Word: silk
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...Suzhou Creek. HAN FENG, Shanghai and New York City?based fashion designer Lounge on an opium bed at Face Bar, a renovated 1930s-era villa in central Shanghai, where a favorite tipple is the Chinese Whisper - a Midori and Cointreau cocktail. Stroll past stores selling bolts of Chinese silk to Restaurant 1931 on Maoming Road, where the traditionally clad waitresses evoke the glamour of old Shanghai. The fried dumplings aren't bad, either. Then catch some music at the House of Blues and Jazz, owned by a local TV personality, before ending the night with a typical Shanghai treat...
...even high-art programmers know that films are also movies. So this year Cannes had a quartet of horror-SF pictures. Two, X-Men The Last Stand and the Taiwanese thriller Silk, showed out of competition in the main selection. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly played in the official sidebar Un Certain Regard. The fourth film, Bong Joon-ho's The Host was in the independent Directors' Fortnight program...
...Silk, directed by Su Chao-bin, tries a sciencey twist on the ghostly-kid genre spawned in Japan by The Ring and imitated by movie industries from Hong Kong's to Hollywood's. Beginning with that favorite Asian movie trope - sending some disposable Caucasian to his violent death - Silk focus on a Taipei research project that has managed, through some anti-gravity gizmo called the Menger Sponge, to capture the ghost of a nine-year old boy. Guess what? The death-child escapes...
...leave after the first hour, wanted to know how it came out. The short answer: boy gets girl, ghosts run wild. And that wasn't worth waiting for. But if you've always wanted to see a scene in which a drunk accidentally pees through a ghost, Silk will satisfy your craving...
...matter how slick and ordinary Silk might have been, I was in a party mood because of the film I'd seen just before it: Paolo Sorrentino's A Friend of the Family. Sorrentino's The Consequences of Love, a gorgeous-looking dark comedy about a fastidious hit man, was one of the lovely surprises of Cannes 2004 and a winner of the Best Film, Screenplay and Director prizes at the Donatello Awards, Italy's equivalent to the Oscars. The new movie trumps the earlier one, creating a small-town Italian cosmos where love and greed, Venus and venality...