MOST of the best part of the evening on Pearl is taken up with The Salem Open 95 Semi-Final (9.30pm). The tournament, being played at Victoria Park for a pot of US$300,000 (about HK$2 million), has already been hit by rain and might be again.
The point of the Salem Open, it seems, is to give Michael Chang a chance to win at least one major tournament a year.
In Hong Kong he is on home turf, despite being American. His closest competition is likely to come from Jim Courier and Swede Jonas Bjorkman, the fifth-seed, who has a serve that is only fractionally slower than a Ferrari in top gear. ON Independence Day in Las Vegas, a pair of lovers quarrel and make up. The plot of One From The Heart (Pearl, 1.25am) is as insubstantial as wet paper, but the escapist nature of the production may help you forget.
This was director Francis Ford Coppola's baby. He filmed it all indoors in his own studio, with his own money and, for good measure, went way over budget.
Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr are the couple in question. Ordinary people in a city of gamblers and dreamers, they both find themselves in the arms of other people, Nastassja Kinski in his case and the late Raul Julia in hers.
Julia is a singing, piano-playing waiter and Kinski a seductive runaway from a European circus family.
Not much else happens, if truth be told. But One From The Heart does reach giddy heights of visual imagination and technical brilliance.
