Author Archives: Howard Ho

What award doesn’t Clint Eastwood deserve? He’s been an Oscar-winning director, one of the most recognizable actors in films, a producer, a military man, a lumberjack and the mayor of Carmel, a small California town. It’s a shame we won’t have Dirty Harry on the ballot for governor. In light of his versatility, it wasn’t […]

Mike Figgis sits in a canopied square in the Farmers’ Market on 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue wearing sunglasses, suggesting that perhaps he prefers watching people without them knowing it. Indeed, as his improvisational films “Timecode 2000″ and the newly released “Hotel” prove, he likes to see what people will do when they don’t have […]

When Elizabeth Upton started her job as musicology professor at UCLA, she was not prepared for the initiation process: creating a new general enrollment course. A medievalist, Upton created “Getting Medieval,” a course about modern incarnations of medieval things from Wagner’s operas to Disneyland castles and “The Lord of the Rings.” “I didn’t know anything […]

UCLA may be a new producer of foreign language filmmakers. Of the seven films honored in this year’s Spotlight Awards for directing, two are in foreign languages and were shot in foreign countries. Chris Eska’s “Doki Doki” is set in Tokyo and deals with mass transit passengers who finally connect after sitting next to each […]

UCLA may be a new producer of foreign language filmmakers. Of the seven films honored in this year’s Spotlight Awards for directing, two are in foreign languages and were shot in foreign countries. Chris Eska’s “Doki Doki” is set in Tokyo and deals with mass transit passengers who finally connect after sitting next to each […]

Director Chen Kaige is known for making films from the safe vantage point of history, but he’s ready for a change. “I used to believe there was no culture in China because the old traditional cultural values were being destroyed by the last 15 years under communism,” Chen said. “Now I feel like I was […]