Two weeks back the W Hotel hosted a guest talk with AnD artists Wing Shya and Tony Chan,  both of whom are directing their first feature film - "Hot Summer Days" which features a LOT of big name actors, including Daniel Wu, Nicholas Tse and Jacky Cheung to name just a few.

The talk was pretty much a Q and A with a radio DJ acting as MC and doing the questioning, unfortunately 95% of it was done in Cantonese.  Thankfully they did translate a bit of it into English, but the weird thing was that the MC did the translation for his questions as well as their answers... ie "Wing just said that the most memorable part about the film was..." 

Which was odd, because both Wing and Tony actually speak English quite well, at least as good, if not better than the MC does. :-P





The two men of the hour doing a TV follow-up interview after the talk.

Anyway it was interesting and I'm looking forward to the movie. it opens next week!  If you haven't seen the trailer yet, check it out here:

Regular Etchy blog readers may have noticed that its been quite a while since I went biking... or at least since I put up a blog about biking.  Its because I haven't been going!  Between my parents visiting in November and then Legend FC promotion and the holidays,  I went a good two and a half months without a single ride.

For those who aren't familiar,  I actually bought a bike three and a half years ago when I was living in the New Territories (countryside part of HK), but a year later I moved closer to downtown and ever since my bike has been a 'ronin bike' (浪人單車)... on weekends I ride it from one place to another then lock it up somewhere and come back another time to ride it somewhere else.

Which means a two and a half months of no biking = two and a half months of leaving my bike unattended locked to a railing somewhere on the opposite side of the territory.    After a few weeks you begin to wonder if its still there (or all still in one piece).  After a month or two you're like "ok, it must have been either stolen, stripped or impounded!"... needless to say when I finally found some time to go get it, I was 90% expecting to not find it -

But I was wrong! :-P

All in one piece... just covered in about an inch of dust...    This is actually in Tuen Mun (a place most of you have never been before, even if you've lived in HK for a long long time).

I moved it to a legal bike parking spot (since I didn't know when I would actually be able to come back).  I was lucky enough to manage to come back the week after (after 2manyDJs) for some night riding.

It was Patrick's Birthday last week.  Simon suggested going to the food market in Northpoint.


They finally came out of the closet! Congrats to the new domestic partnership.

OK, apparently I'm the last person in the world who saw 2012...  I missed it in the theaters but I caught it on DVD recently.


I wasn't particularly looking forward to this film because I thought it'd be a rehash of every other global disaster movie we've seen recently...  from "Japan is Sinking" to "The Day After Tomorrow"...     well it is quite similar... except since this one is newer, you get more special effects, which means more buildings falling, more explosions, more volcanos and more giant crevasses always popping up 0.1 seconds after our heroes manage to pass through.

Actually that's one of my problems with this film... its not just a LITTLE over the top... its so over the top it becomes more of a parody than anything else.   (I could easily imagine the characters saying "ok, we need to take off,  cue the collapsing run-way that opens into a giant crack that our plane barely manages to lift out of before almost hitting some famous buildings too...")  :-P


This over-done-ness is perhaps best embodied in this very image, which also appears in the movie:
Its not just enough to have the White House get hit by a giant tsunami...  or to have an aircraft carrier get hit capsized by a giant wave... they have to have the tsunami flip the aircraft carrier over on top of the White House! (how's that for bad timing!)  ... forget the fact  that you are supposed to be a few hundred miles away from the Ocean.... 

For a movie focused on geography, you think their attention to detail would be a little bit better, but apparently Yellowstone park is somewhere where LA people head to for quick camping trips (its actually 1000+ miles away!)   oh, and somehow  Woody Harrelson's magic radio program reaches the entire western US...

anyway, you have to unplug your brain from such details... or wondering why anyone with a half decent sail boat in the open ocean wouldn't also be fine... John Cusack does a good job with the limited material.  It has a few too many lame "lets discuss humanity" and "oh no, my family is dead" acting exercises in there....   but not enough to ruin the film.

I give it a 6/10 for popcorn thrill ride entertainment only. 

Sorry it took me a while to post this,  it was from two weeks back when I was up in MK showing my friend from Japan around. 

They replaced the giant Daniel Wu Seiko billboard with a promotion for the new movie 'True Legend'. 


Featuring Jay Chou, or as I like to refer to him...  Hawk Man!






doh, i was too transfixed by Zhou Xun to get a good picture of Andy On.  doh! I hope its still there, I'll try to get a better pic of Andy!