Word: dou
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Chinese and Chinese American literature (e.g. Dream of the Red Chamber, Family, The Woman Warrior) and film (Ju Dou, Eat a Bowl of Tea) are full of descriptions of situations exactly like those in The Joy Luck Club. These situations existed in history and they exist now. They are alive and well in China and they are found throughout the Chinese diaspora. I am sure that some men do not relish their positions in the hierarchy and some may have actually rebelled, but the vast majority of us stayed quiet and reaped the benefits...
...Rising Sun hit the screens. The Sean Connery thriller, which opened to yowls of bad publicity about its caustic view of Japan's business intentions in the U.S., has been a decent-size ($55 million) hit anyway. Get thee to an art house, where Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou and other sumptuous dramas directed by Zhang Yimou and starring glorious Gong Li have helped make China a new force in world cinema. Check out Hard Target, as millions of teenage boys already have. The director of this martial-arts pummeler is Hong Kong's John Woo -- the first director...
Today Zhang Yimou is China's ambassador to sophisticated moviegoers. He is a world-class artist who gives his films (Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) heartbreak and visual grandeur. But people do not see Zhang's films so much as they read them, like fortune cookies, for signs and omens about the interior life of a forbidden country. Forbidden to him as well: the Chinese authorities have withheld release of some of his films. And yet Zhang still works in his homeland, against all odds and with great grace. Just like the heroine of his spare...
That face is worth saving, since the title role is played by the radiantly sullen Gong, who has starred in all of Zhang's features and who was declared best actress at last year's Venice Film Festival for this portrayal. As Qiu Ju or Ju Dou, as the bride in Red Sorghum or the balky mistress in Red Lantern, Gong has brought life and body to the director's ethereal cinema style. The Story of Qiu Ju relies even more on her personality than the team's earlier films. There Gong was swathed in luscious silks and period exoticism...
Nevertheless, the crux of the matter is summed up in a foreword by three directors of the show, Henning Bock of the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, Henk van Os of the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery's Neil MacGregor: "If Dou, Drost and Hoogstraten are the true creators of paintings that have for years delighted and inspired us ((as Rembrandts)), it is clearly time we took another look at them as well. Rembrandt remains a giant . . . But he is a giant surrounded no longer by pygmies, but by artists of real stature, whom we ought to know better." What seems...