Pop Stop

Well, Wong Kar Wai (王家衛) didn't win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but we can at least all be happy that the jokes about his movie 2046 not coming out until 2046 will end. Also, reaction to the movie was generally positive, though a criticism that arose in many reports from the festival was that the movie felt as though it were unfinished. It's true that Wong and his crew rushed the completion of the film to submit it in time for the festival, but don't all Wong's movie's end

inconclusively?

Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏), meanwhile, reportedly was a smash hit, causing the crowd to gasp during action sequences and erupt in spontaneous applause on several occasions when it was

screened. Gong Li (鞏俐), who was at the festival to bask in the spotlight of an award, drew gasps as well with her wild chipaos that landed her on the front pages of papers, here showing a lot more of her than we're accustomed to

seeing.

We're also not used to seeing a petty side of Tony Leung (梁朝偉), who may have privately been holding out hope that he'd be awarded the best actor award for his role in 2046 only to be upped by 14-year-old Japanese kid Yuugira Yagira. But there he was, quoted in Tuesday's Apple Daily (蘋果日報) asking rhetorically how that mop-top kid could have won with his acting skills.

Back in Asia, the furor over Michael Jordan's visit to Taipei on Saturday, during which Nike sponsored a face-to-face meeting between the basketball star and fans that ended up lasting a mere 90 seconds and becoming a PR disaster for the company, took on a lurid element too in the current edition of Next Magazine (壹週刊). According to the weekly in a story under a heading that reads, "Jordan in Taiwan, Hong Kong womanizing trip," actresses Little S

(小S) and Pace Wu (吳佩慈) were at the hipster bar Mint with Jordan along with a bevy of "spice girls" and were lured into the basketball great's embrace. The gist of the article is that Jordan stormed through both towns on a hedonistic rampage and that Little S and Wu were portrayed in subsequent media reports to be a pair of floozies groveling for a superstar's attention. Little S even found it necessary to defend her virtue to TV news on Monday by denying that she'd freaked Jordan on the dance floor, as if that would've been a crime.

Hong Kong's godfather of Canto-pop, Jackie Cheung (張學友), lamented to the Associated Press in an interview this week that the Chinese-language music industry is in a sad state and getting worse. He made the standard list of criticisms, such as the industry's myopic focus on the bottom line, the conflicting commitments thrust upon stars, and the haste with which the music is made and released, but he also took a rare step for someone in the industry by saying there is a lack of talent and that labels are stuck reproducing cookie-cutter pop songs. For all the harping about pirate CDs killing the industry, that comes from label owners, Jackie's words are a refreshing blast of the truth.