Confusing headline? You should have seen me when I was standing in the fake forbidden palace! Hengdian World Studios is the name of the crazy movie studio that 'rebuild' the forbidden city for cinematic purposes. And not only Beijing, but they also copied some buildings from Xi'An, Hongkong, Guangzhou and other cities. I didn't know this, but quite a few big movie titles were completely or partly shot here: Gong Li's THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN, Zhen Kaige's horrible THE PROMISE and last but not least Zhang Yimou's latest drama THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. And countless chinese TV series, as it seems.
Last sunday was the 'premiere': I had my very first driving lesson in Shanghai's Xuhui district, near Caobao road line one subway station. The license costs me about 4000 kuai and it will take 'at least' 3 months to get it, as the teacher said. No driving this christmas, too…
This is a graphical view on the contents of the ZHU AND GOU DVD that I am currently producing. Regular users of the software will immediately recognize that I am using Apple's DVD Studio Pro to create my wedding movie DVD. Anyway, all the content is created and encoded, the…
I've been searching a lot around the net lately for a decent shopping system that is PHP/MySQL driven, and the best thing I found was osCommerce - so far. I noticed today that there is a new shopping CMS being developed at Intersprire which is called StoreSuite. The biggest problem…
You've created the Google Sitemaps file with one of the many available Wordpress plugins? You added it to your Google Webmaster Tools account? You added it to your robots.txt file? Good. I did that, too. But all that work, just for Google? Of course, Google is the mighty giant and…
After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the…
I wanted a Xbox 360. But then I saw that the prices for HDTV's didn't drop that much and that we probably weren't going to buy one anytime soon. No HDTV, no Xbox 360 necessary. I don't wanna play Halo 3 on a 21 inch screen TV. Who would? So…
I just had left my home to walk to Longyang road to grab a subway to go downtown for lunch with a friend, when a insane rainstorm started. In the last days it had rained here every once in a while, mostly for about 5 minutes. So I thought 'let's…
Lust, Caution is the new movie from Ang Lee. Most of the story seems to take place in 'occupied Shanghai', so I am guessing in the late 1930's? The story is about a 'ordinary' girl who has to make a dude fall in love with her, then kill him. That bitch! Just kidding, the story seems way more deep than my words could ever describe it... But that's what you would expect from a director who can turn cowboys gay, isn't it? Anyways, there are only very few shots of old Shanghai in the movie, it must be more difficult with each day and every new skyscraper to 'turn back time'. Most of the shots are pretty dark, which is clever, so the removing of the skyscraper-lights gets kinda easy... I know video editing, just believe me. Still, there are some day shots like in the image above. So check out the trailer if you're into Shanghai's history look. The trailer is, of course, available at apple.com in 25 different HD resolutions. Check it out.
German magazine "Spiegel" has published a list of 25 cities - ordered by the amount of skyscraper they have. It's a quite interesting list and it even has some surprises. Shanghai will, of course, sooner or later rise to No. 1 - don't worry! Here we go:
No. 1: Hongkong, China! 7422 skyscrapers.
No. 2: New York City, USA! 5445 skyscrapers.
No. 3: Singapore! 3503 skyscrapers. 4 million people.
By Jakob Montrasio 
