The John Woo (吳宇森) epic Red Cliff (赤壁), dubbed the most expensive movie made in Asia, enjoyed record takings for a Chinese film in its opening weekend in China, the movie's distributor said on Wednesday.
The film, which depicts events in the ancient Three Kingdoms period, made US$16 million in China in the four days after its debut last week, said a China Film Group spokesman.
The box office takings beat other previous domestic blockbusters such as Curse of the Golden Flower (滿城盡帶黃金甲), directed by Olympic opening ceremony mastermind Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), as well as Taiwanese director Ang Lee's (李安) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍), Xinhua news agency said.
PHOTO: AP/TULSA WORLD
Woo, a Hong Kong film director and producer, rose to international prominence with Face Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in 1997.
He was also the director of Mission: Impossible II starring Tom Cruise.
Oscar-winning Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki releases his first full-length film in four years this weekend, dropping computer graphics for his pencil to tell the story of a fish-girl and the sea.
PHOTO: AFP
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which the reclusive 67-year-old both wrote and directed, will hit screens at cinemas across Japan tomorrow after weeks of intense media interest.
Inspired by the 19th-century fairy tale The Little Mermaid by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the story centers around a tiny fish-girl, Ponyo, who rides a jellyfish to escape her home in the sea.
She meets a five-year-old human boy, Sosuke, who vows to protect her, but Ponyo is taken back to the sea. Desperate to be a human and live with Sosuke, Ponyo heads to land again with help from her sisters.
Miyazaki is one of Japan's biggest cultural exports. His last film, Howl's Moving Castle, broke opening box office records at home in 2004 before winning a cult following in Western and Asian nations.
Miyazaki, who had used computer graphics since Princess Mononoke in 1997, decided to shun hi-tech effects in his latest film.
"Our experience told us that what you can do electronically doesn't impress people much. We decided to go fully with pencils ... That's our strength," he said in a recent interview with Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
The film used 170,000 hand-drawn pictures to animate characters and objects, a record number for a Miyazaki production.
It took one and a half years for 70 staff to draw the pictures, according to Studio Ghibli, which has released his works.
Sony Corp will increase the storage capacity of its PlayStation 3 video-game console starting in September, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this week.
The storage space on Sony's console will double to 80 gigabytes, Jack Tretton, head of Sony's US games unit, said on Tuesday. Sony also will offer movies from major studios for sale or rent through its PlayStation 3 and PSP video-game players, Tretton said.
The Class, winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, will open the 46th annual New York Film Festival.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the festival, announced on Tuesday that it will give the opening night honor to Laurent Cantet's drama about classroom life at a French junior high school.
The docudrama was shot with real students and teachers in a raw, improvisational style to chronicle the drama that unfolds over one school year. The Class (Entre les Murs) was unanimously selected for the main prize at Cannes by a nine-member jury headed by Sean Penn.
It's the second film by Cantet to play at the New York Film Festival; his acclaimed Time Out was shown in 2001.
"Laurent Cantet has pioneered a new kind of social cinema,'' said selection committee chairman Richard Pena in a statement. He continued that it is a style "that explores the key issues of our day, from contemporary labor struggles to First World/Third World relations and now to education.''
This year's festival, which runs from Sept. 26 through Oct. 12, will be held at the Ziegfeld Theater due to ongoing renovations at the event's traditional home, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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