Word: gu
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...Chinese film, as in Hollywood, ambition and nuance seldom keep company. The mainland's best-known directors are masters of the kind of movies that critics call "epic" when they succeed and "overwrought" when they fail, films that swamp our eyes and yank at our hearts. Cinematographer Gu Changwei has shot many of Chinese cinema's most imperial tours de force?Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, Jiang Wen's Devils at the Doorstep. But his directorial debut Peacock, surprise winner of the Silver Bear at this year's Berlin International Film...
...place in history, to a young writer in May 1995 - the final month of his 14 years at the Elysée. The writer went on to put those words into the script of Le Promeneur du Champs de Mars (Walker on the Champs de Mars), director Robert Guédiguian's spare, focused film about Mitterrand's final years - in which the President dictates his memoirs and hones his legacy while wracked with the prostate cancer that will end his life...
...with Nixon, the years out of office and finally death have a way of dousing polemical fires. "When people see this film, all the controversies about Mitterrand tend to shrink away," says director Guédiguian, a communist. "It talks about the legend, about the King. The time is far enough away now for us to begin to see him as a whole." Guédiguian's main character, crafted in stunning depth and complexity by actor Michel Bouquet, is known simply as le Président; he smiles more and projects less personal authority than the original, but shares...
Thanks in part to Nike's promotions, urban hip-hop culture is all the rage among young Chinese. One of Beijing's leading DJs, Gu Yu, credits Nike with "making me the person I am." Handsome and tall under a mop of shoulder-length hair, Gu got hooked on hip-hop after hearing rapper Black Rob rhyme praises to Nike in a television ad. Gu learned more on Nike's Internet page and persuaded overseas friends to send him music. Now they send something else too: limited-edition Nikes unavailable in China. Gu and his partner sell them in their...
...good measure, there's also the sheer beauty of the architecture at Kotohira-gu. Alongside the dozens of historic wooden shrines, one new addition is a stunning mountaintop building that houses offices as well as a reception area for religious ceremonies?an ultramodern edifice of rusted iron and glass built into the hillside in a way that complements the main shrine building surprisingly well. Takubo helped design the new building with architect Ryoji Suzuki. Its innovative use of light and space?many of the rooms are actually freestanding boxes in the middle of a glassed-in atrium?has made...