Chen Kaige wins the Kurosawa Award/Mei Lanfang MV released
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
I am not quite sure how to feel about this: Nikita Mikhalkov of Russia and Chen Kaige of China (who is a US citizen, I believe) have won the the Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement at the Tokyo Film Festival. The award was worth 100,000 USD, which the two directors split.
My ambivalence stems from my opinion that Chen Kaige has become kind of a hack of late, though he has, on the whole, made many more decent films than shitty ones, and has even made a couple of near brilliant or at least close to seminal films in the last thirty odd years.
Of course, this is a pretty good omen for Chen, who has a highly anticipated upcoming film, the Mei Lanfang biopic. They’ve already released the official MV/theme song for the movie, sung by the film’s two co-stars, Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi.
