Oh no, unfortunate update! The folks at Vienna Cafe are no longer going to be able to screen Buenos Aires Zero Degree, the documentary about the making of Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together because a Hong Kong artist management company has complained. The company, called Project House, says they manage some of the actors in Wong Kar Wai's film and have demanded Vienna Cafe to cancel the screening and to apologize. Vienna Cafe has asked for proof of their ownership of the rights to Buenos Aires, but in the meantime have replaced Thursday's screening with the Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep vehicle, The Hours.
Vienna cafe Buenos Aires screening cancelled, replaced with The Hours
[Updated] Cinematheque: Behind the scenes of Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together (And other film news)
Update: Due to ownership quarrels, the film Buenos Aires Zero Degree will not be screened as planned on Thursday. Vienna Café is replacing it with Stephen Daldry´s The Hours. And while that´s an awesome movie, it´s still a sad exchange, since The Hours has probably already been seen by most of us and is very easy to access - while...heaven knows when we´ll get the chance to see that Wong Kar Wai Documentary again...
Reminder: See Happy Together tonight
Just a friendly reminder that you can catch a screening of Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together tonight at 7:30 in the basement of ARCH. Drinks are 20% off, film and conversation are free! (IPR enforcers, please don't sue us).
Movie Screening: Happy Together 《春光乍泄》
Thanks to the kind folks at ARCH, the second installment of movie nights at ARCH is going to be this Thursday, and the movie we will be showing is Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai's (王家卫) Happy Together, starring Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as gay lovers in Buenos Aires. If you've never witnessed what happens when you cross Christopher Doyle's cinematography with Wong's cinematic sensibilities, we could point you to numerous writings on it. Fans of Wong probably know that there have been critical scholarly books written about this movie as well as full-length auteurist studies of his corpus to date.
China's first gay student group
The Sun Yat-Sen University (中山大学) in Zhuhai made headlines recently with the establishment of the first gay support group on a Chinese university campus. This is the first legally registered student group, which will perhaps set a precedent for similar groups at Chinese universities that are still informal or unregistered. You can read an interview (in Chinese) with Ai Xiaoming and Li Yinhe (the latter recently made headlines again because she "endorses" wife-swapping) and learn about some of the issues involved in setting up a gay-rights or gay-themed student group at a university. Apparently Sun Yat-sen University has a history of openness -- they even staged a performance of The Vagina Monologues there. The new student group is called "Happy Together" (an homage to Wong Kar-wai, not The Turtles) in English and in Chinese it's known as the 彩虹社 (caihong she or Rainbow Group).
Book Review: In the mood for Wong Kar-Wai?
There are few working filmmakers today so near and dear to the art house film crowd as Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai ( 王家卫 or Wang Jia Wei in Mandarin pinyin). For those who enjoy Wong's poetic (he often collaborates with noted cinematographer Christopher Doyle) and elliptical (Wong shoots scriptless, relying on the flexibility of actors' improvisations and moments of inspiration) films, Wong is one of the world's most original directors, an auteur of the first rank.

