Word: lantern
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...surprising prognosis from China's most successful director, whose early films?Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern?were so grand and ambitious that they burned the country's landscapes onto the retinas of filmgoers around the world. And the bleak outlook is especially striking given that Zhang now looks poised to hit a new career high with Hero, a martial arts fable complete with superstar cast and ravishing cinematography. Last week, Hero premiered at a screening in China's official Holy of Holies, the Great Hall of the People. When it played a weeklong Oscar-qualifying run in Shenzhen...
...Success is nothing new for the 51-year-old director, yet it has long been tinged with disappointment. Ju Dou (Zhang's third film) and Raise the Red Lantern (his fourth) both received Oscar nominations, but initially weren't allowed to play in Chinese theaters. To Live, Zhang's darkly humorous and ultimately tragic masterpiece about a family's struggle to survive three decades of political upheaval, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1994, but is still largely off-limits to mainland viewers...
...director that Zhang found his true calling and an all-consuming lifelong passion. With Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang proved himself in the art houses abroad. But many mainland critics remained unimpressed, accusing him of "exoticizing" the nation's feudal past and poverty-stricken countryside for foreigners. They felt he should play cultural ambassador, using his camera to burnish China's overseas image. Chinese audiences share this ambivalence. Younger moviegoers have an almost universal description of why they dislike Zhang's fixation on the past and on the countryside: "The films are really just...
...Zhang now steers clear of controversial subject matter, embracing instead projects that take risks in their technical execution. In 1999 he mounted an epic production of Puccini's Turandot in Beijing's Forbidden City. Last year he directed a ballet adapted from Raise the Red Lantern. The central government has conscripted him to craft national propaganda: he directed videos for Beijing's Olympic bid and Shanghai's successful application to host the 2010 World Expo. This year he's at work on an "ecofriendly" song-and-dance show for tourists produced by the Guangxi provincial government...
...these movie spells and rituals are grounded in ancient Taoist dogma - the rules of a sacred old game - and which ones were dreamed up by screenwriters high on hash and trash. For some of the answers, consult Peter Nepstad?s essays on his always-enlightening website, The Illuminated Lantern. And if they don?t fill in all the gaps in your ignorance, consider the words of the Taoist priest in ?Devil Fetus.? He offers this sage advice ?to the dead and the alive: Take it easy...