Reeve, the cinematic Superman who became a real-life inspiration through his painstaking efforts to overcome total paralysis, while speaking out for stem-cell research and other potential treatments, died on Sunday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 52 and lived in Pound Ridge, N.Y.

Mr. Reeve was being treated for a pressure wound, a common complication for people in wheelchairs, said his publicity agent, Wesley Combs. These wounds result from constant pressure in one spot, reducing the blood to that area and finally killing the affected tissue.

Mr. Combs said that Mr. Reeve fell into a coma on Saturday. The wound had become severely infected, and the infection spread through his body.

A riding accident in 1995 had left the actor paralyzed from the neck down. After briefly pondering suicide, Mr. Reeve had become a powerful proponent of causes ranging from insurance reform for catastrophic injuries to unleashing the possibilities some scientists believe lie in using embryonic stem cells for research.

As recently as Friday, Mr. Reeve's name emerged, as it often has, in the national debate over stem cell use. In the presidential debate in St. Louis between President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry, the Democratic challenger, Mr. Kerry mentioned Mr. Reeve by name in arguing against the president's position that stem-cell research must be restricted to protect the lives of human embryos.

Yesterday, the White House issued a statement on behalf of the president and Mrs. Bush, citing Mr. Reeve as "an example of personal courage, optimism and self-determination."

As a young unknown actor Mr. Reeve propelled himself to the status of instant myth by starring in "Superman: The Movie," a hugely popular 1978 picture, then going on to do three successful sequels. Many critics said he exhibited humor and sensitivity, particularly in his portrayal of Clark Kent as the bespectacled bumbler. His own ironic detachment came out in a comment he made while filming the first movie.

"I prevent an earthquake," he said. "I repair Golden Gate Bridge and Boulder Dam, and I prevent a nuclear explosion in Southern California."

He certainly seemed able to. He was 6 feet 4 inches tall, with a strikingly handsome, square-jawed face and a strong athletic build. Even before "Superman," he looked like Superman. Enhancing the image, he performed his own stunts, and off-screen piloted his own plane.

He was determined not to be typecast ("escape the cape," he vowed) and found numerous other roles, including leading substantial parts on Broadway. But it was Mr. Reeve's personal courage in dealing with his paralysis that transcended both his causes and profession, making him a real-life superhero in many minds. By using electrical shocks to stir his numb nervous system and tirelessly exercising, he twitch-by-tiny-twitch was beginning to recapture use of his body. In September 2000 he moved an index finger and the news startled scientists who had not expected to see such progress so long after so severe an accident. Mr. Reeve expected nothing less and continued to improve.

"You have to take action and stand up for yourself - even if you're sitting in a wheelchair," he said in an interview with Psychology Today in 2003.

Such was his progress that Mr. Reeve in February 2003 decided to have surgery to free him from the respirator that had enabled his paralyzed lungs to breathe. Electrodes were implanted into his diaphragm so that breathing could be regulated electronically.

But infections ultimately trumped technology, intensive exercise and even steely determination. The slim luck that had nurtured Mr. Reeve ran out.

That luck apparently resulted from the fact that some of his nerves had not been destroyed, scientists suggested. Because they were not dead, they could be revived. Massive amounts of physical activity induced new connections to form and a dormant pathway to revive.

And with that recovery came a string of accomplishments since his accident that included writing two books and directing and acting in movies. His extensive lobbying for public health issues helped earn him an award for public service in 2003 from the Lasker Foundation , which gives awards for medical research.

In a speech then, Mr. Reeve challenged the medical establishment to regain the sense of urgency shown by the emergency medical technicians who helped save his life.

"I believe I speak on behalf of patients who are willing to accept failure as a necessary aspect of moving science forward," he said. "We want researchers to think less like academics and more like E.M.T.'s whose primary function is to save lives."

Mr. Reeve led by example, as numerous other awards testified. "In the Gloaming," a movie he directed for HBO in 1997, was nominated for five Emmys. His performance in a remake of Hitchcock's classic "Rear Window" won the Screen Actors Guild Award for best actor in a television movie or miniseries.

His autobiographies, both favorably reviewed, were "Still Me" (1998) and "Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life" (2002), both published by Random House.

Christopher Reeve was born in Manhattan on Sept. 25, 1952. His parents divorced when he was 4, and he moved with his younger brother and mother to Princeton, N.J. He began appearing in school plays around 8, and soon became involved in the McCarter Theater, Princeton's professional theater.

He was 9 when the McCarter cast him in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. This July, Mr. Reeve said in an interview on CNN that the theater became "like a family to me," as he sought to escape his own family's disruption. By the time he was 15, he was a member of Actors Equity and had worked as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theater Festival.

He graduated from Cornell University, then studied at Juilliard under John Houseman and roomed with Robin Williams. While at Juilliard he began his two-year run as Ben Harper in the soap opera "Love of Life." He acted onstage at night and made his Broadway debut as Katharine Hepburn's grandson in Enid Bagnold's play "A Matter of Gravity."

In a generational switch, the following year he played the role of the grandfather in Corrine Jacker's memory play "My Life" at the Circle Repertory company. Then came Superman, a comic book hero who burst on the American scene in 1938. Producers and the director could not settle on a big-name actor who would take the part, so decided to find an unknown. Mr. Reeve at first thought the idea was downright silly and untheatrical, but read the script and loved it, according to "Contemporary Heroes and Heroines, Book III," published by Gale Research in 1998.

After being invited back for a screen test, the actor prepared for two solid weeks, experimenting with complete makeup and costume changes for both Superman and Clark Kent. The young actor won the part, and found himself starring with Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman. "Superman" had what at the time was the most successful opening in history.

By his fourth and last Superman, "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace" (1987) , Mr. Reeve was helping write the original story for the film. He was also speaking out on many issues from campaign finance reform to recycling garbage in New York City. He went to Santiago, Chile, to demonstrate on behalf of 77 actors threatened with execution by the Pinochet regime.

He was known for his often expert pursuit of vigorous sports, including sailing, skiing, scuba diving and competitive horseback riding. Following the first "Superman" film, Mr. Reeve celebrated by sailing from Connecticut to Bermuda. He also flew his plane solo across the Atlantic twice.

On Saturday, May 27, 1995, he was engaging in a sport that increasingly captivated him, riding horses in competition. He owned a number of horses, including a chestnut thoroughbred named Eastern Express.

The place was Culpeper, Va., where a three-day equestrian competition was taking place. Mr. Reeve was wearing blue and silver riding colors, knee-high boots, off-white breeches and a protective vest and helmet. He and Eastern Express, entry No. 103, were moving harmoniously as they approached a zigzagged, three-foot-high rail jump, the third of 15 jumps.

Suddenly, Eastern Express backed off from the jump. Mr. Reeve kept moving, pitching forward over the horse's neck. His head hit the rail fence and he landed on the turf on his forehead. His head dangled, just barely connected to his spine.

The fall caused multiple fractures of the first and second cervical vertebrae and left him unable to move his limbs or breathe without the use of a respirator.

Mr. Reeve said that in the days after the accident he contemplated suicide, but seeing the faces of his wife and family dissuaded him. His wife, Dana Morosini, an actor and singer, yesterday released a statement thanking "the millions of fans" who supported her husband.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Reeve is survived by his mother, Barbara L. Johnson; his father, Franklin Reeve; his brother, Benjamin; his sons Will and Matthew, and his daughter, Alexandra. Gae Exton, with whom Mr. Reeve lived for much of the 1980's but never wed, is the mother of Matthew and Alexandra.Mr. Reeve's progress after the accident ranged from very elementary things, like learning to operate his wheelchair by puffing into a tube, to very public triumphs like his tear-provoking appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1996. He often testified before Congress.

The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, which was founded by combining two older organizations in 1998, raised more than $46.5 million for spinal cord research.

In his final years, after the electrodes were implanted on his diaphragm, he spoke of one day getting rid of his respirator altogether. His recovery was considered remarkable because most spinal-injury victims make progress only in the first two years after the accident.

One of Mr. Reeve's last projects was directing "The Brooke Ellison Story," about a girl who became a quadriplegic at 11 but rose above her disability to graduate from Harvard. It will be broadcast on A&E on Oct. 25.

Last month Mr. Reeve said on the Oprah Winfrey show that he thought it "very possible" he would walk again. He was asked what would happen if he did not.

"Then I won't walk again," he said.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/national/11CND-REEV.html?oref=login

posted in Archives - 1 reply

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:52:44 GMT

A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM ACTORS KAL PENN AND JOHN CHO

PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

IF YOU HAVE A WEBSITE OR BLOG SITE, PLEASE POST!

IF YOU HAVE A PUBLICATION - PLEASE PRINT THIS WEEK!

July 24, 2004

Dear Friends, Fans, Haters, Players, and True Money Makers,

Hey! This is Kal Penn (aka Kalpen Modi) and John Cho
writing to encourage you to go see our upcoming comedy from New Line Cinema, "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," opening nationwide on July 30th. This film marks the first time a major studio is releasing a project with two Asian American males as the leads. We don't have stereotypical accents, we don't passively tread through the story, we're not asexual or hypersexual, there are no martial arts scenes, one-dimensional cab driver segments. We play a couple of all-American guys who happen to be of Indian and Korean descent. Our characters (Harold and Kumar) are post-collegiate buddies who get the munchies and end up going on the adventure of their lives as they set out to satisfy a spontaneous craving for White Castle burgers. Ebert and Roeper just gave our movie "Two Thumbs Up"! We hope you will too. Read on.

The opening weekend for any film is extremely important. Studio executives (the people who make big decisions about movies) track the numbers from that first weekend's ticket sales and make all kinds of decisions based on that data. They decide if they will add more screens to show a film, if they will spend more money in promoting it, if they will start investing in a sequel... but most importantly, hey decide if elements of the film work and whether they should do it again. In our case, that means they will be asking, "Will a strong script and story succeed or fail with 2 Asian American guys in non-stereotypical roles?". We personally think it will succeed, but we need your help! This film is our chance to prove that realistic, nonstereotypical depictions can make an audience have a blast, and take in enough money to make this happen in the future.

By buying a ticket to "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle", you aren't just gonna get to see a really funny movie with two dudes who look like you. Nope. You're also going to be saying to media outlets, "I support accurate representation of Asian Americans and would like to see more." You have the power to change things simply by buying a ticket to a film that we believe you'll have fun watching anyway!

Please go to the theaters on the weekend of July 30th, and watch "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle". We look at this awesome opportunity like we do voting in an election. Every movie ticket someone buys is a VOTE, and the cool part is, you're allowed to vote as many times as you want. With your support of the film, we will show decision-makers in Hollywood that supporting movies like these is not only the right thing to do, but is also good business. We'll also show YOU what it's like to ride a cheetah, hang glide off a cliff, pick up a hitchhiking Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser), tell off a bunch of ignorant punks, get love interests, and sing Wilson Phillips at the top of our lungs.

So just hold on for one more... week, and check out the website at www.HaroldandKumar.com. This film opens the weekend of July 30th! Send this email to all of your friends. Throw parties. Order food. Make a night (or weekend) out of it and go see "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle"! This is a landmark opportunity for the Asian American community, and we are proud to be the faces involved. With your support and the success of this film, we hope that it's only the beginning of many more Asian Americans on screen...

Enjoy the movie,

Kal Penn and John Cho
"Kumar" and "Harold"

posted in Archives - 1 reply

Point Taken By DAVE KEHR review of House of Flying Daggers (2004)

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 04:11:56 GMT

Point Taken
By DAVE KEHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kehr.html?oref=login

October 10, 2004
DIRECTIONS | FEAT

If you're going to call your film "House of Flying Daggers," you'd better have a darn good flying dagger. Zhang Yimou's new film does, thanks to a seamless combination of clever camera work and computer-generated images that sends that blade soaring through some of the most surprising and spectacular fight sequences in the recent history of the martial arts film.

Each time Zhang Ziyi (as Mei) or Andy Lau (as Leo) flings a crescent-shaped dagger at an enemy, the camera seems to fly along with it, hovering just behind the weapon as it finds its home in an opponent's throat.

Though the action seems to take place in one continuous shot, the dagger throws actually consist of three shots blended together, explained Bill Kong, a producer of "Flying Daggers," which plays Sunday at 8 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall as part of the New York Film Festival.

FIRST SHOT

"We had a very sophisticated new kind of camera crane on location in Ukraine, where many of the outdoor scenes were filmed," Mr. Kong said by phone from Hong Kong. "When Mei throws the dagger, the camera crane moves back quickly to follow the direction of her throw. When the shot blurs, it covers a cut to a second shot, in which the camera crane zooms across the field toward the target."

SECOND SHOT

There was no dagger in that second shot; it was added later by the special effects team (the same Australian technicians that Mr. Kong used on Mr. Zhang's "Hero"). The prop daggers were scanned into a computer, then animated and digitally superimposed on the crane shot.

THIRD SHOT

Though viewers think that they see the dagger striking its target, in fact they are seeing a disguised cut to the third shot - a close-up of a prop knife that has been affixed to the throat of the actor playing the victim. The abrupt contrast between the flying crane shot and the motionless close-up produces an almost physical sense of impact, and we "feel" an image that isn't really there: the knife hitting its mark.

source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kehr.html?oref=login

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Silk Brocade Soaked in Blood and Passion By A. O. SCOTT

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 04:08:09 GMT

Silk Brocade Soaked in Blood and Passion
By A. O. SCOTT

October 9, 2004
MOVIE REVIEW | 'HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS'
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/movies/09hous.html?ei=5006&en=cf4963109b428fe0&ex=1098072000&adxnnl=1&partner=ALTAVISTA1&adxnnlx=1097467541-N2fZsZIf6f26FFB9Q6I7WA

The Chinese director Zhang Yimou first came to the attention of American audiences in the early 1990's, as the maker of stirring, visually glorious tales of historical turmoil and forbidden love like "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou." Then, later in the decade, he entered a neo-realist phase, with rough-hewn, modest stories of peasant indomitability like "Not One Less" and "The Road Home." Now in his early 50's, Mr. Zhang has embarked on the third chapter of an already dazzling career, reinventing himself as an action filmmaker, first with "Hero," a late-summer hit for Miramax, and now with "House of Flying Daggers," which Sony Classics will release next month.

Set in the twilight of the Tang Dynasty, and filmed, from the look of it, at the peak of China's foliage season, "House of Flying Daggers" is a gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving. A Chinese mainlander's tribute to the sword and martial arts epics of the past, most of which were produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it also echoes the widescreen Technicolor westerns and musicals that the Hollywood studios cranked out in their early battle against television.

Mr. Zhang, who once directed a production of "Tosca" with a cast of thousands in Forbidden City in Beijing, possesses an operatic ability to turn intimate stories into grand spectacles. His diva of the moment is Zhang Ziyi (also the star of "Hero" and "The Road Home"), whose delicate facial features fill the screen and whose lithe movements animate the film's heady combat choreography.

Ms. Zhang plays Mei, a blind courtesan who turns out to be a member of the Flying Daggers, a shadowy squad of assassins waging a guerrilla insurgency against the corrupt and decadent government. She is pursued by two government deputies, Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro), whose loyalties come into question as the chase turns into a love triangle. Everyone is engaged in several layers of deceit, and some of the third-act revelations are more likely to provoke laughter than gasps of amazement.

But realism is as irrelevant a criterion here as it would be in an Italian opera. The movie is about color, kineticism and the kind of heavy-breathing, decorous sensuality that went out of American movies when sexual candor came in. Occasionally, Ms. Zhang bares one of her lovely shoulders. If she showed any more, the projector might catch fire.

It might any way, from the sheer audacious heat of some of the action sequences. Two in particular - the "echo game" set piece that takes place in a brothel and a later battle in a grove of whispering bamboo - are likely to become classic reference points, cherished like favorite numbers from "Singin' in the Rain" or "An American in Paris."

It is a commonplace that action movies are closely related to musicals, and few directors prove the point with as much discipline and flair. The bamboo-forest scene is not just a bravura exercise in vertical and horizontal choreography, as fighters swoop down from the leafy canopy and scurry across the ground. It is also a heroic feat of sound design, with the whistle of the bamboo fronds played in counterpoint to the impact of cudgels and spears.

The story inevitably gets lost in this sensory barrage, and it is hard to feel much for the three lovers as they sing their climactic arias of jealousy and betrayal. The final confrontation takes place in the midst of a sudden snowstorm, which envelopes the sun-dappled field that had, a few moments earlier, been a perfect spot for al fresco love-making. And "House of Flying Daggers" itself, for all its fire and beauty, may leave you a bit cold in the end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/movies/09hous.html?ei=5006&en=cf4963109b428fe0&ex=1098072000&adxnnl=1&partner=ALTAVISTA1&adxnnlx=1097467541-N2fZsZIf6f26FFB9Q6I7WA

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Lau & Mak on the Infernal Affairs Trilogy

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 05:19:39 GMT

Lau & Mak on the Infernal Affairs Trilogy
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=6705
Source: Edward Douglas

October 8, 2004

Police and crime dramas have a rich history in Asian cinema, but few other films have had as big an impact on the continent as Infernal Affairs, a trilogy of films by directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak that sheds light on the never ending battle between the Hong Kong police and the Triad crime families using undercover moles planted to keep tabs on each other.

A huge hit in Asia, the first part of the trilogy has been in select theatres the past few weeks, but on Sunday, the New York Film Festival will show all three chapters of the trilogy at the Walter Reade Theatre. It will be the first time American audiences will have a chance to see the entire crime drama in theatres and get some idea of how the trilogy inspired director Martin Scorsese to develop an English language remake to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon.

Directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak are an interesting team, the former a veteran who did cinematography for the Shaw Brothers Studios, the latter a promising young blood filmmaker. Their different sensibilities and backgrounds have allowed the two to create an interesting mix of classic storytelling with cutting edge filmmaking. Although they were busy working on their next film, they took some time to answer some questions we had about their groundbreaking trilogy.

Alan Mak began by explaining the appeal of police and crime dramas on Hong Kong cinema and their movies. "The Hong Kong movies are renowned for their action and cops-and-robbers genres, and there were indeed numerous films on undercover in the 1980s. But they're rarely seen in theatres nowadays, because the audience's preference has changed over the years, and romantic comedies are the local mainstream. You may say there's a degree of nostalgia in 'Infernal Affairs', but I believe what the audience love about the film is the new twists in the familiar genre, with a touch of Buddhism and unprecedented themes of choices, chivalry and mercy."

Director John Woo is clearly an influence on Infernal Affairs, but Mak told us that it actually was one of Woo's early American films that had the most impact. "My inspiration came from John Woo's 'Face Off' in 1997. I loved that story, but the notion of two people literally switching faces and still being alive was unsettling to me. So I began to develop a concept in which two characters wouldn't be superficially changing faces, but exchanging identities and even their personalities on a deeper subconscious level. The 'Infernal Affairs' script was completed at the beginning of 2002."

The premise of the trilogy may seem simple, but in actuality, it is a rich story full of complexities and depth that sometimes may require a scorecard. For the most part, it deals with the relationships between its four main characters:

Chan Wing Yan (Tony Leung) - As a police cadet, Yan was recruited by SP Wong to be an undercover cop within the Triad crime family, putting him directly under the big bosses. This allows him first-hand access to information about drug deals, which he passes onto Wong, the only one on the force who knows Yan's true allegiances. Yan never forgets that he's a police officer, despite being arrested and harassed by the cops for his criminal acts. His dual identity has messed him up to the point of needing psychological counseling.

Lau Kin Ming (Andy Lau) - Ming's connections to the Triad family were apparently overlooked when he became a police cadet at the age of 18, but hard work has quickly moved Ming up the ranks of the police force to the point where he is now a sergeant in the CIB (Criminal Intelligence Bureau). Like Yan, he's torn between doing his job as a police officer and keeping his loyalties to Sam. As Yan passes information onto Wong, Ming does the same for Sam.

SP Wong (Anthony Wong) - Yan's immediate supervisor and the only man on the force who knows that Yan is really a police officer acting as a mole for the department. He has his own ulterior motives for bringing down the Triads, and it often requires doing things outside of the law and behind the back of his commanding officer. Think of him as the Vic Mackie of Infernal Affairs.

Sam (Eric Tsang) - The current head of the Triad crime family. A portly unassuming man whose Buddhist beliefs tend to drive his actions, but his foresight into allying with Thai mob bosses to bring drugs into Hong Kong has made him a powerful and rich man. Once friends with Inspector Wong, their bitter battle has escalated to the point where their main motivations are to oust each other's moles.

Keung (Man-Chat To) - A bit player in the trilogy, Keung is a talkative small-time thug who offers most of the comic relief in the movies. He's also moved up the ranks in the Triad family, although he openly admits that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He works closely with Yan.

The first movie takes place in the present day, where the cat and mouse game between Sam and Wong has come to a head. They are hellbent on uncovering each other's moles planted in their organization. To make it more interesting, Yan and Ming have both been told by their respective bosses to find the mole, not knowing that they have encountered each other a number of times previously. This allows for many unexpected twists to keep the viewer on the edge, something that surely has added to its appeal.

Although sequels are imminent whenever a movie does well, Lau told us a bit about how their approach to sequels differed from the norm. "The common industry practice is to analyze the box office of the first film, and then greenlight the second film, and then the third. But this is not the way we treat our trilogy. We decided to do the two sequels back-to-back, because we're so confident about them. It's considered to be a milestone in Hong Kong cinema, a novel way of local film production."

Sure enough, the second and third chapters of Infernal Affairs trilogy are different in that they're told out of sequential order, and with each new chapter, you learn more about the characters and their past.

"The 'Infernal Affairs' trilogy is not three different stories, but a single story with the ending comes in full circle with the beginning," Mak explained, when asked about the decision to take a non-linear approach to the storytelling. "We actually developed both 'I' and 'III' at the beginning, and then we came up the idea of 'II' while we're shooting the first film."

The second film, a prequel set in the years leading up to the first movie, shows that there's a lot more to the relationship between the four characters than one could ever imagine from seeing the first movie. The prequel also introduces Sam's wife and his predecessor in the Triad family, creating a fascinating interplay that will remind some of another classic trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. It might be the richest chapter as far as information, as well as the most riveting in terms of filmmaking.

There were certainly some challenges about doing a prequel, as Mak explained. "As the story in the prequel is set before the first film, it was really restricting for me to write the script, because the audience already knew how these characters would end from the first film. For example, if I were to write a life-threatening scene for the young Tony Leung character, it wouldn't have any impact as everyone knew he would certainly live to be in the first film."

Lau told us a bit about the influence of Coppola's Godfather trilogy on the way they handled the different crime families in Infernal Affairs. "'The Godfather' is a celluloid classic, and we're living at a time beyond the spawning of classics. It was passion, not box office, which drove us to complete the trilogy within a year. The key was how to capture an inspiration and realize it. We strive to achieve pride and honor for the Chinese cinema and its aficionados; and in our minds, our sequels should reach the same standard as that of 'The Godfather'."

The third film begins six months before the events in the first movie, showing some of Yan's background as mentioned in the first film, but it also jumps forward to the future, showing the repercussions of the events that took place in the first movie.

Although the first chapter of Infernal Affairs, now in select theatres, stands on its own, you'll get more out of it by seeing the prequel/sequels. That said, the trilogy should be watched in order-rather than trying to watch the prequel first-because that is the way they work the best.

Although it hasn't been determined yet whether Infernal Affairs II and III will get some sort of release stateside, all three parts of the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy will be shown at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre on October 10 as part of the New York Film Festival. (As of Thursday night, there were still tickets available.) II and III will also be reshown as part of the Walter Reade Theatre's Hong Kong retrospective later this month.

source:
http://comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=6705

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Five Immortals from the Shaw Brothers Crypt

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 02:50:51 GMT

Five Immortals from the Shaw Brothers Crypt
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/9-10-2004/shawsidebar.htm
by Chuck Stephens

Above: One-Armed Swordsman

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (83): Interrupted by the mid-production death of its star, Alexander Fu Sheng, Liu Chia-liang's darkest case study of martial arts-inflected psychosis begins with one of the weirdest battle-as-ballet showpieces in the director's career: the costume cues will have you swearing you're watching Santa's elves facing off against a troop of killer Boy Scouts, but the choreography will have you weeping with dismay. It also features one of the most fanciful of Liu's many great fighter-training contraptions: a pack of wooden wolves designed to be beaten with poles until their metal fangs fall out.

One-Armed Swordsman (67): Released in the wake of the Hong Kong labor riots, this is the film that put director Chang Cheh, the strangely delicate martial arts superstar Jimmy Wang Yu, and the Shaw Brothers' "new wuxia century" on the map. Far less violent than many a SB action flick to come, the whole thing hinges on the castration-metaphor scene that gives the hero his name-a moment of snowbound, fairy-tale agony as haunting as anything in the collected Brothers Grimm.

The Flying Guillotine (74): Liu Chia-liang was the Shaw's contraption master, even going so far as to make a film called Legendary Weapons of China, but he didn't have a patent on the studio's every death-dealing device. Here, the star is a kind of collapsible metal-mesh hatbox at the end of a long length of chain: Frisbee it at your opponent and it flops down over his noggin like a birdcage; jerk the chain and off comes the sucker's head. Inspiring enough that Shaws designed two sequels around it (the third in the series is called Vengeful Beauty); it also provided partial inspiration for Go-Go Yubari's orb of death in Kill Bill.

Buddha's Palm (84): The best pus-squirting dwarf film ever made, Taylor Wong's martial arts fantasy is a cheapo-extravaganza of mind-boggling silliness and sudden savagery: one minute you're watching what is obviously two little guys inside a woolly dog costume that might have waddled in Sid and Marty Kroft-land, the next minute someone's biting a bloody chunk out of his opponent's arm. Synthesizer blorps and blurts, jarringly displaced dialogue looping, and two chicks battling a piece of killer tin foil - the bridge between The Evil Dead and Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain. Wong went on to make the Kowloon romance-comedy Behind the Yellow Line - the film with Leslie Cheung and that bird-flipping monkey - the following year.

Kidnap (74): While the wait continues for the bulk of the Shaw's Seventies crime flicks to be reissued, this ultra-grim urban thriller from directorial all-rounder Cheng Kang serves as a nail-biting placeholder. Veteran character-actor/gargoyle Lo Lieh stars as a gas station jockey whose wounded pride and financial lack of means inspires a botched boss-napping that terminates in a trip to the gallows for Lo and his buddies. Death By Hanging remade in the manner of Hawaii Five-0.-CS

© 2004 by Chuck Stephens
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/9-10-2004/shawsidebar.htm

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JOURNAL: HONG KONG from Film Comment

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 02:45:54 GMT

JOURNAL: HONG KONG
The former colony's recent cinema continues to reflect its uneasy relationship with Mainland China and its uncertain future.
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/9-10-2004/hongkongjournal.htm
By Li Cheuk-to

In 2001, filmgoers flocked to Shaolin Soccer, the dazzling comeback from Stephen Chow, a local hero regarded by many as personifying Hong Kong's adaptability and resourcefulness. The film's vision of embracing Mainland China's economy as a way out of Hong Kong's dead end resonated with audiences, and the film became the top-grossing homegrown film of all time.

A year later, Infernal Affairs (02) almost broke Shaolin Soccer's record. While its success can be attributed to smart marketing, its basic metaphor - everyone trapped in purgatory, with "no choice but nonstop suffering" - unmistakably struck a chord with the HK audience. The film ends with Andy Lau's triad mole renouncing his past and embracing his identity as a cop ("I want to be a good person!") in search of a brighter future - again, something with which HK natives could readily identify. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's film was lauded for reinvigorating HK cinema at the end of a year in which production levels had reached a new low - that is, until 2003, when the SARS epidemic almost completely shut down production for four months, resulting in only 54 films being produced and released last year.

More than just a public-health crisis, SARS plunged the whole territory into a state of fear and despair. That the international spread of the virus was largely due to China's cover-up of the outbreak, and that the epidemic spread so easily to Hong Kong, brought home the tenuousness of the Special Administrative Region's autonomous status. Suddenly it was as if all the apocalyptic anxieties regarding the post-1997 transfer of power had come true. Then Leslie Cheung committed suicide in April and Anita Mui died in December. In short, it was 2003, not 1997, that marked the end of an era - both for Hong Kong and its cinema.

Conceived before the epidemic, the second and third parts of the Infernal Affairs trilogy are imbued with a sense of fin de siècle. A prequel, Infernal Affairs II (03), is set during the years leading up to the 1997 handover. As with the "nostalgia films" that had been in fashion during the late Eighties and early Nineties (typified by Stanley Kwan's Rouge), the impulse to retreat into the past inevitably implies a disillusion with the present. Its protagonist, Ngai Wing-hau (Francis Ng), is modeled on Michael Corleone in The Godfather, to which the film pays homage. Ngai's betrayal by his "brothers" and subsequent death are inseparable from his commitment to his triad family and its burden of guilt, which elevate him to the status of tragic hero.

Infernal Affairs III (03) was widely regarded as a disappointing and pessimistic collection of strong moments in search of a dramatically satisfying whole. Audiences weren't prepared to identify with the schizophrenic main character's worsening identity crisis when faced with a Mainland arms trafficker/undercover cop. If the first film is the tangled story of two moles in opposing camps, the third is the story of Lau Kin-ming alone. The irony lies in how Lau gradually comes to identify with the now dead Chan Wing-yan (Tony Leung) as he discovers more about his former foe through Chan's psychiatrist (Kelly Chan).

By the end of 2003 there were already signs of an upturn in the territory's outlook. This was partly due to the signing of CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Agreement), which gave HK companies preferential access to the Mainland markets, and partly to the July half-million-man march, which protested against proposed anti-subversion laws and demanded the resignation of SAR Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa. And, despite the near collapse of film production, there were signs of hope: the box-office take for local films went up 11 percent last year.

But the opportunities created by CEPA for the local film industry have proven a mixed blessing. Although access to the Mainland market is easier, filmmakers now face an unprecedented curb on creative freedom. Take Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai's Running on Karma (03), an ambitious meditation on global suffering ranging from SARS to the Iraq war. Andy Lau plays a renegade monk who, while struggling with his own demons, can see into peoples' pasts and futures; he uses his power to help a female detective (Cecilia Cheung) solve a macabre murder case - but then foresees her sticky end due to her seriously bad karma. The Chinese censors considered even this simplified notion of samsara (i.e., reincarnation) as likely to promote "feudal superstition," so the film's Mainland version was shorn of eight minutes.

What's more, the majority of recent HK co-productions have flopped in China, usually because of their poor production values and opportunistic mentality, and despite the fact that most of them readily disavowed those qualities which gave them their specific local character - some to the point where they were barely recognizable as HK films. On the other hand, recent major Mainland productions, like Zhang Yimou's two martial arts epics, Hero (02) and House of Flying Daggers, draw heavily on HK cinema, particularly in terms of creative talent on both sides of the camera. In fact, Hero is so removed from the genre as defined by HK films that it might actually be seen as an anti-martial arts film.

In this light, it's no coincidence that three films this year revisit the familiar conceit of a Mainland Chinese criminal or gang wreaking havoc in Hong Kong - echoing Johnny Mak's Long Arm of the Law, made in 1984, the year HK's post-97 fate was sealed. In Johnnie To's Breaking News, a heavily armed gang of robbers and two hit men, all speaking Mandarin, hole up in an apartment complex and play out a media-spectacle-driven game of cat and mouse with the HK police. The protagonist of Derek Yee's One Nite in Mongkok, a Chinese villager whose brother is an assassin, is hired to sneak into Hong Kong to carry out a contract killing. Cheang Pou-soi's Love Battlefield features a male nurse who is kidnapped to serve a gang of robbers "from Malaysia" (but who all speak Mandarin and are played by Mainland actors).

Each film is quite different, encompassing their respective director's visions and concerns - To's insistence on professionalism and male camaraderie (in this case among criminals) and Yee's sympathetic view of the oppressed and exploited on society's fringes (the killer with no choice, the hooker from the Mainland). But by and large the Mainland criminals are portrayed as an unambiguous threat to HK's social order. To overcome them, the police must resort to manipulation and dirty tricks to cover up their mistakes - reflecting the public's loss of confidence in the competence of the SAR government. If the audience identifies with anyone in Breaking News it's probably the family held hostage by the Mainland gangsters - although the father (To regular Lam Suet), comically eager to placate and cooperate with the intruders, is a clear reference to SAR Chief Executive Tung.

Much of HK cinema now walks a tightrope between the desire to appeal to Mainland audiences (with the compromises that implies) and the need to express contemporary Hong Kong consciousness. Peter Ho-sun Chan's Applause Pictures has found a third way. Chan aims his films primarily at the Pan-Asian market, yet manages to avoid diluting their distinctive HK traits. Though its directors, the Pang Brothers, are from Thailand, The Eye (02) is still every inch a local horror film. While Three (02) is an omnibus film with Korean and Thai episodes, the most successful contribution is the Hong Kong segment directed by Chan himself. Finally, Samson Chiu's satirical comedy Golden Chicken (02) recounts 30 years of HK history through the story of a prostitute with a Heart of gold. All three were hits, and each has spawned a sequel.

The breakthrough animation My Life as McDull (01) and its sequel, McDull, Prince de la Bun, represent another small but unique example of what HK cinema can offer at its best. Thanks to the original's box-office success and the popularity of its comic-book hero, a good-natured piglet called McDull, writer-producer Brian Tse and his cottage industry team of animators have pulled out all the creative stops for the sequel. The result is resolutely local in flavor and appeal and pays no regard whatsoever to the international or Mainland market. The retelling of his father's life story by McDull's mother interweaves nostalgia and fantasy into an allegory about postwar HK history. The narrative is layered with multiple textures and points of view, while the visuals are often embellished with stunning images, such as the neighborhood buildings slowly crumbling one by one, as if the entire city were falling apart. McDull's words encapsulate HK's existential agony: "My father wants to go back to the past, God knows where. My mother only cares about the future nobody knows. And I am all alone, left behind in the present."

Finally, there's Wong Kar-wai. As the sole truly international HK director, he's in the unique position of being able to work without having to pay any heed to the Mainland market. But given the popularity of In the Mood for Love (00) in China, he's unlikely to disregard it completely. The title of Wong's 2046, which has had additional shooting and editing done since Cannes, refers to the expiration date for Deng Xiaoping's "guarantee" that Hong Kong would remain "unchanged" for 50 years after 1997. Before 2003, everyone in HK believed this promise - a kind of wishful thinking. The protagonist of 2046, played by Tony Leung, says, "Everyone who goes to 2046 has the same intent - to recapture their lost memories. Because in 2046, nothing ever changes. Nobody can be sure that this is true, because nobody who goes there has ever come back. Except for me, because I do need to change." But after SARS and the July 1 protest, everyone realizes that change is not only inevitable but also necessary.

Li Cheuk-to is the artistic director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society.

© 2004 by Li Cheuk-to
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/9-10-2004/hongkongjournal.htm

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The Legend of Drunken Master (Interview with Christopher Doyle)

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:49:45 GMT

Aug. 25 - Sept. 2, 2004
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/04/51/film-lim.php

The Legend of Drunken Master

Chris Doyle on bars, sperm counts and—oh, yes—his movies

by Dennis Lim

Arriving at our interview late, disheveled and visibly hungover, cinematographer Christopher Doyle immediately orders a beer: "It’s a bar," he croaks. It’s actually an otherwise-empty hotel bar on a Sunday morning during NYC’s Tribeca Film Festival, but Doyle intends to continue where he left off a few hours earlier—at a "Harlem speakeasy," as he puts it, with an entourage that included the Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang (Springtime in a Small Town). An Australian-born former sailor (with the Norwegian merchant marine), snake oil peddler (in Thailand) and theater-troupe founder (in Taiwan), Doyle is best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-wai, with whom he essentially invented the dominant vernacular of pan-Asian pop. Notwithstanding the occasional Hollywood flirtation (Levinson, Van Sant), his clip reel is a remarkable survey of East Asian auteurs (Stanley Kwan, Edward Yang, Chen Kaige). The plan this morning is to discuss Doyle’s two August movies—the languid minor-key ballad Last Life in the Universe by Thai director (and Pratt alum) Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who’s sitting in with us, and Zhang Yimou’s prismatic, intensely pictorial martial-arts reverie Hero—but the interviewee is having a hard time concentrating. Herewith, the more lucid highlights:

OC Weekly: Do you watch movies that you’ve shot?

Christopher Doyle: I think what happens to someone like me . . . [a pickup truck festooned with American flags drives by outside] There goes America! "Goodbye, America! Have a nice day!" Quote from The Mosquito Coast . . . Anyway, it goes back to that incredible, intense rush—the first image, first day of shooting. Then I fall asleep.

You fall into a trance?

Doyle: Yeah, it helps [laughs]. It might take three to five days to find the rhythm.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang: It took us 10 days.

Doyle: It took three weeks! You get to a point of trust. And if you don’t, people get fired. . . . [truck drives by again] "Hello, goodbye, America!" . . . Even if it’s a superstar asshole firing the cinematographer because he doesn’t like how he looks . . . Going back to your question, you have to keep that wonder at all costs. Tarantino keeps that by just watching films. That’s part of the experience, how you find that wonder.

How do you find it?

Doyle: Working with different people. And it’s easy with Wong Kar-wai because you never know what you’re doing. . . . And there’s a physical aspect of filmmaking. Like on Hero . . . you’re sitting in 50-centigrade heat waiting because you cannot shoot in the middle of the day. So you drink a lot of water. There’s an aspect of sport, mountaineering, that balance between psychological and physical stamina. And look at most directors . . . [points at Ratanaruang] he smokes. Most directors are in terrible physical shape.

Ratanaruang: I can keep doing this because I’m not going to make that many films.

Doyle: He’s a lazy bastard!

Ratanaruang: I’m very lazy, and I don’t have that many films in me. About eight, maybe.

Doyle: It’s like fucking—how much sperm do you have in you?

Ratanaruang: I have enough sperm for 50 films.

Doyle: Even Wong Kar-wai—basically, we’re just remaking the same film. You’re looking for what you really want to say. You probably only say one decent line in your life, and it’ll be on your gravestone.

Chris, you’d never worked on a Thai production before. What was the atmosphere like on the set?

Ratanaruang: Like a joke. I mean, it’s serious, but it’s a joke. You fool around, and at the end, you have a film.

Doyle: I was falling off my motorbike all the time. But the joke is essential to keep a certain atmosphere, to do the real work. Often you get into this psychodrama that’s totally counterproductive. It’s about engagement. I’ve thrown myself into a number of films where I’m the only non-Korean or non-Thai person, and those are the checks and balances that I need. You dare to trust me; I better trust you. And you have to work with young people. I don’t want to get all fuddy-duddy, teaching at NYU or the Christopher Doyle Institute.

How important is the content of the film for you?

Doyle: What do you mean? I’ve done eight films that I don’t know the story of. Tell me what In the Mood for Love is about . . . [an ashen Tian Zhuangzhuang walks into the bar] Good morning, Professor Tian!

source:
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/04/51/film-lim.php

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Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:33:26 GMT

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

Directed by
Phillip Noyce

Writing credits
Doris Pilkington (book)
Christine Olsen (screenplay)

Cast:
Molly...Everlyn Sampi
Daisy...Tianna Sansbury
Mr. Neville...Kenneth Branagh
Gracie...Laura Monaghan
Moodoo...David Gulpilil
Molly's Mother...Ningali Lawford
Molly's Grandmother...Myarn Lawford
Mavis...Deborah Mailman
Constable Riggs...Jason Clarke
Dormitory Boss...Natasha Wanganeen
Mr. Neal...Garry McDonald
Police Inspector...Roy Billing
Miss Thomas...Lorna Leslie

Original Music by
Peter Gabriel
Fred Gilbert (song "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo")
Non-Original Music by
Stephen Foster (song "Old Folks at Home") (uncredited)

Cinematography by
Christopher Doyle
Brad Shield (additional photography)

trailer:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/rabbit_proof_fence.html

Official Site (DVD):
http://video.movies.go.com/products/2809003.html

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Jackie Chan Does Jules Verne

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:36:58 GMT

Jackie Chan Does Jules Verne

From Fred Topel,Your Guide to Action-Adventure Movies.
http://actionadventure.about.com/od/celebrityinterviews/a/aa061004.htm

Around the World in 80 Days
It’s funny that I always get to talk to Jackie Chan for the projects that are most uncharacteristic of him. All the American movies, Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon/Knights, The Tuxedo. He never does US promotion for Drunken Master or Accidental Spy, probably because of the problems with reselling original Asian films for the U.S. market.

That’s okay, I’ll take any chance I get to talk to my hero. I don’t remember Wong Fei-Hung being in Around the World in 80 Days, but since Passepartout is now Chinese, it kind of fits. Still, it’s great to see those elements work their way into an American film, and Around the World is one of the more comfortable combinations of Chan’s fighting and action with the plot of an American movie, and this time a full on family film.

I’ve got to ask, will you let me touch the hole in your head? [Smiles and thinks.] Pay me.

How important was it to have Wong Fei-Hung in the movie? For me, it’s not important. But the director, he wanted to use Wong Fei Hung. I said, “No, why use the 10 Tigers?” For me, it’s old. I’ve been doing those kinds of [movies] so many years, but the director said, “You know what? I think American audience, they like it.” Because the director’s American. So what he thinks is different than me. I say, “Okay, I’ll help you just do Wong Fei-Hung and 10 Tigers.” I helped him choose the casting, Karen Mok, everybody. Did you like it?

I did, especially the cameo you got as Wong Fei-Hung. Okay, then he made a good choice. If nobody likes it… see, I told you so. I’m ready to say that, I told you so.

Is Taiwan still refusing to show this movie? No. One stupid guy said, “We’re against your new movie.” There’s only one stupid guy who did that. That’s the internet. [But fans tell me], “Jackie, don’t worry, there are six million not going to see your movie. If six million people against you, there will be six million going to see your movie. Because there’s half and half.” I don’t care about those kinds of things.

Do you have any comments on American politics? No. I don't know those kinds of things actually.

Do you like to revisit your classic elements like ropes and handcuffs? Whenever you have a rope, when you are handcuffed, you’ve got the same thing. In the old days, it was so much fun when I’m making a movie. Almost everything was new. Handcuffs, wow, clock tower, yes. Then slowly, slowly I’ve used everything. Then when you get on Rush Hour 1, I’m handcuffed. Because the script, the writers write it. For me, it’d old, but for the writers it’s new. Then I do the handcuffs again. Now, this movie, I’m handcuffed again. Shanghai Noon, then you’ve got to have a rope. I’m just trying to release myself. They caught me like this [hands behind back], I jump off. Then Shanghai Knights, I have to jump off again. But okay, I’ll jump with one leg. I think of so many ways. A gun, from Police Story 1, 2, 3, 4, Rush Hour 1, 2, I have to get the gun. Every movie I kick the guns. Next time, I throw the gun. Third time, I do this with the gun [grabs and stirps it]. Sometimes I take the gun. Sometimes I take the gun and go boom, boom, boom, boom. No more. That’s the most difficult part for me.

Do you get a chance to improve on your classic bits? No, you cannot improve anymore. The only thing you can improve is story, script. I do the same punch, but why you throw the punch, because of the story. Boom, one punch, oh, yes. Like Officer and a Gentleman, the whole movie, no fighting. At the end, suddenly in the bar, boom, the whole theater claps. After I see that movie, yes, I have to find a good reason. Fight with drama, fight with love. It makes the action sequence different. Otherwise, fight, fight, fight, throw the table. 100 movies throw the table away.

Do you think about slowing down as you’re aging? The good thing is I always choreograph myself. I know how far I can go and there are so many tricks to help me. Right now, I probably cannot do the jumping turning kick. But what can I do? Okay, then I will design [it so that] you push me. You push me back, I throw the things, then I can take two steps and do the jumping kick. But you don’t know on the screen. Yeah, you push me, then I run and do the jumping kick. Same thing, not like the old days. Boom, I do the turning kick again. I can use the tricks to help myself two more steps or three more steps. Like go out the window. In the old days, I can stand, boom, I’ll do a summersault. Now I have to run. Then what can I do? Then I might use Chris Tucker, “Jackie don’t.” Pull me back. I say, “No, I gotta go.” Then I would never let audiences see I look, I back up. That looks me stupid. I have to do something. If nobody push me, I look, I push back. I take a chair, bam, I still can run. I use those kinds of things to make myself still can do a lot of action things but I love action.

[This makes a lot more sense when he demonstrates it. He’s saying that he works it into the action scene where some plot element forces him to take a running jump, so you never know that he really needs to run to do the same stuff he used to do from a standstill.]

Go to page two for more on Around the World fight scenes and Jackie Chan's family, page three for news on other film projects.

Steve Coogan, fighting Arnold and his son's music career
Why didn’t you have Steve Coogan do any fight scenes? If I create an action sequence for him, that’s a stupid thing. If we fight together, the movie will never look good. He’s the person who will never fight. Even [when] he jumps down to save me, I designed the action for him to jump down the rope, use the rope to help me. So clumsy, he’s not purposely doing that. At the end, he saves me. That’s a clever thing to do. It’s not like he can jump off the Statue of Liberty, then boom, one punch, one kick. The audience would feel like that was very stupid.

What was it like for you to work with Arnold Schwarzenegger? Arnold, I’ve been trying to work on a movie with him so long. We’ve been looking for the script. Stallone, same, but we haven’t found a script yet. Then I know him by Planet Hollywood, we are partners in Hong Kong. He’s very professional. He comes, sits down, look at the script, changes some dialogue. “I want to do this, I do that.” I just watched him. Oh, he’s not so tough. He’s a very lovable person. He talks to and makes fun of everybody. Most of the time, strange, he’d sit on the side playing chess. Very quiet person.

Why didn’t you have a fight with him? I don't think so, because who’s going to win?

That’s the big question! That’s why the script I was supposed to do with Jet Li doesn’t happen. It’s the same problem. Two action stars together. If he’s the villain and I’m the good guy, then at the end I beat him. Then he doesn’t want to die. You want to beat me? I don’t want to lay down. I don’t mind, if there’s a good script.

How old are your kids now? 21. Already a movie star now. He wants to be a musician because he’s Jackie Chan’s son. In Asia, I’ve been hiding him for 20 years. Everybody, paparazzi try to take his photo, now the company, the studio, they give a top class money. They spend 18 million Hong Kong, 10 million U.S. to use so many stars. I go, “Okay, go, go, go.” I cannot lock him anymore. He’s just becoming a star. Next month he’ll release an album. Then the next movie contract. Then they make a Coca Cola commercial. Every commercial with him. I say hang on. Maybe, because you’re Jackie Chan’s son, boom, one year and you’re gone.

Will you be jealous if his album does better than yours? No. I’m praying, better than me, please. At least I let him do something. He was promised when he was 16. We’d sit down at a family meeting. What do you want to do? You want to be a doctor? I want to be in the entertainment business. His mother, “No, don’t do that. You’ll never be better than your father.” He said I want to try. So this is why he wants to be a musician. “I don’t want to be an action star.” Okay, then his mother was crying no, don’t do this. Enough, I don’t want to lose my son.”

What’s his name? J.C. My initials.

What are your thoughts on Hollywood now? What I see in Hollywood is Hollywood is open for everybody. You have talent come in. You have talent out. There’s people in and out so quick. An actor is suddenly famous, two years he’s gone. I look at myself, same thing. How long I can stay in Hollywood, I don't know. Maybe suddenly one or two movies that come out, they’re duds. That’s why every time I make a Hollywood film, I go back to Asia to make my Asian films because I always control Asian films. I know what audiences like. And also, I’ve been in Asia too long. Whatever I make, I make love story, I make drama right now. They accept it. But I cannot make a drama film in the United States. They don’t like it. In Hollywood, I’m still new. I don't think they like to see Jackie Chan slow motion on the beach kissing with Sharon Stone. No, come on, we need some action.

Back to page one for more Around the World in 80 Days, on to page three for Pink Panther explanations and movie project news.

Pink Panther, New Police Story and The Myth
Were you supposed to do Pink Panther? What happened with that? I don't know. In Hollywood, there are so many- - it’s not rumors, there are meetings. Meeting and how to combine everything. Okay, for example, Did you agree to do Cato? Yes. I love Steve Martin. I think he’s a wonderful genius. Okay, then they ask Steve Martin, yes, then we talk. Then the meetings stop. Then Green Hornet? Yes. I’ll do Green Hornet. Then two years later. Then Rush Hour, let’s do it. Yes, go.

You had a meeting on Green Hornet? Everything, yeah.

With Kevin Smith? No, a long time ago.

But you met with Steve Martin? No, my office, William Morris did.

So, you always say you don’t like Rush Hour, but you’re doing Rush Hour 3? I don’t like them, but the audience likes it. Yeah, I have to do like Rush Hour 3 [after] Around the World in 80 Days. See the difference. That’s a more serious, a little bit serious, but this one is totally for a family movie. Then I go back to Hong Kong. Okay, I make New Police Story, heavy drama, very heavy. Waaah, like this. Then I turn into The Myth. The Myth is more like Indiana Jones. Not very technology. It’s like an old fashioned story.

Is that what used to be called Time Breaker/Titanium Rain? No. [That] stop[ped]. See, William Morris took so long. New Police Story, The Myth is my own company, JCE, Jackie Chan Empire. So quick, I just called the director and make it. I really hope you get to see the Police Story. I don’t want a meeting, I don’t have a meeting, I just pick up the script, go. On the set I can change whatever I want.

Does New Police Story have a US distributor? I’m not going to sell it. Why? Because you know the problem.

What is The Myth? The Myth is totally different than 80 Days and New Police Story. It’s like Indiana Jones. I’m going to find the Ching Dynasty tomb. And also help the American NASA do something. But myself is an archeologist. I have to go to India. There’s a very fantasy in the movie.

Wasn’t Armor of God your Indiana Jones franchise? Yes. Suppose I want to be Armor of God 3, but after Stanley the director said, “Let’s make a new thing.” Okay, then becoming The Myth.

Are you doing Joe’s Last Chance? What? Chinese script? American Film? What’s the name of it?

Joe’s Last Chance and you play a character named Friendly? No.

source:
http://actionadventure.about.com/od/celebrityinterviews/a/aa061004.htm

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Jet Li on Hero

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:34:46 GMT

Jet Li on Hero
http://actionadventure.about.com/od/celebrityinterviews/a/aa081904_3.htm

From Fred Topel,Your Guide to Action-Adventure Movies.

Interview for the U.S. theatrical release
It’s been a long time since we’ve sat down with Jet Li. It was in 2001 for Kiss of the Dragon. We caught a bit with him on the set of Cradle 2 the Grave, but Li hasn’t been to LA for interviews in a while. It took the U.S. release of Hero to bring him back.

Hero is the tale of an assassin (Li) on a mission to kill the king. But the first story he tells isn’t exactly right, and throughout the film we learn about his real mission. Li costars with Hong Kong legends Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi in the film directed by Zhang Yimou.

Did you grow up with stories of Chinese legend? Not modern day, but I learned martial arts was. I believe the three levels of learning martial arts. One is the first level, the physical part. You have a sword, it’s part of your body. That talks about skill, physical contact, the best person. The second level of martial arts talks about you don’t have a sword, but your heart is the sword. You use your heart to scare them before physical combat. You can stop the war before fighting. Use your knowledge, use a different kind of power to stop the war. That’s the second level. The third level is you don’t have a sword, even your heart doesn’t have a sword. What’s left is love. All the main religions talk about the same thing. Love people, even your enemy. They beat you, let them beat you. Love them. If after three times they beat you, they’re tired. If they’re not tired, 10 times. 10 times, they’ll be tired. That kind of philosophy I believe in the beginning, of course until I became Buddhist. I believed this kind of message.

What was it like working with Zhang Yimou? He’s one of the most famous directors in China. He made a lot of great films, but a not action films. This is the first action film. Of course, he’s the artist so he asks, he wants something that we never think about that way. Like working with your costar but you can’t see your costar on the set, because he knows shooting the man, the boy in the morning is better because the girl wakes up, put on her face, swallows, it’s not pretty. [If we] wait until sunshine, the light is smoother, the girl is more beautiful. That’s his way, waiting for a few days for one lighting, the lights coming. This is his way. He wanted to dye the hair of 500 horses black. We spent seven days waiting. They changed the color of the horses. So he had a very unique way, angle to see things.

What emotional challenges did he give you? I think the most important is how to tell the story. How to use martial arts. He knows martial arts is not the major subject. He just uses it. I believe he did a wonderful job.

Was there any blue screen work? No. At the real location, we’re waiting days, days. Every day, they only have two hours that the lake looks like a mirror. You can see the people’s shadow at the same time. After two hours, the wind comes in, the waters are shaking. It wasn’t clear. We did a week, not a day. Because the actors spent many years to try to make this film. A few days for him is nothing.

Was it a waste of time? No, everybody just enjoyed waiting because he wanted it. I remember one scene in the beginning of the movie, I walked into the palace, I walked for seven days. You have a hundred people walking around me, but we don’t have much lighting. You can see the shadow from their uniform. Only 2:30 to four o’clock in the afternoon the sun shines. You can see some shining from their costumes.

Continue to page two for more on Hero.

Acting challenges
How much CGI is there in the movie? We use a few thousand people as soldiers, real soldiers on the set. Of course, some special effects are there, like the arrows. They’re not real. The location is I think 95-98% real location over a span of six months.

Did the film provide any acting challenges? I think all the actors and actresses in this film, they’re acting much better than me because Maggie Cheung got an award from the Cannes festival. The other man got an award from the other film festival. Everybody is a great actor and actress. But they spent a lot of time learning martial arts on this film. In the beginning, I knew all the costars were great actors and I’m not. And the director just told me every day, “Jet, forget acting. Even the character at the end of the movie, he doesn’t know how to do it, to kill or not. So just forget. Just do it naturally. Do it naturally and forget it.” So I just listened to him and did my best.

Why do you think you’re not a good actor? Because for an action actor, it’s mostly just physical showing something more physical, not emotion. You need to learn. It’s a little bit different. At least, I didn’t get an award. They did. Everybody in this film got awards. Everybody is a great actor, best actress, best actor from different countries, different areas. Even the king is best actor in China.

What about this film connects with people? I think the way the director shot was not a normal action film. The color is beautiful, each frame is like a painting and the story. I don't know, I just do my best when I was working. Later and now, I don't know. I can’t control. People tried to show this two years ago in the states. That way they could get nominated for an Oscar, not just best foreign film, but maybe can get the other nomination. But we didn’t have a chance. In the past two years, somebody tried to recut the American way, looping English, studying English. I’m glad right now we still keep the original way.

Why did it take so long to come out here? I really want to know the answer also. Because every day, people say, “Hey, I watched Hero on DVD. I already watched the DVD.” I say whoa, whoa, whoa.

Is there an extended version coming? I don't think so.

What are the spiritual analogies in the film? I think 200 years ago, Chinese people, in that culture, trust is very important for man. Like samurais, even though they have different opinions, they’re very proud about each other. Before I kill you, like a cowboy, we shake hands first, then run away, twist again, Boom. But we can’t see that kind of culture in modern day. This film I think, usually action films have a formula. Good guy got trouble, wife died, friends have problem, go to the mountain, learn martial arts, come back, kill the bad guy. Most Asian martial arts films [are like that]. But this film, we talk about a totally different angle to see my character. In the beginning, the same thing, he wants to kill the king. His parents died, he spent 10 years learning martial arts. If somebody’s 10 steps in front of him, you die for sure. But through this journey, at the end of the day, he’s confused by things. He needs to kill the king, but who can guarantee the next king is better than him or not. If he killed him, maybe it would cause more problems, more people would die in the future. So why did he come here? He gave the information, said, “Look, people just want peace. If you can give that, I walk away.” I think that’s the whole point.

How do you see the film’s sacrifice? In real life, if I’m really in the character I will do the same thing. I think Asian culture is very different from western culture. From my understanding, in western heroes, first of all, you need to protect your family, your wife, your children, even your dog. The second thing is protect the city. Third is protecting your country. That’s from my understanding. But for Chinese hero or Asian hero, it’s their country first, then city, then home. Your own personal home. So we always grew up with adults telling us, “That’s a hero, see. Walks by his home three times, didn’t come back to see his wife, he is the man.” In western culture, “He’s the man? He’s not taking responsibility. He walks home, he needs to see his wife, say hello. What kind of man is he?” So it’s a different angle to see the same thing. But I respect what this character is doing.

Continue to page three for Li's future projects.

Future project Unleashed/Danny the Dog and family
Are you still producing and writing with Luc Besson? Yeah, we work with Luc. We’re working on another movie, come out soon, next year, beginning of next year called Unleashed. In Europe they call it Danny the Dog. Also it’s a special martial arts film. It’s very unique. Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins costar. My character [is like] I’ve never played before. He’s mentally only 10 years old, but physically he’s very strong. He grew up very dark, around darkness. He doesn’t understand life, friendship, family, love, anything. He doesn’t know. He just acts like a dog. So Morgan Freeman, his character is a piano tuner. Really funny, right? He plays piano and through the music, he brings me back. I become a normal person, understand and start feeling the friendship, start feeling trust, honor, everything. So at the end of the movie, he’s a normal guy. It’s a very unique story. It’s not a tough man saves the city, tough man saves the day. I want to talk to the audience, especially younger audience because the past few years making movies in the states, I think I need to say something. Because usually, they say, “Jet Li, kick butt, kick ass, yeah!” Things like learning martial arts, well action movies only give the information to kick somebody’s ass, beat somebody up. But I want to tell them if you’re physically very strong, if you don’t understand friendship, family, love compassion, what are we going to be? We’re just dogs. Just like a machine.

Did being a father make you realize this? Of course, but also after you make more than 30 movies, you get a sense of again, again? What I can do, I can tell more things. I think martial arts is not one level. We can play around and maybe find a different way to talk about martial arts.

Will you go back to China to make more films? I think it doesn’t matter [if you’re] in Hollywood, China, Europe. Everybody tries to make international films for an international audience. Some stories I want to make are really difficult for Hollywood to prove we can make that kind of film, like Hero. If I put a script to the studio, I don't think it will work. But Danny the Dog, that’s kind of a special, unique. You want to take off from the formula business point of view to see the things. So you go to Europe, go to China to make it. I think in the middle I need to find the balance. Which commercial action film do I need to do? After that I need to make something that even if it doesn’t work, doesn’t make money, it doesn’t matter. I still want to make it. You need to find a balance in the middle. What kind of stories you believe in and what studios believe can work.

Are you based here in LA or in China? I spent a few years here but right now I go back to China.

And your wife and kids? They’re in China because my wife wanted to raise the babies in China in the beginning, until they’re 17, 13, 14, they’ll come back to study American culture. Both cultures they need to learn in the future.

Do they speak both languages? Yeah, in the beginning. Even in China, they go to an American school.

source:
http://actionadventure.about.com/od/celebrityinterviews/a/aa081904_3.htm

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Kill Bill's Japanese Schoolgirl

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 17:31:47 GMT

Kill Bill's Japanese Schoolgirl
http://actionadventure.about.com/cs/weeklystories/a/aa100703.htm

From Fred Topel,Your Guide to Action-Adventure Movies.

Chiaki Kuriyama Interview
Kill Bill is full of memorable villains, from the feisty Vernita Green (Vivica Fox) to the calm and cool Oren Ishii (Lucy Liu). Then there are subvillains like Go Go Yubari, the Japanese school girl who wields a ball and chain. Chiaki Kuriyama plays Go Go Yubari, whose fight scene with Uma Thurman begins the climactic battle of Kill Bill: Volume 1.

Kuriyama does not speak English, so I had to conduct the interview through her translator, Kennedy Taylor. His English accent didn’t quite sound like a Japanese school girl, though hearing Kuriyama speak Japanese set more of the Kill Bill mood. You may have also seen Kuriyama in Battle Royale, but if not, Kill Bill will be quite an introduction.

Did you read the script in English or Japanese? In Japanese.

What did you think of the script? An extremely dramatic script, really exciting and really exciting to think that I might be a part of.

Did the script change during shooting? It was pretty much the way that it was when I first read it, although one exception would be that some ideas that I had were also incorporated into the script.

What were your ideas? Without going into too much detail, the end of my major action scene, after the climax of the scene, there was one little change that I suggested regarding the way things should turn out. It was in the detail of the tears of blood.

Did you understand all the Asian cinema references? Yes, I think so. Especially at least in the references to Japan, Japan’s beauty and Japan’s culture.

What are your favorite Samurai and martial arts movies? Up until doing this movie, I hadn’t really paid a huge amount of attention to those genres, but after finishing this movie, it really gave me a different sense of appreciation of the way the movies play out. I certainly look at them very differently now, and enjoy Jackie Chan movies and movies like that.

What movies did he ask you to watch? Certainly during the training period, we had lots of downtime and in those moments, Quentin would show us snips of different movies and anime films which I’m not able to remember because we never saw the whole thing.

Did you train the entire three months with the cast? Yes, for three months.

Had you ever had physical training before? I’d done a certain amount, a small amount, for Battle Royale, but not to that extent at all.

Describe the training. We started with the basics of kicking and punching, then we moved on once we got proficient in that, we moved on to working with the weapons, and from then on working with the wires.

What special ball and chain training did you have? Just going through the separate moves and techniques and nailing them down one by one.

How heavy was it? I can’t really give you a precise measurement, but there were two. There was one heavier one and one lighter one.

Did you have to gain strength to use it? Yeah, certainly my right arm has bulked up a certain amount compared to how it was before.

Is the schoolgirl outfit challenging to work with? Not especially. Obviously, a skirt does present certain problems that I had to be aware of. But when it came to the shoot and we were rolling, I didn’t really pay it any attention. It wasn’t too bad.

Was it taped down? No, we didn’t do that.

Were there any mishaps filming the fight scene? Yes, I once hit Quentin on the head with my ball and chain.

How did that happen? Yeah, the setup was the camera was behind me and the action was for me to turn around quickly and wield my mace, my ball and chain, towards the camera. Quentin was just outside of the lens and I clobbered him.

Good thing you didn’t hit the camera. But I actually hit the camera too.

Did it break? No, it wasn’t that bad.

Did you accidentally hit Uma? No, thankfully.

Did Uma ever hit you? No. We were respectful of each other.

Go on to page two.

Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari) Interview
Do you understand the American fascination with the Japanese schoolgirl? No, I don’t think I can, really. In the case of this film, I think the idea of a schoolgirl who’s wielding this deadly ball and chain is itself as a character, the portrayal is inherently interesting so I think that’s why in this movie people might find it interesting.

Why do audiences like to see women fight? I think probably because women are generally not thought to be strong, especially in the case of this movie. My character is somebody who is smaller in stature and yet who’s strong, so to see the fighting situations between people who are not generally thought of being strong is in itself unusual and therefore interesting, I think.

What did you think of Tarantino’s previous films? Very fond of them.

Which was your favorite and why? Pulp Fiction was my favorite. I’d never seen a movie, anything vaguely like that previously, so when I saw it, it felt tremendously fresh to me and really opened up my eyes to wow, movies can actually be like this.

Did you see it translated? It was subtitled in Japanese.

What of your Japanese films would you recommend to people? Well, the reason that I was in Kill Bill was because of my performance in Battle Royale, so I’d love people to see that movie.

Any dramas we should see? My dramatic stuff has mostly been for TV. There’s a TV series that I’ve been appearing in on NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster [and] my first movie is a film called Shikoku, which is a romantic horror movie.

What are you hobbies? I’m very fond of video games and I also love anime.

Favorite video games? Lots of different games, but I’m very fond of musical games, for example Parappa the Rapper.

Does hand eye coordination help you with fighting and training? Obviously, the difference between a game and actual training is you’re using your whole body, so in that sense, maybe not, although maybe something to do with reaction, the speed of reaction, maybe that was of use during the training.

How much time have you spent in America? I’ve only been to America twice actually. The three months training period last year before the movie, and this present trip for the premiere.

Are you excited about the premiere? Yes. I can’t imagine I’m going to get many opportunities in my life to do this, so yes, I’m pretty excited about it.

Is this your first time doing interviews? It’s my first time in America certainly, but I’ve done a certain amount of press activity in Japan.

What did you do when you were off during the training? Generally, I’d just go for walks and things like that. But I went with Quentin to Disneyland. That was the one trip I remember.

Are you hoping to do more American films? Yeah, as much as possible.

Are you learning English? Yes, absolutely.

What are the difficulties? I think the biggest difficulty is that when I’m here in America, there’s a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.

Did you spend a lot of time with Julie Dreyfus? Yes.

Could you relate because she’d spent time in Japan? Yeah, she was very kind to me. We got on very well.

What did you have in common? We were both afraid of heights and in one scene, I had to be quite high up and I was rather terrified, but Julie was very kind ,encouraging me and we got through that together. And just telling me about her past and her journey through life was very encouraging to me.

What roles do you have coming up? A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who’s a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn’t decided yet, but in Japanese it’s I’ll Get on the A Train Sometime.

What kind of movies do you like to watch? Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction.

Have you seen Lost in Translation? No, I haven’t.

Thank you for your time.

source:
http://actionadventure.about.com/cs/weeklystories/a/aa100703.htm

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Lost Planet Edits New White Stripes Video

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:22:31 GMT

Lost Planet Edits New White Stripes Video
"The Hardest Button to Button" is a simple story about nothing

http://www.filmandvideomagazine.com/2003/09_sep/news/lostplanet_stripes.htm

NEW YORK, NY (Sep. 17, 2003) --

White Stripes drummer Meg White (click for larger view)
For the energetic new music video for rock duo The White Stripes, Lost Planet's Charlie Johnston, Geoff Hounsell and Andy Grieve cut visually striking shots that embody the lighthearted lyrics of the band's single "The Hardest Button to Button" Directed by Partizan's Michel Gondry, "The Hardest Button to Button" is a simple and riveting story about nothing.

An allusion to post-punk disco, the song starts out with a heartbeat throb that's equal parts Donovan "Mellow Yellow" and Neil Diamond "Sweet Caroline," and unfolds with a fascinating simplicity: a four-note guitar motif, a two-chord bridge, and a marching pulse. Jack and Meg White, The White Stripes guitarist/vocalist and drummer respectively, are on a walkway where Meg's drums multiply with every beat. She appears with each new set of drums as Jack continues to play on a single guitar and multiple amps emerge with every other pulse. The duo later appears throughout the city -- in a park, on a street corner, down some stairs and into a subway tunnel -- where they weave in and out of the subway trains in time to the music. The ending of the video is spectacular with Jack and Meg White along with their instruments and amps imitating a frequency spectrum meter and even a rotating chorus line.
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Jack White, guitarist/vocalist (click for larger view)
Lost Planet Editor Charlie Johnston attributes the music video's high concept idea to Partizan Director Michel Gondry. "Michel really created the spine of the piece,"comments Charlie Johnston. "He conceived the set-ups and our job was to make sure they worked individually, as well as together. We had to make the entire video interesting and go someplace, and constantly ask ourselves, "How far can we take this concept?"

The talented editors of Lost Planet worked for hours on the Avid, compositing elements and choosing from different shots to bring the idea to life. For Johnston, the most challenging aspect of the project was the transitions. "The transitions had to be fashioned and invented so the video would flow and make sense. Although the concept seems simple, it actually involved some complicated steps to create the end result."

Project: The White Stripes Video "The Hardest Button to Button"

Airdate: September 2003

Client/Label: V2 Records

Production Company: Partizan
Director: Michel Gondry
DPs: Michel Gondry & Lance Bangs
Executive Producer: Georges Bermann
Producer: Julie Fong
Where Shot: Harlem & Riverside Park, NY

Editorial Company: Lost Planet/New York, NY
Editor: Charlie Johnston, Geoff Hounsell & Andy Grieve
Assistant Editor: Bruce Herrman
Executive Producer: Betsy Beale
Producers: Jennifer Suttlemyre & Raná Martin

Visual Effects Company: The Mill/New York, NY
Flame Artists: Angus Kneale, Richard De Carteret, Paul Marangos, Richard
Roberts & Dirk Greene
Flame Assistant: Jeanette Williford
Executive Producer: Alistair Thompson
Producers: Wendy Garfinkle
Color Correction and Online done by The Mill

Source:
http://www.filmandvideomagazine.com/2003/09_sep/news/lostplanet_stripes.htm

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