Word: wais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Despite its lingering reputation as a drab building rife with petty crime, as a whole, Chungking Mansions has cleaned itself up in the past decade with the addition of more than 200 security cameras and an increased police presence. Thanks in part to Wong Kar-wai's popular 1994 film Chungking Express, the site draws a regular flow of tourists to its affordable curry houses and warren of knockoff-electronics booths. While members of Hong Kong's triads - the local underground crime syndicates - play a key role in Nine Dragons, they don't have much of a presence...
...aren't much help. The city's thin retirement protection for the elderly - a modest $130 a month in social security - and a requirement that new immigrants reside in Hong Kong for seven years before they are eligible for public housing are big contributors to the phenomenon, says Ho Wai-chi, director of Oxfam Hong Kong...
...Written By (Wai Ka-fai, Hong Kong...
...Wai has written many movies for Hong Kong's last standing top director, Johnnie To, including Vengeance, the Johnny Hallyday gangland saga that played at Cannes this year. On his own, Wai offers Written By, a conceptually complex yarn beginning with a car crash that kills a man and blinds his young daughter. Years later, the daughter (Kelly Lin) writes a novel in which she dies and the father (Lau Ching-wan) survives but is blinded. Then, within that fantasy, the father writes a novel reviving his child. It's a little more appealing as a Charlie Kaufman-like structure...
...note that movies Americans have never heard of can pull in blockbuster numbers. Recent global winners include the French comedy Welcome to the Sticks, at $243 million; the first installment of the two-part Red Cliff, John Woo's return to Chinese-language action films, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Takeshi Kaneshiro, which has taken in $125 million; and Hayao Miyazaki's charming animé for kids, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, earning $177 million. U.S. fans of Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) will be pleased to hear that Disney will be releasing the film...