gong li Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As I reported in December, Danny and Oxide Pang (Bangkok Dangerous, The Messengers) were hired to direct the sequel to action fantasy The Storm Riders. More details have surfaced at the Hong Kong Filmart, according to Variety. Filming begins next month with original stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng set to return; Simon Yam, Nicholas Tse, and Charlene Choi will also star. The picture will be the first Hong Kong movie filmed exclusively on blue screen, a la 300, though the budget is just $12 million, compared to 300's estimated cost of $65 million. The Storm Riders II is due for release at the end of 2009.

Variety is also reporting that the wonderfully versatile Gary Oldman is in "advanced negotiations" to star in Rain Fall, the "story of a hit man who is forced to protect the daughter of one of his victims against assassination by the C.I.A." If the deal goes through, Oldman would join Shiina Kippei (Shinobi) and actress Akiho Hasegawa. Max Mannix will direct the Japan-set thriller; veteran producer Satoru Iseki is employing "sophisticated Western financing techniques" to get the picture made.

We've been tracking World War II action epic Shanghai since last summer. Production was expected to start this spring in Shanghai, but the Chinese authorities denied the shooting permit after the Weinstein Co. had spent nearly three million dollars building sets. Variety says that production has now been shifted to Thailand and England, though there's no word on a new start date. The film will be directed by Mikael Håfström and stars John Cusack, Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.

We first caught wind of Shanghai this past summer, as part of the announcement that The Weinstein Co. had landed $285 million to make Asian-themed films. At the time it was described simply as "an action epic set during World War II." A few months later, James Rocchi told us that John Cusack was in negotiations to star as "an American expat who returns to Shanghai in the months before Pearl Harbor due to the death of his friend." James noted that the beautiful Gong Li had already been cast, and that director Mikael Håfström was on board. Cusack and Håfström previously worked together on 1408.

Variety Asia Online is reporting that another piece of the puzzle has been added: Ken Watanabe has joined the cast. No details are offered about the role he will play, though the article fleshes out the plot a little. Referring to the character that will be played by Cusack (now confirmed to star), the article states: "While trying to solve the murder [of his friend], he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding." Hossein Amini wrote the script; he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The Wings of the Dove, and also adapted Jude as well as the more recent Killshot.

Watanabe has great presence; he shot to prominence opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai and was memorable in both Batman Begins and Letters from Iwo Jima; he also received kudos for his work as a businessman beset by Alzheimer's Disease in Memories of Tomorrow. During the time period covered in the upcoming film, Shanghai was occupied by Japan, but, as noted above, we'll have to wait and see which part the Japanese-born Watanabe will play. Production is expected to start this spring in Shanghai. Watanabe was also recently cast in Cirque du Freak, which rolls this month, but I presume the filming schedules are compatible.

It must be a wonderful thing to have the kind of voice that gets you film and TV work. Getting paid handsomely to sit on your ass for a few hours is really the American dream, isn't it? There's a very entertaining piece over at theage.com about the people who dub America's biggest stars in other countries. The article shines the spotlight on these unsung heroes, who don't even get acknowledged in the credits. Claudia Motta is "Mexico's Kirsten Dunst." Any time KD graces the screen with her talents, Motta is there to translate. Motta made 10,000 pesos for playing Mary Jane in Spider-Man -- $1100 American dollars. Not too shabby for a job you can do in your sweat pants! And should Dunst ever stop making movies -- which I think might make a lot of Cinematical commenters happy -- Motta can always make money elsewhere. She's been dubbing Bart Simpson for ten years.

Francoise Cadol is "France's Angelina Jolie." She is, naturally, chummy with "France's Brad Pitt." Cadol also dubs Gong Li, Patricia Arquette, Sandra Bullock, and Mary Alice from Desperate Housewives. Italian dubber Giuppy Izzo must have an incredibly obnoxious voice -- she does both Renee Zellweger and Ellen Pompeo on Grey's Anatomy. "China's Tom Cruise" -- Ren Wei -- has also been Ewan McGregor, John Travolta, and Hugh Jackman. Daniella Hoffman -- "Germany's Julia Roberts" -- got her gig by being able to do "a good, really filthy laugh, just like Julia." These voice actors really commit to their roles. They run around the studio, lie on the floor, whatever helps them get the voice perfect. The article is full of such interesting tidbits. In China, for example, dubbing is an incredibly quick process in order to beat the bootleggers. In France, dubbing is taken very seriously -- even leading to voice stalkers. I'll bet Gilbert Gottfried doesn't have to deal with that!

If you've never seen Dino De Laurentiis in person, you're really missing something. The legendary 87-year old producer commanded the stage at this week's junket for Hannibal Rising, arriving at the table with his younger, blonde wife beside him, and eventually getting as many questions from the press as the stars of the film. When he told the assembled journalists that this film was his idea, and that he called author Thomas Harris and wore him down until Harris agreed to write it, it seemed entirely believable. This is the fourth Hannibal Lecter adventure, and instead of being sheepish about that, De Laurentiis went on at length about how this is only the beginning. He views the Lecter franchise as one that can be as durable as James Bond, with new actors taking over as it goes on from year to year. Whether that happens, of course, will depend entirely on how Hannibal Rising does at the box office.

Also on hand for the press day were director Peter Webber, of Girl With the Pearl Earring, and the film's stars, French newcomer Gaspar Ulliel, who plays the young Hannibal Lecter, and Chinese star Gong Li, who listened to and answered questions entirely through a Chinese-English translator who sat beside her. Here's a sampling of what went on during the brief press conference:

Dino De Laurentiis

Cinematical: Dino, did this project begin with Anthony Hopkins saying no to doing a fourth Hannibal film? "Not at all. I can tell you the story. When I did the promotion all around the world for Hannibal and Red Dragon, everybody asked me 'Dino, we need to know when and where Hannibal Lecter started.' I don't give it much attention. But then I receive so much mail in a few years, with the same question, and I come to the conclusion that the audience wants to see the beginning of life for Hannibal Lecter. Anthony Hopkins, seventeen years old? We need a boy, nineteen years old. Ha! Now, I start to say 'maybe this is an idea, to create a new franchise, with a new story, and tell the audience how Hannibal Lecter started. It was not so easy a problem. My first call to Tom Harris, he said 'Dino, really, I don't know...' To make the story short, little by little, I convinced Tom Harris to create a new story. He says 'okay, Dino, I can put down a twenty page outline. If you like it and we are in sync, then I do a book and a script.' He sends me the twenty page outline and it was fantastic. I said 'Tom, let's proceed.' Then he started to do the book and the script -- sometimes he had to stop the book and go to the script, because of priorities and vice-versa -- this is the way the picture started.

In the course of Hollywood history, movie genres have grown from the the lower regions, among the ticket buyers and popcorn munchers, in the Saturday matinees and with the dime store, penny-a-word trash classics. The Western was the first of these, making its movie debut as early as the movies themselves, with The Great Train Robbery (1903). Not fifty years had gone by before some wise guy had the idea to take this ground-level idea and turn it into an impressive, blue-ribbon pageant, a noble, tasteful new object worthy of respect. These came in the form of High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), praised through word of mouth, as Westerns for people who don't ordinarily like Westerns. Critics ate them up. And, if you'll notice, the Western genre is more or less gone.

The same thing happened to musicals. As soon as pictures learned to talk and all through the 1950s, musicals ruled, and plenty of great, small ones crooned and tapped their way across screens, much to the unfettered joy of fans. But in the 1960s, the graceless, inflated, gargantuan West Side Story (1961) -- a musical for people who don't ordinarily like musicals -- came along. And now the musical is more or less gone (and, I'm sorry, but Dreamgirls doesn't count).

No one but Michael Mann knows why, exactly, he went back to his TV show Miami Vice to bring it to the big screen. If you're an optimist, you can think it was because Mann had something he wanted to say with the continued adventures of Miami undercover narcotics detectives Crockett and Tubbs; if you're a pessimist, you can think that Mann chose to act preemptively, before someone else glommed on to his brainchildren and revamped them. Whether it was a dream of hard-edged urban action or a nightmare of Sean William Scott's face grinning idiotically out from The Dukes of Hazzard poster is immaterial. Miami Vice the movie is here, and can be viewed in the context of no context for what it is: A nicely-made, well-shot popcorn crunching action flick with enough style and flash to hide how ultimately hollow it is.

And even with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx stepping in to fill the (sockless) shoes of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas from the NBC version of Miami Vice that ran from 1984 to 1989, the real star of the film is its director. Mann's returned to the same mix of digital and film to capture Miami Vice that he used in Collateral, and the results are apparent from the first scene. As Crockett (Farrell) and Tubbs (Foxx) nose through a crowded nightclub to tail a possible perp, the crowd isn't held at the phony-staged distance at which you'd have to keep the extras to make room for a bulky film camera; instead, it crushes up to the camera's point of view, sweaty and dancing and jostling by in pursuit of a drink, a possible partner or the next high.

With a Michael Mann film, I've come to expect that I won't have time to open my notebook, let alone jot down many details. His work, which includes Heat, The Insider and Collateral, is typically that engaging. This isn't something I mind, because even though I'm a critic, I prefer to enjoy the movies I'm watching rather than to meticulously dissect them as they play out on the screen. I tend to leave the analysis for when I get home, where I can think about the movie as a whole.

However, with Mann's latest film, Miami Vice, which is based on the hit television show he executive produced in the '80s, I not only found moments in which to open my notebook, but I was bored enough with the film to fill up pages, mostly with ramblings about how little I've come to accept those meet-and-greet scenes involving undercover cops and drug dealers. You know, the ones in which the cops attempt to convince the dealers that they are not what they indeed are. These scenes all proceed in the exact same way, right down to the dealer's doubting bluff, therefore by now they should be easily accepted, and yet I always find them instead to be ridiculously unbelievable. Anyway, I could go on -- I did during the movie -- but there's no point in concentrating on one little scene. Besides, I wrote down a lot of other things that I can share, such as, "This movie has some awesome clouds in it." I think that note especially speaks for how engaging the actual story was for me.

Because they just can't get enough Zhang Yimou, Sony Pictures Classics have picked up the North and Latin American rights to his latest project, Curse of the Golden Flower (you may have heard of it back when it was called The City of Golden Armor). Despite the distributor's history with Zhang (they've work with him on eight previous films, including House of Flying Daggers and Hero), in the face Hollywood's growing trepidation about the market strength of Chinese action-romance films, the fact that the buy has been made before the film is even finished shooting seems like a major vote of confidence, both for Zhang and the Chinese industry. That said, of course, the presence of stars Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li probably didn't hurt, either, since the pair of them are among the most recognizable stars in Asian cinema, at least to American eyes.

If you buy the press release blather about the film, it's apparently going to be the Best! Movie! Ever! "From Gong Li's stunning performance to Chow Yun Fat's commanding presence to opulence one has rarely ever seen on screen, this movie will have it all: Brilliantly executed action set pieces as well as compelling intimate drama against the most colorful historical canvas imaginable." Mmm ... hyperbole.