Results tagged “huge”

Hu Ge, the Shanghai unknown who shot to fame after parodying Chen Kaige's The Promise with a story about a steamed bun, seems to have settled in pretty well to his new role as parodyist for hire. Besides coming out with his own 30 minute spoofy action work, he's gotten some commercial requests on the side.

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.

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

Shanghaiist was thinking about how to characterize a movie like this: We mulled over “worst movie we’ve ever seen,” and thought this too harsh, as there are probably loads of worse movies that we’ve seen but have repressed the memory of. And we hope the same happens with this movie.

Photo by raincontreras taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute 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.

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 from Getty Images via The Scotsman.

• 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"?