Andy Lau

It is just rice.

Yes, they're Asian, but this is a stereotype that Asians only eat rice, except for Andy Lau, who never eats rice.

Not only does that grind my gears that they only had rice, not even soy sauce or anything, no condiments, no sides.

And the kids eating it with a smile, bullshit.

J. Cho was a composer.

So he actually wrote many, many songs for Zhang Huimei, for Wu Zhongxian, and for Liu Dehua as well.

But they all turned him down.

And that's how eventually he was like, okay, I'm going to sing it myself.

Right.

Running Out of Time, you have Andy Lau's character, a loner.

Lau Ching Wan's character, n- no, no girlfriend.

You know.

Those have the mark of Johnny To on them.

And interesting, even when he does a populist film, a film that he designs specifically to succeed so he has enough money to continue to do his, uh, his, his film, uh, they have a Johnny To mark on them, although not, not often Johnny To world mark.

I mean, he did this, those two movies with Andy Lau in suits, and one in a fat suit, one in a muscle suit.

Right, the Love on a Diet.

Now remember it's directed by Andrew Lau.

It stars as Inspector Lau Kin Ming, Andy Lau, who is in no relation at all to Andrew Lau.

There's no connection whatsoever with those two guys.

They just have the same name.

Okay, cool.

Fair enough.

So yeah, it's got Andy Lau as Ming and then Tony Leung as Yan.

Yeah.

Other films, like The Suspect, which was shot in the Philippines.

Movies like The Adventures with Andy Lau, which was shot partly in America.

Maximum Risk with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Replicant, which is okay.

I mean, he redefined gangster films when he said, OK, we'll go to the guajai, the kind of the tricky kids of the Hong Kong underworld.

We'll do a guajai, Young and Dangerous, and then you've got Young and Dangerous sequels and spin-offs and movies inspired by that.

Infernal Affairs, which in many ways reprises some of the themes and ideas of this film, which was a big hit starring Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiwai.

And it's just being remade as The Departed to be directed by Martin Scorsese with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio.

She entered the Beijing Film Academy in 2007, and her debut was the peak of her career, The Warring States, The Great Wall, Kong Skull Island, and Pacific Rim Uprising.

She's collaborated with top superstars like Sun Heung-lae, Francis Ning, Kim Hee-sun, Andy Lau, Zhang Yimou, and even Hollywood's Matt Damon.

There's a saying in the industry, the A-do who can't be propped up, the Jing Tian who can't be made famous.

Her resources were top tier, yet she just wouldn't become a star.

Completely, and he could dominate a heavy, dramatic film and then transition seamlessly into a tender vocal track because his voice just possessed this raw, kind of androgynous vulnerability.

The column also brings up Andy Lau and George Lam, and from what I gathered, they were serving very different structural purposes in this pop machine, right?

They absolutely were.

Andy Lau was basically the undisputed king of classic mainstream Cantopop.

The pop culture glue.

Exactly.

Yeah, so when a director needed a film to feel epic, you know, to have this sweeping, masculine scale, they relied heavily on Lam's dramatic vocal power.

But then the MMR piece pivots to Faye Wong, and her presence feels entirely different to me.

I mean, they danced, they sang, they acted in movies.

You know, Andy Lau, one of the Four Heavenly Kings, is the star of Infernal Affairs, which became The Departed by Martin Scorsese.

They were the most ubiquitous people in Hong Kong.

They were literally everywhere.