Word: swordsman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...back on the Silk Road, this time in Western China (Xinjiang province) 14 centuries ago. Lai Xi (Kiichi Nakai), a Japanese swordsman in the Tang Emperor's court, is assigned to capture and kill "Butcher" Li (Jiang Wen), a once-respected army officer accused of treason because he refused to kill women and children in a raid. Lai Xi and Li make an uneasy truce long enough to escort a general's daughter (Vicky Zhao Wei) and a Buddhist monk to safety. Can they escape the pursuit of evil Master An (Wang Xueqi), the preening aesthete and superslick fighter...
...cinemavens at the Toronto International Film Festival talk about movies with a connoisseur's urgency and will pick a fight over pictures that may never grace a cineplex. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, with the star-director playing Japan's legendary blind swordsman, provoked one such debate. Some said it was too faithful to the old Zatoichi movies to be a true Takeshi film, others that it was too Takeshi to be a true Zatoichi. (No matter: the picture still won the People's Choice plebiscite...
...actor who is every inch the celluloid icon that Kitano is. Imagine replacing Sean Connery if he'd been in every Bond film, and you have some idea of what faces Kitano in taking on the mantle of the late Shintaro Katsu, the actor who played Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, from 1962 to 1989. To succeed, Kitano must make audiences forget Katsu?and Beat Takeshi. "Zatoichi and Katsu are mentioned in the same breath," says Kitano. "So if another actor tried to do it, then there is a lot of incompatibility. And that worried...
...Zatoichi copyright. "Everyone knows I did a lot for Shintaro Katsu," she says now. "I deserve the right to do anything." She already had someone in mind, the only actor and director she believed had the toughness to play Zatoichi and the clout to turn the blind swordsman into an international name: Takeshi Kitano...
...summer day, artist Tan Swie Hian, 60, stands poised before a four-story-high canvas in the middle of St. Marcos Square, surrounded by Venice's celestial domes. Suddenly, Tan leaps toward the immense sheet, wielding his brush like a swordsman as he swiftly inscribes an immense poem; inky Chinese characters that tell of sleeping pillows and dreamy, butterfly wings. Singapore's most famous artist is doing at the Venice Biennale what he has long done back home in East Asia: combining East and West, through multiple disciplines, with the explosive precision of a bombmaker...