Results tagged “wongkar”

Worst. Wong Kar-wai movie. Ever.

Photo by Shanghai Sky taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page.

The best overall movie goes to Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬), which, in the voting that started from Feb. 9, accumulated 75% of the vote, with the runner-up being Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙) at 7%. The films are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, with heavy doses of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou.

Just a friendly reminder that you can catch a screening of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together tonight at 7:30 in the basement of ARCH. Drinks are 20% off, film and conversation are free! (IPR enforcers, please don't sue us).

Thanks to the kind folks at ARCH, the second installment of movie nights at ARCH is going to be this Thursday, and the movie we will be showing is Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's (王家卫) Happy Together, starring Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as gay lovers in Buenos Aires. If you've never witnessed what happens when you cross Christopher Doyle's cinematography with Wong's cinematic sensibilities, we could point you to numerous writings on it. Fans of Wong probably know that there have been critical scholarly books written about this movie as well as full-length auteurist studies of his corpus to date.

The Sun Yat-Sen University (中山大学) in Zhuhai made headlines recently with the establishment of the first gay support group on a Chinese university campus. This is the first legally registered student group, which will perhaps set a precedent for similar groups at Chinese universities that are still informal or unregistered. You can read an interview (in Chinese) with Ai Xiaoming and Li Yinhe (the latter recently made headlines again because she "endorses" wife-swapping) and learn about some of the issues involved in setting up a gay-rights or gay-themed student group at a university. Apparently Sun Yat-sen University has a history of openness -- they even staged a performance of The Vagina Monologues there. The new student group is called "Happy Together" (an homage to Wong Kar-wai, not The Turtles) in English and in Chinese it's known as the 彩虹社 (caihong she or Rainbow Group).

This unhealthy obsession with movies is going to stop soon ... but first, we just have to tell you what we just heard.

Photo by idogu 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.

• The BBC, long blocked by Chinese web censors, appears to be following in Google's footsteps regarding the internet in China. Shanghaiist finds foreign news organizations self censoring more disturbing than search engines. Who is next?
• Wu Xianghu, the deputy editor of the Taizhou Evening News, "died of liver and kidney failure after he was severely beaten by police enraged by reports in his newspaper about their work." He was 41. ESWN has photos of the attack. Taizhou is in Zhejiang province.
• Another way of looking at coal mine accident stats in China.

The Nicole Kidman/Wong Kar-Wai project The Lady From Shanghai, which reportedly will shoot in Shanghai, won't get off the ground until after Chinese New Year. Wong still needs to "complete the script, pick locations and finalise Kidman's insurance." Originally, filming was supposed to begin late last year. Now reports have filming taking place in "northern China," so maybe Shanghai won't play a role in the movie after all. (Although it sure feels like we are living in northern China of late. Brrrrrrrr.)

The July 30 overnight party at the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall held earlier this year was the last of its kind. Due to severe public criticism of the event, the company that once held the lease and the rights to this section of the wall has had its lease revoked. Reader, please observe a moment of silence to yourself. Thank you.

There are few working filmmakers today so near and dear to the art house film crowd as Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai ( 王家卫 or Wang Jia Wei in Mandarin pinyin). For those who enjoy Wong's poetic (he often collaborates with noted cinematographer Christopher Doyle) and elliptical (Wong shoots scriptless, relying on the flexibility of actors' improvisations and moments of inspiration) films, Wong is one of the world's most original directors, an auteur of the first rank.

Xinhua has reproduced a story from CRIEnglish.com, making us wonder whether Tom and Nicole will be in Shanghai at the same time: