Results tagged “theroad”

It's not the New York Times and it is certainly a bit slanted towards Beijing by the nature of its source, but the list of top ten books noted by users of book club site Douban.com is a whimsical glimpse into what young, plugged-in Chinese are reading offline these days. Here is the list as it stands today:

It may be the pariah for self-respecting filmmakers (and film buffs) everywhere, but if it’s true that there’s no business like show business, then, the Oscars are anything but irrelevant. Case in point: The recent announcement that China will have not one, but two of its own submitted for consideration in the crapshoot otherwise known as the Best Foreign Film category. Of course, it never hurts when you’re able to find a loophole in the system. For all intents and purposes, the would-be blockbuster The Banquet should be represented by the mainland -- it features one of China’s most beloved (and commercially successful) auteurs in Feng Xiaogang, while starring Chinese megastars Zhang Ziyi and Zhou Xun. So how come it ended up as Hong Kong’s submission? Well, the catch is that The Banquet is a Hong Kong-China co-production, which means those of you who were pulling hard for Johnnie To backed the wrong horse.

Shanghaiist greeted the news that Zhang Yimou had gone back to making touching humanistic films set in the backwaters of China with some trepidation. We hope, after the disappointment of Hero and the even more atrocious House of Flying Daggers that Zhang has gotten this whole slick martial arts fantasia thing out of his system, like Michael Jordan and his minor league baseball lark. Zhang even managed to get veteran Japanese actor Takakura Ken for the lead role. Like Not One Less and The Road Home, the film is shot in a fairly realistic, almost documentary style and the plot is fairly lean, more a short story than a novel.