Site Update Information
November 27, 2000
Two new Windows wallpapers added.
Two new wallpapers - one from Love In A Fallen City and a new item, a monthly calendar wallpaper. January, 2001
features CYF and Maggie Cheung in character from The Story of Rose. February will be available in December.
November 26, 2000
Love In A Fallen City screensaver now available
I was fortunate enough to obtain a movie program from the film Love In A Fallen City and
have taken some of the gorgeous stills from that program to make a fourth screensaver for Free Man
visitors. Take the 'screensaver' menu option from the top page or go directly to the screensaver area to download
this latest in a series.
November 24, 2000
Take a walk across Lamma.
Cyndy Jones, recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong and beyond,
was kind enough to share some snapshots and notes from her journey to
Lamma Island, birthplace of CYF. Follow her as she walks across the island while
you learn a bit about the little place CYF calls home. Just look for the
ticket on the top page, or click here.
October 30, 2000
The Missed Date review and image gallery added.
Long time no update. To remedy that, a review and gallery for The Missed Date, one of the
lesser-known CYF films. For those who have written asking if I've given up on the site, the answer is
a resounding no. Life just has an annoying way of interfering with one's hobbies at times. For
the questions regarding when the Video Box will again be available, the answer to that is I wish I knew!.
As you may know, M.I.T. is hosting the Video Box and I find that when their machines are moved, it's a looooong
process getting them back online. Last time, I'm now told, it took three months. So... it will happen when it
happens. Unless someone has about 400 meg of server space they'd like to volunteer, I'm afraid we'll just have to
ride it out with the good folks who *are* volunteering it. Cross your fingers and hope for the best!
September 8, 2000
The Bund image gallery updated.
Much, much better screen captures are now available in the gallery for The Bund. Check out CYF in the bowtie - great stuff!
August 19, 2000
Two new wallpapers now available.
Two new original wallpapers are now available in the wallpapers section, both with images from The Bund. To answer a recent question: all of the screensavers and
wallpapers offered on this site are original, created by the page maintainer. Unless specifically noted (such as the Apple Daily special on CTHD), all site content is original,
created for Free Man visitors.
August 4, 2000
CTHD screensaver now available.
Eight big and beautiful scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are now available as a custom screensaver
for Free Man visitors. Click on the screensaver icon on the top page menu, or just click here.
August 2, 2000
American CTHD trailer now available.
The American version of the movie trailer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon arrived today. You can download it in either .mpg or .rm (MPEG or RealVideo) formats from the link off of the main index page.
Thanks to Carmelo at Sony Pictures Classics for getting this out so quickly.
July 31, 2000
Six more clips in the Video Box.
Six clips of interviews, personal appearances and behind-the-scenes with CYF have been added to the Video Box.
July 28, 2000
Four more clips in the Video Box.
The Missed Date, Anna and The King, My Will I Will and a deleted scene from The Corruptor have been added to the Video Box.
July 27, 2000
Three more clips in the Video Box.
Their Private Lives, Pembunuhan Pursuit and Alligator Pool have been added to the Video Box.
July 25, 2000
Video Box now open.
A new section of Free Man: the Video Box.
Here you will find video clips (in .mpg format) of
CYF all along the timeline, from his very first film (The Reincarnation) to a clip
from his latest film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Television series, charity
shows, personal appearances, award ceremonies... if it's been caught on video, it's fodder
for the Video Box. I hope you enjoy the clips.
July 6, 2000
Small addition.
Just a small addition on the TIME Asia cover story on CYF & Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and
info on how to order issues from Hong Kong.
June 29, 2000
an update to Hong Kong Heartbreaker at long last!
Finally, an update to the companion site to Free Man, Hong Kong Heartbreaker - the
Early Career of Chow Yun-Fat. Molly Choi has graciously sent me a copy of Hot Blood,
one of the super-rare Goldig films! A great addition to the collection, but unfortunately a real
dud of a movie. Nonetheless, if you want to check out some screen caps, please take a look. There
are links off of the gallery and review pages of Free Man, or you can also reach it through the Hong
Kong Heartbreaker site directly at http://nbi.com/hk/cyf/hkh/index.html.
If you've never explored that part of the site, take a look at some of the TVB serials area as well. I have a lot more to
add to that section, but there's still some nice pictures from various shows. I hope you enjoy Hot Blood and
the rest of Hong Kong Heartbreaker.
June 1, 2000
image gallery for Anna and The King added
The Chinese VCD of Anna and The King arrived a couple of days ago and
I've been making screen caps ever since, it seems like! At any rate, 73 pictures
from the film are not available in the image gallery. I made over 300 but tried
to be choosy; as the VCD is not the quality the DVD will be, please accept these
for now and I'll add better ones later. No review yet - besides, everybody has seen
it already, right? =) In case you haven't bought a copy of the VCD yet and want one,
it can be purchased from chinesebooks.net or YesAsia, both of which have links off of
the resources page.
May 19, 2000
review and image gallery for The Story of Woo Viet added
Aside from the film review and image gallery addition, a few cosmetic changes have
been made, and those will continue to happen until everything is done. Today's
quote is: all the news that's fit to print is not necessarily fit to read.
May 18, 2000
Happy Birthday CYF + cosmetics
A one-day change to the top index page initiates the start of a little redecorating
on the site. Please bear with me as I change a few things here and there. The
changes will mainly be cosmetic in nature, changing a few colors and typefaces;
I will also be adding more internal links for easier cross-referencing
among the film reviews and the info files which will shortly go online.
The Story of Woo Viet review and image gallery will be added later today.
May 11, 2000
Joy To The World review and gallery added
Cheap and silly, but it has some cute moments. Buy this one on sale. I'm going to
try and work on Hong Kong Heartbreaker a bit in the next few weeks, I have four new
series to add (The Maverick, Good Old Times, Vanity Fair and Hotel) and that will
happen over the course of several months - those four series total up to 65 volumes!
In the interim I will be adding to Free Man though, including a new section I'm
calling "The Museum" for now. It should be fun to browse, if nothing else.
May 7, 2000
God of Gamblers uncut version info added
An overview of the deleted scenes, as well as an image gallery of screen captures from
some of those scenes, has been added. Each has separate entries in the review and
gallery indices, or you can click here to
go to the review addendum.
April 23, 2000
beginner's info on VCDs
About once a week someone will ask me about VCDs - what are they, how are they
different to DVDs and so on - so I've made up a small file which I hope will help
those of you new to VCDs. It can be found here: http://nbi.com/hk/cyf/info/vcds.html.
It covers only the very basics, but has a couple of links to some excellent, in-depth FAQ files, too.
April 22, 2000
Now You See Love... Now You Don't review and image gallery added
One of my favorite CYF films. The scenes of him learning English are
hilarious. (Wonder if he thought it was quite as funny when he tried to
learn English for real!) =)
April 15, 2000
screensavers now available
A new menu option on the top page has been added for the screensaver
page. Two original screensavers are now available, one featuring
images from 25 of CYF's films from The Story of Woo Viet to
The Corruptor and one featuring 12 photographs
of CYF posing in expensive duds. =) These screensavers will run
on Windows 95, 98 and NT 4 platforms (a 3.1 version is available
upon request). Sorry Mac users, I don't have the capability to make
screensavers for your machines. These screensavers will unpack and
install themselves and are easy to uninstall too.
As an additional note, the special Anna and The King image
gallery has been taken offline to make way for newer things. The
link to the Apple Daily CTHD photos is no longer on the top page,
but can be found in the Links area (just click on that menu item
from the top page to go the Links page).
April 08, 2000
birthday card
Want to add your message to a birthday greeting for Chow Yun-Fat? Click here to
add your name and message. You have a whole month to think of what you want to say, so be sure and stop by to sign the
card before May 8th.
April 07, 2000
non-review and gallery for Scared Stiff added
A piece of junk, but CYF looks cute in it.
March 31, 2000
CTHD photos, review and gallery for Bloody Money added
Apple Daily published 6 spectacular photos of CYF from the upcoming film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in
their March 31, 2000 issue; I have reproduced them here on Free Man and have included a link to the original article
on Apple Daily's site (it is in Big5 Chinese). Also added today is a review of the 1983 film Bloody Money and
an image gallery for that film as well. Happy Spring!
March 19, 2000
site update notification
Site update notification is now active - you can sign up to be notified whenever a substantive change is made to the
Free Man, Ladies' Lounge, Hong Kong Heartbreaker or any of the future annex sites by clicking here.
March 17, 2000
wallpapers, update notification
A new section for wallpapers has been opened. There's a link off the main
menu on the top page, or you can access the wallpapers area here. Three
wallpapers are currently online, I'll add more in the upcoming days.
Over the weekend a site update notification service will go online. After signing up for the service, you will received a short piece of email (much like
what you find posted here) each time this site is updated. That way you won't have to check back just to see what is new. A new menu item will pop up when that is ready. Happy St. Patrick's Day!
March 15, 2000
non-commercial and going to stay that way
For some puzzling reason, in the last couple of weeks I have received
numerous offers to become an "affiliate" of various commercial sites. In
return for placing flashing banner ads all over the place, I can get
kickbacks and free posters and CDs and other stuff, I'm told. Well,
it's not going to happen. If I want posters and CDs I'll buy them. I'm
not interested in seeing anybody or anything advertised here other than
Chow Yun-Fat and his movies. This site is non-commercial and is going to
stay that way.
March 9, 2000
Treasure Hunt lobby card and movie poster images
You can see the entire set of 23 lobby cards issued for the film Treasure Hunt by taking
the link off of the review page or by clicking here. I hope
you enjoy them! I've also added a movie poster image. I've had this poster for a long time but didn't have a decent picture of it.
Thanks to Mark Morrison of Heroic Cinema there's now one available. What a great shot of CYF.
February 17, 2000
Story of Rose gallery updated
Pics from the DVD of Lost Romance, the remastered version of
The Story of Rose, have now replaced the old ones from videotape.
A little washed out in places but still much better.
February 17, 2000
Site Search
Because the site is getting a little large to just jump around to find things,
a Site Search facility has been installed. There will be (very shortly) search
boxes at the bottom of every page in the reviews and gallery sections, on both
Free Man and HKH. Site will look for your search terms on both Free Man and
HKH. You can set your search options by going to the main search page at
http://nbi.com/hk/cyf/search/search.html
or clicking on the "options" link under any search box.
February 17, 2000
Hong Kong Heartbreaker now open
Hong Kong Heartbreaker, devoted to CYF's television work and his early films,
is now open. I think I found all the little glitches, but there are
probably some lurking. I'll try to get any of those fixed as soon as they
rear their ugly little heads. You can find HKH by clicking on the HKH banner
on the index page of Free Man, or here.
February 13, 2000
changes
I'll be working on the site live over the next couple of days. I'll try to make the
changes as transparent as possible while that goes on, but please bear with me
if you see something a little off, or if a page changes from one minute to the
next. I try to get the major stuff done offline, but sometimes I miss mistakes
until after they're glaringly obvious. =) (And isn't it great about CYF being a
presenter at the Oscars?)
January 26, 2000
a chilling experience
I spent last weekend in Minneapolis to see one of my favorite movies
of all time, Treasure Hunt, part of the "Cinema With Passion"
series presented by Asian Media Access, a great group of dedicated
HK film enthusiasts. For a small account of the
trip and a link to AMA's site, take a look at The
1000 Mile "Treasure Hunt". Okay, so I'm a "hothouse flower", as my
friend Pat puts it. You'll have to excuse the references to the fact that it's
cold in Minneapolis in January - my idea of "cold" is when I have to wear a sweater.
January 19, 2000
PLEASE do not buy AATK bootlegs from unscrupulous sellers on
eBay, Yahoo and other auction sites!
Every dollar spent with a bootlegger
is a dollar subtracted from the studio's estimation of the boxoffice and home-video
draw of Chow Yun-Fat. If you want to see CYF continue his Hollywood career, go
to the theatre to see the film or at the very least wait for the official
home video release from Fox. Even if for some reason you don't want to see
CYF continue his Hollywood career, boycott crappy camcorder-recording VCDs anyway.
January 19, 2000
work in progress
A number of things have to fall together before the next update,
so please bear with me. Because when Hong Kong Heartbreaker is added
the site will be getting a little large for the casual visitor, a
search engine is being installed. Since Joe, my other half (who
requests that I add the modifier "long-suffering") had to learn
Perl from the ground up for this, it's been a few days to get that
in shape. That will go in next week (though will not be
available until I get all the HTML cleaned up and standardized). Once that
is in place, HKH will go in as well as another image
gallery annex (for the gentlemen this time, per request).
Thanks to the generosity of Wal, I now have much better copies of
both The Story of Woo Viet and Club Girl Story; the
film Joy To The World has just been re-released by Winners' Video
Entertainment; The Last Affair has been re-released by Pearl City;
and of course the long-awaited The Story of Rose re-release
entitled Lost Romance has been out for some time and I'm half-way
through re-working that image gallery. So as you can see there is a lot
to be done. It's just a matter of getting it done! =)
January 14, 2000
small glitch repaired in The Ladies' Lounge
Somehow or another, the navigation bar image map at the bottom of
the fourth page disappeared. That has been fixed. You can now go forward
to page 5 from 4. And to answer another question, there are seven theme
galleries; galleries 1 through 6 are two pages each, gallery 7 is four pages.
Any other questions, just let me know.
January 14, 2000
a retreat
A small annex to Free Man has been added,
TheLadies' Lounge.
A celebration of the beauty of Chow Yun-Fat, it is just some pretty pictures,
sorted into 7 themed galleries, to while away a little time. Gentlemen,
you might want to skip this one.
January 7, 2000
Dream Lovers review added
The Dream Lovers gallery is one of the first ones I ever put up on
Free Man, and when I get a chance I'm going to make more (and hopefully
better) screen captures. For now the old ones will have to do. I'm not
going to make any definite promises, but I'm going to try to get
Goodbye, My Friend and The Witch From Nepal done this weekend.
(Yes ladies, The Witch From Nepal is the one you've been waiting for
and I apologize for the length of that wait.)
January 7, 2000
A note about Anna and The King
I've been asked why there is no review for Anna and The King on the
site yet. The answer is in two parts: one, I can't make screen caps from the
film until it comes out on video, which supposedly will occur in March according
to one report I read; two, go to see the movie at the theatre and support
Chow Yun-Fat. Money talks and... well, you know the rest of that equation.
Boxoffice numbers speak loudly to studio execs. Make the counter tick over
once more in favor of CYF. (Or multiple times, hey, why not! It's a great movie!)
January 1, 2000
Happy New Year. Small changes now, bigger ones ahead.
Though I didn't do an update at the time, the index page is back to the
original graphic, the intro text has changed a bit and the link to info
on alt.asian-movies has changed to info on the new newsgroup alt.fan.chow-yun-fat
Just created on December 26, 1999 the new group is still propagating on news
servers around the 'Net but if it's not available on your system now it
should be soon. If not, crab at your newsfeed provider! =) I am
so close to opening Hong Kong Heartbreaker, or at least the TVB portion
of it. A few more images need to be added, a few more names figured out, and
it will be set to go. It will open with information on eight series and I
have three more lined up to add as soon as I can. That will leave only 9 more.
Ouch. Included in the additional info section will be pointers on finding
your own copies of these shows, so look for it soon.
The site updates from 1999 are
also available.
return to the site info main
index
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