Word: gong
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...then Cheung, a Hong Kong actor living in Vancouver, might not have been available for the role of his career. As Cheng Dieyi, a homosexual star of the Peking Opera who is riven by jealousy when his "stage brother" Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) marries a call girl (Gong Li), Cheung is both steely and vulnerable, with a sexuality that transcends gender -- a Mandarin Michael Jackson...
Concubine is an Eastern film whose subject, scope and nonstop bustle will be agreeable to Western moviegoers. Anyone can appreciate the splendor of the theatrical pageantry or the dagger eyes of Gong Li as a dragon lady whose only commandment is survival. The scenes in the Peking Opera School, where boys are caned for doing wrong or right, are no less horrifying than the later tableaux of public humiliation at the hands of the Maoists. But Chen clearly sympathizes with the schoolmasters. From such brutality, he suggests, artists are created. Concubine offers another moral: From the crushing cultural restrictions...
...then Cheung, a Hong Kong actor living in Vancouver, might not have been available for the role of his career. As Cheng Dieyi, a homosexual star of the Peking Opera who is riven by jealousy when his "stage brother" Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) marries a call girl (Gong Li), Cheung is both steely and vulnerable, with a sexuality that transcends gender -- a Mandarin Michael Jackson...
...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 from Chinese-language cinema to make a Hollywood picture. With its deft...
Concubine throbs with the seductive power art has over life. And because this is a movie about the glory and competitiveness of performance, it is appropriate that Cheung, as the tormented homosexual, and Gong, as his bitter rival, should duke it out for the title of most beautiful star on the Asian screen. Cheung wins, because this is his story, and he is equal to the doomed sensitivity of the role. Thanks in no small part to his presence, and performance, Concubine has the sweep and pang of a novel that keeps you reading till dawn, then lives in your...