REVIEW: Christian Bale May Be the Star, But Zhang Yimou Puts Women at Heart of Flowers of War

The great Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou has gone from having films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern banned in his homeland of China to directing the lavish opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, his more recent work taking place in the safer territory of the grandiose historical melodrama of�Curse of the Golden Flower and the Nicholas Sparks-worthy sentimentality of�Under the Hawthorn Tree.�Zhang has insisted that he's not interested in politics, a tack that certainly seems to have its benefits: With an estimated budget of around $90 million, The Flowers of War is one of the most, if not the most, expensive Chinese production to date, it stars Christian Bale and it's China's Oscar submission. But that doesn't mean that Zhang's latest output should be dismissed offhand as nationalist propaganda.

That the accusation's been tossed at�The Flowers of War, a big, button-pushing, brutally effective World War II-era drama, may be due to unfamiliarity with the atrocity during which it's set -- the Nanjing Massacre, during which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands raped by Japanese soldiers after the capturing of the city in December of 1937. It's a horrific incident that remains relatively unexplored in popular culture, though Iris Chang's bestselling book�The Rape of Nanking, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's�2007 documentary Nanking, and�Lu Chuan's excellent City of Life and Death, which played in a few U.S. theaters last year, have brought it recent attention. Given that the massacre remains a painful point in China-Japan relations, and that certain far-right Japanese ultranationalists (like Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara) like to claim the massacre never took place and was invented to�tarnish the image of Japan, it's surprising that the Japanese soldiers don't come off even less one-dimensional in Zhang's film.

The Flowers…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/review-christian-bale-may-be-the-star-but-zhang-yimou-puts-women-at-heart-of-flowers-of-war/

Blake Lively Blu Cantrell Bonnie Jill Laflin Bridget Moynahan Britney Spears Brittany Daniel Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy