ziyi zhang Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Oh, the irony of ironies when the Dennis Quaid serial killer mystery The Horsemen had a tagline that said "Come and see," only to receive an unceremonious dump on something like 75 screens in early March and its first formal review just this week in Variety (and they had to catch it in Paris, apparently!). Box Office Mojo can't even claim any exact figures for what the thing grossed in its very limited run.

In similar straits was the Diane Lane/Mickey Rourke thriller, Killshot, which was formally dumped in Arizona and Arizona alone at the end of January. $18,000 on five screens -- way to capitalize on that Wrestler buzz, Weinsteins. But soon, scarcity will matter not for either film, as Fangoria says that the former film will get its DVD release on July 14th, while Amazon claims a May 26th bow for the latter.

There's no word on special features for Killshot yet, which makes me wonder if we'll see any sign of Johnny Knoxville's reportedly excised character... but maybe I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Eight years ago, Zhang Ziyi soared into public consciousness as the tempestuous heroine in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She's continued to score in sumptuous epics like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and The Banquet, as well as off-beat pleasures such as Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. (Let's all try to forget Memoirs of a Geisha, shall we?) In her latest film, which opened in China last week, she plays a Peking Opera singer.

Forever Enthralled is the English title of Mei Lanfang; the name of a real-life, internationally-recognized opera star well-known for playing female roles over the course of a career that lasted more than 50 years. Leon Lai, a veteran Hong Kong actor and pop singer, takes on the challenging assignment to play the legendary character, while Zhang plays fellow performer Meng Xiaodong, who was known for playing bearded men (?!). The two singers met, married, became parents, and divorced, all between 1925 and 1931.

At a press conference (pictured above, thanks to Ziyifilms), Zhang said: "The hardest thing is walking, wearing these really tall boots ... I practiced that for a very long time." All that practice paid off. Variety Asia Online reports that the film is "on course to quality for a hit," though it probably won't break any records.

Chen Kaige directed; years ago he made Farewell My Concubine, * also set in the opera world. More recently he ventured into epic action territory with the spectacular misfire The Promise. My friend Todd Brown at Twitch posted the Forever Enthralled trailer, which looks like a great match of stars, director, and material. IMDb lists Miramax as having US theatrical rights, though it's not listed on their site. I hope we get to see this one without having to wait forever.

* UPDATE: Title corrected. Thanks to Larry for pointing out my mistake.

Her first Hollywood production (Things We Lost in the Fire) didn't pan out so good, but perhaps Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier will do better with romantic comedy than with serious drama. She's set to direct Lost for Words, a Universal Pictures release that may star the bumbling Brit Hugh Grant and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. With such diverse international talent , it's easy to imagine that the movie's title will also be a good description of the set between takes.

The plot of Lost for Words actually has to do with film set communications. Grant is in negotiations to play a movie star appearing in a film directed by a Chinese woman (Zhang). He develops feelings for her, but unfortunately he initially becomes involved with her flirtatious translator. So, if he's to confess his love for the non-English-speaking filmmaker, he must do so through this other woman, whose heart he must first break. I guess he isn't aware that love is a universal language and he could simply just point to his heart and then to her and then they can have a perfect, wordless affair.

Lost for Words was scripted by Jamie Curtis (Spice World) and Oscar nominee Dan Mazer (Borat). Bier is also kind of an Oscar nominee; her last Scandinavian production, After the Wedding, was up for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

Under it's original English-language title, The Banquet, Feng Xiaogang's loose, Chinese-language adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet played various film festivals (Venice, Toronto, AFI Fest, Palm Springs, Portland, Seattle, New York Asian) and garnered a fair amount of praise. Featuring many stately speeches, beautiful costumes, and stars Ziyi Zhang and Daniel Wu, The Banquet struck me as too inert for its own good, but I respected what the filmmakers accomplished.

The Banquet is a classy and distinguished moniker, somewhat anonymous, but reflective of the affairs of state depicted therein. The film's home video rights were finally sold to DVD distributor Dragon Dynasty. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to rename it as -- drum roll, please -- The Legend of the Black Scorpion. In the words of more than one message board commenter across the globe: "What the f***?"

This title is just as anonymous as the original but bespeaks a poverty of imagination, as though every Asian movie set in the past needs to be prefixed with "Legend." Dragon Dynasty's parent, The Weinstein Co., has done this for years, in fact, starting off by changing Drunken Master II (starring Jackie Chan) to The Legend of Drunken Master, and then retitling Fong Sai Yuk and Fong Sai Yuk 2 (both starring Jet Li) to the more English-friendly The Legend and The Legend 2, and changing Swordsman II (also with Jet Li) to The Legend of the Swordsman.

Back in May, Ziyi Zhang was in talks for a Chinese opera biopic called Mei Lanfang. With filming currently underway on that production, Zhang is looking for her next role, and Variety reports that she may have found it in the long-awaited, aptly-titled Waiting. Based on Ha Jin's National Book Award-winning novel, the English-language adaptation was originally conceived in 2001, for Chow Yun-fat to star in. Now that a number of years have passed, they're looking to a younger generation -- namely Ziyi Zhang and Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) -- to finalize talks. Peter Chan started adapting the novel when it was first tapped for a feature, and the film will still be directed by him once post-production is finished on Warlords.

Waiting details the life of a doctor in China's Revolutionary Army who struggles to do what he thinks is right. When his mother is dying, he agrees to an arranged marriage -- with a country woman he finds to look much older than she is, and one who has bound feet. He doesn't love his arranged life and he lives at an army hospital, so he only visits his wife and family once a year. He falls in love with a nurse, but both are bound by Communist law -- he has to be separated from his wife for 18 years before he can divorce her. The couple then wait (hence the title) so that they might consummate their relationship. 18 years...that's dedication.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.