Results tagged “chenkaige”

Hollywood actress Sharon Stone arrived in Shanghai late Tuesday night at Pudong International Airport. After passing immigration casually dressed in white slacks and a dark long-sleeved top, she was quickly driven downtown in a Mercedes Sedan to the JW Marriott Hotel.

Hu Ge, the Shanghainese man who went from being a nobody to a household name by parodying Chen Kaige's movie The Promise (无极) and nearly getting his ass sued into oblivion as a result, has come out with a new film. Unlike his previous films, which were all shorter and relied heavily on footage from various Hollywood and Chinese movies, this new film, entitled 《007大战黑衣人》 (007 Versus the Man in Black), is a 30 minute spy/action film spoof and features a lot of original, live-action footage. The material is straight up spoof in the vein of Weird Al Yankovic, Leslie Nielsen, or Scary Movie, with a bit of Team America-esque political punditry as well. The movie was "officially released" by video sharing site 6rooms and e-commerce site Dang Dang and divided into four minute installments. The clip above is, as you will notice, from the middle of the movie. Start from the beginning and the site will automatically take you to the next installment.

There's a definitely a buzz for fans of Chinese cinema with the release of Jia Zhangke's new film Still Life 《三峡好人》. In Shanghai and probably the rest of China, the film's theatrical release comes on December 14, the same day that Zhang Yimou's new film Curse of the Golden Flower. And while from the standpoint of the box office returns, it seems pretty clear who the winner will be, Jia doesn't at all seem flustered by the lackluster box office performance that his film has seen in the limited screenings that have happened over the last few weeks.

But back to Bing Feng Tea House: The blogger answers his question this way:

... because he's the head of the jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival, and yet managed to find time during this busy schedule to head up to Beijing to promote his new book and film. People have said that despite the SIFF not being the most prestigious or high-profile of film fests, Besson ought to have taken his job more seriously -- with all those films to watch, and a jury to head (the head of the jury often has to settle disagreements about the films and make sure all decisions are made fairly), how could someone just head over to Beijing, and for three days no less? Bad form -- who knows? In this interview Besson makes it seem as if he worked hard on the 17 films in the competition, but what would you expect him to say?

The Southern Metropolis Weekly's latest print edition had an interesting article about videos and movies online. The article profiled and compared some of the people working in this area and analyzed the business models and economics behind each. One of the people profiled was none other than Hu Ge, the Shanghainese man that caused a stir with his parody of The Promise, director-turned-hack Chen Kaige's latest attempt to waste several hours in the lives of innocent and hard-working people. That parody, a short film called A Bloody Case That Started From a Steamed Bun, got Hu Ge in trouble with the aforementioned hack, who threatened Hu with a lawsuit. The net result has been to make the once unknown Hu Ge into a cause celebre cum indie movie rebel. Not suprisingly, he's gotten some offers, most notably, to make another parody, this time with the approval of the filmmakers. The filmmakers behind the film 血战到底 (Karmic Mahjong). We think that the media might have already seen the parody version (which is basically advertising for the film itself) and were disappointed: Hu himself acknowledges that he made Steamed Bun for fun and because he was pissed off, whereas Karmic Mahjong is already comic and a bit of a spoof (we will review it soon), making it hard for him to find the inspiration. Unlike the first film, however, he isn't allowed to bring in bits and pieces from other movies and TV shows or music -- otherwise known as copyrighted material -- which also made his job harder. These days, Hu is living in a house in the suburbs where has a "studio" and is hatching plans to make a real, live-action film on digital video. The problem is, not many people have expressed interest thus far in investing in it.

Photo by captainvideo taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Stirred by the unprecedented success of Super Voice Girls for Hunan TV, Zhejiang TV and Yahoo are jumping on the bandwagon. Yahoo -- or should we say, Yahoo! -- is duking it out with Baidu and Google, and their latest ploy is this contest, which involves three famous directors: Feng Xiaogang, Chen Kaige and Zhang Jizhong. The contest is called Sou Xing ("searching for stars"), and it's subtitled 让你红的发紫, which literally means that you'll be so red (i.e. popular) that you'll turn purple. Sounds better in Chinese. Anyhow, there's internet voting, all kinds of lists, PK speculations, and, like any good Chinese site, has countless pictures of soulless good-looking-in-that-cookie-cutter-pop-star-way people. The first part was conducted online during March, and the final parts will be shown on Zhejiang TV later this month, when the final 12 contestants for each director will square off against each other. The final prize is an acting contract and the chance to use those "acting" skills for the directors when they make their commercials for Yahoo!.

Yao Ming is tall. He is also good at basketball. We already told you that. He is also China's top celebrity, three years running, according to Forbes. The list takes into account all that is important in life: income, television appearances, newspaper mentions, magazine covers, internet searches, and the like. (Hmmmm. We do a lot of internet searches and we weren't ranked. Likely because we weren't born in Mainland China. Same reason why Jay Chou isn't on the list.)

• If you drive a Mercedes Benz S Series W220, we highly doubt you are reading this website. but if you are, your car is at risk of a gas leak and has been recalled.
• In airline news, American Airlines' prices for US-to-Shanghai flights are not as low as we reported earlier, but they are still low: "The cheap seats are available at $625 from Chicago O’Hare and $675 from Atlanta, Boston, New York LaGuardia, Newark, St Louis, and Washington D.C. Flights from Dallas Fort Worth will cost $680." Tickets must be purchased by March 10 and they are good for flights leaving the US between April 2 and May 1. Return flights must be made before June 30. Also, United Airlines wants to fly to South China. And Continental Airlines desperately wants in on the Shanghai gravy train.
• Who could possibly be "shocked" that half of China is "suffering from second-hand smoke"?

Yeah, yeah, we know it's a little late for 2005 lists. But our editor is off in the U.S. making life-altering decisions and we just found this list of the top 10 Chinese films of 2005 (in Chinese). Here is how it came out:

Chinese director Chen Kaige’s recent movie Wu Ji (The Promise) (website in Chinese) has already surprised Chinese film fans with its US$35 million budget. Now, the premiere of the movie on Dec. 14 at Paradise Warner Cinema City offers a surprise to all of us.