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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

New Hong Kong movies Saving Mr. Wu (解救吾先生), Lost in Hong Kong (港囧) at AMC Loews Waterfront, from October 2.



Two new Hong Kong movies---Saving Mr. Wu (解救吾先生) and Lost in Hong Kong (港囧)---will play at AMC Loews Waterfront from October 2.

The Hollywood Reporter provides a synopsis of the former, starring Andy Lau and Liu Ye and based on the 2004 kidnapping of actor Wu Ruofu:
On a Lunar New Year holiday evening in Beijing, Hong Kong actor referred to only as Mr. Wu (Andy Lau) is rousted by police outside a Chaoyang district restaurant. He’s just finished celebrating a deal for his next movie when an unidentified squad tells him his car has been connected to a hit and run, and would he please come to the station. Unconvinced of their legitimacy Wu "resists" arrest, gets hustled into a car and whisked away. He’s been kidnapped. His captors, led by the sometimes cackling, probably unstable Zhang Hua (Wang Qingyuan, The Crossing) and who have a second hostage, anonymous and — worse for him, working class — Xiao Dou (Cai Lu), are collecting ransoms in order to fund a much larger, more ambitious robbery. While awaiting their 3 million yuan (about $450,000 U.S.) payout, Zhang slips up when he goes to see his girlfriend Chenchen (Li Meng, The Golden Era, the only woman with a speaking part) and promptly gets scooped up by the cops investigating the abduction, Xing Feng (Ding regular Liu Ye, The Last Supper) and Cao Gang (Wu Ruofu, the real victim from 2004). Cue the cat and mouse word games between Xing and Zhang as the police scour the city looking for Wu.
And a September 24 Los Angeles Times review on the latter, which opened in China on September 25 and became the highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time there.:
"Lost in Hong Kong" follows 2010's "Lost on Journey" and 2012's "Lost in Thailand," one of the all-time top-grossing blockbusters in its native China. Connected to its predecessors only thematically, the new film has director-star Xu Zheng embarking on yet another action-packed misadventure. Only this time, Xu's character must babysit an exasperating man-child — a Looney Tunes character personified —played by Bao Bei'er instead of Wang Baoqiang from the previous installments.

Xu plays Xu Lai, a henpecked brassiere designer who's barely putting up with the overbearing clan of wife Cai Bo (Vicki Zhao) on family vacation in Hong Kong. His ulterior motive is to reunite with the one that got away: college sweetheart Yang Yi (Du Juan), an accomplished artist who is set to open a solo show in Hong Kong. Problem is, Xu's aspiring documentarian brother-in-law, Cai Lala (Bao), insists on tagging along everywhere he goes to record his every move.
Tickets and showtimes are available at the AMC Loews Waterfront website. The theater is located at 300 West Waterfront Dr. in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead (map), across the Monongahela River from Greenfield, Squirrel Hill, and the rest of Pittsburgh.