Asian Film Awards 2007 Nominations

The Host by Bong Joon-Ho

The nominees for the 1st Asian Film Awards were unveiled on Jan. 29. The awards ceremony, to be held on March 20, will open the 31st Hong Kong Film Festival.
According to the Asian Film Academy’s mission statement, the awards were created to "to acknowledge the finest of Asian Cinema, and bestow honor in various categories to film artists from across Asia, in the company of distinguished celebrities from around the world as guests and presenters."
"From across Asia"?
The vast majority of the nominated films hail from East Asia. India received only one nomination, while apart from Iran’s two nods, West Asia was completely ignored and so was Central Asia. (Not to mention northern Asia, though [...]

Hong Kong Film Critics Awards 2007

2007 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
2007 Hong Kong Film Critics Society Award winners: January 24, 2007
 

Johnnie To’s Election 2, a follow-up to Hong Kong Film Critics Society 2005 winner Election, revolves around more power struggles among the denizens of Hong Kong’s organized crime underworld. To also took the best director prize, but for Exiled, the tale of a Macau hitman pursued by two other hitmen.
 

Best Film: Election 2
Best Director: Johnnie To, Exiled
Best Actor: Jet Li, Fearless
Best Actress: Gong Li, Curse of the Golden Flower
Best Screenwriters: Wong Jing and Gary Tang Tak-hei, Wo Hu
Films of Merit: After This Our Exile, Confession of Pain, Exiled, Fearless, The Heavenly Kings, Heavenly Mission, On the Edge, Wo Hu
 
Hong Kong Film Critics Society [...]

2005 National Board of Review Award Winners

The New York-based group National Board of Review has selected George Clooney’s black-and-white biopic-cum-sociopolitical drama Good Night and Good Luck. (above, with Clooney and David Strathairn) as the best film of 2005.
Other winners include best director Ang Lee for critics’ fave Brokeback Mountain; another critics’ fave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, chosen as best actor for Capote; and best actress Felicity Huffman, who plays a pre-op male-to-female transsexual in Transamerica.

The best foreign film was Paradise Now, the story of two Palestinian suicide bombers directed by Hany Abu-Assad; while, inexplicably, leading man Jake Gyllenhaal (above, with Anne Hathaway) won as best supporting actor for his gay rodeo cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.
Perhaps the NBR decided to categorize Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist as [...]

National Board of Review Awards 2005

2005 National Board of Review Awards
2005 National Board of Review Award winners: Dec. 12, 2005
 

George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., David Strathairn in Good Night and Good Luck.
 

Best Film: Good Night and Good Luck.
Top Ten Films (in alphabetical order):
Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, A History of Violence, Match Point, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, Syriana, Walk the Line
Best Foreign-Language Film: Paradise Now by Hany Abu-Assad
Top Foreign Films (in alphabetical order):
2046, Downfall, Walk on Water, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Best Actress: Felicity Huffman, Transamerica
Best Supporting Actor: Jake Gyllenhaal, Brokeback Mountain
Best Supporting Actress: Gong Li, Memoirs of a Geisha
Best Acting By An Ensemble: Mrs. Henderson Presents
Breakthrough Performance Actor: Terrence Howard (Hustle & [...]

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA – Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
Direction: Rob Marshall
Screenplay: Robin Swicord; from Arthur Golden’s novel
Cast: Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho, Youki Kudoh, Mako, Tsai Chin
 

 

There are some movies that are released before their time. Only years or decades later, do they come to be appreciated. In the case Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, based on Arthur Golden’s bestseller about the life and love of a young geisha in pre-World War II Japan, it’s the other way around. It is a movie released after – way after — its time.
As long as its makers chopped off about a third of its 145-minute running time, Memoirs of a Geisha would have worked beautifully as a silent film, [...]