1 Giant Leap

You never know what inspiration you might find in a yoga class, or anywhere else for that matter. While going through a rather arduous flow series from triangle through half moon and other poses, Wendy played this cool song:



I always find that good music can make yoga poses and long runs seem like a walk in the park.
"What was that song you were playing during triangle pose?" I asked Wendy after class.
"Haha...you must be talking about the song from 1 Giant Leap. It was a movie with a lot of yogi types. It's a great movie, touching on a lot of interesting issues. You should see it," she said.

It took me a few days to remember to look it up, but I'm glad I did. 1 Giant Leap has just released their second DVD: What About Me. Part global travelogue through 50 destinations across five continents and part music video with excellent music by a wide range of musicians, 1 Giant Leap (Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman) embark on a journey to explore the human spirit and our interconnectedness through music, culture and beliefs. It's a visual collage of our views on life, love, God, money and the search for meaning set to a moving soundtrack.

Serendipitous Discovery: Following the Ninth

Another day, another interesting surprise. I was searching for a way to rent a Lexus R300h in or around Frutillar, Chile (research for LCB: Drives) and came across a post on Fodor's forum by someone asking about a scenic spot between Santiago and Puerto Varas. The poster's name was Kerry Candaele and he mentioned that he was working on a documentary. Someone replied to his question and wondered whether he was related to Casey Candaele, former Major League ballplayer. Turns out, Kerry is Casey's brother and the two had previously produced the documentary A League of Their Own, on which the feature film starring Tom Hanks and Geena Davis was based, about their mother Helen Candaele, who is inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Anyway, he posted a link to his current documentary project: Following the Ninth. Curious, I clicked on the link. Nothing to do with the nine innings of baseball. Rather, the Ninth in question here is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It's a fascinating documentary that links the world and its historical events through this one seminal symphony.

As the website explains: "Part road film, ala Jack Keroac, part musical love story, ala The Red Violin, FOLLOWING THE NINTH will move across geographical and cultural borders like the Ninth Symphony itself. The film will tell the story of passionate commitment to and love for music and its capacity to sustain us even in the darkest of times. Rather than limit the appeal of the story by focusing on symphony musicians alone, FOLLOWING THE NINTH will find the rock band in Hong Kong that performs the piece, the Qanun player in Jerusalem, or the steel drum players in New York City, the five-thousand-member chorus in Tokyo, from poets, priests, and housewives, scholars and scamps all over the world who have found themselves connecting to Beethoven’s Ninth."

I have no idea who that Hong Kong rock band is. Eagerly awaiting the movie's May 2008 release just to find out.

In the movies

Just got a bunch of complimentary tickets to Super Fans, the Eric Kot-directed movie starring Charlene Choi (one of the Twins) and Leo Ku that borrowed our office as a set back in January. Am amazed that it'll be showing on the big screen starting tomorrow!

Dinner with Filmmakers

It's not every day that I get to have dinner with an Academy Award-winning film director, so I was really excited when TN & FY invited me to a dinner they were hosting for their filmmaker friends in town for last week's Entertainment Expo. Filmmakers at the dinner included: Stanley Kwan, Anne Misawa, Corey Tong and Ruby Yang (still recovering from all the Oscar parties).

I arrived at Ning Po Resident's Association's restaurant pretty much at the same time as LC and SK. The thing with filmmakers is that you often know their work, but you don't really know their face. To my slight embarrassment, I actually didn't know that the guy I was sitting next to was the SK, one of Hong Kong's more respectable directors. He was talking about a project that he had been working on, but has since been passed on to Chen Kaige. He had been pushing for Tony Leung to take on the lead character, a Peking opera star, but to no avail. CT and AM are in town finalizing financing for their upcoming feature film, a triptych of love stories spanning three cities around the Pacific Rim. RY is on her celebratory PR rounds for The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short:



We were all extremely entertained by her photos from the Vanity Fair Oscar party. There were snaps of her with Penelope Cruz, Leonardo di Caprio (who she says only took a picture with her because she had an Oscar in hand!), Forrest Whitaker and a whole host of other Hollywood celebs. She never thought the film would get nominated, let alone win. On the night the nominations were to be announced, she even told her team to go home and not wait for the call (fortunately, they didn't listen). I tried to get her to convey how she felt at that moment at the ceremony where they announced her film as the winning film, but I suppose it's not something that can be reduced to a one-liner; all the blood, sweat and tears of so many people involved in that one ephemeral moment. When you watch the trailer for her film, indeed, the Oscar and all the glamour surrounding it all gets reduced to a mere triviality. The Blood of Yingzhou District is actually part of a larger project to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in China through PSAs produced by their organization, The China Aids Media Project.

For those in Hong Kong interested in screening the film and meeting Ruby Yang, FCC has organized a dinner this Friday, 30 March 2007 at 7:30pm. If you miss this one, there'll be a fundraising screening in May.

Casino Royale 2007

I am soooo bummed that Hong Kong is sooooo behind the times. While the rest of the civilised world gets to see Casino Royale this Friday, 17 November, those of us unfortunate souls stuck in Hong Kong have to wait until 22 December!!!

To make up for it, I want to organize a black tie, Casino Royale-inspired New Year's Eve party at Wynn Macau. Imagine this: Beautiful guests in black tie and ballgrowns helicopter over to Macau. On arrival, a fleet of Aston Martin DB9s await (need to work on this detail though). The procession of DB9s arrive Wynn, guests parade through the casino floor on up to adjoining party suites staffed and ready to serve a wonderful sit-down dinner with a freeflow of Krug and caviar. After dinner, the entertainment (from Shirley Bassey's "Diamonds are Forever" to Madonna's "Die Another Day") arrives. Guests party the night away with even more bottles of Krug, Macallan 25 and Cuban cigars until 2007. Masseurs will be available throughout the night in the suites' massage rooms for fatigued guests.

For the occasion, I even have the perfect pair of diamante-studded Shu Uemura eyelashes that I got in Tokyo this past weekend! SM, who is head of the cosmetic brand's international marketing, got my intrigued enough about the product to buy them after hearing all her Madonna stories (they custom-made a pair of lashes from mink and real diamonds for Madonna's Confessions on a Dancefloor tour).

Here's a bit of inspiration (trailers courtesy of Sony Pictures via google video):



I actually prefer this shorter trailer with the Judi Dench voiceover:

In-flight Education: An Inconvenient Truth

I had a great flight from JFK back to HK, where it was easier for me to stay awake through the night (morning in HK time) by watching action/adventure movies and television shows. But the most engaging and thought-provoking movie I watched was the last one I watched over breakfast service: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Most people have known for some time that global warming is a problem. I certainly feel the effects in my day-to-day life in Hong Kong these past few years as pollution has gotten worse and worse. Just being in the US and Canada these past couple of months, I have been able to breath much easier and feel a lot healthier. Granted, I also had a healthier lifestyle, but one should not underestimate the restorative power of being able to breath clean, healthy air. And it's also worrying that in these past couple of years, I've had much more exposure to friends or family of friends falling ill from cancer. And these are relatively young people between the ages of 35 and 60. The facts and statistics Al Gore presents are quite shocking. When you see the dramatic spike in C02 emissions and rise in global temperature in the past few decades relative to a relatively stable span of 650,000 years, it wakes you up to the scale of the problem. We all know that global warming is a fact, but as Al Gore pointed out, most of us are frogs sitting contentedly in a pot of water that is slowing coming to boil, oblivious to the eventual consequences. If you haven't seen the film, try to see it. There's plenty more information on the website: www.climatecrisis.net.

An Inconvenient Truth doesn't just tell you how dire the global warming problems is. It places the responsibility for solving the problem back in the hands of each individual. The website gives more information on how to take action. The movie even inspired me to make a small change; I took the train to work today.

WANLILU at Louis Vuitton Landmark

It's been a crazy week! Not least because we've got the pedal to the metal trying to get LCB to the printers, but we've also got a lot of summer holiday trips to plan for our clients and we had to prepare a half-hour presentation at the Louis Vuitton store in Landmark yesterday. I'm not particularly a person that likes to get up in front of a crowd and speak, but in this job, you have to get used to it. The Louis Vuitton event has kind of been in the pipeline for a couple years now. We first talked about doing an event around travel, because there's such a long heritage of LV being associated with luxury leisure travel (just think back to the vintag steamer trunks). About 6 weeks ago, SC at LV approached me again about doing an event around summer travel where we would present a few interesting travel ideas and they would select products and fashions to match (for example, the LV ensemble complete with beach bag and sunglasses to be seen in while lazing around on the deck of your chartered yacht while cruising the Greek Islands). We decided to present 3 interesting, and somewhat exotic, itineraries. It was only after I came up with the destinations did I realize how tied they were to LV. For example, the driving tour links to LV's classic car event and the private yacht charters links to the LV Cup, their American's Cup Challenger Elimination series. So subliminally, LV is very much synonymous with luxury travel in my psyche; they put style and glamour into luxury travel. So there's natural synergy between WANLILU and LV!

For the event, we put together a 73-slide power point presentation. And I really have to thank Teresa and Peggy for staying till 1am the previous night working on making it all look impeccable. They did a fantastic job! The presentation illustrated 3 dreamy summer holidays: A gourmet driving tour from Florence to the Lakes (we presented two options: Lake Como or Lake Garda, both of which are stunning) via Bologne (overnighting a little further in Montegridolfo because there's a beautiful 8th century castle property designed by Alberta Ferretti), Modena and Parma. The second featured escapes to private islands or aboard private charter yachts in Fiji (Dolphin Island), Mediterranean (villas represented by Indigo Lodges) and Maldives (Dhoni Mighili and Rania Experience). The third was a golfing and safari tour of South Africa. I chose golfing properties along the Garden Route (Arabella Golf Club and Pezula) while staying at Birkenhead House or The Plettenberg and wanted to introduce safari properties that were not in Kruger National Park: Royal Malewane and Shamwari. During the presentation, models walked around sporting LV's latest summer fashions and accessories to match the feel of the destinations. The models looked great!

The party started at 7pm. I arrived at 6pm to set-up. There was a bit of a scare when nobody knew where the projector was. But in the end, we found it and set it up without a problem. By the time everything was set up, it was around 6:45pm and I was feeling like a drink. So Nadine, ever the life-saver, took me to Fourth Floor at Harvey Nichols for a glass of Champagne. We went back a little after 7pm, and there were already a few people flowing in. We started the presentation around 7:40pm, Nadine was the perfect slide-advancer, but even more amazing was that she also managed to act as official photographer in between advancing the slides! And not once did she miss her queue. All in all, people seemed to enjoyed themselves, with the free-flow of Champagne and talk of stunning destinations with beautiful people and glamourous products to match.


After the presentation, I met up with Corey, Karl and Anne who are in town from San Francisco and Honolulu to research their next film. It's a film about 3 different couples in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Corey and his company Makai Motion Pictures have previously produced the award-winning, The Land Has Eyes. Karl is a novelist (his first novel, The World of Normal Boys, is currently being worked into a film) and is working on the script with Corey for their current project. Anne, who will be in Shanghai for the rest of the month for the Shanghai Film Festival, is co-producer on the film.

I had only met Corey and Karl on Sunday, because a good friend of his asked me to introduce him to some people who could help them get a better feel of Hong Kong. Turns out, Corey knows quite a few people in Hong Kong alreaady and at dinner last night, and it turned out that everyone (including myself and the people I was introducing to Corey) at the dinner somehow knew or had connections to Corey's friends! In Hong Kong, there really are less than 3 degrees of separation. Which made me think that his film should really tie together all 3 of those couples and have their paths or histories cross as well, becuase those 3 cities are really linked in that way.

Asia On My Mind Worldwide Benefit Dinners: Celebrating 50 Years of Asia Society

Last night kicked off Asia On My Mind, the month-long celebration of Asia Society's 50th anniversary with a series of benefit dinners hosted in US and Asian cities. Being an American-born Chinese who spent a few of my early years of education in Hong Kong, I've always appreciated the need for an organization such as Asia Society, which endeavours to increase understanding among Americans about Asia and vice versa. Incidentally, another Rockefeller-founded cultural exchange organization, Asian Cultural Council, is our very good office neighbor.

Of the eight dinners held in Hong Kong, Reel Occasion appealed to me the most, because I'm interested in film and I had had chance meetings with both of the special guests. The dinner was beautifully and expertly hosted by Stacey & Robert Morse (In the place of menu and place card, there was a make-shift film cannister placed at each place setting. The guest's name was printed on the film cannister. The menu unwound on the film portion of the film reel inside.), and featured special guests Barbara Robinson and Nansun Shi. Barbara is the Managing Director of Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia and Nansun is Executive Director of Film Workshop Ltd. (the film production company she runs with her husband, reknowned film director Tsui Hark). Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia has produced international hits such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kung Fu Hustle, as well as KeKeXiLi, an amazingly moving and stunningly-shot, award-winning film about the true story of a group of volunteer mountain patrols in their quest to stop the poaching of antelopes in Tibet. I had the pleasure of meeting the film's director, Lu Chuan, last summer when I was organizing a corporate retreat in New Zealand where he was invited as the guest speaker. We had had problems getting a film print of KeKeXiLi to New Zealand for the private screening; Chinese authorities would not allow Lu Chuan to bring a print with him. So I emailed Barbara my request (I had her contact from at least 8 years before, having done some film script translation for her, but had had little contact with her since), and both she and Columbia Picture's office in Auckland was amazingly helpful. They sent the film print all the way to a small cinema in Te Anau and then one of their staff met me at the Auckland airport to pick-up the film print on my way back.

I met Nansun when I interviewed with her for a job before I decided to start WANLILU. At the time, I was toying with the idea of going into the film business, so I sent my resume to Barbara, who then forwarded my resume to Nansun! In addition to having met her on that occasion, I also listen to her morning CR1 (Setting off on a Clear, Beautiful Day from 7-9am Mondays-Fridays on FM88.1, in Cantonese only) talk show most mornings on my way to work. I am a also fan of Nansun's tireless efforts to lobby the Hong Kong Government to do more in the realm of creating a better environment for the creative industries. She has great vision and is one of the few influencial people in Hong Kong who can see the big picture beyond the short-term. So when I saw the double billing of two my most admired film baronesses for the Reel Occasion dinner, I could not resist.

Reel Occasion was a hit -- 2 brilliant and entertaining hosts, 2 inspiring and engaging special guests with 20 other interested and interesting guests (on my table were many financiers). There are 40+ dinners remaining for the rest of this month in the US and around Asia. There's an amazing one in Shanghai on 23 June at Jean-Georges Shanghai with Chinese film directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, fashion designer Vivianne Tam among several other special guests.

So if you happen to be in Hong Kong, New York City, Shanghai, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington D.C., Mumbai, Houston/Dallas, Sydney/Melbourne, check out the schedule to see if you can join Asia Society for what will most certainly be a wonderfully engaging and memorable evening! Dinners in Hong Kong run until next Saturday, 10 June. Themes range from a Bollywood Chic Midsummer Night's Celebration hosted by the Harilelas to a discussion on Japanese investment in China hosted at the Consul General of Japan's Residence. Most in Hong Kong are probably already sold out, but it's worth checking for last-minute cancellations (In Hong Kong, call +852 2103 9808).

Maggie Q: Watch Your Language!

Watched Mission Impossible 3 the other night. The funniest moment in the film was when Maggie Q, having just "accidentally" spilt red wine all over Philip Seymour Hoffman's white tuxedo shirt, blurts out: "ngo ho lun chun ah!" in what's supposed to be Cantonese. Cantonese has got at least 7-9 different tones per sound, each meaning totally different things. In the context of the film, Maggie Q, speaking in the correct tones, would have been saying she's really clumsy. What came out instead, very clearly I might add, was: I'm so f*&@ing dumb!

How could all the translators miss that? Or was it Maggie Q or some scriptwriter's inside joke to all of us Canto speakers??