Word: gong
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...Chicago”) production of “Memoirs of a Geisha.” “Memoirs of a Geisha” boasts an acting team of international superstars like Zhang, Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), and Gong Li (“The Emperor and the Assassin”), talented big-name producers like Steven Spielberg and Gary Barber, and the plot line of the bestselling novel by Arthur S. Golden ’78. The resulting expectations are completely satisfied by the screen adaptation. The film opens in a small fishing...
...work “on the balls of their feet”). These rhetorical tics are part of an effort to make the writing conversational. Chouinard tosses in everything from the second person to quips like, “When I die and go to hell, the devil is gong to make me the marketing director for a cola company” and “Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat.” This folksy tone is stiff and unconvincing. The book also occasionally reads too much like an advertisement...
...scary place for certain norms of Chinese governance.Many of the sites made inaccessible by what has been coined “The Great Firewall” are those discussing specific high-tension questions of Chinese politics: sites detailing the lot of the controversial Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, sites about the Tiananmen Square protests, and some others about Taiwanese independence. Also blocked, however, are sources of general international news—the BBC web site, for example, can only be intermittently reached from within Chinese borders.Of course, firewalls aren’t perfect, but the Chinese government has mechanisms...
Even in early films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Gong Li had a smoldering star quality. So a diva like Hatsumomo fits her like a cheongsam. She thinks she knows why her character is so mean to Sayuri. "In those days, a geisha could not have her own love," she says, speaking through an interpreter, "so she had a lover secretly. She's been deprived of her own love, her own feelings. She has great love and great hate. I thought she might have had the same kind of upbringing as Sayuri. She might have been beaten...
Tears were plentiful on the Geisha set. For Hatsumomo's final, incendiary face-off with Sayuri, Gong Li stayed on the set all day, crying, never getting out of character. Marshall recalls, with awe in his voice, that "hour after hour, as people worked around her, lighting and moving cable, she stood there weeping, because she couldn't leave that feeling. I've never seen anything like that in my life." After the actress filmed her last scene, she couldn't let go. "When Rob Marshall announced that I had wrapped my role and was leaving," she says...