Results tagged “films”

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei sits down for a chat with Yang Yang and celebrated gay film director Cui Zi'en (催子恩), masterminds of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (北京酷儿影展) which took place in June this year.

We recently caught up with Shanghai-based independent filmmaker Luis Tapia of Daedalum Films, who is currently busy preparing for the May 9 premiere screening of his new documentary short about Shanghai band Hard Queen and the life of indie rock musicians in China. Seats are still available for the screening. Advance tickets can be purchased here.

Popular bar matron Cotton Ding, owner of Shanghaiist favorite Cotton's, sits down with Daedalum Films to talk about her story - how she left her home in rural Hunan for the big city, the lessons she learned along the way to becoming a successful bar owner, and what challenges she sees on the horizon.

While some of us spent Chinese New Year's Eve enjoying grilled seafood on a beach in the Philippines, Luis Tapia of Shanghai-based Daedalum Films was lugging his camera to a Shanghai rooftop to record the fireworks. The results, as you can see above, are beautiful (be sure to watch in HD). Thankfully, the video does not include actual sound (you probably got enough of that last night). Instead, the soundtrack is "El Pico" by Ratatat. You can buy that song on iTunes. Enjoy.

Mix Hindi hip hop, Chinese visuals and Bollywood-style dancing and the result is this music video from the soundtrack of the new made-in-China Bollywood film Chandni Chowk to China. For a new trailer of the movie, see below the fold. Shanghai scenes appear between 1:50 and 2:06

The Travel Film Archive takes us on another journey back in time with this look at how life was like in 1938 in the then province of Manchuria (Manchukuo) under the Japanese.

"In 10 years its population doubles to a seething 7 million people!"

Via City Weekend we learn that the documentary film about last year's Converse-sponsored (and Split Works organized) Love Noise rock music tour of China is now viewable at a DVD player near you. Love Noise put Beijing bands PK14 and Queen Sea Big Shark on a converted bus and sent them on a two-week, six-city tour during the height of Olympics craziness last August. The trailer to the Love Noise film is embedded in this post, and after the jump you'll find a slew of related clips, uploaded to YouTube six days ago. The director's first name is Hammer, so it's got to be good.

Warner Bros. has said in a statement last Friday that its new film The Dark Knight starring the late Heath Ledger of Brokeback Mountain fame will not be screened in mainland China because of "cultural sensitivities in some elements of the film". As usual, nobody can say for sure what these "cultural sensitivities" are so we can only play the guessing game again. According to the New York Times,

The studio may have been concerned that censors would be offended by scenes shot in Hong Kong, including those in which Batman nabs a gangster. Another potential point of conflict: the film includes a brief appearance by Edison Chen, above, the Hong Kong singer and record producer who appeared in sexually explicit photographs with several women that were posted on the Internet this year.

The made-in-China Bollywood film that we told you about 13 months ago is about to hit the big screen soon. Earlier known as Made in China and Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo, the film Chandni Chowk¹ to China which combines Bollywood dancing with kung fu, and Hindi actors with Mainland Chinese ones will debut worldwide on 16 Jan 2009 starring Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Mithun Chakraborty and Hong Kong martial arts film veteran Gordon Lau (劉家輝). This comedic cultural mashup looks like something we can all look forward to in our neighbourhood DVD store very soon.

China's about to make a move into Hollywood, and it's going to spend some serious cash doing so. Originally titled Mermaid Island, the newly-dubbed Empires of the Deep will be a $100 million USD "English-language tale of mermaids, mermen and a hero who saves the world from an evil empire". Monica Belluci will star as the lead mermaid; Sharon Stone was once attached as well but has since been dropped (something she said, apparently). Unconfirmed rumors have also tabbed Derek Zoolander as the lead merman. The film will rely heavily on CGI, and according to producer and chief financier Harrison Liang, it will be "something like 'Star Wars' under the sea".

The funeral for Chinese film director Xie Jin (谢晋) held yesterday afternoon at the Longhua Funeral Parlour attracted 10,000 people — a crowd that included both ordinary citizens and celebrities according to Xinhua.

"Carrefour SA, Europe's biggest retailer, said its dairy sales in China fell by 50 percent after government tests showed chemical tainting of milk products. "

At 146 Tongren Road, near Beijing road, 铜仁路146号，近北京西路

This PBS documentary on the underground church movement produced by the Chicago Tribune's Beijing Bureau chief Evan Osnos can now be watched online here, and it is as we said it would be — groundbreaking.

On the list of things that seriously really piss us off children’s movies, Americanized kung fu and animated pandas don’t exactly play a starring role. In fact, it’s probably fair to say they don’t even make a cameo. Unfortunately for artist Zhao Bandi (赵半狄), all these things seem to be at the top of his list, and all these things are clearly evident in DreamWorks’ new film Kung Fu Panda. To display his righteous outrage, Zhao rallied his (only?) two friends and fellow panda advocates for a protest outside the Beijing State Administration of Radio Film and Television offices, brandishing a petition calling for the film’s release to be canceled. Choice words from the protest, courtesy of WSJ Blogs: “If the Hollywood film ‘Kung Fu Panda’ is released on Jun. 20, it will be just like snatching the necklaces and watches from the corpses of disaster victims.” Um, ok. How so?

Among the main gripes with the film: Hollywood is exploiting China’s “national treasure” (its pandas) and its martial arts; the film is made by Dreamworks, a studio founded by Steven Spielberg (who withdrew from his role as an adviser to the Beijing Olympics earlier this year over concerns about China’s role in Sudan); and more broadly, it’s a Hollywood film, and Hollywood is the place that produced Sharon Stone, reviled in China for her Cannes comments about Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake and karma.

By Sue Anne Tay

By Sue Anne Tay

From France24:

Jia Zhang Ke (贾樟柯) mixes documentary and fiction in his film about three generations of Chinese workers. Watch clips from '24 City', filmed in the town of Chengdu, and an interview with the director.

By Jay Caplan

Chinese reports have been saying that around May 1, Google China unveiled its Onebox search function, which allows you to find movies and movie times. If you've used Google in the US, you are probably familiar with this function, it's the thing that sits atop the regular search results, as you can see in the pictures. The main key words are the movie, the name of the theater, and the city that you live in. For the most part, this means that you have to be able to type or do some cutting and pasting in Chinese, though it seems that pinyin city names work. Another report we saw says that the Google results are somewhat limited in that the results you get are for about 25 theaters, even though there are over 160 theaters in Shanghai. Our searches for Ironman and The Forbidden Kingdom show about 25 theater results.

None of the recent wuxia martial art epics can seem to avoid the the endemic schlockiness of the genre, so as a viewer we are just content to find one that isn't altogether too offensive in this regard. We think that Three Kingdoms manages to do that. There's some good action, though nothing you haven't seen before — the hail of spears and arrows, the beheaded enemies, the evil vixen (Maggie Q) playing pipa while men are being slaughtered, and of course, the de rigeur moral message about the evils of war and humanity's inability to end violence with violence.

From Slate V:

During his discussion with Kerry Brown and Duncan Hewitt at the recently held Shanghai International Literary Festival, Paul French quoted British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as saying that "the biggest problem with the environment in China is that nobody in China could care less about it".

From taiande of Current TV:

What happens when Texas Holdem Poker, the "gambler's game," is introduced to the world's most populous and heavy wagering nation? We explore this question beginning in Shanghai, the epicenter of mainland China's fast growing poker scene.

A new directive by the Chinese censorship board, also known as the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), has banned producers of erotic movies, including their directors and leading actors, from participation in domestic film awards. Violators may be banned up to five years from the movie industry and recalcitrant studios may even have their licenses revoked. Xinhua quotes a report by the Beijing News that details exactly what kind of content SARFT frowns upon:

The SARFT asked nationwide studios not to produce films with footage of hardcore activities, rape, whoring, obscene sex exposing human genitals, or sex freaks, the newspaper said. Vulgar conversations, nasty songs and sound effects with sexual connotation were also restricted.