The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- One adorable ‘Pet’
- China unveils rare star power of Oscar entry
- Lindsay Lohan says has learned from mistakes
| Posted: 12 Dec 2011 12:48 AM PST |
| China unveils rare star power of Oscar entry Posted: 11 Dec 2011 05:30 AM PST BEIJING (Reuters) - Zhang Yimou, one of China's bestknown directors, is banking on heartthrob Christian Bale to help boost the country's chances of winning an Oscar, with his latest film on a tragic chapter in the nation's history. "The Flowers of War", China's Academy Award entry for best foreign language film, centres around a mortician (Bale) who gets caught up in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and has to save a group of school girls from the clutches of the Japanese. On the way he becomes involved with a highclass Chinese courtesan, finding both love and personal redemption. The film, which hits Chinese screens on Friday followed a week later by a limited release in the United States, holds little back in its graphic depiction of the events of more than eight decades ago, a story everyone in China knows well. To a Chinese audience the almost caricaturelike Japanese soldiers who at one point erupt in glee at finding virgins to rape are partandparcel of what they are taught in school about an event which continues to poison SinoJapan relations. But the movie is also heavy on the nationalism and saturated with the patriotic pride typical of how the Chinese movie industry views such emotive parts of the nation's history. Bale, though, said he though it unfair to view it as a propaganda film. "It's a historical piece. I certainly never viewed it as that myself. I think that would be a bit of a kneejerk reaction. If anybody had that response I don't think they're looking closely enough at the movie," he told reporters. "It's far more a movie about human beings and the nature of human beings' responses to crisis, and how that can reduce people to the most animalistic behaviour but also raise them up to the most honourable behaviour you could ever witness." China says invading Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 men, women and children in Nanjing, then known as Nanking. An Allied tribunal after World War Two put the death toll at about 142,000. But some Japanese historians say the massacre has been exaggerated and some conservatives deny there was even a massacre. SinoJapanese ties have been overshadowed for years by what Beijing says has been Tokyo's refusal to admit to atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in the country between 1931 and 1945. "Obviously there are fewer people in the West who are familiar with the Rape of Nanking. Myself, I knew about it. I owned the book and had never read it. So I came to know far more about it," Bale added. Billed as the first Chinese movie to star a major Western actor, the country has high hopes it will snag an Oscar. Zhang downplayed that. "We can work as hard as possible but really it's up to the gods. I really don't understand what the rules are for getting an Oscar," he said. While Chinese movie moguls maybe hoping for an ascendance on the world's silver screens to match the country's rise on the global political and economic stage by matching a Hollywood face to the Chinese story, Bale said for him it was more about working with someone like Zhang. "It seemed like a very natural thing to do. I was excited by the notion of making a Chinese movie, of making a movie with someone as masterful as Yimou. I'm quite myopic in my approach to the movies that I want to make." Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Lindsay Lohan says has learned from mistakes Posted: 10 Dec 2011 04:41 PM PST LOS ANGELES: Actress Lindsay Lohan, in her first interview since being sent to jail last month for a probation violation, tells Playboy that she has learned to be accountable for her mistakes. The Mean Girls star told the magazine in an interview accompanying her 10-page nude pictorial that during the past five years she's come to understand "that ultimately we are responsible for ourselves and our own actions." Magazine founder Hugh Hefner has said he advanced the street date of the highly-anticipated issue - in which a blonde Lohan channels her idol Marilyn Monroe's famed 1953 Playboy photo spread - in part because photos were leaked online. The Lohan issue hit Playboy's website on Saturday and the magazine lands on newsstands Dec. 16, one day after Lohan's scheduled interview on Ellen Degeneres' daytime TV talk show. Excerpts of the Playboy interview were released on Saturday. The former child star whose career has suffered in recent years following arrests for drunken driving, drug possession and theft, told Playboy she would have done things differently in her recent years of trouble. "Looking back, I probably would have listened to and taken more advice from the people whom I admire and would have followed through with it more," Lohan said. "My stubbornness at 18 and 19-years-old got in the way," she said. "During the past five years, I've learned that time flies faster than you think, and because you only live once you have to learn from your mistakes, live your dreams and be accountable." In November, Lohan was sentenced to 30 days in jail for violating her probation on recent criminal charges, but served less than a day behind bars due to overcrowding. In an excerpt that apparently references her decision to pose nude for the magazine, Lohan said: "Sex and sexuality are a part of nature and I go along with nature. I think Marilyn Monroe once said that." And the actress, who first gained fame playing twin sisters in 1998 Disney film The Parent Trap, said she doesn't understand why her life has become tabloid fodder. "I have no idea why there is this fascination with everything I do," she said. "I suppose it is all part of this trend of people wanting to know every single detail of a celebrity's life. "I mean, once we get to the point where magazines are doing pictorials on my wardrobe to court, that's just so unimportant," Lohan said. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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