Film Gourmand

 On October 24, 2002, Zhang Yimou's film "Ying xiong  英雄 (Hero)" was released in theaters in China. According to one of the most authoritative Russian film critics, Sergei Kudryavtsev ,  "Zhang Yimou harbored hopes of creating ... a philosophical work of the Confucian persuasion, which would deal with the problem of choosing between life and death, the right of one person (the killer) to determine the fate of another person (the emperor). "    For this purpose, Zhang Yimou used Ying Zheng, the ruler of the Qin kingdom, as one of the main characters in his film narrative. Let me remind you that Ying Zheng ascended the throne of the kingdom of Qin in 245 BC at the age of 13. By the time of his accession, China was a collection of 7 kingdoms that had been in a state of brutal and bloody war of all against all for two hundred years. By the age of 39, Ying Zheng had conquered all the other 6 kingdoms one by one and thus, for the first time in the history of China, cr...

 On October 13, 1997, Taylor Hackford's "The Devil's Advocate" premiered in Westwood, California. On October 17, 1997, the film was released in wide release in cinemas in the United States and Canada. Taylor Hackford's film is an adaptation of the 1990 bestseller of the same name by American writer Andrew Neiderman. The book's success prompted the writer to approach Warner Bros. with a proposal to film the novel. The film company agreed and in 1994 hired director Joel Schumacher to direct the film. He, in turn, was going to shoot in the role of a young lawyer Brad Pitt. The problem arose with the selection of an actor for the role of John Milton. While Schumacher was looking for a suitable actor, interest in the subject of the film faded from the film company, and the project was shelved indefinitely. But very soon this interest arose again, moreover, with a vengeance. The reason for the outbreak of interest in the topic of Andrew Neiderman's bestseller wa...

 On October 9, 1952, Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live (Ikiru 生きる)" was released in Japanese cinemas. The content of the film is inspired by Leo Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". The film "To Live" was not the first work of Kurosawa inspired by Russian literary classics. A year earlier, Akira Kurosawa filmed his favorite novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Idiot", moving its action to Japan. However, it should be borne in mind that, as noted by the outstanding Soviet and Russian literary critic Elena Katasonova, "In this work, as usual, the director did not seek to literally reproduce the plot and ideas of Tolstoy, but tried in his own way to understand and comprehend the situation described in the story of the Russian classic: what to do to a hopelessly dying person at that moment a small allotted rest of his life?" Despite the fact that Akira Kurosawa's film "To Live" was inspired by one of the most famous ...