Word: gongs
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...Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy. Director Marc Forster and a tony cast (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah) hit every punch line with a gong, and Ferrell, who's quiet and fine, seems as lost among them as Harold is in his suddenly fictional world...
...these movies were successful at the box office. And all of them were about as sexy as a lettuce leaf. Or should we make that "fig leaf"? The summer's one notable exception to that generalization was Miami Vice, which featured the rip-snorting bedroom ballets of Gong Li and Colin Farrell. There was hunger in their encounters, and inexplicable need, and, for the audience, the joy of seeing two handsome people heedlessly enjoying one another. For reasons that probably have something to do with its grim and murky plot, the picture was, in Hollywood-speak, a commercial "disappointment...
...halt the spread of such hothouses of faith. But that may be changing, as evidenced by the assault on the Hangzhou church. The mandarins in Beijing have always reserved special venom for groups they label xie jiao, or evil cults. The most famous is the brutally suppressed Falun Gong movement, but the authorities may be tempted to extend that label to the Christian sects that are growing the fastest--those practicing fervid forms of worship that stress miracles and personal inspiration through prayer. A number of cultlike, pseudo-Christian offshoots have sprung up in the Chinese countryside in recent years...
...Shenzhen has surged by about 40% since 2000 to more than $4,000 last year. That's twice the average wage in other major cities like Chongqing. Higher costs are undercutting the profit margins of labor-intensive industries that have been the backbone of Shenzhen's economy. Greg Gong, CEO of Taiwan-based Further Tech, opened a factory in Shenzhen three years ago to make consumer-electronics gear, but he's already getting squeezed. Gong says his costs are rising by 10% annually, driven mainly by higher wages, and tough competition prevents him from increasing the price of his products...
There are some very pretty images in Miami Vice: a sporty little airplane flirting with a massive bank of clouds; down angles on speedboats cutting wide, frothy wakes through the water; almost any moment the camera concentrates on Gong Li or Naomie Harris...