POP STOP

What better way to cap off a nice evening at the movies with a close friend than to strangle a reporter from the Apple Daily (蘋果日報) in a parking lot? That's what Jason Hsu (許孟哲) of 5566 got to do last week and surely Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) and other reporter-bashing pop stars blushed when they saw the pictures in the paper the next day.

There was 19-year-old Hsu, straddling the poor reporter, his hands firmly wrapped around the man's neck and seemingly wrenching at his trachea. Not long ago, 5566 was held up as a paragon of adolescent boy bands, but more recently its members have scuffled with the media and basically outed themselves as a bunch of hotheads.

Predictably, Apple reported the confrontation as an outrage and raised the specter of lawsuits. Hsu, along with all his bandmates, felt compelled to make a public apology on TV the next day. Looking glum and penitent, he made the ritual deep bows and promised to rein in his temper in the future. Hilariously, Apple said they felt his apology didn't look sincere enough, so it was still considering filing suit. Sounds like an out-of-court settlement in the making.

If actress Suzanne Hsiao (蕭淑慎) ever gets in a scrap like Jason Hsu, she'll know who to call, as she was spotted at the premiere last week of her new movie West Side Girls (終極西門) with the support of hundreds of Bamboo Union gang members. Hsiao the a god daughter of one of the gang's branch leaders and, according to Next Magazine (壹週刊), the whole crew was called out to show support at the Xinyi Warner Village.

Now to the long-rumored romantic relationship between Jay Chou (周杰倫) and Jolin Tsai (蔡依林). Until last week it had the cover of a cooperative agreement between their respective labels (Alfa and Sony Taiwan), which meant they often had to be in the same place at the same time. Alfa announced at the end of last week, however, that it would terminate its cooperation with Sony, claiming the Japanese label displayed a lack of transparency in its finances. The question now will be whether Jay will be permitted to return the favor Jolin made by going to his concert last month and catch her show in Taipei at the end of the month.

After Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino was so inspired by his brush with the martial-arts genre that he now plans to film a kung-fu flick entirely in Mandarin, according to Hollywood media. The film, which is still only a glimmer in Tarantino's eye, will reportedly be dubbed for English audiences, but the dubbing will be intentionally of poor quality to mimic the bad overdubs of 1970s martial-arts movies. Whether the lines will be re-dubbed in Mandarin for Chinese-speaking audiences was unclear.