Making sense of celebrity relationships

Some kind soul has prepared a chart to help navigate the complicated world of celebrity gossip:

Beijing music scene soap opera

Yeah, it’s old news – the original text version purported to prove that Faye Wong and Zhou Xun were 妯娌. A later black-and-white version was a little hard to read. This latest version has been making the rounds of blogs and forums lately probably in reaction to the news earlier this month confirming that Dou Wei and Gao Yuan had separated a couple years back. And Dou Wei and Dou Peng aren’t really related at all – they just share a surname.

Still, it’d make a pretty good TV serial, don’t you think?

Another chart is needed to outline the relationships between the characters in Zhang Yimou’s new movie, Golden Armor, particularly for star Jay Chow, who reportedly didn’t know what the movie was about when he agreed to do it after Zhang saw his performance in the music video for Fearless.

Golden Armor takes the Cao Yu play Thunderstorm and sets it in Tang Dynasty China. The chart helpfully shows the correspondence between the roles played by Chow Yun-fat, Gong Li, Jay, and the other actors, and the Zhou and Lu families of the original play.

What it does not do is lay out the conspicuous similarities that have led to accusations that Golden Armor is stealing from Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet.