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Pop Stop

Jay Chou plans to sell phones as well as records in the future. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES

After agreeing to star in a film about basketball Jay Chou (周杰倫) scored another slam dunk this week when he was picked to become a phone company’s spokesman. Chairman Chou (周董) — as he is known by fans because of his domination of the Chinese-speaking pop world — fittingly announced his NT$20 million tie up with Motorola at Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall.

The Chairman presided over a grand Phantom of the Opera-themed event, which included a children’s choir greeting guests as they trooped into the building, masked staff in capes and gold painted models holding phones (not a scene envisioned by Gaston Leroux when he wrote the book in 1910).

Local newspapers naturally led with the news in their entertainment pages, but their take on the affair was that Chou had replaced his former girlfriend, Jolin Tsai, as the US-based company’s representative. Tsai was dropped in May after she was caught using another brand of phone. Chou pointedly told journalists in Beijing that he and his entourage all used “Moto,” adding he had also given his “friend, not girlfriend” Patty Hou (侯佩岑) a mobile.

While Hou was said to be livid about being called a “not-girlfriend,” Tsai has clearly moved on and told the celebrity blog site www.supermars.com that her fantasy one-night stand used to be Leonardo DiCaprio but was now Paul Walker, the hunk who stars in 2 Fast 2 Furious, because he had a “great screen image and a turn-on body.” Chou, incidentally, took on the Walker-like role of a street racer in his movie Initial D (頭文字D), for which he won Best Newcomer at the 42nd Golden Horse Awards.

On the same Web site the butter-would-not-melt-in-her-mouth Rainie Yang (楊丞琳) claimed she would never have a one-nighter. Yeah, right. She then admitted that if Jude Law was to treat her for a romantic dinner and take her home for a DVD she might be tempted — “as long as it wasn’t a porn video.”

Yang, incidentally, is known on local Internet forums as founder of the religion of extreme cuteness, or kou ai jiao zhu (口ㄞ教主), so her child-like innocence is a big deal. Unfortunately this was slightly undermined when Next Magazine (壹週刊) recently caught her philandering with her supposed ex.

Both Yang and Tsai reckoned Stanley Huang (黃立行) of former pop band L.A. Boyz was the one-night stand king as he was an American-born Chinese (ABC) and they are “open-minded” about these things. Yeah, right?

If there is an opposite to innocence in the world of local celebrities it’s the media whore Hsu Chun-mei (許純美), 48, who earlier this year was the only person in the world amazed at the fact her 23-year-old fiance and model Peter Chiu (邱品叡) had not made love to her — even though they were planning to marry. The sound of wedding bells receded, however, when Hsu alleged her bridegroom-to-be had broken her nose after she refused to pay off his gambling debts.

Hsu went public with the assault and showed off her bleeding olfactory protuberance on TV. Earlier in the week she appeared on Kevin Tsai’s (蔡康永) program after her features were again rearranged, this time by a cosmetic surgeon. Watching her, it must be said, holds the same fascination as witnessing a train wreck.

Pop Stop has been a fan of MC Hot Dog in the past but this time the gloves are off as the rapper turned on Kevin Tsai for being gay (though he’s quite frank about it) and outed a few other minor celebrities in his latest song Brokeback Mountain (斷背山).

As if this cheap shot was not bad enough he also turned in his buddy Ma Nyan-sheng (馬念先) when it was pointed out the song’s melody was lifted from Lenny Kravitz’s It Ain’t Over ‘Til its Over. “It wasn’t me,” the Dog said, his tail between his legs, explaining he wrote the lyrics but Ma came up with the tune. Kravitz’s record company EMI is suggesting royalties are due. As penance, perhaps, the Dog should do a duet with Elton John, which is what Eminem did when his homophobic comments got him into trouble.

— COMPILED BY

JULES QUARTLY

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