MUSEYON BOOKS Smart City Guides for Travel, History, Art and Film Lovers
It’s time to meet Scarlet Cheng, your guide to Film + Travel in Hong Kong. A life-long lover of film, she got an on-location education on the industry while living in Hong Kong. In our guide to Film + Travel, she shares that expertise. After the jump, find out the one actress she wish more people would watch…
Name: Scarlet Cheng
Home base: Los Angeles, CA
Day Job: Arts writer, Professor of film history
Museyon Guides: Last movie you watched?
Scarlet Cheng: ‘An Education,’ a new film from Danish director Lone Scherfig — set in early 1960s England, it’s a wonderfully made film with vivid characters and very clever directing. It’s a film about first love which is at once painfully true and painfully funny, and lead actress Carey Mulligan will steal your heart.
MG: What’s a favorite location you discovered while writing your chapter?
SC: I love Hong Kong trolleys — the old streetcars that wind through the main thoroughfares of the city. When I started writing my chapter, I realized how in many films the trolley plays a part.
MG: Any cool locations/factoids/updates that didn’t make the final cut?
SC: I’d loved to have been able to include films with Josephine Siao, a wonderful actress who made a successful transition from teen flicks to grown-up comedies (‘The Spooky Bunch,’ ‘Summer Snow,’ ‘Hu Du Men‘). In 1995 she won the Best Actress Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for her witty and compassionate portrayal of a woman dealing with a father suffering from Alzheimer’s in ‘Summer Snow.’ Unfortunately, those films haven’t really traveled outside a Chinese-speaking market.
MG: Favorite Hong Kong movie moment?
SC: Too many to rank!
MG: Best places to see a movie?
SC: At film festivals and screening rooms — the audiences are film aficionados, and generally there’s no eating, so no popcorn chewing or nacho crunching to compete with the soundtrack.
MG: Describe your dream movie.
SC: I think a movie set in the 1950s in New York…
MG: If you could live inside any movie, which would it be?
SC: I’d like to be Asta in any of the ‘Thin Man’ movies — woof woof!
