Word: fu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Director Benny Chan has packed Heroic Duo with sophisticated weaponry, high-speed car chases and dizzying stunts, including one stomach-quivering sequence in which a character traverses two skyscrapers using a wobbly, metal stepladder. Noticeably absent are high-wire kung fu acrobatics; Chan, who first gained notoriety with kung fu fantasy Magic Crane, apparently no longer wants anything to do with Chinamen in robes?unless they're behind the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa...
...Abandoning his cultural kung fu roots may have proved to be a wise business move for Chan?Arclight, a U.S. film distributor based in Australia, has already bought the movie's international and U.S. distribution and licensing rights for a seven-figure sum. (Chan's 1998 Jackie Chan vehicle Who Am I? and Gen-X Cops were both distributed overseas by Columbia TriStar.) Like his previous action flicks, Heroic Duo goes for the mainstream jugular, but this time Benny Chan devotes enough screen time to character development so that you care (slightly) about these characters before they're blown...
...Chinese government's official answer to these questions, as expressed in an indictment handed down last month by authorities in Beijing, is that Yang was spying for Taiwan. According to Yang's wife, Christina Fu, and lawyers advising her, the evidence cited for this charge consists of little more than the fact that a foundation Yang ran for a few years until 1994 received funding from donors in Taiwan's Kuomintang political party and that Yang sent $400 to three relatives and one friend on the mainland. More likely, the charge of espionage is intended to get mainland authorities...
...Yang, now 40, first left his homeland in 1986, he did so out of a sense of patriotic duty. The prevailing wisdom of the decade after the Cultural Revolution held that science, not politics, was the key to China's future. "Jianli decided to study math at Berkeley," says Fu, now a statistician at Harvard Medical School, "because he wanted to serve his country." But when the student democracy protesters began to flood Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Yang forsook his equations for late nights watching the TV news. And after Deng Xiaoping declared martial law several weeks...
...visit Harvard. Later came China's accession to the World Trade Organiza-tion and Beijing's winning bid to host the 2008 Olym-pics. In this atmosphere Yang began to experience doubts. "The temptation to see for himself what was really happening at home became stronger and stronger," says Fu, "He was starting to feel too cut off." Yang told a distraught Fu that he'd just take a quick look around and be back in 10 days...