"I Didn't Write That Review..."

One of my most (in)famous movie reviews is for a film called Dead Slowly.

It had pretensions of being an art film, and it failed on that (and every other) count. 

However, it also  had an actress named Joman Chiang. As I make inappropriately clear in the review, I had long harbored a rather virulent and unabashed physical attraction to Ms. Chiang.

Which is why I found myself gripped by a deep fear last night as I ate dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui with a friend and her friends.

You see, one of my friends, whom I had met while playing with Dear Jane, is a good friend of Ms. Chiang.

I was jealous.

I had talked with the fan about Ms. Chiang's films, particularly Dead Slowly. My friend said she  hadn't seen it, to which I replied that I was unfathomablyjealous.

So when this friend asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said that she, myself, and Ms. Chiang should all get together and have dinner.

I said it as a joke, just as I had once joked with a Japanese friend "Email her manager and see if I can interview her..."

Of course, as is the usual way of my life, the jokes get serious (and the serious gets laughable) and so last night I found myself sitting across the table from Ms. Chiang, who obviouslyhadn't read my review.Proof positive that ignorance is bliss.She's a very nice young woman, and I enjoyed the evening for lots of reasons. I got to meet new people, I got to speak Cantonese, and I got to smirk at all the dirty looks gwei por gave me for sitting with four Chinese women.

It helped that their husbands often looked jealously upon the same tableau that irked their spouse.

That's not a euphemism, but it should be.

Of course, these people's perceptions of my reality were far different (and more salaciously fantastic) than the reality itself actually was.

Dammit.

But wait, it gets better (worse?)...

Sitting next to me was a woman who had also been in local films. It turns out that she had a small role in Butterfly, a film in which Ms. Chiang portrays a young lesbian.

The other friend was Ms. Chiang's lover in the film.

I have never seen Butterfly. To be more accurate, I have never allowedmyself to see it.

In the same sense that I never went to strip clubs or dawdled in a Porsche showroom, there's no sense looking at something that will never be a part of your existence, nice to look at though it may be.

In addition, the potential for this film to inspire epic, shameless bouts of self-abuse is so vast that I know better than to even risk looking at it.

How do I know this? The DVD cover tells me so:So last night, I ate dinner with the two women in that image.

Dammit.

Because now I probably canwatch the movie. It's been madesafe.

How so?

Well, with the exception of one (Japanese) woman, the idea of polishing the woodwork over people I know in real life is nearly as repugnant to me as it would be to them.

Thank God Pauline Chan/ 陳寶蓮is dead.

But on the bright side, this other woman was also in IQ Dudettes/辣椒教室, one of my favorite HK movies, so hopefully next time (which we all agreed to last night) she'll sign my DVD.

The idea that there will bea next time assumes, of course, that none of them reads that review of Dead Slowly...It's hard  work being this stupid.But its good work if you can get it.