According to the Chinese media, France’s MK2 has secured theatrical rights for the new Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) film 24 City (24城记), which is going to screen soon at the Cannes Film Festival.
Fans of French film might be interested to know that Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 classic Le Cercle Rouge (starring Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand) is being remade in Hollywood by none other than Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To.
What’s even more weird is that Chow Yun-fat and Orlando Bloom are attached to the project.
Malaysia’s The Star reports that in Chen Shi-Zheng’s Dark Matter the film about the Chinese physics grad student in the US that gets homicidal. The production lost their first actor, which is when Meryl Streep suggested to the director that they get Quinn instead — but the catch was that he was almost too good-looking and charismatic for a physics professor. We guess they were looking for someone more shriveled, perhaps paraplegic?
The Taiwanese film What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?(情非得已之生存之道) (dir. by Doze Niu) originally had a cameo role by Chinese actress and all-around hottie Zhou Xun (周迅). She even donated some of the money she won from the Golden Horse acting prize to the production, but her part was, in the end, deleted from the film. We have not seen the film on DVD here yet, but it seems it was just released in Taiwan on April 11, so might not make it here you know, for another three hours or so.
Ang Lee is coming out with an autobiography this October, and some reports claim that in this book, Lee states that although many women seem to like his films and admire the depictions of women in the films, that he doesn’t really understand or have much interest in women. We’d probably have to read more of the book to know what context this statement occurs in (there’s more in the report itself, but you’d still want to read the entire book), but we’re sure that this will provide more proof for those into the Chinese rumor mill who believe that Lee is a closeted homosexual.
The 10th annual Deauville Asian Film Festival began a couple of days ago, but we hadn’t been keeping close tabs on it. But lo and behold, what pops up in Google reader other than the news that Chinese director Jia Zhangke won some kind of artistic achievement award at the festival. Intrigued by this we opened up the article, only to find that there wasn’t that much information at all. So we decided to find what we could in the English and/or French press. In English there was just about nothing. In French all we could find was this article, which tells us the various films that won awards (Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly 《集結號》 was one of them) and the directors that were offered some kind of “hommage” — but if you look at the bottom of that link you will see that Jia Zhangke was not alone in this category. There are other Japanese and Korean directors, as well as Chinese actor/director Jiang Wen. So why does the Chinese article only mention Jia? Was that some kind of oversight, or are there different subvisions or categories of “hommage”? In all truth, it probably doesn’t matter. Jia’s already the toast of the European film festival circuit, so no surprises here, but he is still young (38), and we’re still cheering him on, and eagerly awaiting his new movies, fiction and documentary alike. We don’t really read French, but maybe you do, in which case you can find out more here, or here.
In case you’re wondering, as we did, where the heck Deauville is, here’s Google to the rescue:View Larger Map
