Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Daffy Duck Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1965 It's Nice to Have a Mouse Around the House, (co-starring Speedy Gonzales, Granny, and Sylvester,) and planned by Friz Freleng and finished by Hawley Pratt.
The cartoon marked the first theatrical pairing of Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, with Daffy serving as Speedy's new foe in the cartoons, it was also the only time where they paired together in a Friz Freleng cartoon.
Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour has once again been checking out the very funny website, Letters Live, (where actors read actual letters from famous and not so famous people.) We stumbled upon this one, so lets watch it -
Peter Dinklage reading of Spalding Gray's essay becomes a love letter to New York City after the tragic destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.
We've picked another entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's film is the classic 1969 Kung Fu movie, A Touch of Zen, (Hsia nu,) directed by King Hu, and starring Shih Chun, Hsu Feng, and Pai Ying. The film is considered on of King Hu's greatest work and the film is very influential throughout the genre.A Touch of Zen was the first Chinese film to win an award at Cannes, where it took home the Technical Grand Prize in 1975. So push away from the table, get comfortable and join us in watching A Touch of Zen.
Production of A Touch of Zen began in 1967 but was not completed until 1969. Against director King Hu’s wishes, producers demanded that the film be exhibited in two parts (in 1970 and 1971) in Taiwan, where it languished at the box office. The famous bamboo-forest fight climax of the first part was reprised at the beginning of the second. Without Hu, the producers then recut the film into a two-hour version and rereleased it to theaters, where it performed no better. In 1973, Hu regained control of the film and recut it according to his original intentions: as a single three-hour film. That version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975.
Demand Euphoria!
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