Word: swordsman
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...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...
...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...
...fall from a great height: that befits a tragic hero or, in Leslie's case, a tragic diva. For if Brigitte Lin embodied the woman-man in such '90s films as Swordsman II and Ashes of Time, then Leslie was Asia's definitive man-woman. More persuasively so, because for Lin it was a role; for Leslie it was life. A gay man in a society intolerant of gays, he never explicitly acknowledged his homosexuality. But neither did he try to suppress it, as some Hong Kong stars have done. He was too much the showman, the exhibitionist...
...stage the fights, Zhang chose Ching Siu-tung, a renowned choreographer who has also directed 21 features, including such Hong Kong classics as A Chinese Ghost Story, Swordsman II and The Heroic Trio?not to mention a 1989 quickie called A Terracotta Warrior, starring two kids from the mainland, Gong Li and Zhang Yimou. The very first set-to in Hero is a terrific one between Li and Yen. (Each man first imagines the fight, like a chess player visualizing his opponent's possible moves.) How swift their swords! How eloquent their body language...
...shot in the flickery black-and-white of the Godzilla genre, another will unfold entirely in Japanese anim?. Tarantino even sent his cinematographer, Oscar winner Bob Richardson (Platoon, JFK, Wall Street), lists of must-see Samurai and Shaw Brothers' classics like Five Fingers of Death and One Armed Swordsman as a pre-production crash course in the camerawork of the kick-flick canon...