Taiwan President Chats with Oscar Winner Ang Lee
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian paid a
rare house visit Tuesday, to chat with Academy Award-winning
director Ang Lee, who brought along a golden Oscar statuette —
the first for the island.
Taiwan-born Lee, whose Mandarin-language “Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon” won the Oscar for best foreign language film, has
been given a hero's welcome.
Lee returned home to celebrate his mother's birthday, and has
said he wanted to share his pride with family and friends.
Chen, who went to the same high school as Lee in the southern
Taiwan city of Tainan, praised Lee for “winning the glory for the
country.”
The president said he had twice watched the movie, which
mixes gravity-defying martial arts with a heart-breaking love
story, and was impressed by Lee's work.
The government plans to present Lee with an official award
and a prize of T$1 million (US$30,000).
The film, starring Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, won four
Academy Awards in March for best foreign-language film, best
score, best cinematography and best art direction.
(US$=T$33)
© Reuters 2001. All rights reserved.
by Paul Majendie
LONDON (Reuters) – Paul McCartney, speaking for the first
time in 21 years about the drug bust that sent him to jail,
admitted it was “very, very scary” in his Japanese cell.
McCartney hardly slept and had terrible dreams during the
nine days he spent in jail after being arrested at Tokyo airport
in 1980 when customs officers seized marijuana from his suitcase.
His arrest was a disaster for the former Beatle — it led to
the breakup of his band Wings and cost him one million pounds in
compensation to the group's Japanese tour organizer.
“I was thrown into nine days of turmoil in that Japanese
jail,” McCartney recalled in a new documentary about Wings, the
group he formed with his late wife Linda after the Beatles
disbanded.
“It was very, very scary for the first three days. I don't
think I slept very much at all. And when I did sleep I had very
bad dreams,” he told his daughter Mary in the interview being
screened next month.
He confessed: “I don't know what possessed me to just stick
this bloody great bag of grass in my suitcase. Thinking back on
it, it almost makes me shudder.”
McCartney, who was first told that he faced seven years hard
labor for what he had done, passed his time in prison on
“cigarette breaks” when he was allowed to talk to fellow inmates.
They included a Marxist student and “a guy who was in for
murder, a gangster guy, he had a big tattoo on his back, which is
the sign of the gangsters in Japan.”
To pass the time, he started playing a game which he had
played with his fellow Beatles at the Abbey Road studios in
London.
“It was who can touch the highest part of the wall. Of
course, because I was taller than all of the other prisoners as
they were Japanese, I tended to win the game,” he said.
The two-hour film, which took three years to make, will be
launched on American television on May 11 and then broadcast
around the world. It includes previously unscreened home movie
footage of Paul and Linda, who died of breast cancer in 1998.
Alongside the film, a double CD featuring 40 songs by Wings
will be released.
One of their greatest hits was “Mull of Kintyre” which topped
the British charts for nine weeks in 1977 — but many music
critics felt the band was a pale successor to the Beatles.
