Results tagged “hiddendragon”

The Post kicks off Radiohead's two nights at Madison Square Garden by talking to people who hate Radiohead but have been afraid to admit it because Radiohead are critically beloved and "cool." An entertainment editor says, "Hating Radiohead is the hipster's dirty little secret," and Spin writer Chuck Klosterman, though a fan, can understand the hate as well. "There's definitely now a symbolic value to saying you hate Radiohead - even Kid Rock makes a big deal about hating Radiohead. He even has a video where he's literally using toilet paper with the word 'Radiohead' embossed on it." Kid Rock? Using Kid Rock in an argument about hating Radiohead is like knowing Brett Ratner hates David Lynch - it doesn't matter at all.

With all the excitement about The Hulk opening tomorrow, Movie City News brought up this old FlakMag interview with Hulk producer, co-writer, and frequent Ang Lee collaborator, James Schamus. The December 2000 interview was about the screenwriting process for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but at the very end, Schamus mentions he and Lee were talking to Stephen Merritt about turning 69 Love Songs into a musical. How hot would that be? And does anyone know the status of this? Lee has wanted to do a musical for a while, Gothamist thought it perhaps might be a remake of Flower Drum Song.

Gothamist has always wondered about the people who translate foreign films. The L.A. Times has a fantastic article which sheds light on this little known part of filmmaking, which is becoming more and more important with globalization etc., ad infinitum. The article profiles Tim Sexton, who translated Y Tu Mama Tambien, as well as offers interesting tidbits like Louis Malle deliberately kept the sentences short in Au Revoir Les Enfants to make subtitling easier. One of the bigger successes lately, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had an American screenwriter, but the writing had to translated to Chinese, then translated back again, to make sure things weren't lost (Interview with writer James Schamus).

Let the games begin. The Directors' Guild has announced their nominees, and they are Stephen Daldry for "The Hours," Peter Jackson for "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," Rob Marshall for "Chicago," Martin Scorsese for "Gangs of New York," and Roman Polanski for "The Pianist." The most likely nominees for the Academy Awards' Best Picture of the bunch are "The Hours," "Chicago," and "Lord of the Rings." Photos above and an article(registration required) from Variety. "Gangs" and "The Pianist" are possibilities, but Scorsese and Polanski are polarizing figures. However, as these projects are labors of love for them, especially with Polanski's personal experience with the Holocaust and Hollywood's love of reliving the Holocaust in film (see "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful"), they may be nominated for Best Picture. Good will for Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks may make "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" a Best Picture contender, but I personally am done with the big fat Greek hype. Back to the directors, the DGA awards are usually good indicators of who will win Best Director at the Oscars, but more recently, there's been discrepancy: Ang Lee winning the DGA award for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," while Steven Soderbergh won the Oscar for "Traffic"; Ron Howard winning the DGA for "Apollo 13", Mel Gibson the Oscar for "Braveheart".

For my 59th movie of the year, I saw Zhang Yimou's Hero . Sort of like his attempt to ride the wuxia picture train after Ang Lee's success with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero has a pretty amazing cast, Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and the Hidden Dragon herself, Zhang Ziyi. Like most wuxia films, the story is pretty lame, but the art direction is really sumptuous and beautiful.