REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

In 1971, as Mao's Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals" to the countryside, two teenage boys are sent to live on the remote and unforgiving mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Even though the knowledge the narrator and his best friend Luo had acquired in middle school was "precisely nil," they are nevertheless considered dangerous intellectuals and forced to spend their days carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain to fertilize the fields. But when they bargain their way into obtaining a forbidden Balzac novel from their friend Four Eyes, a new and dizzyingly vast world opens up to them. Through Balzac, the narrator discovers "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden" [p. 57]. And when Luo falls in love with the beautiful Little Seamstress, life and literature come together in a passionate romance. Luo and the narrator plot to steal Four Eyes' suitcase full of books both for their own pleasure and to transform the seamstress from a simple peasant into a sophisticated woman. Their success in doing so, and the unexpected consequences that follow, drive the novel to its stunning, heart-wrenching conclusion.

Part historical novel, part fable, part love story, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a moving testament to the transformative power of literature.

Reading Groups Guide

 

Classic Chinese Movies - A Chinese Ghost Story - 1987

 

천녀유혼(倩女幽魂 A Chinese Ghost Story 1987)
- 감독 : 정소동
- 출연 : 故 장국영(영채신 役), 왕조현(섭소천 役), 우마(연적하 役)
- 개봉 : 1987년

1980년대 후반 10대/20대를 보낸 대한민국 남자라면 모두가 잊지 못하고 기억할 그 이름, 왕조현. 이제는 어느덧 40대의 중년 여인이 되어 버린 그녀지만, 아직도 가끔씩 그 시절-그 영화-그녀를 떠올리면 혼자 엷은 미소를 짓게 된다.

Cheonnyeoyuhon (倩女幽魂 A Chinese Ghost Story 1987)
Director: jeongsodong
- Cast: 故 Leslie Cheung (youngchaesin 役), wangjohyeon (seopsocheon 役), Uma (yeonjeokha 役)
- Released: 1987

The late 1980s, 10 / 20s Republic of Korea sent a man to remember his name, if not all forget, wangjohyeon. Mature eoneudeot 40s now she has fallen, but those days are still occasionally - the movie - is remembering her pale smile alone is summed.

This is a machine (Google) translation of Korean that was uploaded by the individual who uploaded the video.  It is not very good.  Obviously.  Anyone who is fluent in Korean may send to me their version.   Additionally, Chinese may submit their versions in Chinese with English translation.

wdb

Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦)

The Hatchet Man

Even in 1932, it was a bit difficult to accept Edward G. Robinson as a hatchet-wielding Chinese hit man. Now, the idea seems both hilarious and a little offensive. Those who can manage to limit their guffaws will find in The Hatchet Man (1932) an interesting twist on Robinson’s usual characters.

The film springs from the notoriety of the Tong wars. Tongs were associations that formed among the newly arrived immigrants of America’s Chinatown. As with other such organizations that claimed to protect immigrants, the Tongs became criminal in nature. Everyone in Chinatown had to pay fees to the Tong association, which provided “protection.” Their enforcers were the “boo how doy” or, as they became known in the English-language press, the hatchet men. Their blades filed to razor sharpness, the hatchet men left their death-dealing instruments in the skulls of anyone who crossed the Tong. In the 1870’s and 1880’s rival gangs of hatchet men would go after one another in the streets, events that became known through widespread newspaper coverage as “Tong wars.”

In a way, putting Edward G. Robinson in a film about hatchet men makes sense. Warner Brothers had purchased the David Belasco – Achmed Abdullah play The Honorable Mr. Wong about the Tong wars. Tongs were like the Chinese version of gangsters, right? So who else to put in the lead but Warner Brothers’ leading gangster star, famous for his portrayal of Little Caesar (1931)?

The story has Robinson as Wong Low Get, the most highly respected hatchet man of his Tong. Having sworn total allegiance, he cannot turn down an order, even one to kill his best friend Sun Yat Sen (J. Carroll Naish). His friend forgives him in advance of his execution, begging only that Wong raise his daughter Toya San (Loretta Young) as his own. Wong does as he has sworn but as she grows up he falls in love with her. She marries him out of a sense of obligation but a handsome gangster, Harry En Hai (Leslie Fenton) gets her to leave Wong, disgracing him and leading to a shocking turn of events.

As was typical of the time, almost no Asian actors appear in the cast of a film set completely among Chinese characters. Makeup artists had noticed that audiences were more likely to reject Western actors in Asian disguise if the faces of actual Asians were in near proximity. Rather than cast the film with all Asian actors, which would have then meant no star names to attract American audiences, studios simply eliminated most of the Asian actors from the cast.

William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy, 1931, The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943) was then directing six films a year for Warner Brothers and brought both a polish and speed to his movies, making them superior entertainments for their time. Made during the few years before strict enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, The Hatchet Man has elements that would not be allowed later such as adultery, narcotics and a somewhat graphic use of a flying hatchet.

Director: William A. Wellman
Screenplay: J. Grubb Alexander, play by Achmed Abdullah and David Belasco
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Film Editing: Owen Marks
Art Direction: Anton Grot
Music: Bernhard Kaun
Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Wong Low Get), Loretta Young (Sun Toya San), Dudley Digges (Nog Hong Fah), Leslie Fenton (Harry En Hai), Edmund Breese (Yu Chang), Tully Marshall (Long Sen Yat), J. Carrol Naish (Sun Yat Ming).
BW-74m.

by Brian Cady

On location with China's movie industry

TENGCHONG, China—In a remote and mountainous part of China's southwest Yunnan province on a cool autumn morning, three of Asia's top movie stars are waiting for the action to begin.

Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tang Wei have traveled with the rest of the 200-plus crew to this isolated spot near the border with Myanmar, where they have been camped out since late August.

"Wu Xia," from director Peter Chan, is a $20 million martial-arts drama slated for release next summer. The story, which takes place during the end of the Qing Dynasty, is about a repentant killer living a simple life in a secluded village and whose past catches up with him.

Mr. Chan, one of Asia's most-successful filmmakers, is looking to put a new spin on the martial-arts genre with "Wu Xia," which translates roughly as "martial-arts chivalry." He's assembled an A-list cast, two cinematographers, an award-winning costume designer, and a visual-effects team from South Korea to bring what he describes as detailed authenticity to the film. Its ambition underscores the current trend in Chinese cinema toward highly polished blockbusters.

We Pictures

On the run in 'Wu Xia'

Still, there is little Hollywood glamour out here on location.

Filming today is in a tiny village about an hour's drive from Tengchong, a city of several hundred thousand—relatively small by Chinese standards—in western Yunnan. Tengchong is home for the cast and crew during the shoot. Getting to today's location involves a convoy of trucks, buses, vans and cars—all of us sharing the road with villagers and livestock along a series of smooth two-lane highways and bumpy, unpaved paths through fields and forests. To get to the shoot, the crew and cast—sporting shin-high rubber boots to trek around in the mud—hike across steep terrain marked by rocks and puddles to the river valley below.

read more at The Wall Street Journal

I Wish I Knew

Portraits of a City

Pieces of the past Demolition work on the Bund, in a scene from I Wish I Knew

• Almost everything you hear about Shanghai is accompanied by words like futuristic and fast. That makes I Wish I Knew, a low-tech film by Jia Zhangke — China's most interesting contemporary director — a refreshing change of pace. It's a delightful history of the city, told through interviews with past and present residents or those with strong connections — among them actresses Wei Wei and Rebecca Pan and filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, who set his acclaimed Flowers of Shanghai in the city.
• Jia made I Wish I Knew for the now concluded World Expo, but didn't expect that it would make it past the censors. The biggest risk he took involved temporal focus. Many recent representations of Shanghai zip straight from the era of rickshaws to that of maglev trains, in a local variant of the national chronology filmmaker Zhang Yimou employed in the pageant he created for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games; Zhang rushed from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to today with no stops in the Qing (1644-1911), Republican (1912-49) or Mao eras. I Wish I Knew, by contrast, lingers on two periods that get short shrift: the mid- to late 1940s, when the Nationalists were in charge, and the 1960s and '70s. Most notably, while high-profile presentations of Chinese history tend to ignore the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), several of Jia's subjects allude to the suffering it caused. (See pictures of Shanghai's World Expo.)

          Read more at Time

The Asian Challenge to Jon Stewart's Dominance

Yes, of course, I'm scare-mongering. As with many other "imminent threats" from the unstoppable Chinese and their East Asian neighbors, the idea that Comedy Central will soon lose its #1 rank in politics-based humor is an exaggeration.

And yet....!! You can't minimize what the NMA ("Next Media Animation") group in Taiwan could be capable of. They've made an art form out of campy but compulsively watchable CGI reenactments of events in the news, with a rich helping of the tabloidesque. The first one that was widely noticed in the US was their dramatization of the Tiger-v-Elin Woods tussle last year.

Two election-related features from NMA to get on the record now, as the world watches  America going to the polls. First, their distillation of Christine O'Donnell's campaign themes, including her warning about China's "carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over the United States."

The full clip is here and in embed below.
  On the same China-menace theme, NMA has also done a remix of the famous/ infamous "Chinese Professor" ad. Perhaps it is one degree more obvious and less deft than the O'Donnell, Woods, or Sarah Palin items but it is still effective in its own way. (It's worth noting the rococo element to the satire here. In America, the "Chinese Professor" ad might evoke fears of Asians in general or ethnic Chinese as a group, which would certainly affect people in Taiwan -- but also specific fears of the government in Beijing, which at times is the object of fear-mongering in Taiwan too.)  In any case worth seeing as a complement to the original ad, (whose audience full of "Chinese students" is actually the result of a casting call in the DC area) and for the surprising star turn by the surly panda at the end.

Read more at The Atlantic -James Fallows

Chinese Monkey King story adapted in $60M 3-D film

HONG KONG (AP) — The Monkey King character from Chinese folklore will be revived in a $60 million 3-D blockbuster starring Donnie Yen and Chow Yun-fat, as local filmmakers try to match the massive success of "Avatar" by launching their own productions in the new format.

The Monkey King, also known as Sun Wukong, hails from the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West," which describes a Buddhist monk's pilgrimage to India to collect religious texts. He is protected by three disciples, including a fighting monkey with magical powers.

The popular story is frequently adapted in stage productions, movies and TV series. It received the Hollywood treatment in 2008 when Lionsgate released "The Forbidden Kingdom," which costarred Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who played the Monkey King.

Now Chinese filmmakers are answering with a big-budget adaptation of their own.

Hong Kong director Soi Cheang started shooting "Monkey King" in Beijing on Oct. 8 with Yen in the title role and Chow playing a mythical emperor, Hong Kong-based Filmko Entertainment, one of the investors, said in a statement Monday. Other stars include actor-singer Aaron Kwok and actresses Kelly Chen, Cecilia Cheung and Gigi Leung.

"Monkey King" follows the character's life story before his India trip, when he attacked the Heavenly Kingdom with the Buffalo Demon King (Kwok), upset that he was snubbed by its rulers — a move that led to his imprisonment until the pilgrimage.

Read more at Google Hosted News

Aftershock (2010) 唐山大地震 - Official Trailer [HD]

'Aftershock,' China's domestic box-office champ, finds a way to U.S. theaters

"Aftershock," China's highest-grossing domestic film of all time, has found a way into U.S. theaters. The movie, which played at the Toronto International Film Festival, will open at selected AMC theaters across the country Friday. Earlier this month, China Lion Film Distribution announced a partnership with AMC Entertainment to introduce mainstream Chinese films to American audiences.

Directed by one of the country's most popular directors, Feng Xiaogang, "Aftershock" revolves around the aftermath of the massive 1976 Tangshan earthquake.

Made for $20 million, which is a big budget by Chinese cinema standards, "Aftershock" was released in 5,000 standard and 14 IMAX theaters this summer in China. By August, it had outgrossed "The Founding of a Republic" to become the most successful Chinese film with nearly $80 million in ticket sales. ("Avatar" remains the all-time king of the Chinese box office, with more than $200 million in sales.) "Aftershock" is also China's official entry in the foreign-language Oscar category

The Los Angeles Times

Zhang calls new film a back-to-basics romance

BUSAN, South Korea — Veteran Chinese director Zhang Yimou unveiled his new romance to foreign audiences at Asia's leading film festival on Wednesday, calling it a simple love story that sheds the bright colors and epic scale of his recent productions.

Set against China's decade-long ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution, "Under the Hawthorn Tree" follows the relationship between a high school student sent to work in the countryside and a young geologist.

Zhang hones in on the prudishness and sexual ignorance that characterized courtships at a time when China was caught up in revolutionary fever and closed to Western influences.

Hand-holding is taboo and hugs are tentative. The female character rejects help as she crosses a creek with her love interest — relenting only to holding onto a common tree branch found lying on the ground. But their hands slide and link. A peck on the cheek sparks a squeamish look. A planned night of intimacy ends in awkward, clothed slumber.

"Indeed, there are many major commercial productions in China these days. The movies have displayed different kinds of glamor. It is unusual to suddenly make a basic, no-frills small film like this," Zhang told a news conference at South Korea's Pusan International Film Festival. The festival kicked off Wednesday with the first screening of "Under the Hawthorn Tree" outside of China.

"I was just touched by the love story of these two young people," he said. "I wanted to show the young people of today an innocent kind of love."

Zhang was a major driver behind China's deluge of historical and kung fu epics in the past decade, his contributions including the martial arts films "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" and the imperial court drama "Curse of the Golden Flower." He also dazzled the world with his massive opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which saw hundreds of performers form Chinese characters with large blocks.

Read more at Google hosted news

Digging up the ashes of revolution

Freedom is an abstract for those living in a free society, but for those who don't, it's nothing less than the unattainable dream worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.

The only problem is, freedom looks different to different people, and when the plates of history are etched in the acid bath of bloody events, the official version of freedom often comes with prohibitive conditions. Frequently, it doesn't even look like freedom at all.

For Chinese director Jia Zhangke, it wasn't the definition of freedom that pulled him into a comprehensive scavenger hunt for survivors of the Cultural Revolution. It was the smell of a fire that burns still, even 60 years hence.

Zhangke decided to dig up the smouldering ashes in his new movie currently touring film festivals, I Wish I Knew. A feature-length documentary that interviews key participants, victors and victims of China's famed 1949 "liberation," the movie rotates around the fundamental concept of freedom - and what it looks like, and feels like, to those on opposite sides of the struggle.

"I always felt it was important to record the personal stories and the thoughts of the older people who saw so much," says Zhangke, via a Mandarinspeaking translator.

"The Cultural Revolution happened in 1949, and the survivors are beginning to die off from old age. Their history, their stories, would be lost if we didn't record them now for posterity."

Zhangke says many of the stories are hard to hear, which is why the Chinese government was typically against any thorough chronicle of its bloody past. But as the tight reins of communism slacken to accommodate a galloping capitalist economy, the rules of engagement shift -- and that's where Zhangke seized on the opportunity to make his movie now -- before the people and their stories faded into nothing.

"I wanted to do this 10 years ago, and go back even further -- all the way back to 1920 -- but I couldn't because those stories are gone now. The people are dead. Now I start in 1933," says Zhangke, the auteur behind such films as 24 City, Still Life and Unknown Pleasure.

Read more at The Vancouver Sun

China Video Site Signs Deal to Legally Show Hollywood Films

In a move that will legally bring more American TV shows and films to the Internet in China, Ku6 Media, an operator of one of the country's largest video hosting sites, has signed content deals with Sony Pictures Television and a major Hollywood studio.

Ku6 announced the deal in a statement on Thursday, claiming that the agreements would make Ku6 "the first Chinese local video portal to acquire legitimate copyright content from major Hollywood studios." The deal would give Ku6 the broadcasting rights for several hundred Hollywood films and TV episodes.

The company operates Ku6.com, China's fourth-largest video-sharing site with 10 percent market share, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International. Video sites in China like Ku6.com and its larger rival Youku host pirated American movies and shows uploaded by users, even as the companies have worked to take such content down. But now the sites are seeking to license more copyright content in order to lure more users and generate profits.

Read more at PC World

'A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop' an homage to Coens' 'Blood Simple'

Zhang Yimou, director of operatic spectacles such as Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is a dazzling stylist with a painterly command of color and an eye for panoramic compositions.

For reasons known only to himself, in A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, China's greatest living director chose to remake the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, their bare-bones Texas noir of 1984, and to set it in feudal China. The result is akin to using a frayed shoestring to make a silk purse.

In truth, it's more rethink than remake. If I had to guess what drew Yimou to the Coens' movie, itself a gloss on people behaving badly, it would be its prototypical characters caught in a prototypical situation. The principals - a wealthy husband, his beautiful and faithless wife, her feckless boyfriend, and the detective who hunts down the lovers - are figures as universal as they are timeless. As are the safe full of money, the forbidding lock, and the gun, sold by a Persian merchant, that fires endless bullets but does not always kill.

Read more at The Philadelphia Inquirer

A Family Caught in the Wheels of China’s Industrial Locomotive

Movie Review

Last Train Home

\

Zeitgeist Films

Chen Suqin, left, and Zhang Changhua, married migrant factory workers in Lixin Fan’s documentary “Last Train Home.”

According to an introductory note that appears on screen at the beginning of Lixin Fan’s documentary “Last Train Home,” every year, during the lunar New Year, 130 million workers return from China’s industrial cities to their homes in the countryside. This temporary shift in population, which the film calls the largest human migration in the world, is one of those numbers that seem impossible to comprehend. One hundred and thirty million people, moving between work and family, stoking the engines that drive the machinery of worldwide consumer capitalism. What does that look like? What does it mean?

To suggest an answer to the first question, Mr. Fan, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker whose guile and courage with the camera can seem almost magical, looks down at a throng of migrants pressing toward the train station in the southern city of Guangzhou. The crush of faces, possessions and umbrellas looks almost like an abstract composition, until you are in the middle of it, at which point it becomes chaotic and overwhelming. In what looks almost like a random encounter, Mr. Fan zeroes in on two individuals, a married couple whose travails will provide a painful, local illumination of a huge and complicated social phenomenon.

Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, who come from a rural village in Sichuan province, have worked in the factories of Guangzhou for 15 years, stitching and bundling garments, sharing quarters in a dormitory and returning home each year to visit their children. Zhang Qin, their daughter, is a high school student when the film starts, and her younger brother is in middle school. The children live with their grandmother, who settled in the area when the Chinese government was sending workers from cities to farms, and who is part of a long cycle of sacrifice and suffering propelled by changes in state policy and shifts in the global economy.

Read more at The New York Times

The Chinese Violin

In this animated short from the Talespinners Collection

, a young girl and her father move from China to Canada, bringing only their Chinese violin along for the journey. As they face the challenge of starting fresh in a new place, the music of the violin connects them to the life they left behind and guides the girl towards a musical future

 

• Joe Chang,
• 2002,

What's the Toy Story with Pixar's enduring appeal?

Fans of all ages refuse to grow out of the Toy Story brand - but Hollywood can't afford to get complacent if it wants to stay ahead of the global game

Toy box office success ... Toy Story 3. Photograph: Disney/Pixar

 

    Toy Story 3 3D

1. Production year: 2010
2. Country: USA
3. Directors: Lee Unkrich
4. Cast: Don Rickles, Joan Cusack, John Ratzenberger, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Keaton, R Lee Ermey, Tim Allen, Timothy Dalton, Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn
5. More on this film

 

The Pixar factor

Pixar maintained its unblemished record as the company's 11th release, Toy Story 3, launched at the top of the charts through Disney over the weekend. Arguably the most astonishing production house ever to come out of Hollywood, Pixar is a phenomenon. Its films all combined have grossed several billion dollars globally, almost every one is widely admired by critics, and several have won Oscars. The enduring appeal of the brand was demonstrated by the impressive $109m (£73m) launch, which shows that, 15 years after the first Toy Story appeared in cinemas, fans of all ages are still willing to turn out.

The number is significant in that Toy Story 3 is only the third animated feature to gross more than $100m in its opening weekend, Shrek Forever After and Shrek 2 being the other two. We can expect more and more 3D-animated features to achieve this in the years to come and every studio executive wants a good animation property. While they are labour-intensive, often taking several years from inception to delivery, well-rendered animated movies based on solid storytelling tend to yield high returns. The trick is to keep the production costs down and, as the sector matures, we are seeing this start to happen.

Live-action movies continue to struggle this summer, but I'm convinced this is nothing more than a blip; an unfortunate confluence of poorly executed material. It will pass. Hollywood will always churn out movies of varying quality – there will be plenty more shockers and delights in the years ahead. The question is, when will the theatrical experience level out – and what will that level be?

Read more at TheGuardian

What's the Toy Story with Pixar's enduring appeal?

Fans of all ages refuse to grow out of the Toy Story brand - but Hollywood can't afford to get complacent if it wants to stay ahead of the global game

Toy box office success ... Toy Story 3. Photograph: Disney/Pixar

1. Toy Story 3 3D
2. Production year: 2010
3. Country: USA
4. Directors: Lee Unkrich
5. Cast: Don Rickles, Joan Cusack, John Ratzenberger, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Keaton, R Lee Ermey, Tim Allen, Timothy Dalton, Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn
6. More on this film

The Pixar factor

Pixar maintained its unblemished record as the company's 11th release, Toy Story 3, launched at the top of the charts through Disney over the weekend. Arguably the most astonishing production house ever to come out of Hollywood, Pixar is a phenomenon. Its films all combined have grossed several billion dollars globally, almost every one is widely admired by critics, and several have won Oscars. The enduring appeal of the brand was demonstrated by the impressive $109m (£73m) launch, which shows that, 15 years after the first Toy Story appeared in cinemas, fans of all ages are still willing to turn out.

The number is significant in that Toy Story 3 is only the third animated feature to gross more than $100m in its opening weekend, Shrek Forever After and Shrek 2 being the other two. We can expect more and more 3D-animated features to achieve this in the years to come and every studio executive wants a good animation property. While they are labour-intensive, often taking several years from inception to delivery, well-rendered animated movies based on solid storytelling tend to yield high returns. The trick is to keep the production costs down and, as the sector matures, we are seeing this start to happen.

Live-action movies continue to struggle this summer, but I'm convinced this is nothing more than a blip; an unfortunate confluence of poorly executed material. It will pass. Hollywood will always churn out movies of varying quality – there will be plenty more shockers and delights in the years ahead. The question is, when will the theatrical experience level out – and what will that level be?

Read more at The Guardian

 

No 'fight for fight's sake'

John Woo's new film has martial arts, but also women and love, reports Liu Wei

John Woo describes his new Chinese film as a cross between Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Face/Off, only set in ancient China.

Titled Reign of Assassins, it follows a female assassin who wants to become a housewife. But it is not easy to abandon one's past.

Armed with an ancient monk's remains that can unleash destructive power, she embarks on a deadly pursuit of other assassins.

It is scripted by Taiwan director Su Chao-pin and co-directed by Woo, who says he loves the story.

"I think he (Su) was inspired by Face/Off, but he will not admit it," Woo says, with his signature shy smile. "Both stories are about people who want to destroy their past and lead a different life. But that is difficult."

The story also has shades of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in that the assassin marries a skilled swordsman who works as a postman.

"I love the story because it is very different from most wuxia films," Woo says. "It tells human-interest stories, while many wuxia (stories are about) just fight for fight's sake."

Also, the film is a dream come true for the 64-year-old veteran. Known for gunplay films such as A Better Tomorrow and Windtalkers, Woo has long wanted to shoot films about wuxia, women and love. Now he has all in one film.

"Sword is the new gun in this film," he says. "Gun or sword, as long as they are used right, can stand for integrity and justice, not violence."

Michelle Yeoh, star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Mummy 3, leads the cast. An old friend of Woo, she wins high praise from the director.

"She is as brave as Jackie Chan," Woo says. "She used to be a dancer, so her fighting sequences are both beautiful and powerful."

The film is also a love story, Woo says. "You will see how a woman gives up everything for love."

Yeoh, in turn, describes Woo as the real star on the set.

"Every day I find more and more people on the set, all fans of Woo," she laughs. "Everybody wants to watch how he directs the film. He is very gentlemanly, always smiling, (saying) okay, good, but (what about) another take?"

Yeoh also says Woo gives Su much freedom to direct. He always seeks Su's opinion first, before giving his advice.

"He never tells Su to do something or not to do something, I think this is the way really accomplished men do things," Yeoh gushes.

Su is not the first young director Woo has supported. He has produced the works of two young directors and is aiding Taiwan director Wei Te-Sheng's new epic Seediq Bale (literally "a real man" in the language of the Seediqs, a Taiwan aboriginal group).

"I like working with young talents," he says. "Sometimes, they just need an opportunity."

Read more at asiaone

'Karate Kid': A solid retelling of a great story

My initial reaction to the concept of remaking “The Karate Kid” with Jackie Chan and Will Smith’s kid (Jaden Smith) was, “How dare they?!” How dare they take Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio) and turn him into Dre (Smith), a 12-year old kid from Detroit! How dare they turn Mr. Miyagi (the late Pat Morita) into Mr. Han (Chan)? How dare they take the “karate” out of the movie in every way but its presence in the title and make what is actually “The Kung Fu Kid”?

How dare they!

My fuming was only reinforced when the first trailers came out featuring a scene where Chan’s Mr. Han is attempting to kill a fly with his chopsticks. That scene with Mr. Miyagi in the 1984 original is iconic; you won’t find many people from my generation that don’t know that scene well. Mr. Han, though, doesn’t get the fly with his chopsticks. Instead, he kills it with a fly-swatter and then pries it off the swatter with his chopsticks. Says Dre, “Um, that’s nasty.”

In hindsight, however, that sequence is a microcosm for 2010’s “The Karate Kid.” I don’t know that director Harald Zwart and screenwriter Christopher Murphey meant for folks to take it this way, but this was what I realized about their “The Karate Kid”: They dare because they are acknowledging they are simply updating a classic. They dare because they are not pretending this movie will be a classic.

It won’t be, either (although a sequel is already being developed). What 2010’s “The Karate Kid” is, on the other hand, is a quality re-telling of a great story. Dre Parker and his mom (Taraji P. Henson) move to China from Detroit because of her work. Dre deals with it better than any real 12-year old would, at least until he meets Cheng (Zhenwei Wang) on the playground; Cheng kicks the snot out of Dre for no real reason. That is how it is supposed to go, of course, because “The Karate Kid” requires a ruthless villain — even if he is 12 years old.

The elements that made 1984’s “The Karate Kid” so great are, for the most part, accounted for. The karate might be kung fu, and instead of Daniel-san adjusting to California it is Dre Parker adjusting to China, but the emotions are all the same. Dre gets picked on by bullies and the handyman happens to be a master martial artist. Dre, just as Daniel-san was, is easy to root for. It doesn’t hurt that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s kid can act (his parents are both producers, by the way). Jaden seems right at home carrying a feature length, big budget movie in the middle of the summer blockbuster season. Chalk that one up to the genes from Dad. Macchio and Morita will always be the gold standard for chemistry, but Smith and Chan work quite well together. Remember “wax on, wax off”? Of course you do! We all do! That scene, with a 2010 twist, is here too. 

Is it goofy that Cheng and his fellow pre-teens are such jerks? Is it weird that there is a romantic kiss between Dre and his crush, Meiying (Wenwen Han) when they are just little kids? Is it uncomfortable watching Jackie Chan cry? Yes, to all of the above. And I’ll still take Daniel-san’s crane kick over the one-legged-back-flip-super-kick to the face that Dre executes in this finale.

But, I watched all 140 minutes and enjoyed it. And, as any good re-telling should, it made me want to watch the original “The Karate Kid” again. It has been too long.

Juneau Empire