Watch this now, before the various stripes of hypocrites rob us of this ingenious music video.

前天看了爾冬陞的《門徒》。這是一套認真的片，值得入場去看。

故事很簡單，沒有多餘的愛情綫或twists，基本上都在預料之内。可是爾冬陞的長處就在於用情景、性格來説故事。新不了情、忘不了、旺角黑夜亦如是。故事由每個人，各有不同的性格，在同一個環境下的想法、選擇和行動而帶動。這樣的格局，其實與你我的日常生活沒有多大的分別，也即是你我差一點就是戲内的主角。我覺得，這是他的電影扣人心弦的主要原因。

你可以批評選角的問題（古天樂、張靜初這樣的俊男美女，哪有一丁點像道友呢？），但不可以因爲這些無可避免的商業元素而抹殺了他的認真。以毒品作爲題材的影片中外皆有，但資料搜集做得這麽詳細的恐怕不多。有這些資料作爲back up，導演帶我們進入毒品的這個探險就順暢得多。

吸毒有什麽感覺？毒品從哪裏來？我們應怎樣對待上了癮的人？戒毒真是這麽難嗎？究竟,爲什麽人要吸毒？

說到底，這就是一個關於人的故事，毒品只是導演今次拈手而來而又運用的出神入化的工具。

很期待爾大導的下一件作品...

p.s. 今天看到報紙娛樂版，驚詫新年檔期的港產片票房慘淡，除《門徒》外，《雙子神偷》、《心想事成》都非常不賣座。 - 天呀，請別繼續把全港六百萬市民都當作是白痴了。求求其其、馬馬虎虎的電影，省掉吧！

I was greeted by this headline from Yahoo! in the first morning back to work. Not a bad start to the new year!



恭喜發財！新年快樂！ :)

Leveraged Buyouts

You have two cows. You come home from the fields one day to find Henry Kravis chatting to your spouse at the dining-room table. Two days later, you have no spouse, no farm, and no table. Two guys the size of sumo wrestlers have saddled up the cows and are riding them around the farmyard.

Hedge Funds

You have two cows. A guy in an open-necked shirt drives up in his Bentley and offers to take care of them for you in return for a year's supply of steak and 50 percent of their milk. They won't be allowed to leave his compound for two years.

Six months later, you have half a cow, producing sour milk. ``You have to be willing to lose rump today to get rib-eye tomorrow,'' the hedge-fund guy mumbles through a mouthful of sirloin and champagne.

Commodities

You have lots of stocks and bonds, but no cows. Are you crazy? Cows are the hot new market. Here, buy this exchange- traded cow futures contract. It can't lose. It gained 40 percent in the past six months.

Carbon-Emissions Trading

You have two cows. They produce 1.2 tons of methane gas per day. After a hefty donation to the re-election campaign of your local representative, the government gives you enough emission permits for six cows. You sell three permits, buy another cow, and apply for a European Commission grant to build a methane-gas power station.

ROME, Italy (AP) -- It could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love.

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua. The site is just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."

Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.

Although the Mantua pair strike a rare and touching pose, archaeologists have found prehistoric burials in which the dead hold hands or have other contact, said Luca Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum.

The find has "more of an emotional than a scientific value." But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals, he said.