July 1, 2012 | Hongkie Town

Hong Kong is usually voted the freest market in the world by some thinktank. Here’s an article in the SCMP today. A lucky few are getting rich from this. The majority are not.

The real cost is that Hong Kong is filling up with stores operated by chains and conglomerations. Independent, so called “mom and pop shops,” are disappearing from our landscape. And of course the massive, unchecked rise in rents and real estate prices means that the choices for most of HK’s residents are dwindling down.

Food lovers suffered the bitter taste of disappointment yesterday when two more much-loved culinary mainstays in the city closed their doors.

Devoted customers of Leighton Bakery’s store on Matheson Street, Causeway Bay, munched on its delectable egg tarts and sausage buns for the last time yesterday as owner Lam Shek-yam closed his store to cash in on the city’s property boom

Taking a break from the lunchtime rush, which saw crowds snaking around the block for a final snack, Lam said it was with a heavy heart that he shut down the bakery, which has been his place of work for the last 28 years.

Resting in a seat next to the drinks counter, Lam, who started baking at the age of 12, said: “A lot of customers came this week to say goodbye.”

The store has long been a favourite with shoppers and office workers grabbing a bite for lunch or a quick breakfast. Lam says he has sold the shop for HK$140 million – a huge profit on the HK$13 million he paid to buy the site in 1996.

Customers will now have to go a little further afield to the bakery’s sister outlet on Leighton Road.

A few blocks away, restaurateur Tai Chung pulled down the shutters on Lan Fong, a cha chaan teng, or Hong Kong-style cafe.

He has fallen victim to the cut-throat property market in Causeway Bay, one of the most expensive places in the world to rent retail space. He paid just HK$19,000 per month for the premises when he opened his business in 1987, but is now paying HK$80,000.

He was given his marching orders after negotiations on a new lease broke down in March.

Tai, who still runs the original Lan Fong on Jaffe Road, Wan Chai, would not disclose the rent he was asked to pay but said that even if he had offered double the previous figure, he would not have kept the lease.

“We just couldn’t work it out,” he said last night.

He hopes to open another Lan Fong in Causeway Bay and is scouting for a new venue.

It’s a familiar story in Causeway Bay, where last month a sock retailer was forced to become a street hawker after the rent on her 250 sq ft shop was doubled from HK$70,000 to HK$150,000 and the site of a small noodle shop went on the market for HK$180 million in April – a year after it was sold for HK$100 million.

Indonesian restaurant 1968 closed its main Causeway Bay location when rents rose last year, while the UA Cinema chain was ousted from Times Square, apparently to accommodate a luxury retailer.

Japanese restaurant Wallmann Market, near the new Best Western hotel on Canal Road West, closed in August after the landlord raised the monthly rent to HK$180,000 from HK$85,000. The 3,000 sq ft Nam Ah Restaurant, also on Leighton Road, closed in November after its landlord increased its rent to HK$360,000 from HK$255,000.

The area around Times Square, a popular spot for rich mainland tourists, has seen a huge influx of luxury brands in recent years, while analysts believe the opening of the massive Hysan Place shopping and office complex will push rents up further.

Really, you can’t blame Lam for cashing in. If I could get $140 million on $13 million, I’d do it in a heartbeat. And some of these businesses that relocate due to rising rents manage to thrive in their new locations. But these seem to be the exceptions to the rule.

Came across this in another HK blog last night. I guess there are some out there who believe this.

Fortunately, in the fifteen years since the Handover, Hong Kong has thrived in its status as a special administrative region of China, tapping both worlds to occupy an exciting and unique position.

I’m guessing that position is horizontal.

This is also in the SCMP today:

Almost two-thirds of Hongkongers and long-term residents think the city has become a worse place since the handover, a poll for the Sunday Morning Post shows.

It also found rising dissatisfaction at slow progress towards democracy and a growing feeling that Beijing has failed to implement the principle of “one country, two systems”.

Just 16.8 per cent of those questioned by the University of Hong Kong’s public opinion programme believe the city has become a better place since the end of British colonial rule, down from 39.9 per cent in a similar survey in 2007.

The figures are based on the opinions of 883 people born in Hong Kong, or who moved to the city before the 1997 handover.

Almost four times as many people, 63.8 per cent, believe the city is worse off, 27.7 percentage points higher than in the 2007 poll.

Programme director Dr Robert Chung Ting-yiu says the figures show a “big switch in public sentiment” and paint a gloomier picture than found five years ago.

“Probably [it was] because 2007 was the time when Donald Tsang Yam-kuen was still fresh in his position as chief executive and enjoyed good popularity, while 2012 is a time when both Donald Tsang and [his successor] Leung Chun-ying … are both facing big trouble,” Chung said.

Tsang faced a string of scandals in his last few months in office for accepting travel and a cheap deal on a retirement flat from his tycoon friends and staying in luxury rooms overseas while on government business. He was also criticised for failing to tackle the wealth gap and high property prices. Leung’s integrity was also challenged after it was revealed that he had six illegal structures at his house on The Peak.

Chung said “the public sentiment is significantly worse than that of mid-1997, but is much better than that of mid-2003″ – the year of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak and massive protests against a plan to introduce controversial national security legislation under Article 23 of the Basic Law.

In the latest survey, a third of Hongkongers said “one country, two systems” had failed, up from 13.3 per cent in 2007. Those who said it had succeeded fell by almost half, from 62 per cent to 38 per cent.

More people are now dissatisfied by the city’s progress towards democratisation than are dissatisfied, the reverse of the 2007 poll.

The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Given that this is the 15th anniversary of the return of HK to China, Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting. Barricades have been erected all over Wanchai and Admiralty to prevent people from getting anywhere near him. Yesterday, a reporter from HK newspaper Apple Daily “shouted” a question. “President Hu, the people of Hong Kong want the truth behind June 4 to be revealed, do you know this?”

The reporter was immediately taken by a policeman to a stairwell where he was questioned for 15 minutes and eventually reprimanded.

“He told me that my yelling was breaking the rules,” said the reporter.

Also yesterday:

President Hu Jintao issued a clarion call for unity as he met Hong Kong’s business and political elite behind a tight ring of security – but outside, hundreds of protesters demanded democracy and transparency over the death of dissident Li Wangyang . They clashed with police, who responded with pepper spray.

Also yesterday:

[Hu Jintao] praised the contribution of outgoing leader Donald Tsang Yam-kuen and former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa for “developing the economy in a stable way, improving people’s livelihoods continuously, ensuring orderly democratic progress, and maintaining social harmony and stability” in the 15 years since the handover.

I guess he’s never heard of the Gini Coefficient.

Happy 15th anniversary, Hong Kong!

I suppose most people who have heard of Bobcat Goldthwait know him as the stand-up comedian with the high-pitched scream. Or perhaps they know him because he was in 3 of the Police Academy movies. (“I did Police Academy 4 because there were so many unanswered questions from Police Academy 2 and 3.”) Actually, despite the persona, he was a pretty socially conscious stand-up. However, he doesn’t do that any more, he now writes and directs (but does not star in) indie films. He got off to a rough start with Shakes the Clown in 1991 but got a lot of attention (and some good reviews) with 2009′s World’s Greatest Dad, starring Robin Williams as a father capitalizing on the death of his son. This year, he’s brought us God Bless America.

Frank is a middle-aged man who, seemingly in the course of a day, loses his job and finds out he has terminal brain cancer. Fed up with everything he sees on TV, from screaming political commentators to reality shows to “American Superstarz” (an American Idol parody), he goes on a killing spree.

I wish I was a super-genius inventor and could come up with a way to make a telephone into an explosive device that was triggered by the American Superstarz voting number. The battery could explode and leave a mark on the face, so I could know who to avoid talking to before they even talked. I could look and say, “No, you’re not going to be saying anything that’s going to be adding any value to my life.” It’s not nice to laugh at someone who’s not all there. It’s the same type of freakshow distraction that comes along every time a mighty empire starts collapsing. American Superstarz is the new Coliseum and I won’t participate by watching a show where the weak are torn apart every week for our entertainment. I’m done, really. Everything is so cruel now, I just want it all to stop. I mean, nobody talks about anything any more. They just regurgitate everything they see on TV or hear on the radio or watch on the web. When was the last time you had a real conversation with someone without somebody texting or looking at a screen or a monitor over your head? A conversation about something that wasn’t celebrities, gossip, sports or pop politics? … I get it. And I am offended. Not because I’ve got a problem with bitter predictable whiny millionaire disc jockeys complaining about celebrities or how tough their life is while I live in an apartment with paper thin walls next to a couple of neanderthals who instead of a baby decided to give birth to some kind of nocturnal civil defense air raid siren that goes off every fucking night like it’s Pearl Harbor. I’m not offended that they pretend that it’s my responsibility to defend their rights to pick on the weak like pack animals or that we’re supposed to support their freedom of speech when they don’t give a fuck about yours or mine.

I think the above, a speech delivered by Frank about 15 minutes into the film is really well written but it also highlights the problems with this film. The first is that the film basically stops dead at several moments like these for these diatribes that would work better as stand-up comedy (in the classic Lenny Bruce vein) than film. It’s also always a problem when a filmmaker has to tell you the premise, to make sure you “get it,” rather than reveal it to you through the film. And in this case, once the premise is stated the film has nowhere to go.

Things go downhill even further when high school student Roxy tags along with Frank, helping him with his killings and delivering a diatribe of her own halfway through the film, mostly about why Alice Cooper was the most important rock star of all time – a diatribe that one could easily accept from a 50 year old man (even if it’s wrong) but from a supposed-to-be 16 year old girl in 2012? Seriously Bobcat, come on. The parodies of reality TV, Rush Limbaugh and Jersey Shore that come early in the film are spot on but they’re soon left in the dust so that Goldthwait can make his point over and over and over again, just in case you didn’t get it the first 5 times. Goldthwait is trying so hard to make his point that he doesn’t even try to make the plot that believable. So while I can agree with that point, that doesn’t equate to a good film.

Joel Murray (brother of Bill) does an excellent restrained job playing Frank. Tara Lynne Barr (not the daughter of Roseanne) does an admirable job with the thankless role of Roxy. Look fast and you’ll see Larry Miller and Mo Gaffney in small roles.

I wanted to like this film because I’m a Bobcat Goldthwait fan and I agree with what he’s trying to say here. I just wish he’d found a better way to say it.

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The other day we watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a low budget film that was an unexpected $100 million box office hit in the U.S. It’s a British film that that British do so well – feel good uplifting tales like that one about the cops who pose for a calendar or the kid who wants to be a dancer or almost anything with Hugh Grant. It comes to us from John Madden, not the U.S. sportscaster but the British director of Shakespeare in Love. And it has an amazing cast – Tom Wilkinson, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup, Celia Imrie and Dev Patel. Plus the beautiful Bollywood actress Tena Desae.

Here’s the story: 7 somewhat elderly people in England have hit retirement age and find out that their money doesn’t go that far. Via the internet, they find an ad for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel For the Beautiful and Elderly”, located in Jaipur, India. And so they all head there – the film makes the claim that they’re out-sourcing their retirement to India, which sounds good but isn’t strictly true. Of course the hotel is much less than it appears to be from its web site. Hilarity ensues.

On the one hand, these 7 people (plus Patel, from Slumdog Millionaire, as the hotel’s proprietor) are cardboard cut-outs. They’re stereotypes through and through. Tom Dashwood’s retired judge has a surprise up his sleeve but that’s revealed relatively early in the film. Every other character and every bit of plot is entirely predictable. And yet …

On the other hand, the cast puts everything they’ve got into this slim screenplay. Dench and Wilkinson have never been better. They effortlessly rise above the material. Trying to resist them is hopeless – I found myself cheering for (most of) them. And Madden, together with cinematographer Ben Davis, does such a good job of portraying Jaipur. Okay, I’ve never been there. But after watching this film, I feel as if I could make my way around that city without a map.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel may suffer from a weak script but the great cast and Madden make the stay in this crumbling hotel an enjoyable one.

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In brief: also watched Blitz. Because even though I know that most Jason Statham movies are B movies, for the most part they’re very good B movies. This one’s just okay. It’s not an action film, it’s a police procedural about a nutjob who’s going around killing cops. Decently directed, good supporting cast, but aside from the gore there’s little here to differentiate this from a TV movie.