How about Andy Lau? I first saw him in HOFD and have since seen him in other things. He's very talented. I think he's very talented and very yummy looking!

Totally agree :happy:

Oh look, an opportunity for me to put in my favorite Andy Lau pic, WOOHOO




As my grandmother says, "I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers!" God lover her!!

...and yutakagr, I have Lonely In Your Nightmare on my iPod :blush

...and maybe my favorite Chen Chang, because he's SO cute.

Ok Kristi


Now i'm shocked :blink: :blink:
I'M SO GLAD TO HEAR that there are still people who are listening to this kind of music(''Lonely in your nightmare''is my favourite,among others.I'm still their fan,if you need anything,I have all their cds) phoness :D



Chen Chang is the guy in ''The Promise'' movie?

I'm sorry if he has already be posted but he is worth another look! Terence Yin born in Hong Kong brought up in USA he is the violinist on the street in Lavender. That is where I noticed him he is Sexy!










And Tony Leung Chiu Wai as Mr Yee Oh I must exercise Lust and Caution with the very thought of him

Omg... Andy looks great in that pic!!!

vip_27

OMG,what an avatar you have..... tuzki06 and your siggy and my avatar,stolen from you,forgive me,but i couldn't resist :lol:
ahhhhhhhh ....awesome Takeshi... tzuki37

:lol: :lol: :lol:

No problem....We share everything here ;) :lol: :P

eee tony leung!

i really want to see lust, caution....

Now Saldiamond was that a bad eee or a good eee? I love Tony and will not have you saying bad things crry . He is one of the worlds greatest actors. He makes my knees go weak and when you do see Lust Caution his expressions are just breath taking as is he! It is a very emotional film. I also love In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express Tony in uniform :drool :drool :drool It is a Brilliant film I love when Tony's charater talks to the cuddly toys and the soap!

Tony Leung Chiu Wai is HOT!

that was a good eee lilyana, don't worry! that was my version of a fan-girl "squee" lol. i absolutely love tony! i fell in love with him and takeshi when i saw chungking express.

i just loved how he was talking to his washcloth like, "why are you so sad?" :heart:

and takeshi and his pinapples. sigh. ^_^

Oh Saldiamond I will let out a Fan Squeal ! :spin I forgot about the dish cloth as well how could I forget! it is just so endearing just like him!
Here is Tony and it really is so so cute!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI1OGoJz51c

Whoa! Thank you for those pictures of Tony Leung and Andy Lau!! I guess, they'll be the Kings of Actors in Mandarin ent. world eternally :D I remember that they were TWO of The Five Tigers: Felix Wong Yat-wah, Michael Miu Kiu Wai, Kent Tong Chun Yip, Andy Lau and Tony Leung. But the other 3 were not active anymore past 40^^

Anyone knows this actor from Mainland China?



His name is Huang Xiao Ming. Born in China, 13 Nov 1977. Recently, I'd been curious abt him. And somehow to me, there's something similar with Takeshi Kaneshiro, abt him, but I can't seem to point it out :P
He shot stardom and become very popular among China girls, after his performance in a China remake of Return of Condor Heroes 2006 as Yang Guo, the lead. And he also starred a China remake of the 1980s HK serial, Shanghai Bund (starring Chow Yun Fat).



His latest series is a China remake of Duke of Mount Deer as the lead, Wei Xiao Bao. Despite his introvert/shy/quiet personality, he acted WXB's comical side pretty well. (Maybe that's why he reminds me of TK ^_^) He also sings and dances. But his singing skill is just so-so compared to his acting performance, IMHO.

Hello yanie! :wave
He is a real cutie! z)

Oh Tony is taking up my mind. Sexy Beast!
Caliente

I have two words for you...LUST, CAUTION. OMG! :o

Thank you for the pics!

This is my favorite of Tony. He just looks like a little boy...but he's SO not.

Article on Zhang Ziyi's mysterious fiance.

Source: New York Times
URL: www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/business/media/28vivi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

July 28, 2008
A Media Powerhouse Everyone and Nobody Knows
By TIM ARANGO

Over the Fourth of July weekend at the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman’s 57-acre East Hampton estate the Creeks, Vivi Nevo was in his element.

Mr. Nevo, with his fiancée, the megawatt Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (the star of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), sitting on his lap, watched Jon Bon Jovi give an impromptu performance before taking a turn on the dance floor to Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright.”

A wind-up doll of kinetic energy, who bounds about like a shortstop, Mr. Nevo, who is 43, is said to be the largest individual shareholder of Time Warner, was once the largest private investor in Goldman Sachs, is engaged to China’s most famous actress, vacations on Rupert Murdoch’s sailboat, is the godfather of Lachlan Murdoch’s son, counts Lenny Kravitz as a good friend and attended Madonna’s wedding in 2000.

And many people, including even some of his close friends, a few of whom joined him at Mr. Perelman’s estate over the Fourth of July — and spoke about the party anonymously because it was a private event — have no idea what his background is or how exactly he made his fortune.

Twenty years or so ago, Vivi Nevo, his first name a nickname for Aviv, was living in a studio apartment in the Concorde building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Today he is the media industry’s Zelig, often referred to among his media friends as “the international man of mystery.”

“He is everywhere, all the time, like no one I have ever seen,” said Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, which frequently hosts Mr. Nevo at its high society parties.

Who is Mr. Nevo? An Israeli who took a modest inheritance from his family and parlayed it into a sizable fortune through savvy investing, much of it in media and Internet companies — and into connections in the media world.

Behind the scenes, his influence on the media industry is subtle. For upstart Internet companies, he has been an important broker of relationships with traditional firms; and for Time Warner, in particular, he was an advocate, when the Yahoo takeover battle erupted, of trying to assemble a three-way partnership among Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and Time Warner’s AOL.

Of all the characters the media business attracts — and creates, for that matter — perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo. Among his many overlapping circles of friends, nearly all say that Mr. Nevo is a force in their lives: a loyal friend, a trusted conveyor and keeper of information and someone who never forgets a birthday or a bar mitzvah.

“He’s someone I’ve really liked,” said John J. Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, who met Mr. Nevo several years ago while he was at the helm of Credit Suisse. “I trust him. He’s got great instincts for the business.”

Gordon Crawford, senior vice president and a director of Capital Research and Management and one of the best-known media investors, met Mr. Nevo around 10 years ago and the two became close. This month they flew together to Sun Valley, Idaho, for the investment bank Allen & Company’s annual media conference. “I don’t know anyone who’s worked harder at developing contacts,” Mr. Crawford said. “It’s definitely more than social. I think he’s a pretty astute observer of what’s going on in the media.”

Mr. Nevo has an uncanny ability to network and a knack for putting himself in the right place at the right time.

In the spring of 1999, John Thornton, who was then president of Goldman Sachs, was in Los Angeles for the bank’s road show before it went public, and after giving a presentation, he sat down. “The guy sitting next to me was Vivi Nevo, and we just started talking and developed a nice rapport right then.” Later, Mr. Thornton became an adviser to Time Warner. “So I dealt with him a lot there,” Mr. Thornton recalled. “He was very active in talking with management. I can’t think of anyone who is principally a private investor who is that focused on one industry.”

Mr. Nevo’s discretion, combined with a lack of a paper trail, equates to a constant chirping of questions in the media industry about his back story.

“He’s a great character, so that draws attention to him,” said Lachlan Murdoch, explaining the growing fascination that people in the media business have about Mr. Nevo. “He’s also a very private individual.

“When I moved back to Australia” — after leaving the News Corporation, where his father is chairman, in 2005 — “we spoke a lot. He’s been a friend through thick and thin.”

Those who knew Mr. Nevo in the 1980s, after he moved to New York from Israel, have watched his rise with curiosity.

“You’re asking questions I’ve asked myself many times,” said Nicolas Rachline, who met Mr. Nevo in the late 1980s when both were part of a fashionable New York expatriate crowd that hung out at Le Bilboquet, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. “What the hell does Vivi do? He seems to be a powerful player in the entertainment industry. How, I don’t know.”

Mr. Perelman met Mr. Nevo years ago on the Los Angeles social scene — either at Barry Diller’s or at the house of a Creative Artists Agency partner, Bryan Lourd, he said — and the pair’s relationship is purely social. “There’s no business element,” Mr. Perelman said. “It’s purely social, but it’s a deep social. He’s around my family, I’m around his fiancée. We take a lot of trips together.”

The glittery social world that Mr. Nevo inhabits is secondary — and the byproduct of — what is the core of his professional existence: a sizable stake in Time Warner he has maintained for years, apparently with impeccable, buy-and-sell timing. Mr. Nevo, through his firm NV Investments, has never owned 5 percent or more of the company, which would require public disclosure, but it is widely believed in the industry that he is the largest private shareholder; Mr. Nevo himself often says so.

A Time Warner spokesman said that Mr. Nevo is a shareholder but could not verify the size of his holding. But Mr. Nevo does have, and has had for years, the ear of management.

Mr. Nevo, whose workaday uniform is snug, black Christian Dior suits, has a particularly close relationship with Richard D. Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman, who stepped down in January as chief executive. Like many of his media mogul friendships, his relationship with Mr. Parsons started years ago in Sun Valley. “I first met Vivi at the duck pond in Sun Valley,” Mr. Parsons recalled in a phone interview. “In typical Vivi Nevo fashion, we shortly became best buds.”

The personal connections are part of how Mr. Nevo makes investment decisions. “He informs his instincts by being in the space,” Mr. Parsons said. “This is how he absorbs what’s going on, and decides where to place his bets.”

For a man who has become a ubiquitous figure in a very public industry, Mr. Nevo is, and has remained, largely a private, unknown quantity. “He’s not so much mysterious, as he just doesn’t want to be public,” said Mr. Parsons, who is an executor of a trust Mr. Nevo established for his daughter, Lilly, age 6, from a previous relationship. “The mysterious part is, you can’t Google this guy and get his whole story.”

Mr. Nevo has always refused requests for interviews, and he declined to comment for this article. In private conversations with some friends and associates, however, Mr. Nevo has provided glimpses into his background.

The silhouette of Mr. Nevo’s story goes like this: he was an only child who was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved with his parents to Tel Aviv when he was a baby. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother was an anesthesiologist. As a boy, Mr. Nevo would vacation with his parents in Los Angeles, where he became enchanted with the glamour of Hollywood.

There was family money — his father ran a chemical company, according to several people, including Mr. Nevo’s friend and tennis partner Frank Biondi, the former head of Universal Studios and chief executive of Viacom. But the driving force of his life is the memory of his mother, who died of cancer in the late 1980s, leaving him an inheritance that allowed him to start investing.

“It’s all about the respect he had for his mother,” said Elizabeth Saltzman, international social editor of Vanity Fair, who met Mr. Nevo on the New York social scene in the 1980s (the second time she met him she shared a helicopter with him to the Hamptons). “His mother was everything. I think there’s a huge mama complex, of trying to make her proud.”

With the inheritance — which one business associate of Mr. Nevo’s, who spoke anonymously because his conversations with him were meant to be confidential, pegged at around $10 million — Mr. Nevo set about investing and networking. He opened trading accounts at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as Allen & Company, which eventually won him an invitation to Sun Valley, the place that became the locus for so many of his relationships, including those with Mr. Parsons and Lachlan Murdoch. Through diligence and hard work, the right contacts and a lot of the right trades during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, he turned his inheritance into a sizable fortune.

Mr. Mack said: “He took the money his family left him and he really created this media, trading empire. At Credit Suisse we did a lot of trading business with him, either outright or with derivatives.”

How much money he made is really anyone’s guess. When Mr. Nevo began appearing a few years ago on certain lists, like Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list, Forbes tried to gauge Mr. Nevo’s wealth to see if he belonged on the magazine’s list of billionaires, but ultimately gave up trying. Mr. Nevo owns homes in Malibu, Calif.; the Los Angeles-area neighborhood of Brentwood; the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York; London; and two homes in Tel Aviv, including his modest childhood home outside the city, which sits empty. In addition, he and Ms. Zhang recently bought a home in Beijing.

“Vivi is a very hard worker, and we’d begin chatting about the markets in the early morning, and then we’d talk late in the afternoon,” said Bob Packer, who ran Goldman Sachs’s institutional equities unit in San Francisco and handled many of Mr. Nevo’s trades. “He loved working with the markets. He’s just a really affable, wonderful, loyal guy.”

In the case of Time Warner, his relationship with the company and its executives began in the early to mid-1990s, when he established a relationship with Gerald M. Levin, then chief executive.

“It was in a social context,” Mr. Levin said, trying to recall how he met Mr. Nevo. “I would go to every major fight that HBO had in Las Vegas. It was either at the fights in Las Vegas or at some movie premiere. No, I think it was in Vegas.”

“I spoke to him about Time Warner and what we were doing. Increasingly, he got interested. Unlike some other financial players, he has an interest not just in the financial aspect itself but also the personalities. The social nexus is part of his understanding and analysis.”

Joseph Ravitch, a prominent media investment banker at Goldman Sachs, said Mr. Nevo was “extraordinarily Zelig-like in the sense that he endears himself to a totally diverse group of people from C.E.O.’s to artists and rock stars.”

“But it’s not really Zelig,” he continued, “because he is always the same, open and straightforward Vivi.”

Several years ago, Joseph R. Perella, who led investment banking for Morgan Stanley and was the senior banker on the Time Warner account, received a phone call from Mr. Parsons. “Parsons said, I know a guy you’d like to meet,” Mr. Perella recalled. “Interesting guy. Knows a lot about the business.”

Mr. Perella said they hit it off almost immediately over lunch at San Pietro, a Manhattan restaurant favored by investment bankers. “He’s one of the least boring types I have ever met,” Mr. Perella said. “My sense is he’s a self-made guy who made it himself. He’s just a smart investor. As for the building blocks of his fortune, I have no idea.”

Of late, Mr. Nevo has been sprinkling money around in private companies, many of which are new media ventures. He has around 25 private investments, according to a business associate, including stakes in Demand Media, a social networking company; CityVoter, a social site that allows city dwellers to post about things like where to eat and where to shop; an online music site, Buzznet; Spot Runner, an online advertising company; and the Internet video company Joost. He also has an investment in the Weinstein Company, the film company run by the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and had a small investment in Bette, a now-shuttered New York restaurant that was owned by Amy Sacco, a prominent nightlife entrepreneur.

Many of the investments are modest in size — about $1 million in the Weinsteins; six figures in Demand Media — but Mr. Nevo’s association with a company brings value beyond the size of the check he writes. “He’s sort of like a media Wizard of Oz,” said Tyler Goldman, the founder of Buzznet, who approached Mr. Nevo last year about investing. “He had some strategic advice, but mostly relationship advice. We were working on a number of deals with bigger media companies, and he had advice on how to approach those.”

Nick Grouf, the chief executive of Spot Runner, said that Mr. Nevo was instrumental in brokering relationships, including with Lachlan Murdoch, who also invested. “Vivi has been very helpful to us in making introductions to his friends,” Mr. Grouf said. “Lachlan is a great example. And with Time Warner, I met Dick Parsons through Vivi.”

In fact, Mr. Nevo’s value — beyond friendship — to many executives is his wealth of information and contacts. “Vivi is plugged in to everything,” Mr. Parsons said. “He hears everything.”

For others, Mr. Nevo is a great friend with a comfy house in Malibu in which to crash, as Lenny Kravitz did during the West Coast part of his 2004 world tour. “It was nice to just have a place to put your stuff,” Mr. Kravitz said in an interview. “If I had to say anything about Vivi Nevo, it’s that he’s all heart. He operates on trust, heart and feeling.”

And about Mr. Nevo’s business? “I don’t go there with him,” Mr. Kravitz said. “And that’s part of our understanding. I’m interested in Vivi Nevo the person.”

Not an actor but director.

Article on Zhang Yimou from New York Times

August 8, 2008
Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up
By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING — For much of the past quarter century, the Chinese director Zhang Yimou made films that showcased his country’s struggle against poverty, war and political misrule to the outside world — films that Chinese, for the most part, never saw.

Time and again, Mr. Zhang’s terse, gritty epics were banned by government censors for portraying China’s ugly side. When he won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, the authorities stopped him from attending. Up for an Oscar one year, officials lobbied to have his film withdrawn from the competition.

But when the Olympics kick off Friday at China’s new National Stadium, with President Hu Jintao of China, President Bush and other world leaders in attendance and perhaps one billion people watching live on television, Mr. Zhang will preside over the opening ceremonies.

Nearly two years in the making, his spectacle is intended to present China’s new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games. Whether or not it succeeds, it will underscore one reality of a rising China: many leading artists now work with, or at least not against, the ruling Communist Party.

Rising nationalism and pride in China’s emergence as an economic power, and robust state support for artists who steer clear of political defiance, have transformed China’s cultural landscape since the early part of this decade. Today, directors, writers and painters who seek to expose the darker side of authoritarian rule not only enrage the censors, but also often find themselves shut out of the lucrative market for Chinese art, books and film. Many of those who find less political outlets for their talent, on the other hand, can get rich.

“People really are selling their talent in a way that can make them money,” said Ai Weiwei, an internationally recognized artist based in Beijing. “They really know that if they work with the government, they’ll benefit.”

The opening ceremonies will represent a particularly momentous conversion for Mr. Zhang, whose experience during the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution appeared to inform several of his internationally acclaimed — and domestically banned — films, including “Ju Dou” and “To Live.”

Mr. Zhang said in a recent interview that he never had political aims. His supporters say it is the Communist Party that has become more sophisticated, seeking to harness the country’s top talent and embrace a broader notion of national culture.

But critics accuse Mr. Zhang of making a pact with a political leadership that has a long record of restricting artistic freedom, playing the role of favored court artist — a kind of Chinese Leni Riefenstahl, creating beautiful backdrops for iron-fisted rulers.

“He went from being this renegade making films that were banned and an eyesore for the Chinese government to kind of being the pet of the government, in some people’s eyes,” said Michael Berry, who teaches contemporary Chinese culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost a complete turnaround from his early days.”

Other artists, including a few who fled into exile after the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989, now seem to be searching for ways to partner with Beijing as well.

The Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun and the celebrated pianist Lang Lang perform for the country’s leaders at Beijing’s new National Theater and serve as cultural ambassadors overseas. Xu Bing, a painter and calligrapher whose work in the 1980s was viewed as subversive, is now a vice president at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. He recently created a huge installation piece for the new Chinese Embassy in Washington.

Few artists, though, have embraced the government the way Mr. Zhang has. He has served as an artistic adviser to Beijing, promoted the nation’s image abroad and produced a short film to help China win the right to host the 2008 Olympics. He is now a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body.

Beijing’s Turnaround

Beijing, in turn, has promoted Mr. Zhang, giving his recent films favorable opening dates that bolster box office returns. The country’s film authorities allowed one of his recent movies to open at the Great Hall of the People. Cultural authorities even lobbied Hollywood executives to get his big-budget martial arts film, “Hero,” an Oscar.

Some Chinese critics panned “Hero” as an implicit homage to authoritarian rule. While it did not win an Oscar, it became one of the highest grossing foreign films in the American market.

Its success gave rise to the rapid commercialization — and depoliticization — of Chinese art. China’s cultural landscape is now filled with big-budget historical dramas, multimillion dollar art auctions, government-backed opera and dance extravaganzas, and bold new state-financed entertainment venues that suggest a melding of art, culture, power and national pride.

Like Mr. Zhang, the director Feng Xiaogang said he tired of battling censors long ago and switched to making more entertaining films that could deliver box-office riches. Chen Kaige, another prominent director with a history of provocative and rebellious films, has also been embraced by Beijing, which a few years ago allowed him use of one of the country’s most important government buildings for the premiere of his big-budget film “The Promise.”

“Now, the government wants directors to promote the country’s economic development,” said Wu Tianming, a well-known producer and director. “And the directors need money and fame and they can earn even more money with government support.”

For months, Mr. Zhang and his crew have been closeted in a secure Olympics compound, preparing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. The three-and-a-half-hour show is still shrouded in secrecy, though some highlights have been leaked. Mr. Zhang will use more than 15,000 performers and fireworks by the renowned artist Cai Guoqiang. Acrobats will dance through the air as in Mr. Zhang’s martial arts films. Lang Lang will headline a program that will include dance performances and the Peking Opera.

To help create China’s cultural moment, Mr. Zhang initially tapped Steven Spielberg to work as artistic adviser on the opening ceremonies.

But under pressure to sever ties because of China’s role in Sudan, Mr. Spielberg resigned in February, saying that his conscience troubled him and that China should do more to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The resignation was an embarrassment for China and Mr. Zhang, and it served to demonstrate the kind of pressures that artists in the West can come under when they work for the government. In China, though, Mr. Zhang sidestepped the matter with what has become his standard line, “I have no interest in politics.”

A Troubled History

Politics, in the past, was not easy to dodge.

Mr. Zhang’s father, an accountant, had served as an officer in the Nationalist army fighting the Communists during the country’s protracted civil war. His uncle fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan. Mr. Zhang grew up in northern Shaanxi Province in the 1950s on the wrong side of history.

The family’s problems intensified when the Cultural Revolution got under way in 1966, touching off a decade-long period of political madness. Mr. Zhang’s home was ransacked and his father was labeled a “double counter-revolutionary.”

At 18, he was sent to labor in the countryside, tilling fields with peasants. Mr. Zhang recalled a youth filled with despair in a 2005 interview with Mr. Berry of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Most enemies of the people during that time fell into the category of the ‘five bad elements,’ ” he said. “Well, people like me were called ‘the worst element.’ So those 10 years, from 1966 until 1976, I lived under the shadow of tragedy and hopelessness.”

In 1971, though, he was assigned to work as a machine technician at the No. 8 Cotton Mill in Xianyang, in Shaanxi Province. It was there that he fell in love with art and photography.

“He showed no interest in politics,” said Lei Peiyun, who worked with Mr. Zhang in the factory’s propaganda department. “But he once told me that people are shackled by politics.”

With Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Zhang gained admission to China’s only film school, the Beijing Film Academy. Initially he made his mark as a cinematographer, working on “Yellow Earth,” the 1984 film of a classmate, Chen Kaige.

But he soon began making his own films. In visually striking features like “Red Sorghum,” “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” he explored the country’s feudalist past, the plight of women and the conflicted lives of the Chinese people.

“At that time the whole culture was destroyed,” said Mr. Wu, the producer and director who helped finance several of Mr. Zhang’s early films. “They tasted the ugliness but less of the beauty.”

Although his early films won critical acclaim in the West, they were often banned in China as dark and even poisonous.

Some officials even accused him of pandering to Western tastes by stereotyping the Chinese character, an accusation he strongly denied. Others viewed his films as veiled critiques of the leadership, buried in the subtext of films set in pre-revolutionary China.

Wang Bin, his longtime literary adviser, said this happened in 1989 during preparation for shooting “Ju Dou,” the tale of a woman forced into an arranged marriage with an impotent old textile mill owner.

That summer, after the military fired on pro-democracy activists occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mr. Zhang and some co-workers ventured outside and witnessed the aftermath of the killings.

“We saw burned vehicles, bloody students,” Mr. Wang recalled. “I don’t want to say much now. But we spent the whole night sleepless. Because of that event, I trusted Zhang Yimou. I felt he cared for his nation.”

Distraught by what they saw, Mr. Wang said Mr. Zhang and the staff altered the screenplay, and the film’s final scene.

“At the end of the film, Ju Dou has a huge fire, and that represents our emotion,” he said. “That is June 4.”

He was bolder when he made the film “To Live,” which traces one family’s tragic journey over the course of four decades, ending with the Cultural Revolution, a subject that to this day remains taboo.

Colleagues said Mr. Zhang’s team submitted a fake script to the censors for pre-approval, promising to make a film about China’s bright future, and then secretly began filming “To Live.”

When the film was released to critical acclaim overseas, government censors were infuriated. Mr. Zhang was banned for five years from making films in China with foreign funds.

It was the last time he seriously challenged government censors.

The threat that he could be barred from making movies altogether, had a profound — if never fully articulated — effect on Mr. Zhang, said Zhang Zhenyan, his longtime production manager, who is no relation.

A New Approach

The director began toying with new and less provocative genres — a gangster film, tear-jerkers and a tender tale of a village teacher who, with the help of a benevolent state television boss, rescues a lost student.

Then in 2001, after the hit film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” by the Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, Mr. Zhang’s work became commercial on a grand scale. He made three big-budget martial arts films that broke box office records in China.

Critics said he had sold out to Hollywood. Mr. Zhang defended his new taste as international and modern. In an interview late last year, he said, “China has stepped into a new era, an era of consumption and entertainment,” adding, “You can condemn it if you like, but it is a trend of globalization.”

“Hero” told the story of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, who was known for burning books, burying intellectuals and unifying China through brutal means. Some critics accused Mr. Zhang of pandering to Beijing with a story that seemed to glorify an all-powerful state that preserves unity and stability.

Government officials praised the film, calling it “a new starting point to China’s new century.”

And before the film was even released to the public, the government submitted it as the nation’s official foreign-language Oscar nominee in 2002 (the state selects just one film each year) and then lobbied Hollywood executives for it to win, according to film industry executives.

A letter Mr. Zhang wrote in late 2002 to Miramax Films, which had acquired rights to “Hero,” hints at his new influence.

Annoyed by the editing of the film, Mr. Zhang told his American backers, “If you insist on doing nothing to support the film but keep on delaying and cutting down the movie, and eventually destroying it, I cannot imagine how the Chinese government and the whole Chinese population will think of you and Miramax.”

He added: “I truly believe no one could stop their anger! You will be hurting not only me, but also the whole Chinese population.”

A Cultural Hero

There were other perks. His production of the opera “Turandot” was staged in the Forbidden City, a national landmark. Beijing nominated his last three films for the foreign-language Oscar, even though “Curse of the Golden Flower” opened last year to poor reviews.

And then the top honor: he was named artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympic Committee and later won the competition to serve as impresario of Olympic ceremonies.

“The government made him a cultural hero of China,” Chen Xihe, a professor of film at Shanghai University, said in an interview last year. “Why would he continue to make movies that challenge the political system?”

Mr. Zhang dismissed the suggestion that there were political motivations behind his work, and he said the Olympics were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that any Chinese would be foolish to pass up.

“For a century, this is the most important time for the Chinese to host all of guests coming from all over the world,” he said in an interview. “I took this job, to a great extent, because I wanted to do something for the Chinese people.”

Friends said his stewardship of the opening ceremonies was the ultimate reward for a man who spent so many years was on the outside, once tarred as an enemy of the state.

“Although he started with no interest in politics,” said Bai Yuguo, a longtime friend, “he’s now at the center of China.”

I watched wee Tony today in Lust Caution as I have a lot of Lust Caution pent up inside of me. My man booked his flights back to Glasgow via London today it is the 12th September I cannot contain myself. So I watched wee Tony too get some Lust Caution out of my system.
I love this frame of him just the climax of the scene of all that is so beautiful and passionate. crry bangwall
Mr Hong Kong himself Tony Leung Chiu Wai Sexy Man :drool

for me Tony Leung is the best Chinese actor..he is more than handsome or talented he is anything an actor can be..