Almost 08/08/08!!!

OK, go away for a couple of weeks and the biggest wedding since Charles and Diana happens under your radar - Tony Leung and Carina Lau (wedding announced some time a couple of weeks ago) finally wed after dating for almost 20 years. Not big for most people but FREAKING big for HK, China, and Taiwan and that's over a billion people + so important for 1/4 people in the world. Wong Kar-wai and William Cheung 'curated' the wedding (whatever that means). ON the topic of The Talent Mr Leung, began watching pirated RED CLIFF DVD in Toronto, but it was, as the Pacific Mall salesgirl told me, only 'camcorder quality' so not even '90% DVD quality'. I like old school hand held pirated DVDs because it preserves the sense of the cinema as a public space - e.g., you can hear everyone laughing their heads off when the actors say something ridiculous that will just appear very 'Oriental' in the official DVD (e.g., any glossy but lame-o Zhang Yimou martial arts film). It's good to have a clued-in public present to judge how silly things are (I think I've been reading too much Gramsci this week, but on this see also Laikwan Pang). Back to John Woo's The Battle of Red Cliff: in one scene, Tony Leung's and Takeshi Kaneshiro's characters challenge each other to sing but then have a gu-zheng-off instead (contest on flat stringed instrument... last seen in Kung Fu Hustle) and everyone in the audience got the giggles. Sadly never made it to the end so can't report on film but watched it with my teenaged cousin who kept substituting everyone with Lord of the Rings characters (hee hee). But hey, it's John Woo so we can count on trustworthy themes - brotherhood, blood, and diagonal shooting (hmm, that will be more difficult with axes and cross bows but I'm sure he'll manage).

ps. here's a follow up to previous blog courtesy of Vanity Fair featuring John and Cindy McCain (can you take someone named Cindy seriously?):