Word: zhou
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...film, literally, than its predecessors. By day the sun shines through the tin roofs and sultry shacks of the Chus' shantytown in the New Territories, and by night a lunar white shines from the modern apartments of nearby Hollywood Plaza. That's where the enterprising, Shanghai girl Tong Tong (Zhou Xun) lives, dreaming of the real Hollywood, before she jolts the Chus into life, then sets them burning...
...movie is Zhou's first outside of mainland China, but her luscious portrayal of Tong Tong, a woman by turns wide-eyed and desperate, shanghais the show. That's no mean feat for an ingenue, and except for Zhou and Glen Chin, all the film's actors are amateurs Chan plucked from the street. Despite the director's deft touch with comic characters, not all manage watchable performances. Chin's gruff, soulful Chu is a match for Tong Tong, and Leung earns kudos as the least annoying fat kid in recent Chinese cinema. But Ho's Ming does little more...
...Zhou gives Hollywood its bittersweet lilt. When she disappears two-thirds of the way through, the movie descends into jarring absurdism, replete with violent mutilations, an unexpected murder and unhygienic pork butchery. Pigs become nearly indistinguishable from people, and Chan just rescues his work from an unsatisfying dissonance with an ending that returns to the film's essential sweetness. Life in Hong Kong may be getting bleaker by the day, but Fruit Chan knows the lights of Hollywood haven't gone...
...TIME: Was Zhou Xun easy to work with? Chan: Her attitude was quite good. But she was very concerned about sex. This is a Chinese problem. If you make a movie about sex, they're very shy about it. They try to get out of doing the scene...
...argument from Zhou Yuanyuan as she scrambles up one of the steeper reaches of the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing during a recent weekend. Decked out in $80 hiking boots and combat fatigues, Zhou and her boyfriend, co-owners of a real estate company, have turned to physically challenging day trips to stay fit. "Our business has been good, but our stress levels are high," says Zhou, 23. "We've been eating too much and gaining weight. We find we must exercise?otherwise we just can't perform at work." The government is contributing to the cause...