hero Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With Hollywood types running out of superhero ideas, it would appear the Showtime network has taken the next logical step: how about the gay superhero? And they're certainly not alone on this one; Variety reports that the hourlong project comes from Stan Lee and is based on the book Hero by Perry Moore. The story is said to focus on an "up-and-coming superhero who struggles to hide his secret identities." If anything, it certainly ups the ante and raises the stakes, and, in my opinion, is a pretty interesting idea. Like any superhero, gay men and woman across the globe often hide who they really are for fear society will punish them in some way, shape or form for being different. With the recent Prop. 8 debacle over in California, now is probably the perfect time to combine a popular mainstream genre with a topic more people need to not only come to terms with, but understand and support.

But is there room for a gay superhero amongst today's testosterone-fueled, run-and-gun box office blockbusters? Is this an idea that has potential, or do you see it slipping into territory that makes you feel too uncomfortable? Showtime is a network that likes to take risks with their programming, and so are you afraid the show would spend more time in the bedroom than out fighting crime? And would it be a bad thing to focus more on living as an individual with many secrets versus living as a superhero who loves to kick ass and take names?

Sound off below ...

If you've ever seen a film by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, you might not initially think of him to direct an action movie, even of the slower, more poetic wuxia genre that includes films like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's Hero and other recent works. But the master director has long confessed in interviews that he'd like to make a martial arts picture, and even as far back as 2002, Hou was attached to helm an adaptation of Pei Xing's 9th century fantasy novel "Nie Yin Niang," about a female assassin, which was then reportedly titled Xia Nü.

Six years later, following his first non-Taiwanese film (the Ozu tribute Café Lumiere), the triptych Three Times and his first Western project (Flight of the Red Balloon), Hou seems to finally be on track to making his wuxia dreams come true. Variety reports that his adaptation of "Nie Yin Niang," now titled The Assassin (or maybe The Hidden Heroine, or simply Nie Yin Niang), has received funding from the Taiwanese government's National Development Fund and is therefore moving forward with a pre-production start date of October 1 and shooting expected to begin in early 2009.

As a lovelorn cop in Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express, he ate expired cans of pineapple; as a mute urban guerrilla in Wong's Fallen Angels, he broke into other people's businesses and forced passers-by to be his customers. Those were the first two films in which I saw Takeshi Kaneshiro; his brooding, romantic looks have served him well in a career that has ranged all over Asia -- aided, no doubt, by his broad appeal and multi-lingual talents. Born in Taiwan, he speaks Japanese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

His highest profile titles in the West have probably been the Japanese science fiction action picture The Returner and Zhang Yimou's costumed martial arts epic House of Flying Daggers. He's one of the stars of the just released action epic The Warlords (which has done boffo box office) and will also be featured in John Woo's upcoming Red Cliff. Kaneshiro will also be starring in The Fiend With Twenty Faces (AKA K-20: Kaijin niju menso den), according to a recent story by Mark Schilling at Variety Asia Online.

Kaneshiro will play a master criminal plying his trade in a fictional Japanese city in 1949. The lovely Takako Matsu -- who is coming off a lead performance in the big fall hit Hero -- has been set to portray a victim of "The Fiend" and veteran Toro Nakamura will co-star as a detective. Shimako Sato will direct. Filming is scheduled to begin in January and Toho plans to release it in December 2008. I'm hard pressed at the moment to think of a role in which Kaneshiro has played someone that could be called a "fiend," so I'll be very interested to see what comes of a film that's been described as a mystery crime drama.

In the United States, movie studios generally wait until television shows have been canceled for years before making a film version. Why is that? Different audiences? Different expectations? Desire to milk a show dry of creative ideas before reaping millions in syndication and sales of DVD box sets? It's different in Japan. As Mark Schilling of The Japan Times points out, "Japanese drama shows usually have limited runs of 11 episodes or so, no matter how stratospheric their ratings. They can have profitable afterlives on DVD and other media, but not the sort of syndicated eternities enjoyed by the most popular U.S. shows. Japanese producers have explained this difference to me by saying that, for local audiences, dramas are like news -- and thus naturally have short life cycles."

Some shows, however, can roar back to life on the big screen. Popular 1997 TV series Bayside Shakedown inspired four movie versions over a period of seven years. More recently, the 2001 series Hero was revived for a special that aired in July 2006 to great success, followed by a feature version that was released in September and has proven to be the year's biggest box office hit.

Chihiro Kameyama is the man behind the success of both Bayside Shakedown and Hero. (I talked briefly with him for an article in AFI Fest Daily News a couple of years ago; he's very sharp, focused and engaged.) His latest TV-to-movie property is based on the new hit show Galileo; Variety reports that filming on the movie version, entitled Suspect X, will start early next year with the goal of completing the film in time for a fall 2008 release. Galileo stars Masahuru Fukuyama "as a misfit physicist who helps girl cop Kou Shibasaki (pictured; Maiko Haaan!!!, Memories of Matsuko) solve crimes." The series is based on a novel by mystery writer Keigo Higashino; Variety says the movie will be based on another novel by Higashino.

I first noticed it back in 1999. While working as a film critic during what became an extraordinary year for movies, there was one month in which everything started to suck. Movies like The Thomas Crown Affair, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Brokedown Palace, Outside Providence, Mickey Blue Eyes, In Too Deep, The Astronaut's Wife, A Dog of Flanders and Chill Factor appeared one after another, leading a colleague and myself to brand the phenomenon as the "August Dumping Ground."

Indeed, this name has proven apt: Movies that open in August are the ones that studios don't really know what to do with. Sometimes they've been shelved for a couple of years and the studios simply shuttle them out as a kind of house cleaning. Last year we had John Dahl's dud war movie The Great Raid and Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, in which it was obvious (to put it lightly) that Gilliam did not receive final cut. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo also graced American screens during this period. In 2004, Spike Lee's awful She Hate Me and the butchered, Renny Harlin version of Exorcist: The Beginning opened. 2003 gave us the infamous Gigli.

But studios don't always know what they're doing. The most famous recent example came in 2004 when Miramax released the two year-old martial arts classic Hero in August, convinced that they had a flop on their hands -- a Crouching Tiger retread. It made a fortune, placed on several critics' ten best lists (including mine) and has now eclipsed Crouching Tiger as a pinnacle of the genre.