The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| China unveils rare star power of Oscar entry Posted: 11 Dec 2011 07:21 AM PST BEIJING, Dec 11 — Zhang Yimou, one of China's best-known directors, is banking on heartthrob Christian Bale to help boost the country's chances of winning an Oscar, with his latest film on a tragic chapter in the nation's history. "The Flowers of War", China's Academy Award entry for best foreign language film, centres on a mortician (Bale) who gets caught up in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and has to save a group of schoolgirls from the clutches of the Japanese.  Star power: Christian Bale, best supporting actor nominee for his role in "The Fighter" at this year's Oscars. — Reuters pic The film, which hits Chinese screens on Friday followed a week later by a limited release in the United States, holds little back in its graphic depiction of the events of more than eight decades ago, a story everyone in China knows well. To a Chinese audience, the almost caricature-like Japanese soldiers — who at one point erupt in glee at finding virgins to rape — are part and parcel of what they are taught in school about an event that continues to poison Sino-Japan relations. But the movie is also heavy on nationalism and saturated with the patriotic pride typical of how the Chinese movie industry views such emotive parts of the nation's history. Bale, though, said he thought it unfair to view it as a propaganda film. "It's a historical piece," he told reporters. "I certainly never viewed it as that myself. I think that would be a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. If anybody had that response I don't think they're looking closely enough at the movie. "It's far more a movie about human beings and the nature of human beings' responses to crisis, and how that can reduce people to the most animalistic behaviour but also raise them up to the most honourable behaviour you could ever witness." China says invading Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 men, women and children in Nanjing, then known as Nanking. An Allied tribunal after World War Two put the death toll at about 142,000. But some Japanese historians say the massacre has been exaggerated and some conservatives deny there was even a massacre. Sino-Japanese ties have been overshadowed for years by what Beijing says has been Tokyo's refusal to admit to atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in the country between 1931 and 1945. "Obviously there are fewer people in the West who are familiar with the Rape of Nanking," said Bale. "Myself, I knew about it. I owned the book and had never read it. So I came to know far more about it." Billed as the first Chinese movie to star a major Western actor, the country has high hopes it will snag an Oscar. Zhang downplayed that. "We can work as hard as possible but really it's up to the gods. I really don't understand what the rules are for getting an Oscar," he said. While Chinese movie moguls may be hoping for an ascendance on the world's silver screens to match the country's rise on the global political and economic stage by matching a Hollywood face to the Chinese story, Bale said for him it was more about working with someone like Zhang. "It seemed like a very natural thing to do. I was excited by the notion of making a Chinese movie, of making a movie with someone as masterful as Yimou. I'm quite myopic in my approach to the movies that I want to make." — Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Lifetime remaking ‘The Blue Lagoon’ Posted: 11 Dec 2011 01:50 AM PST  Brooke Shields as she is today, arriving at the 15th annual Webby Awards in New York, June 13, 2011. — Reuters pic Lifetime confirmed to TheWrap that the made-for-TV do-over will be produced by Neil Meron and Craig Zadan's Storyline Entertainment and Judith Verno's Peace Out Productions, in association with Sony Pictures Television. The 1980 movie starred Shields and Christopher Atkins as Emmeline and Richard, two children who grow up together while marooned on a deserted island, fall in love, experiment with the birds and the bees and don't initially realise why Emmeline's tummy begins to grow. The Lifetime remake will actually be the third version of the movie; the story is based on a 1908 novel by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, as the first of a "Blue Lagoon" trilogy. A 1949 movie adaptation of the first novel starred Oscar nominee Jean Simmons and Donald Houston. In 1991, Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause both earned Razzie nominees as the stars of "Return to the Blue Lagoon", a sequel to the 1980 film. The movie becomes the second big-screen-to-boob-tube makeover in Lifetime's upcoming slate. The network is also producing a remake of "Steel Magnolias", the 1989 drama that earned Julia Roberts her first Oscar nomination. The Lifetime remake will feature an all-black cast. — Reuters Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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