Chinese Films

Mainland Chinese movies won big at the Hong Kong International Film Festival awards gala Thursday, bagging gold and silver in the Asian Digital Competition and the Humanitarian Award for Best Documentary. The Tibetan film "The Silent Holy Stones" won the International Film Critics Federation prize, known as the FIPRESCI.

Village Roadshow Pictures Asia released its first Chinese-language film with no certainty the modestly budgeted movie would succeed with audiences in the world's most populous country. But "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons," a comedic take on a well-known 16th century Chinese fantasy novel, had a February opening-week gross of $93.5 million - the biggest ever in China. It already has made $200.5 million, and it could go on to gross more at China's box office than any other Chinese-made film in history.

China, which pulled "The Da Vinci Code" last week, is planning to release 26 films to mark the 85th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Wednesday. Those include "The Forest Ranger," featuring a ranger who dies protecting a state-owned forest, and "The Backbone," a documentary about past generations of Chinese communists, such as revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.

BEIJING - China's one-child policy, sterilization and Japan-Sino relations are just some of the raw, real-life subjects tackled in a cluster of controversial independent Chinese films screening at the 37th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF). The festival, which kicks off Sunday and ends on April 2, features 306 feature films and shorts from 68 countries and regions. They range from the world premiere of Herman Yau's "Ip Man: The Final Fight" to the closing-night film, "Closed Curtain," directed by Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi.

Clearly, 1985 is the year of discovery for the Chinese cinema. There's been a retrospective at UCLA of the films of Xie Jin, China's leading director, and a series of recent Chinese films at the Grande 4-Plex about to wind up a six-month run. Now, we'll have the opportunity to see 13 movies made before 1949 when the Four Star Theater, 5112 Wilshire Blvd., presents "Electric Shadows: China Film Classics From Before the Revolution," Friday through July 10.

BEIJING - China's one-child policy, sterilization and Japan-Sino relations are just some of the raw, real-life subjects tackled in a cluster of controversial independent Chinese films screening at the 37th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF). The festival, which kicks off Sunday and ends on April 2, features 306 feature films and shorts from 68 countries and regions. They range from the world premiere of Herman Yau's "Ip Man: The Final Fight" to the closing-night film, "Closed Curtain," directed by Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi.

AMC Entertainment Chief Executive Gerry Lopez said the Chinese conglomerate poised to take over the nation's second largest theater chain would provide needed debt relief and resources to upgrade many of its cinemas across the country. "We're going from a group of five financial owners -- private equity funds -- to a single strategic, long-term buyer who happens to love this business and who is already in this business," Lopez said in an interview Thursday. "For us, this is nothing but great news.

Like modern-day Marco Polos with cellular phones, Hollywood executives are venturing to China seeking the same kind of profits they reaped exporting fantasy to the rest of the world. But despite China's promise of 1.3 billion potential customers, a burgeoning middle class enamored of entertainment, a flourishing creative community and a growing, less shackled economy, the largest untapped market for American movies and TV shows remains maddeningly out of reach.

Hollywood has produced its share of trashy movies, but archivistPaul Caruso was searching for films of a more enduring nature when he crawled into a hole teeming with debris and garbage at a Glendale dump Wednesday. Taking hardly any notice of a nudie picture that had bobbed to the surface nearby, Caruso reached into the muck and pulled out a strip of film tape. A dozen enthusiastic colleagues watched, along with the impassive driver of a backhoe vehicle, as Caruso scrutinized his find.

Moviegoers in China enthusiastically see American films, yet the reverse is almost never true. But you'd think if there would be someone who might bridge the divide -- someone whose personal background, connections and professional expertise could help bring Chinese films more into the U.S. mainstream -- that person might look much like Wendi Murdoch. Born and raised in mainland China, educated at Cal State Northridge and then at Yale, employed at Star TV in Hong Kong, she married News Corp.

When "The Avengers" hit theaters in China last May, the same weekend it opened in the U.S., moviegoers there were bombarded with advertisements featuring Iron Man and the Hulk. Chinese audiences packed cinemas, buying some $90 million worth of tickets and helping make the superhero movie the top-grossing film worldwide in 2012. This weekend, the most successful Chinese film of 2012 will arrive in American theaters - but more than six weeks after its Chinese debut, and with considerably less fanfare.

After the coffee. Before figuring out what that wet stuff coming from the sky was last night. The Skinny: It's Friday the 13th, so take the proper precautions. Friday's headlines include the weekend box office preview, a story on how China is opening two U.S.-made animated films opposite each other, much to the chagrin of Hollywood, and the latest on the DirecTV-Viacom feud. Daily Dose: It used to be if one distributor was in a fight with a programmer that caused channels to come down like the one DirecTV is in with Viacom, rival distributors would try to steal away some subscribers.

AMC Entertainment Chief Executive Gerry Lopez said the Chinese conglomerate poised to take over the nation's second largest theater chain would provide needed debt relief and resources to upgrade many of its cinemas across the country. "We're going from a group of five financial owners -- private equity funds -- to a single strategic, long-term buyer who happens to love this business and who is already in this business," Lopez said in an interview Thursday. "For us, this is nothing but great news.

Chinese filmgoers have had their choice of two war epics recently: Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" and Zhang Yimou's "The Flowers of War. " Although "Flowers" has outperformed "Horse" at the box office in China, filmgoers seem to be more impressed with Spielberg's film, at least judging by the comments of movie fans online. "War Horse," a tear-jerker tale of a boy and his horse in World War I, has won kudos for its touching story and Hollywood sheen. By comparison, some believe that Zhang sold out with "The Flowers of War," starring Christian Bale as a Westerner trying to save a group of women in a church during Japan's siege of Nanking in 1937.

Penetrating the Chinese movie market has long presented any number of challenges to Hollywood studios, from quotas to censorship to cultural sensitivities Add raising money to the list of potential problems. Legendary East, the Chinese film venture established this summer by film finance and production company Legendary Entertainment and its chairman, budding Hollywood mogul Thomas Tull, has canceled plans to raise $220.5 million on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year after it was unable to find enough investors.

Moviegoers in China enthusiastically see American films, yet the reverse is almost never true. But you'd think if there would be someone who might bridge the divide -- someone whose personal background, connections and professional expertise could help bring Chinese films more into the U.S. mainstream -- that person might look much like Wendi Murdoch. Born and raised in mainland China, educated at Cal State Northridge and then at Yale, employed at Star TV in Hong Kong, she married News Corp.

China's ethnic tensions have spilled into Australia, where all Chinese films scheduled for the Melbourne Film Festival have been pulled to protest the inclusion of a documentary about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. The films were withdrawn by their directors on the eve of the festival's opening Friday after organizers turned down the Chinese government's request that they cancel the screening of "The 10 Conditions of Love," an Australian-made documentary about Kadeer.

Orange County's Asian community gets a new movie theater Saturday, as the Thu Do (Capital) Cinema opens in Garden Grove, taking over the 800-seat Edwards Westbrook Theater near the corner of Westminster Avenue and Brookhurst Street. The theater will offer Vietnamese, Chinese and French films, according to Bob Lee, a spokesman for the Vietnamese partners who will operate the theater, bakery owner Van Hong of Westminster and Monterey Park businessman Steven Tran.

When the Chow Yun-fat action-comedy epic "Let the Bullets Fly" opened in China last year, it quickly became a phenomenon. Lured by its splashy fight scenes and whip-snap dialogue, filmgoers swarmed theaters. The movie wound up taking in more than $100 million at the box office in China, the most for a homegrown film. Yet despite its Hollywood-style violence and an actor with international name recognition, "Let the Bullets Fly" hasn't even managed to find a distributor in the United States.

An opening title card announces that the new film "Beginning of the Great Revival" was made "in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of China. " Unfortunately, the movie never overcomes the dutiful weight that implies. A companion piece to the 2009 feature "The Founding of a Republic," "Great Revival" is in many ways the very definition of propaganda — it even ends with an image of a waving flag — but "Revival" is too harmlessly flabby to be taken quite that seriously.