Word: gong
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...name is Songlian (Gong Li), and she has just come to be the fourth concubine of the master (Ma Jingwu). The first mistress is old and irrelevant; the second is ingratiating, lethal, with "a Buddha's face and a scorpion's heart"; the third a saucily imperious opera singer. Each day the chamberlain will raise the red lantern in front of one of their houses, and that woman will be blessed with the master's favors. His strategy, supported by millenniums of male domination, is divide and conquer. So the caged princesses must play power games, with their rivals...
...stranger to the bar scene of his own era, the Bard of Brooklyn would love the crowd at Chicago's Green Mill Lounge. Every Sunday night it's standing room only in this gritty neighborhood tavern. The audience is there for the weekly "slam," a literary version of The Gong Show at which amateur poets compete for small cash prizes and the much richer reward of having their work heard by an enthusiastic public. The poetic abilities of many contestants may be open to debate, but the audience is always in top form. On a typical evening a rambling poem...
...greatly dismayed that the most prominent Christian on campus has such unorthodox views. At the rally, Gomes claimed that in terms of Christian teaching, Peninsula "got it wrong" and he was gong to "get it right." He cited his position as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals as authority to declare that homosexual behavior is "reconcilable" with Christianity. To put it bluntly, he is wrong...
...movie seems enshrouded by fate, so are its characters. Jinshan (Li Wei) runs a dye factory in northwestern China in the 1920s. This vile old man has taken a young wife, Ju Dou (Gong Li), who is made a slave to his viciousness. In bed he gags and harnesses her and rides her like a donkey, and the night bleeds with her shrieks. But the degradations stir Ju Dou's willfulness and sensuality. Now she undresses before the avid eyes of Tianqing (Li Baotian), her husband's adopted son. By abandoning herself to him, she hopes to liberate the captive...
...story is primal, and so are Zhang's cinema strategies. Everything is told through gestures and colors. In the undressing scene, the beautiful Gong Li (who is the director's offscreen companion) wordlessly expresses the range of Ju Dou's feelings, from shame to rebellion to cool majesty. And with its sensuous color scheme -- reds, yellows, blues, in bold and subtle tonalities -- Ju Dou looks like a dream of carnage at sunrise. When the couple make love by the dye vat, a long bolt of red fabric unravels past Ju Dou's face: an ornament to her ecstasy...