Surreal Chinese Film Features NBA Stars

Surreal Chinese Film Features NBA Stars, A wild trailer features Dwight Howard, “Tron”-inspired effects, and a love story. It’s not new information that Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony are going to star in a feature film titled “Amazing,” a joint production between the NBA and the Shanghai Film Group (SFG) that’s been billed as “the first NBA-themed motion picture outside of North America.” The NBA and SFG announced the film project in August 2010, and we promptly noted how fascinating it sounded, how excited we were for it, and how big an opportunity it appeared to present for sheer filmic disaster.

But you’d be forgiven if you forgot about “Amazing,” because things have been pretty quiet on the development front since that initial announcement. The scheduled summer 2011 release date came and went, as the league and its players tended to other, more pressing business. ‘Melo moved from Denver to Manhattan and appeared on “Nurse Jackie,” while Dwight seemingly tried to move from Orlando before hemming/hawing his way into a one-year extension with the Magic, and appeared in “The Three Stooges.” And in the absence of updates, it seemed like the project had been, at the very least, de-emphasized. Film buffs the world over began to fear that the film would never see the light of day.

This last weekend, though, roundball-loving cineastes received some long overdue good news. Not only is “Amazing” back, on its way to global cineplexes and sounding bigger and better than ever, but thanks to the magic of The Basketball Jones’ Trey Kerby, we now know what it looks like. And oh, man, does it look even more insane and great than we’d hoped.

Li Anlan of the Shanghai Daily has some details on the film:

For the first time, the NBA is partnering with a non-US film studio to release a major film overseas, the producers announced at a global press conference [...]

“Amazing,” a production by the Shanghai Film Group, tells the story of a fictional world known as “The Sixth Sense.” It uses basketball imagery to combine the visual elements of a video game with a movie, akin to the 2010 American science fiction film “Tron: Legacy.”