The movie features Christian Bale in the role of John Haufman, a mortician sent to bury a priest at a private boarding school for girls in Nanjing during the massacre. Based on a true story, Bale's mortician dons the robes of the recently deceased priest, and assumes his identity in order to protect the girls, as their school comes under siege from Japanese troops. more ›

The 60th Berlin Film Festival began yesterday with a focus on Chinese cinema, and particularly, Shanghai - director Wang Quan'an lead the opening ceremony with a special screening of his new film "Apart Together (团圆 Tuan Yuan)" more ›

• Corrupt officials are illegally holding $1.5 billion in Chinese public money hostage... and that's just the cash anti-corruption officials have been able to find. [Huffington Post]
• A man with a hunting rifle went on rampage in Hunan, killing 12 people, seriously wounding two others and setting fire to six homes. [AFP]
• Zhang Yimou, the most successful director in China and the man responsible for both the Olympics and National Day spectacles, talks about his fame and his integrity as an artist. [Financial Times]

We've always marveled at the immense chasm between the Chinese book market and the rest of the world. Of course, issues of translation and appeal abroad have kept the market pretty domestic, but that seems to be changing slowly. Chinageeks makes a great point in response to the coverage of Frankfurt Book Fair: it seems that the only interest the west can muster towards Chinese literature is when the book or author carries some sort of scandal with it, leaving the vast majority of authors and books unnoticed. There's a lack of foreign awareness of books that split the difference between banned-in-China and sterilized-by-censorship that leaves a big old lacuna where books by talented Chinese authors should be. more ›

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 more ›

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While we aren't able to provide you with any spoilers like we did for the opening ceremony, executive vice president of NBC Olympics David Neal made his way to a college campus 90 minutes west of Beijing where secret rehearsals were being conducted and exclaimed, "It's just unlike any other closing ceremony I've ever seen." While Olympic closing ceremonies in the past are usually "a simple vehicle for extinguishing the Olympic flame and setting the stage for the next games", China under the charge of creative director Zhang Yimou has pulled out all the stops to "dazzle" the world with glittery shows and a "great deal of entertainment". more ›

What do you think? more ›

All this month (that would be March), the photography of Hong Kong artist Norm Yip will be on display not on the walls of a fancy-schmancy gallery on Moganshan Road, but on the meandering walls of Shanghai Studio. more ›

When Shanghai resident and blogger Jakob Montrasio posted this photo on our Contribute Page, we wondered exactly when he visited the Forbidden City, because the blue skies in the photo weren't in Beijing last week when we were there. Then we realized the photo was taken in Zhejiang Province — a place called Hengdian World Studios (横店影视城) — where a seemingly life-size replica of the Forbidden City can be found (with a small mountain... more ›

The contrarian and sometimes controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未), who was a consultant in the design of the new Olympics stadium (known as the "Bird's Nest"), has disavowed his creation: more ›

Photo by Shanghai Sky taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. more ›

Of course, everyone and their momma's got a blog now, but Sina.com has made it somewhat more official by opening a series of blogs just for the members of the Film Critics Association. It makes it easier to find the work of some of China's more well-known film critics. The blogs are young, you'll find at most a few posts, but it's at least a place you can go to find some interesting opinions and reflections on the state of Chinese cinema as well as the biz. Take Zhang Baiqing's blog, where he discusses the importance of the audience to the film or Yang Yuanying's comments on recent Chinese attempts at big-budget commercial films from Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang. There are a total of thirty prominent film critics' blogs featured here. more ›

From Xinhua we learn that Ridley Scott has purchased the rights to two screenplays—Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) and Genghis Khan (成吉思汗). According to that and other reports, Scott is intent on making a historical epic type film about China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, with the help of Zhang Yimou, whose film Hero featured the first emperor as a character. According to Chinese reports, Scott will probably get down to some serious work on this after the 2008 Olympics, in part because Zhang Yimou's a little busy with the opening and closing ceremony preparations. Though we respect Ridley Scott, we really can't feel an ounce of excitement about yet another historical epic full of grandiose themes that will ooh and ahh us for two, maybe three hours, and then you leave you feeling just about as empty as you did before. more ›

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. more ›

Photo by jules_shangahai 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. more ›

There's a definitely a buzz for fans of Chinese cinema with the release of Jia Zhangke's new film Still Life 《三峡好人》. In Shanghai and probably the rest of China, the film's theatrical release comes on December 14, the same day that Zhang Yimou's new film Curse of the Golden Flower. And while from the standpoint of the box office returns, it seems pretty clear who the winner will be, Jia doesn't at all seem flustered by the lackluster box office performance that his film has seen in the limited screenings that have happened over the last few weeks. more ›

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. more ›

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. more ›

Local police said the lecture was "unacceptable", the newspaper said. more ›

Shanghaiist noticed that the Chinese press was running something about Steven Spielberg making a movie adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West (西游记). Now you don't get much more classic than this: This novel and its characters (Xuanzang a.ka.Tangseng the monk, Sunwukong a.k.a. the Monkey King, Friar Sand a.ka. Sandy, and Pigsy a.k.a Pig) are known to just about every Chinese person alive since the late Ming dynasty, when the novel was published (okay, well it might have taken awhile to catch on). The story received a new lease on life when, in 1986, CCTV put on the live action show, and while some of the effects are complete cheese to us now, back then they were considered something of a milestone in TV. It also proved that people in China could be and were quite willing to be enthralled by this medium. Even today, theme songs and music live in such places as Shanghaiist's girlfriend's mobile phone ring, where quite appropriately, Pigsy's song plays (but don't tell her we said that). more ›

... because he's the head of the jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival, and yet managed to find time during this busy schedule to head up to Beijing to promote his new book and film. People have said that despite the SIFF not being the most prestigious or high-profile of film fests, Besson ought to have taken his job more seriously -- with all those films to watch, and a jury to head (the head of the jury often has to settle disagreements about the films and make sure all decisions are made fairly), how could someone just head over to Beijing, and for three days no less? Bad form -- who knows? In this interview Besson makes it seem as if he worked hard on the 17 films in the competition, but what would you expect him to say? more ›

Shanghaiist has a retraction to make -- what we previously dubbed the "Chinese Oscars" in this post was absolutely wrong, because, naturally, the 6th Chinese Language Movie Awards (第6届华语电影传媒大奖）deserve this title. This awards ceremony had previously been held in the mainland, but this time (April 17), they moved it to Hong Kong. And guess who won? Tony Leung Ka-fei (Liang Jiahui) won best actor for the 80th eighth time for his role in Election (Hei Shehui). The only "surprise" came in the success of Peacock (孔雀), the debut film from cinematographer turned director Gu Changwei, which took home awards for best director, best original screenplay, and best actress for Zhang Jingchu. Election won best film awards, again. We don't get it -- if all these film awards are pretty much the same, and there are so many of them, then isn't each one worth correspondingly less? Does this really award good cinema, or is it just a kind of collective Chinese movie industry circle-jerk in installments? You be the judge. more ›

Amen to that, Stevie. Amen to that. more ›

Yao Ming is tall. He is also good at basketball. We already told you that. He is also China's top celebrity, three years running, according to Forbes. The list takes into account all that is important in life: income, television appearances, newspaper mentions, magazine covers, internet searches, and the like. (Hmmmm. We do a lot of internet searches and we weren't ranked. Likely because we weren't born in Mainland China. Same reason why Jay Chou isn't on the list.) more ›

• Shanghai's luxury hotels took a hit during the Chinese New Year period, and in order to recuperate some of their losses, cut their prices in late January by as much as 50-70 percent. For example, the Sheraton went down from 1600 yuan a night to 728 yuan a night, and the Portman's prices fell from 3000 yuan to just 800 yuan.
• Taobao, one of China's main online auction and shopping sites, is no longer permitting the sale of "original flavor underwear" (原味内衣), i.e. used or worn underwear. According to the reports most of the people selling these items were of the female persuasion, and the prices were generall 20-40 yuan, though some choice items topped the 100 yuan mark.
• Go here for some pictures of graffiti art in Beijing. Some of it ain't bad, artistically speaking, but is probably not good for the building of a harmonious society.

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. more ›

Yu Hua (余华) the author of To Live, a novel that was adapted by Zhang Yimou into a film, released his newest work of fiction in a decade this past July. Entitled Brothers (兄弟), this novel tells the story of a pair of (step) brothers and the trials and tribulations of childhood and adolescence in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. more ›

Aging movie star Jackie Chan, an early Shanghaiist favorite, is bad-mouthing Chris Tucker and his diva-like demands for slowing down production of the third installment of the lucrative Rush Hour franchise, which we have had to live with for seven years now. Seven years! more ›