DVD Tuesday A girl a gun a baby and Clive Owen careen through this sly meta-action movie romp in an exhilarating hail of bulletsWriter-director Michael Davis deliriously trashy mash-up of John Woo and Loony Toons was greeted by a mix of scathing denunciations and cluelessly slavering encomiums applauding its over-the-top excesses rare was the reviewer who deigned to notice its sly poignantly affectionate deconstruction of contemporary action-movie clichs Shoot Em Up tanked at the box office but I suspect its going to find its following on DVD where each and every knowingly audacious frame can be frozen and savored An itinerant carrot-chomping down-on-his-luck man with no name Clive Owen come on Mr Smith is not a name is waiting at a deserted big-city bus stop in the middle of a dark dark night when a hugely pregnant woman waddles by with a gun-toting thug in hot pursuit Smith intervenes you just know he once knew someone like her exc
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Question: I have a question about the beautiful actress Zhang Ziyi, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But in Memoirs of a Geisha, she was called Ziyi Zhang. What gives, and what’s her first name?
Answer: Zhang Ziyi’s first name is Ziyi, but in many Asian cultures it’s traditional to give the surname first. Given that for the bulk of human history, the most important thing you could know about a person — in both the East and the West — was who his or her family was, I’m surprised that this order isn’t the norm everywhere. But in the West, the standard name format is surname last (generally a patronymic — the father’s name) and given name first. Miss Zhang appears to have adopted the Western order as part of her bid for international stardom; Americans especially have a problem with “weird” names. That
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Question: It seems like every other movie I see advertised is based on a TV show, like The Dukes of Hazzard. But what about the other way around? I know there was a series based on My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but what other TV series have been based on a movie, and were any of them good?
Answer: There have been a handful of top-notch TV shows based on movies. The flop Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) was revived as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003); Robert Altman's acerbic M*A*S*H* (1970) became the long-running M*A*S*H (1972-1983); Neil Simon
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Jonathan Rhys Meyers had no idea what he was getting into — literally — when Woody Allen cast him in the romantic thriller Match Point, now in select theaters. "I had never read the script when Woody offered the role to me," the actor tells TVGuide.com. "And I just accepted. For any young actor to be in a Woody Allen film, you're just going to do it regardless of what it is."
Once Rhys Meyers did peruse the script, he was hit with another surprise. "I was like, 'If I get four or five good scenes, I'll be gold.' And then it dawned on me how much work I had to do in this!"
And how. Match Point features Rhys Meyers as Chris, a former tennis champ who latches on to new Brit bud Tom (Matthew Goode
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Question: What is a spaghetti Western? And how does it differ from a regular Western?
Answer: The short answer is that spaghetti Westerns are Italian productions set in the American West. The longer answer involves a confluence of historical, economic and cultural forces. The popular reimagining of the American West began as the West was still being won, with pulp novels, Wild West shows and touring theater productions. Movies were the next logical step in the process, and their formative years followed so closely on the heels of the conquest of the frontier that real-life legend Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) lived long enough to act as an advisor on early Westerns. American Westerns ranged from simple adventure fables aimed at children to more psychologically and socioeconomically sophisticated stories. But by the early '60s, after more than 40 years of movies and TV shows, American Westerns were running out of steam. European
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