Where Tai Kor’s (Big Brother’s his moniker) involved, beg, borrow, steal, an invite, or gate-crash the event. It’s always illuminating, not just from the shine and glisten of his Dragon Blade.
Jackie Chan has the most winning personality of celebrities. He speaks an English unique to himself, and understood the world over. (While others have to be dubbed.) He is Clown. King. (Oops, sorry Elvis.) Gentleman. Champion. Actor. Expert. Humanitarian.
Here Jackie Chan is doing his lot for CSR (the term so beloved of big companies).
Corporate Social Responsibility. That’s the message – I got – from the media conference of Dragon Blade, Jackie Chan’s latest epic martial arts blockbuster.
Seven years in the making, at US$65 million cost, with the Gobi Desert for authentic backdrop, and coupla Hollywood actors John Cusack and Adrien Brody bringing up the rear, and Super Junior’s hawt Korean, Choi Siwon. (You squeal here.)
JC is Commander of the Silk Road Protection Squad. Picture a highway used by 36 tribes. That’s like mighty busy, and sure tempers will flare, fights ensue.
Jackie’s job to keep the route peaceful, oi, brudder, don’t be like that, can?!
So it’s China and Rome, 2,000 years ago, but with scant imagination you can see it in its modern context.
Substitute ancient Rome for America and it’s like the effable Mr Chan toiling towards Mr Xi Jinping and Mr Barack Obama meeting in the centre of the Silk Road to forge peace.
You’ve got to salute Jackie Chan.
All of the above, and 200 horses, 300 eagles, dunes of camels, 2,000 shedloads of bottled water drunk dry in five days, and all the sand of the Gobi Desert exfoliating your face (plus elsewhere).
Someone asked him about his son Jaycee (in recent news over drugs charges) and Jackie said his son would have to face his problem head on, himself.
Meanwhile Siwon could be seen to be translating the Chinese Q&A into English for John. Did you Americans not pick up any Chinese during the shoot? “Knee how?” piped up John. (How did he know about my kneecaps…)
About the writer:
Sylvia Toh Paik Choo is author, broadcaster, columnist, debater (like to argue), elegant, fashionable, gourmet, hilarious, and we're out of alphabets (well there is i for idiot...)
