Results tagged “cinema”

Have you discovered Sub-Cinema, the new bi-weekly film screenings that started taking place at Dada last month? Every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month you can watch cult classics, B-movies, independent cinema and documentaries - all for free! This week it´s time for Babylon, Franco Rosso´s film about black youth growing up in South London.

Alliance Française keeps serving movies to all who are charmed by the rich French cinema history. On Saturday they offer a "crossed movies"- experience, where one 1953 Jacques Tati classic meets a 2008 drama featuring Isabelle Huppert. The event is called "Crossed Movies : Modern and burlesque society".

Not that this should surprise anyone, what with the flash mob tribute, the Chongming Island Neverland Ranch and the myriad of other ways China has shown its love for the King of Pop, but This Is It has proven to be a spectacular hit in the country. Tickets sold out within days of going on sale, severely trouncing the last Chinese megahit, Transformers 2. In case you want to see a gallery of what the premiere in Shanghai looked like, this is it.

We were just alerted to this intriguing website called AsiaPacificFilms.com, a website that's streaming "culturally and historically significant films from Asia and the Pacific." All the films on the site are selected by a panel of scholars, critics and curators, and can be streamed in DVD quality.

Oh good heavens, the new Michael Jackson documentary is here! For all of us who have spent hours in nostalgia, watching old videos and performances and nervously followed the news around his passing...here comes finally something yet unseen. This Is It is the recordings around the popstar´s preparations for his planned 2009 tour with the same name. The movie will be screened at cinemas during two weeks only, so you better get moving!

And so yet another Americanized 3D version of an old animation classic crashes upon us. This week Imagi Studio's version of "Astro Boy," the superhero story that originated as a manga in 1952 by Osamu Tezuka, sees its worldwide release. And with the release of the movie, a huge marketing carousel filled with toys, books and video games starts spinning as well. It raises some questions on how to actually best do our old classics justice.

Vienna Café cooks up with a Truffaut movie this coming Thursday! One of film history´s most important directors didn't only write and direct Les 400 coups, Jules et Jim, Baisers volés...but also Le Dernier métro (The last metro), which is the movie of choice for this week.

The old ladies and fellas you see dancing in the parks in the morning, China´s "forgotten generation", rarely gets a chance to be the central subject in Chinese movies. Director Ye Kai is now presenting an exception to that rule, by creating a feel-good comedy about a charming group of elderly amateur dancers, caught up in a quest to win a competition that will let them take part in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Vienna Café once again enriches our existence with an LGBT-related movie! On Thursday 24 September the "dark Irish comedy" Breakfast on Pluto from 2005 will be featured. Director Neil Jordan is previously known for The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles.

As many independent films aren't welcome on the cinema charts and often only get public screening in connection with film festivals, one should definitely take the chance when these low budget, yet high quality movies finally appear on a silver screen. Now this opportunity has reached Shanghai's own independent film director, Kevin Kai Huang (黄凯), and his movie Park Shanghai. Well, at least on Sundays... during the month of September...

Update: Due to ownership quarrels, the film Buenos Aires Zero Degree will not be screened as planned on Thursday. Vienna Café is replacing it with Stephen Daldry´s The Hours. And while that´s an awesome movie, it´s still a sad exchange, since The Hours has probably already been seen by most of us and is very easy to access - while...heaven knows when we´ll get the chance to see that Wong Kar Wai Documentary again...

On Thursday 3 September, Vienna Café will be the place to be if you wanna kill eleven birds with one stone. In one evening you can watch ten movies and have a cup-of-whatever-you-fancy. They are namely screening short films that have been in the Meiwenti Global Film Contest. Ten shorts films of different genres and stories, of which some are some set in Shanghai. The girls from one of the short films, Just Around the Corner, will be there during the evening. Don't miss out!

Had your share of robots transforming into vehicles, lisping ground sloths that adopt dinosaur eggs and and the wizardry of Hogwarts? Here's another cinematic solution for you! Every Thursday, Vienna Café at Shaoxing Lu offers a different film choice for the Shanghai movie audience. This week's movie is a reality based border-crossing romance between a Turkish actress and her Kurdish lover.

Note: the movie of choice for this week is mainly directed to French and/or Chinese speaking cinephiles and book lovers who don't necessarily need a movie screening to be a sit-back-and-relax-while-you´re-stuffing-popcorn-into-your-mouth-kind-of-experience. Nope, our pick this time around is all about deep analysis and religious brooding!

Green Hornet isn't the only Bruce Lee vehicle being modernized in the United States. His last complete movie before his death, Enter the Dragon, will now get a noir remake dubbed Awaken the Dragon. It will be a contemporized drama about "a lone FBI agent who pursues a rogue Shaolin monk into the bloody world of underground martial arts fight clubs," according to First Showing. And it seems they've already decided who will play Bruce Lee's part - Korean megastar Rain. Since they haven't found the right actor for the FBI agent, we'd like to make a recommendation: Steven Colbert. You know you'd watch it.

After the daily news showers we got on protests and violence in Iran thanks to its disputed election, here comes a movie tip for the one who wants to get a closer look at Iran and a whole other president campaign that once traveled the country.

If you are not yet familiar with amazing Finnish auteurs Kaurismäki - here´s your chance! Tonight at 7pm there will be a one screening only of the 1987 road movie Helsinki-Napoli All Night Long. Director Mika Kaurismäki is the older member of Finlands most creative and important filmmaking team, with the other half being Aki Kaurismäki.

The latest movie in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opened today all over China (even in "riot-bruised" Xinjiang). According to China Daily, it's expected to be this year's leading box office revenue raiser.

Zhang Yimou, creator of the spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and director of a whole bunch of famous Chinese films, is now going to do a remake of the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple." Not to give too much of the plot away, but basically a Texas bar owner hires a PI to kill his wife and her lover, things go awry, lots of people die and one Shanghaiist editor oohs and aahs at the camerawork but finds the rest of the movie entirely forgettable. The Chinese "Blood Simple" will be called "San Qiang Pai An Jing Qi (三枪拍案惊奇），" which translates to "The Stunning Case of the Three Gun Shots" and is described as a "thriller-comedy." Source: SF Gate

Danish-Swedish drama, "Original," which Slumdog director Danny Boyle called a "light, touching and subversive study of mental illness that is both compassionate and never sentimental." The movie follows the trials of Henry, a man who has acted as a pale reflection of other people's expectations his whole life, when he decides to make an effort at becoming a true original. Sverrir Gudnason, who plays the male lead in the movie, also won the SIFF's best actor award. The jury called his performance "brilliant, sensitive and humorous..." and "absolutely mesmerizing." Source: Variety

• Audit Finds Beijing Games Produced Surplus [Wall Street Journal] "The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics produced a surplus of about 1.16 billion yuan ($171 million), according to the latest audit issued Friday by China's National Audit Office. Revenue from the Olympics, which China hosted for the first time in August, totaled CNY20.5 billion and expenditure totaled CNY19.34 billion, according to the auditor's report."
• Gingrich comments on Uighurs don’t sit well with some in GOP [Freep] "Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got into a public spat with fellow Republicans this week after he denounced the 17 Chinese Muslims who are being released from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison as 'terrorists' who should be sent back to China, where they’re likely to face persecution."
• The U.S.: Always Making Trouble For China [Forbes] "Instead of offering the usual foreign-correspondent musings about China, Forbes invited an outspoken Chinese essayist to take a few shots at the U.S. and the rest of the West. Wang Xiaodong, a researcher at the Communist Youth League-affiliated China Youth and Children Research Center, urges that China strengthen its military and stand up to the U.S."

One of the movies we're most excited about seeing is Building 173, a docudrama about one Shanghainese building and the people who lived in it. It'll be airing twice on Saturday, June 20 - once at 6.30pm and a second one at 9pm (with a discussion afterward).

First the Singaporeans seduced China's prettiest lady, Gong Li, and now it looks like the city-state might have its claws on China's current kung fu king! According to the AFP, Jet Li has taken up Singaporean citizenship and brought a property worth nearly 20 million Singapore dollars. Of course, nobody's confirming it right now... are our hearts really going to be broken again? WHAT'S SO GOOD ABOUT SINGAPORE ANYWAY?

If you're interested in catching some of the films, most of the information you'll need is at their official website. Browsing though the schedules, it seems that there an awful number of fairly recent Hollywood releases, such as Eagle Eye and Pink Panther 2. Why you'd want to fork over money to watch these on the big screen is beyond us, but dig a bit deeper and you'll find that there is a very healthy selection of films by two English directors: Alfred Hitchcock and Danny Boyle. Of the latter, little needs to be said: he's the head of the jury this year, which is why so many of his films are being shown. Although you've no doubt seen many of the more successful ones, you can use this chance to see some of his lesser known, earlier works. As for that great benefactor of Freudian film theorists goes, you've got the standard fare: The Birds, Rear Mirror, North by Northwest, Psycho, Rope etc.

Chinese director Lou Ye has defied the authorities to produce controversial movie after controversial movie. But risking arrest in China may be worth it, since his newest, "Spring Fever" has now won the best screenplay award at Cannes.

Cinemaphiles and celebrity lovers - look this way! In just a couple of weeks, the Shanghai International Film Festival will kick off for a whole nine days, starting June 13.

Sick of hearing about how absolutely awesome JJ Abram's Star Trek is from your friends in the States?Isn't it frustrating, considering it's one of those movies that actually would be better seen in theaters and who knows how long it'll take for a decent copy to be released on DVD here, right? Not really! Turns out we only need to wait one more week before basking in our nerddom, because the movie is boldly going where.... okay, where several big releases have gone before. According to IMDB, the set release date for Star Trek (星际迷航) in China is May 15. Be sure to live long and prosper til then!

Street Fighter II, the 1990s arcade game that swallowed more of our quarters than we care to count, holds a very dear place in our hearts. And Chinese kung-fu master Chun Li, being the first playable female fighter ever, was especially dear to at least one uber-geeky Shanghaiist editor.

For any one who (us included) who missed the eArts festival opening last weekend in Shanghai with free performances by Dead J and others, tonight is your chance at redemption. Screen Play, a mashup of film footage and computer animation, is performed to by Top Floor Circus, Elliott Sharp and fellow musicians. Taking place in Xujiahui Park, things kick off at 7:30pm and the best part....it is all free.

This self-orientalizing piece of crap has a few good moments. Since they are few and far between, we'll just tell you what they are.