Red Cliff by John Woo (Magnet Releasing)
John Woo will be the recipient of the 2010 Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
As per the Venice festival's website, Woo was chosen by the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, "at the recommendation of the Director of the Festival, Marco Müller.
"The acknowledgment recognizes a filmmaker who in recent decades, with his revolutionary conception of staging and editing, has renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylization (close to visual art), both in Asia (in films such as A Better Tomorrow, 1987; The Killer, 1989; Bullet in the Head, 1990; Hard Boiled, 1991; the recent colossal film Red Cliff), and in Hollywood (Broken Arrow, 1996; Face/Off 1997; Mission Impossible 2, 2000).
"In his war and gangster film masterpieces, Woo has been capable of transfiguring hyperbolic motion (defying gravity) and exasperated violence with a highly original poetic and romantic infusion, sustained by an extremely personal and energetic figurative tension, similar to a surreal hallucination."
This will be Woo's fourth time at the Venice festival. In 2004 he was the “godfather” of the Secret History of Asian Film sidebar. Two years later, he directed one of the episodes of All the Invisible Children, which was screened out of competition. And the following year, he was the producer of Blood Brothers (Tiantang kou), Alexi Tan's debut feature and the closing-night film of the 64th festival.
Woo is currently in the Chinese city Hengdian working on a new martial-arts action feature starring Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The 67th Venice Film Festival runs Sept. 1-11, 2010.
Can't wait to see Red Cliff. It's supposed to be a great action movie, my favorite kind.