What Women Want (2011)

First we will set the stage. We are in Beijing, China, the time is present day, and most of the action will take place in and around a top-tier ad agency. Andy Lau plays Zi Gang Sun, an ad executive who is on a seemingly terrific career path.

He’s not only an eligible bachelor, but he revels in it. He’s unofficially – the hottest guy in the office. He’s also a male chauvinist, and his skill is in selling products to men. Girls working there fawn all over him, that is when they’re not flirting with him, or creating scenarios where they can bump into him.

On his way to the office one day – he meets a beautiful woman in the elevator. He offers to buy her a coffee, and she says she only drinks water. You can see the attraction. His for her is written all over his face, and she’s intrigued too, only she’s not so outgoing about it that you can easily tell what she’s thinking. She is Li Yu-long and she’s played by Gong Li. Lau’s Mr. Sun doesn’t know it, but she’s just been hired by his firm to become the Executive Creative Director of the firm – a position that he thought he would be promoted into that day.

After his boss, the firm’s CEO’s broke the news to him that Li got the job instead of him, he heads back to his office, where his staff had a surprise party set up for him – a celebration on his promotion. That he didn’t get. He dismisses them. Sorry guys, not today. Maybe sometime in the future.

The next morning, there’s a big meeting scheduled in the conference room to introduce this Li. Sun makes a bet with one of his buddies, that this Li, whoever she is, will look like a man. Soon after Li walks in and sits down. Sun goes over to chat her up.  He still hasn’t a clue as to who she is. He only knows that she is the woman from the elevator from yesterday. “Oh – you also work here?‘, he says, amping up the wattage of his smile.

When Li takes off her glasses, Sun says, “You look good without your glasses.”

She replies, “You also look good … without my glasses.”

Shanghai

If I asked you to think of a movie with a beautiful woman, a suave guy in a white dinner jacket, the brink of World War II, spies, letters of transit, and the term film noir, you would probably come up with Casablanca, the famous Bogart/Bergman film from 1942; and you would be right.

If I then said – move the whole thing from Casablanca to Shanghai would you have a title in mind? Probably not if you live in the USA, because this film will not be released in America until the summer of 2011.

Shanghai is a noir thriller. An American CIA (or whatever they called it back in 1941) operative named Paul Soames (John Cusack) travels to pre-war, Japanese occupied Shanghai to solve the murder of his friend and fellow agent, Connor. He will have to deal with Chow Yun-Fat as a triad leader, Anthony Lan-Ting, who is doing business with the occupying Japanese. Lan-Ting’s beautiful wife Anna is played by Gong Li, and the Japanese Shanghai Chief of Security (read as head of Intelligence) is played by Ken Watanabe.

Cusack, Watanabe, and Chow Yun-Fat will be up their eye balls in tuxedos and dinner jackets, fedoras and trench coats, rain-slicked streets, and the decadent Shanghai night life in smoky night clubs and cafes where the men strutted like peacocks and the women dressed to kill those proverbial peacocks. Soames’ mission was to solve the murder, but along the way he’s going to discover that a good number of Japanese war ships headed toward Shanghai have been diverted – their destination: Pearl Harbor.