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Posts Tagged ‘Zhang Yimou’

 

Trailer Watch: Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home

…or “Homecoming” as it’s called in the trailer, but I’m guessing they changed it because “homecoming” has different connotations here in the States. It amounts to the same thing, of course.

Zhang Yimou is a favorite of mine, though I prefer his smaller, heart-achingly human films like Happy Times and Not One Less to his emotionally colder forays into larger-scale cinema (Hero notwithstanding, because that movie is awesome). Incidentally, Yimou was almost going to be the subject of Jason and Lydia’s conversation in Multiplex #896, but Wong Kar-wai fit better, and I realized that I hadn’t seen enough of Yimou’s most recent films.

Anyway. Coming Home has no domestic release date yet, but it should premiere at Cannes in May, followed by its Chinese release.

In the film, Gong Li reunites with Yimou for the first time since 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower). Chen Daoming stars as a Chinese dissident “who is forced into a marriage, flees to America and is sent to a labor camp when he returns to China.” (via The Playlist)

Trailer Watch: Christian Bale starring in Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War

Courtesy TV.Sohu.com (via Coming Soon) comes a trailer for Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, which stars Christian Bale stars as “a Catholic priest who shelters a group of prostitutes and female students in his church during the brutal 1937 invasion and pillaging of the Chinese capitol by Japanese troops known as the ‘Rape of Nanking.’

As a longtime fan of Zhang’s films (particularly Hero and his earlier, quieter dramas like Happy Times, Not One Less and Raise the Red Lantern), I’m definitely interested in this, although perhaps because I don’t knowing much about the historical events in question, I couldn’t make a ton of sense out of this trailer.

The film also stars Shigeo Kobayashi, presumably as a Japanese soldier, and I noticed Paul Schneider (All the Real Girls, Parks & Recreation) in the trailer, as well.

The Flowers of War will be the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film in the next Academy Awards (according to an old /Film article on the film, the film is about 60% Mandarin and 40% English), and so it will get a release before the end of the year somewhere, but possibly not a very big one.