Canne's prizes revive HK films
HONG KONG - By lifting the Golden Palm for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Tony Leung gave Hong Kong's drooping film industry a much needed boost.
Film-selling website to shut down
WASHINGTON - Reel.com, a website aimed at selling to film-goers, will shut down, the owners said on Monday, citing a cash crunch.
Chinese erhu meets Western jazz
IT was a slightly unusual marriage - the Chinese erhu, an ancient Chinese stringed instrument, and a six-piece Japanese jazz band - so it was difficult to know what to expect as we arrived at the crowded Shanghai Centre Theatre for a recital titled "Shanghai Dream."
The aroma of Spanish wine
MIGUEL Torres, chief executive officer of the leading Spanish Torres Winery, was very enthusiastic introducing his wines in Shanghai two days ago despite the fact that his joint venture in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, is running in the red.
Lucky meeting brings singwes together
THE soft 1970s songs of Filipino band "Infinite" sounded enchanting in the Lobby Bar of the Huating Hotel as drizzle fell on the streets outside.
Striking the right note for kids' future
CHILDREN play pianos while their parents wait outside. A common scene in local piano schools.
'Some Like It Hot' - century's best comedy
LOS ANGELES - "Some Like It Hot" and "Tootsie" - films in which some of Hollywood's great male stars dress up as women, were named on Tuesday as the two funniest American films of all time. Picking the 100 best comedies for the American Film Institute (AFI), a blue-ribbon jury of 1,800 experts voted Billy Wilder's 1959 cross-dressing classic starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe No 1, followed in second place by "Tootsie," the 1982 film in which Dustin Hoffman plays an actor who cannot get work as a man but stars as a woman. Two other transvestite tales made the top 100 - "Mrs Doubtfire" at 67 and "Victor/Victoria" at 76. "I can't figure it out. I guess with Americans in the year 2000, transgender is no longer transgressive," said Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel, who was one of the writers on the three-hour CBS TV special in which the latest AFI list was presented. In third place was Stanley Kubrick's Cold War masterpiece "Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," a film in which, while no one dresses up as a woman, Peter Sellers does get to dress up as a Henry Kissinger-like expert and a well-meaning but luckless American president. Woody Allen's tale of New York Jewish angst versus the rest of the country, "Annie Hall," was in fourth place, just above the Marx Brothers' satirical war film "Duck Soup," in which Groucho plays a prime minister. Unlike AFI's previous lists for best American films and stars, in which some famous names seem to have missed the vote, Schickel said it seems that almost all of America's great clowns and comics made the list - from Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields to Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello and even that comedian who never gets any respect, Rodney Dangerfield. The top 20 list follows:
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