Friday, July 30, 2004

That Babe From "The Transporter": Shu Qi

I rented a movie called So Close, a martial arts movie from Hong Kong about these two sisters who are tech-savvy assassins. The plot was really complicated and I didn't understand most of it until I read the summary on the official website. Nice action sequences, though, and the women were very easy on the eyes. But imagine my surprise when I recognized one of them as that Chinese babe from The Transporter.


Turns out it's the current Hollywood tradition of giving small bit parts in American movies to huge foreign mega-stars (see Monica Belucci in Matrix: Reloaded). Her name is Shu Qi, and she is one of the biggest actresses in Hong Kong cinema. She is also, in my opinion, the second most beautiful female celebrity in the world next to Angelina Jolie, but I digress. What surprised me most about So Close is that she played a hardcore assassin, completely unrecognizable compared to her mousy role in Transporter. I found a great article in Time Asia about her that made me understand her more and like her less, but there's no doubt she's a hottie. And it's nice to know beautiful women with screwed-up careers aren't just a Hollywood phenomenon.

2 comments:

Maurice Mitchell said...

Verrry interesting. She had such an innocent face, who knew she was such a hottie in Japan?!
Makes you think about all the foreign actors you see in films. How many of them are grade-A actors in other countries?

Nigel G Mitchell said...

I noticed that the Matrix series took a lot of steps towards introducing foreign actors, like Monica Belucci and those Indians in the third movie. I bet it's more common than we think.

I also found that article on Shu Qi interesting in the way it shows how Hong Kong cinema operates, like the fact that she wants to become a singer, not because she likes to sing, but because it's expected of Chinese actresses to put out CDs. I felt kind of sorry for her.